As I have said previously, I don’t read PvP regularly any more, mostly because I don’t find it particularly entertaining, and I’ve talked about that before. Other people do, and that’s fine. We all like different things. But this week somebody emailed me and said “you have to check out the current guest story by Dylan Meconis because it will make you flip your shit“, and this person generally knows what makes me flip my shit, so I said “oh, all right” and went and read it. And my shit, while not quite flipped, was certainly bestirred.

To be fair to Meconis: the art is generally good and she clearly knows how to construct a strip properly (and so many people don’t). But the story elements harp on one of my major pet peeves that has emerged out of nerddom over the last decade or so.

Quick summary of the plot: There are two characters named Marcie and Francis, who recently got married. Marcie is a relatively normal person who likes a lot of “nerd things.” Francis – as anybody who reads PvP knows – is one of the worst examples of a stupidly common trope in nerdesque literature, e.g. the ubernerd who is basically an amoral sociopath but who periodically “redeems” himself by recognizing that he is a dickhole and making a grand gesture to apologize. (Every nerd comic strip seems to have at least one of these. Some of them have multiples, because nerd comic strip makers seem to think that these people are, in some way, quixotically admirable. SPOILER: They never are.)

Anyway, prior to getting married, Marcie took off elsewhere and was single for a while, and the premise of this particular story is that during that time she dated a dude named Arjun Khan (who from the moment of his introduction telegraphs the eventual “KHAAAAN” joke, of course) who was an architecture grad student there. It rapidly becomes clear that Arjun is a cool guy in all respects: he’s polite, friendly, good-looking, charming, smart, lots of other good things. His one flaw is that he does not know the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek: he is not a nerd!

(I just want to pause the plot here for a second. Putting aside, for a second, the fact that anybody who makes it to grad school is going to be at least slightly nerdy in some way – it doesn’t happen otherwise, folks – is anybody else really sick of the “oh he can’t tell the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek” shorthand for “mainstream”? Fucking everybody knows the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek. My sixty-five-year-old mother, who does not follow science fiction in the least – she really likes Downton Abbey, though – knows that Star Wars is lightsabers and Jedi and Darth Vader and the Rebel Alliance, and Star Trek is Kirk and Spock and the Enterprise and the Prime Directive. Which is to say: this bit of storytelling shorthand is stupid and needs to go away forever.)

Francis, because he is a dickhole, flies into a jealous rage, and then he makes his Grand Gesture, which is to play Skyrim for so long that he can get all of the cheese wheels in the game together. Putting aside the fact that a video gamer playing a video game for a long time is a pretty weak-ass Grand Gesture, I really want to comment on Francis’ sullen, angry-looking “will you just look at the shit I do for you” expression here, because it is fucking creepy. If somebody glared at me like that while they were supposedly apologizing, I would not be inclined to take their apology seriously. I am just saying. But anyway, Marcie breaks down crying because somehow this is now her fault for not telling Francis about her ex-boyfriend when she knew perfectly well he would freak out like a stupid asshole.

Anyway, the two of them make up, essentially, and Francis asks Marcie why she picked him over Arjun, who is so clearly better a person than Francis it is not even funny, and her explanation is that Arjun is not a nerd – he doesn’t like comics or video games or going to cons. And this is the part that drives me nuts, because this isn’t just questionable story writing – this is something I hear people say in real life all the time, especially from nerds, and it’s always silly.

Look, I have had my share of relationships. Some of them liked some of the weird stuff I liked. Some of them did not. (None of them liked professional wrestling, despite my pointing out that it was homoerotic as all hell, honestly, and come on, babe, you love slash fiction… but I digress.) Certainly none of them liked all of the stuff I liked, which is fine, because that is called “being an adult” and recognizing that while shared interests can certainly strengthen a relationship, they are arguably the least important part of one. Being considerate of your partner’s emotional needs, for example. Helping them with their daily logistics. Being something that generally makes their life better rather than being an emotional trial. Or, and I am just throwing this out here, not being a massive dickhole all the goddamn time.

“Liking the same stuff” is so far down the list as to be negligible, especially when “showing interest when your partner tells you stuff they are excited about” will do just as well ninety-five percent of the time (and if you genuinely like the person, then it’s never hard to be actually interested because they’re interested, even if afterwards you won’t bother following up with your own independent research on the topic) and when, if we’re being honest, “liking the same stuff” can be as basic as “sports,” “movies,” “eating out” or “doin’ it.” But Jebus, telling this to nerds is only slightly more difficult than… I am running dry on analogies here, so you can just pretend I mentioned Doctor Who or something, but my general point is that “nerd subculture” – which, really, is a thing that should not exist, because there is no logical reason that people who like comic books should also like video games except for the fact that they are intensely marketed to the same demographics – places too high a priority on its gewgaws of nerdformation.

This is, when you get down to it, another facet of the mindset that created the “fake geek girl” brouhaha last year – the belief that somehow, knowing what THAC0 is or being able to hum the Doomy Doom song from Invader Zim is in and of itself precious, rather than the fun-but-meaningless-crap that it clearly is. It’s all about the same gatekeeper mentality, that conflation of “nerd identity” to something akin to race (which, while also an entirely social construct, at least provides clear visual identifiers when the people being identified aren’t cosplaying), but in the PVP story, Meconis has actually gender-reversed it – which is, I suppose, sort of a blow for geek girls? Except it means that geek girls have to settle for horrible Francises rather than decent and good Arjuns, so actually never mind, that’s not a blow for geek girls at all when you think about it. Someone more talented than me should write a sociological essay or something about that.

(And, of course, the denouement to the story shows us that Arjun, all along, was willing to try and learn about Marcie’s interests anyway, because even as he is being cast as a potential future villain, he’s still basically a decent guy. Also, the gag line in that particular strip is very good.)

EDIT TO ADD: Discussion in the comments is going astray from what I was trying to talk about as people defend the necessity of shared interests in a relationship – and yes, shared interests are important, of course, but that wasn’t my point so I’m going to expound a little more.

