// WIRED US/UK — MOBILE & WEB
Zyzz Was the Original Looksmaxxer. His Rise and Untimely Death Feel More Relevant Than Ever
That was the aspirational rallying cry of Aziz Shavershian, better known by his online alias, Zyzz. Once the shy and skinny son of Kurdish parents who struggled to find his place in Sydney, Australia, where the family had moved from Russia, he’d thrown himself wholeheartedly into fitness, spending hours at the gym every day and frequenting the infamous Bodybuilding.com and 4chan forums.
In time, the teenager’s chiseled physique gave him the confidence to develop an online persona that had little in common with the gentle and goofy kid that his friends and family knew. This would be Zyzz, a brash raver who strutted, mugged, danced, and flexed shirtless in front of his webcam while asking if viewers were “mirin’” (that is, admiring his body) and exhorting other men to chase their self-improvement goals. By 2010, his videos had made him an Australian celebrity with fans around the globe.
And as of August 2011, he was dead in Thailand, at the age of 22.
Aziz “Zyzz” Shavershian and brother Said “Chestbrah” Shavershian.
Shavershian’s brief and tragic life is the basis of a new documentary, Poster Boy: Becoming Zyzz, now available on Apple TV and Prime Video. But this keenly nuanced film is more than the familiar tale of an ambitious youth who pursued fame at all costs. It also reckons with the digital forces that could produce a person like Zyzz in the first place, and how his preternatural instincts for navigating a brand-new media ecosystem anticipated an entire generation of masculinity influencers.
Depending on your perspective, Zyzz can be regarded as the original “looksmaxxer”—though the term had yet to be coined—or one of the earliest forefathers of the manosphere as we know it today.
“I really see this as a cautionary tale,” Poster Boy’s director, Selina Miles, tells WIRED. She notes that Shavershian’s meteoric rise and untimely death left a huge impression on Australian millennials, and that his legend continues to reverberate today. “He had his transformation, and his story has really resonated with a lot of people,” she says. “We have to stay curious as to why. Why has he had this impact on men?”
Through a mixture of Zyzz’s archival content and interviews with close friends as well as his older brother, Said Shavershian—a professional bodybuilder to this day—the documentary circles the question of his outsized appeal during a key shift in human communications. At that moment, few imagined YouTube (launched in 2005, when he was 16) or Facebook (first available to him the following year) as a means to notoriety, let alone financial success. Indeed, Zyzz’s earliest videos amount to little more than a kid playing around in his bedroom; later, he and his pals experimented with showing off their abs and biceps at music festivals and nightlife hot spots, hoping for reactions of any kind.
While Zyzz promoted values of inclusion and mutual support for men looking to become the best version of themselves, he also began to feed off those who insulted him, online and off: “U mad?” and “Come at me brah” were two of his recurring catchphrases. He understood sooner than most how controversy drove clicks, and even maintained fake social accounts to amplify the war between himself and the haters. “He made this page on Facebook that was, like, ‘10,000 likes and I'll bash Zyzz,’” Miles says, describing an incident that didn’t make it into the documentary’s final cut. “When the page was doing well, he switched the name of it to be promotion for his protein brand.”
His rhetoric turned homophobic and misogynist, contemptuous of anyone who had not optimized their physical form. A 2010 post on his Facebook page read: “id rather be dead than ‘normal.’”