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pyatIf you’re reading this blog, you’re probably familiar with the Lemon Demon song, “Geeks in Love.” It was made into a popular flash animated video that was making the rounds a couple of years back. The lyrics themselves are fairly amusing, though the video bothers me a bit, containing as it does a great deal of hatred for “mundanes.” And while I often feel that way after a brush with marketing staff or alarming people on the bus, I recognize it as more a response to being uncomfortable with people who have different outlooks and goals and background than I do.
I should say that I don’t actually dislike the song, and I don’t want to seem like I’m over analyzing it. However, after getting the song stuck in my head a little while, I realized what else I disliked about it. The geek couple in the video is portrayed as liking random bits of media, and this seems to be the primary criterion of being a “geek.”
And when they hear our favorite bands, they wish that they were geeks in love.
We rattle off our in-jokes while they wish that they were geeks in love.
Novelty bands and in-jokes! That’s what it’s all about. And LOLcats, and dressing up like anime characters. Unfortunately, these are all very shallow things. Basically, if it has a wizard, robot, or superhero in it, or it was drawn in Japan, it’s “geeky.” Or Cthulhu. Cthulhu is geeky.
I think though, that the fan culture as a whole confuses the shibboleth for the substance. People will pile on identifiers and tags indicating that they are a member of fandom, but then not evidence any actual deep interest or critical appreciation of the things they are allegedly fannish about. To use the example of Cthulhu, I once met a man with a personalized Cthulhu license plate and t-shirts and plushies, who had never read Lovecraft, nor even played the RPG based on his works. His “Cthulhufandom” was a sort of formless, amorphous blob at the centre of his being, madly piping out references without context to a meaningless universe where…
… sorry.
I guess I am a geek. The biggest thing I’m fannish about it table-top RPGs. Rarely does a day pass in which I do not make reference to this interest. I know more about the history of the hobby than most people, to the point of taking road trips to look at otherwise nondescript houses in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. This is a fandom I developed through active participation and development.
The second biggest thing I’m fannish about? I have no idea. I don’t watch television. I read a single comic book, and it’s a comic book about table-top RPGs. I’m certainly not up on current SF and fantasy novels, though I did just re-read the Elric books. I don’t play video games at all, though sometimes I go though periods where I play an awful lot of Civ IV.
I shall make a list.
1. Table top RPGs. As noted.
2. George Orwell. I’ve read all his published works several times, along with some biographies and collections of his personal correspondence and BBC memos.
3. Steampunk, sort of. In the sense that I like and read 19th century speculative fiction. I suspect most Steampunk cosplayers don’t know H.G. Wells from Orson Welles.
4. Rumpole of the Bailey! Yes, really.
5. Hard-boiled crime fiction, or at least private eye stories from 1920 till 1955 or so.
6. Victorian England, and Imperial England in general, possibly related to #3.
7. Hard SF, though I rarely read anything written after 1990.
8. Historical curiosities, particularly technology
9. Furry media that intersects one of the preceding things.
So, like, if someone were to write a roleplaying game adventure about Rumpole’s grandfather (a badger) who travels to British colonial Burma to help youthful Imperial Police inspector Eric Blair (aka George Orwell, perhaps a kind of ferret) solve a murder, with the evidence based a curious idiosyncrasy of a Gestetner No. 6 typewriter, that might just be best thing ever.
I should say that I don’t actually dislike the song, and I don’t want to seem like I’m over analyzing it. However, after getting the song stuck in my head a little while, I realized what else I disliked about it. The geek couple in the video is portrayed as liking random bits of media, and this seems to be the primary criterion of being a “geek.”
And when they hear our favorite bands, they wish that they were geeks in love.
We rattle off our in-jokes while they wish that they were geeks in love.
Novelty bands and in-jokes! That’s what it’s all about. And LOLcats, and dressing up like anime characters. Unfortunately, these are all very shallow things. Basically, if it has a wizard, robot, or superhero in it, or it was drawn in Japan, it’s “geeky.” Or Cthulhu. Cthulhu is geeky.
I think though, that the fan culture as a whole confuses the shibboleth for the substance. People will pile on identifiers and tags indicating that they are a member of fandom, but then not evidence any actual deep interest or critical appreciation of the things they are allegedly fannish about. To use the example of Cthulhu, I once met a man with a personalized Cthulhu license plate and t-shirts and plushies, who had never read Lovecraft, nor even played the RPG based on his works. His “Cthulhufandom” was a sort of formless, amorphous blob at the centre of his being, madly piping out references without context to a meaningless universe where…
… sorry.
