This story is deeply uncomfortable, mostly because the deeply cringe-worthy narration could have easily been copied and pasted from any of a number of dark corners of Reddit. This isn’t the first story with this kind of sentiment in the pages of this publication, which makes me wonder how much of Heavy Metal’s content found its way into the more toxic elements of contemporary masculine philosophy. Of course, that bullied young man went on to become a gamer and a programmer. The punchline of the story is that he runs into this woman in a grocery store a decade later and is happy to see that she’s clearly miserable, with a boorish husband and a couple of kids. He congratulates himself for not going over and talking to her – the implication is that he would have obviously been a better choice in the long run.

(Heavy Metal Crossroads Special, 1999 – Page 22 Inferno by Martin)