roseveare

I keep increasingly seeing snippets of a "nice guy/geek guy characters are bad" u-turn in fandom which to be honest, what? Because stupid me, I'm still wed to the notion that when I say a character is a nice guy that's a good thing, and I have no idea where the original meta is that this stems from or when but--

Yeah. So. Jake Foley. Chuck. Keiichi Morisato. Sam Oliver from Reaper, maybe, because I need to rewatch that show and I can't remember if he has a girlfriend at the start. But any number of other characters that we loved 5-10 years ago, are we not supposed to like anymore because they're presented as nice/geek guys who can't get girlfriends? When a decade ago we had icons that said "geek guys get all the girls" and geek positive was great? (though I think my response at the time was "can geek girls have some too?")

Shouldn't fandom send memos when the meaning of something entirely flips from positive to negative? Or at least shouldn't people have some kind of grasp that maybe a lot of fans, either new ones incoming or ones that didn't get the memo yet, are going to assume words mean what they mean? The person who expected me to psychically intuit all of this in a conversation last year obviously didn't, they were still telling me I was an emotionally vacant aspergers bitch (while not a direct quote, pretty much in a nutshell) in email a month back for not knowing it.

I get that somewhere at the core of this u-turn is a thing about how some people built up fantasies about this type of guy and got let down or taken advantage of, so it's probably whiplash from that whole thing 5-10 years ago? But it seems couterproductive to hype up and condemn one character type for doing shit that men do or as if non-geek types never do that. I also get that there's a shift in the status of the geek in the real world now we're all much more technology-hooked so there's a time-sensitive factor. But I always read this as predominently a male comedy trope anyway, which I liked because it actually tended to give me characters that I could relate to a bit more than the other standard fare. And gee, at heart the message that someone might be socially and romantically inept and yet in the course of the story have their inner value affirmed and brought out... Of course that's not going to have meant anything to people who watched and rooted for those characters.

There was a fabulous Tumblr post I saw a few weeks back about "your fave is problematic" which dug into this whole issue of fandom suddenly declaring things "problematic" in dismissal of all the people to whom that thing had been important and helped them out by giving them a reflection when they felt shitty in the past. I'll have to see if I can find that again.

Regards the fact it might be feeding a bit into the Nathan-hate thing in some quarters where I've encountered hints of this, frankly I'd say he's a more developed character and actually presented as far too morally muddied to fit this trope anyway. And when can't get a girlfriend is re-visioned through/tied to a physical disability (albeit of supernatural origins) and anxiety about not being able to sustain relationships because of not being able to touch|feel people, I would say that is a fucking different thing. (And also a damn good reason -- among others -- why this particular character might come attached to a great deal of other importance for people who are this. [In non-supernatural-troubled variants, obviously.])

In terms of the direct geek thing it's probably an... older trope anyway? It's certainly going out of fashion, because computers and genre tv is more mainstream than it used to be.

But meta-ish thoughts aside, mainly I am just, fuck you fandom, on this point. Because it changes the rules on you and doesn't tell you and then calls you names for not knowing. And seriously, where did these conversations happen? Because I didn't see them. All I've seen is the odd mention that over time added up to the conclusion that this is now a Thing.

I'm sorry if anyone is offended by this post. I am definitely working in the dark without a map, here, and have had to piece together what understanding of the issue I could.

[ETA. Someone brought up the idea that this might come from a thing in the feminist rather than fandom sphere, of a Nice Guy Syndome, so it seems possible to me that this is filtering through in a slightly confused sort of sense, and there might be a couple of different things going on rather than one clear strand.]

[ETA 2] There are comments if you follow the livejournal link, which may explain the issue more fully.