The issue here is, as I said, about the gatekeeper mentality that envelops nerdity. It’s the nerds-as-tribe dynamic (and, in another aside, when nerd parents do their best to get their kids into the nerd stuff they like, that’s part of it too). Shared interests are important, yes, but your average nerd presumably also likes things that are not-nerdy! You can share those interests, which is my point: in the strips, Arjun and Marcie clearly have lots of stuff in common that they like. It’s just not the nerd stuff, and the statement being made is that the nerd stuff is more important somehow. Which: everybody values their own obsessions differently, of course. But choosing borderline-sociopath over decent-human-being because of those obsessions – because the decent human being, while decent, is not one of us per se – has all sorts of wrongness attached to it. And that’s what bugs me about the strip and the larger thought process it represents – because even if you really, really like playing XBox, we are all more than our individual Xboxen.

1a. Which being created clues throughout space and time to ensure their own creation?
Bad Wolf

1b. Who saved at least one President and possibly many more?
Bad Dudes

1c. Who leads a conglomerate of villains much admired by doctors?
Bad Horse

1d. Who possesses numerous toys to compensate for their illiteracy?
Bad Religion (“21st Century Digital Boy”)

1e. Who pretended to each be the other in order to gain an informant’s trust?
Bad Boys

1f. When did a hunter suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder?
Buffy Summers in “When She Was Bad” (s1e2)

1g. Who felt they should have been born female due to their extreme beauty?
Johnny B. Badd

1h. Who dreams of helping to scrub space whales?
Strong Bad

1i. Which New Jersey food products are thirty-two ounces of in your face?
Milk and Cheese, Dairy Products Gone Bad

2a. Which alien was sentenced to spend time with cavemen as punishment for inventing a doomsday machine?
The Great Gazoo

2b. Which rich businessman detonated his livelihood to pursue a dream of performance?
Gonzo The Great

2c. Who bled so greatly that he inadvertently invented a unit of measurement for it?
The Great Muta

2d. What concept requires one to be a navigator across millions of worlds, all with too much of one and not enough of the other?
The Great River (from “Treachery, Faith and the Great River,” s7e6 of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)

2e. What is it called when elders from every stedding meet to discuss and deliberate?
The Great Stump

2f. Who shackled the chosen one to the stone of triumph?
The Stonecutters (in “Homer the Great”)

2g. The mightiest of what race had a wingspan of over thirty fathoms?
The Great Eagles

2h. What would a newspaperman utter when startled?
“Great Caesar’s Ghost!” (or, alternately, “Great Shades of Elvis!”)

2i. What was dedicated to fifty dead men?
The Great Escape

3a. Who was trapped by her brother within a diamond-hard prison?
Monet St. Croix / Penance / M

3b. Where may you control the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Senator and the Tax Man?
Saint Petersburg (the card game)

3c. Who gave his people hope in the face of a dying star?
Saint Walker

3d. Who rose to prominence from criminal beginnings after the success of their own brand of energy drink?
The Third Street Saints

3e. Who were taught German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Gaelic, and French by their mother, and used it in their quest for justice?
The Boondock Saints

3f. What did Victor cry out on the sixteenth day?
Saint Victor exclaimed, “This…is fantastic! Oh…this is terrific!”

3g. Who spoke to the audience at the beginning of every episode?
The Saint

3h. Who created a group of assassins and named them after the angel of death?
The Order of St. Dumas

3i. Who ended up having boat drinks thanks to the actions of a man with a plan?
Jimmy The Saint

4a. Whose return led to a magical renaissance in England?
John Uskglass

4b. Which exhibitor suffered from osteogenesis imperfecta?
Mr. Glass

4c. What requires you to look into the Eye of Eternity?
The “Through A Glass, Darkly” Quest In World of Warcraft

4d. Who was responsible for introducing people to a life of thievery?
Looking Glass Studios

4e. In what work did four gunslingers arrive at Topeka?
Wizard and Glass

4f. What commences with a story about Kanubai?
The Serpent Bride by Sarah Douglass, first in the Darkglass Mountain Trilogy

4g. What is said to be effective against the walkers from the north?
Dragonglass

4h. What was the most important aspect of Castalian social life?
The Glass Bead Game

4i. What 70-ton machine was designed expressly to counter the threat of invading clans?
The Gallowglas-class heavy ‘Mech

5a. What film was a coming-out party for a dead man named Smedley?
Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things

4b. Which social butterfly found themselves forced into a difficult situation involving a super-suit?
Ms. Thing

4c. Who alternated twice between being a man, and being not a man?
Swamp Thing

4d. What killed the Norwegians first?
The Thing From Outer Space

4e. Who caused a man to find himself traveling through time, due to an anomaly which never existed?
Q in “All Good Things” (s7e22 of Star Trek: The Next Generation)

4f. From where do you return to find the hot supper your mother made waiting for you?
Where The Wild Things Are

4g. Whose secret rings of power were only known to his best friend’s little sister?
Benjy Grimm, Owner of The Thing Rings

4h. Who played a convict on death row who was able to escape his sentence thanks to an extremely unusual medical procedure?
Rosey Grier in The Thing With Two Heads

4i. What was the name of the Znutar‘s mascot?
The Ook / “dat Ook t’ing” in The Awful Green Things From Outer Space

6a. What was the ultimate goal of the research centre in Sprodj?
To send a rocket to the moon

6b. Who refused to wait for Eliza?
Sam Bell in Moon

6c. Who went to Las Vegas and returned alive?
Tom Cullen (M-O-O-N, that spells Tom Cullen)

6d. Who befriended and managed a collection of curious oddities?
Luna Vachon

6e. What was the last act of Circadia Senius before he was killed?
To launch a gravity module to replace the destroyed moon

6f. Who pursued two hunters through Heaven to satisfy his own agenda?
Zachariah in “Dark Side Of The Moon” (s5e16 of Supernatural)

6g. What company specializes in the construction of artificial memories for the dying?
The Sigmund Corporation (in To The Moon)

6h. Who created the hit TV show “Legends of the Khonshu”?
Marc Spector (Moon Knight)

6i. Who always had trouble finding work due to a problematic medical condition that was largely his father’s fault?
Remus Lupin (AKA “Moony”)

7a. What adventurer found that her secrets were preventing her from speaking clearly?
Haley Starshine

7b. Which ship was both the largest traditional capital warship ever when it was built, and an expression of tyrannical might?
The Super Star Destroyer Executor

7c. Whose would-be nemesis wished to raise their son as his enemy?
The Mist (in Starman)

7d. Who did not recognize his sentient ship when she took human form?
Peter Quill, the Star-Lord

7e. In the foretellings of a dead god, what was the instrument of prophecy to contain within her flesh?
“All the starry universe”

7f. Who was eventually revealed to be an angel, even though she denied it fiercely?
Starbuck

7g. Who swore to fight the Instrumentality for as long as he lived?
Vanth Dreadstar

7h. Who eventually became the immortal ruler of her husband’s kingdom?
Yvaine (in Stardust)

7i. Which ship cannabalized the fleet it was guarding for supplies?
The Battlestar Pegasus

—

So, this was a fun exercise, and I do believe I’ll repeat it again next year. (Now that I have an idea of how difficult this one was – expect next year to be much harder.)

