The Sheer Uselessness of Fan Wars
Conflicts among geeks, fans, nerds, and otaku? Seen it a lot in decades of nerdiness, geekiness, and general productive weirdness. Fanfic wars, cosplay wank, it’s all old hat to me.
Oh, I should note? I hate it with the burning passion of nine thousand and one suns.*
See, here’s my view of where fandom/geekdom/whatever stands in our live.
It’s Recretational – For Some
So you play games, watch TV, write fanfic, whatever. It’s fun, it’s relaxing. It’s not your career or anything, but it’s part of who you are.
That’s awesome. So many people do not know what they like or enjoy. Legions of people don’t find anything that inspires them. Your life is a crazy-nerd quilt of inspirations, be it Green Lantern slashfic**, or collecting ancient decrepit comics. You know what makes you happy.
It’s Professional – For Some
Then there’s people like . . . well, me. Yeah, my hobbies are 99.9% pure nerditanium, but really I’m a professional geek. My hobbies and career aren’t exactly easy to separate. You know the type – you may well be the type***.
This is great too. Hobbies enhance careers, careers enhance hobbies, everyone wins. It may not be as relaxing as having separate hobbies, but it opens many opportunities in life.
What do you see here?
I see that geek conflict, fan wank, all of it has no freaking place in either side of the equation. If you’re having fun, dragging in conflict defeats that for you and everyone else. If you’re professional, engaging in a flame war is pretty damn unprofessional (and doing so makes you look bad and develop bad habits).
I’ve seen battles over cosplay, shippingg wars, game dissing, and so forth. I can’t remember a time anything good came out of it.
So, yeah there’s always conflict. It happens. It’s life. But it helps to remember that for us, that conflict in so many cases is the antithesis of why we’re the nerds, fans, and geeks that we are. It lets us avoid making it worse, let’s us avoid starting it, lets us catch ourselves.
If we have to finish it and shut down a fan war? We finish it remembering what’s important to us – the fun, the professionalism, or both.
* Go on. Yell “Over 9,000.” I KNOW you want to.
** With so many species I’m not sure what slashfic IS in the GL corp. Also, seriously, does Mogo ever get any romantic plots?
*** If you want to be the type, contact me. I write on this stuff.
I think it’s our way of behaving like sports fans, or maybe it’s simply human/social nature. What always irks me is the subjective labeling of a “true fan”. This happens in sports and geek interests alike, criticize something you like and you are dubbed the UNTRUE FAN! I comment all the time how the Red Sox have no team chemistry, uh, then I’m NOT a TRUE fan! Ghost Rider was one of my favorite comics but the movie was a piece of poop, uh, not a true fan I guess right? Then there’s the “did you read the book/comic/manga” trap that goes either way in favor of the person asking it. We’ll use the example of Lord of The Rings; “Bob” says he didn’t like the LotR movies, he’s then asked; “did you read the books?” No he says, ah the rational answer is; “ah you’re not a true fan then.” Or! He answers YES and gets the; “you’re just a cranky old fan.”