ColdFisharians of the world, unite!

"And when we open the heads of these two young people, we find, not a straightforward motive on the surface anywhere; we find, indeed, not a soul so much as an oversoul, a zeitgeist, a congestion of acquired ideas, a highway's feast of fine, confused thinking."

H.G. Wells - The Wheels of Chance

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Major spoiler alert for Weregeek. (First story arc reveal. (a.k.a. the best part of the comic))
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In direct contrast to Dominic Deegan's adept establishment of an internal locus of control for its protagonist (cited in my previous post) stands the webcomic Weregeek. Its initial story arc set up a standard wish-fulfillment fantasy in which roleplaying geeks get superpowers, band together to glory in their newfound specialness and fight an evil conspiracy of the boring. It was decently executed at that, but what really set it apart was the grand reveal of the wish-fulfillment fantasy having itself been only a role-playing campaign all along, complete with the rather poignant barb directed toward the audience that if you really believed it was real "you would not be able to function." Had it stopped there, Weregeek would've remained a positive example in its field. However, I immediately noted that the strip, having little or nothing to say after that point, rapidly fell back on the lowest common denominator of relationship dramedy. Last time I checked up on it this winter it seemed dead set on proving me horribly right, strutting and fretting its way across some awkwardly staged love triangle polyhedron.

I would've been quite willing to declare the comic officially dead when the last un-attached character, Abbie, got paired up. Fortunately, the author must've heard me because she finally addressed the issue. Unfortunately, it was done via the most pathetically predictable display of feebleminded narcissism. Abbie, attempting to discern why she's not dating, decides to nail down her own exact sexual category... by getting mentored in sexual identification by a furry and taking an online quiz.
Yeah...
Never mind that the conversation reads like a 1950s middle school educational video script. Golly-gee Dr. Tapir, until now I didn't even realize I had such a raging case of the asexuals! She then comes out to her roommate by dressing up in a cape as a superheroic "grey ace" and though yes, in all fairness the farce is deliberately played up as the goofy antics of a hyperactive character, it can't help but remind one of Weregeek's beginnings more than a decade ago.

Shadowgeek or shadow asexual? Weregeek has come full circle. Where a decade ago it was capable of gently deflating its audience's personal fable of specialness derived by membership in a defined group of plucky rebels, now it has a character ecstatically trumpeting "I'm not just a weirdo, I'm ace!" And, of course, this conclusion is not reached by private investigation or honest introspection, or by the expedient of ogling a few hundred asses on the street and tallying up one's tapping preferences... but by codependent preciousness and supplication to the zeitgeist. There's good money to be made in pandering to the majority of humans devoid of intellectual free agency, to the latest crop of useful idiots, to the hordes of slavish simpletons cribbing their lack of personality off online pop-quizzes and reddit echo chambers.

Humans dread facing their true worth, defined by their ability, intellect, creativity, integrity, by qualified qualities. They crave social status via some intrinsic label that can never be taken away from them, by "identifying as" special due to facile moral posturing or their basest attributes like their skin color or sex or what you stick and where you stick it. It would've been very simple to build up Abbie as one of the most respectable asexuals in the history of fiction... by simply never bringing it up and showing her interacting with others. Have her <do> things and not <be> a category. But a world of weirdos, of individuals, of world citizens just won't do now, will it? One must declare allegiance, after allegiance, after allegiance...