A post at the Cringepics Subreddit displays a highly-awkward attempt by a “fedorabeard” (a term I am totally stealing) to flirt with Kitty, a Hot Topic employee that suits his highly-superficial fancy. Of course, he couldn’t just ask for her number or social media info directly—after the smackdown she gives to fedorabeard, the person who gave him her info should probably run for the hills. Here’s a highlight, and the whole Imgur album is below:

Listen, buddy, you don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me, and from the obliviousness I’ve witnessed here I doubt you’d know your ass from a hole in the ground. I’m not your Felicia Day, I’m not your Ramona Flowers. I’m not your manic pixie dream girl. I’m an actual, real live human being and you’ve had a single five minute conversation with me. You can take your little nerd-girl fantasies you’ve so thoughtfully projected on me and shove them right back into the box of tired, worn out Hollywood tropes you pulled them out of.

***

And one last thing to leave you with, bucko. If you have to tell somebody you’re a nice guy, you’re doing something wrong. Or you’re not actually a nice guy, you’re a pushy fucking creep living in a fantasy world where girls fit whatever cute little mold you decide they should. You ever wanna buy your collectibles in my store again, deal with another associate or find it within yourself to treat me with the respect and distance you’d afford to a stranger whose pants you DON’T wanna get into. Creep.

There is no one specific moment when the guy blew it, but among the myriad things he should not have done, comparing Kitty to “a real life version of Felicia Day or Chloe Dykstra,” followed by the acknowledgment that they are real people but that he’ll never meet them, has to be among the dumbest things anyone has ever said to anyone.

This particular archetype of the geek girl does not actually exist in real life, and manic pixie dream girls only exist as supporting characters in movies with male main characters. The trope does damage to the women perceived as manic pixie dream girls, and the men who hang their hopes on a spunky Natalie Portman lookalike swooping in and showing them how to savor life.

To put it another way, I suspect that many guys who claim they want to date Felicia Day actually want to date Penny or Codex.

I agree with Dr. Nerdlove that the movie (500) Days of Summer should be required viewing for guys in general. Fedorabeard definitely needs to watch it, or watch it again if he didn’t understand it. The central premise of the movie is that Tom (Joseph Gordon-Leavitt) believes in True Love, based in part on a mistaken understanding that The Graduate had a happy ending. He meets Summer (Zooey Deschanel), and based on a series of possibly-misinterpreted, almost-certainly-irrelevant factors, concludes that she is The One. It does not go well for Tom, because he is never in a relationship with Summer, the person, but rather Summer, the fantasy in Tom’s mind. It’s not clear if Tom ever learns the right lesson from his experiences, but the movie makes that lesson abundantly clear. Tom’s friend Paul (Matthew Gray Gubler) delivers the moral in no uncertain terms:

Robin is better than the girl of my dreams. She’s real.

I used to buy into quite a bit of this stuff, long long ago. Many aspect of our culture encourage it, but it’s still b.s. Don’t be that guy.

Now then, here’s the Fedorabeard exchange in all its brutal glory. Don’t be this guy.

Photo credits: Genevieve (DSC_8024) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons; MingleMediaTVNetwork (Felicia Day) [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons