I find it laughable that you think that geeks weren’t exactly as messy about every fandom update. 25 years ago Star Wars caused public meltdowns. I was there, where grown men cried, in public.
Yeah there was no shortage of people acting like the Star Wars franchise had been utterly ruined by the prequels and the OT special Edition back in the day. Same thing is happening now with the sequels.
It’s true what people say, “nobody hates Star Wars as much as Star Wars fans”.
“You Star Wars fans sure are a contentious people”
“You just made an enemy for life!”
One could argue that it’s the same nerds. The difference isn’t generational, it’s the forums for discussion. Modern platforms offer more validation (in the form of echo chambers) and monetisation in response to over-reacting to this kind of stuff.
Yeah, I did start to mention that possibility. The meme doesn’t really specifically state that it’s a new crop of people, and I do actually suspect it’s a mixture of older nerds who have gone insane and newer nerds who started out insane.
They were the same as they’ve always fucking been, you’re just older and have a better capacity to both notice it and be tired of it, so now you see it more and have a bias because of that.
Before the internet was big we had shitloads of counter monkeys hanging out at the comic shop willing to do either one and sometimes both of these to anyone who would, or had to, listen - with the most likely person being the dude working at the comic shop. Nerds have been doing this shit over comics alone for decades.
Okay boomer.
What, you like the way nerds act, these days?
You enjoy hearing people bitch and moan about what’s canon and what’s not canon?
You didn’t think it was just a little embarrassing, when “Star Trek: Lower Decks” did a one-off joke about a Space Koala God, and people GENUINELY FREAKED OUT, DEMANDING TO KNOW IF THAT SHIT WAS NOW CANON, IN THE STAR TREK UNIVERSE, and actually got into heated debates, about it?
That’s not fucking cringe behavior, to you?
Hell, I didn’t even touch the whole racism and sexism thing. Again, I’m not under any fucking illusions about the past. I know oldschool nerds were mostly heterosexual white men, with some creepy attitudes about a LOT of things. But godDAMN, things have gotten next-level racist, sexist, and intolerant.
To my eternal shame, the realm of the nerds is the ONE AREA where a lot of the young people are seemingly becoming more bigoted and chauvinistic, compared to the oldheads. Fucking depresses me off my fucking ass, man.
So yeah, you call me whatever you want.
People were bitching and moaning twenty years ago about midichlorians, a one-off throw away line that nobody knows it even exists, outside of huge Star Wars nerds.
As for the racism and sexism, it’s despicable, but nothing new. The “new” thing is the internet giving a place and validation to all those deranged individuals, who share controversial takes and create circlejerks and echo chambers where those controversial opinions are upvoted.
People were bitching and moaning twenty years ago about midichlorians, a one-off throw away line that nobody knows it even exists, outside of huge Star Wars nerds
That’s fully true, and I guess it just exposes my oldness, more than anything else. I still have the prequels in the “new shit that just came out, last Thursday” category, in my head. But yeah, that was literally twenty fucking years ago.
Modified theory: I still think nerds used to be a little more “I know oh-so-much more about this media than you ever will” and a little less “I’m eternally uncomfortable about the changes being made to my media.” Lucas came along and started tinkering with his own franchise, in a way that had not been very common, in past eras.
People were used to movies and shows being remade, and arguing about the merits of the original, versus the new shit. They were used to adaptations from books and comics often being disappointing. They were used to SEQUELS coming along and bringing new ideas. Ideas that sometimes even included some retcons, which would technically reach back and change some of the sacred original canon.
But Lucas made prequels very fashionable. AND he wasn’t very careful with what he changed, and how he changed it. And he didn’t listen to all the people telling him “hey, Jar Jar is annoying,” and “hey, these Galactic Senate scenes are cringe,” and “yo, we don’t need to know about how the Force works, on a cellular-biology level.” He just did what he wanted, in an entirely selfish, fart-sniffing way.
And that became the TEMPLATE for a lot of prequel media, up to the present day. I think film and TV producers started semi-deliberately antagonizing the oldschool fanbases, because it drives engagement.
That’s no excuse for people to act like fucking morons, but I do think that we, the nerds, are being consciously manipulated, to draw out the most inflammatory responses, from the worst of us.
