Card Collecting Part 2

Card Collecting Part 1

Once I had acquired a taste for card collecting, I wanted to keep going. During my frequent visits to the card shop, the owner would introduce me to new sets. The next one I had my eye on was the Flair Marvel set. Flair was an imprint of Fleer, and were their highest quality products. These cards were made/colored in Photoshop or some other computer program, used cardboard that was easily at least twice as thick, and had a very nice slick UV coating on them. Instead of coming in foil wrapped packs, these came in small cardboard boxes.

Like the previous set, there were 150 cards, but only 18 special foil cards. As I recall, I was able to get all of the cards without too much issue and only had to trade with a friend-of-a-friend once for a particular special card.

However, unlike the previous set, this one was not X-Men only. The set was a celebration of the biggest and most memorable events in the Marvel comics universe up to that point. Examples include character/team debuts, character deaths (like Gwen Stacy), crossovers, major stories (like the Phoenix Saga), and many other snippets of the 30 year history of these characters. These cards expanded my knowledge of the Marvel Universe quite a bit, and allowed me to feel at ease about buying a comic book in that I would probably know who a majority of the referenced characters were now. 

Around this time my mom became concerned about how much money I was spending on these silly little cards. I reassured her that I was being responsible - in fact, it was precisely because of these cards and how I hated being broke 28 days out of the month that I forced myself to learn how to budget. Anyway, my weak defense was that they were worth something and that I could sell complete sets to recoup the money for things like college or going to Japan. The concept of comics as investments had been in the news recently so I defaulted to that. She asked to whom and how would I go about doing such a thing. I didn't have an answer, but found one years later - eBay (though I had obviously overestimated their projected value and demand). 

The third set I collected was the 1994 Marvel Universe set. It had 200 cards in the set, with a variety of solo cards and 9-card page sets telling a complete story arc in one picture. This set had some holographic cards, and I happened to get one on my very first pack. There were only 4 of them, and I had spectacularly good luck getting those particular ones. Besides these there were the usual Powerblast cards, but these came in 3 varieties and were a pain to collect. Packs from Wal-Mart came in a gold variety, packs from a hobby shop (like the Card Shop) came in silver, and anyplace else had "rainbow" versions. The collector in me decided that I needed all 3 so I eventually did it. They also had something called "Suspended Animation," which were on transparent plastic and were double sided (it was supposed to emulate a celluloid animation frame). 

Another one I got was the Marvel Masterpiece set. These were a set of 150 cards that had the most popular and relevant characters that were in the stories in the comics from the recent years. Each card had more character history and facts on it, but what was unique was that the entire set was painted by the same duo – the Hildebrandt Brothers – so there weren’t various styles from card to card like previous sets.

There were 10 special holofoil cards, but they each came in three flavors (like the last set) - gold, silver, and bronze. Because I was chasing a complete set of 30 of these holofoils, I ended up buying enough cards to do almost 3 full normal card sets. I gifted one to my brother Matt, hoping he would use it to get more into the comics side of things (it didn’t work so well). There were also 9 other Powerblast cards that I almost collected 2 full sets of during my pursuit of the 30 holofoils.


With four full sets of Marvel/X-Men cards, I had spent quite a bit of time and money on them. They became like my pride and joy, and I pored over them for hours reading the information and admiring the artwork. I learned quite a bit about the characters, but learned that I quite like collecting things. I made sure to have them in the best kinds of binders using the best kinds of pages and other ways of preserving them so nothing became ruined. 

Card Collecting Part 3

Card Collecting Part 1

The thing that got me into buying, reading, and collecting comics is cards. And what got me into cards was my brother Chad.

I had always been interested in superheroes and stuff, but I tend to be an “all-or-nothing” kind of guy. When I decide to pursue a hobby, I’m all in. Which can be good and bad. Good because I invest deeply into it and become well versed and knowledgeable, but bad because I look at the time/money/opportunity cost it would take to be fully committed to something new, and often decide that it’s not worth the effort. Unfortunately, it’s like I’m gate-keeping myself out of something I could possibly enjoy because I don’t want to do it casually.

In the case of comic books, I often saw them at convenient store or department stores. But the thing that made me shy away from them (besides the actual price) is the number 162 or 459, and by those I mean the issue numbers. See, I had this idea that a comic book was one long, continuous story (I mean, it IS) and that beginning in chapter Two-Hundred-Something meant that I had missed tons of relevant plot points and character interactions in those past issues so I would be lost.

