"I'm a weeb for Ireland"
In which Cartoons Hate Her comes to terms with a devastating realization: She has a cringey obsession with Irish culture.
I’m traveling to Ireland today for the Kilkenomics festival. This is a very strange but very fun festival in a picturesque little town called Kilkenny, in which Irish comedians and international economists and econ writers go on stage together. The econ people talk seriously about econ, and the comedians crack jokes. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s basically the kind of thing that only Irish people could think up. When I went two years ago, I wrote a fun post about how Ireland got rich:
Other than its startling economic success, another interesting thing about Ireland is the emotions it inspires in Americans. Even though most Americans don’t have an actual ancestral connection to the Emerald Isle, we all grow up steeped in stories about Irish immigration in the 1800s. So lots of Americans, consciously, think of Ireland as “the old country”, and have an almost inexplicable emotional connection to it. Bill Clinton famously claimed to be part Irish, despite no record of any familial connection; I feel it too, despite the fact that my ancestors are all from East Europe.1
Anyway, this strange emotional connection reminds me a little bit of weeb culture, which is a bit of an obsession of mine. So when the pseudonymous blogger Cartoons Hate Her offered to write me a guest post about how she’s a “weeb for Ireland”, I thought this would be a perfect time to publish it.
Perhaps you’ve heard of a “weeb” or weeaboo, basically a Japanophile (usually a white person)2 who has an outsized interest in Japanese culture. Weebs have been documented as existing as far back as the 1800s:
Modern-day weebs are typically white men obsessed with anime and other components of Japanese pop culture. Weebs have been stereotyped as neckbeardy, creepy, and cringey, but there may be benevolent weebs who truly just love Japanese pop culture.
Noah Smith, himself a big fan of anime and Japan, wrote a great article about weebs and provided a nuanced portrayal of the weeb mindset, arguing that most of them are simply cultural enthusiasts with no creepy motivations, and that the “anime pfp” Nazis you’ve probably seen on Twitter aren’t emblematic of your average weebs. #NotAllWeebs.
But anyway, I came to the devastating conclusion that I am a weeb. Not about Japan, but about Ireland and Irish culture. My obsession has gone back at least thirty years. And like a weeb, I’m confident that no matter how obsessed I am with Ireland, I’m getting the obsession all wrong and don’t really know what I’m talking about.
I don’t even know where my Ireland obsession began, but it was far enough back into my childhood that I don’t really remember. A while ago I wrote about my obsession with Victorian orphans and associated literature when I was in elementary school. I’m guessing that I discovered a vague sense of “Irish culture” around that time.
On the bright side, my need to be obsessed with a culture that wasn’t my own was better channeled into Ireland than whatever I was doing in 1996:
Anyway, a big part of my Ireland obsession awakened with the concept of Irish dancing. My school was heavily Jewish and Italian, but we did have a few Irish-American kids, and many of them got to leave class early for Irish dancing lessons, where they’d curl their hair into flawless copper ringlets and wear regal green velvet dresses and grown-up makeup. I was jealous of them, but even more jealous when one of them brought in a VHS tape of the iconic Riverdance Irish dancing program. Something about the music and dancing just hooked me. I had a similar reaction when I watched the Irish dancing scenes in Titanic when Rose slums it in steerage (Why does it never feel that way when I fly economy on Delta?)
I asked my parents to enroll me in Irish dancing classes. They laughed and refused because we weren’t Irish and I was a terrible dancer who couldn’t even be bothered to figure out the Macarena for our school spring concert. So I would practice my own version of “Irish dancing” in my room. One St. Patrick’s Day, my family attended some kind of cultural festival in our hometown where, much to my seething envy, a bunch of kids got to perform Irish dancing. I bided my time until my big moment: later that year, when I attended a Santa Meet and Greet at the mall, I took it upon myself to use “meeting Santa onstage” as an excuse to begin an impromptu Irish dancing performance to the unnervingly off-beat, “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmastime” playing on the speakers.
I can only remember this moment as I saw it from the eyes of an eight-year-old: I had absolutely killed it.
I could have sworn I heard a parent ask if I was professional and if I was hired to perform. Like, I know for a fact that I looked like an idiot and there’s no chance anyone believed I was a hired dancer, especially given that I was wearing a pink GAP puffer coat with a groovy smiley face flower on it, and not an Irish dancing costume, but I genuinely remember someone saying this. Maybe they wanted to help me maintain my delusion. Maybe they just couldn’t think of any other reason why a child would start performing bad Irish dancing at the mall. But I swore they said it.
The obsession continued. I begged my parents to let me dye my hair ginger red (they also said no to this one.) Sometimes, when our backyard looked especially green and misty, I would pretend I was “in Ireland.” I eagerly looked forward to St. Patrick’s Day every year and ignored the naysayers who insisted it was a corny American thing. When I was twelve, I developed a crush on one of the geekiest boys in our class just because his last name was Gallagher. We never dated, but I dated other Irish boys. It’s not that I only dated Irish guys or even that they were my main type, just that being visibly Irish probably helped them level up by 2 points on the 1-10 scale. This phenomenon possibly explains why Sabrina Carpenter dated Barry Keoghan. On the bright side, my husband should feel very good about himself that I consider him a solid 10 without any Irish heritage, although he could pass in a Collin Ferrell way.
