The Untold Truth Of Ohio Final Boss

Be it because of the rapid and widespread adoption of TikTok, the steady maturation of Generation Alpha, or the unprecedented meme pressure cooker that was the first string of COVID-19 lockdowns, it seems as though there are just too many internet people to keep track of anymore.

From YouTubers to Twitch streamers to whatever the hell a "Skibidi Toilet" is, this current phase of digital content creators has arguably evolved from mainstream celebrity culture (in the vein of that enjoyed by, say, the PewDiePie's or Fred's of yesteryear) to something far more esoteric, stratified, and impenetrably online. In other words, the internet arguably feels more separated than it ever has — a loose ecosystem of distinct, constantly changing worlds that only briefly brush up against one another before usually shattering into oblivion. Memes can die days after they start or balloon uncontrollably until they somehow become the basis for an episode of "Family Guy" or an entire Netflix original series.

All this is to say that you're likely here because your brain is currently trying to process the phrase "Ohio Final Boss." Wherever you first heard or saw this bizarre title (almost certainly against your will), the sheer amount of digital noise that undoubtedly surrounds every bit of online discussion probably didn't help you make much sense of it. And while we can't make you un-learn this phrase, we can fill your brain with the requisite lore so that it doesn't float around in your head like a useless cultural non-sequitur.

Ohio Final Boss is the alter-ego of the Japanese TikTok and YouTube-based performance artist known mononymously as Satoyu. Based on the online footprint currently available, Satoyu appears to have begun his journey to stardom on YouTube in February 2020, before spreading out to Instagram and TikTok within the next month. For context, this was during the early months of Japan's fight against the then-burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic — his first TikTok video was posted on March 21st, less than a month before the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would declare a national state of emergency. During this time, TikTok saw a massive influx of both creators and consumers, turning it into the generation-defining social media behemoth it is today.

While TikTok was gaining popularity, however, Satoyu's rise in viewership didn't come until nearly two years after he posted his first video. In 2021, TikTok overhauled its live-streaming service, revitalizing yet another space for its creators to profit and grow their audiences. Here, in the early months of 2022, Satoyu began quickly attracting his army of followers by streaming himself dressed in fine suits and walking menacingly toward the camera. His performances were consistently accompanied by a particular style of music known as "phonk" and featured his talent for contorting his face into cartoonish expressions.

In December 2023, Satoyu was officially recognized by TikTok Japan as one of the platform's Rising Creators of the Year. As of May 2024, he has 1.4 million followers on Instagram, 5.4 million followers on TikTok, and 11.4 million subscribers on YouTube.

Here's where we have to warn you that everything written above is about as normal as this article is gonna get. Everything below will descend quickly and steadily into the annals of online nonsense, which may or may not inspire you to destroy all of your electronics and move into the woods just to cope. In fact, we'll start the downward spiral right now by letting you in on what is arguably the least ridiculous part of this meme — the Ohio Final Boss isn't even from Ohio.

Eagle-eyed readers may have picked up on that from the above paragraph, as the actual Midwestern state isn't mentioned once. As written, Satoyu is from Japan, and  he appears to have lived there his entire life. It's not even clear if Satoyu has ever even set foot in the state of Ohio, or if he has created content in the U.S. at all for that matter. There is, based on information available online, absolutely nothing about Satoyu that has anything to do with Ohio whatsoever. So how — and, way more importantly, why — does he call himself the Final Boss of Ohio?

Well, Satoyu wasn't actually the one to coin this nickname. Another TikTok creator running the now-defunct account @llOnlyOhioll gave him the name "Ohio Final Boss," seemingly referencing Satoyu's penchant for aggressively yelling the Japanese greeting "Ohayo" during his live performances. Other users began referring to him as the Final Boss of Ohio as well, until the meme eventually circled back to and was embraced by Satoyu himself.

Like all great art, viral memes in their current iteration often draw on a variety of sources for inspiration, often even influenced by other memes not much older than themselves. Satoyu's Ohio Final Boss persona was crafted — knowingly or not — from the combination of some of the internet's most popular memes and topics of comedy at the time. Through his work, waning corners of the digital world were also briefly injected with new energy and purpose.

