Weebs of HBS, Rise Up!

It’s okay to like anime

I see you. You, over there. With the fresh haircut and respectable demeanor. You made a great comment in class today, and now you’re greeting sectionmates left and right down Aldrich Hall. You look every bit the polished HBS student and charismatic future leader.

I see the real you, too. Twenty years ago, you turned on the TV, and Inuyasha’s feudal fairytale rocked your whole world. Or maybe it was Dragon Ball Z’s buff aliens punching each other in the face. Or Sailor Moon’s magical girls transforming into champions of love and justice.

Either way, it sent you into a spiral. You moved onto Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece, your original Big 3 before MBB meant anything to you at all. You debated the moral complexities of Attack on Titan. Skip Beat! made your heart skip a beat. You drew fanart. You read fanfiction. You might have attended an anime convention, or two, or three. You occasionally ran with your arms behind you, like a ninja from the Hidden Leaf Village.

But sometime between your adolescence and early adulthood, you learned it was uncool to like anime. Despite the breadth and depth of anime as a storytelling medium, fans were cast as Japan-obsessed “weebs” who rarely showered and bought questionable body pillows. When you started thinking about business school, you read r/MBA posts on the “stigma” surrounding anime at top programs, warning that you should never mention this hobby in your application or on campus.

And so, when you got to HBS, you pushed down the part of you that memorized every arc in Chainsaw Man in favor of the part of you that skis and plays tennis and knows what EBITDA stands for. You assimilated into the crowd like the orange goo in Neon Genesis Evangelion (if you know, you know). Meanwhile, Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle came out in 2025 and became the highest-grossing international film in U.S. history. The One Piece live-action adaptation broke records for Netflix. Megan Thee Stallion and Alysa Liu ranked their favorite series on camera. K-Pop — once similarly, unfairly scorned — entered the mainstream.

Weebs of HBS, rise up! The wind is at our backs. Our power level is approaching 9,000. Unlike the protagonists of Spy x Family, we can embrace our true selves. And we are not alone! In an anonymized survey of HBS students, twenty out of twenty-five respondents confessed to casual or active engagement with anime. Armed with Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and 2x2 matrices, HBS weebs will run the world!

Vicky Liu (MBA ‘26) grew up in Surrey, Canada. She graduated from Yale University with a double major in Political Science and French. Prior to HBS, Vicky worked in technology M&A at Evercore and technology growth equity at Summit Partners.