Recently, I stumbled upon a video of a boxer (Benjamin Whittaker) demolishing his opponent with flair.
The absolute mastery Whittaker showed was a delight to watch. He had some semblance of Emanuel Augustus. But the one thing that caught my attention was the “Whitebeard Pirates” tattoo he had on his back.
For those of you who don’t watch anime, the tattoo was most prominently engraved on the back of a character named Ace, the adopted brother of the protagonist Luffy in the anime One Piece.
It wasn’t the first time in recent memory that a prominent/viral athlete sported anime aesthetics.
Sacha Boey, a recent signing of the Football(Soccer) club Bayern Munich wore a straw hat and imitated Luffy’s mannerisms in his reveal.
I know anime(or sports for that matter) isn’t what I usually discuss here… but hear me out.
I grew up with this stuff (anime) and irl, am known by my friends, family, and colleagues for being unusually athletic, a stark contrast to the intellectual bubble I seem to have found myself in and regularly partake in online.
It’s why seeing this trend of mostly Gen-Z nerds (of which I am sort of a part) displaying amazing physical feats drew my attention. I relate on a level most don’t understand.
I regularly exercise (train) with ankled weights as an homage to this iconic Naruto scene.
To this day that fight is engrained in my psyche; It’s motivational. In a world of gifted ninjas with the ability to use “jutsu”, Rock Lee was fighting against the odds with pure physical ability.
In a sense, I try to push myself beyond what I feel I should be able to do in every aspect of my life to remarkable effect.
Why bring up anime?
I noticed a trend of nerds trying to bring into reality the fictions they grew up with either through themselves or technology as a medium and I can’t unsee it in the most important facets of our lives.
It’s apparent in “tech” with tech in this instance mostly referring to computer-oriented industry. You won’t find a young person working in AI who hasn’t watched anime and more importantly, was deeply influenced by it growing up. Heck, you won’t find a middle-aged person who works on technology (in a technical capacity) and doesn’t have a favorite anime. Even the “normiest” of engineers has a Studio Ghibli film they can point to.
Twitter is littered with anime profiles with the possessors of these accounts being some of the most gifted people one could ever imagine.
There’s an inside joke that AI is spearheaded by nerds trying to bring into existence AI “waifus”.
And beyond anime, we have some of the titans of our age Zuck, Bezos, and Elon all pursuing science fiction-oriented projects. Science fiction!
I don’t think people realize how absurd it is that we live in a time where people are pursuing say the “Metaverse” and no one bats an eye and when eyes are bat there isn’t a sense that it can’t be achieved, just that it may be of burden to society.
I feel there’s more here that needs to be explored but hasn’t been given much voice. Novel media generally attracts the gifted who not only tend to be high in Openness To Experience but Conscientiousness.
As we see an increase of gifted people come to the foreground whose primary diet has been (at one point) novel or esoteric media, I expect there to be a lot more wonky events that blur the line between the near-cartoonish and reality; things that would seem to belong in a comic occur more frequently. Crimes so heinous they might as well have been devised by the Joker; Inventions so outer-worldly. Just downright insane events that would belong to a comic book. I expect these sorts of events to happen with more frequency and to be dependent on whether the main actor in the said event has watched “novel fiction” with novel fiction being defined by fiction whose genre isn’t currently in the mainstream.
For internet points sake I’ll dub this the Shonen Effect.
It’s really difficult to put into words that a whole generation of men are modeling their lives on what they’ve seen in something like Baki The Grappler unless you witnessed the trend that was the “Baki Pose” challenge not too long ago and that this is bound to have some wonky effects.
I’ll probably expand on this more in some quantitative capacity later on but for now, this is it!
I think the effect of fiction on people's dreams and motivations is a fascinating blind-spot for many (and I'm also guilty of that blind-spot). I know for a fact that I've been deeply inspired by fiction, and that fiction has probably formed many of my desires. What romantic ideals I have. What type of man I want to be. What I see as moral. When I was trying to get disciplined in my late teens I always internally referred to "burning my house down", which was a reference to how Ed and Al in Fullmetal Alchemist made sure they could never return to their safe haven - in order to cement their quest.
Yet when I imagine others I often think they're driven my much more rational motives, for some reason. When it comes to propaganda it's easy to imagine others to be susceptible (see Third Person Effect), but when it comes to a being moved by fiction, for me it's the reverse. It's common to imagine others less complexly than yourself. But also, it can feel weird to think that people just want to emulate the fiction they see. I was amazed to hear anecdotes form the book "If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution" that slogans and ideas from Hollywood movies were a prominent feature in mass protests all over the world in the 2010s, from Ukraine to Hong Kong to South America people were referencing The Hunger Games and Lord of The Rings. Fiction is powerful.