Don’t worry, Gregory – your anime club membership is quite secure, you’re not in the digital world. In-universe, that is…on a meta level, being a webcomic character, you kind of live in a digital world, but let’s not go there.
It’s easy to understand Gregory’s concerns, of course – the random appearance of a pair of goggles is most easily explainable with you having unwittingly stumbled into the digimon franchise. Other anime also feature random goggles, but they usually aren’t as central to the plot. So Gregory’s conclusion is quite logical – which can actually serve to disprove it, since in the digimon franchise, the character having the goggles usually isn’t the smartest kid of the lot. Or the sharpest tool in the shed. So, if Gregory’s conclusion had been correct, he’d change considerably the moment he puts on these goggles – he’d suddenly have a lot of get up and go, but would lose most of his sit down and think in exchange. Whether that would be a good trade is up to each reader to decide.
On a different level, this is also a bit of a homecoming, since Gregory’s design has featured a pair of goggles from the start – his current version is actually the first that didn’t have any. Up to now. And his admission that he’s in an anime club and likes the digimon franchise actually retro-actively explains why he’s always been fond of goggles as a fashion statement! How’s that for carefully planned writing? *coughcoughcough*
His assertion that the magic hat is mostly good for rain protection is a bit unfair, of course – it’s also highly convenient for plot advancement, as I’ve noticed before. For it provides another ready-made explanation for the random appearance of a pair of goggles, since its erratic nature can be used to handwave away any kind of random appearance. And in a fantasy setting, ‘random’ can always mean ‘willed by a higher power’, so everything works out well in this instant.
And, digimon and fashion aside, the goggle’s appearance does serve the plot – more on that on Thurs…uh, Monday.
All that having been said, I’ll leave the concluding remarks to somebody more qualified than me: