But a Jape

“Wait a minute, I put on that elaborate song and dance routine just for this one girl who otherwise does not know me, and she still doesn’t want to sleep with me? Then what the hell was this all for?!”

– a not insignificant number of nerds who learn too many lessons from fiction

I rewatched A Goofy Movie recently and realized Max’s first lines in the song After Today are a lot more concerning in today’s context than they were in the 90s.

It also made me think about how frequently the trope of, “nerd puts on extremely public performance to earn their peers’ approval,” occurs in fiction, and how, if actually emulated in real life, it would most likely go horribly wrong.

You know how a lot of “cringe content” tends to be, “this person thinks what they’re doing is far more impressive/entertaining than it really is?” Yeah, I blame media like A Goofy Movie and Revenge of the Nerds for giving nerds the hope that, “showing them all how cool I really am,” was actually a reasonable solution to their social problems.

– James