this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2025
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You ever watched dragon ball? it's what Piccolo does all the time.
It's acting in a way in a situation that makes you appear like you don't care about how awesome you are even when you're in a life death situation, another example was Yahia Sinwar, dude was martyred while farming aura.
Oh so it's like Evola, the Italian fascist who glorified war and violence so much that he went on contemplative walks during air raids. Unfortunately he wasn't killed by this nonsense, only wounded. Now fascists on the internet share this picture to fucking honour this vile man:
I wonder if this also ties in with the origin of the Hollywood trope about the hero walking away from the explosion while not looking at it. There's definitely a lot to be said about aesthetics of fascism with respect to Hollywood, especially in its love of militaristic heroic 'justice'.
It's also quite depressing how much contemporary slang in the English language can be traced back to the fascist parts of the internet (eg chad, alpha, based, incel, looks-maxing, possibly aura farming too). This doesn't bode well for the future if that is what is influencing the way we speak to one another.
what
i don't think 'aura farming' can really be tied to fascism quite like you're saying lol. I'm sure if you posted that pic of Evola on X and said 'aura farming' it probably would get a bunch of nazis gooning to it, but the actual slang itself was not borne out of someone posting Evola or anything like that. Literally one of the oldest usages of it as far as I could find was this tiktok of some kid doing the water bottle flip and hitting a strike at bowling lmao
edit: i wanna add that, in most uses, saying someone is 'aura farming' is not usually meant to be a compliment. Piccolo aura farming is the most common meme and the reason is because he always gets his ass clapped 5 nanoseconds afterwards. Someone like Ichigo or like, Lae'zel aura-farming is usually like "come on why are you aura farming right now" lol. (realizing all my aura farming knowledge is from anime & video game discussions and locking myself in the chamber until i've gotten it out of my system)
Yes, and the Hollywood directors who depicted white-military-hero-man walking away from an explosion without looking at it weren't card-carrying members of the Nazi party either. But that doesn't mean that reading this stuff as having some relationship with the aesthetics of fascism is incorrect.
If it's often used in the form of an ironic critique to undermine the proud macho posturing of the 'aura farmer' then that is promising, but so often that layer of critique is quickly lost (for example in the online hero-worshipping of Patrick Bateman and Don Draper).
I mean yeah, aura farming is not 100% one thing because the nature of 'aura' as a meme is usually complimentary. I'd actually say that the Evola pic would probably resonate more with fascists (or young men who don't know better) with just an 'aura' caption rather than 'aura farming' because like I said - aura farming is usually derogatory.
'Yes bro we see the fit' and aura farming go hand-in-hand. It is not usually meant to be complimentary. Imagine you have a friend who out of the blue posts a pic of themselves at some popular/trendy spot clearly framed so their entire outfit you've never seen them wearing before is in the picture - that's aura-farming and most people would be like "yes bro we see the fit" in what would not exactly be a complimentary tone lmao. Now, if you complimented 'aura' on that post, you'd be a good friend in a way but i digress
Just for fun I'm going to attempt to combine this with Walter Benjamin's concept of the aura (probably not my best work): It's not the act of farming or being called a 'farmer' that that dispels the aura, but the act of creating something that is designed to be posted. Nothing on social media truly has any aura to it in Benjamin's sense, given the way social media is massively commodified by the corporations that run it, the influencers and advertisers that populate it, and by capitalist society in general. There is only the appeal to the concept of a nonexistent non-commodified authenticity, the "false spell of the commodity". Calls of 'aura' on social media crave for that impossible authenticity that social media can't possibly provide, and calls of 'aura farming' merely point out the posts that stray too far from the "false spell".