Woke up thinking about that itasha stuff at Offkai.
At first it was pretty inscrutable, like what's the connection between car culture and these anime women? They're weird enough dots to connect that I think it requires an explanation, and I've settled on one, namely that it's psychological displacement.
>Disclaimer: Having unconscious negative emotions isn't immoral; everyone has them. But sometimes these hidden shameful emotions, of which people are often totally unaware, get redirected onto more socially acceptable targets. That's displacement.
In this case, these men probably have an unconscious desire to subjugate women, to exert control and authority over them, tell them what to wear, who to talk to, where to go etc. As a defense mechanism, these feelings get mapped onto their cars, which they're legally and literally entitled to own. They've got the pink slips to prove it, to use Fast & Furious terminology.
This raises the question: why are men like this at Offkai? Could they be seeking to un-displace these feelings? Well, that's not really for me to judge, but it does explain a lot.
This is really common stuff around fan communities of course, and it's all positive self-expression that nobody could find fault in, at least on the surface. It gets complicated when you start asking "why?" though, which I was prompted to do as the anime woman trapped inside an iPad was marvelling at the anime woman splayed out onto the hood of a car. Flattened, idealized, commodified, inhuman. The absurdity of it hit me hard, probably because I'm just as implicated by all this psychology bs that I'm spewing.