It’s difficult to grasp the appeal of Fuentes, a diminutive chauvinist virgin who has described himself as an “incel”, a “loser” and a “chud” — the latter, for those with jobs, is new-gen internet slang for a Right-wing prat. Yet somehow the man who coined the phrase “your body, my choice” has become a boyband-grade obsession for an army of alternative female yearners. If his fans in general are “Groypers”, a term related to the 4chan mascot Pepe the Frog, then these sighing women are his “Groypettes”.

Velvet Groypette is a typical case. They post images of Fuentes edited into album covers, or standing awkwardly at a nightclub with the looksmaxxing streamer Clavicular (the recent Avengers Assemble-style gathering in Miami also included Andrew and Tristan Tate; the group sang along to Kanye West’s song “Heil Hitler”). In their bio, they brag that they have been banned from TikTok three times. To them, Fuentes is Radiohead’s pitiable, misunderstood Creep, which is why one edit plays that song over a clip of our improbable matinee idol saying: “I am a bitchless, rizzless, hoeless, 5’9” chud incel who was over before it began … it’s over for me.” “I could save him,” writes one commenter; he is 2026’s Christian Slater in Heathers, a weirdo masochist who only sensitive girls truly see.

The Groypettes perform lovelorn victimhood, cosplaying as a battered girlfriend in a toxic relationship with this baddest of “bad boys”. The user Grippy Groypette, another exemplary specimen, hangs a pinkified American flag showing Fuentes doing the Nazi salute; “he could hit me and it would feel like a kiss,” reads the caption. “Me too girl me too,” writes a commenter. On Instagram, a user called Groypergirlies says “I’d let him ruin me”; Womenforfuentes takes the urge to self-sacrifice further, committing to a “baby groypling revolution” by churning out children for the cause.

It could, you might say, all be a canny ragebait device; what woman would engage with, let alone fantasize about, a man whose interests are so in opposition to her own? But the community is simply too large to be a trolling fad — if you search for X accounts with “Groypette” in the username, you can scroll and scroll. Besides, Andrew Tate, the OG slaphead king of the manosphere, never boasted a comparable league of female footsoldiers; Tate is massively more known and despised than Fuentes, only a recent inductee to the liberal mainstream’s fascist hall of fame. And if these women truly hope to be hit by a far-Right agitator, there is evidence suggesting Tate would know what he was doing. Nevertheless it is Nick who has been chosen as the “pretend bf” to this burgeoning subculture of troubled “foids” (women, to you and me). Why?

Perhaps it is because, unlike Tate, Fuentes’s violence is only hypothetical and therefore can be seen as romantic; so is his sexual life. Also unlike Tate, Fuentes is boyish, inaccessible and a little awkward. While both are undeniably camp, Tate does it in a hypersexual, dominating way, designed to impress other men; his moral universe is about status and money, and the women within it are only ever ciphers. Fuentes is obsessed with suffering and purity, civilization and destiny; his is a world which, in a very narrow way, leaves space for the perfect woman. Tate is a brutish warlord, and Fuentes a sad princeling. For a Tumblr princess, the choice is simple.

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The Groypette did not come out of thin air. A scour of TikTok, Instagram and X suggests the standard-issue Fuentes fangirl is either white or vaguely Latina, in her early twenties and terminally online; she listens to Lana, she bedrots compulsively, she takes photos of herself crying. She is, in other words, an inheritor of the other tortured female internet subcultures which have so obviously shaped her aesthetic and which have tightened their grip on isolated young women since Covid: the first is clearly ED Twitter, where eating-disorder girlies post thinspo (thin inspiration), list dizzyingly low current, starting and goal weights and competitively make themselves miserable and ill. It is no surprise that many of the self-identified Groypettes also have these stats in their bios, or the telling tag “edtwt”; martyrdom and attention-seeking suffering is native to both communities.

The other, perhaps even more obvious, progenitor is the Tumblr e-girl — a young woman seen on moody collages with long brown hair, hiding her face in adorable despair, taking a picture of her skinny legs and cigarette, and mournfully daydreaming about… herself. She is the grieving maiden of former times, dragged into the 21st century and given smudged eyeliner, bulimia and a phone addiction. And she is perfectly portrayed in another Velvet Groypette banger about the user’s grief in having to withstand Fuentes’s Christmas posting break. In this one, images of pretty girls crying and looking out of windows, clutching their silky hair or lying catatonic like Flaming June, are interspersed with Fuentes thirst traps.

For the Groypette, Fuentes’s beliefs and the broader America First movement are, ironically, secondary to her performative sadness. Where male fans of Fuentes crack sick jokes about the Jewish Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein’s family members “dying in the Holly”, the Groypette focuses mainly on her deathless love. Hitching herself to Fuentes’ bandwagon is less about ideology — these girls almost never post about his racial politics, for example, save from attention-seeking deployment of the n-word — than about recruiting Fuentes as the latest instrument for self-harm. Cutting herself, smoking, making herself sick and even showing off bruises is so aggressively woven into the DNA of the internet sadgirl; posing as the girl not only picked, but hit, by the anti-woman bogeyman of the day appears to have a perverse way of making otherwise unremarkable women feel special.

