The Evolution of “Geek Culture” (part 2)

(previously)The Evolution of “Geek Culture” (part 1)

You would think that finally being accepted would be the happy ending to the story. Geek culture has “arrived” and is finally widely accepted. It’s not social suicide to wear a Dr. Who shirt, talk about the Infinity Stones, or debate console wars and video games as it once was. Clubs and small get-togethers were starting to become bigger. A Smash Bros. tournament or 3DS meetup that used to take place occasionally in someone’s basement now is a weekly event with 50 people attending. All sorts of people you wouldn’t expect to attend a Comicon-style event show off their tickets ahead of time. There are entire swaths of Reddit and YouTube dedicated to oddly specific hobbies where there was once just a sole webpage back in the late 90’s. Shows like Stranger Things look back fondly (through very rose-tinted glasses) on those times with the DnD nerds as the town heroes - something that wouldn’t have happened before. Basically, it was way easier to find and recruit new members to things traditionally relegated to the realm of nerd-dom. 

All is well in the world, right? 

But there was a major shift in things. I wanna say it started around 2014 and came to a head in mid to late 2018. The major battlegrounds were things like the all female reboot of Ghostbusters, Gamergate, “New” Atheism, the new Disney Star Wars films (especially the Last Jedi and Solo), Marvel Comics, and several other areas. Hardcore and longtime fans of these hobbies were suddenly being accused of gatekeeping and excluding people, especially women. 

My experience had been that for the most part, girls/women didn’t want to be seen doing these things, but when there was one, she was accepted with open arms. I will also admit that these sorts of boys are probably not the greatest at reading social cues or knowing how relationships are supposed to work. So there were probably girls who may have liked said hobbies, but were too afraid of committing social suicide by being associated with them or who were turned off by the boys’ lack of social grace and/or hygiene, possibly.

I will also admit that a lot of these hobbies have some gatekeeping elements built in to them naturally. They aren’t the kind of thing (like, for example, sports) where there are a lot of casual fans - you’re either all in or your not part of it at all. And there is a higher/steeper learning curve (like needing to understand/memorize a lot of background information in order to keep up with spirited debates) that might be purposely designed to keep “normies” out. In this arena, words and ideas are what's important and athleticism is not at all, so one needs to be prepared to defend one's opinions about fictional universes. There is probably also a measure of distrust towards more “normal passing” newcomers because of all the wedgies and swirlies suffered in the past - there are plenty of examples of opening the group up to new members and having it attract more bullying in the long run. That type of exclusion/derision is fertile grounds for an “Us vs Them” type mentality between cliques. The other threat to the fan community is the swarm of "Nu-Fans" who invade a space and demand that it be changed to accommodate the interests of these people who didn't know it existed until last week. Rather than admitting that perhaps Star Wars is just not their thing but Marvel is, they petition to make Star Wars more like Marvel with lightsabers. I personally have not been much into Star Trek, but I don't go onto their part of the playground and demand that Gene Roddenberry (or whatever corporation owns the IP presently) make it more to my liking. 

This type of "gatekeeping" is actually good to help keep what made something good/popular in the first place more "pure," for lack of a better term, and more inline with the original premises and ideas. In other words, gatekeeping for reasons like race/gender/etc. is not a good thing, while gatekeeping for merit reasons or to ensure the product/IP remains intact should be commended. However, bad actors/media will accuse fandoms of the first kind of gatekeeping when they're really engaged in the second kind. A slightly different example is that we all benefit from the American Medical Association gatekeeping who can and can't perform surgery. (see: In Defense of Gatekeeping)

I also truly believe there are people who (previously) secretly loved something geeky but couldn’t let on in public that now are free to enjoy it without social stigma, and that’s a good thing. But there are also bad actors and opportunists who get accepted along with the new and casual fans, and eventually they cause the havoc. 