When I said that to my wife a bit ago, she looked at me and said, “I have no idea what you mean by that.” I’m kind of assuming you feel the same way, so I’ll explain.

A traditional ‘alternate universe’ story, which is something that just about every sci-fi/fantasy series gets to from time to time, is like pornography in that it’s really just the same thing each time with very little variation. Each AU storyline purports to focus on a single point of divergence that has sent history down a different path…but the differences are never so great as to preclude instant audience identification. (For example, in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Yesterday’s Enterprise”, twenty years of war with the Klingon Empire hasn’t resulted in any advances in technology beyond the Galaxy class starship, the Enterprise hasn’t been destroyed and replaced by the E or F, and all of the bridge crew have not only survived but have wound up in the exact same command positions on the exact same ship. Likewise, Giles is still assigned to the Hellmouth and despite the subtext of many episodes involving the idea that what separates Buffy from other Slayers who’ve died young is her friendships and connections with the everyday world, the only sign that Buffy is any less skilled as a Slayer is the little scar on her lip.)

The “twists” to this reality are designed, like porn, to provide simple and visceral thrills. They are less intended as logical consequence of any particular point of divergence as they are to give the audience the specific excitement of breaking well-established narrative rules. The premature death of Charles Xavier, for example, doesn’t lead to the dystopia ruled by Apocalypse because Charles Xavier did anything in particular, it leads to the dystopia ruled by Apocalypse because it’s the only chance that Marvel has to show a world where the bad guys won and the heroes are a desperate resistance movement. In the much later “Here Comes Tomorrow” storyline, Beast isn’t a villain because it’s a logical extension of Scott’s retirement from the team; he’s a villain because showing a fan favorite hero as the villain is a staple of alternate universe stories. (Another common trope is best exemplified in the ‘Magik’  series, where the cute and winsome Shadowcat is shown, in the alternate dimension of Limbo, as being a hardened warrior. The series also shows charming and friendly Nightcrawler as a lecherous villain…basically, you can chalk up 95% of alternate universe stories to the combinations of “set in a dystopian reality”, “well-liked hero is a villain”, “infamous villain is a good guy”, and “comic relief/peril monkey character is a total bad-ass”.)

And, like pornography, alternative universe stories have their own version of the “money shot”. If you accept the idea that the breaking of series narrative conventions in an AU story is the sci-fi/fantasy series equivalent of the sex in porn (and roughly the same amount of time is devoted in AU stories to showing how different and unexpected the alternative timeline is as is devoted to the sex in a porn movie), then the natural “climax” is the ultimate breaking of narrative convention, the death of characters who normally are given a protected status by their role in the story. Buffy is always safe in the Buffyverse (and possibly the only person who is)…so therefore, she has to die at the end of ‘The Wish’. ‘Days of Future Past’ has to end with a bloodbath, because it’s the only time Chris Claremont can get away with incinerating Wolverine, Storm, Colossus and Magneto in a single issue.

Does this mean that alternate universe stories are without merit? No. Like porn, there are wide variations in quality. (‘Days of Future Past’ would be qualified as “erotica” in this analogy, for example.) But it is worth remembering that stories like these always start out with a huge advantage in fan’s affections because that’s really all they’re intended to do. They are stories made to give long-term followers of the series “fangasms”, no more and no less.

So, the King William’s College Quiz has come and gone another year, and as always, I was barely able to answer anything, but then again the real point of the Quiz is to go on a knowledge scavenger hunt. And it seems a shame that there is only one per year. So here is a – doubtless easier – quiz of similar mindset. And I know it is easier, because this Quiz is expressly nerd-themed, if you will. Cooperation and collaboration are, of course, encouraged. Googling is not, because come on, it’s not like you win a prize for this.

ONE

a. Which being created clues throughout space and time to ensure their own creation?

b. Who saved at least one President and possibly many more?

c. Who leads a conglomerate of villains much admired by doctors?

d. Who possesses numerous toys to compensate for their illiteracy?

e. Who pretended to each be the other in order to gain an informant’s trust?

f. When did a hunter suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder?

g. Who felt they should have been born female due to their extreme beauty?

h. Who dreams of helping to scrub space whales?

i. Which New Jersey food products are thirty-two ounces of in your face?

TWO

a. Which alien was sentenced to spend time with cavemen as punishment for inventing a doomsday machine?

b. Which rich businessman detonated his livelihood to pursue a dream of performance?

c. Who bled so greatly that he inadvertently invented a unit of measurement for it?

d. What concept requires one to be a navigator across millions of worlds, all with too much of one and not enough of the other?

e. What is it called when elders from every stedding meet to discuss and deliberate?

f. Who shackled the chosen one to the stone of triumph?

g. The mightiest of what race had a wingspan of over thirty fathoms?

h. What would a newspaperman utter when startled?

i. What was dedicated to fifty dead men?

THREE

a. Who was trapped by her brother within a diamond-hard prison?

b. Where may you control the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Senator and the Tax Man?

c. Who gave his people hope in the face of a dying star?

d. Who rose to prominence from criminal beginnings after the success of their own brand of energy drink?

e. Who were taught German, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Gaelic, and French by their mother, and used it in their quest for justice?

f. What did Victor cry out on the sixteenth day?

g. Who spoke to the audience at the beginning of every episode?

h. Who created a group of assassins and named them after the angel of death?

i. Who ended up having boat drinks thanks to the actions of a man with a plan?

