Why Your Lust For A Shared Fandom Is Fucking Up Your Relationships
My friend Rahul Kanakia wrote an excellent article called “Why Do All Sci-Fi Novels Assume That If A Person Likes All The Same Stuff As You, Then You’re Their Soulmate?” And there, he highlighted one of the major fallacies of geek culture: ZOMG IF I COULD JUST FIND A WOMAN WHO LIKES D&D, THEN WE’RE MEANT TO BE.
But honestly, while your mutual love of GI Joe cartoons is a good starting point to launch talks, it’s by no means a guarantee that you’re gonna be good at a relationship. I mean, yeah, “She loves D&D!” seems great – but if you’re a passionate roleplayer who nobly flings the rulebook aside in your quest to discover Your True Character, and you hook up with a girl who’s a merciless power-player who’d cheerfully run an orphan-slaughtering factory if the XP boost got her to twentieth level, then you’re probably not going to work out well in the long run.
That geek fallacy assumes, incorrectly, that there’s only one thing to love about any given media property – so if you both like it, then you both like the same thing. Yet every fandom’s a big place. When I say I love Star Wars, I love Luke. Others love Han. Or Darth Vader. Or Jar-Jar. And you seriously think a guy who has a room full of Jar-Jar collectibles is going to connect with the Capulet that is Lady Vader?
Now, I’m not saying love can’t blossom from the same fandom. (Frankly, I’ve never found two Terry Pratchett fans who couldn’t work it out.) But when fandom is presented as the unerring key to your heart, that leads to disaster. Because that encourages sad, lonely men (and women!) to view the opposite sex as some sort of collectible action figure – “Wait! I found the girl who likes Pokemon! That means I’m done!”
So they discard women who don’t like Pokemon, narrowing their vision to find that one Pikachu girl.
And they find her, and of course she’s surrounded by tons of other blinkered dudes who are convinced that if they can just get her attention, they are guaranteed love.
And they find her beset by men of all sorts, so many drooling dudes that it starts to erode their enjoyment in this hobby – sure, maybe she loved Pokemon once, but in a Pavlovian process she is now coming to associate “Pokemon” with “guys constantly pawing at her,” and that’s not cool.
But lo, they persevere on, pushing past all the other guys to become her friend. And they genuinely seem to believe on some level that merely a) being in close proximity to her, and b) sharing this hobby means c) hot smoochin’ FOREVER.
Yet A + B != C here.
That’s a problem with American culture in general, not just nerd culture. Every love story slurs “falling in love” and “staying in love” together, because functioning long-term relationships are hard to make dramatic. Falling in love, that’s exciting! It’s a first! Fireworks of new things! And breaking up, that’s exciting! All the arguments and final decisions!
So what we get, filtered through the lens of narrative interest, is this weird idea that “falling in love” has mostly the same mechanics as “maintaining a relationship.” And so we come to think what makes a good relationship is this constant fascination, endlessly going out for coffee and exchanging secrets and finding new places to go, because that’s what young couples do.
Except that’s the start of a relationship. All those grand gestures are because you’re finding out what the other person is like, having all of these grand talks because you don’t know them yet – and you’re trying to determine whether this is, indeed, good. And I’m not saying you shouldn’t be interested in someone, because part of maintaining a good relationship involves not going on autopilot – but too many old married couples have tried to restart their relationship by “Let’s go out for coffee,” only to discover that they actually don’t have much left to say to each other.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Gini and I have been together for fifteen years. We’ve heard all our good stories. We don’t have much to talk about because we’ve been there for everything that’s happened over the last fifteen years – we catch up when someone comes back from a convention, or when the new Avengers trailer drops. But if our relationship was predicated on “all the new things we did together,” our marriage would be buried in a broken heap down at the dump.
But what nerds come to think is that this flurry of initial conversation is proof you’re compatible. And it’s not. You’re confusing the gathering of proof with the proof itself.
Sometimes you talk for hours on the phone, yes, and what you discover in those hours on the phone is that this person (or at least who this person presents themselves as) is someone you’d like to call a friend. But when you have that terrible overhang of “exploration is romance” tangled up in this, then you get some very confused people. Hey! We spent days together! I comforted them when they were down! I did all the things that romantic couples do, and romance didn’t come tumbling out, so she did something wrong!