So after a honeymoon period of great growth of geek culture, the pendulum has swung the other way. Most of the backlash stems from “nerds” having their spaces being invaded. “Nerd” and “geek” are no longer the insults they once were, but words like, “toxic,” “incel,” and, “masculinity,” have replaced them. Essentially, what it comes down to is that these types of “geek” hobbies are being socially “gentrified” to an extent. Someone on a reddit post put it fairly perfectly and succinctly: 


So to see gamers, especially “nerd” gamers, accused of doing the opposite [excluding people], is very upsetting. It’s not just a false accusation, it’s a movement to try to exclude and eject those very gamers who were so welcoming in the first place.
It's called social gentrification, and it's something I've seen discussed many times in this sub. The pattern basically goes like this:
1. A nerdy hobby (video games, comic books, etc) suddenly becomes cool and mainstream.
2. An influx of new, non-nerdy fans enter the hobby.
3. Creators are encouraged cater to the broadest audience possible, which often involves dumbing it down, removing sexy women, and putting in token gay and minority characters.
4. The old fans don't like the changes being made to their hobby and start to complain.
5. Progressive bloggers and writers attack the old fans for not being "inclusive" and write articles smearing them. The old fans start being seen as undesirables (again) by the public.

6. The old fans are driven into the shadows, some abandon the hobby in disgust.
7. Eventually the hobby's mainstream appeal peaks, and begins a slow decline. The casual fans lose interest and find something new and trendy to follow.
8. The hobby becomes nerdy and uncool again, leaving only the hardcore fans.
On second thought, Step 8 may be wishful thinking.

I think that in all businesses/industries, there are growing pains. Once geek culture caught on, several corporations saw it as a new money-making opportunity where it wouldn’t have been such in the past. The proper way to please the long time fans and the newer, more casual fans simultaneously is always a tough tightrope to walk. There’s something in the business world called the  Pareto Distribution (closely related to the Matthew Effect), and in this context, it turns out that something like 20% of the fans were responsible for 80% of the revenue that companies like Lucasfilm earned. And instead of appealing to the hardcore fans, they pandered to the other 80% while trying to recruit increasingly greater numbers of less passionate fans by means of "wokeness" and diversity instead of coherent story and character growth. 

To those of us who are old enough to have experienced both sides of this story, it feels disingenuous when normies loudly proclaim how great this culture is when it is what used to be made fun of, like they’re only doing it because it happens to be popular at the time. In sportsball (a term that geeks use to throw a little shade back at the bullies), they call that being Fairweather Fans.   

I understand why corporations would sell out - the promise of money. Someone has convinced them about this phantom potential audience out there that’s just waiting, even chomping at the bit, to take part in the great cultural experience that is geekdom, and will only do so once they see themselves represented on screen, or page, or whatever, and that it becomes sufficiently woke/diverse. The best example is replacing Tony Stark with a 10-year-old African-American girl in the comics (and later in the MCU). I imagine that someone convinced the editor-in-chief that there were hordes of young, black girls who would just love to buy and read Marvel Comics, but the fact that Iron Man was a straight white dude turned them off [in my head, it probably went like a Screen Rant Pitch Meeting]. If Tony were to be gender and racially swapped, not only would the old fans continue to read the book, but all these new fans would flock to the All-New, All-Different Iron Heart! (spoiler alert: neither thing happened)

At some point the corporations decided they can bleed the fans dry with fake paid fansites/reviews, and to longtime fans, it looks more like a soulless cash grab from the new owners of the IP, especially when the original creator(s) have sold their IP to a new company. Lucasfilm and Blizzard are perfect examples of this. 

Nerds care about things like consistency in canon, the story and character development, continuity, the rules of the universe, and lore, and feel like they’re just being exploited for money and fame. “Normies” don’t usually care about those things terribly much, and just want the street cred and the t-shirt without doing the legwork of reading/watching the source material. When companies pander to the normies they tend to alienate the original (and more hardcore) fans. 

In summation, I really hate to see my neighborhood of pop culture being so ruined and exploited. Different sections of the hardcore fans are fighting back and they're catching hell for it. But I think it's a fight worth having. 



A few good articles:

A great article on Social Gentrification


Another great article on the evolution of Subcultures (very relevant)

The Evolution of "Geek Culture" (part 1)

This post is one that’s going to make me feel old, but I think it bears putting into words.

My kids are growing up in a much more accepting and kinder world with regards to the types of hobbies we enjoy. It was very different when I was their age, and at the risk of sounding like a, “walked to school barefoot in the snow uphill both ways,” type of post, I’m going to talk about it.

