Stop Looking Up To Characters You Relate To (i.e. yourself)
Or your peers, for that matter...
The only thing that stuck with me from season 1 of Bob’s Burgers is when Bob found out a baseball player he looked up to a few years older than him is a scoundrel, and said player tells him, “you shouldn’t look up to people your own age.” It seemed at once obvious and prescient, and I felt lucky right away that I had role models and mentors at the time who are significantly older than me to look up to. Weirdly, though, I think it’s more common to track the movements and try to copy the actions of people that are closer to one’s own age.
Recently I tweeted out an anime version of the popular “if you admire them, you missed the point” meme, knowing that Killua would throw some people off, as he isn’t posed as nearly so much of an antagonist within his show. People responded that Killua is ‘too relatable’ not to admire; which I found interesting because, while I think it’s a good reason to like and appreciate Killua that you relate to him, it’s not necessarily a reason to admire him.
At the start of Hunter X Hunter, Killua isn’t a very good kid. He murders people pretty much just for getting in his way or because he feels like it, and only starts turning his behavior around thanks to the influence of his friend, Gon. By the end of the show, Killua has developed a softer, more personable side and is definitively fighting with the good guys to save the world, without a doubt making admirable decisions and accomplishing feats along the way; but it’s not as though by the end of the show he is even close to one of the most admirable characters in the series, much less one to look at as a base for your own behavior. If you are at the same point in your life that Killua is at the end of the series, you are on your way up from a baseline of human decency on the road to humanitarianism.
When I think about anime characters I relate to, they are of course usually characters I like and want to watch because they have something to say about me, and because maybe I can grow from the experience—but characters I admire are in a whole different class, standing as paragons of their place in society. Characters with extreme moral fortitude like Tsunemori Akane from Psycho-Pass, or with immense skill in navigating and effecting society like Kusanagi Motoko from Ghost in the Shell, or excellent diplomatic leaders, like Shiroe from Log Horizon, are characters that I admire, because they can do things that I can’t do, but want to be able to. These are characters designed from the top to be so good that you’d have to totally lack any humbleness to compare yourself to them directly.
Characters I relate to the most, meanwhile, are typically not so impressive. I relate to them specifically because they share my flaws; and even if there are things that they can do which are great, I can still compare myself to them because they fuck up in the same ways I would. In watching them better themselves, I am inspired to do the same to myself—but if you’re following someone that closely behind, then you’ll inevitably crash in all of the same places that they will along the way.
#myselfin4animecharacters
We can’t know yet what Killua or Mamimi from FLCL will do to make themselves into truly admirable people. At the end of their shows, they have dealt with relatable emotions that we, too, should have dealt with at similar stages in life to the ones that they are at. We haven’t yet tackled the real-deal issues that would make us admirable people, and maybe we never will—but as long as we look up to people (and characters) who do, we’ll be able to pick ourselves up even when we falter and continue chasing after the gold standard that we know exists from seeing the people way ahead of us.
I think a lot of the admiration of peers comes from seeing what looks to be a slightly displaced version of ourselves—someone in a position we would already be in if we’d made a decision differently somewhere along the way. But they already made that decision by this point, and you didn’t—and they’ll have a totally different trajectory from you now, having already done that. You have to think about what you’ll have to do starting from this moment to catch up to where your peer already is—and that may be impossible, or it may be a bad idea as you don’t yet fathom the consequences of your peers’ success. Look up to people who have sustained—who keep making good decisions, whose wisdom has stood the test of time, and who have already made the mistakes you would have if you didn’t listen to them about how they could’ve prevented them. That way, you’ll recover much more easily when you make them anyways.
A really nice reflective piece Bea. I sensed a similarity to Jordan Peterson's advice to "orient yourself towards your highest ideal" or something like that. Feels like a more abstracted way of saying what you've written about choosing role models who have sustained good decision making. But maybe I've simply spent too much time this past year overdosing on the controversial doctor's lectures. I've sometimes wondered if you had any thoughts on the Jordan Peterson battle, as a unique internet figure that seems able to glide between seemingly antithetical social clouds.
I feel like most people are conflating like with admiration