You are hopping back and forth between looking for friends, mentors, or some sort of "community."

Those are all different things with different answers, and you should probably figure out what you are actually after before you commit to some major life change to do it.

But, while its not very practical advice, I can tell you that people can tell very easily when you are trying to deliberately build a connection with them and its often very off putting unless they are doing the same. So if you go in trying to achieve that, you'll often ironically lower your chances. Its really a case of "do your own thing and let your brightness attract others to you."

Honestly, its tough man. I'm in basically the same boat as you.

Its times like this that I'm thankful to have been blessed with siblings and born into a good, godly family, especially my little brother who also happens to share my interests in things like gaming, anime, etc, and childhood best friends that I'm still close with (though I don't talk to often these days because we're states apart) who I share a lot of interests with too.

There are things like compromises that might have to be made because its difficult to find people who are the same combination of things you are, especially the more seriously you take them. If you take your Christianity seriously, (which you should), its that much harder to find people who are the same way but don't just broadly condemn or sneer at entertainment media. Its not impossible to find people like you, but it could be difficult depending on your circumstances.

Or you could have different friends for different things. Gaming friends might not necessarily be the same as the people you go to church with or the people you work with, but if they're decent people its not something sinful to be friends with them (unless they're openly sinning or encouraging you towards sinful behavior). Obviously you shouldn't abandon common sense or anything if someone has a lot of red flags, but there are loving and good people everywhere.

Honestly, (if its feasible and reasonable) I think you should consider moving to an area where its likely to be at least somewhat conservative-leaning and having a churchgoing population (i.e. a southern state), but also near a college town or something so the population is young enough to appreciate the same hobby interests you do. That's probably your best bet for a happy overlap. I'm lucky enough to have moved to such an area myself about 2 years ago for school, but I've been... reticent about efforts to socialize and go to church properly and meet people. Still though, even though I haven't made many efforts to make friends, somehow friendships have still happened in my life here.

You can also create your own communities of course, but just be aware that most online friends aren't worth shit. I have about... 2, maybe 3 online friends that I believe I can trust with almost anything and vice-versa and actually consider them true friends, and that's over about 8 years and a lot of online friendships I've regretted having. Doesn't mean all of them are of course, just be aware that IRL is very different from online.

You sound similar to me so I'm guessing you're in your mid to late 20s or something, there's a lot more options for you than you think, but you'll probably have to get out there and put in the legwork. In my case I'm going to a kind of grad school... but I really need to put in more effort to get more connections honestly. There's a lot of people who are interested in things like anime/games at the place I'm attending but I'm like "ehh... I don't feel like it" is the problem. Still though, somehow I've made some friends and acquaintances in spite of that.

Moreover, you shouldn't get hung up on things like statistics, likelihoods and trying to "beat the spread" when it comes to real life and making friends. Yeah, it might be difficult, but good friends don't come easy. Just try to stick to good places. Also, most importantly, you should pray often and earnestly and have faith that God will work in your life and surround you with good people. You should make the effort of course, but yeah. Those're my suggestions at any rate. I wish you the best man.

My suggestion would be to look at your hobbies and see if there are groups in your area that match. more mainstream hobbies are unfortunately pretty infested, but it is still possible to find a group that just likes to partake rather than engage in culture war bullshit. generally, the more niche and tactile the hobby is, the better the group.

Athletic hobbies are also a good way to go if you're into that sort of thing. look for groups doing pick up games of basketball, baseball, ultimate frisbee, soccer, etc etc. you'd be surprised how chill jocks can be post-High-School. just be prepared to get in shape, especially for team sports.

lastly, if it's in the cards, you might just have to move. some areas are so infested with moral busy bodies and culture war bullshit that nothing is sacred. I learned that the hard way in two cities I've lived in. unironically, if you live in a blue county, try moving to a purple or red county. definitely do your due diligence by visiting and getting a sense of the vibe before pulling the trigger on anything.

Japanese women > Western women

edit:

Thats on average. There are still many crazy Japanese women.

Since you sound like you don't mind getting outside: libraries. I've ranted about librarians before. but the people you meet there are usually decent.

Very easy to shift to "let's grab a coffee" "What are you reading?" "I don't know that author, tell me more"

You're looking for a community that combines all of your hobbies in one. Essentially a community that already exists, and has been created for you and is ready made and waiting for you. That's not going to happen and is slightly narcissistic. If you want that community, create it within your own family.

And then find other communities that fulfill one part of your life. And other communities to fulfill other parts. Unless of course you can find a Based anime church.

Here is a good group as I fit some of your interests and am a Christian as well. You check out Christianity.win?

A lot of people have been having the same problem. I posted two threads quite a while back where people noted how hard it was to socialize and meet people.

I left Idaho to go live near family again. It just got too hard, too expensive, to live on my own. My job has gotten harder over the last couple years too. A lot of people who spent years here are getting up and leaving. Coworkers and I have had discussions about how hard it is too socialize now. Some younger than me have been telling me horror stories.

