I Been Robbed

What does one do when some of the very things that helped to define her as unique became so mainstream that they're no longer weird or geeky?  Do you insist to new friends that you liked this stuff way back before it was cool and in fact caused you to be labelled "geek" or "nerd" by your own family?  Do you find new interests - casually discarding those very things you loved and you stood by for years even though they subjected you to social pariahism?  Or do you embrace what mainstream culture can do for your favorite genre and ride the wave until this all becomes uncool again?

I remember in second grade meeting a young man named Greg in the Gifted and Talented class at my elementary school in Okinawa.  While Greg was a typical mean seven year old, in my secret thoughts, Greg was supremely awesome!  This was due to the fact that Greg played Dungeons and Dragons.  This early exposure to the penultimate role-playing game only served to shape the coming years.  While I was never able to convince Greg to let me play with him nor anyone else, I had been bitten by the bug of alternate realities, expanding creative horizons, fantastical beasties, and magic.  Almost thirty years later and this love has only expanded, although I still have never found anyone to play D&D with.

For this love I endured years of name calling by my siblings, acceptance but lack of complete understanding by my family, and difficulty making friends that understood me compounded by the fact I never lived anywhere long enough to find those with interests similar to mine coupled with a desire to fit in quickly since I would be gone soon anyway.  There were positives such as developing a love for the slightly off beat.  When you have to search a bookstore for the fantasy section and ultimately find it in some darkened corner tucked away so we weirdos will not offend the "normal" clientele, you learn to love being the skeleton in the closet.  The secret being that there were obviously enough of us that loved these books and spent real money on them that there were sections devoted to our beloved genre and we were not lumped in with fiction.

It also taught me to love who I was and that the opinions of people I don't know don't matter and that of those I love should only matter as far as it affects them.  And my love of sci-fi did not affect them.  I learned to appreciate my perceived quirkiness.

What a great many people do not realize is that some very highly intelligent people write in this genre.  There's a reason the genre has always been associated with science geeks.  It expands the realm of accepted reality.  It teaches you to think outside the box.  It introduces young minds to concepts that are difficult to explain in real world terms, but make total sense in the world of Isaac Asimov or Orson Scott Card or...  These authors never told you what to think.  They simply told you to think.  Think about the possibilities.  Accept the impossible and decide on your own what you will believe.

The Next Generation

With all these positive points, the social stigma has always in the past crippled those of us who wish to shout aloud our preference for these other world.  We were labeled Trekkies, or comic book geeks, or those weirdos that like to dress up.  Combine this stigma with the social retardation experienced by a young girl who was not given the opportunity to find like-minded individuals in a pre-internet era and you get my childhood.  Alone even within a family of five.  Loved, but with no one to share my dismay over the death of Superman or with whom to discuss the possibility of time travel and whether or not it has been done before in the manner presented in Pastwatch.  As a result, I became proud of my differences.  I chose to revel in them and use them to explain away beliefs that my siblings thought odd.  As a an adult, after learning my lesson with the first husband (a young and foolish transgression) I decided to wait for companionship until I was able to find a man who could at the very least appreciate my nerdiness if not completely immerse himself within it.  In the meantime, I taught my children to love fairies and dragons.  I taught them to read as much as they could of whatever they wanted (it took a while as neither has been the voracious reader I was in my youth, but we're slowly getting there).  I taught them to embrace their own weirdness - whatever it may be - and to shout it out to the world in defiance of established social mores.

But now, in thanks to the likes of J.K Rowling, who I cannot lambast no matter how mainstream she has made wizards, Peter Jackson, who I have to adore, Stephanie Meyer, and George Lucas, who really never should have made the SW I-III as he had fallen too much in love with enhanced special effects and lost sight of the effectiveness of good writing, my beloved genre has become mainstream.  The very thing that made me different and  I believe led to me finding the love of my life, has been co-opted by the children of the John Hughes generation and, as a result, embraced by those same people who used to shun us "weirdos".

How do I feel about this?  In some ways, it's nice to see what happens when funds are released by those with the wherewithal to create or distribute the movies, television shows, comic books, novels, and sundry accessories that help to define what we're all about.  We get some mind-bending results as Inception jaw dropping spectacles like LOR.   The drawback to all this money is a loss in the ideals and inherent principles of the genre.  Now creators, especially of the movies, must produce results that have mass appeal.  It must draw in the crowds.  It must fly off the shelves.  Drastically reduced is the culture that encouraged cult classics like Rocky Horror Picture Show, Star Trek before the Next Generation, Clash of the Titans before remakes.  And the remakes.  THey may be technologically better, but they will never compare to the originals.  The cheese factor aside, these were the stories that boldly went where no man had been before.

And finally, I have been robbed.  It is now cool to like wizards and witches.  It is now cool to believe in alternate realities.  TV shows are made about loveable nerds and they do well (Big Bang Theory).  I and my ilk are accepted because of our quirkiness.  The things that made me interesting have been usurped and turned into fodder for the masses.  My sci-fi section at the bookstore has expanded and spilled over into the bodice-ripper genre (of which I have also been a fan since teenage-hood and I also blame for this turn of events as the heroines have been traveling in time for at least 15 years).  There is actually a teen paranormal genre now.  It all just seems to be the paint thinner that sloughs away the gild from the lily.  I only hope to  retain my membership in the world of the offbeat and ride the train of expanded possibilities now available until we nerds are able to take it back, along with the worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars, DC, Marvel, Asimov...