QAnon and the Unreal: A Paranoia Agent in the Modern World
On January 6th, 2021, a mob of conspiracy theorists and fascists stormed the US Capital building in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. The storm of deceit and disinformation that made this riot possible has been building for years and contains many, many, component parts, each of which is unprecedented in its own way and deserving of attention. Unraveling this entirely is a huge task, and that will be the work of historians to come. For the purposes of this video; however, I’d like to tune out a lot of the moving pieces and debris to focus on one aspect I find uniquely modern and uniquely American. I am interested primarily in one of the groups present at the capitol building: QAnon, Through processes that would have been unimaginable in any other generation, QAnon’s supposed founder Q has coagulated out of a disembodied collective unconscious and taken on physical life, a unique American Scream of the digital age. But first: let’s talk about anime.
Paranoia Agent is a 2004 anime series by Satoshi Kon that grapples with the stresses of modern Japanese life by telling the story of one Shonen Bat, or “Lil’ Slugger” in the English dub. As a heads up, I will be spoiling Paranoia Agent in this essay, so if you want the full Shonen Bat experience untainted by my musings, go watch it and then come back. I promise it’s a great show. Shonen Bat as he is introduced to us is a mysterious street attacker with a crooked baseball bat making his way through the lives of seemingly unconnected victims: a famous character designer, an arrogant elementary school student, a corrupt police officer. The attacks are confusing and brutal, drive-by assaults where he beats people to death with his bat before skating off, seemingly into thin air. As public attention and the media become increasingly focused on Shonen Bat, the frequency and power of his attacks also grows proportionally until he becomes almost omnipresent. As the situation escalates, it becomes impossible to suggest that all of this is being perpetrated by one criminal miscreant. Eventually the truth about Shonen Bat is revealed: he is not a person at all. Rather, he is a fiction invented by character designer Tsukiko Sagi in order to evade responsibility for being unable to repeat her earlier success, in the hopes that being a victim of a sudden and violent street attack would take pressure off of her at work. This fiction of Shonen Bat was adopted by more and more people in need of an easy way out, sometimes from family troubles, social pressures, or financial responsibilities. Eventually, nursed by mass hysteria, the character took on physical form and began acting on it’s own accord. In other words, Shonen Bat is a monster created by the collective unconscious of the Japanese public as a twisted solution to a problem that only makes the problem worse.
At the time of airing, this character was comfortably in the realm of science fiction.
Now imagine for a moment that Paranoia Agent was made in America, in the year 2020. How does the Shonen Bat from this show differ from that of the original? Well, for starters, he would be responding to a more existential sense of desperation. America in 2020 spent most of the year in lockdown, meaning most people’s jobs either disappeared or became much more flexible, and having no job in American culture strips you of identity and worth. So instead of coming from the pressures of an oppressive work ethic in a society that moves too fast and demands too much, he’d probably form because people feel desperate to have some agency and identity in their own lives. After all, this country is increasingly ruled by apathetic and self-righteous billionaires. It is struggling in the wake of a pandemic that stripped people of social connections and economic opportunities. It should hardly be a surprise that people feel like they have no control over even their own lives. Secondly, death is not seen as a way to escape your problems in America, instead, suicide is considered shameful. Since Shonen Bat has to be unconsciously summoned, this would mean that all of his victims are, in a way, choosing to end their own lives. This idea would be a non-starter for most Americans, who would be unwilling to part with their sense of self-worth. This limitation means that Shonen Bat’s role is now to remove people from the social playing field without killing or incapacitating them. Instead, Shonen Bat would trap them in a fantasy world, one where they could assume a quintessentially American role, that of the everyman hero who fights for freedom. He would make all his victims into their very own Paul Revere or Ulysses S. Grant and hold them there in self-righteous glory until they lose all connection to reality. If this connection seems like a stretch to you, one of the main characters in Paranoia Agent gets stuck in a very similar fantasy world near the end of the show, one where he is able to carry out his childhood dreams in an older, simpler version of Japan. In addition, America’s Shonen Bat would have no need to gain popularity through neighbors and coworkers gossiping to each other — our show is in 2020, after all, and the internet amplifies gossip to a level previously unimaginable. Shonen Bat would first emerge onto the internet, anonymously, like he first appears in the original show, and lay down roots there, only later emerging into the attention of the media.