My old church group died when several members left for other states. Still keep tabs on them but not the same. Church got taken over by left wingers from California and turned into liberal "church.". Still haven't found one to replace it. Had a little local bar I used to go to in Idaho but the one I used to go to back in WA had all the locals leave as things kept getting more expensive. Still got friends I see every now and then but everyone is busy and the old days of hanging even once a month are long gone. Funnily, they complain if a lack of close friends too but nobody makes the effort anymore.

It's true that you will have a bigger chance of forming a deeper and more meaningful relationship if your significant other shares the same interests as you, but you might want to broaden your 'horizon', so to speak.

Games, anime and VR? I mean, come on. Apparently, you claim that you're fluent in Japanese, presumably to better watch 'anime'. How about you focus on the language aspect more. There is more to Japanese culture than just 'anime'.

And games/VR just devour all of your time.

Why are you making these exclusive? The church doesn't excommunicate you for Dancing or VR.

• Church is 2 hours a week. If you get incredibly involved, it might make up a max of 8 hours a week. Keep shopping churches until you find one that's based.
• Dance is 1 night a week, maybe 2 nights. That's 6 hours. TBH that's way too much dance, you will likely meet literally everyone in your local dance community dancing that much.
• A hobby store regular for gaming might be 4-8 hours a week. Younger non-leftist men are reliably playing in hobby stores because you need to be gainfully employed to afford 40k.
• VR chat sounds like shit, but maybe give it a shot.

There's 168 hours in a week. 40 working, 56 sleeping, for a good 72 hours left over. You have time to be in multiple communities, just don't spend so much time online.

Only thing I would advise you not to do is set up your own community, because managing and growing it will be a sinkhole that eats all your time and prevents you from doing actual things in the real world. If you want to control a community then do it, but don't pretend it's an efficient path to get genuine connections with good people.

Not gonna solve your entire problem, but you should find another church. I have the same problem as you where I feel like I'm isolated from the rest of the members with the cultural barrier and political differences. (They're conservative, but refuse to see the problem) Eventually one member joined that watches anime, but that's not a big deal for me anymore.
I can only confide in my pastor, but that's enough comfort for me to continue learning. Right now I'm just training myself for family in the future.

You assume hobbies and activities and meet like minded people. For many of us, thats becoming conservative traditionalist socializers. Hiking, camping, shooting, softballb/bowling/pool. Picking up smoking(cigars, pipes whatever) because the people on the smoke pad are more open fatalistic people. I have found good people to ...stand and sometimes enjoy country music with, and I would definitely go for the older metal(white) crowd too. The most important thing we need is community, specifically battle buddies to guard eachothers houses. Post Covid that's where my efforts are, the real, physical and BIFL.

I used to be a gamer. Have a good rig, but the VR I don't care to socialize much with, and my staple of games(production/rts) don't lend themselves to socializing much or stupid bullshit, cause whatever fuckin gender you are, the factory must grow.

I'm also in a pretty similar boat, I don't have any desire to move to Japan but visiting seems fun, so that avenue was closed to me a long time ago when I made that decision.

In terms of finding friends or people, I've not really had luck other than at work - some people I can get along with on a hobby and personal level, and others I've found good friendships in things I'm less interested in but still view positively, like guns, hunting, sports, their families and values in general.

Outside of that I've got my high school group I'm still very close with, even becoming adults at this point we have all grown in different but similar ways so that's been great to have.

And when looking for new people, every online space I've found has just been horrific for finding real friends. For finding a community or people that resonate with me, maybe KiA is the only place, but other than my random comments I don't really 'know' anyone here other than the common users in passing. I'm happy to have a place where I can find some unpozzed news and some people to commiserate with from time to time as we see the degeneracy take over and increase.

If you find a good place or make a good place to find something like what you are looking for, feel free to share it with us so we can find that kind of refuge too.

Try the YMCA. What you do is sneak in to the women's locker room, find some open lockers and sniff the panties in the locker. Find the ones that smell the best, then leave a note telling the owner that she's got a top notch crotch, along with your phone number.

Be careful not to get caught sneaking in, though. The Y might ban you.

i cant really awnser this... it has no correct awnser. the best i could tell you is your never going to find a perfect fit, also furries will show up almost anywhere some surprisingly arnt COMPLETE cancer but its rare. that said trying anyway... your probabbly better off trying what you mentioned and making a space for yourself and like minded people, if you go that route would wholey recomend a few rules no politicised topics, should be enough of a starter filter to keep the worst out as you build and add too it.

Not sure if you have/would be interested in a Switch, but I've had some success and met some solid sanelings in the Splatroon community (jokes aside)

-It's pretty bad in pure terms of a competitive shooter (16 ticks per second, p2p server model, buggy netcode), but it's got the Nintendo polish on the aesthetic, worldbuilding, music, etc...Very playable and enjoyable if you can stomach the occasional random DC. Lots of anime vibes kept strictly PG-lite by Nintendo.