Dude, you literally say at the start of your comment that:
nerds used to be a little more “I know oh-so-much more about this media than you ever will” and a little less “I’m eternally uncomfortable about the changes being made to my media.”
You then proceed to call a movie director “selfish” and “fart-sniffing” for telling the story the way he wanted to tell it. You’ve got to admit the irony in all this.
Also, it’s true that big companies are following trends and fostering memes to drive engagement, but I very much doubt that they are willingly antagonizing their own fan bases to drive negative engagement. That sounds like a nightmare that no social media manager would purposely walk into. Nobody is willingly stirring the pot by making people theorize conspiracy theories about a secret leftist agenda. That’s just humanity for you. Some are good people, a lot suck.
The entities that are willfully stirring the pot are social media platforms, who have a lot more to gain by having those people scream at one another in their feeds, because controversial takes can populate comment sections more and faster than mild takes, which drive engagement on those social platforms even further.
I don’t like your dumbarse “my generation were great, the young generation are bad” mentality.
It’s rose tinted bullshit, and you’ve reached it by ignoring decades of pointless nerd debates.
The only cringe behaviour I see is yours.
I never really intended it to be a generation complaint. Note that, in the meme itself, I didn’t say “old nerds” on the top and “young nerds” on the bottom. I said “nerds back in my day” and “nerds in the current era.”
A LOT OF THE NERDS ACTING LIKE SHIT-FOR-BRAINS MANIACS ARE TOTALLY THE SAME NERDS WHO USED TO ACT BETTER, BACK IN THE DAY.
It’s a mixture of oldheads who went insane and new nerds who went insane more quickly.
I just think the pointless debates were a little less annoying, when they were at least done from a position of “haha, I’m so smart,” as opposed to throwing tantrums.
I think part of it is how social media has allowed us to put so much pressure on producers, writers, showrunners, etc, to deliver “explanations” for stuff that they’re doing.
Back in the day, you’d have to write a physical letter, stick it in the mailbox, and hope someone at the studio wouldn’t just throw it directly in the trash, before it could even get to the producers you were angry at. So the nerds just talked amongst themselves, knowing it would be pointless to engage in letter-writing campaigns.
But now, we collectively abuse our power, brigading media creators for the slightest little thing that we might dislike.
Username does not check out…
This person looked in the mirror this morning and thought to themselves “THEY are the problem!!”
Nerds are not more racist, sexist, or intolerant now than twenty years ago
Now you just see the morons on discussion forums which let you interact with people who you would have never talked to in real life
Yeah there was a whole issue when games stopped giving stat impacts based on character gender
Italics, bold, all caps
Hmm… are you the person in the comic? Is this new canon?
Where do you see all this behavior that you don’t like? Maybe you need to remove yourself from these crowds you hate so much. If everyone else is the asshole, maybe you’re the asshole, etc. Just leave any community you don’t enjoy, period.
I don’t see any kind of the BS that you mention. I talk to sensible people of my own choosing about things I want to talk to them about. You should try that, I suppose. 🤷♂️ Best of luck to you. 👍
You have to be trolling. This shit is E V E R Y W H E R E.
If nobody was screeching and wailing like I’m talking about, then why did Todd Howard have to come out and do a goddamned press conference, explaining that the plot of Fallout: New Vegas hadn’t been retconned out of existence?
That pressure didn’t come from nowhere.
Have you stopped to think why it affects you so much, that people care so much about lore?
I am not trolling. It just seems like this bothers you a lot, so I figured I’d just give some tips on how I’d handle it. 🤷♂️ Take it or leave it, I guess.
You’re missing the point, on several different levels.
First of all, note that both the nerds in my meme care about lore. Both of them are depicted as having extensive knowledge of the lore, from whatever media they’re talking about. And both of them care about it. The first one, in my opinion the more “traditional” nerd, deals with a potential change in lore by obsessively cataloguing and analyzing the situation. He will likely assume that it’s a mistake that’s been made, and that the fans of the media actually know more about the lore than the writers, themselves.
Sure, that type of nerd isn’t immune to ALL emotionalism, about such changes in lore…but his main concern is maintaining his obsessive catalog of knowledge, then using that armament to win arguments with whoever will listen. If he thinks the changes are bad, he will usually be happy enough to just have that as another thing he can be correct about.
