I’m not even sure what to make of this commentary about the Scott Pilgrim movie, which I have not seen. I have not read the book, either.
However, I have been subjected to the ire of certain factions of Nerddom for not being sufficiently nerdy. It would not be an overstatement to describe my early experiences (primarily in SF fandom, and in those circles where SF/Comics fandom crossed over) as hazing – and read the comments at the link for extra creepiness. I got so much hatey hate, that one day I asked my buddy author Bud Webster, what the heck the problem with me was. And Bud says to me, he says, “Colleen, you were the kind of people we were trying to get away from.”
WTF?
Keith Giffen went a little farther: “You are being punished for being popular in high school.”
Labeled NINO (Nerd In Name Only,) I took a lot of crap for daring to breach the Fortress of Nerditude where even Cat Piss Man is embraced with open arms, but the cheerleader is only accepted as a non-threatening lust object in fiction.
One well-known female professional flew into a rage because when I was sixteen-years-old, I entered a costume contest as Lady Galadriel. Kelly Freas took me aside to warn me that this woman had such a meltdown over me during the contest judging that I was to watch my back around her. “Galadriel is my elf!” cried the lady who claimed rule over something Tolkien created.
Years later, now a pro myself, I met her again. And she remembered. In great detail. And she was still furious at my encroachement on her territory. She was one of those women of SF/Comics whose womanly welcome extends only to women who do not threaten her. A sixteen-year-old blond threatened her a lot. A young female pro threatened her a lot. I still threaten her a lot.
In this spirit, I direct you to this Anti-nerd Rage Awesome.
If nerds go from underdogs to top dogs, there’s literally no outlet left for the unpopular, in much the same way that Nirvana hitting the top 40 charts killed the underground music scene.
Everyone deserves their own place to go that is not dictated to by the rules of the majority that already sets the pace for every other social gathering. Nerds should not be beholden to the same concerns that the “cool kids” use to pull rank on each other, and quite frankly, we shouldn’t have to be exposed to those people if we don’t want to be, because a lot of them are simply assholes. It’s like telling the quiet girl who’s into anime that her only allowed outlet for enjoying the medium involves sharing space with the girls who called her a lesbian for not being into the most popular boy band of the moment. The most important freedom is freedom from other people.
I declare my right to freedom from Cat Piss Man.
The comments thread is a wonder.
All I wanted to do when I was a kid was go to a convention and buy some books. I didn’t realize that was an act of aggression like, I dunno, beating up a kid with thick glasses.
Moving right along, an interview with my lovely and talented collaborator Barry Lyga:
An amusing feature on soap operas at The Atlantic.
From the ridiculous to the sublime. What a dull cliche. Go read Moliere instead.
A call to abolish tenure for professors. My dad does not have tenure, so I guess I am prejudiced about it all.
Tenure is a bad deal not just for universities, which are saddled with its costs, but also for professors, who are constrained by its conventions. Cathy Trower, a researcher at Harvard University who has studied tenure for the last decade, says the current system may actually be scaring talented young people away from academia. “This one-size-fits-all, rigid six-year up-and-out tenure system isn’t working well,” she says.
Beautiful model dressed as slave Leia gets molested at Star Wars convention. I’m not sure that’s news.
Someone will tell her that’s what she gets for going to a convention as a NINO.
Colleen is extremely stinky and cross after a morning of farm labor. Not sure that’s news, either. Lack of rain has our watermelons splitting open on the vine. Very vexed.
The nerd-rage links amused me, in a sad way, because what seems to be behind it is that the apparent “intruders” into Nerd-dom are not conforming to the social rules of said Nerd-dom. It makes me sad, because it seemed to me that the whole point of being a nerd/geek (and I personally prefer being called a “geek”) was that the individual was not obliged to conform to anyone’s social rules. “I’m here because I want to be,” ought to be enough. Although I certainly agree that good hygiene is a fair expectation of ALL my fellow human beings (meaning, I’d ditch Cat Piss Man quickly too!).
But I suppose those who complain of violations of Nerd-dom social structure (“Don’t let the jocks in!”) have never sat down and worked out their personal philosophy of why they are nerds/geeks in the first place. They got shunned for their esoteric interests and just accepted it, and then created a replica social structure with others who were shunned, with its own hierarchy.
For myself, I simply decided to be consciously non-conformist. If I conformed to certain social expectations it would be entirely by choice for that event/organization/community. But I’ll jay-walk away from expectations if it suits me (which would include a consideration of consequences). I find it sad that there’s such a degree of conformity expected, even now, in what presents itself as a non-conformist sub-culture. Heh.
This is what I get for being a “limited anarchist.” (And every time I say that, no one EVER comments on it, which makes me even sadder.
)
oh Jesus wept. No.
Sorry, but the “you’re not allowed to be popular AND a geek! you can’t be able to move from one circle to the other like that! it’s not fair, we only get one choice you can’t have both!” argument is in-fricking-ridiculous. Grade school politics stop being relevant when grade school is over, seriously.
“It’s like telling the quiet girl who’s into anime that her only allowed outlet for enjoying the medium involves sharing space with the girls who called her a lesbian for not being into the most popular boy band of the moment.”
Yeah that would have been me, back in the day. I also ran our local D&D club, back in the late 70′s/early 80′s. Unpopular. Name called. Stuff stolen. Locker slammed. You name it.