What I didn’t know about comics was that there are often just 3- or 4-issue story arcs, and that it’s easier to “jump in” to a comic book at beginning of one of those. I also didn’t know that a lot of good writers often summed up important past continuity points for newer readers. Had I known that, I probably would have started sooner. 

The other main thing that kept me away was knowing that there would be more characters that I was unfamiliar with. For example, from the various animated series I could probably have named 4 or 5 of Superman's villains. But someone like Brainiac or a place like the bottle-city of Kandor were unknown to me, and I would be lost when those kinds of things came up in conversations/stories. 

Watching an animated series is a good way of getting to know major characters, and especially when they’re made for an audience who is unacquainted with most of the world those characters inhabit. In the case of the X-Men, I had just an inkling of who they were from some past animated series (I think I had caught Pryde of the X-Men or seen them on a Spider-Man and Friends episode or something) and seeing a friend draw Wolverine in class. But I was excited to see it on Fox Saturday morning cartoons. 

You can hear this picture. 

So I started watching the X-Men animated series somewhat religiously and immediately fell in love with the concept of mutants and the themes they presented. But I wasn’t quite to the level of wanting to buy the comics, because I knew that there were more characters and past stories I was unfamiliar with. 

What got my foot in the door, as it were, was the 1994 Fleer Ultra X-Men card set. Somehow Chad had ended up with a few of them and I saw them. These things were gorgeous; instead of the usual pen/ink comic book drawings, these were painted by many talented artists. I read the bios and character histories on the backs of the few cards he had and decided that completing this set was a worthwhile endeavor. 

I started helping Chad collect the set, and discovered that a few of my friends also were collecting these so I had some people to trade with. Slowly we filled up pages with cards, and because I had access to more money due to my paper route, I could fill in the gaps more quickly than Chad. Besides buying new packs at department stores, we made frequent visits to the local sports card shop. They had all kinds of things there, but one valuable resource was that we could buy singles for a quarter or less to acquire cards that we hadn’t been able to get because of bad luck in picking packs. I started to also familiarize myself with the necessary accessories such as plastic protectors, sleeves, boxes, and pages that held 9 cards in a 3-ring binder. My other brother Matt helped educate me on some of the finer aspects of these things, having collected many, many sports cards (mainly basketball) in previous years. 

Along the way we got a few of the special cards and eventually got the whole set. Once we had them all and I had devoured the information on the backs, I felt somewhat educated in the world and history of the X-Men. But I had also discovered that I liked collecting sets like these. Once we had a full set, the journey was complete, and I sorta felt disappointed that it was over so soon (and by soon, it had been like 7 weeks). 

 I decided to start again. I wanted my own set in pristine condition and with matching, new card pages in a nice binder. I took some of the doubles that I had collected and placed them accordingly, and then bought a bunch of new packs to get me started. The binder I chose had a clear pocket so I could slip a picture of whatever I wanted into it. I made a drawing of one of the special sets of nine cards that all made one big picture when put together and colored it. 

 But in addition to the main 150 card set, I decided that it would be fun to get all of the special cards as well. That was going to be more of an ambitious endeavor, as there were several sets of special cards which were immediately identifiable by their foil backgrounds. Most packs of 10 cards had a fairly good chance of having one special card in them. There were 40 in total, but only 34 of them were reasonable (though still difficult) to collect. Each special set had something like a one-in-five or one-in-seven chance of having a card in a pack, but getting the right cards together involved a lot more trading and buying from the card shop. Overall, I would say I had fairly good luck at getting the cards I wanted and only had to trade for a few of the ones I couldn’t find in packs or at the shop, but when I traded cards I tended to sweeten the pot for the other party so they wouldn’t regret making the trade with me. Finally at long last I had all the cards except for one – and it was one that could only be found in Wal-Mart packs (they had an exclusive deal with Fleer at the time). It wouldn’t be until around 2007 that I would finally track down that missing card with the help of eBay. 

There were 6 others that were foil versions of some of the regular cards, but they were only in 1:11 packs from Wal-Mart, and I could never find any. These days a full set of 6 goes for somewhere between $400 and $600 on online auctions. 

After completing the collection, I found that I basically had enough doubles to have another full set of regular cards (with only a few missing). I bought the necessary pages and binder for them and gifted them to my son Avery years later. 

