Gizmodo, of all sites, published a piece today written by Alyssa Bereznak, a woman who ventured into online dating, specifically OkCupid, and came out with a story¹ about a date with a man who is really good at Magic: The Gathering.

I’m divided on this whole thing. This woman is clearly not interested in nerdy pursuits, but the actual substance of her piece isn’t really about hating nerds, it’s more about the sort of information that gets put in dating profiles. Now, in her particular case, the information she wished was there was about a nerdy pursuit. And it could be argued that the sort of deep passion for any subject that is required to become a World Champion of it can be considered nerdy — car nerds, fitness nerds, politics nerds, et. al. — but you don’t need to unless you are intent on casting this woman as a hater of passionate interests.

Common interests build relationships, and discordant interests contribute to strife, that’s true whether it’s you not liking their interests or vice versa. There are countless shortcuts in the modern world of dating, all of them mildly distasteful when discussed openly and plainly, and if the worst one this woman is guilty of is too hastily deciding that she has nothing in common with this man, then she is hardly outside the norm.

Now, that doesn’t mean she isn’t at least a little deserving of the scorn she’s received today, just not really for the supposed nerd bashing. She published this piece. She “outed” this person, when it would’ve been fairly simple to alter some details and leave certain points vague enough that his particular identity didn’t matter, simply that she felt she had nothing in common with him and felt he should have made his level of involvement with Magic clear in his profile; it would have been a dubious point, and fairly demeaning to “nerdy” pursuits, but it would have been presented with a degree of tact. She chose not to do that, and she should bear the consequences of the very public way in which she disclosed and presented this story, but let’s not turn this into a war on nerds.

It’s perfectly fine not liking someone because you don’t think you have anything in common; it’s marginally acceptable to write a piece about it on an incredibly popular blog; it’s decidedly not OK to include the sort of specific details that she includes. That’s just being a bitch.

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Footnotes

1. You can google it if you like, but I don’t see the need to contribute to its search rank by linking to it. [↩]

Some people see that this blog is called “Everything Is Amazing” and get confused, because so much of it is intense criticism and downright hating. Well, a part of that is that I genuinely do think that the world is amazing, and it would be foolish to besmirch it by ignoring the bad things within it¹. But one of the more persistent threads in the negative remarks on this blog is that fandom is shitty.

Drew McWeeny wrote an excellent piece today, after a long increasingly aggressive twitter argument with Harry Knowles, head of Ain’t It Cool News, describing why we can’t simply throw all the blame on the studios for the increasingly derivative and lazy film marketplace we find ourselves in. One of the problems, he notes, is that targeting a nerd audience doesn’t seem to work.

There is a fine line between serving an audience and shamelessly pandering to them, and when the studios decide to go whole-hog and pander without hesitation, and the result is box-office failure after box-office failure, the message seems clear: chasing the fanboys isn’t working. They are unreliable, they are ungrateful, and they aren’t turning out for the “sure things” that have been greenlit specifically for them.

This is one of the reasons I find myself unable to visit Ain’t It Cool News anymore. As much as I like nerd-focused films, it seems like they’re never good enough for the online bastions of nerdery. The problem of course being that there is no such thing as ‘nerd-focused films’ because every nerd has their own idiosyncratic and extreme stance on what should happen to their film. Nerds, like too much of society today, are too self-centred to realize or appreciate the amazing things that happen on their behalf².

When a Captain America movie comes out, they trash it because his helmet doesn’t have wings, or when a Thor movie comes out they trash it because one of the characters is played by a Black man. They ignore the quality of the film, the writing, the directing, the performances, in order to feed their pointless minutiae-driven rants.

There’s no real solution to this. There’s a chance we’ll hit some critical mass and nerds will grow up a little bit and the world of film and television will be able to get back to creating good television regardless of nerd-based fan-service, works that can broaden the minds of all viewers not just satisfy the narrow expectations of the “fans.”

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Footnotes

1. Another perspective here is that it’s amazing how bad some things are. [↩]
2. That doesn’t mean that things can’t improve; they undoubtedly can in almost every aspect of life, but that doesn’t mean things are bad. [↩]