Amongst the morass of normals with Berserk tattoos, faux appreciation for Vegeta, and an utterly impossible interest in the bad guy of Naruto, there is a community of “suffering enjoyers”. Audience members who enjoy watching a character suffer great perils and trials and emerge a dark, grey, but physically undaunted version of themselves. All of these are completely fake and there is no character or anime as true to life as Baki when it comes to the art of suffering, its many faces and multitudes and the attitude necessary for its actual overcoming.
Baki, like many characters is born into a doomed legacy, his father is the most powerful fighter in the world, no one else is even close. His fathers orbiters can extort world governments for services and extravagant lifestyles through a BAP-ian display of their strength which defies all moral or intellectual argument- Read not laws to those that wield swords or however that goes. He can never be his father, even if he were to achieve that level of physical power he will never the tyrant that his father is. This is a life of suffering.
Baki has a girlfriend who quite simply does not understand and is not really capable of understanding the quantifiably insane circumstance of his life, and insists on sticking by him anyway. This is a life of suffering.
Baki is beaten, poisoned, sickened, ambushed, attacked, degraded, slighted, and talked down at frequently. Through all of this the thing that Baki does is just the one thing he can actually do on his own terms, which is win fights. There really are not other characters with as much suffering AND agency as Baki. It is my view that the seemingly random ultraviolence and fantastical terms on which events are precariously balanced in Baki’s life are in fact far truer to life than any circumstance that can be contrived by an author that ultimately writes out of depression or self pity. Clearly, Baki is a love story to fighting, and cool guys that are good at fighting, who have in an incontrovertible fashion proved their worth to the living through their exploits in the domination of their fellow man. They have ascended beyond, become creatures of supernatural habits inimitable by the common man and exist in a plane amongst themselves.
Normals can never get Baki because they can never imagine that you can eat air noodles, they have not the spirit for it.