Nerd Culture - Tumblr Posts

You ever just put on that one batman shirt you always wore when you thought you were a cisgender boy and then match it with the batman themed eyeshadow palette to then sit in your pyjamas and watch mediocre nic cage films?

I thought that Hopepunk was just part of the broader what I'mma call Xpunk - where X is a thing, and punk actually just means future for some reason.

If grimdark isn't a genre, does that mean hopepunk isn't, either?

(With reference to this post here.)

"Hopepunk" is basically the culmination of nerd culture's mistaken propensity to treat genre as a prescriptive checklist of tropes. The term's proponents invented a definition of a genre of media they believed ought to exist, then went about looking for examples of media that fit that definition. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way – genres in media are something that can only be identified after the fact, as a description of emergent trends in the dialogue between creators. If you try to declare a genre into existence by fiat and work backwards to figure out which media belong to it by going down a checklist of tropes, you just end up with a random grab-bag of works which aren't meaningfully in dialogue with each other.

(Some definitions of "hopepunk" do admittedly somewhat resemble romantic fantasy, particularly the late 1980s to early 1990s strand, but as far as I can tell this is coincidental – it's abundantly clear that most of the term's proponents have never read a Mercedes Lackey novel!)

Re-posting, because I completely agree.

The shitty thing about seeing a segment of nerddom swing to the Alt-Right and Gamergate and complaints about SJWs is that, back 20 or 30 years ago? We were one of those groups it was okay to be cruel to. I’m not saying it was on the level of racism or homophobia, clearly, but nerds were absolutely on The Outside. Look at nerds in basically any sitcom up until roughly 2005. Playing D&D or WoW was a punchline, not something “normal” people did.

And then we hit the Age of the Geek. And it changed.

(By the way, shout out to Alec Hardison on Leverage for being a good nerd. Love me some John Rogers.)

The problem is that a significant number of nerds took that little bit of social acceptance… And used it to kick down at anyone they wanted to. They weren’t interested in inviting people into their fandom, they were interested in trying to help get more people into the club of being accepted.

They were interested in settling scores, gatekeeping, and reinforcing their acceptance by displaying the same shitty behavior that people threw at them. And they feel like this is their right, this is their vengeance.

It’s awful. It’s profoundly fucked up.

I mean, I don’t know what solution I have for this. There’s deep, systemic issues in our culture and our subculture that need badly to be rooted out and fixed. And there’s people out there who want to do anything but that.

All I know is what I personally can do. Make my corner of Geekdom someplace warm and supportive and friendly. And I can hope other people will do the same, and that, in the long run, it might be enough.

My linguistics textbook is talking about the formation of the words “shipping” and “shippers”. I kid you not.

I told the main clerk at a trading card store that my best friend was just now getting me into the Pokemon TCG and all I mentioned was that I ‘have not played a tcg since I was a teenager’.

This white, male, middle aged gatekeeper fuckface proceeded to condescendingly mansplain how it was ‘really good’ I was ‘starting out with a game like Pokemon, because it’s sooo much easier and you can just play the game- as opposed to have to worry about all these checks and counters with a more complicated game, like Magic”.

... The card game I played HEAVILY as a teenager and was very good at? WAS MAGIC: THE GATHERING.

I’m so tired of this shit and even my friend, who’s white but a GAY male, has issues hanging out with self-professed members of the ‘nerd’ subculture because of the rampantly toxic attitudes towards women, non-whites, and p. much anything that’s also NOT WHITE STRAIGHT MALE.

That’s NOT EVEN SCRATCHING THE GODDAMN SURFACE of the Asian fetishization and sexual harassment I’ve fucking suffered in comic book shops, conventions, video game tourneys, and cosplay meet-ups.

This shit needs to STOP.

This thread is the experience of so, so many women in tabletop, tcg, and other related hobbies. I’ve been lucky in my DnD groups but encountered it elsewhere depressingly, enragingly often. I’ve sat at a table to play Magic: the Gathering only to have the guys I was playing with start critiquing my body and discussing what they’d like to do to me sexually. Few things have felt more awful and demeaning; I consider that a personal low point in the nerd portion of my life.

If you, too, have stories like this, I am here for you. Come sit with me. There is a place for us in nerddom, and never, ever let any gross creep tell you otherwise.

LOUDER.