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HOW could they be so brave as to defy death, opening their chests, arms wide, in front of guns? How could they not fear the sight of blood gushing from the bodies of their fallen brothers? How could the death of one not deter the rest? What drove them to embrace the inevitable?

Due to this unprecedented display of heroism and brotherhood among Gen Z Bangladeshi students during the recent anti-discrimination students movement, many have asked these questions, and many have attempted to answer them. Some responses have been based on political and historical observations. However, during an adda with my colleagues we speculated that there must be more than one reason behind this unflinching display of valour. We ventured into exploring the psychological background of this heroism and brotherhood.

A recent interview on the program ‘Muktobak,’ (August 14, Channel 24) where Manzur Al Matin asked Dr Salimullah Khan a similar question, sparked this discussion among us. When Matin inquired about the reason behind such bravery, Salimullah Khan compared it to the boiling point of water. He suggested that when the absence of voting and other rights acts like fire and heat, and when the tolerance of the general populace reaches its limit, people overcome their fear to resist extreme oppression. While this explanation was satisfactory from an Aristotelian perspective — that humans are political animals and must therefore be able to enjoy political rights — we remained curious. We were eager to identify the psychological motivations behind such seemingly reckless and impulsive actions. We found our answer in the age of the protesters, their tastes, their lifestyles and their strengths. Most of them were members of Gen Z — a generation often deemed unproductive due to their perceived addiction to the virtual world.

There is a common tendency among elders to condemn younger generations for confusing the virtual world with the real one. Since they spend much of their time playing video games, watching movies and TV series, and connecting with others across the unstable worldwide wave, they are often considered incompetent when it comes to addressing real-world issues that demand tangible change. However, my colleagues and I believe that this very immersion in the virtual world is one of the key reasons why they were fearless on the battlefield.

A generation that grew up frenziedly playing online battle royale games like Call of Duty, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), Garena Free Fire, Valorant, Fortnite, and Apex Legends — day after day, nonstop — has experienced a paradigm shift. In these games, they interact live with teammates, no matter where they are in the country or the world, fighting against enemy teams, strategically covering each other during battles and reviving fallen teammates. This virtual world, once their reality, transformed when they stepped out of their rooms and onto the streets to protest.

For them, the virtual had once been real. But now, responding to the ‘call of duty’ to defend their actual friends — those made of real flesh and blood, who, as Tyrion Lannister from HBO’s Game of Thrones would say, were ‘dying like flies’ — reality itself began to feel virtual. These ‘kids,’ who relish the adrenaline rush of gaming, movies and TV series brought that same spirit to their real-life battles against adversaries who underestimated them. The biggest mistake of the now fallen regime was failing to recognise the strategies of Gen Z and what they could accomplish in toppling tyranny — or, to put it in gaming terms, the ‘main bosses’. They are not just another political party that can easily be deterred or disbanded.

This generation heavily relies on icons, quickly adopting and owning iconic figures to showcase a kind of courage that triggers goosebumps — a sensation Gen Z is very familiar with, especially when they encounter ‘stranger things’ in situations that were supposed to be, to put it innocuously, not so strange. The death of the brave Abu Sayed, a student at Begum Rokeya University, was a moment of truth for them. After that, there was no turning back. They knew, like Sherlock Holmes in the BBC series, that ‘the game is on.’ They knew who fired the first shot, they anticipated when and from where the next shots would come, and they predicted the next moves. With their ‘all eyes on’ catchphrase, they unearthed incidents and caught numerous human rights violations on camera, quickly exhibiting them in the galleries of Facebook.

A generation that has spent a significant amount of time in virtual spaces like Facebook, YouTube and Instagram knows the ins and outs of these platforms intimately. They did not need a stage built on fragile bamboo to address the nation with equally fragile words that no longer inspire the masses to action. They understood that such stages, like the faces eager to be seen on them, are prone to collapse. Having 5,000 virtual friends on Facebook (and barely five in reality) paid off. Even when the internet was in ‘need for speed,’ they did not slow down. Instead, they found ways to unite against forces twice as cataclysmic, covering distances at the speed of their collective hatred and anger.

Yeats’ ‘All that delirium of the brave’ paved the way for a new paradigm in Bangladesh. The Gen Z who fought on the front lines, in a state of delirium, thought they might respawn, just as they do in games. Little did they know that some of their own countrymen would prove to be far more brutal than the adversaries in their ‘unreal tournaments,’ unwilling to spare lives in their quest to protect a segment of the population that has long treated the country as a playground for power and greed.

Nothing in this world is useless. Even impulsive immaturity — acting without a second thought and without fear of consequences — can play a crucial role in overthrowing a regime. These ‘immature softies,’ these mama’s and papa’s boys and girls, wrapped the entire country in the lyrics of rap songs, which also contributed to the boiling point Salimullah Khan pointed out. With these rap songs as their background music, and on the verge of being defeated by a brutal force, they drew inspiration from Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow, raising their wooden sticks like heroes never seen before, standing alone against a mounted army even as they knew that defeat was inevitable.

In the phantasmagorical nightmare that unfolded, in the whirlwind of images and icons, a voice loud and clear cried out: ‘Avengers, assemble!’ Knights from several universities joined the fray with coordinated attacks on the oppressors and the godlike figures who believed, like Thanos, that they could vanquish anything with a snap of their fingers, not realising that they knew nothing. They knew nothing of how uncontrollable the minds and spirits of Gen Z truly are. The only thing unlike any video game was this: as they marched towards the emperor’s imperial palace to put an end to an ‘age of empire,’ when Gen Z thought it was the ‘endgame,’ it was already ‘game over’ for their opponents. Achieving what they are calling a ‘second independence,’ some even celebrated with the ‘chicken dinner’ of PUBG as they focused their attention on obtaining ‘loots.’

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Hisham M Nazer is an assistant professor of English, Varendra University.