Once I had this set and a few others under my belt, I felt well versed enough in the X-Men (and Marvel) comic histories that I started buying comics, but that’s a story for another post.


Card Collecting Part 2

Card Collecting Part 3

I finally played Skyward Sword again . . .

This is a follow up to a previous post about having played Skyward Sword only once, even though I’ve played through every other Zelda game at least 3 times, and even some of the spin-offs multiple times.

My wife has slowly been making her way through the Zelda series, and has now completed everything except Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild. Since I consider BotW to be a far superior game, I want her to play that one last. So we’re playing Skyward Sword together, and I’m using it as motivation to finally play it a second time, and after almost 8 years, I have a new and slightly different perspective on the game.


The Positive:

The tutorial went faster than I remember it going, but probably mostly because I didn’t wander into certain rooms/situations (like sword training or trying to find trinkets in the dorm rooms, or waste time talking to people) until absolutely necessary and I knew I could skip a lot of exploration because I already knew that it yields no items/treasures/side quests/etc. until much later in the game. 

The story is actually pretty decent, even if they dropped the ball on a few items of lore/continuity with other games. Link constantly running after his friend and getting involved with something bigger than himself and then finding out that he's the chosen hero is a common Zelda plot, but this added some good dramatic tension. Groose, in particular, has some good character development. 

The dungeon designs/atmospheres were also among some of the better in the series, and bosses like Koloktos, Ghirahim, and Demise were very satisfying fights. While I like the idea of Ghirahim being the "anti-Fi" and Demise's sword being the antithesis to the Master Sword, I feel like their impact as such is lessened because we never see Demise's sword again in "future" games. And because this new lore was ignored in the next game released (ALBW), the upside-down Triforce on the sword now makes it look like it belonged to Lorule. But this idea of twin opposing weapons was used in both Ninja Gaiden II  (the Dragon Sword and the Dark Sword of Chaos) and Harry Potter (Harry and Voldemort's wands) and I like the idea - I just wish it got developed further.

Some of my previous criticisms in my prior post weren’t quite as bad as I remember them. For example, there were a couple more musical cues from past games than I thought, and Fi doesn’t solve the puzzles for you quite as much as I remembered, even if she is like an overbearing Jewish mother telling you where to go and what to do before you even have time to make a decision (Navi on steroids, in other words). The final Skyloft dungeon with its interchangeable rooms was very innovative, and was kinda like a Zelda version of a review before a test.


The Negative:


A lot of what Fi says/does is sort of intended for players who are either brand new to the Zelda series, or just new to games in general. The whole game seems to be using the "training wheels protocol," and assumes nobody has ever played a game (ever) which is good for beginners but horrible for experienced players. For example, when a sign tells you that you absolutely should not do something (like throw stones into a circle of rocks), gamers know to try it out. Or when dialogue hints that you should follow someone to a secret entrance, Zelda players know to follow that person. But when Fi pops out to explain that you definitely should try to throw the stone in, follow the person, or that there's an 90% chance that the dungeon boss is behind the big door, I just want to reach into the TV and yell, “No shit, Sherlock!” and it shouldn’t take 4 pages of unskippable dialogue to tell you as much.

I know there are video game tropes that are sometimes lost on new players and that the Zelda series has its own tropes (like how switches, torches, and block-pushing work). So there should be an option to mark that “I’ve played a video game before” and a “I’ve played Zelda before” that disables these unnecessary hints. In other words, there should be three levels of hand-holding and many hints/suggestions would be disabled for experienced games.

It takes soooooo long to get through text boxes. Every time you accidentally fall off of Skyloft, or try to buy something takes a while to get through. If you want something done multiple times, there isn’t a quick “duplicate this purchase/task” button. You have to read the entire text again (to be fair, this is a common thing I’ve complained about on games like Minish Cap or Wind Waker). Besides the useless text, there’s a lot of time wasted in showing you things like how the map works in excruciatingly slow detail every time a new section gets opened up. Like, I get it, OK? I don't need to be reminded what each bug is every time I get one. 