When I was young, there were very few acceptable outlets for “geek” or “nerd” culture. The

most mainstream of them were Star Wars, and to some extent, Star Trek, but seeing outward professions of fandom by others was a pretty seldom sight. Public proclamations of fandom (like wearing a shirt) was tantamount to wearing a “Kick Me” sign. Admitting you were a Nintendo or Marvel fan more or less made you out to be Urkel, the prototypical nerd. Personally, I was never given a swirly or shoved in a locker. But there was definitely ridicule when someone overheard me talking Zelda with a friend, saw my Marvel card collection that I brought to swap with other collectors, or saw me doodling Wolverine in class. Though I think it was known that I was into such things, I knew better than to bring it up unless I already knew the other party was a fan. Like, I kept a mental list that I could talk Star Wars with these 3 friends, Comic books with certain other friends, video games with a select few, etc. And when talking about those things at school, we kept the conversation kinda quiet so as to not draw attention our way.

The Sci-Fi, Superhero, and Fantasy genres seemed to be the domain of the nerd and

making those kinds of movies is really expensive because of the additional costuming, set, and special effects costs being so much higher than, say, a comedy like Fletch or Animal House. So when one did get made, it was usually terrible and only enjoyed by the most hardcore of fans.




Meanwhile, Sit-Com, Drama, and Sports television programs were on nearly all the time. But things that represented my interests and hobbies were only shown on Saturday mornings. I grew used to just accepting that most other shows would be about Hospitals, Cops, and Relationships that sometimes had pop culture references (video games didn’t make the cut as popular to be referenced in “pop” culture). Though what I liked wasn’t as mainstream, I used to love when even the smallest semblance of geek culture was seen on more traditional media. Like, I just about wet myself with glee while watching Family matters when Harriet mentioned Nintendo. Once.


Sometimes I would catch wind of something, like the 90’s Flash TV series, or Birds of Prey on the WB. Even if it wasn’t terribly great, I would still watch and support it hoping that it would get better because I was starved for things I really wanted. But these types of things were 1) usually cancelled after the first season, 2) were almost always relegated to really inconvenient time slots (and it seemed to change time slots weekly so it was hard to catch consistently), and 3) were often bumped for other programs that took precedence, like the Miss America Pageant. Back then, I really tried to embrace the philosophy that Kevin Smith (still) espouses - support everything that is even vaguely comic-book/sci-fi related so they will continue to make more of it.

There were, of course, comic books, computers/electronics, novels, Dungeon and Dragons, but very few movies outside of the Star Wars/Star Trek ones. The only (decent) ones I can think of are examples are the first Batman and Superman movies, Dune, Tron, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Occasionally there was a TV show, like Wonder Woman, Hulk, or Flash, and there were animated series. And there were places like Radio Shack, an arcade, or a comic book store that served as some of the few refuges for geeks but even these places were seen (to some extent) as seedy and frequented by less-than-desireables.

Video games caught a foothold and then almost lost it in the Video Game Crash of 1983, but thankfully were saved by Nintendo (for the most part). Slowly it gained in popularity, but was still seen as more of a nerd/geek/unpopular thing, and usually not something that girls did. However, there was always a prominent video game case/display in major stores like K-Mart, Wal-Mart, etc. that gave the hobby some visibility.


But something happened. I’m not sure exactly what it was, but sometime around 2003 to 2005, it became socially acceptable for some reason. Perhaps the kids who grew up with Nintendo were now of an age to spend large amounts of cash on consoles/accessories and it was enough that the business world finally took notice. Maybe it was Bryan Singer’s X-Men and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films that made it ok to like these things, or Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films winning all the Oscars. Perhaps it was the Star Wars prequels wrapping up that allowed the older generation of Star Wars fans to “transmit” the love of the films to their kids. It might even have something to do with online forums letting us all know that there were more fans than we initially thought because it was safer online than in public. I’m almost certain that Buffy the Vampire Slayer had something to do with it.

I don’t know.  

Edit: After reading some comments on Reddit, I have decided that Lord of the Rings probably accounted for like 45% of the shift, and the other things just mentioned are spread across the other 55%. 

