What I learned at a comic con

Or, how to be a nerd

I told my therapist I needed to play fewer video games, so I could spend more time on the kinds of hobbies that would be interesting to the kinds of people I want to be friends with. He asked: why don’t I make friends with other people who play video games?

It’s the kind of question that makes me stop hard and then mumble some half-hearted answer, in the hopes that the question will go away, and I won’t have to deal with it.

I was only really ready to answer the question a few weeks ago, when I went to DC’s Awesome Con. The answer is partly about my early path to nerdom, but also about how I’ve had trouble knowing how to be a nerd with other people.

I am a nerd, and I have been for a long time. When I was around eleven years old, I joined a Boy Scout troop. At my first troop meeting, the Scoutmaster was telling a story about how, one night in the woods, he saw an enormous, bird-shaped shadow, cast by the moonlight. “Oh, maybe it was a wereraven!” I offered. Wereravens are like werewolves, but for birds. I knew this because I had read the Dungeons & Dragons™ Monstrous Manual™ (2nd Edition), which my older brother, also a Boy Scout, had bought. But he didn’t seem happy about my encyclopedic knowledge of fake creatures. I’m pretty sure I saw him hiding his face in his hands.

In middle school, my nerdiest friend and I thought it would be a good thing, for the school-wide talent show, to string together all our favorite lines from our favorite nerd things. I recall particular lines we sampled from Dune, Interview with a Vampire, and the computer game MechWarrior 3. I’m surprised that the teachers let us put on this incomprehensible performance. I’m also surprised that no one ever talked about it or made fun of me for it. That’s something I still can’t explain.

My most painful memory of nerdom is from sometime in elementary school. I’m crying in bed, trying to sleep. My mom comforts, asking what happened. “A kid on the bus called me weird,” I say. Whoever it was, they were right. I was a weird kid. This memory hurts, not because the words sting now, but because I remember how hurt I was then.

But that was really the worst of it for me. For the rest of my life, I managed to be a nerd but avoid many of the consequences. In middle school, I felt I was at the top of a small social pyramid of fellow nerds, but somehow I had the respect of even the cool kids. On my eighth grade field trip, near the end of the school year, just before going to high school, and when the old social order was crumbling, I crossed paths with one of the cool girls. “You were never mean to me,” she said. “Thank you.” I felt social vertigo.

The next year, at high school, the old social order did crumble. My high school freshman class was more than triple the size of my last middle school class, so my old friends were scattered around an enormous campus. My best friend and nerd squad co-captain had moved away. My old social status, however small, evaporated. I started over.

By my senior year, I had pulled off the same trick. I was still a nerd: Most Likely to Succeed, president of the drama club, part of the marching band. But through a series of events I again can’t explain, I was one of five senior boys voted as prom king candidate. (This was a literal popularity contest. One day in homeroom, the teacher handed out a sheet with the names of every student in our graduating class. “Pick 5 boys and five girls,” she told us. I asked what the criteria were. She shrugged.)

And I never stopped being a nerd. In college I had nerdy friends. I got a PhD. I’ve seen all five seasons of Babylon 5 more than once. When I can’t sleep, I read the fan wikis for Lord of the Rings, Dune, and Harry Potter.

But in some ways, despite all these many years of nerdom, I never knew how to be a nerd. I have just enough taste and aptitude for coolness that I don’t want to be pigeonholed. I have just enough ambition to “be someone” that I don’t want to be “just” a nerd.

I’ve found myself looking down my nose, gently sneering at “those nerds,” the kinds who like anime, or who really like to dress up, or who I think are too pale because they don’t spend enough time outside playing the sports that I myself don’t play.

In a bit from the show Louis, an overweight woman tries to flirt with Louis, himself overweight. Louis doesn’t play ball. She remarks that thin, hot guys are willing to flirt with her, because there is no danger to either party. But Louis is afraid to flirt with her, because then he will acknowledge that the two of them are in the same league. This, I think, is how I am about nerds. Yes, I am one, but somehow, I don’t want to acknowledge I’m in the same league. I want to have my cake and eat it.

Going to my first comic con showed me new ways to be a nerd. Two kind friends invited me to the con. They wore anime onesies. Sweet nerd children asked to take selfies with them and their costumes. 

We spent most of our time together walking through the artists’ section of the conference. More than one artist had a series of works depicting Dungeons & Dragons classes, but as cats: cat druid, cat bard, cat mage, cat cleric, cat rogue. My friend asked for the cat fighter? “Oh, I’m so sorry, I don’t have cat fighter. But I do have cat barbarian!”

These artists showed me a whole new way that one be a nerd, through art. You like Dungeon & Dragons, and cats? Well, paint both! Another artist was a mermaid nerd, but her young son was a WWII history nerd, so she started painting giant squids attacking submarines.

I realized that my nerdom is mostly about encyclopedic knowledge. Reading the Dune wiki pages is fun, but it’s also lonely in a way, and not at all creative. Here were nerds who were creative, making new stuff. It kind of blew my mind.

My friends poo-pooed the “corporate” merch area, and I came to understand why. It was a concentrated scene of the kind of nerdy materialism I disdained. My parents raised me to not be materialistic, so I could never relate to people who wanted to be a nerd by, say, owning all the Pikachu pillows. (But I tried to lean in. The only action figure I’ve owned was a Babylon 5 Londo Mollari. I thought, if there was ever a place to buy a Babylon 5 T-shirt –a place that was not the internet– this was the place. I’m happily wearing it right now.)

How come you’ve never heard of this TV show? Because it came out around the same time as another TV show about a CGI space station, Deep Space Nine. How nerdy is that?

The comic con showed me two ways to be a nerd. One was art, one was material acquisition. I’m not an artist, and I don’t like to own many things, so neither of these worked for me.

Around the same time, three different friends independently invited me to play some video games together. More accurately, to play the same video game and then talk about it. Like a book club, but for video games.

So here I am, being a nerd, with other people. I think I’ve finally figured it out. I needed video game book clubs.

I also needed people to read this essay, which is a sort of navel-gazing ethnography of nerds, which is probably nerdier than buying all the Pikachu pillows. So thank you for being a nerd with me, by reading all the way to the end.