Megan cosplaying as Bruno Bucciarati at this year’s Crunchyroll Anime Awards.
Photo: Courtesy Crunchyroll
There are very few cases in which an entity should be obligated to clear a sample for a rapper, but Megan Thee Stallion’s request on “Otaku Hot Girl,” off her latest album, MEGAN, is one of them. Because if anyone is going to properly represent weeb culture, it’s her. “Y’all know how I told y’all I got an anime sample on my album,” she told fans on Instagram Live before the album dropped. “I recorded the song before I asked for clearance, so when I sent the people the song, they was like …”
Despite all her years bringing anime from incel spaces to hot girl ones, the Grammy-nominated rapper was made to jump through hoops. Apparently, the unnamed studio wanted her to change the lyrics, denied her the clearance to cosplay the characters in the music video, and told her to remove character names from the song. In the end, Megan must have gotten at least one sample cleared, since “Otaku” uses a line from Jujutsu Kaisen and references characters from both JJK and Naruto. But fans expected the song to contain references from other Shonen Jump titles, too.
Of course, Megan, a known otaku (an anime, manga, and/or video game nerd for the uninitiated), has been a weeb activist since before she was famous. As a high-school senior, she courageously spoke out against the “discrimination to nerds everywhere” in a viral clip taken from a decade-old school news broadcast. Now, she’s continuing to include anime in her music and in her cosplay. Here’s a rundown on all the times she weebed out:
On “Otaku Hot Girl,” a track off her new self-titled album, Megan sampled fitting dialogue from the fantasy horror series. “I like a tall woman with a nice big ass, like Grammy winner Megan Thee Stallion,” we hear Yuji Itadori’s English voice actor say. In the original dialogue, Itadori says his type is Jennifer Lawrence, but voice actor Adam McArthur remade the clip to say Megan.
Then in the chorus, Megan raps that her opps “can’t touch me like Gojo,” a reference to Jujutsu Kaisen’s fan favorite, the strongest jujutsu sorcerer of their time who can essentially create force fields to fight cursed spirits. Elsewhere on the track, Meg references Sukuna, a powerful spirit currently trapped in the mind of Itadori. “Niggas bow down when I pop out like Sukuna,” she raps. And later, she says she’s “fightin’ demons in my head like I’m Itadori.” Even the fantasy world of JJK sorcery techniques gets a shoutout. “‘Cause he wanna get caught in my domain expansion,” Megan spits.
In 2019’s “Girls in the Hood,” she says she wants a man like Sasuke. “I’ma make him eat me out while I’m watchin’ anime,” Megan promises. “Pussy like a Wild Fox, lookin’ for a Sasuke (ayy, yeah).”
Naruto weaponizes references in “Otaku Hot Girl” to give her copycats and Naruto fans alike some lashings. “I’m not finna argue with a Sasuke avi’ / Incel mad, I’m a weeb and a baddie,” she raps in the first verse. Translation: some of those in the nerd community are too lame to even bother with. Not Megan though! Later in the song, she mentions Sasuke’s inherited power of copying someone’s fighting style, saying “Hoes want my technique, couldn’t be like me / With a Sasuke sharingan.”
On that same album’s pre-release single “Cobra,” which deals with her depression and anxiety, Megan crawls out of a snake just like the Naruto character Orochimaru, a legendary ninja who sought immortality and fell from grace.
While teasing her diss track “Hiss,” which slyly hits at Drake, Nicki Minaj, and other Megan-haters, she name drops Tokyo Ghoul’s main protagonist. “Remember when Kaneki really turned into KANEKI … yeah thats how i feel lol,” she captioned an Instagram post ahead of the song’s release. Kaneki is a half-ghoul, half-human character whose kind soul is corrupted after being captured and tortured. Suffice it to say, Megan was warning fans that “Hiss” would be dark after everything she’s been through.
Another song off Megan’s self-titled album takes inspiration from an iconic character. The poster design for the pre-release single references One Piece’s Boa Hancock, who is often pictured with her slithering, skull-bearing familiar. In Megan’s version, a triptych of the rapper is seen with Boa’s half-bob, half-long haircut while a snake poses in the foreground.
For Megan’s feature on GloRilla’s “Wanna Be” she compares herself to an Attack on Titan warrior who looks like a walking anatomy class poster. “I’m the female titan, I’m steppin’ on bitches / I’m showin’ my titties, I tore up the city,” Megan asserts.
When Dragon Ball Z’s Goku goes into his Super Saiyan form to fight more powerfully, his black locks turns blonde. Something similar happens to Megan when she changes hair color. “When I switch my hair to blonde / I’m finna turn up like Goku,” she warns on 2019’s “Running Up Freestyle.”
In addition to Dragon Ball Z, “Running Up Freestyle” has references to Spongebob and the game Street Fighter, so why not bring in another of the most beloved media franchises of all time? She raps, “Yellow diamonds, Pikachu.” Gotta catch ‘em all.
