Dear Self-Proclaimed Nerds: Please Stop Trying to Make a Subculture Out of This Shit

Nerd: a derogatory slang term for an intellectual but socially-impaired, perhaps obsessive person who spends inordinate amounts of time on unpopular or obscure pursuits, to the exclusion of more mainstream activities. Nerds are considered to be awkward, shy, and unattractive. Thus, a nerd is often excluded from physical activity and considered a loner by others, or will tend to associate with a small group of like-minded people. As with other pejoratives, nerd has been reappropriated by some as a term of pride and group identity. ~ Wikipedia

The word used to be an insult; only a few years ago, it stood for trainspotting, social ineptitude and glasses that left the wearer utterly without dignity. Things are different now – the 2000s saw a huge influx of superhero movies, and The Dark Knight was the highest grossing movie of 2008. DC, taking advantage of the accompanying surge of interest in comic books, rebooted their entire line in September.

Fantasy put in a strong appearance too, with the hugely successful Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter movies. The Dark Materials trilogy also became a sensation (although the movie franchise was mercifully abandoned after universal agreement that the first film was a fucking abortion). Meanwhile, massive advances in gaming created intricate and graphically beautiful products that inspire as much discussion as art-house cinema among fans. Nerd has gone mainstream.

And so many self-proclaimed nerds hate this fact like poison.

It’s pretty much an accepted fact that all subcultures, however subversive they might initially appear, will ultimately be broken down, repackaged, and sold back to us in watered-down junk form by marketers and corporations. It happened to hippie, punk, goth, grunge - and now, some nerds believe, it’s happening with Their Shit.

No names mentioned or anything.

The increased use of technology in everyday life has made computer aptitude a more or less mandatory form of interaction, rather than a signifier of social ineptitude. The image of the thirty year old nerd listening to metal in his mother’s basement and ruling only the interwebs is an unflattering throw-back to a not-so-distant past, when those who went online for their social interaction were commonly assumed to be horrible at real life. Today, though, mention that guy and we picture Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerman.

And I suspect that that’s what a lot of the self-proclaimed nerds are pissed off about: as soon as the label ceases to be an insult and starts to gain positive connotations, it’s taken from them and put on like a Spiderman T-shirt by the same borderline-illiterate trendies who picked on them in school. It’s being diluted and sold right back to them, via people who disdained it just a few years ago.

But here's the thing - nerd is not a subculture. So... you can quit guarding it like a dog with a bone. It's a term with very little meaningful currency nowadays - and in fact, by trying to make it into an esoteric little niche for Clever People, you only create a target out of it for the very marketers and corporations you're implicitly bitching about when you get bitter about the fact that shit you’ve loved for years is suddenly popular.

So far I’ve only mentioned certain types of nerdery, because there are many out there that I’ve never even heard of. Just last week, for example, I discovered an Otherkin community dedicated to educating the world on metaphysics.***


*** Yes, seriously. 

Because the truth is, nerd fodder stretches from J. G. Ballard to Joss Whedon. It doesn’t outright exclude anything on the basis of ideology, and it certainly doesn’t carry with it any guarantee of intellectual greatness; just one more reason people who use it as a self-congratulatory implication of how smart they are get on my nerves. The label applies to quantum physics fanatics and a Doctor Who junkies alike. Nerdy things can be just as dumbed-down and banal as mainstream.

Again, no names mentioned.

Today, nerdy no longer automatically means intellectual; geekdom unites professors of philosophy and Spider-Man fans. More than ever in this information age of ours, there can be no one thing that makes a nerd, when we have access to so many things one can be nerdy about: there are online communities for lesbian comic fans, white supremacist songwriters, straight female authors of slash fiction, middle-aged academics, and anime sneeze fetishists. Its identity politics are not ruled by a single dominant discourse. The trappings of Geekdom are too many and their creators too varied in background and beliefs for that.

That’s not to say it isn’t guilty of the same bullshit as the mainstream at times, of course. There's a strong interest in marginal voices, but it’s by no means a utopian, colour-blind or gender-indifferent world. And for all its indie pretensions, it's not without market domination either - DC could undoubtedly buy and sell most of the comic producers in the States.