I’m still bothered by the Lore that’s ignored/changed, the fact that there was another Link before this one (Hylia’s Chosen Hero - actually, I think I might have been misinterpreting this and the earlier hero was this same Link), and suddenly there’s a 4th goddess we’ve never heard about even though it’s supposed to be the first story chronologically. Somehow an ancient society in the Lanayru Desert had such good tech and electricity but is now lost (this continues in BotW - 10,000 years ago the Shiekah figured out how to make walking robots and lasers then somehow everyone kinda forgot how to make them). Link is given the outfit/hat with no thought of how “future” games address the issue - if they had given him just the tunic (but not the hat) and let Minish Cap tell the origin of the hat it would have been much better (a line in OoT about the Kokiri dressing like an ancient hero would have been nice as well). “Worldbuilding” isn’t something that’s taken into account much, as it seems that besides Aonuma, Miyamoto, and a handful of other top people, each Zelda game is made by a different team of programmers/designers. And it seems like this is the game where the Master Sword went from being the blade of evil's bane to being the sword that seals the darkness, and turns it into the ghost-containment unit from Ghostbusters. 

The Backtracking. Since the Gorko the Goron is able to show up in multiple places, it would be nice if all 3 areas got interconnected somehow eventually (or if there were a 4th and 5th region instead of re-using the same 3 areas). That would make it a little more “metroidvania-ish” and all the backtracking would be a little more justified (it seems like they were kinda going for this a little). The only problem is that the areas weren’t connected and the only real thing physically stopping Link from getting to some ledges/places was the hookshot. In other metroidvania style games, there are several obstacles that can be overcome, like wall hugging or double jumping. While I appreciate that the creators tried to make effective/efficient use of the same terrain while making each area like its own dungeon-like puzzle, it just gets tiring having to retread the same ground with an additional challenge (Stealth, escort mission, itemless, etc.). Fast travel between bird statues would have fixed a lot of tedium and lessened the impact of the backtracking. I will say, however, that playing it less frequently (because Anne only plays a couple times a week) makes some of the backtracking seem less tedious. 

To top it all off, the boss rush mode is required if you want the last piece of heart and the best shield. I don't mind when games do it, I'm just not a fan of a boss rush mode in general. Most games just have the boss rush mode as a bragging rights thing, and skipping out on it doesn't impact the game. But this game forces you to do it if you want that stuff (which I do). So what it means is that instead of fighting Ghirahim and the Imprisoned 3 times each, it usually ends up closer to 6 times each (depending on the random bosses picked by the game). After feeling like it gets old having to re-tread the same 3 areas, having to do so with the bosses just makes it that much worse. I think if the three Imprisoned battles changed - like each time it became more human looking - it would have lessened the feeling of tedium and given a hint as to what it was. 

It seems weird that new races show up (kikwis, mogmas, parella [water people]) that don’t seem to be direct progenitors of other races, the way that Koroks are supposed to be evolved Kokiri and Rito are evolved Zora. This kinda goes back to the whole worldbuilding concept and working backwards from where they already had established lore. As a good example, George Lucas had the art designers “wedgie” out the capital ships on Star Wars Episode 2, and had other designs in Episode 3 that can be easily identified as the forerunners to Star Destroyers, X-Wings, and Tie Fighters.

For as few mini-games as there are in Skyward Sword, they aren’t as good/deep as other games. For example, not a lot of feedback is given during the duet with Kina. As simple as playing the harp is made to be, doing the song is really difficult. A meter like what Guitar Hero gives you would have been nice. And the skydiving one on Fun Fun Island seems to be based a lot more on luck than skill (it turns out to be a controller issue - the HD version is much more consistent because a Joy-Con works better with the gyro controls than the Wii Motion Plus did with pointer controls).

The following criticisms are still valid, but I don’t have much more to add to what I already posted: Skyfield is still empty, some of the bosses are kinda dumb-looking, and the enemy selection is rather small.

And for the amount people complain about the linearity of this game, the one part of non-linearity they put in actually had a game-breaking bug in it that required downloading a separate update channel for the Wii if it happened.

If I could remake the game . . .

I would give a left/right hand version choice for the sword (without mirroring the whole game) and a better UI experience (not so many stops/pauses to show bug inventory going up, faster shop dialogue, fewer pointless menu questions, etc.), and fast-travel between bird statues. These things should definitely be a part of any remake Nintendo does, and mainly falls in the category of “quality of life” upgrades. Just fixing these things (which would be easy and wouldn't involve having to re-program the whole game) would make it 10 times better. 