Except she didn’t. She figured out what kind of relationship she’d like to have with you. And you’re misinformed enough to believe that this process is what creates love, instead of realizing this process is where you discover if romantic love might exist.
(I say “she” here, because guy nerds are often the most vitriolic about misunderstanding the process, but hoo boy you see women assuming that “intense discussions” are “love” as well. Nerd culture is overwhelmingly male, and I’m discussing nerd culture, but Jesus please don’t take these examples as evidence that women don’t make these mistakes often.)
So what you’ll often see in male nerd cultures is this horrendous bitterness – hey, I found a woman who likes Pokemon! And we talked! We talked for hours! And she wasn’t interested in me!
She must be a fake nerd girl.
Because yeah, of course the problem isn’t that you foolishly assumed a shared fandom was your ticket to hot cuddles. Nor was it that you assumed that your having long talks would create a lasting love. No, the problem is that she just wasn’t into Pokemon enough, and god damn it how dare someone claim they’re into Pokemon when they won’t fuck me.
Whereas the truth is, watching Pokemon cartoons is a thing you can do together. It’s a good thing to switch back to when the awkward silence falls over that first date. But loving Pokemon doesn’t say a damn thing about what love language you speak, or how you react when your lover hurts you, or whether they’re good for you in bed, or how much you pay attention to the person you’re dating as opposed to watching this brightly-colored Japanese cartoon on the screen.
That shared love you have of fandom? It’s a good start. But a good start isn’t a guaranteed finish. And worse, that attitude is slowly making fandom a hostile place for women, by reducing their fandom to a sign of romantic compatibility, and encouraging every guy to think that they deserve a shot with her, and all the angry feedback that incurs when they don’t get it.
And if you’re wonder why it’s so hard to find a girl who’s into what you are, maybe you’re part of the problem. Because they do exist. They just may have chosen to take their love into a private space, where that affection they have for Green Lantern doesn’t turn their body into a bulls-eye.
Annie, Or: How To Do A Revamp Properly
Hollywood does a lot of reboots and revamps, uprooting classic stories to either a) tell them the exact same way you told them before, or b) changing so much that they forget exactly what made the original great.
Annie, however, is the finest revamp I have ever seen. It completely changes the classic Orphan Annie story – which is good, because that story’s almost a century old at this point, and encrusted with decades’ worth of predictable remakes. It’s fearless in the way it throws out whole elements, whole characters, changing classic songs without batting an eye.
And what you get is modern, and refreshing, and just as relevant as when the old Annie came out.
Annie’s been getting some terrible reviews – partially, I suspect, because the producers were a tad heavy-handed on the autotune. But I also think there’s a certain discomfort with how they’ve changed Annie – a soporific ode to yesterday’s greatness – into a fairly ugly reflection of today’s environment.
Thing is, for all the talk about The Black Annie being an outrage, Black is the new Irish. Annie was a red-haired moppet not because the people of old loved Gingers, but because she was clearly the unwanted offspring of an immigrant class most people despised. People back in the day would have properly read this encoding, but America’s largely forgotten the “NO IRISH” signs hung on places seeking employment. So having Annie be unwanted and black is proper.
And Annie is – well, not Annie. Don’t get me wrong, I love old Annie (I can quote you large swathes of the 1982 version), but old Annie was – well, sweet. She was supposed to be spunky, but after she rescued Sandy, she sort of lapsed into a cheerful passive aggression where she got what she wanted by sunnily guilt-tripping everyone.
This new Annie, however, celebrates the hustle.
This Annie schemes. She’s got dreams, and she doesn’t just sing Tomorrow – she’s hunting for side jobs to get the $43.20 to pay for the bureaucratic fees to find out who her parents were. She isn’t just thrilled to be with today’s equivalent of Daddy Warbucks – she’s actively using him, as she uses her. As witness this scene where Stacks (the new Warbucks) realizes he needs to put Annie up at his house in order to get the photo ops he needs:
Stacks: “There’s got to be an easier way to get these photos.”
