What Does Nietzsche'S Overman Symbolize In Manga Characters?

When I sit down with a pen and a wild idea — like turning Nietzsche's Übermensch into the soft center of a messy shipfic — I get excited about all the ways sympathy can be earned on the page. The Übermensch is often painted as cold, transcendent, or terrifying, but fanfiction thrives on intimacy. If you let that figure have contradictions, small failures, and secret attachments, the reader starts rooting for them. Give them a person who struggles with loneliness after outgrowing their community, or someone who believes in radical self-overcoming but still cares for a sick friend. Those little domestic details—burnt toast, handwritten letters, a memory of a childhood pet—work wonders. In practice I lean on two tricks: the first is perspective. Tell the story through someone who admires or misunderstands the Übermensch, so the high ideals are filtered through empathy. The second is showing process rather than proclaiming doctrine: scenes of learning, fumbling leadership, moral slips and reparations. I also borrow tone from 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' when I need philosophical depth, but I pull it down to kitchen-table intimacy so readers can breathe. Of course, you can complicate sympathy by keeping the Übermensch's problematic edges—elitism, ruthlessness—intact. The best fanfiction I love balances awe with critique, so the character is sympathetic without being sanitized: a living, inconvenient figure who invites both admiration and worry. That tension is delicious to write and even more fun to read.

When I look at art that tries to embody Nietzsche's idea of the overman, I tend to read it like a little detective story—tracking recurring symbols and the moods they create. The most literal trio comes straight from 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra': the camel, the lion, and the child. Artists often use these beasts or their qualities—burden-bearing posture, fierce defiance, playful creation—to suggest stages toward a new kind of humanity. The tightrope walker image from the same book shows up everywhere, too: a thin path suspended over abyssal space, emphasizing risk, transition, and the vertigo of becoming. Beyond those textual cues, visual language leans heavily on ascent and illumination. Mountains, stairways, ladders, or figures climbing toward a blinding light or sun are classic shorthand for transcendence. Light itself—golden or harsh white—functions almost like a moral sun in paintings, implying new values being born. Animal pairings like eagle and serpent (Zarathustra’s companions) turn up as wings, coils, or heraldic emblems to suggest pride mixed with wisdom. The lion is often pictured mid-roar or ready to leap; the child appears in gestures of play or open hands, not as naïve innocence but as creative sovereignty. Form and posture matter: the overman is frequently portrayed in a heroic, sometimes classically nude, pose—lean musculature, forward stride, an uncompromising gaze. Yet modern takes fragment that ideal: Cubist or Expressionist distortions, fractured planes, and dynamic lines can portray the struggle and becoming rather than a finished, polished godlike figure. I’m always a little cautious, though—there’s a long, ugly history of misusing Nietzsche’s ideas, so when I see Aryanized musculature or triumphalist iconography I read skepticism into it rather than celebration. All in all, the symbols are more about movement (camel → lion → child), light, ascent, and the forging of new values—images that feel raw and a bit dangerous, which is exactly why I keep returning to them in sketchbooks and gallery notes.

When I flip through a stack of comics late at night I can almost trace Nietzsche’s fingerprints across the panels — not literally, but in the way creators toy with the idea of what a superior human might be. The core of the 'Übermensch' or overman from 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra'—the project of self-creation, the refusal of herd morals, the drive to make new values—shows up everywhere: in the unshakable confidence of a Superman who seems to live beyond ordinary morality, in the brutal efficiency of characters who take it upon themselves to remake the world. But it's important to separate inspiration from literal adoption. Most superhero stories appropriate the image of transcendence and then complicate it, because a literal Nietzschean overman who supersedes morality makes for a troubling protagonist on page and screen. Take 'Watchmen' as a textbook example: Ozymandias reads like a twisted Übermensch, someone who rationalizes mass murder for a higher goal. The story forces readers to ask whether a superior intellect grants the right to rewrite values for everyone. Contrast that with 'All-Star Superman', which treats Superman’s power as an invitation to embody noble ideals rather than to legislate values alone. Those two takes show the split: is the hero a creator of values or an exemplar of them? I find this tension endlessly fun to dissect because it mirrors our cultural anxieties. Modern superhero narratives often stage Nietzschean themes against checks and balances—friends, institutions, or the hero’s own conscience—to avoid glorifying unconstrained will to power. As a fan, I love when a story leans into that moral friction instead of offering easy answers; it keeps me turning pages and thinking long after the credits roll.

