The Self-Mythology of Nerdiness

I am what I consume.

This meme set off a nice little discussion, mostly because it represents a complete inversion of what really happened. I fixed it:

Well, I fixed it if you go by what a “nerd” is prior to the creation of a “nerd identity” in the 2000s. I also call them drama kids (they were always in drama in high school). They’re the special snowflakes who, in the absence of a real identity, create a new identity based around what they consume. It was there in my generation, but kids born in the 1990s were hardest hit.

They called themselves nerds because they consumed “nerdy” products that were special and out of the mainstream; basically they were another variety of niche hipsters. By the time The Big Bang Theory was on the air, “nerd” was a lifestyle area with associated brands as much as Grunge (with Doc Martins) in the early 90s or punk (with converse and vans) in the early 2000s.

Buy product. Talk about product. Get excited for next product.

That’s the sad end of the Generation Y, and I talk about it in my book.

But here’s what is crazy about that first meme. None of the those properties were ever nerd properties to begin with. They were all normie properties; that is, they were beloved by the common man, not a niche of self-styled outcasts.

Star Wars was the most popular movie franchise in the world. How could you think normies ruined it when for three decades every person in America went to see it in theaters? Every boy and a fair portion of girls in the 80s had Star Wars toys. The only “nerdy” thing about the property was the long-tail products like Extended Universe novels, but even these were popular with a lot of normie boys. Star Wars videogames were immensely popular and everyone played games.

What killed Star Wars, if you even want to say it is killed, was that the franchise was handed over to nerd-identifying hacks who treated the franchise like it was box of their toys from 1985. But even then, the new movies still made a killing (much to my chagrine). Normies still showed up! Why? Because they had always showed up to Star Wars movies – that’s why they all made so much money.

What about Lord of the Rings? As a set of novels, it’s the most normie fantasy that exists, to the point that most casual fantasy readers have become oblivious to all the origins of the genre prior to 1980. Vance, Moorcock, Zelazny, and Howard are forgotten and every new writer builds on Tolkien in a manneristic fashion. As a film franchise? It not only swept the Oscars, it was the last blockbuster that everyone watched to win big. It was, in many ways, a send off to the best parts of the corporate era just like Revenge of the Sith.

It wasn’t a small, dedicated group of geeks that turned Lord of the Rings into the biggest fantasy franchise ever (well, besides Harry Potter), it was casual readers picking up a book to dip into the genre with something generally considered a classic by the 1990s. It was apparently the best-selling book behind the bible for some decades. Tolkien fandom is something else entirely, dominated by the worst kind of nerds – sex-obsessed leftists who detest Tolkien’s religion and wish his works were not Catholic, and to whom scholarship is post-modern pasting of queer themes into a book where nothing of the kind is present. It’s debatable whether they actually like the books. Luckily, they only got involved recently in film adaptation, and we saw how that turned out.

Alright, but Marvel! Comic books are the center of geek culture, right? If you mean they are geek art because they don’t sell well, then yes. If you mean geeks made them great, then you are wrong.

Jim Shooter once remarked that in the 1980s Marvel sold 100,000 of every title every month, on the low end. X-Men or Spider-Man, if it was a big issue, could move seven digits. I’ll leave you to look up current sales. The fact is that comics were widely read, especially by the youth, until the mid-1990s when the industry was captured by fans-turned-artists who turned comics into “mature” collector pieces aimed at an aging adult market. The books disappeared from spinner racks at drug stores and became sequestered in specialty stores managed by more fans. Marvel went bankrupt in 1997 (cultural ground zero, anyone?) precisely because normies stopped reading. Normies built the brand, and it collapsed when they left. Brian Niemeier has fortuitously analyzed this macro and attached it to the types of stories told.

What about the MCU? Well, again those movies are major box-office successes. Normies bought tickets. General audiences were the target demographic, not geeks. You don’t hit a billion at the box office selling tickets to a single subculture, especially a subculture known for only buying a few thousand copies of a major legacy brand in its original printed format. After massive success, the franchise was handed over to hipster nerds to make things like Thor: Love and Thunder or made to focus on d-list heroes only megafans cared about. Each movie became so loaded down with mandatory backstory and references to the past movies (more than twenty of those) that a casual viewer is easily lost – a complaint familiar to the comics. In essence, they started making the ideal movie for comic-book guy, not for people who want to go to the movies on a Saturday afternoon.