Annie: “Not if you want me in ’em.”
And I think that white America is generally uncomfortable looking at this. Annie’s supposed to be escapist! Annie’s supposed to be sweet, a passive thing carried off by well-meaning rich people! But no; Annie explicitly rejects that paradigm, saying that the people who get rich work their ass off for it. Annie works hard, Stacks works hard – it’s a sharp-eyed look at the American Dream, wherein you won’t get anywhere if you don’t scrape for every penny, but by God the system can still knock you on your ass.
Speaking of which, Annie carries on the great tradition of keeping its creator Harold Gray spinning in his grave by completely changing Daddy Warbucks. The movie is firmly in the pro-FDR camp, but recognizes that things have changed since 1940. Stacks is now a cell phone billionaire running for mayor, mainly because it’s the next achievement to rack up for his massive ego. He has no particular plans for New York, no vision – it’s just the next step up in life for him.
And here’s the thing: the movie questions whether this is a good thing.
Whether Stacks is worthy of being mayor is a constant background issue. This new Annie implies that if you’re going to rule, you should do so with compassion, and while you can get elected it’s not going to be good for people if you do.
The new Annie also has compassion for everyone, man. The streets that Annie lives in? Rough, but supportive overall. They’ve got nobody but themselves. In particular the movie transforms Mrs. Hannigan, throwing out the random “Her brother and his ditzy girlfriend show up” plotline to provide Ms. Hannigan with a real and awful choice in politics. Ms. Hannigan has actual dreams – and while she’s unabashedly a monster, she once was a singer. She never made it. And that failed ambition curdled something within her.
In this new world of Annie, everyone has something worthwhile about them, if you look hard enough.
I suspect this movie’s getting pummeled in the reviews because, well, for a kid’s film it’s explicitly political. And as a remake, it is the precise opposite of what most people consider to be faithful – all the classic elements are erased. So you’ll have people pounding on it for putting in new musical numbers, or transforming the classics, and that’s it.
And… Annie’s black.
There needs to be a better word for racism, something more fine-grained. But in America, there’s this thread bubbling through our culture where white kids get to be adorable, but black kids are perceived as a threat more easily, seem more sinister. White people aren’t even aware of it, but the fact is that black people are twenty times more likely to be shot by cops, and I don’t think that’s because the cops are KKK members – I think it’s because years of cultural mores have piled up to quietly teach us that pale skin is forgivable, and dark skin is a harbinger of ill intent.
What’s the word when someone’s quietly regurgitating negative attitudes they’ve absorbed without even being aware of it? “Racism” sounds like an active choice to most white people. But there’s no better word to indicate these subliminal winces, the kind of thing where people say I dunno, Annie’s good but there was just something about her I didn’t click with.
And the danger of this sort of thing is that you get to handwave all criticism by claiming racism, which I am explicitly not. Like I said, this won’t be to everyone’s tastes. But the problem with this unthinking downgrading of African-Americans is that some percentage of negative reviews is doubtlessly due to this insidious undertow, and maybe it wouldn’t have made Annie A+ reviews across the board, but maybe it’d be a 6.0 on IMDB instead of the 4.9 it is now.
Regardless, though, Annie is an amazing movie. You’re going to get poppy auto-tune sprayed in your face, and if you don’t like that, then best stay away. But the film’s battled through crippling reviews and an early Sony leak of the full film three weeks before release to earn more than its budget, which indicates strongly that someone’s liking it. I suspect, in time, it may become a touchstone classic for someone in the next generation, much like Labyrinth was a box-office flop but inspired many young girls to be more than they were.
In any case, it’s not gonna be in theaters for much longer. I’d go see it while you can.
Flex Book Tour: New York and Boston(ish)! Meet A Weasel On March 13th and 14th!
I promised y’all I’d tell you when I’d be in your town to sign my upcoming novel FLEX, and at last I have East Coast dates confirmed! So mark your calendar! Not only will I sign books for y’all, but chances are extremely good you can coax me out to the bar afterwards, where I may even buy you a drink.