Finally, Shonen Bat’s appearance would have to be adapted to fit into the American mythos of manifest destiny and rugged individualism. The mystique in the original Japanese design comes from the idea that no ordinary person ever could have become Shonen Bat. What kind of elementary school student would take it upon themselves to violently assault people using roller blades and a golden baseball bat? Certainly not one you or I have ever met. However, Americans grew up on the story that through pronounced effort and ingenuity, anyone can achieve anything. The idea of Shonen Bat being a sort of impossible person wouldn’t carry the same weight here, in the land where anything is possible, it would just make him seem distant and uninteresting. Instead, an American audience would be much more captivated by the opposite idea: that Shonen Bat could be literally anyone. He could be anyone like you and me, someone fed up with the system, who feels that the world is being locked into a death spiral and wants to do something about it, and if they become a folk hero in the process, so much the better. So our Shonen Bat can’t look like a kid with a baseball bat, that’s far too specific and too transparently indicative of the childish unreflective id forces that power the violence. In fact, our Shonen Bat can’t have a face at all, since a face would only define him and limit the kind of person he could be. To preserve as much variability as possible while maintaining singularity, our Shonen Bat should be just a single letter, preferably one traditionally associated with mystery, mastery, and esoteric knowledge. X or Z or maybe even Q.
It shouldn’t be a great surprise to most people that Q, the aforementioned founder of the QAnon conspiracy group, is probably not a real person. On the website 4chan, where Q originated, posts are not linked to an account, so it is near impossible to confirm that multiple posts purporting to be written by the same person actually are. It is worth mentioning that users can use a tripcode, which associates a post with a unique digital signature for anyone who knows the password, to show continuity, but these passwords are easy to crack, and Q’s tripcode has changed on multiple occasions. In all likelihood, Q is a character cooperatively created and sustained by the digital unconscious of 4chan as an emergent leak of desire, just as Shonen Bat was created and sustained by the collective unconsciousness of Japan. Think of a leaky roof in an unnoticed corner of the house, slowly bringing about decay and tearing the whole house down. Also like Shonen Bat, Q’s power and influence has exploded out of the imaginary and become a real force in the modern world. A QAnon supporter was recently elected to Congress. QAnon participated in the first breaching of the American Capitol Building since 1814, resulting in the deaths of at least five people. All this despite Q not being a real person.
I want to take a moment to reflect on how completely bizarre this is. Unlike other invented characters of the past, Q is not the product of a single person, or even a group of people. He is not a persona, like JT LeRoy, who was created essentially as an identity to sell books, or a multiple-use name, like Luther Blissett, who was an experiment in shared identity and authorship. These are ruses designed and carried out with specific ends in mind; identity as a marketing tool. Q is a character who emerged spontaneously in response to the needs of the time, from creators who may not have been in contact with each other or had any shared idea of the end they were driving towards. This character, entirely unreal and creatorless, has gone on to be a major player in United States politics and has become one of the greatest threats to American democracy in living memory. This is a thing that would have been virtually impossible before the internet.
So here we are. What next?
Well, If we look back to Paranoia Agent, Shonen Bat, the original Q, is eventually exorcised by forcing the inventor of the character, Tsukiko Sagi, to reject escapism and face reality as it is. Truth be told, I always found this ending unsatisfying. Sure, Shonen Bat was originally Tsukiko’s delusion, but by the end of the show he had grown to the point where he belonged to everyone. It doesn’t make sense that he could be destroyed by resolving just Tsukiko’s neurosis, as if all the damage could be undone by a therapeutic story and some personal insight. While I’m happy for everyone’s learning and growing, I feel it exists on a different plane from mass-death events. And Shonen Bat is a mass-death event. By the end of the story Tokyo is in ruins. A character walks out of a subway station and remarks that Japan looked like this after the war. As a science fiction narrative, that’s brilliant and brings us full circle, but does America really want to go there as a reality?
That said, I think the ending points to something important, that anchoring oneself in reality, however painful that reality may be, is better and more fulfilling than inventing a way out or trying for a cheap “cleansing through violence.” There are a lot of problems in America right now, and not a lot of solutions. The pandemic continues to wear on, social unrest has only increased, the gap between the rich and the poor here is greater than it ever has been, and the narrative of American self determination is seeming more detached from reality with every passing day. Change will not come quickly, and not without the help of people, who, rooted in actual reality, push for actual solutions. Now, this is the point in the essay where I would generally be expected to clarify what exactly those solutions are. I don’t know. What I hope to do here is less make a map for fixing America, and more shift the terms of discussion towards a paradigm that might be more helpful. At the very least, I am confident that falling back on cheap therapeutic solutions or blaming the problem on someone else is just not enough anymore. We have a new kind of problem, one that even the most forward thinking cyberpunk writers couldn’t see coming, and it looks like a leaky pipe in a dark corner of the house.
Thanks so much for reading! This is my first post, and I hope to get out more uplifting content like this, that explores the changing world through the lens of pop culture. Hope to see you next time!