The two comments in particular are this: 

from /u/TechniChara:

I've said this before - on paper, [the LotR Trilogy] should have failed spectacularly.

• Low budgets (less than $100MM per film) with huge special effects expectations and cinematic translation of a sprawling world
• Directed and written by an unknown indie director, his wife and friend
• Directed in a country with little more than an indie film industry
• Adapting a work that was deemed unfilmable even by modern standards
• Using an unknown special effects workshop
• Featuring a 100% CGI character as a main character meant to blend in with live action and interact with other characters - history before LotR showed this was very risky and likely to fail.
• All three films filmed at once - this is the biggest shocker. This had never been done before, closest was two films at once and one film would always end up worse off at best. Three films is logistically insane.
• Some of the main actors were relatively unknown, so there was little star power to draw people in
• At the time, geek was not cool. High fantasy with weird names and deep lore would put a neon sign on your person screaming "kick me!" The genre itself was known for some mild successes and plenty failures. At best they might expect to break even.

It should have gone wrong. But someone really fucking liked Tolkien and rained a hurricane of good luck upon that production because everything good that could have happened to make it even better than originally envisioned, did, and it forever transformed our culture to embrace and love geek.

And this comment from /u/Deggit:

There's a lot of missing context here for people who grew up with film series like Harry Potter, Hunger Games, or the MCU. The idea of making a trilogy of nearly 3-hours-each fantasy films, and financing and shooting the entire trilogy before the first film was even theatrically released, was considered absolutely looney tunes in 1998.

Fuck, it's audacious now.

But in the late 90s it was especially bad for genre films. The epic flop Cutthroat Island was one example of what scared Hollywood away from fantasy adventure for a while. The 90s were a heyday for straightforward action films and in the latter half of the decade, for slick adult scifi. But fantasy and comic books were considered dork material. The only high grossing comic book movies were about Batman or Superman. Also, if you were an industry exec in the late 90s, your idea of chaching was sequels, not film series per se. You would make a movie and if it was successful the sequel gets greenlit. The idea of purchasing an entire IP just to make a structured cinematic universe out of it was... out of this world in 1998.

There were eight trilogies that really changed the landscape of Hollywood between 1998 and 2008. They completely altered the possibility-space of what a successful, genre movie could look like.

1. First, the original X-Men trilogy... though it's probably not considered a notable series of films anymore, at the time it blew the doors off superhero filmmaking. Instead of the "god IPs" of Superman & Batman, the X-Men films made bank with "less bankable" characters (there were earlier films that tried this, like Spawn, that were just a bit too soon before their time). There woulda never been Iron Man (and certainly not Deadpool), without X2 back in 2003.

2. Then LOTR happened and showed you could get huge mainstream box office and even sweep the Oscars with a fantasy movie, leading to a glut of me-too movies for the next decade (most notably, the Chronicles of Narnia movies). The first movie is very much a "Part One" and proved that a film that was necessarily, unashamedly incomplete could still be a success. There would be no "cinematic universes" without LOTR and Harry Potter, which I'll talk about for #8.

3. At the same time you had the Star Wars Prequels and...

4. ....the Matrix trilogy, both of which were highly commercially successful despite fanwars, and both trilogies pointed the way to a new "hybrid" Hollywood that combined live action and completely virtualized environments, which is what most top grossing movies are doing today (the New York City in Avengers 2012 doesn't look as wild as Avatar's Pandora, but they are both 100% fake). Together with LOTR all three film trilogies also combined CGI with miniatures, mattes and other "conservative" special effects techniques.