The SECOND type of nerd is a ball of insecure, fragile, cringe-tastic emotion. If the writers make a change to the fictional universe he’s become attached to, he lacks the ability to say “meh. I’ll just ignore that. Maybe it means I don’t really care for this latest iteration of the series, or this TV adaptation. I’ll just hope they do better next time.”
They can’t do that. They melt down and freak out. It’s unseemly, to say the least.
And the thing is, these guys are so loud and obnoxious (and even SCARY) that they’re starting to have an increasing ability to affect the media that I care about. I’m a nerd, too. Keep that in mind. I don’t like seeing my people act like shitheads, and I don’t like the hobbies I enjoy being threatened by whining freaks.
his main concern is maintaining his obsessive catalog of knowledge, then using that armament to win arguments with whoever will listen. If he thinks the changes are bad, he will usually be happy enough to just have that as another thing he can be correct about.
The SECOND type of nerd is a ball of insecure, fragile, cringe-tastic emotion. If the writers make a change to the fictional universe he’s become attached to, he lacks the ability to say “meh. I’ll just ignore that. Maybe it means I don’t really care for this latest iteration of the series, or this TV adaptation. I’ll just hope they do better next time.”
Both of these types of nerd sound insufferable in their own way, in my opinion, to be absolutely frank with you.
Yeah. I agree. Nobody should aspire to be either one of those fucking assholes.
But the new variety is much more likely to ruin stuff. Like I’ve mentioned, there is evidence that producers and/or writers are responding to them. When the oldschool nerd acted smug and sarcastic, nobody paid any attention to his stupid ass. Everyone just went “man, that guy takes fandom waaaaay too seriously” and totally ignored the dipshit.
So, ya know, I prefer that version. The one that doesn’t wreck up the place.
The only difference now is that we have a medium that can instantly spread our view across the globe
…what?
Where are you seeing this kind of reaction?
Is the complaint that young nerds nowadays can’t figure canon out or they whine about it more?
It’s not about “figuring out” what’s canon. It’s this hand-wringing, “b-b-b-but is it canon or not” bullshit. It is indeed the whining that I’m talking about.
I have only watched the first episode of the new Fallout series, but apparently there’s some kind of inconsistency, between the timeline of the games, and the timeline in the show. As I said, oldschool nerds would have been like “HMMM, BEING A SMART PERSON, I NOTICED EVERY TINY THING THAT WAS CHANGED. FIRST, DID EVERYONE ELSE NOTICE EVERYTHING I NOTICED? I BET YOU DIDN’T, BECASUE I’M VERY VERY SMART AND MY KNOWLEDGE OF THE LORE KNOWS NO BOUNDS.”
Then they would all argue about whether the version of the timeline in the new TV show or movie is good or bad.
But these kids now…they just start whining and screaming. Todd Howard literally had to make a video statement, confirming that the game timeline was not being retconned.
Nobody used to do that. It’s cringe shit, man.
I guess I blame Disney for going out of their way to ostentatiously obliterate the Star Wars expanded-universe canon, in a very insulting and apocalyptic manner. And Marvel for pushing the idea that the film timeline is the “official” one.
But it’s still cringe to get so bent out of shape. Be a judgmental, picky, annoying nerd, all you want. But at least have the decency to be smug and superior, rather than an irritating little pussy.
I’m sure if the internet existed at the time, there would be plenty of things to find on the wayback machine of nerds in the 50’s complaining about DC taking away Superman’s exhaustive list of super powers and making it a more manageable, consistent set. Or turning Batman from a light-hearted detective series into whatever it is today.
Canonicity debates? Laughs in C0da
I hate canon debates.
“So which of these two adaptations actually happened?” …NEITHER of them. They’re fiction, man. Even most writers are making it up as the go.
But the board said 2277!!!
Who cares about canon, just make your own. Star Wars episodes 7-9 are not canon for me.
So many bad commas
72 percent of them were on purpose.
Yes! Equestria girls is officially canon. Fucking deal with it.
That’s nothing new my friend.
Chewbacca dies saving people on an exploding planet.