The Master Sword should have been forged from scratch, not already existing as the Goddess Sword which evolved. The “finding the 3 special metals” concept has already been done to make the Phantom Sword, so have 3 different swordsmiths each make a different part of the sword (handle, blade, and jewel or something) and have Link collect the 3 flames (that part doesn’t need to change) that are required to make the white fire to purify/fuse the metal and infuse the power of the Three Golden Goddesses in the smithy’s forge (which can be acquired in any order). And then have Fi enter the sword as the final step but sell it as a self-sacrifice before the final battle to give the sword its full potential/shine/beam. If Fi wasn’t so annoying it would be a bittersweet moment. This would all be much better than having the pre-made sword just magically change shape/color/size.

Discovering Hyrule for the first time should have been really cool. Seeing a few landmarks (Lake Hylia or spectacle rock), heck even MAKING a few landmarks (the forest draining could have been the start of Lake Hylia or Spectacle Rock could have been the last 2 remaining boulders from a large scale assault that Link was helping the Gorons defend, or something.

Make the timeshift stones a bigger part of the game, not just a specific dungeon/area. It was a really cool idea and was wasted on such a small portion of the game.

Conclusion

After playing through BotW, I now kinda see what they were going for but just didn’t do terribly well. My physics professor told me of a music experiment some people did where they took a whole bunch of popular songs and were able to figure out the common things, like a particular beat pattern, chord progressions, and such. After figuring out what people like, they constructed a song that had all the things in common. In theory, it should have been the greatest song ever. But it was pretty boring, actually. Meanwhile, a song put together of all the elements that weren’t so popular turned out to be somewhat more interesting. It kinda illustrates the point that, in theory, Skyward Sword had all the Zelda elements there and by all accounts should have been the best Zelda game, while BotW was an open world game that was just kinda Zelda-ish and broke a lot of Zelda conventions, but was way better overall. I will say that a couple of areas where Skyward Sword shined were the weaker parts of BotW, namely dungeons and story.

Overall, I would say that the flaws overshadow the good parts. I was probably more disappointed that the game isn’t what it could have been, and disappointment is the gap between expectations and reality. I also get the feeling that there were high aspirations for this game but that they had to cut a lot of content, which is odd, given the long development time (5 years) between Twilight Princess and this one (from what I understand there are different teams that work on handheld and console games). I just wonder what else could have been.

But having said all that, a low-end Zelda is still about a mid-range game when compared to other games overall. If Skyward Sword were a standalone game (not connected to the Zelda franchise) I probably would have been a little more accepting of it. But I hold Zeldas to a higher standard. The biggest reason for disliking it as much as I do is just the wide gulf between what I was hoping for/expected and what the final product was.

Update: Since the HD remake, I will add that it fixes almost all of the easily fixable problems, like UI/UX, skippable scenes, motion controls, disabling hints, and a few other things. Changing any of the story elements or lore would require a new game made from the ground up, so I understand why nothing of that nature was changed, but I very much enjoyed my third playthrough of it using a combination of motion controls and button controls. 



List of specific callbacks for the 25th Anniversary

In my previous post I mentioned that they tried including elements from past games, but I only listed the bad ones.


AoL: Goddess looks like Trophy (this one might be less intentional)

OoT: Headmaster Gaepora, the 6 symbols around the Sealed Grounds dome

MM: hand in toilet, swimming

OoA: Losing all items and having to refind them

WW: Whip/Grappling thingy, Groose catapulting Link was like what the Pirates did

FSA: Zelda breaking out of her crystal was similar to the captured maidens

MC: Mole Mitts, Gust Jar

TP: A “twilight” world where you collect tears, flamboyant colorful cannon man,
       double clawshots, final boss distracted by bug net, Gate of Time resembled the
       Twilight Mirror

PH: Revisiting the same areas/dungeons. Guardians chasing you around.
       Treasure hunting. Drawing on goddess wall. Tears collected look like
       gems P/W/C gems.

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 via social media. 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 movies such as the all female reboot of Ghostbusters, Gamergate, “New” Atheism, the new Disney Star Wars films (especially the Last Jedi and Solo), Marvel Comics as a whole, 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 someone willing, 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, malicious 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 precisely what used to be mocked, and it gives the impression that 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 after 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 that stuff terribly much, and just want the street cred and to wear the t-shirt without doing the legwork of reading/watching the source material beyond a Wikipedia summary. 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 sporting a Chewbacca 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 about 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, Dungeon and Dragons, and novels, 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 that made it ok to like these things, or that Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films got all the money, or Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films won 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 equivalent 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 . . .