But part of the allure of nerdery is its fascination with marginal voices, idiosyncrasy of vision, and the excitement of discovering little-known gems by veering off the beaten track. And that will always happen, because – again – nerd is not a subculture. It is a word sometimes applied to people who may be into one or more of an immense variety of interests. Virtually everything that attracts enough interest will become commercialized in the end, but there will always be those small groups of people seeking originality.


And with the internet at your disposal, you will never run out of things to discover. They made a bad movie out of your favourite comic? Then go read The Bobcats, or Daisy Owl, or any one of a million others floating around the interwebs made by talented individuals whose names you’d never have even heard if this was even ten years ago. It's not like the inclusion of nerdy shit in the mainstream is killing that impulse that keeps people making this stuff - all it’s done is give them a forum. Corporate interests still hold art to ransom, but this is far from a new state of affairs; they always did.

So get over yourself. Geeking out over something doesn't make you a superior being. It just suggests a good deal of knowledge about a particular topic, alongside a passion for it that’s strong enough to make you gibber like an overexcited preteen, carried away with excitement and praise and love.

I don't pretend to understand all of it.

Getting the arse about people discovering things you liked years ago is ridiculous - just judge mainstream efforts on merit instead of onanistic anti-populist snobbery, and enjoy the upsides. I mean, do you want to bite the hand that fed you The Dark Knight and Frozen Planet?

"Yeah, that's what I thought, bitch."

Or do you want to count down to season 2 of the awesome Game of Thrones, and root for HBO to do a similarly good job on American Gods?

Appeals to self-proclaimed nerds to remember their core identity as the REAL discoverers of this shit, and contempt for poseurs and wannabes who enjoyed the Watchmen movie without ever reading any Alan Moore, seem to suggest that nerdery is something to be hoarded; some currency by which we real fans can judge ourselves superior to others. Yes, it can be annoying when people eat up commercialized versions of things you like whilst actively resisting superior but lesser-known works. But hating people who creamed themselves over Mark Steven Johnson’s Daredevil, because they didn’t read the comic back when they were a teenager, is missing the point.

The point is to hate them because the screenplay was poor and you’ve taken dumps with more charisma than Ben Affleck.

Let's be clear: I’m not such a hippie I'm suggesting we do away with judgment altogether. If a book, movie, comic or whatever is genuinely shite, then it’s your civic duty to berate it loudly.


But if the reason you’re pissed off is because you’ve loved it for years and a lot of other people now love it too, then quit bitching. As far as I'm concerned, that just means all the more people to favour with my incisive commentary and witty observations.

Surely that which excites you should beg to be shared. Instead of bitching about the Mundanes stealing Our Shit, shouldn’t we be excited that so many people have fallen in love with geek-gone-mainstream things that are actually really fucking good?

Because there really is a lot of awesome stuff out there. And if you’re complaining about others encroaching on your territory, then... are you sure you really like this stuff? Because maybe it’s just me, but when I fall in love with something, I want to share it with everyone I’ve ever met. When seized by the enthusiasm of a new discovery I will send you links, make you sit and watch clips from the internet, orate a thesis on my interpretation of its message, and just generally become monumentally boring on the subject.

Because when something lights you up – I mean really hits you right in the sweet spot – don’t you just want to show it to someone? And isn’t it an absolute pleasure when you find a fellow nerd with whom you can rhapsodize about something you thought you were alone in liking? To paraphrase that paedo teacher in The History Boys, it's like a hand reaching out across time and space, and taking yours.

Pictured: wisdom. Also, boy-love.

Fairy Tales with Dubious Morals: Part III

Rumpelstiltskin 

A miller is called before the king for an unspecified reason, and to make himself more impressive, lies that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The king deals with this obvious dick-waving in the most reasonable way possible: by locking the girl in a barn filled with straw, and telling her he will execute her if he doesn’t  return to find it full of gold in the morning. 

 “Look, kid, nobody is mad at you. But your daddy told the King he grew the best turnips in the kingdom, and until we check he wasn’t bullshitting his Lord and Sovereign, you gotta just sit here with me. You don’t want your king being lied to by peasants, do you? Good boy.”

So there she is, locked in the barn, weeping and probably wondering whether she’ll be hanged, stoned or broken on  the wheel like a bug. Enter Rumpelstiltskin, a small hobgoblin-like creature, who asks why she is crying. Upon learning of her plight, the hobgoblin offers to spin the straw into gold for her, in exchange for her necklace. The deal is made, all parties keep to their end, and in the morning the miller’s daughter is not decapitated.

