Nobody talked much about Goddess Mode #4, I guess because it's an entire issue exposition dump in which nothing actually happens, but it's worth analysing because it's a doozie on the meta level. It doesn't take much insight to tell the main character, the "oracle of garbage", is a massive mary sue not least because that's the only thing Zoe knows how to write. However, this issue lays the whole story bare and it's basically the same story that every manic pixie pseudo-game designer of Zoe's generation tells, I guess we might call it the millennial monomyth. The basic tenets of the story go that in days of yore, the internet was where all the cool kids hung out (it's worth noting that psued's days of yore are ALWAYS post the
eternal September) but that now the internet has been co-opted by normies and Nazis, but that they're
not part of system man and they're still cool. Basically, they're all pining for when they were 12 and had downloaded MIRC and hung out in edgy channels where they pretended to be lesbians, but now they're all smoking more pole than a five dollar hooker.
Zoe's take on the monomyth comes with a serious dose of narcissism and saviour complex. The whole thing can be summed up as "How did I, a weak and foolish girl, ever find the inner strength to take on internet bullies and rescue so many damsels?" I think this one panel can stand as a synecdoche:
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Imagine the sheer balls necessary to write that about your own Mary Sue.
