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Bilbo Baggins, Geek Hero
I’ve been entirely too negative lately. Granted, there is much to be negative about (waves towards the tire-fire that will soon engulf the US), but I need a break. So, instead of growling about the world, I want to spend some time with something I find completely good: the character of Bilbo Baggins.
In one of my Lit classes, I currently have assigned a paper in which my students need to select a hero (of any kind from anywhere, so long as it is a fictional person) and analyze the reasons they are considered heroic – what do they symbolize, to whom, and why? It usually generates a really interesting batch of papers (some good, some bad) that ideally gets my students to consider the underlying cultural and psychological forces behind the idea of heroism.
Now, if I were to write that paper myself, the hero I’d probably pick is Tolkien’s (and Jackson’s) Bilbo Baggins.
Bilbo Baggins is the hero with whom I most identify in all of literature. He is, at heart, a man who craves adventure while, at the same time, realizing how insane that is. He knows what is really important – what really, ultimately matters – is a good home and good food, a warm bed, and one or two good friends. Adventure is inimical to these things. And yet he needs it anyway.
Look at all them Bilbos!
In this way, I see Bilbo as being the spiritual standard bearer of all of Geek Culture. Geeks are, of course, obsessed with adventure and excitement: they love stories of spaceships and dragons and daring do, and they spend hours pretending to be this hero or that heroine, battling the forces of evil. However, the vast, vast majority of them, if asked to give up the comforts of home to go traveling into the wilderness with a bunch of gung-ho survivalist types, would have a hard time agreeing.
And who can blame them, right? You can just imagine the conversation. This guy shows up at your door, possibly in the middle of the night. He claims to be an agent of some secret international organization. He has with him a bunch of bearded mountain men. He shows you a map. And he says this:
We need your help, (insert your name here), to overthrow a brutal Third World dictator and reclaim the resources he has pillaged from my friends here. We believe you have the skills. Sign here.
That’s crazy, guys. I wouldn’t sign that paper. But you know what? Just like Bilbo, I’d wake up the next day after the mountain men threw their rager and think to myself “did I dodge a bullet, or miss the greatest opportunity of my life?”
He, for instance, READS THE CONTRACT…
Because the thing that makes Bilbo a hero – the thing that separates him from me and you and just about every geek and homebody on the planet – is that he goes. He says yes (late, of course, but still yes). He goes for the whole damned way. What’s more, he becomes more and more important to the dwarves survival. Why? Because he’s a thinking man (err…hobbit). He’s clever. He retreats when he ought to and talks his way out of trouble. He’s smart. And for once, the smart guy – the good, ordinary guy without the bulging muscles – actually comes out on top. Because he’s good at riddles (a geeky pastime outside of some Anglo Saxon hall), because he’s friendly, and because he uses his head.
Bilbo doesn’t slay the dragon. Bilbo doesn’t smite the goblin army. Bilbo doesn’t become some incredible warrior. But he’s an essential part of the adventuring party – he saves their lives several times over – and he comes back having, just for once, lived the adventures he’s always dreamed about. And then, to kick it all off, he writes a book about it – you just don’t get much more nerdy than that. This is what makes Bilbo the quintessential geek-hero – the Sir Gawain of GenCon, the Paradigm of PAX.
Then, to top it all off, he goes on to be an awesome old guy. The guy who tells the stories at parties that enthrall all the kids. The guy who has mysterious sacks of gold in his cellar. The guy who everybody thinks is just a bit off. This, too, is a geek fantasy.
This hobbit lived well, my friends.
Every nerd wants to end up the mysterious elder statesman – the man who knows mysteries. The guy who can casually discuss that time he looked death in the eye but who, at the same time, isn’t some wacko down by the river. Not a soldier, not a prince or king or leader – just your friendly neighborhood bookworm with secret depths. The guy who stages the best parties at which he manages a prank they will talk about for the rest of time, all so he can go off and retire with his super-awesome friends in the distant mountains.