-Troon month was insufferable but again, Nintendo's brand image protection caps a lot of the faggotry at tolerable levels in the game proper. Several attempts to make everything about 'pronouns' via social media mobbing have failed. During June the occasional pushback post managed to float to the top of my plaza (i.e. 'I don't care if you're trans. Ink Base.' That got 'em butthurt, lemme tell ya.) Also, whether through organic unpopularity or an intentional crackdown, the recent 'Free Palestine' trend did not catch on. In general the demographic seems invested in preserving the escapism and repelling woketoid shit.

-Good intersection of gaming/anime with about as big a smattering of Christians as one could hope for in these times. Spotting someone with a Bible verse handle or something like 'JesusGirl,' etc...is a daily occurrence more often than not. And on the topic of girls, it's got one of the more balanced demographics. Many of them are there to git gud, not pontificate feminit manifestos.

-General discord servers are about what you'd expect. I'd recommend looking for smaller servers dedicated to 3rd-party tools (some of the discord bots that integrate with the game, Lean's tools, stat.ink, etc...) or less popular game modes (Salmon Run Server for example has a tolerable and contained fraction of woketoids)

It'll take some time. If you just roll in and look around you probably won't be thrilled about your prospects. Be patient, hit up some of those smaller places, and chances are I'll find ya eventually. Maybe mention that engine of yours or list off some neat anime both here and there, or something. Won't tell you outright it's me, but maybe you'll always suspect.

(This goes for anyone in the same or a similar boat as OP)

The first thing to do is be sure you are confident about yourself. That was big for me in my 20s, because as a kid I felt like a lot of people treated me like an oddity, like there was something wrong with me that needed to be fixed. Instead, I had to accept myself and I don't waste time with people who see me as some project. I think I heard this on a podcast recently, but these guys were saying that if you're happy and confident home alone by yourself, good things all follow from that. I very much operate like that.

Something else I notice, it seems you define yourself by anime/games/VR and that's fairly limiting. Maybe it's fine if my first paragraph holds true, but I don't think you are if you're posting like this here. My suggestion is to try other things and be sure you aren't defining yourself by a single hobby.

You mention church, dance class, I assume you have a job or some sort of business connections. Pick out receptive people that share your values and take up opportunities to build relationships outside of expecting they must know about anime and games. I'm not friends with raging leftists, because if I found one that was a carbon copy of my interests I wouldn't want to put up with their values. You're already interacting with people, things will come up. Take them up on it. One example of my own, some new friends at the time were talking about playing golf. I'd never played it. That turned into, "oh I have some old clubs you can use take them out to a driving range a couple times and come play with us." So I did. I'm shit at it still to this day. Because of what I said earlier though, it doesn't bother me, I own it. Sure, I try, but it's a little out of my aptitudes and I don't progress that well. If friends had a problem with a shit golfer, that's a red flag they aren't friends anyway, just walk away. I don't play golf more than a few times a year now, but it was an in to building relationships and I'm still friends with some of those people and not just for some golf. It worked because while we don't necessarily share the same hobbies, we share similar values.

Historical Medieval Battle.

It's filled with right wing nerds like me.

You seek an all-in-one solution, but I don't think such a thing already exists. You're looking for a community of "you"s, a clonedom somewhere out there. And that simply isn't happening.

"The wise are few and far between", for sure, yeah, so... Go far between. Make one friend at church, one at the discoteka, one at the local War40k gaming hole... Wanna know a secret? People are pretty apathetic, in general, to the hobbies of others. To your church friend you're the friend who also does dance lessons. To the war-gamer, you're the one who bible-thumps on his off-hours. To the dancer, you got into it because of the Princess Tutu anime, or something. But at the end of the interaction... None of them care.

I've got a good friend, who does SCA fighting. I've got no interest in it. We're still good friends. I've got another friend who embodies the meme "my life is a gym", he'll lift weights while we chill watching anime streams, dude love the shonen work-hard-get-stronger storylines.

Your friends do not need to be clones of you. And they need not all come from the same location.

It's really difficult, I don't have any proper answers for you either which may come across as unhelpful but I'm just being honest. I had a hard time socialising with people my age before ( Zero interest in crap like pop music etc. that all the other mainstream normies listen to among other things ) and it's only got worse now as I refuse to be woke and go along with the herd and I'm the same in that I've gotten into the really autistic side of my work where I've learned two different programming languages.

I'm considering South America personally, going to see if it's at all possible to socialise there. The reason being especially with Argentina right now the population seems to have quite a Libertarian streak going on and I think that's been my problem. I'm in a country and especially RL I am fucking surrounded by leftists to the point even a lot of non-woke people online don't realise how left wing my area is.

I refuse to sit around though and end up like a feminist wine aunt, I'm going to save up money and do a holiday to some of these deep South American countries. Radical problems require radical solutions lol. I don't think I really want to reveal where I'm going to end up until I've potentially settled in a bit. The ideal scenario is being able to country hop between the UK, but the UK is getting that bad now I don't want to give any leftists the ability to doxx me and fuck with any potential legal processes as the pricks often do.

Also major plus point for me with South American countries, the climate won't kill me, very mild so that's nice. Will have to see if I'm allergic to these countries like the UK because I got tree pollen allergies.

In Australia we have Men's Sheds