#this has been. sef pepe silva moment

[shmothman]

allow me to elaborate.

Genos, Trauma, and Identity

(I'm sure all of this has been said a million times, considering I'm years late to the fandom, BUT I can’t stop thinking about it.)

Genos is traumatized. Obviously. At 15 years old, his whole family (his whole town!) was killed in front of him by a rampaging cyborg. His entire world is shattered in one day. And I don’t think this is ever explicitly stated, but my assumption was that he was probably close to death when Kuseno found him. (“being only a weak 15 year old, I was alone at the end of my strength in a ruined town.”) Not to mention the fact that the intense body modification he underwent to become a cyborg would have massive psychological consequences. 

So Genos, having just lost his entire family, is saved by Doctor Kuseno, “a scientist for justice, on a mission to stop the rampaging cyborg and end his oppression.” We don’t get to see what Genos was like before all of this, when he was a poor kid living “a peaceful and happy life” with his family, but I can only imagine him at fifteen, right after this massacre that he witnessed and this injury he was dealt, young and crying to the only person he even has in his life now, who he’s only just met. 15 year old Genos trying to deal with all this grief, just a teenager sobbing in a scientist’s lab. And Doctor Kuseno is a doctor, an engineer—he’s in no way equipped to guide a teenager through all this trauma, so the only solace he can offer this sobbing kid is that together, they can avenge his family, that they can make sure it never happens again, that no one else will have to go through what Genos is going through now. Kuseno gives him the option of being able to fight back.

And that’s something that Genos can hold onto.

He says: “I asked the doctor to give me body modification surgery to make me better, stronger, faster. That’s how I was reborn as a cyborg who fights for justice. I promised Doctor Kuseno I would terminate the evil cyborg and return peace to this world.” And so, he has all these surgeries, not only to save his life but to make him a weapon, to enact revenge for the lives lost, and for the way it's made him feel.

Genos becomes the Cyborg for Justice, and it becomes his entire identity. He’s not Genos, the boy who lived happily with his family (and of course, we don’t even know anything else about his past, he doesn’t talk about it, doesn’t think about it anymore), but Genos, the cyborg for justice.

The more it becomes his identity, the more he's able to lock up the part of himself that's just a crying kid in a lab. He just keeps repeating to himself that now he's a cyborg for justice. Now he can protect people. Now he can find the cyborg who did this and kill it. He’s focused and driven. He thinks about this one thing, about vengeance, and he doesn’t think about anything else. He’s the cyborg for justice. That’s it. (He can’t think about the things he’s lost. He can only look forward.)

And that’s how he lives for the next 5 years. He hardens himself, he “wanders from town to town eliminating evil,” and as far as we can tell, he doesn’t have any relationships with anyone besides Kuseno. He doesn’t need anyone besides Kuseno. He can’t afford to lose anything else. And he doesn’t have any purpose but searching for the cyborg that killed his family (he’s not an individual with wants and needs anymore—he doesn’t see himself as human anymore). And it must be noted that Kuseno is the same way—he’s driven by the single-minded desire to destroy this cyborg, and thus, so is Genos, who now holds Kuseno above all else, as the man who saved his life and made him stronger. He ties his identity to Kuseno, takes Kuseno’s drive as his own, and that lets him not think about his incalculable losses, except in the abstract; he thinks “my family was killed, and I will avenge them,” but refuses to think “I lost everyone I ever loved.” And he fights, and fights, and fights—he defeats evil, and he becomes confident enough in his abilities that he thinks he can “lose to no one but the rampaging cyborg.”

And then he (self-admittedly) becomes overconfident, and he almost dies fighting the mosquito monster. And he meets Saitama. 

He sees Saitama, with a single punch, destroy the monster that would have killed him—and he immediately knows that Saitama could beat the rampaging cyborg. And thus, if Genos becomes like him, Genos could beat the rampaging cyborg. 

Genos needs to become stronger in order to defeat his enemy, and Saitama could be the key. So, for ostensibly the first time in years, Genos allows (or rather, demands) someone else into his life—because now, Saitama is inextricably linked with Genos’s one goal, and thus his identity.

He latches onto Saitama in an almost childish way, in a similar manner to the way he latched onto Kuseno. He is the cyborg for justice. He is Saitama’s disciple. He is going to get stronger, so that he can defeat the rampaging cyborg.

This is all he thinks about. He can only look forward.

Because of all the things he’s been through, and because of his goal, Genos values strength above all else. There is a hierarchy in his life, with the strongest people on top: Kuseno, who saved him, and is powerful because he created Genos’s body, and thus created his strength; and now Saitama, who is physically the most powerful thing Genos has ever seen. Genos places himself below them. He is deferential toward them, honors them above all else, and becomes extremely protective of them—and thus, of his identity which now revolves around them. (Because who is he without them? Who is he without his goal? That doesn’t matter. Keep moving.)

The more he ties his identity to Saitama, the more his emotions revolve around him. He's happy when Saitama does well. He's angry when Saitama isn't treated well. We don’t know how Genos expressed emotions before the start of the story, but it seems like he mostly only shows anger, though even this is pretty restrained for a character who could be called a bit hot-headed. Still, his identity is incredibly fragile—it’s really only attached to the one thing—and he seems to grow more and more possessive of Saitama as Saitama meets more people (makes more friends). It’s insecurity, in its basest form: he has a fear of being replaced (and thus of losing part or all of his identity), although he wouldn’t be able to understand or articulate that currently; he never really learned much emotional intelligence, and he isn’t going to be able to learn it from Kuseno or Saitama. 

And then, of course, there’s the simple fact that he doesn’t seem to put much value on his own life (and not just in the way that he’ll gladly lay it down to protect others). He nearly self-destructs at a couple different points (notably, Saitama’s strength is the thing that saves him the first time, and Fubuki’s ambition and her connection to him that saves him the second time) and never has anything to say except “I’m sorry I wasn’t enough.” It... comes from several places, I think; one of them being survivor’s guilt. He was the sole survivor of the cyborg’s attack. And in a way, I think he’s had to justify his own continued existence to himself. If he gets vengeance, if he restores peace, then he has a reason to be alive. If he’s of use, if he avenges his town and family, then it will be worth it. If he can’t do these things, if he isn’t strong enough, then he shouldn’t be here, anyway. “Forgive me, doctor.” 

I don’t really have a point to all of this, except to say that he’s deeply broken, in so many ways, and doesn’t have the emotional wherewithal to be able to consciously understand or articulate any of it. Even if he could, it wouldn’t matter to him—the only thing that matters is his concept of justice. So. In conclusion: Therapy. Now.

having normal thoughts vis a vis genos’s emotional repression and just overall how he’s dealt with all the Trauma of his life and I just 😭😭😭😭😭