By: Peggy Sue Wood | @pswediting

Hi, everyone! This week’s post is a little different. It’s more about research and media literacy than anything else. Here is my sort of joking conspiracy theory about the Internet right now:

Teaching—and writing—in 2025 feels a little unreal. AI is everywhere, search engines summarize before they share what you are looking for, and every time I go online it feels like it’s nudging me toward something: a purchase, a viewpoint, or a distraction. It’s enough to make the “Dead Internet theory” sound less like a conspiracy and more like a realization of our current reality.

Bringing me to this post, a partial follow-up to what I wrote last year on intertextuality in Mieruko-chan.

You see, a little over a year ago now I decided to write a post on Mieruko-chan, as I was enjoying something horror-adjacent for the first time in forever and somewhat getting into the Fall-mood that I tend to skip out on (if you read last week’s post, you know why).

In the first episode of the show, I noted the story of the man who becomes a tiger and, at the time of writing the post, I was searching for that story. I Googled “tiger in Bungou Stray Dogs reference” (BSD). I Googled “common stories for high school students in Japan.” No title for the story referenced surfaced in my results, surprisingly. I changed the way I phrased it several times too, even looking on a few Reddit pages through what Google recommended and so much more while finding nothing.

I asked my friend from Little Tokyo about it; I asked my group of anime friends who didn’t know; and I even went to AI. No clear answer. While all of my friends remembered that there is a story the tiger reference comes from, they couldn’t remember the name. To add insult to injury, most of them told me, “Just Google it!” and I hated to admit that Google seemed intent on not helping me.

I thought about contacting one of my Japanese professors or one of the exchange students I knew from undergrad, but felt like that would be a bit too silly to reach out over, particularly when I was becoming upset and unreasonable about it.

So I Googled again. And Googled some more. And kept Googling until I decided I was just going have to give up on finding it or give up on making the post.

I was not about to try another search engine (Bing? Sorry, but no.)—but maybe I should have…. Anyway, I tried everything I could think of through my preferred search engine, and nothing. Not a single relevant hit.

So I did what I imagine everyone does when a mystery stays unsolved too long: I rationalized it. I figured it must be something either so obvious that Google can’t imagine I wouldn’t know what I was talking about, and therefore doesn’t offer the title. OR the story referenced is so obscure that it’s going to be near impossible to find. I admitted as much in my post, saying “However, it’s worth noting that just because I couldn’t find the exact origin doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. In fact, it could very well be a popular story, especially considering its inclusion in a high school class within the anime….” That said, among several other things in my paragraph-long attempt to rationalize my own inability, I hit “Schedule” to publish, and moved on. I figured then that if it was as well-known as I thought it should be, someone would comment.

Sure enough, exactly one day later, @dendria21 on WordPress set the record straight. The story being referred to is almost certainly “The Moon Over the Mountain” (also translated as “Beast Beneath the Moonlight”) by Atsushi Nakajima—a modern Japanese classic about a man who gradually transforms into a tiger.

Then suddenly, when I searched again, it was everywhere. The first result: The Wikipedia page. Then YouTube summaries, scholarly articles, and I even found that Bungou Stray Dogs features a character named Atsushi Nakajima, whose power is—wait for it—turning into the tiger that I definitely Googled before.

I put in the same search terms I used before, and all of a sudden, that’s the first thing that pops up every single time. So, why did it not show up before? Why did it take me so long to find something so canonical? I had been Googling variations of “Japanese story, man turns into tiger,” “tiger metamorphosis short story,” and yet nothing until after I had the correct name in my search history.

It’s easy to dismiss it as user error—maybe I just used the wrong keywords. However, I’m not entirely convinced that’s the whole story. Sincerely, I struggle to imagine I’m that bad at Googling considering this is a soft skill I’ve been developing and using since the early 2000s. Even after dozens of variations, not once did Nakajima’s story appear in my results? Come on.

This led me down another rabbit hole: the nature of search itself.

Google’s algorithm doesn’t fetch every page that matches your words. Apparently, it predicts what you want. It weighs intent, personalization, testing, language settings, and sometimes it throws users into experimental buckets that show different results to different people. So, depending on where you are, you might be living in a slightly different version of the Internet. I mean, articles like this official Google explainer, this overview from TheeDigital, and this post from ReputationX break down how personalization and constant index updates create a kind of “parallel search universe” for people, which made me feel like I’m not totally crazy in thinking it might be related to my issue here. However, could it really hide Nakajima’s tiger from me during the whole of the draft process?

This whole experience of spending hours searching for a tiger and finding nothing until the algorithm decided I was “ready” since I finally used the right title for the story, has sort of haunted me over the last year. Because, to me, it’s not about a failed search but rather the creeping opacity of our digital tools. Especially as more and more information is mediated by AI and shaped by invisible “personalization” layers that are likely there to engage you in spending more time, money, and focus on it than anywhere else.

In job searching, companies are using more and more AI tools to filter out applicants and some companies are removing roles outright as a result of AI taking over entry level work. Many of my students are constantly using AI. Even in an effort to avoid it, it seems to be everywhere. AI is also becoming increasingly concerning for other reasons—editing videos without formal direct consent on uploads that could reshape how we see and understand the world, among other things, through the media we have (or don’t have) access to. It’s frightening.

In a less conspiratorial way, I think it is more likely that because I was Googling Ryūnosuke Akutagawa so much at the same time, the other author referred in Mieruko-chan, played a larger role in preventing me from finding what I wanted. Or perhaps I was just tired and missed it, this is a possibility, and I certainly hope so to some degree.

Still, as I write this, I realize that I may need to rethink the way I prep new courses and assignments as an instructor. I’m realizing that part of teaching digital literacy in my compositional and research writing English classes now involves teaching how to think around search engines—to question what isn’t showing up, to notice absence as much as presence to the best of your ability.

We already have to do this with information in studies, asking what might be the author’s biases? What is not being said here? We do this too with marketing media… but, now that may not be enough. As we probably should have been doing for years, we likely have to do this for everything we engage with online and that, in itself, is a pretty scary thought. Very Black Mirror here…

With that rant said: next week, I plan to be addressing the intertextuality of “Beast Beneath the Moonlight”/“The Moon Over the Mountain” by Atsushi Nakajima and Mieruko-chan. However, if time gets away from me, I may wait until next year for a follow-up on that… who knows?

Thank you for reading!

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Developmental edits by: Krow Smith | @coffeewithkrow

Copyedited by: Katherine Cañeba | @kcserinlee