I guess I am a geek. The biggest thing I’m fannish about it table-top RPGs. Rarely does a day pass in which I do not make reference to this interest. I know more about the history of the hobby than most people, to the point of taking road trips to look at otherwise nondescript houses in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. This is a fandom I developed through active participation and development.
The second biggest thing I’m fannish about? I have no idea. I don’t watch television. I read a single comic book, and it’s a comic book about table-top RPGs. I’m certainly not up on current SF and fantasy novels, though I did just re-read the Elric books. I don’t play video games at all, though sometimes I go though periods where I play an awful lot of Civ IV.
I shall make a list.
1. Table top RPGs. As noted.
2. George Orwell. I’ve read all his published works several times, along with some biographies and collections of his personal correspondence and BBC memos.
3. Steampunk, sort of. In the sense that I like and read 19th century speculative fiction. I suspect most Steampunk cosplayers don’t know H.G. Wells from Orson Welles.
4. Rumpole of the Bailey! Yes, really.
5. Hard-boiled crime fiction, or at least private eye stories from 1920 till 1955 or so.
6. Victorian England, and Imperial England in general, possibly related to #3.
7. Hard SF, though I rarely read anything written after 1990.
8. Historical curiosities, particularly technology
9. Furry media that intersects one of the preceding things.
So, like, if someone were to write a roleplaying game adventure about Rumpole’s grandfather (a badger) who travels to British colonial Burma to help youthful Imperial Police inspector Eric Blair (aka George Orwell, perhaps a kind of ferret) solve a murder, with the evidence based a curious idiosyncrasy of a Gestetner No. 6 typewriter, that might just be best thing ever.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 04:40 pm (UTC)Holy crap that was a brilliant turn of phrase. Well said sir. Well said.
On account of sickness my head feels stuffed with cotton and so I can't quite find the words to articulate what I find really interesting about the first half of this post other then it's about how we construct identity.
I find the... a... huh... I find a number of 'geeky' fandoms' tendency to identify or turn their noses up at 'mundanes' somewhat troubling.
I worry that in an attempt to celebrate how they're 'different' from other people (a perfectly reasonable and healthy thing) they may also loose sight of what they have in common.
Actually I think it really just rubs me the wrong way to identify people as 'mundane.' Really, how snobby and pretentious can you get?
Huh... moving away from that rant at light-speed, Pyat, if you're still looking for things to write about I would be fascinated to hear your thoughts on constructing identity in the context of... well... any number of fandoms or communities. Anything that catches your fancy really.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-17 05:51 pm (UTC)Yes, definitely. Especially as the various fandoms seem to be expanding to almost become a new default society. Harry Potter outsells legal thrillers and action movies by a considerable margin.
Anything that catches your fancy really.
Well... thank you!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-18 07:03 am (UTC)Fandoms by and large define themselves by what they are *not* just as much by what they *are*, and I think that's part of the problem right there. I rarely identify myself as a fan of X show or Y continuum for this reason: the minute I do, I can hear just as many doors slamming shut as there might be swinging open.
The whole bit about "the mundanes" is part of this -- because if there's one thing NO fandom wants to be part of, it's mundanity. Meaning life lived without any sense of ... well, fannishness, I guess. But I think it's really more about a misplaced (more like unrefined) sense of resentment against people who ruin their fun, whether that's part of the agenda or not.
I had some firsthand exposure to this not long ago, when I was over at my parents' place and a friend of theirs dropped in for dinner. (My parents know about my above-mentioned interests and while they don't share them are certainly wise enough not to give me silly grief about them.) Said friend spied me with one of the manga I had brought with me -- it was an untranslated item I was trying to read through for the sake of an article (http://www.genjipress.com/2009/02/tamayura-douji-vol-1-eriko-san.html) I was drafting -- and he made some all-too-easy-to-interpret-as-snide remark about grown men (I'm 37) reading comic books. I could have come right back at him with an equally sharp set of remarks about how graphic novels are taken seriously as literature in other countries, or some other remember-the-Alamo level of defensiveness (even if all I'd really achieve there was the creation of an anecdote I could then replay for the sake of other fans who weren't even there at the time). I chose instead to change the subject.
It's not a question of being a fan vs. not being a fan, of being mundane vs. being a Trekkie / Whovian / Babster / otaku. It's about knowing that everything has a place, and that part of that is also accepting that not everyone else in the world has to have a hobby at all, least of all yours.