Conforming is one of the biggest crimes within my principles. I take pride in being an もてない男(motenaiotoko)[1] and sticking out for my interests even though I've been alienated and punished by others for it. Told the way I present myself is off-putting, anti-social, and creepy even. That I should grow-up and face the "real world". Conforming would mean letting society take my joy and escape. If you'd let society take it from you, for the sake of fitting in, then you're the weakest link and never deserved to be called an otaku in the first place.

Densha Otoko(Train Man) presents the opposite idea. You should change yourself. The way you dress, your haircut, cleanse yourself of your otaku ways, become a different person. The man that Hermes falls in-love with isn't Densha, it's an Ideal Man(TM). Densha is a completely different man from the otaku he started as. He hollows out the uniqueness of each individual otaku. To exist as a husk, an idea, all for society and a woman.

It's not just Densha that does this to himself. By the end of the manga you can see the 2channers that were encouraging Densha's behavior and "journey" get jobs, "glow ups", slowly letting go of waifus. It presents otaku-ism as a thing to grow out of, to let go and face the real world. Don't you know silly man, the real end goal is living a normal life, with a normal job, married to a normal woman, to procreate and have normal kids in a normal house, retire at a normal age, to be released by death from you're normal life.

It's misguided and slap to the face for otaku then and now. No matter how it helped repaint the image that otaku had in the public. I don't think it was worth being seen as a cucked geek, waiting for his dream girl to save him and cause a desire to change his entire being for. Why is being an otaku seen as something to grow out of?

Notes & Further Reading:
1. Coined by Honda Toru, roughly translates to "Unpopular-man"

Toru Honda:
Asahi 2005 Interview

Frogkun 2016 Interview