The difference being that there aren't human trafficking networks that ship dreamy hunks to lonely AO3 users, but there are human trafficking networks that enslave people, read: mostly women, from the global south so they can be SAd by western men. Not to mention that there is an oingoing rightwing project to bring back "tradwifes", read: making women basically the property of their husbands again, which is something that for a lot of older people is still within living memory. Go read up how divorce law used to be until the 1970s. When my mom got married, she could not even open a bank account or start a job without written approval from her husband. That was the law in my country back then. In the 1960s. And the guy who made that cartoon wants that back.

How can you think that's the same as your lonely friend joking about her romance novels? It is not, there are entire layers of systemic violence missing. This is like comparing a black person saying cracker to a white person saying the n-word, or comparing a trans woman making forcefem jokes to a terf taking people's HRT away. Universalism has its limits, and they show up wherever one group has the structural, systemic power to make the other group's life hell.

This guy could be a hardcore misogynist, but he could also be a lonely teenage kid

People in the incel community always are both hardcore misogynist and lonely af. When i look at these communities, i also see that they often long for emotional closeness and connection to somebody more than for sex or romance. But that does not change that they are absolutely vile misogynists.

And this 100% was made by an incel in the sense of "member of a mysogynist online community" and not an incel in the sense of "awkward but nice kid who just can't get laid". The entire meme screams incel, every wojak, every wording. Yes, i know, wojaks are used by everybody now, it's honestly scary how much reach incels now have culturally, but that's part of the problem here, isn't it? And "government mandated girlfriend" has been a talking point among them for 20 years now. The phrase is older than the term incel itself, and it has always boiled down to "every man should get one woman as his personal slave and what the woman thinks about it does not matter because we do not view women as people with internality and agency."

who would figure it out pretty fast in the right friend group

Let me tell you about my experience with /r9k/. Way back before Gamergate, i stumbled upon 4chan. And because i was really bad at picking my battles back then, i spent a couple years debating reactionaries there. Especially incels. They didn't call themselves incels then, they had not yet appropriated that term from the lonely woman who would later coin it. They called themselves permavirgins, foreveralones etc., but it was the exact same thing otherwise. And i've always had nerdy friends, socially awkward friends, neurodivergent friends, people who took a lot of time to get used to the whole dating thing. But for my friends, that always worked in the end.

So i thought i could help these proto-incels. Give them advice. As it was an anonymous site and they could not recognize me, i was free to go groundhog day and try every possible approach. Uncomfortable truths, compassion and commiserating, talking them up, pointing out how my friends had hooked up with their partners in spite of not being square-jawed jocks etc. etc. Nothing worked. Every single time, it was like talking to a wall. They absolutely insisted on being intrinsically undateable and nothing could snap them out of it. I've never seen so much self-pity and fatalism in my entire life. It's no wonder they coined the term "blackpilled" a few years down the line.

Fast forward to me approaching my egg crack and watching way too much ContraPoints, including her Incels video (which, in hindsight, is its own can of worms, but let's not have that discussion now). She lays out the basics, i go "mhmmm, yeah, i recognize that, omg yes, that's exactly what they're like" and then she gets to how the community deflects attempts to help them. And they literally have a whole genre of memes to counter every single approach i've tried with them back in the day.

tl;dr: You can't help incels. Save your time and energy for people who are willing to accept help and who aren't a misogynist death cult.