From Fan Devotion to McDonald’s Meals to Tora-san Talk: A Thread Gone Completely Off the Rails

Background and Key Points

The board this thread comes from, Nandemo Jikkyo (“anything goes live”), is one of 5channel’s fastest-moving general chat spaces — threads are less about their opening topic than about whatever image or tangent someone drops next, which is why “are you into oshikatsu?” (fan-support spending: merch, event tickets, gacha pulls for one’s favorite idol or character) could detour through hololive VTuber clips, a stranger’s convenience-store dinner, and a 1970s film franchise inside a hundred-odd posts. The VTuber references (Laplus, Kanata, Himemori Luna) point to hololive, the dominant Japanese VTuber agency whose talents build fandoms almost entirely around live-streamed personas rather than physical idols, which is precisely the kind of oshikatsu the thread’s opener meant. Tora-san (Otoko wa Tsurai yo) is a Shochiku film series that ran 48 installments from 1969 to 1995 and holds the Guinness record for most films starring the same lead actor; each entry drops the itinerant hero into a new town where he falls for that film’s “Madonna,” a rotating heroine played by a different actress every time — Keiko Takeshita, Ruriko Asaoka, and Kaori Momoi are three of dozens of one-off love interests, not competing storylines.

The thread never really argued over oshikatsu itself; the closest thing to a dispute was whether the lone McDonald’s poster deserved a friendly ribbing or a photo request, with posters flip-flopping between “nobody wants to see that” and “no wait, please post it.”

What’s easy to miss without Japanese context: the “weak man” jab is a stock self-deprecating meme term for a socially awkward, low-status guy, not a literal insult — and the Tora-san favorites listed aren’t ranked against a single continuous plot, since each numbered entry is a near-standalone story unified only by its wandering protagonist.