FOUR

a. Whose return led to a magical renaissance in England?

b. Which exhibitor suffered from osteogenesis imperfecta?

c. What requires you to look into the Eye of Eternity?

d. Who was responsible for introducing people to a life of thievery?

e. In what work did four gunslingers arrive at Topeka?

f. What commences with a story about Kanubai?

g. What is said to be effective against the walkers from the north?

h. What was the most important aspect of Castalian social life?

i. What 70-ton machine was designed expressly to counter the threat of invading clans?

FIVE

a. What film was a coming-out party for a dead man named Smedley?

b. Which social butterfly found themselves forced into a difficult situation involving a super-suit?

c. Who alternated twice between being a man, and being not a man?

d. What killed the Norwegians first?

e. Who caused a man to find himself traveling through time, due to an anomaly which never existed?

f. From where do you return to find the hot supper your mother made waiting for you?

g. Whose secret rings of power were only known to his best friend’s little sister?

h. Who played a convict on death row who was able to escape his sentence thanks to an extremely unusual medical procedure?

i. What was the name of the Znutar‘s mascot?

SIX

a. What was the ultimate goal of the research centre in Sprodj?

b. Who refused to wait for Eliza?

c. Who went to Las Vegas and returned alive?

d. Who befriended and managed a collection of curious oddities?

e. What was the last act of Circadia Senius before he was killed?

f. Who pursued two hunters through Heaven to satisfy his own agenda?

g. What company specializes in the construction of artificial memories for the dying?

h. Who created the hit TV show “Legends of the Khonshu”?

i. Who always had trouble finding work due to a problematic medical condition that was largely his father’s fault?

SEVEN

a. What adventurer found that her secrets were preventing her from speaking clearly?

b. Which ship was both the largest traditional capital warship ever when it was built, and an expression of tyrannical might?

c. Whose would-be nemesis wished to raise their son as his enemy?

d. Who did not recognize his sentient ship when she took human form?

e. In the foretellings of a dead god, what was the instrument of prophecy to contain within her flesh?

f. Who was eventually revealed to be an angel, even though she denied it fiercely?

g. Who swore to fight the Instrumentality for as long as he lived?

h. Who eventually became the immortal ruler of her husband’s kingdom?

i. Which ship cannabalized the fleet it was guarding for supplies?

So here’s a question I’ve been pondering for a while now: If you were to find someone in the early stages of geekery…a “proto-geek”, if you will, with an interest in cult fiction but no knowledge of it to speak of, what would you feel like they’d need to know to develop a useful cultural vocabulary for hanging around with other geeks? That is to say, if you had to write a capsule summary of every “essential” piece of geek fiction, something that would at least let them follow a conversation until they can see it themselves, what would you sum up? Obviously they’d need to know Star Wars and Star Trek…but what are the key points they’d need to be aware of? (For Star Wars, I’d say the six movies and at the least the Zahn trilogy. For Star Trek, I’d say you could suffice with an explanation of Starfleet and the various main characters of each series, and a summation of the types of adventures they get into. Since Trek has looser continuity, I don’t think you need a timeline.)

Beyond that…what else would you at least try to instill a knowledge of into this proto-fan? Doctor Who? Babylon 5? BSG? Buffy/Angel/Firefly? X-Files? Farscape? Hercules and Xena? Those seem to have pretty well-established fandoms, and giving someone a capsule summary seems fair. Then there are the Alien, Predator, and Terminator movies, Blade Runner, Highlander, the Evil Dead series, the Marvel movies, the Indiana Jones series…older films, like the Universal horror films would be good to know, and there’s always Godzilla and its sequels…and of course you’ve got the basic timelines of the Marvel and DC universes. And what would you call the essential books? Dune, perhaps? Heinlein, Clarke and Asimov? Maybe even the Dragonlance series, as a way into Dungeons and Dragons and other tabletop and computer games?

The more I think of it, the more exhausting it seems. But I do think you could reduce it down to just one book, at most, a sort of Compleat Geek Primer. What do you think should be on the list? Do you think it’s doable? Do you think it’s desirable? Share your thoughts in the comments?

When I wrote last week’s post, about how it it’s okay to form opinions on things you haven’t seen yet, and even to not change those opinions in the face of opposition from people who have seen those things, many people pointed out the perilous downside to this. Which is that, just as we have all (or most of us have) been faced by an angry fan snarling out, “How can you judge it if you haven’t even seen it?”…we have also all been on the receiving end of dripping disdain wielded by someone who read about a casting rumor on io9 that shows that the movie is totally going to suck because the gay cowboy from ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is playing the Joker and there’s no point in even watching it now.

Those people are absolutely right. (The people who point out the perilous downside, not the people who refused to watch ‘The Dark Knight’ because Heath Ledger was in it.) There’s no question that fans can be obnoxious, and that any creative decision that’s daring and unconventional will attract a crowd of people not just ready but eager to jump on it with hobnailed boots before they have a chance to really judge it. The impulse to see a truly spectacular failure in progress is an old one, and there are many who will say that it resulted in a lot of brilliant stories never getting a fair shake. (Even now, ‘Heaven’s Gate’ has its defenders, and I’ve met someone who will insist that ‘Sucker Punch’ is a Brechtian masterpiece.)

We all have a responsibility not to be that fan. It is okay not to like things. It is even okay to not like things irrationally, based on little to no evidence. If you are wrong, the only thing you’re hurting is you, after all. And yes, it is okay to tell people that you’re not interested in something when it comes up in conversation (like, say, a discussion of “Things You Irrationally Dislike Based On Almost No Evidence”.) But what isn’t okay is to be aggressive. Going into a comics forum to tell everyone that you’re not even going to pick up ‘Avengers Vs. X-Men’ because it’s s obvious it’s going to suck…not cool. Sitting in on a DC panel just so you can tell everyone that ‘Flashpoint’ was the last DC comic you’re ever reading…why bother? Clearly nobody there will agree with you, because they’re all there to hear about the new comics coming out of DC, so why do you want to start an argument? It’s okay to let people disagree with you. That doesn’t mean you can’t ever say you didn’t like something, or even to have a friendly argument about the relative merits of a film/book/TV show/comic/play. It’s good to discuss things, and and even to have wildly differing opinions. The point at which you start getting upset at people for liking things you have no interest in, though, is the point at which you need to just take a step back, relax, and remember that just as nobody can make you watch ‘Green Lantern’, you don’t have to make a pre-emptive strike on their enjoyment in order to stop them from forcing it down your throat.