And if I’d discovered some of them were into the same GENRE as me (anime is a whole genre, you know, much more than the dribbles of it that make it across the ocean) I would not have felt threatened, I would have laughed. Because that meant they had to come to MY playground to feel special. Laugh at me all you want, jerks, but in the end you’re following MY trends, not the other way around. So who’s the loser now? And when you’re done following what’s popular for something else that becomes popular, me and my interest in it will still be there, watching your ass hit the screen door on the way out. That’s a victory in my book. Smug mode, engaged.
And literally, the same thing occurs to me at each succeeding San Diego Comic-con, where it’s flooded with every wannabe media writer who arrives with “ooh, shiny” all over, then bashes the attendees “geek/nerd/fat/blah” while they themselves partake of what those attendees enjoy. It becomes the ultimate “this convention would be great without the convention’s attendees” argument. And just who was it that built this city on rock and roll, my friend? Ta da. The one would not exist without the other. You didn’t “discover” Comic-con any more than Columbus “discovered” North America. Someone was there before you.
That’s right, media dude, you had to come to OUR playground to feel cool, to feel special. You’re bashing on us but you’re the leech. And eventually a leech drops off and rolls away, and the fandom endures.
Popularity can’t “ruin” fandom, because popularity =/= fandom. Fandom = fandom. Since when does popularity in non-fandom dictate popularity in fandom, anyway? How many obscure movies and shows faded from general memory that remain beloved in fandom like little shrines with candles and flowers around them? Let’s face it, all of them.
If you stop liking something because it’s now popular, how less shallow is it for them, the mudanes (now muggles), to START liking something simply because it’s popular? You’re playing their game doing that. Instead of laughing when they play yours.
Your love for something has no bearing on my love for something. Your love for a genre does not taint mine, even if you hate me. The only requirement of fandom is that you like the story, the game, the pictures, the entity within fandom. Anything else is immaterial.
/big ol’ tl;dr soapybox
I am totally loving these comments.
And now I am going to go draw my comic book while watching my Revolutionary Girl Utena dvd.
hey, but you know what, our opinions don’t count because no matter how geeky/nerdy you are, being a girl automatically disqualifies you from SRS BZNS Fannish Discourse…
Who peed in that guy’s cheerios? I understand wanting newbies to be respectful of whatever aspect(s) of fandom you’re into but to be exclusionary to anyone who doesn’t fit your definition of a “proper” fan is very hypocritical. Putting up a wall against perceived interlopers is an understandable defense mechanism but being hypersensitive just helps perpetuate the fanboy stereotype.
I have some friends (shocking, I know
) who aren’t into what I like but if they ask about “Doctor Who”, comics or anything else I like, I’m not going to recoil in shock. I had made a deal with a friend of mine who is a big Yankee fan. I would go to a game if he read “Watchmen”. So we both got a glimpse into each others’ worlds. He wound up liking it and I had fun at the baseball game.
If more people get interested in “geeky” subjects, how is that a bad thing?
Odd, I never pegged Scott Pilgrim as a nerd anyway, he always struck me as more of a slacker-hipster type. Thus, informed by geek chic, but not a nerd, really, at all. What is the character even depicted as being into that’s at all nerdy? In the source comic, that is.
I was a little surprised when Michael Cera was cast as Scott Pilgrim. I guess he’s the nerd go-to guy now, like Will Smith and Keanu Reeves are for SF protagonists.
Damn, I wrote ‘sci-fi’ and then took it out… damn you, social programming!
Well, there is the Groucho Doctrine:
“I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”
The nerds have won. Look at Bill Gates. Look at how much this world depends on IT. Star Trek was the future, until we all started putting earpieces in our ears like Uhura, and talking into our portable communicators (why isn’t there a Classic Trek cellphone!?!), and working with ethnically diverse co-workers. (Unfortunately, we’re still working on the Prime Directive.)
Yeah, there’s some deep scars people carry from high school. By my senior year, I was eating lunch out by the tennis courts, reading Orwell and Huxley, and identifying with Winston Smith and Bernard Marx. I did not have senior photos taken. I was so eager to leave high school I returned my graduation gown before my mother could take a photograph. (In retrospect, I should have gotten my GED ASAP, but this was the 1980s, when GEDs were a sign of failure.)
I think there’s also the Fear of Public Humiliation. The fear that the football team will burst into your D&D gaming, strip you to your BVDs, and run you up the high school flag pole.
Much of fandom is about escapism… cosplay, role playing games (the kind you can do in public places), movies, books, comics… Fans don’t want to be reminded of the real world. They are Clark Kent, and don’t want people to know their secrets.
Fortunately, high school is changing. Once the bullied stopped killing themselves and started killing the (perceived) bullies, administrators took notice. Dunno if this helps. The new movie “You Again” might create some interesting dialog, but there are many people from my graduating class I avoid on Facebook, and probably would assault if I met them face-to-face.
My 26-year-old nephew loves sports, coaches football and lacrosse. He’s not a stereotypical jock, because he was raised right (and made a geek by his cool uncle with lots of comics and cartoons).
There were a lot of NHS members in the dance squad (considered more elite than cheerleaders). One became an actuary, although I don’t think any were on the debate team. I don’t think any had any geekish tendencies.
As for the … media who attend Comic-Con… I think about the movie “The Birds”. We just need an Inciting Incident…and a flag pole.
I would strongly disagree that administrators took notice of bullies when the bullied started killing people.
The problem with believing you are Clark Kent is that you have to be wonderful on the inside of the nerdy wrapping.