If I go by fan-art of female otaku in their rooms, then I'd have to assume that having lots of plushies is a girl thing. Then a Tumblr search happened to put the original meme beside my "female" version. Comparing the original meme's otaku room vs mine, I'd have to say that the biggest difference are the images on the flat screens. The original has some beautiful shoujo on the screen; I've got Sengoku Basara's lead samurai paused on my screen. The most visible poster in the original's room is of a female character, while 2 of the 4 posters/prints that are visible in my room's photo are of couples (the other 2 being a lone girl, and a pair of guys).
I wonder if I'm worthlessly pursuing a gender stereotype? I mean, there are so many different individual tastes across the genders, that technically, any otaku room could look like anything, with no discernible gender of the owner. But as a photo to represent a "girl's otaku room", in order to contrast a "girly girl's fashionista room", I feel like maybe I'm not working hard enough to find a photo that represents the otaku version of a "Mundane fashionista's room". I mean, I was trying to do a "female version" of the original meme.
But then again, that emphasis on a division of gender was based on the fact that the sports memorabilia room, from the original meme, brings to mind "masculine" connotations. It was very easy to think of a female version of such a "hyper masculine" room motif as sports memorabilia. Because Mundane girls hoard such "hyper feminine" collections as make-up, accessories, and clothes. Perhaps it's those extreme levels of delineated, "traditional", gender connotations often found in the Mundane world, which mislead me to believe an otaku comparison photo needed to be equally extreme in its gender connotations.
It makes me even more proud to be an otaku, now realizing that we blurr "traditional" gender lines. While it's true that a female Mundane can have a sports memorabilia room and a male Mundane can have multiple fashionista collections, it's a little sad that those collections in and of themselves, are so immediately attributed to one gender or another. But otaku rooms/collections, on the other hand, have so much variety, overlap, and---quite frankly---less societal pressure towards extreme gender definitions, that there are no definitive reference markers to identify an otaku room as female or male.