Everybody talks about how they want their letter from Hogwarts or their development of mutant powers and a visit from Professor X – both cool, granted – but I feel Bilbo’s life is the one I’d actually want. A guy who lives in what amounts to the world’s most comfortable book-nook and who, once long ago, was dragged off to adventure by his ears, had the time of his life, and lived the rest of his days in comfort, surrounded by friends. That’s the life, guys. That’s the goal.
Let’s all go forth and be Bilbos.
No Spoilers Are In This Post
Let me start off by posting a few memes I’ve come across in the past 48 hours:
And..
Now, I’ve talked about this before, but I feel the need to reiterate. You might think I’m a bad geek for saying this, or insist that I don’t really love Star Wars (which would be utterly false), but let me say this right now:
GET OVER YOURSELVES, YOU RAVING NUTBALLS!
Look, I get it – you don’t want somebody spoiling Star Wars for you. Fine. That’s fair. Spoiling somebody else’s fun is a jerk move. That, however, doesn’t mean you get to tromp around the internet lighting fire to anybody who wants to discuss a movie they just saw and didn’t appropriately warn you beforehand. You’re acting like spoiled children. It’s embarrassing.
I don’t want the movie spoiled for me, either. If some jerk comes along and deliberately spoils the movie in the comments of this post, for example, that makes them a consummate ass and no friend of mine. But accidental spoilers are a different thing entirely. So is having a conversation about an experience other people haven’t had. Even beyond all that, there is the simple fact that it is just a goddamned movie and you should act like a fucking grown-up.
It’s times like this that make me feel like I’m not a geek after all. I mean, hell, I play (and sometimes write) role-playing games, I have a Warhammer 40,000 hobby, I write science fiction and fantasy, I’ve LARPed, gone to movie premieres in costume, I love Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings and the rest of it…but I’m not a fanatic. I’m just not. I am not freaking out right now. I’m excited to see The Force Awakens (I see it tomorrow), but I’m not bouncing off the walls, eight-year-old-on-Christmas-Eve excited.
Irrational, blind enthusiasm for things is always, has always been, something that freaks me out. People who paint their chests at football games are basically an alien species. The people who scour every second of movie trailers to reveal the smallest hints at prospective plot points are as bizarre to me as Donald Trump supporters (well, maybe not Trump…how about Cruz supporters? Yeah, that’s still pretty freaking gonzo nuts). I do not get it. I recognize that it’s a central part of our species – fanaticism is as old as ideas themselves – but I am not comfortable with it. I cannot turn off my rational brain and allow the emotional one to take the reins. Not over something like a movie, anyway.
So go forth, enjoy the movie, discuss it with friends. But don’t go burning bridges with Uncle Hank because he accidentally let something slip. Don’t cuss out some teenage cousin because they “ruined” something so insignificant as a Star Wars movie. Yes, I said insignificant. Because it is. I might love it, you might love it, but ultimately it’s just a movie about things that never happened in a place that doesn’t exist. It probably doesn’t even rise to the level of art (and if it did, spoiling it would be impossible, anyway – you can’t “spoil” The Great Gatsby or VanGogh’s Starry Night). It should never rise to the level where we would jeopardize our friendships and emotional well-being over it. That’s childish.
I remember once I had a book spoiled for me (accidentally) by a friend. I snapped at her about it. She snapped back. It was then that I realized she was right. It was childish and selfish of me; I had no right to act that way.
Neither do you.
Publicity Notes
- The Iron Ring is coming off a hell of a run after being selected as Book Bub’s “Fantasy pick of the day” about a week ago. It peaked at #2 overall on Amazon for Fantasy e-books! It is still on sale for 0.99, but probably not for much longer. Act now!
- My short story, “Adaptation and Predation” has been published by Escape Pod science fiction podcasts. It’s the first time an audio recording of one of my stories has been done, which is pretty damned cool. The story is set in The Union of Stars, so if that world of mine had piqued your interest at all, go and check it out now – it’s free!