Warhammer is perhaps the closest to a genuine geek or nerd franchise, but it was part of the table-top gaming market, which, again, during the 1980s was mainstream. Dungeons and Dragons wasn’t a “nerd” activity, it was just a game kids played. Only later on (the 1990s) did it become encysted by nerds and turned into a special fantasy subculture. Warhammer fans are big into their games and miniatures and there is a strong barrier to entry, but there are also many Warhammer video games and books; despite not being in the movie realm, it’s a pretty popular franchise.

I would not say, therefore, that normal people getting into it would kill it; quite the opposite. It would likely halt the activist entryism that its core fanbase is afraid will kill the fun lore of Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40k.

So the original meme is way off-base, and is probably indicative of the break between millennial (90s kids) and Gen Y (80s kids). We both create false identities based around consumption of products, but Gen Y at least has a passing memory of certain things being popular, mass-market products. Things like Star Wars practically define popular culture, but a funny thing started happening in the 2000s in that pop culture started to become part of geek culture. Reference humor is the hallmark of Gen Y media; and thus it just got incorporated into a self-identifying nerd subculture without anyone thinking of the contradictions inherent in such a belief.

Yes, everyone likes Star Wars, but we REALLY like it. We cosplay! We… Watch the movies sometimes… more than everyone else.

Honestly, there is nothing wrong with liking Star Wars, but I realized in 2015 when I got all the backlash from calling a spade a spade with the Force Awakens (it sucks) that people have far too much of their personal identity wrapped up in liking a certain thing (a thing they have no part in the creation of) and needing it to be good.

I see the same sort of nerd historicizing when it comes to every form of mass media. People who create their identity as “nerd” will say things as absurd as they were bullied for playing video games. Video games are not a nerd hobby. Every person I knew in high school played games. Everyone, male or female, played at least a little bit, whether it was Pokemon, Tetris, or Doom. It’s like trying to say you were bullied for watching TV. No, it is rather part of the forging of identity, the story you tell yourself to explain yourself to yourself. It’s an attempt to define the self and the other, and to draw clear lines around both.

It's self-mythologizing.

People take upon themselves the mantle of “nerd” have a need to be part of something. The Irish have myths about the settling of the island, and so nerds have myths about the settling of their sub-culture. Billion-dollar properties are popular because nerds liked them first. Nerds supported them (by consuming product) until they went mainstream. I tweeted out the “fixed” meme and that is what many people spat back at me.

Oddly enough, there is one example that fits the narrative, but it’s not on the radar of most “geeks” right now, because it happened before they were born: Star Trek. That franchise was revived partially because of concerted letter-writing campaigns in the 1970s, years after the original series was cancelled (but had gone into syndication, thus still gaining wide exposure to the growing TV audience). It was boomers who saved Trek and allowed it to be revived in the late 70s and 80s as a movie franchise, then eventually a TV series based on that success. By the way, the movie that probably saved Star Trek, The Wrath of Kahn, was made after kicking the Gene Roddenberry (a nerd) out of the franchise following the disaster of the first movie and normie-fying it into an action franchise. And that first movie likely only got made because of the wide appeal of Star Wars. I have to call it like I see it.

If think there is always political confusion with this process – millennials view everything as necessarily political needing to reflect the self. “Nerd culture” has always been left-leaning, so its natural that a nerd takeover would end up inserting leftist positions (after all, nerds want things for themselves, not general audiences). Nerds are a kind of hipster, and that means separating yourself from the mainstream (more conservative by nature) culture. The mythology of us and them extends into the political, of course. This is the problem with “entryism.” The people doing it are motivated by identity, not experience. Hierarchy based on consuming product is just part of the us and them mentality.

Comics were popular. Video games were popular. Movies were very popular. Everyone enjoyed them. If you were a bit of a nerd about one particular thing, that’s great, but it doesn’t mean you are either an oppressed victim or a special snowflake. And don’t take my preaching too hard, because I tend to do this, too, as do most of my generation. I call myself a metalhead, but what does that mean? I am something because I like something? Nonsense!

You are, in all likelihood, a normie.

Just like me. And that’s great. You don’t have to feel bad about really liking something, because it is normal. Just remember that when the thing you think is special is wrecked, chances are it was a self-identifying nerd who did it, and it was to snub the normal folk, not please them. It was to make it special and for themselves (the nerds). It’s capturing the popular and taking it away from the normie that is the problem.

I’m sure you have some other counter-examples, though (Punk music and Bioware games come to mind), so lay them on me.

I am an independent writer and musician. You can be a part of my niche culture by joining my patreon or ko-fi and getting access to my discord server. Of course, you can listen to my music and buy my books – hopefully because you enjoy them.