The king is pleasantly surprised to see all the gold in the morning, and as a token of his gratitude, does the exact same thing to the girl the following night. Locked back up in the barn with an even bigger pile of straw, she again begins to weep (I hear recurrent death threats can have that effect). But she’s saved once more when the hobgoblin turns up and does the job in exchange for her ring this time. Again, everybody goes to bed happy.

The next morning, the king is so impressed with this even bigger pile of gold that he immediately demands another - and promises the girl that if she can pull it off a third time, he will marry her and make her his queen. Presumably the proposal itself is the height of romance, what with him locking her in the barn threatening her death if she fails as it’s being made.

“It’s okay, honey, this just symbolises how I’ll break your fingers one by one if you ever lie to me.”

 (Source: Ken Fotos) 

The hobgoblin shows up to bail her out again. But the girl is now out of jewellery, and has nothing to offer him  in return. So, in lieu of bling, he asks for her firstborn child. Realising that she’s quite attached to her head, the girl agrees, and the king marries her the next day after finding the third pile of gold. 

They reign together happily, and no mention is made of domestic abuse despite the king’s overt sociopathic tendencies thus far. A year later, their first son is born, and the queen is so happy that she forgets all about the deal. Before long, however, the hobgoblin shatters her new-found royal bliss when he comes back to claim the child as agreed.

 

Proles can be like that. Motherfuckers always want paying.

The queen weeps at the thought and offers all her wealth if he will let her keep the boy, but the hobgoblin is adamant, declaring that living things are more dear to him than all the treasures in the world. Eventually, though, she weeps so piteously that he concedes somewhat; if she can guess his name within three days, he will let her keep the child.

  

“Awww, don’t do that. You knew the deal. C’mon, stop crying... it’ll be all right... Oh, for fuck’s sake. Aight, here’s what we’ll do.”

For the next two nights the queen lies awake thinking of every name she can, but never gets it right when the hobgoblin shows up to hear her guesses. So eventually, she does what any mother who is also a queen would do, and dispatches spies to find it out. One such messenger returns to her on the third night and reports to having seen a hobgoblin through a cottage window at the edge of the forest. The queen realises that she is saved when she hears that the creature was dancing around, singing that the queen will never guess his name is Rumpelstiltskin.

The next day, the queen tries this name. The hobgoblin cries, “The Devil has told you that! The Devil has told you that!”, and flies into such a rage that he literally tears himself in two.

 

I know what you're thinking, and yes: exactly the fuck like that.

The Supposed Moral

Actually, this one’s kind of on the monster’s side. The king is immediately established as a tyrant and all-around dick when he responds to a miller’s boast by threatening the life of his innocent daughter. And when he marries the girl, it’s implicitly out of greed – he does it because he believes she can spin straw into gold. Let’s hope he never asked her for an encore.

The king plays fast and loose with the lives of others, and more importantly, he forces the miller’s daughter to do the same by relinquishing her as-yet-unborn child to save her own life. The hobgoblin, a rustic forest-dweller living outside of their code, is the only one whose actions suggest that living things are truly more precious than riches to him – the king marries out of greed for gold, the miller’s daughter effectively becomes a queen by selling her firstborn. Rumpelstiltskin, however, will not be bought off.

And, leaving aside his goblin-like appearance, look at what he actually does: he shows up like a guardian angel and twice save a peasant girl’s life in exchange for some comparatively minor payment.

Granted, he also demands her firstborn with the same matter-of-factness. But it’s at least strongly implied that he does this in a children-are-a-gift kind of way, rather than a Saw II kind of way. And he is moved enough by the queen’s grief to give her another shot – it’s true that it doesn’t exactly make the prospect of giving up her child any less painful, but you know what? He didn’t have to do that shit. He’s played fairer than anyone else in the story.

The Actual Moral

So the king is a dick, while the 'monster' actually isn't so bad. But what about the protagonist?

The tale initially places our sympathy with the miller’s daughter, for the terrifying and unjust situations that the actions of the king and her father put her in. Even when she gives in and promises the hobgoblin her first child, we can sympathise; the child doesn’t exist yet and is no more than a distant possibility to her, whereas she is really in this barn and really going to die.