If for no other reason than someday, you might change your mind. And when you do, the last thing you want is for all your friends to remind you of the time you said you wouldn’t watch ‘Buffy’ because you weren’t a thirteen-year-old girl.

I still haven’t seen ‘Revolution’.

Honestly, I don’t even know if it’s been picked up for a second season, or whether it’s going to be another one of those post-‘Lost’ series that the networks poured money into hoping to catch lightning in a bottle a second time only to see it die a quick and painful death. (Along with ‘The Event’, ‘FlashForward’, ‘No Ordinary Family’, ‘Heroes’…and yes, ‘Heroes’ died a slow painful death instead…the point is that a lot of people have tried to recreate what made ‘Lost’ popular, only to find out that it doesn’t work like that.) And the greater point is, I haven’t watched it because it looked lousy.

I kind of do this a lot. I didn’t see ‘Cloud Atlas’, I didn’t read ‘Avengers vs. X-Men’, and I have no intention of checking out ‘The Lone Ranger’. Why? Because they all look awful. This is one of those statements that feels like it shouldn’t be contentious, but it very frequently is. Because everyone has different tastes, and each of the stories described above has people who will defend it passionately and vociferously. (Except maybe ‘The Lone Ranger’. That thing will sell tickets to Johnny Depp’s immediate family only. And even they’re going to sneak out and see something else.) And these defenders always have a single defense whenever anyone says, “I didn’t see that because it looked awful.” That defense is, “Well, how do you know it’s awful if you didn’t even see it?”

On some levels, this is the perfect attack. It paints your opponent as ignorant…and worse, as prejudiced. They saw two minutes of footage from a movie, and instantly decided they knew what was going to happen in the entire 90 minutes. (Or 186 minutes, if you’re one of the people who skipped watching ‘The Hobbit’.) They don’t know the ending, they haven’t experienced the twists, they can’t possibly judge a film/TV show/book/comic based on an ad for it!

But there’s a simple counter-argument: Life is too short to waste on shit that you know is going to be shit walking in. This was a gigantic revelation to me as a college student, when I sat down to watch ‘Godzilla’ (1997 version, free ticket) and I realized that even for free, I had overpaid for this by spending my time on it. It looked like it was going to be a bad movie, it got terrible reviews, the word of mouth was lousy, and you know what? It was exactly what everyone said it was. I was not going to discover a secret gem of cinema that the masses had disdained when I saw ‘Godzilla’. I was going to be wasting my time.

And since then, I have (for the most part) trusted my judgment when it came to ads. If it looks bad in two minutes, the odds that they picked the worst two minutes to show you are not high. If the concept sounds stupid, it probably is stupid. (Peter David once said that everyone judged ‘The Other’ as dumb based solely on hearing the concept of “spider-cancer”. Speaking as someone who read it, the people who judged it as dumb before reading it are probably happier. They certainly have more money in their pocket.) You do not have to sample everything that comes down the pike just to see if it’s really as bad as it looks, and you don’t have to apologize for skipping something that looks bad. Yes, you might be missing out on something wonderful. You know what? There’s plenty of other wonderful things out there. You can spend your whole life watching movies and not get through them all. Why waste time on the bad stuff? (Unless the bad stuff has a guy and two puppets making fun of it. Then the reasons are self-evident.) Demanding someone go out and watch a bad movie just so that they can argue it’s bad based on more evidence is like demanding they touch the stove just to prove that bright red glow emanating from the metal isn’t a paint job.

So I won’t be watching ‘Revolution’. I won’t make a big deal of it–there’s a whole companion post to this that could be written about people who jump into forums just to tell everyone how lousy the show they like is, and how stupid they are for enjoying it–but I also won’t back away from my opinion on it. Because if I’m right and it’s bad at two minutes, it’s going to be punishing at twelve hours. And I have too many good shows to catch up on to spend twelve hours punishing myself.

Pleased to announce that mgkdotcom is now the sort-of-official tabulation site for the 2012 rec.sport.pro-wrestling Awards, the oldest and awesomest wrestling fan-awards tradition going on the internet.

Nominations have started now and we are open for business there; voting begins January 1.

DECEMBER 8 UPDATE: Due to overwhelming response, we are publishing the first iteration of the current nominations list ahead of schedule! You can see it here. (Now please, stop nominating CM Punk for Best Wrestler. We’ve got it covered. Believe us.)

Guys, I have totally had it up to here with the whole “fake nerds” thing at this point, which just refuses to die and just keeps getting stupider and stupider as otherwise generally rational people insist on clutching whatever ostracization they have suffered previously like it is some sort of precious jewel or something. However, because I am brilliant I have found the perfect metaphor to describe all of this.

Sadly there is no embedding on Youtube allowed of my brilliant metaphor because Youtube is THE MAN, but you can all go to the link and figure out the metaphor for yourselves, because I am not going to explain it or who represents what. Is Tony Harris Stan Gable? Are “fake geek girls” represented by Poindexter’s violin, or perhaps they are the synchronized handclaps? Does Booger represent the fantasy football nerds who are apparently not for-real nerds? Is the fact that Takahashi is dressed up as a stereotypical Indian chief subtle commentary on nerd tokenism in multiculturalism, or is it a clever inversion of that, reinforced by Lamar’s prominence in the clip?

NO EXPLANATIONS. It is simply a perfect metaphor for the entire mess and you all have to accept this. I leave it to the huddled masses to parse this bit of received wisdom.

Peyton, over in John Seavey’s post about the Fake Geek Girl bullshit which I am glad he wrote because honestly at this point I just do not have the energy to engage with that bullshit for what feels like the tenth time, writes:

As a complete aside I also wanted to thank MGK, John Seavey, and Jim Smith for this site. As someone said upthread, it’s one of the few places, along with Scalzi’s Whatever, Evanier’s blog, and Jim Hines blog and a few others that, as a female nerd, feels safe and supportive.