The Big Bang Theory: A Critique
Fan favorite and perennial Emmy nominee, The Big Bang Theory, was recently renewed by CBS for an additional three seasons. This is hardly surprising, given the show’s ratings, but I do confess I reacted to the news with a degree of regret. Whatever merit the show once had (and that was modest to begin with), it has long since departed and I would prefer to see it gone. If I’m being honest, though, I fail to see what CBS would replace it with that would be substantially better (the sitcom landscape is a dry and desolate wasteland), so whatever. Let it persist.
My issue with The Big Bang Theory is not really related to its portrayal of geek culture. Yes, it’s an unfair caricature of nerds and gamers (and often inaccurate for the purpose of deriving plot), but I would honestly challenge you to find anything in sitcom-land that isn’t a caricature of somebody. Caricatures are easy to mock and easy to write jokes for, and therefore they populate the television at its lowest echelons with all the same density that phytoplankton populates the oceans. Do I find it occasionally insulting? Yes, of course. Does it actively bother me? No, not for that reason. What bothers me about the show is its overriding cynicism. It is a show that thinks the worst of its characters, its audience, and the world in general.
Pictured: sadness in my heart
Let’s begin with the title, shall we? It is a crass pun and little more. It’s the kind of joke told by seventh grade boys in damp locker rooms whilst they speculate about female genitalia. Indeed, much of the entire theme of the show is oriented around such sophomoric, insulting puns, often at the expense of the female characters on the show. If anybody should be offended by The Big Bang Theory, it should be women. The basic premise of the show is that a woman can be attractive or she can be smart, but she cannot really be both. Penny, the most attractive, is also consistently displayed as an airhead with a poor memory, a disinterest in learning, and a history of poor life choices. Amy, the least attractive, is the only one able to match intellects with Sheldon Cooper. In the middle is Bernadette, who is not as attractive as Penny, but more attractive than Amy and is, therefore, somewhere between the two in terms of raw IQ. She is displayed as socially awkward and ditsy on the one hand, but also competent and rational on the other. This binary idea of women is beyond insulting; it’s a willfully ignorant display meant to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
This demographic, by the way, is no more friendly to ‘nerds’ than it is to women. Geeks are likewise displayed on a similar binary scale – intellect is also governed in inverse proportion to social grace and physical prowess. Because the nerds are smart, they are also weak. Sheldon, the smartest, is also the weakest. Howard, the one whose intelligence is most often ridiculed, is the only one in the end to actually achieve the presumed goal of all involved: marriage to a beautiful woman (though not as beautiful as Penny, as though the show is saying “let’s be realistic, here, nerds”). He also becomes an astronaut.
As if this weren’t enough, the show’s humor is exclusively hostile to its characters. We are never laughing with these people – we are laughing at them. Sheldon is the constant butt of jokes that demonstrate him as weak, unwise, and improbably clueless about the social world not because Sheldon is in any way realistic, but rather because the audience prefers to see the so-called genius put in his place. We are watching a crew of highly educated, presumably intelligent men involved in important fields get torn down and mocked for the purpose of appeasing an audience that doesn’t like eggheads and finds it implausible that attractive women would find scientists interesting or that scientists could at all manage to attract women on their own merits. To this end, characters in this show do not give each other compliments, relying instead on a litany of insults that are typically too juvenile to be funny beyond their simple shock value.
Towards the beginning of the series there was a point where the show was cynical but also novel – I watched it, laughed at some of the jokes, and identified with a couple of the plotlines, etc.. That point, however, has been smothered by the incessant recycling of the same five jokes over and over again. Leonard is ashamed of his geekery, Sheldon is clueless, Raj is awkward, Howard is skeevy, Penny is dumb and, right there, I’ve covered ~85% of the show’s humor. On a basic level, the show isn’t substantially different from Chuck Lorre’s other cash cow, Two and a Half Men, which is every bit as cynical and miserable. There is no joy in the lives of Charlie and Alan and there certainly isn’t any joy to be had amongst Sheldon, Raj, Howard, and Leonard. They are hamsters in wheels, running in their stereotype-dictated tracks, never to escape or to really grow.
