How Jojo's Bizarre Adventure helped ease my post-election fears

Last week, Donald Trump won the presidential election against Kamala Harris, and in January will be installed as the next president of the United States, returning to the White House after four years away. Trump is easily the most divisive figure to come along in American politics — maybe global politics — in decades, and I was firmly in the camp that was hoping he would lose the election.

Obviously I'm hoping for the best out his presidency, but in the days after the results came in, the main thing I was feeling was afraid. I'm afraid that Trump will tank the country's economy by, among other things, imposing new tariffs on foreign goods, driving up inflation just as the country had gotten it under control following the post-pandemic boom. I'm afraid he's going to decimate public goods by, for example, eliminating the Department of Education, making it harder to raise families in a country where the birth rate is already dropping. I'm afraid his economic policies will concentrate even more wealth in the hands of the super-rich, creating a world where basic economic security is forever out of the hands of most Americans. I'm afraid his permissive attitude towards dictators like Vladimir Putin will make the world much less safe as new wars break out around the globe. I'm afraid his enthusiasm for mass deportations will create a humanitarian crisis that will past catastrophes look mild, I'm afraid he plans to further roll back the rights of woman and queer people, I'm afraid his dismissal of climate science will hasten the world's path towards environtmental disaster, and I'm afraid his hostility towards the democratic process means he may try and fix things so we never have another meaningful election in the United States again.

I hope to heaven I'm wrong about all of this, but I am afraid. I normally like to follow the news — I have some go-to papers, websites, podcasts and YouTube people I like to check out — but in the days after the election, I pretty much avoided all of them. Thinking about what could be ahead of us was too stressful. So what did I do instead?

I watched an anime called Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Okay, so in the part of the show I'm at, in the third season, hero Josuke and his friends are trying to track down a serial killer named Yoshikage Kira, who has now has stolen the face and identity of another man and moved into that man's house, pretending to be a husband to the man's wife and father to his son. In the last episode I watched, Yoshikage Kira found a cat in the basement. Like many of the characters on the show, the cat has a Stand, which is a kind of spirit companion that grants it supernatural abilities. The cat is acting hostile towards Kira's "wife" Shinobu, so Kira kills it and buries it in the backyard. The next day, the cat regrows itself as a plant, but with feline eyes and little leaves that look like cat ears. It's developed a new power that allows it to shoot air bubbles at people. So now Yoshikage Kira has to battle this air-puffing cat plant while Josuke and his friends — one of whom has a power to turn anyone into a book into which he can write instructions, FYI — look for him.

What does any of this have to do with Trump or politics or the future of the United States? Absolutely nothing, and that's the point. WinterIsComing is a site about sci-fi and fantasy, about stories that are often set completely outside our world. People have long used these stories as a kind of escape. You don't have to think about the geopolitical implications of the election when you're wondering about the rules governing how plant-cat hybrids work. (Kira ends up putting the cat a pot and keeping him the attic, FYI, where the low light condition keep him in a constant cat nap.)

That's not the only use for sci-fi-fantasy stories, of course. Many use metaphor to comment directly on matters of the day. Severance, which is returning for a second season on Apple TV+ in January, got people talking about the changing nature of work when it premiered in 2022, just as people were returning to the office as pandemic restrictions started to slacked. HBO's upcoming show Dune: Prophecy is set in a world where "thinking machines" have been outlawed, which dovetails with the ongoing discussion about generative AI. And people never stopped seeing parallels to real-world politics in Game of Thrones, a show about how to get and keep power.

And then there's something like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, which is so strange that it's impossible for me to think about the real world while watching it. And in stressful times, that can be a blessing.

Although it shouldn't become a crutch. I intend to get back up and pay attention to politics again, and do what I can to ensure I live in a country that's safe and prosperous. That will mean engaging with feelings of stress and worry, probably for the rest of my life. So it goes. But when I need a break, I'm thanking to Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and to Game of Thrones and to The Lord of the Rings and to all the other stories and storytellers who offer a refuge from the real world, for a little while.

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