Ryan Higa withdraws attention from online bullying in the most unexpected yet ingenious way: the Roast Yourself Challenge.
Illustrious Youtubers from Ryan Higa himself to Lilly Singh (Superwoman), Niki and Gabi, and LaurDIY accepted this challenge and started making diss tracks that soon spread rampantly on the SNS feeds with the (hashtag) #RoastYourselfChallenge. It may seem as a futile attempt to admonish yourself and voluntarily nitpick on your flaws. But perhaps this is an innovative start of discouraging cyber bullying. This challenge represents so much more than a passionate and entertaining rap. It represents our willingness to not criticize the people around us but rather divert our attention to picking on the countless inner flaws we have as people.
Ryan Higa initiated this challenge with the intention of showing us that once we start condescending ourselves, it is much harder to chide those around us. By taking a moment to be modest and humble about ourselves, we learn that everyone has flaws and imperfections. We learn that is what makes us humans and that we shouldn’t be ashamed of them, nor be mocking of others. This challenge insinuates that before going on to judge people by their appearance, we should look at the mirror and understand that all of us have built in flaws as well. Why pick on others when you have the same freckles, same frizzy hair, and the same makeup paste furiously applied on your face?
This challenge further responds to the nature of contention. Some individuals choose to pick on people for the fun of having a feud or a fiery dispute. That was actually the reason Ryan Higa started this challenge in the beginning- out of boredom. He personally was bored from the lack of social feud, had nobody to fight with, and therefore decided to fight with himself.
The bullies we see are bullies because they crave the fact that they can make someone emotionally teared up or because they find it amusing that someone gets hurt at the end.They chastise people simply because they feel like doing so and because they want to feel the intensity of an argument. If people truly want the social drama and attention, they shouldn’t do it by hurting others but rather themselves. The Roast yourself challenge satiates this craving for drama yet it doesn’t cause problems with anyone else.
In the final analysis, the Roast yourself Challenge may have been developed out of pure boredom but it developed into something so much meaningful. It discourages online bullying and diverts people’s attention from picking on people around them to themselves. Entertainment and media has conjured up a possible cure for the disease of bullying.