Honestly, if you want the heavyweight critics of Nietzsche’s idea of the overman, I’d start with thinkers who worried most about elitism, nihilism, and the political fallout of a philosophy that celebrates the strong will. Bertrand Russell comes to mind first for me: he was blunt in his rejection of Nietzsche’s moral project, seeing the overman as an invitation to contempt and social hierarchy rather than any emancipatory uplift. Russell’s tone is pragmatic and skeptical, the kind of voice that reads Nietzsche and worries about how rhetoric about superior types can translate into real-world oppression. On a different register, Karl Löwith digs into the genealogy of Nietzsche’s ideas and argues that the overman is a disguised form of eschatology — a secular salvation story that reproduces the same metaphysical shape as the religious narratives Nietzsche claimed to overthrow. That’s a heavy, historically informed critique: it makes me look back at 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' and 'Beyond Good and Evil' and see the messianic cadence beneath the aphorisms. Then there’s the Frankfurt School—Adorno and Horkheimer (and later commentaries from Walter Benjamin circles) criticized Nietzsche’s anti-Enlightenment instincts and the way his rhetoric can be retooled into authoritarian aesthetics. Feminist voices also cut through the myth: Simone de Beauvoir, for instance, pointed to how Nietzsche’s exaltation of strength and creative domination dovetails awkwardly with his misogynistic lines; she reads the overman through the lens of gendered power. If you want a map for further reading, pair Nietzsche’s 'The Gay Science' and 'On the Genealogy of Morals' with Russell’s essays, Löwith’s historical critique, Adorno’s writings on culture, and de Beauvoir’s 'The Second Sex' passages that touch on philosophical misogyny. I’m left uneasy and fascinated—Nietzsche is magnetic but dangerous if you don’t hold his texts up to these sharp counters.

When I sit with Nietzsche's idea of the overman, it feels less like a neat philosophical formula and more like a dare whispered on a late night walk. The overman in 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' responds to the collapse of old certainties — the death of God — by proposing that humans must become creators of new values. That creative leap is precisely where existential angst shows up: the hollow ache that follows when inherited meanings evaporate, leaving raw freedom, responsibility, and the terrifying prospect of having to invent yourself. Existentialists like Sartre and Camus framed that hollow as absurdity or nausea in 'Being and Nothingness' and 'The Myth of Sisyphus', but Nietzsche flips the script. For him, angst can be catalytic; the overman confronts the abyss and says yes — an active affirmation, or 'amor fati', the love of one’s fate. Still, I find it helpful to be frank: this isn’t a cozy prescription. Striving to be an overman often deepens existential strain because it demands relentless self-overcoming, a refusal to hide behind social roles or comforting ideologies. It’s creative, yes, but also exhausting. I often think about characters who embody this tension: someone like the protagonist in 'Neon Genesis Evangelion' struggles with voids of meaning yet is pushed toward self-definition. For me, the takeaway isn’t to eradicate angst but to treat it as raw material — a signal that the old map doesn’t fit and that I might sketch a new one, imperfectly, inch by inch.

What draws me into debates about Nietzsche's overman is how impossibly fertile and slippery the idea is—like a character who refuses to sit still on the page. Scholars argue because 'Übermensch' resists a single, neat definition: is it a moral ideal, a dramatic persona, a rhetorical provocation, or a literary archetype? Part of the fuss comes from language. Translators have offered 'overman', 'superman', and other renderings, each carrying different cultural baggage. 'Superman' instantly evokes comics and heroic masculinity; 'overman' feels colder, more clinical. That tiny semantic fork changes how critics read authors who quote or allude to Nietzsche. Then there's Nietzsche's style to reckon with: aphorism, parable, poetry. 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' isn't a philosophical tract in the strict analytic sense; it's a performative text. When a novelist echoes the Zarathustrian tone or stages a charismatic outsider, some readers map the overman onto a character, while others see parody or critique. Historical misuse adds fuel—infamous appropriations by political movements warp the concept, so literary scholars unpack reception history as much as textual meaning. Feminist, postcolonial, and psychoanalytic critics all bring different tools: one analyzes gender and power in depictions of the overman, another reads it as imperial fantasy, a third traces psychological drives in individual characters. Personally I like how messy it gets. That muddle invites cross-genre play—think of how 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' pops up in modern novels, films, and even comics—and pushes readers to confront ethics, aesthetics, and politics at once. Debating the overman isn't just academic hair-splitting; it's how we test the limits of interpretation and how literature continues to talk back to philosophy.

Nietzsche's influence on modern literature is profound and multifaceted. His ideas about the 'death of God,' the will to power, and the Übermensch have seeped into the fabric of contemporary storytelling. Authors often explore themes of existentialism, nihilism, and the search for meaning in a world devoid of inherent purpose. For instance, the works of Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre are deeply rooted in Nietzschean philosophy, questioning the nature of existence and human freedom. Even in popular fiction, characters grappling with their own morality and the absence of divine guidance echo Nietzsche's thoughts. His critique of traditional values and the call for individual self-overcoming resonate in narratives that challenge societal norms and celebrate personal autonomy. Nietzsche's legacy is a testament to the enduring power of his ideas in shaping the way we understand and depict the human condition.

I’ve been diving deep into anime and philosophy lately, and while Nietzsche’s works are incredibly influential, I haven’t come across any direct anime adaptations of his writings. That said, his ideas often pop up in anime thematically. For example, 'Neon Genesis Evangelion' explores existentialism and the concept of the Übermensch in a way that feels Nietzschean. Similarly, 'Berserk' delves into themes of human struggle, morality, and power, which resonate with Nietzsche’s philosophy. While there’s no anime that directly adapts 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra' or 'Beyond Good and Evil,' many series borrow heavily from his ideas, making them a great way to explore his thoughts through a different medium.