Complex Personalities is a treatise, an exploration of the main characters of FOGClub. I will not be trying to do my best to try and decypher their motivations, desires and raison d'etre, I will however, do my best to explain the characters to the layperson to the best of my ability. Heaven or hell, let's rock.
Scott Akimoto and Kevin Nadeau are the focus characters of FOGClub. Both are naturally - the writer's idealized Mary-Sue self-inserts, however since Scott wears the glasses and totally gets the girl, he's the one that the comic makes its "main" focus character. Today, I'll be focusing on Scott.
So, what do we know about Scott? First and foremost, his name's an inane Kevin Smith reference. Scott is named after Scott Mosier, Kevin Smith's producer and I guess he played Snowball in Clerks. Dennykun loves him up some Kevin Smith. To be fair though, FOGClub started up in 2001 when there were only four Kevin Smith movies, only one of which was pants-shittingly awful, the others were only so-so but I'll go to my grave attesting that Mallrats was the best movie Kevin Smith had ever made. I'm digressing. Had FOGClub been made in say, 2007, after Kevin Smith shat out Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Jersey Girl and Clerks 2, I'm pretty sure that even the die-hard KS fanboy would have thought twice about naming the two main characters in his 1,147 entry-long online comic strip after the limpdicks that made those awful, awful, terrible movies.
Scott is half Japanese, every Japanophile Nippon Ichi Numba One weeabo's dream come true. Apparently his father is Japanese (as evident in this strip) and his mother is Caucasian. You can tell he's Japanese because of the gray hair at his temples and his stern eyebrows. Apparently Mr. Akimoto is very upset that he was taken away from his busy schedule of earning a salary at some job he can't stand to attend his son's funeral, only to have the whole thing dashed to pieces when his son spontaneously materializes out of thin air, ruining his trip out to Wellman. Way to let your ancestors down, Scott. You'd best perform an act of ritual self-mutilation in order to appease their wrath!
Scott has an impossible physique. His body is simultaneously skinny and totally ripped. His face is chiseled and he has a chin so sharp you could zest a lemon off it. He has the body that a totally out of shape, unremarkable in every way douchebag who wants to be adored by everybody because he's just so goddamned awesome would imagine himself and thus, is how he draws his idealized self-insert.
Now, I'm not one to critique D-Kane's physique, nor is anybody who would be reading this, but I at least would have the common decency to draw myself (were I to ever write and draw a self-insertion wish-fulfillment web comic) as Huge, rather than as some prettyboy with an impossibly-narrow waist and a barrel chest who is somehow completely unable to get chicks. What the fuck? Seriously.
Scott is in love with Annamae (I shit you not, that's her name). But Scott is too lame to admit that he loves her, even though she's shown as completely falling over herself in love with him. No seriously. A sassy redheaded girl who as into your chosen hobby as you and therefore you've someone with whom to converse AND one with totally rude titties is effectively every self-obsessed nerdchild's wet dream come true. It took Scott approximately six weeks of continuity to stop referring to her as "Anime."
So, why is Scott too lame to admit that he loves Annamae? Let's set the controls on our WABAC to take us to February 11, 2001. What's so damn significant about February 11 anyway? Well, according to the comic's own wacky, fucked-up sense of time scaling and continuity, it's actually February 14th. That's right - St. Valentine's Day.
See, St.
Valentine's Day is a holiday that all of us who aren't subaverage manchildren
stopped caring about around the time our ages hit double digits. Oh no,
not Dennykun Scott, however. Scott - at the age of nineteen
- still actually gives a shit about a fake holiday fabricated by David
Icke's lizardjews from beyond Orion in order to convince us to buy schmaltzy
and tacky gifts like the willing and complicit little consumer-droids
you are. I don't give a shit about the fake holiday, but I'm cynical.
Scott however, isn't. Well, he
is, but doesn't share my (and the rest of the First World's) apathy
toward the non-holiday. He sits up on the rooftops (which becomes a recurring
gag throughout the strip) and bawls his little eyes out. A-bloo-bloo-bloo.
All because St. Valentine's Day is overtly discriminatory against the
single. Yes folks, D-Kane has accused The Establishment of levying a policy
of institutionalized discrimination against him just because he lacks
a significant other.
Apparently, in Dennykun's world (this would be the one that he himself occupies, not his characters, however the lines become increasingly blurred as time progresses), the winner of St. Valentine's Day is the one who has amassed the most greeting cards, chocolate candies and other sundry materialistic bullshit, in his world, St. Valentine's is effectively the polar opposite of Christmas - where it's better to receive than to give.
Scott feels this way because of A Girl Named Catherine. It's been widely speculated among the FOGClub fandom that Catherine is a poorly-obfuscated pseudonym for a girl that broke Dennykun's heart back in high school when he decided that her pity was the same thing as love. He fell stupid head-over-heels with her, started buying her flowers and asking her out to Kevin Smith movies. They hung out a few times and he decided that he was crazy-stupid in love with her. When he confronted her about it, she obviously laughed in his face and totally shunned him, breaking his crazy, deluded little heart! Apparently, Annamae feels the same way. But both characters are too stupid to admit it to one another.
Or it could be rather than the characters are too stupid to admit it, the writer is too stupid to overcome his neuroses and allow his characters to just be in love with one another. Carl Gustav Jung would say that D-Kane is simply projecting his repressed sexual angst onto his art. Everybody projects their own neuroses into their art, especially when you're ham-handed and lacking in imagination. Doubly-so for a self-insertion wish-fulfillment webcomic hosted on Keenspace (now Comic Genesis).
So, Scott met Annamae on the sixth strip and first continuity day, he fell instantly in love with her at that first meeting, but it took him until the three hundred and sixty fifth continuity day (and three hundred and seventy eighth strip) to tell her that he loved her.
What the fuck?
It must be awful to be the lead character in a romantic comedy that's neither romantic nor comedic.
Next Complex Personality: Kevin Nadeau
