Manga/Manwha/Manhua

[Richard Kielbasa]

Manga/Manwha/Manhua

“A woman is, while a man must become” - Camille Paglia

About 80% of women throughout all of genetic history have reproduced, whereas only 40% of men have.

This is because women are the reproductive bottleneck.

A woman can have a mere 15-30 kids in her lifetime, whereas the average man is capable of impregnating every woman on earth (men generate 100–300 million new sperm every 24 hours).

This results in a fundamental biological signal still present when we organize into society:

Women have inherent reproductive value, whereas men are expendable.

The fundamental feminine task in organized society is to display and maintain reproductive value

*Of course, the money machine has priced this information in nonconsciously as the beauty industry

An adult human male in organized society does not have value until he demonstrates it.

Value is the marriage of [how men organize themselves hierarchically] and [what women select] in a given culture. 

*Note that each is also a function of the other.

It began primitively as purely the physical. Today we have largely metricized the concept of value; we call this money.

Subcultures create edge cases however. Members of a subgroup might additionally value [adherence to religion X’s commandments] or some aspect of character like honesty or resourcefulness; Silicon Valley has a unique binary —> exit or no exit

Demonstrate is a unique word. A demonstration of value is the only logical proof of it.

The word implies something like a performance, which in turn implies an audience.

What does the modern young man’s intense Manga/Manwha/Manhua addiction mean? What does that type of story do for their biology?

I hyperfixate on a single trope; I posit this is the representative sample. This explains the genre.

This scene is almost always a permutation of “fighting in an arena”.

This is the male fantasy, distilled. Value demonstration to what the brain can say is effectively everyone.

Who is really in the audience?

A rival (usually the other in the arena),

A love interest (possibly being protected right now from the other),

People met along the way that didn’t think much of you (being proven wrong even as we speak),

People that did who invested in you (feeling pride in this moment),

You. Not “you” the mc as your fictitious avatar (like the above 2 sentences), literally you.

The story about the “solitary” mc who has no audience within the fiction is actually the most important. Because then you are the primary audience demonstrated to.

*There is often also a “training arc”, something we can now reclassify as preparation for value demonstration. This proposes something important and attractive to the male psyche - that there even exists a path to becoming something demonstrably valuable.