Opinion: Escapism, complacency, and the inner Gigachad

From zero to hero: why we root for losers now

Once upon a time, our heroes were untouchable. They wore tuxedos to gunfights, jumped off skyscrapers without breaking a sweat, and had powers that made the gods of old look almost underwhelming. We looked up to them and wanted to be them. Lately, something strange has been happening. Our protagonists aren’t flawless anymore. They’re… well, kind of losers? A struggling mom saves the multiverse. A high schooler turns into an edgy anti-hero. A socially awkward anime girl can only talk by writing in a flipbook. What happened? Did we all decide that being cool is overrated?

My guess is it’s some mix of disillusionment and a desperate need to escape. When the economy is stuck and social pressure is heavy, we seem to have swapped aspirational fantasies for something more relatable: flawed characters who stumble their way to greatness. Is that empowering, or are we just fooling ourselves with prettier versions of mediocrity?

Why we love watching nobodies become somebodies

Take isekai. It’s a genre common in modern Japanese pop culture where a character gets pulled into another world (think The Matrix, but with more swords and arguably worse-written existential crises). The whole genre runs on one premise: losers get a second chance. The socially inept gamer becomes an overpowered hero. The book-obsessed psychopath razzle-dazzles medieval peasants with modern knowledge. The fantasy is simple. You escape your current life and start over as someone extraordinary.

Western media loves this trope too. Remember Ready Player One? A broke, awkward kid saves the virtual universe because he knows obscure 80s trivia. Or Harry Potter: an unloved boy living under the stairs finds out he’s a wizard destined to beat the most feared dark lord in history. These stories land because most of us secretly hope we’re meant for something bigger than our boring lives. We’re only so many days away from our own breakthrough.

The catch is that these stories often cheat. The protagonist doesn’t win because they work hard or grow as a person. They win because they’re “chosen,” or because they trip over godlike powers. That’s escapism at its most fun, and also at its most dangerous.

When escapism becomes a trap

These stories look empowering at first. Even the most flawed of us can be great! Look closer, though, and a lot of them romanticize passivity.

Back to isekai. The protagonist usually gets huge power without earning it. One minute they’re a nobody; the next, they’re fighting zombies or saving the world from some guy with a hand fetish. Fun to watch, sure. But what’s the message? That greatness takes no effort? That you just wait for a deus ex machina to fix your life?

This shows up outside fantasy too. A lot of modern media sells “acceptance” in a way that slides into complacency. Characters get celebrated for “being themselves,” and nobody asks them to grow. The worst offender is the “romance with a gimmick” show. These shows decided that drama and a slow build to a real relationship took too long. So we get the same formula every season: Girl A has a quirk, she meets Boy A, and they live happily ever after. It’s like we collectively decided that wanting something in life and working towards it was too much work.

And maybe that’s the point. When real problems feel impossible to fix, we reach for stories that let us off the hook. Escapism helps for a while. But it can also widen the gap between what we expect from life and what we actually get.

The case for struggle: why we might need to suffer

Growth hurts. That’s kind of the point. Magical thinking and escapist fantasies can’t replace hard work and sticking with it, and deep down we know this. That’s why Rocky and Good Will Hunting still hit. Nobody in those movies gets handed anything. They fight for it.

So how do we square this with our love of loser-to-hero stories? By rethinking what “acceptance” means. Accepting yourself should mean being honest about where you are right now and still trying to get better. Giving up on getting better is resignation, and we shouldn’t call it acceptance.

What if media leaned into that? Picture an isekai where the hero gets no instant godlike powers and has to learn the new world from scratch. Picture flawed characters who inspire us by working for their success, so we see what we could become if we actually tried. That’s how you go even further beyond.

Unleashing your inner Gigachad

Enter Korea’s first viral meme of 2025: the Inner Gigachad. It started as a joke about acting absurdly confident while the world burned around us, and it quickly turned into a rallying cry for self-improvement. People filled their feeds with posts in a mix of broken English and Korean, held together by pure charisma, next to pictures of chiseled men and captions like “Hey 만삣삐, you have to trust yourself to take action. Only you can decide what the right decision is.”

It was ridiculous and completely over the top, and it worked. The Inner Gigachad never asked you to be perfect. It asked you to believe in yourself with total audacity, even when you felt like a loser. You show up to life with the swagger of someone who thinks they’re invincible, even if you’re barely holding it together.

So maybe you won’t save the multiverse or lead a rebellion against a dystopian regime. Maybe your story is smaller and quieter, and it still counts. Learning a new skill, mending a broken relationship, getting out of bed on a day when everything feels impossible: those are real fights. So STOP 띵킹 만삣삐. A day will come when your hard work pays off, and it won’t be some benevolent god who rewards you. It’ll be you.