#but we shouldn't pass our generation's hangups onto the next

[robot-roadtrip-rants]

Because I am a CHUMP and a FOOL I went and watched the short after I finished your video. It brought up a lot of memories from my youth. As some of your commenters noted, Amberlynn is a stereotype from the aughts, not from the 20s. I saw jokes like Amberlynn all over the place when I was a teen. I remember the fandom and the fangirls who inspired the Amberlynn jokes. Let me tell you about the world--well, the US--that the real-life Amberlynns grew up in.

This is the era of abstinence-only education. Purity balls are in the news, and Disney Channel pop stars are wearing purity rings. When Amberlynn is a teenager, her teachers tells her that people who have pre-marital sex are like chewed-up gum. When she turns on the TV, she hears Miley Cyrus announcing that True Love Waits. If her family goes to church, she may have been issued a promise ring. Amberlynn is a nerdy girl; she may be reading fantasy/sci-fi novels with smutty content, like I did when I was a teen. And she may have to hide those novels from her parents, like my friends did, or else they'll get taken away--she's too young for that filth.

But there's this wonderful new thing called the Internet. It opens up all kinds of amazing doors. Amberlynn has been composing adventures about her favorite characters in her head for years, and now she learns--she's not the only one! There's this whole site, fanfiction.net, where people post all the adventures they composed for their fandoms. Some of it--gulp!--is pornographic. And there's this thing called a "blog"--it's sort of like an anonymous online diary. Amberlynn can post whatever she likes, and no one will know it's her! Best of all, her parents have no idea what she's getting up to on the computer. They're probably not Internet literate. If Amberlynn is careful, they'll never find out about all the filthy, disgusting smut she's reading and writing, they'll never know all the fucked up, angsty thoughts that she lets out on her Livejournal.

And all that filthy, disgusting smut that she's writing...well, there's kind of a running theme. Whether het or slash, the top is always a dominant, sexually aggressive man forcing his attentions on a shy, innocent, submissive bottom (either woman or uke). The bottom always cries and struggles and insists that they totally don't want to have sex, but when the top keep harassing them, they slowly give up the fight. They can't help themselves, it just feels too good to be kissed, felt up, penetrated. Pretty fucked up, right? Why on earth would anyone write such problematic, rape-excusing shit?

I want you to go back and reread my second paragraph, and I want you to think about what that does to a teenage girl. What it's like to be told that having sex is like being chewed up and thrown away like gum, to hear pop stars on TV tell you that "not everyone, guy or girl, wants to be a slut!" You're looking at the boys around you and you're wondering what it would be like to touch and be touched, and everything around you tells you those desires are Wrong and Bad and Slutty. That's what Amberlynn is going through right now. Good Girls don't have sex. Good Girls don't even want sex. But hey...if a really hot guy forced really good sex on you...well...it's not your fault, right? Not even if you enjoyed it.

Amberlynn isn't the first girl to unconsciously follow this line of thought. This shit predates the Internet by centuries. I'm dead serious, you can find Regency romance novels that follow the same formula. Dubcon/noncon gives women who have been raised in repressive environments an excuse to enjoy sexual fantasies without feeling shitty about their natural urges. A lack of agency means a lack of guilt.

Now, the Internet offers Amberlynn a degree of freedom to express herself that she may not have felt beforehand. But it isn't 100% free. Early on in her geeky Internet journey, Amberlynn is going to learn that not all geeks are created equal. There's a hierarchy.

See, geeks in the aughts really REALLY want everyone to know that they're Not Like Other Geeks. Society hadn't atomized into a million little niches yet; there was much greater pressure to conform to "normal." Geeks weren't "normal." And the way we handled that was to cannibalize our own.

One of the best ways to demonstrate normality is to find an even weirder person and mock them for their normality. So that's what we did. I say "we" because I definitely participated. I laughed at all the furry jokes. I sneered at the OCs and the self-inserts. I'm guessing Vivziepop did, too. We were geek kids learning how to be geek adults, and our only model was, well, The Geek Hierarchy. And it was really, really important to reaffirm our normality because, deep down inside, we knew we were at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Geek girls are abnormal. Geek girls are intruders into male spaces. Geek girls write fanfiction (ew!) about boys kissing (EW!), and they obsess over hot male characters (EW EW EW!!). It's normal for (straight!) dudes to thirst over sexy female leads, to draw dirty fanart, or to even write their favorite male character kicking ass and getting allllll the pussy in 50-chapter sagas that everyone praises. But a woman doing the same to male characters? Or worse, writing them as a f****t? Disgusting.

(I'm sticking to the cishet perspective here because that was my experience, but TRUST ME, there were queer issues a-plenty. Not a few of the Amberlynns of my era were using fic spaces to figure out their sexualities and/or gender identities. I don't think I can describe those experiences, but I want you to know they were happening.)

So if you're a geek girl in the aughts, you never, ever, ever talk about your fic to anyone outside your fanfic circle. You definitely don't discuss dirty fic, or self-inserts, or slash. You never talk about your ships, you never crack certain jokes, you never give people your Livejournal (or Tumblr, or AO3, or...). And when other nerds mock those FREAKS and WEIRDOS obsessing too much over their smutty headcanons and ships and whatnot, you nod and smile. You comply with the Geek Hierarchy.

Amberlynn doesn't comply. Amberlynn chooses violence.

By the time we meet Amberlynn in her twenties, she has long since abandoned any pretense of normality. She proudly wears her fandom merch. She covers her walls in monsterfucker posters. She has the gall to watch pornography. And--gasp!--she has kinky, gross fantasies, and she wants to be desired. She is every stereotype of gross girl geeks piled into one character.

Are we going to discuss how geek girls have used fandom spaces to explore their sexualities for decades? Are we going to discuss how purity culture has impacted those explorations? Are we even going to bring up how so, so many people who have issues with organized religion will latch onto Hell/paganism/magic/whatever their childhood faith told them was Bad? No. Amberlynn has grievously violated the Geek Hierarchy. She needs to be punished. She needs to be made an example of what not to do.

I may be swinging a bat at a hornet's nest here but comparing the Weeaboo-boo short to literally any Hunter: The Parenting episode, especially Boy Story or any episode with Grimal in it, really makes the difference clear. That short sucked so much ass, mostly due to mean-spirited misogyny.