Speaking of heritage: unlike your typical white weeb, I am at least part Irish, but not Irish enough to justify my weebishness. I’m half Ashkenazi Jewish (to all of you on right-wing antisemite Twitter, congratulations on your keen “noticing,” and I haven’t even posted nose). My other half is loosely “WASP” but it’s more of a collection of random Northwestern European ethnicities—English, Scottish, French, German, Swedish, and, well, Irish.
I actually didn’t know I was Irish until adulthood, when my mom began exploring her ancestry on Ancestry.com and later 23 and Me. For many years in my teens, I wanted to be Irish, but didn’t think I was. Can you imagine how I felt when I discovered that I was actually part Irish after all this, with an entire lineage of family members with the last name Kennedy? It must have been like Rachel Dolezal discovering she’s actually 1/16th Nigerian. Suddenly, my excitement about St. Patrick’s Day felt slightly less embarrassing because at least I could claim some Irish heritage to back up my shamrock-induced soyface.
This continued into my thirties. I recently binge watched Say Nothing and listened to the associated audiobook. I am obsessed with House of Guinness. If it’s Irish, I’ll watch it. There was a month where I listened to two songs by the Cranberries on a loop basically all day. Whenever we pass by an Irish pub I tell my husband we have to go there “at some point” despite barely drinking alcohol. When it was time to name our daughter, I had a bunch of names picked out: Nora, Bridget, Fiona, and I even flirted with Siobhan for a while, my excuse being that I “liked Succession.” I have since channeled all of those names into Sims characters and I can’t deny creating ten-generation Sims legacies of Irish people. I love chunky cable knit fisherman sweaters, although I prefer cotton over the traditional wool. I have a favorite Spotify playlist called “Celtic folk music,” and I play it nearly every day when I’m making breakfast. Sometimes, when I wear a particularly woodsy-looking midi dress with a pair of lace-up boots I take a walk with my baby while listening to “Rocky Road to Dublin” on my AirPods. My husband, despite initially finding this obsession a bit weird, has come around to it, often playing “Galway Girl” by Ed Sheeran whenever I walk into the room.
I completely understand that this is not “really” Irish culture. I understand that I don’t really get it. I know that if I actually showed all of this to an Irish person, they’d probably laugh at me, or maybe even be offended (can you culturally appropriate the Irish if you’re part of a slightly less white subgroup? More at 11.) This is why I’m so embarrassed. Not embarrassed enough not to write a whole article about it, but still a little bit embarrassed. I feel like those people who say they love Chinese food because they love their local Chinese restaurant in their suburb of Cleveland and exclusively order wonton soup. I don’t need anyone to remind me that I’ve gotten the Irish all wrong. I know I have. But I want to enjoy my version of Irish culture—not sell it to others, profit off it, or claim it as my own—no matter how silly it is.
My warmth toward my imagined concept of Irish culture has extended to things that aren’t actually Irish, but feel Irish-coded. Ireland, at least in my demented mind, has come to represent a particular vibe: cozy, friendly, warm, moody, misty, mysterious…I can’t fully explain it, but it just makes sense in my head. It’s like those people who see the number 4 and immediately know it’s orange.
Much to my surprise, despite looking zero percent Irish, and marrying a man who looks zero percent Irish, my second child came out looking like she belongs on a billboard below big green letters that say “Travel to Dublin.” My mom recently went to Ireland on a trip, and knowing how I feel, brought me back a tiny green wool cable knit cape for her.
At this point you may be wondering if I’ve ever been to Ireland. The answer is no. I may still go one day, but I have concerns that it might ruin the whole thing for me. I’m painfully aware that my idea of “Irish culture,” is similar to a weeb’s idea of “Japanese culture” in that it’s mostly based on movies and music. I know a little bit about Irish history, and I’ve read and watched content on The Troubles, but I don’t know enough to be confident in my overall understanding of Ireland or Irish culture. If I went to Ireland for real, I imagine there would be a rude awakening, plus a lot of irritated Irish people who found me unfathomably annoying. In an effort to save the good people of Ireland from any further plight and injustice, I will be suspending any visits to Ireland until further notice.
In fact, an Asian American friend of mine even confessed that she feels it too!
Note: I disagree with CHH here. Weebs are actually disproportionately Black or Asian in America! See my original post on this.
 | A guest post by
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Emotional support from an Asian American who is a bit weeaboo for Scandinavia, including a love of minimalist architectural designs, wooden churches, and smoked fish. I took a course on Icelandic sagas in college and almost started on a career path towards archaeology of Viking-era England.
Well, I guessed you were collaborating with Heather Cox Richardson, but this is great, too!
I have 3/4 Irish ancestry and I am donating at a least a 1/4 of it to you; you've put in the time, you deserve it. Far more than I do, because I was/am a weeb for Denmark. It probably started with Hans Christian Anderson, but I cultivated it with a good dose of Karen Blixen in my teens and early twenties. I tried to get people to call me "Alma" for a while. I carried "Smilla's Sense of Snow" around in my NPR tote in the nineties. I was an OG watcher of Borgen. You get the picture.