There is much to despise in the Groypette: she is craven, inauthentic and willing to sell other women down the river for a scrap of online attention. But, as a product of today’s balkanized youth culture, I understand her. If you were nerfed by Covid isolation, have a fragile sense of self and need male admiration to survive your own crushing mediocrity, then throwing yourself in with this band of countercultural “poasters” makes sense. The fact remains that nobody is as simpishly servile to a semi-attractive alt woman than a man who professes to despise her sex. Case in point: such men fill Groypette comment sections with admiring missives such as “the Groypettes might actually be crazier than the Groypers and that’s awesome honestly”; “I need a Groypette”; “WTF? I love women now.” If you’re looking for attention, this is a good place to start.

This thirst for alt-Right women explains why Amelia is probably filling your timelines this week. For the uninitiated, she is the purple-haired girl from a catastrophically misguided anti-far-Right, Prevent-funded video game called Pathways commissioned by Hull City Council for use in schools. Unfortunately, she’s become an instant cult heroine. In AI-generated fan renderings, Amelia burns pictures of Keir Starmer with cigs and tenderly pets British bulldogs; she leads the game’s male main character to brighter futures with fields of poppies, a sort of manic pixie doomer girl. In many ways, she is the platonic ideal of a Groypette: the Amelias of this strange new world aren’t bimboish “Staceys”, big-breasted blondes at the top of the sexual hierarchy; instead they are based noticers or, in plain English, they get the world’s depressing realities and are a salve, not salt, to the downtrodden man’s wounds. They might resemble the liberal e-girls with pronouns in their bios who normally deride the “incel”, but really they are meek, compliant and devoted — all the women, in other words, who have spurned him in real life given an ideology transplant.

For the Groypette, it’s win-win. She needn’t particularly engage with Fuentes’s ideas, or even meet up with any members of this oleaginous movement in real life; her mistreatment is only theoretical, and her proximity to something so overtly sinister is enough to make her feel important, with all the distinction of the not-so-secret self-harmer. All that remains is to wonder whether, when Nick Fuentes does step out with his own First Lady, all the glamour of groypettery will dissolve into a puddle of tears. His professed sexual loserdom seems to be part of his appeal; any woman he chooses would become by definition exceptional. Strange as this all may seem, it appears likely that if and when Fuentes stops being such a massive virgin, his female fanbase will revolt. There was a reason why John Lennon had to hide his marriage to Cynthia.

The fate of the Groypette is an alarm bell for the collapse of liberal feminism: though she has attached herself to a movement which is by definition disempowering, she sees it as a price worth paying for a sense of belonging, for devotion and meaning. An empty and cynical modern feminist credo which has robbed young women of the right to question transgenderism, prostitution, pornography and the consequences of mass immigration is losing ground, because of course it is. The worldview of the Groypette may be hopelessly ironic, nihilistic, racist, even suicidal — but for a small subset of women it is more enticing than the dreary bullshit-artistry of the progressive mainstream. That should worry us.

Crooner, an angelic-looking 24-year-old YouTuber from Southern California, has a lot of experience with Replika. In 2019, as part of research for his undergraduate thesis, he signed up for a programme that involved early beta testing of the app. He wanted to study the philosophy of AI.

“Replika claims to be therapeutic,” he told me, “but there’s something sad about how it takes you away from other humans. I honestly predict more and more guys will be earnestly falling in love due to AI girlfriends and abandoning real romance.” He very much believes in love. He thinks the internet needs more of it.

I discovered Crooner on Twitter, when we were both tagged in a thread about internet culture. He responded to one of my comments with a link to a YouTube video. “I have a theory about incels,” he wrote.

Crooner’s videos analyse the digital spaces we inhabit. One of them opens with him putting on a shirt and tie, fixing his longish, floppy locks, and then sitting behind an enormous plate of spaghetti and two flickering votives: a candlelit dinner. The word “nervous…” scrolls across the bottom, before a Zoom prompt appears. “Emily has entered the waiting room.” Emily, a telegenic blond, fills the left half of the screen. Crooner offers her something to eat, a gesture across cyberspace, and they go on to discuss her thoughts about Rapunzel, phenomenology, and their shared history of taking e-relationships offline.

This video is part of Crooner’s “E-Girl Museum” series, which features split-screen interviews with female YouTubers. Crooner is very interested in e-girls, who have had a profound impact on his sense of self, his romantic life, and even his creative pursuits. “They’ve been more real to me than IRL girls, in a way, if that makes sense, in the space they take up in my imagination,” he says with direct, cheerful conviction.

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Incels are very interested in e-girls too. So interested, in fact, that on incel forums, which I have spent a lot of time researching, discussion of them is essentially forbidden, restricted to a very specific context: references must be broad, and broadly negative. Anything else is considered “simping” — an offence punishable with a ban. Incels resent the attention lavished on these young women, and endlessly criticise their insatiable desire for attention, their licentiousness, their greed. OnlyFans creators, the ultimate e-girls, represent everything wrong with the world: narcissism, female privilege, sexual depravity, and financial abuse.

