#psychology of smoking

[dropintomanga]

What Smoking Entails in Manga

Last year, a survey was given to Japanese manga publishers about what top 5 manga to recommend for 2023 and the number one title was symbolic of many things related to Japanese culture - one of which was smoking.

The title was called Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You by Jinushi. I got a chance to read Volume 1 recently and it's a very fascinating romantic comedy about a middle-aged salaryman and a early 20s' female convenience store clerk and how they're bound by their love of smoking. The author made a comment saying that their admiration of how cool smoking was in fiction was a huge inspiration in creating the story.

Which got me thinking about how much smoking is prevalent in the anime and manga worlds and how much characters who smoke are beloved by many.

When I was still exploring new titles to follow in my '20s, one that stood out to me was Great Teacher Onizuka. The main character was someone who was a total idiot, but was pretty badass. Oh yeah, he smoked. I later got into Rurouni Kenshin and fell in love with Saito Hajime. Oh yeah, he smokes. A LOT. It's funny because I got into comics because of X-Men and the characters Wolverine and Gambit smoked quite a bit. I liked both, but not as much as the anime/manga characters who smoked.

When you think about it, there's a lot of anime/manga characters who smoke. Sanji from One Piece, Revy from Black Lagoon, Nara Shikamaru from Naruto, Toshiro Hijikata from Gintama, several adult characters from Cowboy Bebop (like Spike Siegel pictured above) - I could go on.

In video games, there's Yakuza/Like a Dragon characters and one of my favorite heroines ever, VA-11 Hall-A's Jill Stingray, smokes.

I love how cool all of those characters look when they smoke and I don't even smoke. I don't want to because of all the health risks smoking entails. My father used to be a smoker, but quit before I reached junior high school because he was having health problems.

At the same time, I do something a bit silly. I pretend to smoke with the air around me. I like to pretend I'm holding an imaginary cigarette to my mouth and inhale/exhale oxygen when no one's looking. It's a habit I've built from following my favorite characters who smoke.

Smoking is indeed something that shouldn't be romanticized. But I think about why people smoke in the first place - particularly my dad and Chinese people (particularly men) smoked. I remember one time when I was at a Chinese doctor's office, there was a video played for Chinese people addicted to smoking. There was a doctor in the video who said when Chinese people immigrate to the United States, they're often exposed to a lot of stressors (usually related to acculturation) that weigh a ton. Smoking is one way to help process and relieve their stress. They're coming from a country where smoking is definitely the norm in their culture.

There's a lot of talk about smoking being a sign of maturity and surviving through tough times. I decided to look up the relationship between smoking and mental health/illness. It's not surprising that there's negative effects. People with depression and anxiety may smoke a bit more than those who aren't affected by them. What makes it really hard for them to quit is that smoking has social benefits. Nicotine can help calm nerves and make smokers feel more confident in behaving in a proper social manner.

When I think about the many characters who smoke, smoking does help them before they get ready to take on a big task involving other people. It's literally the calm before the storm. Hell, I do "oxygen smoke" as a way to feel calm before facing reality or having big conversations with my friends. But I was drilled so hard by United States anti-drug programs (when compared to Asia) that I didn't want to feel like I was dying. That's why I never took the plunge despite the coolness of smoking found in Japanese media and try to encourage anti-smoking measures. Plus I think it helped that I wasn't super-stressed despite my mental illness to the point where I resorted to substances. Plus I had people who genuinely cared about my well-being and a somewhat optimistic belief in the best of humanity.

While Japanese media (and other Asian media in general) continues to showcase smoking to a decent degree, there's contentious pushback in America over the portrayal of smoking in their media. Yet smoking rates in Japan have gone down though quite a bit over the years due to anti-smoking measures. It's not as low as health organizations would like, but progress is progress.

The only thing I think we can agree on is that the world is so cruel and there should be wider acknowledgement of how the bad parts of life can lead people down to dangerous substances in order to cope. I think this is what creators intend to show when they have characters who smoke. Yeah, they look cool, but they're flawed people trying to find some sense of meaning/connection to worlds that disappoint them over and over again.

We're just trying to find ways to breathe life into inner peace, whether it's with oxygen or smoke.

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

Raising Cain (Brian De Palma, 1992)

[letz-smoke-zaza]

Life is unfair,

Kill yourself or get over it.

Life is unfair,

Kill yourself or get over it.

— Child Psychology , Black Box Recorder

[ghostclout]

how do i explain to people i dont like serial experiments lain in a "breakcore, lets all love lain, rei ayanami smoking weed, wow she just like me fr, dont get attached to the internet kids" way. i like it in a "jesus fucking christ a piece of media has never impacted me more and i think has changed my mental health in both a good and bad way. and also i love the old internet aesthetic" way

[itstheheebiejeebies]

@lewis-winters my best attempt of classifying the various cigarette (and bonus syrette) holds in Band of Brothers

Most guys cluster in C and I and Guarnere has a unique hold that resembles G but is essentially reversed

[smashorpass50plus]

& carl jung. thanks 😩

[dovesick]

the seamstress

[makoredeyes]

Coercion eventually got Damien out to the beach but (un)fortunately for the fireteam he’s found a bar to go hide at.

