punipunipyo said:
Yeah, I was TOTALLY in sync with your view on the whole "Fake Nerd Girl" thing... I was like (the first time I heard this was a "thing"... "WTF? Weren't we supposed to be hella happy, that we ARE the mainstream? That WE are the standard? that WE took over? THat ALL they (the beautiful people) are now wanting to be part of OUR culture?" I still don't get it... it took us years, we finally took over the world... and now we don't want to let the people who can MORE APPROVE us being the majority in? that's just stupid... they now want to crown us, and we cast the crown out the window (not in a Christian way)? weird...
Nope, we didn't take over the world.
Thick framed glasses took over the world. Basic Star Wars trivia took over the world. Online memes took over the world.
Being actually nerdy, as in being obsessed with extensive details of some insignificant hobby, even at the expense of sociability, is just as ridiculed as ever. Except that now the people who kept supporting the bullying and the hate and the arrogance, call themselves "nerds", based on some surface change in fashions. Because now instead of dudebro movies, we have dudebro shooters (and games are nerdy, right?), or because the blockbuster movies have more speculative fiction and less traditional war/police action movies (aliens are nerdy, right?), etc.
Because the youtube vloggers playing up their "nerd girl" appeal are the same ones who would have played up an emo style a few years ago, a punk rocker style two decade ago, and a hippie style half a century ago. Because they tend to be the kind of people who care more about following the trends, than understanding the motivations and behaviors of the subcultures that they represent.
Abandon4093 said:
I can't tell whether people genuinely don't understand why there's a thing about fake nerd girls, or whether they're just pretending not to understand it to come off as understanding or something.
People hate attention whores.
That is all.
No seriously, people complain about attention whores everywhere. If there's a person whoring attention, there will be somebody complaining about it. Add to that the general insecurities of people who actually identify as a 'geek' in a non ironic fashion, and you get 'the fake nerd girl meme/situation/whatever.'
It's really not that hard to understand. And I don't even bloodywell identify myself as a geek/nerd/whatever.
The thing is, that all these bloggers, journalists, opinion leaders, and commentators, who keep bringing up these moral issues, are basically pundits.
They are the pundits of the gamer community, and they make a living from bringing you the latest Moral Panic, even if they have to make one up.
Because "There is this big outrage full of idiots where everyone says this and that exact thing, and now here I tell you why they are all wrong" sells better than "There is a recent discussion theme with various directions, out of which, I vehemently disagree with the sexist implications of
Penetrator999's post, and though
leto2yay brought up a good point about booth babes being sexist, then
nippon-warkiller brought that too far by blaming this on the girls themselves, and while
Kafkaesque_Dreamer's justification for nerds' distaste for fakes was spot on,
HotForAsuka sounded a bit too elitist as if she would have a superiority complex about how being a True Nerd is better than being other people."
It's just a show. It's supposed to make you feel involved. Make you feel afraid of the barbarians at the gate, about the "outraged masses" obsessively repeating their point, while US, the right ones, are merely "engaging in discourse".