“How I Feel In My Hometown”: The Anime-Local Mashup Trend Letting Gen Z Rethink Home

A fast-rising TikTok format outside Japan right now is the “How I Feel In My Hometown” meme. Creators film extremely ordinary scenes from where they grew up—strip malls, bus stops, sleepy main streets—and cut them together with high-energy edits of anime characters, plus on-screen text about how it actually feels to be back home. One widely shared version pairs rural Tennessee backroads with characters from the dark-fantasy anime Chainsaw Man to express boredom and a desire to escape. The emotional punch comes from the clash between the mundane setting and the stylized, overdramatic anime persona: users say it captures the weird mix of nostalgia, embarrassment, and alienation many Gen Zers feel when they return to their small towns after moving away. Unlike simple “aesthetic” edits, this format is closer to pop psychology: a way to test out different identities against the backdrop of a real place. The trend is now spreading beyond the U.S. to Europe and Latin America, with fans localizing it for their own cities and countryside, effectively turning anime mashups into a new form of hometown self-analysis.