![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rodoA/N: I read seperis’ “well, yeah, if by geek culture you mean men” and had Opinions on “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die” as well, and I also have to work on my ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
inkitout word count a bit ...
You are right, you are not a nerd. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any nerds left, that we aren’t geeking, building our social cycles around obscure media, genres and the feeling of not-belonging, that there isn’t any non-mainstream media left for us, just because yours is now mainstream.
I was born in the 80s, and thus my school days started considerably later than yours. I became an anime and manga fan just when being one was neither a very obscure nor very well-known phenomenon. The old-school crowd was all about big boobs, hentai and videos you weren’t able to get your hands on until you were eighteen. The new-school crowd that came after me was all about Naruto, One Piece and Pokémon. My brother and I were all Sailor Moon and Neon Genesis Evangelion, respectively. I was there for the Otaku Wars (whether we could call ourselves that or not), the earlier AnimaniAs and for my hobby to get more and more popular. I was the one the old school crowd loved to hate, because little teenage girls didn’t belong in their world. Geekdom changes. It’s changing now too, and it has certainly changed since your day.
Later, my interests shifted a bit, to fantasy with male homosexual relationships, to historical manga and fantasy, to science fiction TV shows and basically everything I could get my hands on. And even if you don’t judge these books and comics and series obscure enough, they are where I live. Translations into my native language are by no means a given. But I still like my mangas, even though they are now mainstream, for the most part, just like I still love The Lord of the Rings. Geek culture becomes mainstream all the time. It’s really not unusual that it happened to yours, and it’s not unusual that it happened to mine. The thing is, history makes classics out of obscure media and forgets about mainstream culture all the time. Shouldn’t we be happy that we were there first, recognized its potential and loved it so hard that now everyone knows about it? I definitely think so.
You are right about one thing: the internet changed geek culture. You might think that it changed for the worse, but I don’t agree. When I went to school, my only friends were the other lone Sailor Moon fan and a girl that was obsessive about two things: dancing and reading every Karl May novel ever written, not just the classics. Now, I can socialize with other geeks and not just the crowd of LARPers, RPGers and trash fantasy fans that I meet twice a month. I can socialize with other geeks who just happen to have watched that one Bollywood movie five times too. I can share my stories, my derivative art and my love for mangas like Anatolia Story with others. I can order things on Amazon! With the exception of a few mangas and more popular fantasy books, I would be hard-pressed to find anything I like in shops.
What the internet did not do was make it easy to become and “otaku” (the Otaku Wars left their mark on me). Sure, a lot of things are more accessible, as far as buying is considered – or pirating, if that’s your thing. However, that’s not what makes you an “otaku”. What makes you one isn’t interest or knowledge, it’s obsession. And only obsession keeps you going if you have to wait a year for the next instalment. It’s obsession that makes you learn a language just so you can read or watch something (or write meta posts like this). It’s obsession that makes you subtitle something for others. It’s what makes you write fanfiction, draw fanart and make fake trailers of The Shining. None of that changed!
You still can’t become an expert in one weekend. Even if you watch a series for the entire weekend, that doesn’t make you an expert, it just means you watched it. Someone might be an expert on science fiction novels from the seventies, or think they are, but there’s still a host of Eastern European science fiction out there that they’ve never read. Mainlining recent Bollywood cinema within a weekend is downright impossible and most Korean manhwa I will never read because I do not speak Korean.
Everything that ever was is not available forever. If you think it is, I hope you can find the Gosford Park soundtrack. I couldn’t (because torrenting is potentially dangerous). The one for Was nützt die Liebe in Gedanken was really hard to find and the version I found was buggy. To this day I don’t know how to get my hands on the mangas and novels in the アルスラーン戦記 series or Eroica by Riyoko Ikeda. What if the movie you’re looking for is there, but it doesn’t have subtitles in any of the languages you speak? Or if you have to fight your way through Coffee Prince with French subtitles that are too fast to read, so you have to pause every few seconds? Links die, as do torrents, and I suspect that they will continue to do so, since the people who want to sell us stuff are very much interested in that.
And if you think that the creative, longing for more side of geekdom is dying, you couldn’t be more wrong. It is thriving. Look for fanfiction, if you will. Yuletide is a good starting point, and it is full of people who crave more of that one thing that is so obscure you’ve probably never heard of it. And people creating it. You’ll find dedication there, and people speaking a geeky language that no newbie can easily understand.
Geek culture has always been derivative because culture has always been derivative. Your heroes remixed just as much as the fans do now. Geek culture has also always changed. Your daughter, if she is a geek, will have a geek culture of her own that you will not understand because it is not yours, anymore than my father understood mine, since his geekiness was limited to Karl May, Raumpatrouille Orion, Perry Rhodan and Franco-Belgian comics by René Goscinny.