The Big Bang Theory is like a poorly run zoo – go a few times and find the lions and the elephants interesting. Go every day, and soon you start to wonder why the lions look so sad and why the elephant never plays with that big rubber ball. You feel like you and the animals are rehearsing some kind of perverse play, wherein you watch and they exist and nothing changes or improves, and yet for some reason everybody still expects you to applaud.
What’s in a Geek-Off?
Everybody knows the answer is ‘Batman’. If it weren’t the answer, geeks would have to concede that brawn beats brains.
The comic book store argument is a staple of the geek subculture. You’ve seen it on The Big Bang Theory dozens of times: Sheldon, Raj, Howard, and Leonard sitting around their living room, arguing until they’re blue in the face over whether Thor’s Hammer can penetrate Cap’s Shield, or what the difference is (or ought to be) between zombies and mummies. As much as I gripe sometimes of the stereotyping of geekdom by that show, I do have to admit in that one respect they are generally spot-on. It is a thing. It happens all the time.
But what is the point? They aren’t real, so why bother?
Why do I bother critiquing things like zombies, giant robots, and mermaids? As one (unusually offended) commenter asked:
Do you go around telling kids there’s no Santa Clause [sic], too?
Let’s ignore the spelling error for a moment and take for granted that the commenter in question is not referring to the Tim Allen film franchise, both loved and admired by all humanity (he gets fat by magic – comedy gold!). Let’s engage the essence of the critique here: why ruin all the fun? It’s a worthwhile question, and it does deserve an answer.
Geeks have these conversations because they are fun. They are fun in the same way that analyzing literature is fun, or critiquing the fashion choices on the red carpet is fun, or really any act where you pass judgment on something is fun. It isn’t just geeks who do this – we all do this. Having opinions and backing them up with arguments is part of the deal with being able to think. Can such arguments go off the rails? Sure they can. Conflicting opinions can often be confused with personal rancor, feelings can get hurt, and all enjoyment can get sucked away by some guy crossing the line. Most of the time, though, this doesn’t happen.
Part of what makes these geek conversations unique is the fact that their subject matter is often entirely fictional. There is no empirical definition for the weight of Thor’s Hammer, only what can be inferred by circumstance. I once had an argument with a guy about how lightsaber duels weren’t reflective of what a duel with a plasma sword would really look like. My critique was oriented around the supposition that the plasma wouldn’t have the same mass that the sabers seemed to when fighting – less mass means less inertia, which means a whole different set of fighting techniques become possible, thus changing the duel. His argument was that we had no way of knowing how densely packed the plasma was in the blade, therefore it may have the same mass as a lightweight sword of the same length. I came back by citing the conservation of mass – if the plasma had that much mass, where did it go when the blade retracted? Lightsaber hilts do not get visibly heavier when shut off, therefore…
You get the idea.
These conversations are often fun. They ask us to think and analyze what we observe and to draw conclusions from it. This is how human beings learn. This is how we adapt and change. If nobody asked such questions, nothing new would happen. Now, granted, science fiction and fantasy franchises aren’t the most important thing in the world to debate, but to equate critiquing their conventions with ruining Santa Claus for little kids is unfair. For one thing, that implies that scifi/fantasy is only for children, which I object to in the most strenuous terms possible (I mean, have you even read Freud or Jung?). For another, that suggests that we are having this conversation for the express purpose of ruining something for someone else. Not true. We’re trying to change it, in our small way. We’re trying to say it can be better. We try not to have these arguments with people who don’t care or don’t want to hear them (at least the more socially facile of us do) – the last thing a geek really wants to do is ruin somebody’s fun. If you like the old thing, well fine – opinions differ. If you have such a problem with my disagreement, offer me a robust defense. Debate it.
It should be fun.
Why I am a Bad Nerd
Firstly: This is required reading material.
