Revealed – Poster Boy: Becoming Zyzz Review

Explosion Network may receive a commission when you purchase something via a link on our site

I had not heard of Aziz Sergeyevich Shavershian, better known online as ‘Zyzz’, before watching the latest Revealed documentary on Stan, Revealed – Poster Boy: Becoming Zyzz. But now that I’ve watched it, it’s wild just how ahead of the times Aziz was in terms of knowing internet culture, how to use the algorithm, and ultimately setting up some groundwork for today’s gym-fluencers.

In this documentary from Selina Miles, the early days of Zyzz and his brother sitting in their room watching anime and browsing those early wild days of the internet forums, and the beginning of things like YouTube and Facebook are charted, and how those affected a young man struggling with both mental health and body dysmorphia issues is raised.

Initially a very skinny kid, and struggling with “picking up chicks,” Aziz and his brother take to the gym to better their bodies. As the internet forums told them, it’s what girls want. And this windfall turnaround from nobody to an internet star begins. Zyzz charts his gym routines and body transformation online, and begins to build something of a following. He begins to build a rude and abrasive character; this is Zyzz. At one point in the documentary, Zyzz says he loves to troll people, and it’s revealed he would often pretend to respond to himself, as someone else, to keep drama going online. He figured out the key to internet social media stardom well before everyone else: drama sells. Being hated can sell. Being loved can sell. But whatever you have to do to stay relevant is all that matters.

Zyzz is described as a bit of a geek throughout this documentary, with those closest to him talking about how silly a kid he was before he created his online persona. But Zyzz takes over. He asks his friend group, collectively known as the ‘aesthetics,’ to film him standing topless around Sydney to capture passersby’s reaction to his body. His videos aren’t hyper-edited; they’re amateur compared to today’s influencer standards, but Zyzz had all the elements down and in place in 2010 for what would become today’s golden standards.

As quickly as Zyzz’s star rose, he was still a very young man, and he would die at just 22. In the final year of his life, the documentary charts his increasing paranoia and continued focus and stress over his looks. Here was a young boy who was sick of being made fun of and did the thing—he turned himself into a Dragon Ball Z character. But the one thing he never worked on, the one muscle he never put any time into, was his brain and mental health. The one thing that was always affected by any comments about his body, either coming from those online, in the street, or, worst of all, from within himself. And it’s this untreated muscle that leads him to his death ultimately.

Until this documentary was released, the exact cause of Zyzz’s death had never been released publicly. Instead, the public was just told he died from a heart attack in Thailand. But it’s the why he travelled there alone, and the state he was in when he died, that’s the most tragic factor of Zyzz’s short-lived stardom and life.