Trouble is, the girl is no longer so innocent when she becomes a queen. Corruption rules, and power brings the realisation that it’s actually no big deal to promise the moon when it’s convenient, and renege when it’s not. 

All the easier if you’re dealing with someone in a less privileged position than you. As a miller’s daughter, she was helpless; but as the queen, she suddenly finds herself able to deny the forest-dwelling hobgoblin. Power both corrupts and enables - she can’t stop him from reclaiming his dues by force, because he’s magic. But being as she’s now a queen, with minions and everything, she can stop him with some good old-fashioned subterfuge. And it doesn’t matter that she cheated, and she knows she cheated, and he knows she cheated – there’s no come-back. It’s just tough shit for the little man. The ruling classes will have their will of you, and do you out of your payment if it suits.

 I for one am grateful to be living in a time where such inequalities and injustices now allow for proper legal redress.

Fairy Tales with Dubious Morals: Part II

The Princess and the Pea

Somewhere in Denmark, a prince is lounging around heaving sad sighs – he has his heart set on marrying a princess, but none of the ones he’s met are awesome enough to deserve him. He’s also suspicious that some may be only pretending to be princesses (this frankly baffling paranoia is never explained; presumably he had a bad experience of some kind). 

This being a fairy tale, into the midst of his naval-gazing comes a young woman claiming to be a princess, who seeks shelter at his castle on a stormy night. The prince quite likes the look of the little goer, but tells his mother that he couldn’t possibly marry her without being utterly certain that she is a real princess. Presumably this is in response to the mum doing that old people nudge-nudge-wink-wink thing at him behind her back the whole time; either that or he's in the habit of discussing his possible conquests with her.

 Pictured: every girl's dream.

His mother responds by giving the girl a bed with twenty mattresses to sleep on, but placing a single pea at the bottom of them all. In the morning, when asked how she slept, the girl responds with a tirade about how she didn’t sleep a wink because something hard kept bruising her (fnar, fnar). The prince and his mother realise that she is a real princess after all – for only a princess could be spoilt beyond all reason – er, delicate enough, to feel a pea through twenty mattresses. The prince marries her, and she presumably repays him for the horribly uncomfortable night she spent being unwittingly auditioned with a solid kick to the kidneys. 

The Supposed Moral

You got me there. Honestly, I’m not sure. The innate nobility of monarchs? The erotic appeal of fragility? The importance of protecting your bloodline from covert pollution by inferior beings?

... Wait, what?

The Actual Moral 

Marrying somebody from a different social class is not merely out of the question – it honestly does not even register on the scale of possibility.

 Look at them, with their scabies, and their beady little eyes. They eat rats you know.

But that’s okay, right? It’s a fairy tale. Princes marry princesses, witches cast spells and monsters get their shit ruined; them’s just the rules. And besides, everyone understands that it’s from a different time. It’s not like “them & us” attitudes about your innate superiority to The Others have caused us any real problems in, say, the last hundred years or so...

 

... All right, except for that ONE TIME.

All I’m saying is, you have to wonder if Prince Purity’s attitude extends to race, religion, or nationality. Because those are some pretty fucked up implications on the inherent inferiority of the 99.999% of the human race who aren’t royalty.

 

“Remove your physical perfection and unconditional adoration from my sight, peasant. Arbitrary inherited titles are how we select life-partners in this social strata.”

The Werewolf

Just a kickass song by one of my favourite bands - a weird little a capella with a schizophrenic build-up & some startlingly beautiful harmonies. It's part-folk tale, part-gothic setpiece, part-demented hillbilly ballad.You keep thinking it can’t get any more haunting or demented. It replies "Bollocks to that."

The song brings together violent animal sexuality and human guilt & moral anxiety - a common theme in modern werewolf myths, in which a very common trope is the afflicted's attempt to protect others from the monster inside them by locking themselves away during the full moon. This contrasts with earlier lore, which was just as likely to see them as evil and violent men, transformed by the Devil to wreak beastlike violence in his name.

Enjoy, and check out the Holy Modal Rounders, if you like the sound of hippies gibbering over strains of psych-folk.