I went to PAX East this past Saturday. I go for really only one reason, and that’s the annual Warhammer 40K Tournament, which is a lot of fun, fairly laid back, and I’ve never had an unpleasant game while there. There is, however, something inherent in gaming conventions that makes me uneasy. It’s the same thing, honestly, that makes me uneasy at sporting playoffs and rock concerts and any other event in which the combined
This many people on the same mission in the same place is…concerning.
masses of fandom converge to worship. It’s not just the crowds (though I’m not crazy about crowds), but the presence of groupthink. I would feel the same way at PAX as I would feel at a celebrity wedding or the coronation of a new king: here is a massive group of people hopelessly enthusiastic about a thing that is (1) not of their making and (2) in existence for the purpose of purporting the illusion that it is, in fact, of their making. Everybody talks about how ‘their’ team made the playoffs, but unless you live in Green Bay, that team is in no way, shape, or form yours. There is a whole subset of people who define their worth and orient their personal emotional health upon the presence, absence, and/or disposition of entities that they, themselves, have no influence over. It weirds me out.
There is something different at a gaming convention like PAX, though, that isn’t quite as obvious at sporting events or rock concerts (though it is clearly and undoubtedly present). The naked materialism of it is on a scale that even stadium owners might envy. Well, no, maybe ‘materialism’ isn’t the right word (you’re paying $6.00 for a hotdog at either venue and lauding your collection of themed clothing in the same exact way). I think instead what I’m going for here the way in which consumptive choice interacts with evaluations of personal self-worth, as described by the blog post above.
I’m reminded of a quote from Simon Pegg:
Being a geek is all about being honest about what you enjoy and not being afraid to demonstrate that affection. It means never having to play it cool about how much you like something. It’s basically a license to proudly emote on a somewhat childish level rather than behave like a supposed adult. Being a geek is extremely liberating.
Naked consumerism has never been better summed up than by “Gotta Catch ‘Em All.”
Now, when I first heard this quote, I cheered its sentiment as a defense of geekdom. The more I thought about it, though, the less enthused I became. There are a couple things here that trouble me. Firstly, ‘not being afraid to demonstrate that affection’ is misleading. I am certainly not afraid to demonstrate my affection for, say, Warhammer or role-playing-games or science fiction. That, however, is not license in itself to harp and gush over them to a unreceptive audience or to behave like a child. More importantly, though, is the way in which geekdom often chooses to express this enthusiasm and, indeed, how society dictates our enthusiasm should be expressed in general. A geek wears costumes, has themed T-shirts, owns themed bedsheets or salt shakers, and professes their vehement allegiance to Dr. Who or The Walking Dead and will not accept their favorite franchise’s faults. This shouldn’t be necessary or even recommended for a ‘true fan’; it is, as Pegg himself says, childish. The ‘supposed adulthood’ Pegg alludes to is not really a negative thing. It’s the awareness that your enthusiasm is not necessarily mirrored by everyone else and, furthermore, that such enthusiasm is not correctly represented by spending money on frivolities that in no way reflect the aspects of your particular franchise that make it a worthwhile thing in which to indulge. If you’ve got a pokeball salt-and-pepper shaker on your table, how am I expected to react to that? Even supposing I am a fan of Pokemon, what the hell does a salt-shaker have to do with Pokemon? What is the message here?
The second thing I take some issue with is the idea of geekdom (as described by Pegg) as being ‘extremely liberating’. Maybe I’m just an old stick in the mud, maybe I’m a bad geek or nerd or what have you, but I don’t really see ‘liberation’ at PAX. I see, instead, collective self-assurement. The throngs of costumed gamers at PAX assuage the collective anxiety gamers often feel in non-gamer society. They are self-identifying themselves as an entity outside of the ‘mainstream’ (whatever that is) by associating themselves with gaming franchises and, often, specific characters inside that franchise. They are, in essence, defining themselves by what they consume and gaining confirmation that their consumptive choice is positive by the presence of so many other like-minded individuals. This is the opposite of liberation – this is conformity. Now, I’m not saying that geeks and gamers shouldn’t be proud of what they do for fun, but I am saying that the decision to express this pride in such tight confines and in such prescribed ways is suspect. I am forced to ask of the sundry Batmen and Marios striding about the BCEC: Are you holding Mario up, or is Mario holding you up?