The times they are a-changing. Suck it up.
seperis’ “well, yeah, if by geek culture you mean men” and had Opinions on “Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die” as well, and I also have to work on my inkitout word count a bit ...You are right, you are not a nerd. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any nerds left, that we aren’t geeking, building our social cycles around obscure media, genres and the feeling of not-belonging, that there isn’t any non-mainstream media left for us, just because yours is now mainstream.
I was born in the 80s, and thus my school days started considerably later than yours. I became an anime and manga fan just when being one was neither a very obscure nor very well-known phenomenon. The old-school crowd was all about big boobs, hentai and videos you weren’t able to get your hands on until you were eighteen. The new-school crowd that came after me was all about Naruto, One Piece and Pokémon. My brother and I were all Sailor Moon and Neon Genesis Evangelion, respectively. I was there for the Otaku Wars (whether we could call ourselves that or not), the earlier AnimaniAs and for my hobby to get more and more popular. I was the one the old school crowd loved to hate, because little teenage girls didn’t belong in their world. Geekdom changes. It’s changing now too, and it has certainly changed since your day.
Later, my interests shifted a bit, to fantasy with male homosexual relationships, to historical manga and fantasy, to science fiction TV shows and basically everything I could get my hands on. And even if you don’t judge these books and comics and series obscure enough, they are where I live. Translations into my native language are by no means a given. But I still like my mangas, even though they are now mainstream, for the most part, just like I still love The Lord of the Rings. Geek culture becomes mainstream all the time. It’s really not unusual that it happened to yours, and it’s not unusual that it happened to mine. The thing is, history makes classics out of obscure media and forgets about mainstream culture all the time. Shouldn’t we be happy that we were there first, recognized its potential and loved it so hard that now everyone knows about it? I definitely think so.
You are right about one thing: the internet changed geek culture. You might think that it changed for the worse, but I don’t agree. When I went to school, my only friends were the other lone Sailor Moon fan and a girl that was obsessive about two things: dancing and reading every Karl May novel ever written, not just the classics. Now, I can socialize with other geeks and not just the crowd of LARPers, RPGers and trash fantasy fans that I meet twice a month. I can socialize with other geeks who just happen to have watched that one Bollywood movie five times too. I can share my stories, my derivative art and my love for mangas like Anatolia Story with others. I can order things on Amazon! With the exception of a few mangas and more popular fantasy books, I would be hard-pressed to find anything I like in shops.
What the internet did not do was make it easy to become and “otaku” (the Otaku Wars left their mark on me). Sure, a lot of things are more accessible, as far as buying is considered – or pirating, if that’s your thing. However, that’s not what makes you an “otaku”. What makes you one isn’t interest or knowledge, it’s obsession. And only obsession keeps you going if you have to wait a year for the next instalment. It’s obsession that makes you learn a language just so you can read or watch something (or write meta posts like this). It’s obsession that makes you subtitle something for others. It’s what makes you write fanfiction, draw fanart and make fake trailers of The Shining. None of that changed!
You still can’t become an expert in one weekend. Even if you watch a series for the entire weekend, that doesn’t make you an expert, it just means you watched it. Someone might be an expert on science fiction novels from the seventies, or think they are, but there’s still a host of Eastern European science fiction out there that they’ve never read. Mainlining recent Bollywood cinema within a weekend is downright impossible and most Korean manhwa I will never read because I do not speak Korean.
Everything that ever was is not available forever. If you think it is, I hope you can find the Gosford Park soundtrack. I couldn’t (because torrenting is potentially dangerous). The one for Was nützt die Liebe in Gedanken was really hard to find and the version I found was buggy. To this day I don’t know how to get my hands on the mangas and novels in the アルスラーン戦記 series or Eroica by Riyoko Ikeda. What if the movie you’re looking for is there, but it doesn’t have subtitles in any of the languages you speak? Or if you have to fight your way through Coffee Prince with French subtitles that are too fast to read, so you have to pause every few seconds? Links die, as do torrents, and I suspect that they will continue to do so, since the people who want to sell us stuff are very much interested in that.
And if you think that the creative, longing for more side of geekdom is dying, you couldn’t be more wrong. It is thriving. Look for fanfiction, if you will. Yuletide is a good starting point, and it is full of people who crave more of that one thing that is so obscure you’ve probably never heard of it. And people creating it. You’ll find dedication there, and people speaking a geeky language that no newbie can easily understand.
Geek culture has always been derivative because culture has always been derivative. Your heroes remixed just as much as the fans do now. Geek culture has also always changed. Your daughter, if she is a geek, will have a geek culture of her own that you will not understand because it is not yours, anymore than my father understood mine, since his geekiness was limited to Karl May, Raumpatrouille Orion, Perry Rhodan and Franco-Belgian comics by René Goscinny.
The times they are a-changing. Suck it up.
no subject
Date: 2011-02-08 04:05 pm (UTC)Language is really the most basic obstacle between fans and canon, from my point of view.