Gay Panic in the Streets of Geekdom

The writers at nerd-news blog Topless Robot are exposing their own insecurities perhaps, with a lazy gay-panic punchline in a post asking for readers’ “Most Shameful RPG Moment.” Soliciting  “hilarious, heartbreaking and embarrassing stories” of tabletop RPG gaming, the writer provides this scenario as an example:

Have you ever had a character who sex with another member of the party, even though both characters were played by guys? And felt horrified about it? Good, you should’ve, because that’s some freaky shit. [Note: emphasis mine]

It seems almost quaint to me, that a nerd’s biggest fear might be being perceived as, “Gay.” This sort of homophobia in geeks is a dissonance that I’ve never understood. I’ve always been of the belief that those marginalized by society (whether by race, orientation, or alignment)  share a common persecutor and should naturally ally against intolerance.

Maybe it’s my viewpoint that’s quaint, but somehow I think that if you took a wide poll of self-identified geeks and nerds, the fear of being perceived as “Gay,” wouldn’t rate in the top 10. My number one geek fear right now is the oppositte– that I might share anything in common with the intolerant sort of geeks who are still grossed out by the idea of two dudes kissing each other. With mainstream pop-culture eating up Superhero and SciFi properties, video games as big business, and the internet emerging as the dominant communication medium; nerds can’t be made fun of for what they like anymore, so much as they can be made fun of for what they are like.

Few people are going to deride you for watching Watchmen (except maybe Alan Moore) or playing Left 4 Dead, because comic books and zombies are officially part of the mainstream zeitgeist. On the other hand, obsessively creating a fantasy world whose moral/ethical values mirror your own specifically intolerant and juvenile power fantasies will always be worthy of mockery.

In a double backflip of irony, Topless Robot’s bit of bland homophobia sits beneath a satirically placed Chick tract illustration, wherein a character freaks out about their D&D character dying before attempting suicide themselves. Looks like someone rolled a -12 for self-awareness.

p.s. No links to Topless Robot were included because, why give them the traffic?

Binge-Nerding

So, here’s the trailer for the upcoming game, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2: Fusion (which by the by, sounds more like a concept restaurant that serves Cherry Spidey-tini’s, than a game).

Being a nerd who loves both comic books and video games can be rough psychologically. We overlook gameplay mediocrity in favor of embodying our favorite licensed characters and utilizing their trademark super-powers. It’s Stockholm Syndrome for geeks, as we sympathize with our abusers/exploiters by accepting a substandard product (at premium prices), and just shrug at generic gameplay and nonsensical plots that are underdeveloped by even the hackiest of standards. And the latter is important, because we generally read comics for the stories they tell.

We accept mediocrity, because the union of comics and video games often present a sort of nerd-buffet overgorged with all the characters, powers, and bits of storylines we desire– but with none of the individual voices, quirks and character-defining moments that make us fans of the original work. Sure we’ll get a Spidey one-liner or two, but a few offhand puns don’t define a character and hardly distract from how arbitrary these games often feel. A lobster and steak buffet is great in theory, but it’s usually a vacuum of dread and existential despair in reality.

Basically what I’d like to see is a comic book game that doesn’t feel generic. A lot of the joy of having so many playable characters in the last Marvel Ultimate Alliance game was deflated by the fact that so many characters special powers did the same thing. And while it wasn’t spectacular, one of Justice League Heroes‘ assets was its fairer differentiation between characters moves and relative strengths (although maybe Green Arrow was just a little too useless). The best games of last year (Grand Theft Auto 4 and Fallout 3 imho) engaged and immersed their players into complex stories rich with idiosyncratic characters and sideplots. The gameplay served the story-telling, rather than being an end in and of itself.

With the mediocre Civil War storyline as its basis, all the recent commentary on event fatigue seems relevant, becasuse many of the same issues with characters getting short shrift to serve a particular product are present (though for the record, I enjoyed Final Crisis throughout its run). In general, my hopes aren’t high for MUA 2. (Although in hindsight, Civil War at least had some interesting moments compared to the ambivalence I felt towards Secret Invasion, which will probably be greater than Dark Reign…. et cetera. ) At best, one hopes that there may be multiple storylines/endings based on the different factions involved, and at worst we’ll get the same old crap w/ some next-gen console lighting effects. And unfortunately for many, the same old crap will suffice.

Chocolate and Peanut-Butter

David Schmader, one of The Stranger’s most consistently hilarious and humane writers posted this advert over on The Stranger’s Slog, saying that,

“Ten years ago, if you’d have told me that an openly gay former child star would one day be hired to hawk the butchest old-school man’s man scent in America, I would have laughed in your face, and maybe called the cops on your obviously-whacked-out-on-PCP ass.”

And to point out what’s probably obvious to my fellow nerds: the patient that Neil Patrick Harris TVMD is so dutifully examining is Anthony Stewart Head of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer (and International Coffee) fame. So in a subtle way, Old Spice is marketing their (grand)dad smell on both the gays and nerds, whom are the chocolate and peanut-butter of adolescent victimization.

I mention the latter because comics are a venue where the geeks, weirdos, nerds, and otherwise bullied have often found voices and resonance. Whether you think about the context in which Jews like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman in the anti-semitic 1930s, or the X-Men’s deliberate parallels to the 1960s civil rights movement (and later parallels to gay issues in addition to racial politics), and the wide array of comics as autobiography– for whatever reason, comics have been a place for many marginalized voices to flourish. That’s not to say comics haven’t also been a forum for political and moral bigotry or that the major publishers of comic books have had some noble intention (most didn’t and don’t in the present).

The reason I bring any of this up, is because as we’ve seen in the popularization of the “graphic novel,” and comics in film/television– advertisements once aimed at a much different class of people (or to inspire jealousy of that class/type) are now, more than ever, setting their sights on us– the once socially dispossessed who’ve found outlets in mediums like comics and the internet. Without getting all Adbusters on you about capitalism, the evils of niche marketing (pandering?), et cetera– I wanted to talk about this Old Spice advertisement because it brings up the sorts of tangential connections to identity, pop culture, and politics that I think about all the time. Before I start laying down the snark on one side of an issue or another, I want to start mapping those connections and the questions that they raise.

-chris

p.s. Fun F-word Factoid: In 1999 Tony Head guest starred as “Dr. Staretski” on the epicly mediocre sitcom Two Guys, A Girl And A Pizza Place, a show which somehow managed to have four fucking seasons! And people wonder how/why the internet is replacing older media formats.