Okay, okay – I’m being unfair, and probably a bit hypocritical. There were lots and lots of people at PAX who got dressed up just for fun and that didn’t treat the weekend as some kind of ‘safe zone’ for consumptive choices they make that they feel aren’t welcome elsewhere. Indeed, there are probably a lot of folks who didn’t go to PAX to salivate over what they intend to spend their money on next and, instead, went to have fun and play games with new people, just as I did myself. However, to make the claim that so-called geek ‘culture’ isn’t predicated on the idea that consumption defines our personalities would be an error. It is, and far too many of us buy into it. A lot of geeks are having their strings pulled by other people (many of whom aren’t geeks at all), and that bothers me. When I go to PAX, I have fun and I enjoy the costumes, but I also get the same feeling I get when I’m walking to Fenway Park amid a sea of Ortiz jerseys: Are we actually our own selves, and is that a good or a bad thing? Why can’t we have the courage to be our own person and present ourselves as such, no jersey or t-shirt or funny hat required?
Does this make me a bad nerd?
On Spoilers and Nerd Rage
People get angry over the dumbest things.
How DARE you tell me who Kaiser Soze is! I will KILL YOU ALL!
Exhibit One: Spoilers
I get it – you don’t want the ending of something ruined for you. That’s fine, and I’ve been there before. As someone who loves stories, I try not to spoil things for my friends; case in point, I was on the verge of watching the third act of The Shawshank Redemption the other day when my wife commented that she’d never seen the movie. Since we were catching it halfway through, I turned off the television and pointed out that it would really be better if she watched the whole thing sometime (mental note: purchase Shawshank Redemption). I did this because I’d like her to fully enjoy the movie as I did, as the end of that film is one of the greatest in film history.
But if I’d left it on, what then? Would my wife freak out and cover her ears like a child, yelling ‘Spoiler Alert?’ Would she be mad at me for ‘ruining’ the movie for her forever? Would she leap across the room and try to wrestle the remote from my hands to prevent her premature knowledge of Andy Dufresne’s fate?
Obviously not; she’s a grown-ass woman. Yet, we see geeks and nerds and so on acting this way frequently. It’s almost become a socially acceptable form of nervous breakdown – by dint of the fact that you have yet to see/read thing X from start to finish, you reserve the right to silence all conversation involving X in your presence. If denied, it is acceptable for you to stuff your fingers in your ears and throw a half-humorous (but that means half-serious!) tantrum. It’s, frankly, ridiculous. We shouldn’t indulge in it if we value our dignity.
The other side of the coin, though, is those out there who seek to spoil. These folks I fundamentally do not understand. They are the guys who scour the internet for sneak peeks of Batman’s newest costume or hunt down scripts to the latest scifi movie. They’re the ones who lurk in the depths of various internet forums attempting to access the secret ending to some book before that book is even available. What the hell is wrong with these people, exactly? Why can’t they wait like a normal person and enjoy the story when it is available? It’s just a movie, for God’s sake! You aren’t revealing some world-altering detail that we all need to know, you’re just frothing at the mouth to consume any vestige or dreg of your favorite movie franchise that you’re behaving like a lunatic. Calm down! You will get to read the book, I promise. Why do you want to know aspects of the plot right now? Furthermore, why the hell do you feel the need to tell everyone else until, inevitably, is scrolls across my Facebook feed?
I accept that nerd/geek culture is filled with people overly enthusiastic about their favorite stories. That is, indeed, a recognized facet of the subculture. This, however, does not absolve us from behaving like mature human beings. If somebody spoils a story, you don’t get to freak out. It, ultimately, really isn’t that big a deal, so act with a little class. On the other side of the coin, though, don’t go about spoiling things just because you can. Wait. Be patient – the movie will come out, you will get to see it, and then you can talk about it with your friends to your heart’s content. And, should you and your friends start talking about how awesome Thor 2 was, those present who still want to see it and object to having it spoiled should have the good grace to excuse themselves from the conversation without shrieking at you. We’re grown-ups, folks – act like it.