Friday, March 13th: WORD Bookstore Brooklyn
126 Franklin St, Brooklyn, NY 11222
7 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, March 14th: Annie’s Book Stop Of Worcester
65 James Street, Worcester MA 01603
5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
Tell your friends! Make extravagant plans! Arrive with bells on, for I fear loneliness! (And once the people have their Facebook event pages up for these, tell ’em, so they can better prepare for either an onslaught or the hollow rustle of tumbleweeds drifting through their store!)
I Don't Know Charlie Hebdo
I’d be shocked if you haven’t heard, but there was a recent terrorist attack on a French magazine called Charlie Hebdo, which published cartoons of Mohammed. Twelve dead, including the editor and four cartoonists. I think the only word that comes close to summing it up is “terrible.”
I had not heard of Charlie Hebdo before this attack.
Fortunately, social media has my back.
Over the last two days, Twitter has provided me with a mini-education on what Charlie Hebdo was, the long tradition of purposefully offensive French satire, a smattering of cartoons, and past controversies. This is better than Wikipedia, in many ways – Wikipedia summarizes a thing in an essay style designed to be as dry as dusty encyclopedias, whereas Twitter links me to shining jewels of editorials, reducing things to the pithiest of quotes. I’ve read probably a good novelette’s worth of information on Charlie Hebdo since the murders.
Yet this education is incomplete.
The thing I find lacking in all of these talks on Charlie Hebdo is, well, Charlie Hebdo. I could be thought to be well-read on the topic – but the truth is, for all the furor, I still have zero idea what the inside of the magazine looks like. I’ve seen a few covers, which appeared to be pretty amateurish to me, and some translated cartoons, but…
I have not experienced the source material in any meaningful way. Only a radiating circle of reactions to it.
Which happens a lot in social media. I sure know a lot about Justin Bieber and what a jerk he is and how his fans are crazy, but I couldn’t pick a Justin Bieber tune out of a Spotify lineup. I’d read tomes’ worth of Twilight’s regrettable gender politics and shoddy writing long before I finally sighed and picked the damn book up to see for myself. The Michael Brown shooting gave me voluminous essays explaining to me Just What Happened During The Shooting before I gave in and read the coroner’s report for myself.
In social media, the story becomes its own narrative, often divorced from the core material. Yet we wind up considering ourselves experts on a topic we’re still, in some vital way, unfamiliar with.
Interestingly, I wound up envying my friend Billy Moreno on Ferguson, because he took some time off and went down to Ferguson to participate in the protests. Now, Billy, he has a good take on what happened down there. He got off his couch and got some direct experience – and admittedly it’s just a sliver of real life, but that’s all any of us get, really.
Yet even a tourist’s direct take is better than a Twitter overview, to my mind.
I’m not saying the hundred essays I read on “What it’s like to live in Ferguson” were useless – some education is always better than none – but I remain excruciatingly aware that any image I take away from social media is lacking some essential truth. It’s a flurry of opinions, many from people I usually agree with, but I can no more get a full idea of what it’s like to live in Ferguson than I can fully get what it’s like to live as a black man by reading essays.
It’s good to use those essays as a bridge to understand things, mind you. I’m a better person for having read black fathers’ takes on the talks they have to have with their sons, and imagining me having to say that to my kids, and feeling that burn of the ol’ empathy muscle flexing and flexing hard.
But it’s also good to recognize that “reading someone’s take on an experience” is not the same as “knowing that experience.” Just because I read about that black father doesn’t mean that I get what it’s like to be him, now. Just because I read about Ferguson doesn’t mean that I know what’s happening down there. Just because I’ve read tons of fan reactions to Twilight doesn’t mean that I know what reading the book is like.
There’s still that gap.
And so I come to Charlie Hebdo with a student’s ignorance. They were engineered to be offensive. They served a long-set function in a foreign society I don’t understand that well. Nobody should have murdered them, of course – but when I look at, say, their cover presenting the Boko Haram sex slaves as welfare mothers, I have to acknowledge that this cover was presented in a context, and despite reading much of the hubbub surrounding that cover, I am largely unaware of that context.