((Started this like a month ago and just finally got around to finishing it. Got lazy with the shading but whatever. ))

[minerayana]

[popping-your-culture]

Reviewing Lost Highway (1997). Check it out on the blog.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

The lights out au is the first au in a while to peak my interest : O

I gotta know, why is Sally evil and what does she do?

Also how's Barnaby doing? <: (

im Delighted to hear that!! (also hi! your laughingstock art is adorable!)

Sally isn't really evil per se... she's just sleepwalking! while having mild to intense nightmares! most of the time she just sleeps in her house, but once per day she takes a walk - a "patrol" - around the neighborhood before going back to sleep. every so often she wakes up Extra agitated, and needs to be soothed to sleep or she'll get destructive. in general, though, Nightlight!Sally just patrols and attacks anything that makes noise until it goes Quiet again

and Barnaby! well! he's having the most wonderful dreams <3

[violet-jessop]

two nights in a row gripping ice cubes like i'm 14 this is fucking pathetic

[amicus-noctis]

'Smoking is one of the greatest and cheapest enjoyments in life, and if you decide in advance not to smoke, I can only feel sorry for you. '

- Sigmund Freud

[high-in-the-tower]

I think Louis would get a vampiric restriction order on Lestat's behalf against Gabrielle. Because Lou would totally blame the parent here.

Anything to absolve Lestat in Louis mind and ease the guilt that he's still attracted to that man. I can easily see him turning around and saying "he's french 🤷‍♀️" as Daniel looks on him in disapproving horror

[firethekitty]

imagine passing a blunt to vash & he takes a bite out of it

[not-poignant]

Would you be willing to talk about the idea of 'psychopaths in real life'? I know you've written them but because there's so much messy pop culture around the idea of a psychopath I've never been sure of what about the idea of them is real. Are some people simply born wanting to hurt people? Or is it the result of early major trauma, or innate? I've met a lot of very cruel people but I think I'd say they probably weren't like that with select groups of people (their friends or family) rather than people they viewed as targets/unimportant/sinners/etc... Probably? I suppose I think of them more as emotionally sadistic than as fundamentally incapable of empathy. But maybe I just haven't met the right people, or known them well enough. Just an invitation to share your thoughts on the subject, if you're willing.

Are some people simply born wanting to hurt people? Or is it the result of early major trauma, or innate?

If you had an answer to this, anon, you'd have an answer to one of the greatest mysteries of psychology and sociology. The truth is, we just don't know for sure. There's a lot of good evidence on both sides, depending on who you're studying, which strongly suggests that sometimes it might be the first, sometimes it might be the second, and sometimes it's both.

But the reality is we don't know.

Scientists really, really want to find ways of detecting folks like this before some of them turn to extremely violent or cruel crimes, so obviously finding out the causative genetic and/or social factors is extremely important to them. It would save a lot of money re: governments for a start, so this is an area that's had bursts of funding over the years. But the reality is we're not really a great deal closer to figuring it out.

We do know that some folks genuinely seem to have had no social causative factors, and others folks genuinely seem to have been shaped by their upbringing. If you want to go into this there are hundreds of books and articles on the subject, and you'll very quickly see that no one is in agreement and we still have no solid early detection systems.

I've met a lot of very cruel people but I think I'd say they probably weren't like that with select groups of people (their friends or family) rather than people they viewed as targets/unimportant/sinners/etc… Probably?

The fact is, unless you were with them 24/7 you don't know how they were behaving with friends and family. In fact, this is how certain priests and cops get away with so much of what they do. There are priests who have been kind and compassionate to entire congregations and then gone on to rape 30/40 children in cruel ways that have led to many suicides, who feel zero shame or remorse and who very obviously just wanted access to children in a job that would give them community trust without having to earn it. That kindness and compassion is a performance to secure what you want.

Secondly, perhaps they were good with friends and family, so was Gacy. Many folks like this understand that they need to strategically set up networks of people who believe you to be kind etc. Being a psychopath doesn't mean you're stupid (although some are, varying intelligence levels exist), often these folks understand that to get away with doing what they truly want to do, there needs to be a cloak of 'I'm fine and normal and nice' around them. The ones who don't understand this tend to go to jail very quickly (or die very quickly due to the circumstances around their behaviours - being a psychopath is not a safe thing to be if you can't pair it with an ability to be selective).

But maybe I just haven't met the right people, or known them well enough.

I'm not going to talk about specific details of my past but I will say it's likely that you just haven't met someone on this level and/or have but are just not in their target zone because they might just be in the periphery of your experience.

Folks like Crielle exist in the world, for example, and sadly it's often more people than you'd expect. But some of those people are also incredibly intelligent and manipulative. They often operate on a level different to most of us.