Life is Not the Cafeteria
I was at a party the other day where it came up that I’m a science fiction writer. The guy I was speaking to seemed to deflate at my admission, as though I had just admitted to being a violent anarchist or something and found he no longer had anything to talk to me about. I added, for his benefit, that writing science fiction is not the sum of my whole life’s experience and that I have alternate interests. He brightened significantly at this, congratulated me, and added “cause, you know, some of those guys, that’s all they do.”
Now this was a party among many of my new neighbors, so it wasn’t really in my interest to start laying into the guy. Also, he seemed like a perfectly nice fellow and thought that what he was saying was genuinely complimentary. I did, however, want to ask him something: “Which guys? Please list for me all the geeks you know and describe how SF/F is all they care about. Let’s hear it.”
I’d bet real money that the dude doesn’t know a single one.
We are not this guy.
As a straight white Protestant American male, I really can’t claim any real idea of what it’s like to be discriminated against. I think, however, that the closest I come is being able to self-identify as a ‘geek’. I get really, really tired of people pigeonholing who I am, where my interests lie, what my knowledge consists of, and in what ways my social skills have formed as a result of me confessing an affinity for science fiction and fantasy stories. Even as geek-dom becomes ‘cool’, it has only become so as a kind of stereotype. To the world, if I tell them I like Star Wars and play role-playing games, they assume I’m Dr. Sheldon Cooper or, if they’re being charitable, his roommate Leonard. I’m not.
Sheldon Cooper is a socially dysfunctional, arguably autistic physicist with a host of emotional problems. He was picked on in high school, he’s a scientific genius, and he’s obsessed with comic books. Are there geeks like him out there? Yeah, there are a few, I’m sure. I can’t with any honesty say they’re all that common. There aren’t a lot of Howards or Rajs, either. Those characters are caricatures, picking the most embarrassing aspects of some folks in the geek community and condensing them into a trio of ridiculous people who bear passing resemblance to the actual population of geeks out there.
I am a geek. I play (and write) roleplaying games, I write science fiction stories, fantasy novels, like Star Trek, and have read widely in the specfic genres. I also am 6’2″, 200lbs and in pretty good shape. I was a varsity athlete in swimming in high school, earning a letter all four years, and am a reasonably good cyclist besides. I was a professional improv comedian for four years following college. I am a clear speaker, an engaging conversationalist, a good storyteller, and can pick up on most social clues as well as anybody else. I am not afraid of women, am married to a beautiful woman, and also have many female friends. I like camping, I’m a decent sailor, I know how to start a campfire, and I can perform all the standard physical labor-type things men like to thump their chests over. I don’t know a hell of a lot about computers and am not terribly interested in technical specifications of obscure computer components. I don’t have an i-anything and my cell phone is practically five years old by now.
I’m not exceptional. Many of the geeks I know are performers, nurses, athletes, and so on. Some of them study martial arts, others are great dancers, and still others seem to have a never-ending rotation of attractive women they are dating/sleeping with/whatever. They are as likely to love football as anybody else. They play Dungeons and Dragons and aren’t ashamed of it, and it has no deleterious effect on their lives. The idea that it is somehow requisite that those who enjoy stuff like that are some kind of basement-dwelling troglodytes is, frankly, offensive.
Thing is, though, that not enough geeks are actually offended by it. We often ascribe to the ‘high school cafeteria’ model of society, wherein we slot ourselves into a particular clique and stick to that table, unwilling to travel across the aisle for fear of sticking out. Now, granted, I will concede that many geeks fit into various aspects of the geek stereotype, but few of them are so one-dimensional as to be defined by all or even most of them. You can’t say those things about them with any more accuracy than you can say, for instance, that all Irish people are drunks or all Italians know people in the Mafia or all Asians are bad drivers. It just isn’t true, and adhering to those beliefs is ignorant.
Perhaps I shouldn’t complain. For the first time in my life, there are decent odds I can point out that I write science fiction or that I play roleplaying games at a party and folks will be actively interested in what it is and why I like it. Geeks enjoy a certain mystique these days, it’s true. Mystique, though, isn’t the same as acceptance.
Auston Habershaw 