5. Together with this was the Raimi Spider-Man trilogy and...

6. the Nolan Batman films. The importance of these two is they heralded the dawn of "manchild cinema." In a revenge of the nerds, the pariahs of pop culture took it over; the kid who used to get shoved into lockers for playing with toy armies was now helming $150m movies, and those movies then became the top rated and most discussed movies of that year. It was an era of complete euphoria and vindication for the former dorks. (Peter Jackson was partially identified with this generation of directors as well). Premises that would have been considered abysmally dumb and puerile became real movies because you had a "dork whisperer" like Zack Snyder, Joss Whedon, or Sam Raimi in the director's chair making movies for his fellow dorks. Manchild cinema was arguably a 10-15 year generational fad that swept not just movies but TV (Big Bang Theory ran alongside its heyday) and our wider pop culture (celebrities playing Dungeons & Dragons was pretty unimaginable in 1995). Manchild cinema came to an end around 2017 or so, with the Star Wars Sequels and Justice League both being unfortunate casualties of the pop culture shift. Ironically the main reason for its demise was possibly that younger audiences are so used to any premise being a possible movie - the idea of, say, Kick Ass being an actual Hollywood movie doesn't amaze them - that they began to be a bit more cynical about these films than their "inject it into my veins, because I never had this as a kid" elders.

7. The seventh trilogy that was crucial in Hollywood's transformation, and honestly it's weird that I put it at #7 because it deserves a higher spot, was Pirates Of The Caribbean which presaged the entire Disney MCU. Pirates nailed down the tightrope-walking formula of all modern blockbuster films, where everything is postmodern and meta and the characters continually puncture the drama of their own situation, yet the movie is also full of genuinely indulgent genre thrills. There's no Tony Stark without Jack Sparrow. This film-making strategy is in the final analysis a cynically psychological management of the audience; you give them the stupid thrills they want, but also give them an 'out' from having to admit they're invested in a movie about men in spandex or women with magic swords. In other words: THEY FLY NOW? THEY FLY NOW (also, EARTH IS CLOSED TODAY, SQUIDWARD). Interestingly the age of Jack Sparrow movies may be coming to an end for two reasons. First the idea of "Marvel humor" has filtered into pop culture so much that people see that shit coming a mile away (and few screenwriters did it as well as the original Pirates screenplay). Secondly there's a trend in movies, filtering in from television, for a "New Sincerity". Mad Max: Fury Road was one example of a post-2010 film that made no apologies for its hideously genrebound setting and plot. And every movie the Rock makes, especially the Jumanji films, pretty much wears its heart on its sleeve with no false ironies.

8. Finally there was Harry Potter which was maybe the most important film series of all of them, even more important than LOTR, because it kind of revolutionized the relationship between studios and actors. The idea of hiring actors for an entire series turned films into quasi-TV and created a believable continuity that went beyond the casting-carousel James Bonds and Batmans of the past. Also, while many of the costs of producing a film remained fixed on a per-film basis, the franchise grew increasingly profitable, ending with two films that were absolute fucking cash cows and created a merchandising empire.

All I know is that now it’s remarkable when I go in public and don’t see someone wearing a Marvel t-shirt or see hordes of Captain Americas and Iron Mans (Iron Men?) while Trick-or-Treating. And it’s not like it’s that this kind of thing is finally just tolerated. It’s flat out thriving and even driving current pop culture. The MCU in 10 short years became the highest grossing movie franchise with 23 movies that are the cultural event that Star Wars was in 1977, only even more so. When I visit subreddits like /r/NBA and /r/CFB, which should be the stomping grounds of jocks and sports fans, there are Thanos jokes and WandaVision references peppered throughout the LeBron and College Football Playoff discussions. That still blows my mind.

When once there were a few small conventions for very specific things (Star Trek or San Diego ComiCon) that were often a punchline to jokes told on sit-coms, these are now huge industries, with conventions popping up all over the place. Cosplaying has been normalized and is even popular enough that some people make a living doing it. The Big Bang Theory was a whole show about physicists (and one engineer) that lasted 12 seasons but would have never made it past the initial pitch when I was young. Instead of the "nerd" being the outcast like Urkel was, they're the main stars. The video game industry rivals the film industry every year for most money grossed, and e-Sports and Twitch live streaming is a thing. Sports stars in the NFL solving Rubik's Cubes and talking about Black Panther isn't out of the ordinary. Dr. Who is no longer an obscure British show known by only a few Americans.

Basically, what I’m trying to convey is that if I could get into a time machine and go tell my 9-year-old self that the biggest movie ever was about Captain America and Iron Man (and like 50 friends in full costume) taking down Thanos, that there would be an actor who portrayed Wolverine perfectly, and that dressing up as characters or playing video games made you “cool,” he would call me a liar.







However, there is a Part 2 to this story . . .