I’m just gonna say that I feel very proud to have received this comment, since I decided quite some time ago (like, years) that this was going to be one of my primary goals for the site. As I get older1 I find myself getting more liberal rather than less, which is a pleasant thing to realize, and John and Jim and everybody else I’ve invited to the site were invited, at least in part, because I knew they had no truck with all of the bullshit that nerd-dom encourages in celebration of the straight white guy norm. And I say that as a white guy who mostly invited straight white guys, which happened mostly because whenever I’ve encouraged guest bloggers to apply, they are usually straight white guys.2

This really isn’t just about the blog, either, but what I do generally. I mean, I’ve said before that Al’Rashad is adapted from a screenplay I wrote about a dozen years ago, but the simple truth is that the comic is much better than the screenplay ever was. The big action beats are for the most part the same thus far, but:

– Originally Rayana was much less proactive as a character. Even then I wanted her to be kick-ass, but as written in the screenplay, she was not nearly at the nigh-Brainiac-Five level of intelligence and competence which she is at now, and she works, I think, so much better now than she did previously. Having Kahal be her personal engine of destruction adds a new twist to their relationship which I like quite a bit as well; I like that Kahal takes his lead from Rayana whenever it isn’t a “right now we fight desperately” moment.
– Apali was originally male, and moreover was not nearly so important to the story as she is now. Making her female actually broadened her quite a bit and let me do more with her. The fact that she has essentially been Rayana’s surrogate mother isn’t something I’ve explicitly written in a page yet, but I think it’s pretty obvious, and that simply wouldn’t work as well if she were male as she was originally.
– Also, Joro really should have been a girl, as I’ve written previously, but the ship sailed on that one. Sometimes you realize things too late.
– Finally, there’s one more major character aspect that hasn’t been revealed yet (and might not even be revealed in the first story arc) but to which I gave serious thought, then discussed it with Davinder, then discussed it further with a few people whose opinion I respect in order to make sure that it would work with what had been written already. I think when it gets revealed people will accuse me of pandering (as always happens in these instances), but again: it’s something that makes the overall story simply work better. This is because different races and genders and sexual orientations and all the rest: they’re not checkboxes you have to fill in to pass a test. To blatantly steal from Pratchett: they are all different metals, and alloys are stronger.

I’m drifting a bit here from my original point because I started talking about my comic (which you should all read and adore, of course), but to get back to it: it’s a damn shame that the internet needs places that are “safe and supportive” for female nerds and gay nerds and non-white nerds and all of the other nerds who are not typical nerds, because everybody should have the right to act like a goddamned overgrown child about some irrelevant piece of pop-culture if they so choose because that is what we are all doing, really. The question should not even have to be posed. More people who I can argue “but Superman would TOTALLY beat up Thor” with is always going to be a benefit. More people who will argue whether the Enterprise could blow up a Star Destroyer are always welcome.3 I really don’t care if they have tits or different amounts of melanin – I care that they have fresh perspectives and new ideas, because more ideas is always better.

But so long as those places are necessary, I am determined that my place will be one of those places. This is not an ironclad promise that I will always be perfectly enlightened, because we are all works in progress and nobody ever gets it right one hundred percent of the time. But I think it is important that I try.

Okay, soapbox mode over, and tomorrow if I have time I’ll write the essay about Wreck-It Ralph that lots of people have been demanding for some reason.

1. IMPORTANT CAVEAT: I AM NOT OLD OLD, JUST, LIKE, OLDER AND STUFF [↩]
2. Unless Jim Smith is actually a pseudonym for “Laverne Washington,” which it could be. You never know with Jim. [↩]
3. Right answer: The Battlestar Galactica nukes both of them. [↩]

You know, it may be hard to believe, but I don’t always want to talk about feminism in the geek community. I don’t seek out fights with angry misogynists. I’d be perfectly happy to talk about Episode VII, and why I’m looking forward to it even though I have a sneaking suspicion it’s going to suck.

But then shit like this happens.

For those of you not clicking through on that link, it’s a post on John Scalzi’s blog about Tony Harris, former artist on (among other things) ‘Starman’, and his misogynist, semi-literate, possibly (hell, hopefully) drunken Facebook rant about girls “preying” on male geeks by showing up at conventions in costume while being attractive, and not always knowing that much about the character they’re portraying. Because somehow, this is predatory behavior. (Presumably, he bases this off of the African veldt, where lionesses are known to dress up as Wonder Woman to attract the attention of antelopes even though spotty distribution and poor literacy rates in the region mean that they’ve never even read a single issue.)

Naturally, Scalzi eviscerates this stupidity with ease, because even though he is wrong wrong wrong on which Star Wars movie is the best (hint: it’s the original) he is almost never wrong on matters of real consequence and is excellent at expressing himself. And because he is confident in the rightness of his opinions and is willing to defend them, he has a comments section. Said comments section, for those of you not willing to read several hundred comments, is filled with women saying, “Hell yes. I am sick and fucking tired of having to prove my geek cred to every fucking man at the convention, one by one, simply because I’m a woman who is moderately attractive. I’ve been active in fandom my whole life and legitimately enjoy geeky things, and the sexist disbelief I experience is obnoxious almost past the point of endurance.”

This is promptly followed by someone clueless saying, “Oh, we weren’t talking about you! I totally believe that you’re a real geek girl. We were talking about all those other girls out there, the real poseurs who are just impersonating geeks in order to gain that all-important cachet of social acceptance from the now-dominant geek sub-culture. Those are the real enemies out there, as I’m sure you’ll agree. They’re the ones who are just trying to ‘belong’, and don’t really ‘get it’. They’re mainstream people who think they’re geeky even though they’ve never seen an episode of the original Battlestar Galactica!” Usually, this is where they bring up ‘The Big Bang Theory’ and use the phrase “nerdface” unironically.

Here’s the thing, everyone who insists that while each individual incident of rampant misogyny and asshatted stupidity is obviously terrible and should be condemned, there’s still a principle that’s worth defending here and you’re going to defend it…it is not your principle that everyone is arguing. It is your facts. Because there are no women out there who do this. Women do not treat science fiction conventions as some sort of four-day singles bar, where they can pick up a guy for only the price of having to dress up in a random skimpy outfit that they found on the Internet and pretend to be interested in boring shit about elves. It does not happen. When you think it is happening, you are either a) imposing your own frame of geekery onto the woman in question, or b) confused and imagining that your lack of social skills, your sexism, and your unfortunate history with women in high school is somehow the fault of the person you are talking to.