Fairy Tales with Dubious Morals: Part I

If you’re from a first world country, there’s a good chance you were raised on a diet of television,  junk food, baffling euphemisms for the genital area, and fairy tales. The lasting appeal of fairy tales can be explained by their engagement with universal dilemmas such as good versus evil, in a way that’s straightforward and easy to grasp, and their handy knack of imparting moral lessons, while allowing ankle-biters to face their fears in a safe space. Disney became a cornerstone of western culture simply by being good at them.

Sounds good, right? You get to hear a fun story, while working out your unconscious anxieties by seeing them defeated in the form of frequently awesome monsters.

Come on, how many of you can honestly claim to be as comfortable with your own sexuality as this guy?

And if all goes to plan, you get to resolve those anxieties, while learning valuable morals which will stay with you for life. On the face of it, it’s a pretty good deal.

The problem is that sometimes, when you look closer, these morals are either so low they’d make the inhabitants of a Mexican whorehouse blush, or so baffling they make George W. Bush and Boris Johnson look like eloquent, well-informed speakers.

So if you’re reading this from jail, juvie, or the internet cafe you’re hanging out in to keep warm because you’ve been robbed by hookers so many times your home’s been repossessed, don’t hate yourself too much: there’s a chance the Brothers Grimm bear some part of the blame. 

Thanks for the crack habit, dickholes.

HANSEL AND GRETEL

According to folklore scholar Maria Tatar, this story is all about the two kids working out their independence and general coming-of-age shit via the metaphor of food. During a harsh famine, their wicked stepmother convinces their father to abandon the children in the woods so they won’t suck up any more of the limited harvest supply. The father inexplicably consents to her plan, despite the fact that this gives him “great sorrow”.

Pictured: great sorrow. 

( David Castillo Dominici)

The kids overhear them planning whole thing, decide “Fuck that”, and lay a trail of breadcrumbs to help them find their way home. But their plan is ruined when the trail is eaten by birds; lost in the woods, they stumble upon a house made of gingerbread, with sugar window lattices, and are so hungry they fall upon it and literally begin eating the walls. 

Inside the house lives an old woman, who invites them in and feeds them as many sweets and good things as they can eat. However, it turns out that she does this because she is in fact a witch who wants to eat them, and the cookie-fest is her way of fattening them up for this purpose. 

However, Gretel manages to shove the witch into her own giant oven, burning her to death. She and Hansel then steal the witch’s jewels in lieu of leaving a dump in the middle of her carpet, and hightail it out of there. By the time they make it home, stepmum’s obligingly kicked off, their father is overjoyed to see them, and the three of them live happily ever after on the booty-money from the jewels. 

THE SUPPOSED MORAL

Apparently this story is about independence; the children must break the first and most primal dependence the infant has – on the mother, for food – and learn to fend for themselves, kicking some evil witch ass along the way. One symbolic mother figure won’t feed them at all, the other will literally feed them to death, and the only way they can resolve the circle jerk is to become independent entities capable of feeding themselves and their surviving parent, as per the circle of life. All’s well that ends well, right?

THE ACTUAL MORAL

If you want something, just help yourself. And if anybody gets in your way, kill them and steal their shit.

It’s time to look at things from the witch’s point of view for a moment. So you worked hard at the dark arts all your life, poured the results into getting a foot on the property ladder, and you’ve finally swung yourself a nice place. Okay, so it’s made of gingerbread because you’re eccentric that way, but it’s yours and you love it.

Then one day, you go home, and what do you find? You’re missing a fucking wall, because two passing kids just decided on a whim to literally eat your house. It’s probably at this point that you decide to detain them pending punishment. 

Granted, in this case “punishment” involves murdering them and devouring their corpses, rather than having a police officer give them a stern talking-to. But just imagine for a second that Hansel and Gretel had used a petrol bomb instead of the power of gluttony to take out that wall, and the witch had retaliated with a shotgun rather than attempted cannibalism. I’m not saying any of this would be justified; I’m just saying, there’d be at least ten websites lionizing her over the right to defend one’s property by now.

“Ain’t no guvvamint gon' tell ME how to mind my own yard.”

So in less than 24 hours, Hansel and Gretel manage to vandalize the house of an old woman who lives alone (oh yeah, did I mention that she’s also blind?), murder her horribly by burning her to death in an oven, and jack her jewels as a final “fuck you” to pension rights and general human decency. 

“Wow... gotta say, I’m starting to understand why your mother was emotionally distant towards you.”

Nice work, kids. Stay classy.