School shooting suspect Dimitrios Pagourtzis
By David Futrelle
In the wake of today’s school shooting in Santa Fe — which left ten dead and another ten wounded — the mood on Incels.me is unusually subdued. On the highly active forum for self-described “involuntary celibates,” school shooters and other mass murderers are celebrated as heroes, with Elliot Rodger, who killed six in Alta Vista, California in 2014 as an act of “retribution” against women for rejecting him, regarded as a veritable incel saint.
But nobody on Incels.me is hailing the Santa Fe shooting suspect, 17-year-old Dimitrios Pagourtzis, as the second coming of ER.
In part that’s because, less than a month after a horrific act of mass murder in Toronto by a self-desctibed incel brought their community more media attention than ever before, users and mods alike are worried that any excessive displays of enthusiasm might lead to their forum being shut down.
And in part that’s because a lot of the regulars on Incels.me aren’t convinced that Pagourtzis is ugly enough to be a true incel.
Oh sure, there are some who are celebrating Pagourtzis’ alleged gun rampage as an act of heroism in the war against “normies.”
“THE INCEL REBELLION HAS ALREADY BEGUN!” cried one commenter, quoting from the Facebook message posted by Alek Minassian shortly before, police say, he deliberately ran down pedestrians in downtown Toronto, killing ten.
“[L]et us pray for the victims and their families,” another commenter in the same thread wrote sarcastically. “Hopefully they will suffer immensely.”
“A nice surprise for my Friday,” wrote a commenter in another thread devoted to the shootings.
“Fucking based,” added another in the same thread. “I hope the normslime suffered as they drew their last breaths.”
“Very good news” agreed a third, “guy might not have looked traditionally incel but he did rack up a nice score.”
In yet another thread, a commenter took pleasure in imaging the teenage girls likely killed in the rampage. “Take that hypergamous sluts,” he declared.
But not everyone was quite ready to canonize Pagourtzis as the newest incel saint. For one thing, he’s not dead, a fact that led some on the board to mock him as a “pussy” too cowardly to end his rampage with a dignified suicide.
But the real sticking point for many on Incels.me was that, in their minds, Pagourtzis is simply too conventionally attractive to merit the incel moniker.
“He looks like a high tier normie,” noted one ambivalent commenter, ” but maybe he is a mentalcel.” (That is, someone whose romantic and sexual woes are allegedly caused by their mental problems rather than their looks.)
“This dude has chad looks,” complained another in the same thread. “Just look at his masculine frame, lose big forearms and big wrists and pretty face. Next to him I look like a piece of shit with my skinny fat, manlet body, ugly face, small forearms and wrists like twigs!”
“If I was that good looking I would have never heard of this site,” sniffed a third.
Still, not everyone on Incels.me is convinced that Pagourtzis is a “high tier normie,” much less one of those hated Chads.
While the alleged shooter isn’t ugly, one commenter noted, he’s also “not a Chad which means he may as well have been ugly. Women make no distinction between a 1/10 and a 5/10. You’re either hot or not.”
Others said they suspected he was a “manlet” — that is, too short to catch the eye of Chad-obsessed Stacies.
Still others detected what they saw as a fatal flaw in his facial structure that would forever disqualify him from female attention. “NEGATIVE CANTHAL TILT,” one commenter thundered. “1 flaw = ITS OVER”
What on earth is “negative canthal tilt,” you may wonder — at least if you’re not an incel or a plastic surgeon. It means that your eyes droop a little at the outer corners. NCT has become something of an obsession with incels trying to find flaws in their own appearance because they refuse to believe the real flaw is in their personality.
Trust me, fellas. The real problem isn’t your looks. It’s literally everything else about you — as your reaction to this tragedy makes very clear.