Being a geek does not automatically mean “being into everything you are into and having an encyclopedic memory for trivia.” Many cosplayers are costume geeks. They have as much interest and obsession with the details and minutiae of costume-making as you do for Star Trek, or (slightly more accurately) as rocketry geeks do for rockets. They may very well be choosing that costume based on its aesthetic appeal and challenge, not because of an attachment to the character. Does that mean they’re not real geeks? No, it means they’re geeks about something you don’t care about and instead of taking the time and effort to get involved in their fandom, you’re berating them for not getting involved in yours. This is not defending a principle. This is being a jackass.

Which is the other important thing. A lot of the time you’re just being a jackass. The woman who’s dressed as Death, but doesn’t respond when you say to her, “Chim-Chim-Cheree!” It’s not that she’s a fake geek girl who didn’t even read the character’s first appearance; it’s that she’s at the convention to have fun, not to participate in a fucking trivia contest…especially not one where the prize is you looking down her shirt for the next six hours. When she nods politely at your comments about ‘American Gods’ and walks away, it’s because she has someplace to be, not because she’s secretly one of the cheerleaders who turned you down for a date in high school and she doesn’t really love Neil and she’s laughing at you when you’re not looking.

If your response to this incident, or any of the other incidents like it, is to say, “Yes, but the principle of keeping out the poseurs because they’re really just bullying real geeks with their condescension, that needs to be defended,” then remember this: It is not the principle that the other side is arguing. It is the data. If you claim that squirrels are secretly stealing your underwear, the question involved is not whether or not theft is wrong. That question is moot, because there are no underwear-stealing squirrels in your home. And even if you find a YouTube video out there of someone sitting at a park bench with their gym bag partially unzipped, and a squirrel runs up to the bag and pulls out an item of clothing and runs off with it to use it to line their nest, that does not make you right. The plural of anecdote is not data. The existence of this video does not make pointing at random squirrels and shouting, “Stop stealing my boxer shorts, you bitch!” any less insane. Please, just let this ‘fake girl geek’ bullshit go. Because you’re not doing yourself any favors when you defend it.

I’d be the first to admit that the title of this week’s post is a bit of a loaded question; clearly, letters columns aren’t “necessary” because they’ve been phased out of most of the comic books in the industry for about a decade now, and DC and Marvel haven’t stopped publishing comics. (Although, as always, I feel compelled to add the word “yet” onto the end of the phrase, “DC and Marvel haven’t stopped publishing comics”.) But I do think that letter columns served a distinct and vital purpose in the comic book industry, and it’s worth asking whether or not that purpose is still be served by other means in the wake of the decision to stop devoting page count to the words of the reading public.

To answer that question, it’s worth first asking what purpose the letters page once served. The answer is simple: Letters built a sense of community among the readers of a particular series, and of readers of comics in general. When you got to the end of every issue, and saw a full page (sometimes two) of people who read the same issue that you did and that cared enough about it to tell the company, it gave you the feeling that you weren’t alone in your enjoyment of comics. In a pre-Internet world, where local fan populations could vary wildly from city to city (or from city to small town, or from small town to rural area where you got your subscription delivered to) it was important to fans to know that their fandom didn’t make them freaks. Especially since (hey, it was a more innocent time) they published the addresses of their contributors. A lot of fan clubs that later grew into major fan organizations got their start from people who became “pen pals” after reading each other’s letters in the back of a comic book. Some of those readers, like Kurt Busiek and Mark Gruenwald, went on to be professionals.

Which was another important thing to note: The letters page didn’t just build a sense of community, it built a sense of participation. Breaking into comics was (and is) hard, but just about anyone over the age of five could break into the letter column. All it took was a goodly amount of persistence, some paper and a parent who indulged your need for stamps and envelopes. Seeing your name in print in your favorite comic was a huge thrill for a fan, one that created a strong sense of loyalty to the comic that in some small way, you felt like you’d helped create. Sure, other people did the drawing and the writing and the coloring and the inking, but there would be a blank white space there if not for you!

And as a counterpart, showing that the company cared about the thoughts of its readers helped to deflect frustration or anger with a book. Dan DiDio is known for being relentlessly positive about DC’s books in interviews (the man waxed rhapsodic about ‘Countdown’, at least while it was still going on…that has to take a PhD in bullshitting to pull off) but back in the old days, Marvel and DC weren’t afraid to print the occasional negative letter, just to show that they could admit their own flaws. The tone of the letter columns was generally upbeat, of course, but the occasional crank made them seem magnanimous in allowing fans their fair say.

And sometimes, the letter column could be a place to tell an entirely different story. Claremont had a few years where he answered the letters “in character” as one X-Man or another, while James Robinson’s ‘Starman’ turned into a wonderful series of fan essays on the love of antiques. Mark Evanier’s letter columns in ‘Groo’ were just as funny as the stories, and Alan Moore’s letter column in ‘League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ were drop-dead hilarious satires of the letters pages in the Victorian pulps. (Which should come as no surprise; Moore always had an eye for details like period-authentic letters pages. I still have a soft spot for ‘1963’…which may have something to do with my own 60s-style fan letter that was published in the final issue.) Some titles showed that the letter column could be more than a pre-Internet fan forum.

But of course, we now live in an Internet age, which is where we come back to the question, “Are letter columns necessary?” DC and Marvel each run their own forum boards now online, and there are countless independent boards that people can use to link up and talk comics to their hearts’ content. In a world with blogs and vlogs and LiveJournal and ScansDaily…well, blogs and vlogs and LiveJournal, at least…is there really a need for an additional place for comic book fans to share their opinions?

I would say “yes”. Perhaps not as much as there once was; I don’t think anyone is still having trouble finding other comics fans out there, and I don’t think that people are having difficulty finding outlets for their opinions about comic books. But I do think there’s never going to be a substitute for that cachet that comes from having your name published in an official capacity by the company whose material you love; having a space for the readers within the publication helps to make it feel less like the interaction between fans and professionals is entirely one-way. I won’t go so far as to say that a lot of the fan outrage over the last decade comes from not having an official voice in the comic, but I do think that everyone who says “fan entitlement” is driving angry fans misses a chunk of the point. It’s powerlessness that causes fans to get upset about the latest development in their favorite book, and having a place where the company officially says, “We will listen to you. This may not change, but we hear your voice and here is the proof,” can make some difference. Those two needs can’t be served as well by forums, or by conventions or blogs, and they’re something that I think is worth bringing back. Even if it’s not, strictly speaking, necessary.