And maybe this is just my take on things, but I frequently feel like people are force-educating themselves on daily topics so they can have opinions – hey, Charlie Hebdo just got shot, how do I feel about that? I need to be a part of this social media story, to have something meaningful to contribute, and so I gotta start finding what I think Charlie Hebdo was so I can be relevant. It’s the old op-ed columnist trick, where you wake up and have twelve inches of column to fill, and you’d better fill it with something. Let’s start asking Interesting Questions! Was Charlie Hebdo too offensive? Should people be defending them? Hey, can we find all the worst moments of Charlie Hebdo to kickstart a discussion on my watch? Can we find the finest moments when they spoke truth to power?
People sometimes get accused of “seeking offense.” I don’t think people seek offense. But I do think that social media encourages people to seek a story that they can attach themselves to, to determine super-quickly whether they are For this new stage of events or Against it – and thus they carbo-load on other people’s interpretations of these events so they can stake out a position. So they can be seen to be participating.
As for me, though, I kind of think that social media discourages a very important skill: the ability to Not Know. Do I think that Justin Bieber’s a spoiled twat? I honestly don’t know. Never met the dude. All I get on Twitter from friends who delight in watching snotty teens go down is a constant stream of his worst hits, and I refuse to assume that this is accurate.
What I hear about him sounds bad, I agree. I’m willing to go so far as to say that he looks like an entitled jerk who’s going to run into trouble when he runs out of fans. Just like it was entirely fair of me to say “I haven’t read Twilight, but a lot of my friends think it’s pro-stalkery pap, and so I have no interest in reading it.” (Even if I eventually did.)
But when I speak of Justin Bieber, or Charlie Hebdo, or Ferguson, or any breaking story, I also acknowledge my own ignorance. I don’t know them. I haven’t been there, myself. I am being educated second-hand, by takes on people’s takes – and it’s not merely okay, but actively healthy, for me to say, “I don’t have to have an opinion on this.”
What I see on Twitter isn’t necessarily the truth. It’s just a collected amalgamation of the opinions of people my friends agree with. And while I trust my friends, they can fuck up, and I can fuck up, and so the least I can do is keep my ignorance on the topic firmly in mind.
Until someone starts writing about pudgy white male depressives. Then I’m an expert.
If Someone Gives Me Another All-Male Cast, I'm Gonna Ancillary Justice 'Em
I’m reading Ancillary Sword, the sequel to the most excellent Ancillary Justice, which has a “hook” that’s confused a lot of people:
All of the characters are referred to as “she.”
Not that the universe is all-female, of course; it’s just that the lead character in the Ancillary series is actually a computer AI given a fleshy body, and in this universe gender clues are both subtle to spot and socially painful to get wrong. And since the book’s told from Breq’s viewpoint, she just assumes that everyone’s a “she,” even if they have a beard or an Adam’s apple or a chest as furry as a black bear in heat.
This has gotten a lot of pushback as “stunt writing.” Who is Ann Leckie to just gender a whole universe? It’s confusing! It’s crazy!
But in other news, Mark Lawrence made a post where he was very proud of publishing a (successful) book with an all-male cast, which led to a discussion of how a lot of fantasy writers just sorta forget to put female characters in except when it’s time to fuck. All the leads are male. All the shopkeepers are male. All the politicians are male. One wonders how these universes breed, when women are all hidden like cockroaches, not venturing into the light until one of the very manly testosterone-producers waves his magic schlong and they all arrive from whatever hidden chick-village they hole up in.
That’s unrealistic. So the next time I read a book where it’s all-dudebro, all-the-time, I’m just going to assume that the lead character is, like Breq, actually psychologically incapable of spotting the difference between men and women, and we are hearing the strange story of a man who is so in love with his muscles that he has accidentally misgendered a whole world. It’s not that women don’t exist here; it’s that he is incapable of recognizing the female nature of someone who’s not sexually attracted to him personally, and these bold adventurers are actually severely psychologically dysfunctional in a way that they, sadly, cannot recognize.
These poor souls! But now that I’ve just Ancillary Justiced their plight, I can feel their pain. This isn’t bad writing that presents a completely unrealistic world artificially warped to service the needs of very manly men; it’s just very subtle characterization, where the author is drawing attention to how stunted the world view is of so many heroes.
It’s a service, guys. Thanks for providing it.