But Crooner sees it differently. “They play these roles, maybe a Rapunzel type, or the manic pixie, the chaotic e-girl, who compels the boy to save her. This forces him to shape up. It gives him the chance to become a hero.” He isn’t interested in judging anyone, or in identifying their dysfunction. I tell him that the story of Rapunzel is thought to represent Borderline Personality Disorder resulting from narcissistic parental abuse. He laughs, and then acknowledges that a staggering proportion of e-girls talk about having the disorder “compared to normie spaces”.

“I play this kind of ‘searching lover’ young man,” Crooner explains. “I do some philosophy too, but I’m showing people my quest for the holy grail.”  His videos and his timeline are filled with depictions of knights: young men in medieval armour. One of his most popular tweets bears the image of Leonardo DiCaprio from Romeo and Juliet, dressed in chainmail for the masquerade ball, alongside the Knight of Cups tarot. It says: “You’re not an incel. You’re an Arthurian Knight on the Quest for the Holy Grail.” His Twitter handle is @heropilled.

“This is what me and my friends, who I’m calling the e-Romantics, are onto right now: trying to flesh out the right mythos for the incel.” He believes that incels are in dire need of a different narrative about themselves and who they could be.

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Flandalff the White is one of Crooner’s friends, and his aims are similar, though he is more private. “I think there’s a way to help lift men out of the ‘swamp of sadness’ so many are stuck in. I managed to crawl out of it myself, so I feel I may have a few insights that might help.” He is producing a series of YouTube videos based on an 800-tweet thread. Before he agreed to speak to me, he wanted to make sure that I wasn’t going to characterise him as “anti-incel”. “Incels are my brothers,” he said. “We all sink, or we all float, together.”

Another member of the collective is Tanner, who is edgier than both Flan and Crooner, with an ironic sensibility and a penchant for shitposting. He wouldn’t tell me anything about himself, but he snarks about US politicians of nominal significance, so he’s probably American. In addition to caustically funny satire about “mid-girls” and “coomers”, he writes on Twitter about how Romantic Love was a signature invention of the Middle Ages, a reaction against Christianity. He believes that the e-relationship is “one of the last bastions of romance in the modern age”, because it involves an obstacle to overcome: the distance. “There is a courtship and then a heroic process against the odds.”

After speaking to the e-Romantics, I decided to test-drive some of their content by retweeting it for my own followers, many of whom are incels. They have responded favourably so far to ideas of knights and grails and quests: “That seems wacky. Weird. But fun.” From this crowd, any response at all is noteworthy; one of curiosity rather than cringe is monumental. The e-Romantics seem to be doing something right.

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What they’re doing right would be called, in the field of countering violent extremism, a “counter-narrative”. Several organisations have tried it. The Google-backed tech start-up Moonshot CVE offered the “Redirect Method”, for example, which involved a series of short videos designed to “undermine the extremist narrative” of white supremacism and Islamism. These ostensibly inspirational stories from ostensibly credible messengers were recommended for users who searched certain keywords online. I haven’t seen these videos myself — they’re not publicly available — but after the programme was deployed in 2019, abysmal results were reported.

The alternative narrative of the e-Romantics seems a better fit for incels — better than impersonal propaganda, and also better than the mantra they hear everywhere else: “Just focus on yourself!” We constantly prescribe self-improvement, self-realisation and self-care — elevating and encouraging selfishness as the noblest, healthiest pursuit, while pathologising intimacy and devotion as “codependency” and overearnest attempts at connection as “harassment”. Maybe the root of our relational difficulties is the 21st-century maxim that our most aspirational, “final form” is one of cold, navel-gazing contemplation.

There is clearly hunger for the “hero pill”. The Marvel Universe, and fantasy programming in general, is endlessly expanding. But romantic love is often minimised in these recent iterations — written off as too heteronormative, sexist, ableist. Chivalry is practically a hate crime. But the need to give one’s life meaning, the call to heroism and adventure, is still alive and well in all of us. And in young men, it seems, it can turn into something very dark. Today’s anti-heroes are very appealing. After all, being someone powerful and evil is better than being no one at all.

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Crooner understands where this can lead. “The incel has will but he lacks power, so he manifests his power through ideology, through fascism,” one of his videos explains. But, he goes on, this isn’t the path to happiness. “Have you noticed that fascist statues never smile? They’re not live-laugh-loving.”

I asked Crooner about the dangers of encouraging incels to risk their hearts. Perhaps, for some, the romantic quest might actually be futile; perhaps it will just lead to rejection.

“That’s the quest,” he says. “You don’t lose if you get rejected. A hero has to suffer. You just go on to the next part of the quest. In the meantime, you create. That suffering makes you level up. You can create something beautiful. It’s all about the desire. Keep following that.”

He’s right. Love inspires human greatness. Unrequited love, especially, produces a lot of the best art. And for the e-Romantics, this isn’t about countering violent extremism. They’re not focused on crime prevention or tackling misogyny. They’re just “a ragtag bunch of internet weirdos” without any agenda, who want to change the online landscape so that they can enjoy it more. “It’s our space,” Crooner says. “We live here. Why not make it what we want?”