Annnnnnd right off the bat we’ll put this behind a big ol’ spoiler tag for those who are behind on Season 7 of ‘Doctor Who’…

continue reading "My Question About ‘The Angels Take Manhattan’"

For those of you not already aware, it’s a new season of ‘Doctor Who’…and before I do the jump-cut that separates out the spoilers for those who haven’t seen the season premiere yet, let me just say how utterly strange it is to be a fan of ‘Doctor Who’ in an era where that series is enjoying such tremendous popularity. This year at DragonCon, Doctor Who cosplayers outnumbered Star Wars, Harry Potter, Star Trek, and any three Joss Whedon series you’d care to name. Full Daleks, TARDIS dresses, and Elevens too numerous to count. It’s a good feeling, don’t get me wrong; this isn’t one of those, “If you weren’t reading ‘Timewyrm: Revelation’, man, you can’t really understand what it’s like to be a fan!” rants that you occasionally see when something cult becomes mainstream. But I’ve spent the vast majority of my life as a Doctor Who fan, probably since I was two or three years old, and for the vast majority of that vast majority I could expect to meet another fan (outside of the Internet fora specifically designed to assist Who fans in congregating) perhaps once, twice a year. It was an obscure British import with laughable production values (especially compared to ST:TNG, which slightly overlapped the classic series in its dying days) and black-and-white repeats. To see it now rise from the ashes as a world-conquering juggernaut, right around the time that Star Wars and Star Trek (the Big Two when I was a kid) are fading to some extent, it’s…surreal. I keep expecting people to change their minds.

But since they’re not doing that, let’s talk ‘Asylum’, shall we?

continue reading "My Sneaking Suspicion Regarding ‘Asylum of the Daleks’"

In this particular case, I think it’s probably “Things Everyone Loves About Comics: Karl Kesel”. Because really, who has bad things to say about Karl Kesel? He’s a phenomenally talented inker who’s been working in the indsutry for decades, alongside everyone from John Byrne to Rob Liefeld, and who has a gift for making everyone he works with look better. (If you’re thinking, “He sure didn’t make Rob Liefeld look good,” remember that I just said “better”. Industry legend has it that Rob turned in the pencils for the final issue of the ‘Hawk and Dove’ mini-series late, without and hands or feet drawn in for any of the characters, then took the metaphorical phone off the hook. Those hands and feet you see there? All the work of the inker, which means they may be the only correctly drawn feet in a Liefeld book ever.)

In addition to his art, he’s got a lot of great writing work under his belt. The 90s ‘Hawk and Dove’ series he did with his then-wife Barbara remains a cult favorite, with all sorts of the things I absolutely love about comics that we never get to see enough of. (They actually created new villains for the series! It had unironic humor! The heroes used their powers cleverly, and were sympathetic and likeable! There was a really strong supporting cast, and good love interests for each of the two leads, who despite being male and female didn’t spontaneously fall in love! …until after the series ended, but in the interests of staying relentlessly positive I will not touch ‘Armageddon 2001’ with a twenty-meter cattle prod.) (And neither should anyone else.)

He did a phenomenal, well-remembered run on ‘The Adventures of Superman’ that’s perhaps best known for introducing the new Superboy…who wasn’t always that emo, I swear! As with ‘Hawk and Dove’, his run was always characterized by well-written, funny dialogue and fast-paced adventure (which he carried over to his two excellent runs on ‘Superboy’. Probably my favorite moment in the history of the character was when Knockout tried to manipulate him into becoming a supervillain, finally trying to cement his corruption by telling him to kill another villain in an issue-ending cliffhanger…only to  told, at the start of the next issue, “Are you nuts?”) He wrote ‘The Final Night’, which was a nice, tight, one-month crossover of the kind we saw for about four years from DC and then never again, which gave Hal Jordan a noble, dignified send-off that undid a lot of the poor treatment he’d suffered at the hands of DC’s editorial crew and probably should have stayed as the final end for the character. He also did some nice work for the probably-misconceived but still well-written Tangent line from DC (he was the one who did the Joker stories).

Over at Marvel, he had a tragically underappreciated Daredevil run (anyone remember the awesome story where Mister Hyde was framed for murder and Matt Murdock had to defend him? That was Karl Kesel.) He also wrote the first few issues of ‘Fantastic Four 2099’, the really high quality ones before the line utterly imploded because Marvel fired the line editor and all the talented writers walked in protest. (There is, somewhere, an alternate universe where Marvel kept Joey Cavalieri on, and Peter David and Warren Ellis and Karl Kesel kept writing their respective titles for another few years at least. I want to go there and steal all the comics.) He wrote an awesome FF annual where Ben Grimm traveled to a parallel universe where Marvel time mapped to real time one-to-one, and Johnny was in his late forties and thinking about retiring and leaving the whole “super hero” business to his kids. (High concept, and funny as hell.) He also wrote some great fill-in issues of the regular FF series, including the one where Ben Grimm was revealed to be Jewish (in what was ultimately a very touching Jack Kirby tribute. Another thing that Kesel loves to do is to tribute Kirby in ways both small and large. I approve.) I’m still hoping that someday he’ll get a regular gig writing the FF, because he has their voices down perfectly.

Oh, and he also did a really cute and clever “inverted X-Files” series called ‘Section Zero’ that was a victim of the implosion of the Gorilla Comics company, but that was way ahead of its time and presaged series like ‘The Middleman’ and ‘Warehouse 13′. It’s a frustrating theme of Kesel’s writing that all too often, he’s not considered to be a “hot” creator, and his work gets short shrift as a result. Either someone more famous comes along to write the book (like Kevin Smith on DD), or sales aren’t high enough to sustain a series. Which is a damn shame, because I’ve never read a Karl Kesel comic that hasn’t brought a huge smile to my face.

Oh, and if all that doesn’t convince you that he’s awesome, he just sold his whole comics collection. Why? To pay the medical bills of a special-needs baby he adopted. Even if he’d never written or drawn a single comic, that’d make him special. When you add it to everything else, it makes him one of comics’ unsung heroes…but I like to think that everyone who knows anything about him knows that he’s one of the great ones.