In their hilariously formal analysis, Lessons in Meme Culture, an educational video essay YouTube channel with nearly 2 million subscribers, praised Satoyu as having had a history of contributing to online content for years before his rise to fame, which they felt helped him capitalize on sections of internet culture that hadn't yet overlapped, allowing Satoyu to take advantage of the meme styles he already knew. Ohio memes, which have been wildly popular on the internet since 2016, meshed in Satoyu with the "final boss" meme trend and the Russian music style of phonk, both of which had been prevalent in meme circles with varying degrees of popularity for about a decade. The channel posits that Satoyu's character, the Ohio Final Boss, is evidence of meme culture's ability to unify jokes and entertainment styles from around the globe. For his part, Satoyu doesn't really engage with Ohio memes personally and instead focuses on his anime character persona. Ohio memes are nevertheless a strong aspect of Satoyu's Ohio Final Boss, perhaps because Ohio memes themselves have an astounding amount of "lore." 

Ohio has almost always had a strangely prominent presence across online subcultures — like New York in the Marvel Comics Universe, it just seems to be the place where everything happens. Know Your Meme traces the state's meme status back to a viral Tumblr post from August 2016, in which a faulty electric bus terminal was photographed with the ominous message "Ohio will be eliminated." Thereafter, Ohio has been regularly portrayed in memes as some formidable opponent or deadly locale.

Tragically, Ohio's connection to extremely online subcultures has existed at least since 2014, the year in which a Hamilton middle-schooler attacked her mother in connection to the then-ubiquitous Slenderman meme. Cincinnati was the site of the 2016 incident in which a gorilla named Harambe was killed to protect a young child who had fallen into his enclosure. Furthermore, controversial brothers and Viners-turned-vloggers Jake and Logan Paul hail from Westlake, Ohio.

These people and occurrences ranging from completely innocuous to unimaginably horrifying have made Ohio this sort of digital black hole that can swallow up almost any potential meme — including Satoyu. By merely saying something that sounded like "Ohio," he was turned into an anti-hero icon of the state. Satoyu has taken ownership of the place he was granted within Ohio's lore, as well as the title "OHIOBOSS." Perplexingly, one of his catchphrases is now "Made in Ohio."

Satoyu's erroneous catchphrase has become so synonymous with his identity as the Final Boss of Ohio that he released a single under his own name, titled "MADE IN OHIO." Produced by Glaceo (Italian music producer Antonio Montagner, who has a history of melding music and meme culture in his work), the song boasts a high-energy dark phonk beat that makes it perfect to listen to while you menacingly stalk your mortal enemies from Cleveland. Over the music, Satoyu can be heard shouting various phrases in Japanese (sadly, an official transcript of the piece is not available online, as of publishing).

It was originally released to Satoyu's YouTube channel on August 15, 2023, and has amassed over 300,000 views and 10,000 likes in the months since. On Spotify, it has been played over 234,000 times. Though it might not be doing Taylor Swift numbers, "MADE IN OHIO" has been taken by Satoyu's fans as further evidence that he should seriously consider pursuing a career in voice acting. The comments on his YouTube channel are full of users comparing him favorably to voice actors on shows like the anime "Jojo's Bizarre Adventure" and praising the song for being (in their opinion) genuinely enjoyable to listen to out of context.

Of all the purely online celebrities out there right now, none are quite as prominent as Jimmy Donaldson — the YouTube mega-influencer commonly known as MrBeast. On his main channel alone, Donaldson has a staggering 256 million subscribers, overtaking the likes of PewDiePie in 2022 to become the platform's most-subscribed-to individual creator. On his way to achieving 48 billion lifetime channel views on MrBeast, he has given away millions of dollars (often as part of viral charitable stunts), produced a video scored by Academy Award-winning composer Hans Zimmer, and recreated his own high-fidelity "Squid Game" competition two years before Netflix would. Arguably most impressive of all, however, is that he managed to survive an encounter with none other than the Ohio Final Boss.

On May 19, 2023, Satoyu uploaded a video to his TikTok that featured him "fighting" Donaldson in some unknown location. Satoyu — in character as OHIOBOSS — uses what appears to be a toy version of the "Star Wars" Darksaber to do the viral "Forget" TikTok sword-dodging meme with Donaldson, before sucking him up in a gold "Made in Ohio"-branded vacuum cleaner. (We warned you this article would eventually stop making any sense). As of May 2024, the video has 2 million likes and over 24 million views, making it one Satoyu's most popular creations. In August 2023, he reuploaded the collaboration to YouTube as part of a "Best of..." compilation, which currently has 1.1 million views. In terms of entertainment value, the video is ... fine. It does, at the very least, make Satoyu the best new "Star Wars" character since Glup Shitto.