Does he? These are prime midlife crisis years for someone his age, I believe, and he has been lately trying on identities like a tween too shy and boring to manage a really florid case of chuuni.
TIL a new word, which totally explains my teenage interest in the occult, Wicca, shapeshifting magic, etc. — although I did also have a syncretic New Age/Hindu/Catholic mother, which was the more obvious proximal cause.
Oh, I was the same. It's a species of healthy and developmentally sound 'rebellion,' I think.
Nothing really out of the ordinary - though of course I would as soon kick a puppy, as say so to someone in the throes of it! People deserve to enjoy themselves and kids deserve to be kids. But I do take "chuunibyou" (chūnibyō) as just part of what we do around that age, to begin the process of cleaving unto ourselves and defining who we are. It only happens English doesn't have a word for this aspect specifically; luckily for us, what it does have is a habit of mugging other languages for loose vocabulary.
Do you know him personally? How could anyone know that. The times he is on camera is a tiny fraction of his life in which he is most likely to not be his true self.