This Controversial Influencer Might Be Ruining Manga For Everyone

Logan Paul is one of the most controversial influencers in the business, and that’s especially true for Pokémon and other TCG fans. When Logan Paul made the claim that he was getting into the Pokémon card game, it quickly became clear that he only did so because it was popular, and not because he was a genuine fan; even worse, the fact that he was involved at all still caused packs and individual cards to become ridiculously expensive to the point that the average person couldn’t buy them, and years after he gave up Pokemon, it’s still unreasonably expensive.

Logan Paul caused irreversible damage to the Pokémon TCG community, and now, every TCG community fears the very idea of him doing the same to their game, with his recent attempt at getting involved with the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game being a prime example. Now, however, Logan Paul appears to have turned his predatory “pump and dump” practices toward another community, and suffice to say, they aren’t having it in the slightest.

Why Manga Fans Are Suddenly Hating Logan Paul

In his latest attempt at earning clout by latching onto trends, Logan Paul announced that he was getting into manga in a very unconventional way: by revealing that he bought graded prints of the first issues of Shonen Jump with One Piece and Dragon Ball, respectively. Each print reportedly sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, with the Dragon Ball issue even going for over half a million, and people have already reported that old prints of other manga have suddenly skyrocketed in value online.

Right off the bat, manga fans are hating Logan Paul for doing exactly what he did to Pokémon and other TCG fans; by latching onto a trend and going for the biggest purchases possible, he’s ruining the market by inflating the prices so that only the richest people can afford it. Pokémon is still in a state where high prices and scalping for Pokémon TCG have left it all but inaccessible, and no one wants to see that happen with manga.

Worst of all, of course, is how fake it comes across as. When someone usually gets into anime or manga, it should be simple enough for them to read or watch something, and whether or not that’s done legally, it wouldn’t make sense to get into it by buying one of the most expensive pieces of media available, especially if it’s something you’re supposed to keep sealed in a container. Logan Paul’s actions are antithetical to how the average manga fan behaves; it reeks of forced behavior and paints him as a fake fan, and that’s what hurts the most.

Nearly everyone is disgusted by the idea of Logan Paul applying his “pump and dump” tactics to manga, but just how bad the effects will be has yet to be seen. While grading manga prints in the same way as comic books has slowly become a thing, many manga fans balked at the idea even before this incident with Logan Paul, and with the negative impact he has on hobbies already well-known at this point, this is likely to only impact the small percentage of manga fans who view books as collectibles rather than manga, in general.

The worst thing that can happen with a hobby is for it to suddenly go from being accessible to everyone to something few people can afford, and when people like Logan Paul get involved in hobbies for little more than internet clout, that’s almost always an inevitability. It’s understandable why manga fans would be afraid of having to deal with what Pokémon fans dealt with, but ideally, those fears will be overblown, and by the time Logan Paul moves on to something else, nothing will have changed in any significant way.