But recently I've really come to realize how much as an audience geeks suck.
Not you, person reading this. I'm sure you're awesome and you judge everything based solely on execution, merits, and quality. You never make knee-jerk reactions and your certainly don't fling your pre-judgments all over the internet as "the truth" and only listen to opinions that agree with and label everyone else uncritical idiots or whatever.
Actually, I hope you really don't do that. And for all I know, you don't. But a lot of geeks do. From movies to comics to whatever, even "professional reviewers" and the like who fall into the more geekish subdivisions of our culture manage too often to get kind of annoying about this stuff.
Take any upcoming "geek" movie. Let's say, Thor. Now many of us of the nerdly persuasion are happy about what we've seen of this film about crazy space gods done by a cast of guys with tons of awards and critical acclaim attached to their name. We might not like it when we see it, but we applaud the attempt.
But if you go beyond the "Man, looks pretty sweet" or "Hey, we'll have to see" reactions and try to gather "the geek reaction" to the film? Good luck. Because it's
all over the place, nitpicky, and often incredibly off putting. Worse, nearly everyone who is involved in this level of nerdbitching is declaring themselves a voice of silent thousands if not millions.
Which is silly. To quote Ash from
Army of Darkness "Look, I've never even seen these assholes before." And I'm so geeky I can name you
every Asgardian god in Marvel comics and tell you how they differ from their Norse source material, including the guys who don't exist in the old myths.
But still, using the same example I'm just going to give a few examples of why, if you're Hollywood, you should probably ignore geeks as an entity- and I say this as a huge geek. Because these are some often repeated "important problems" I'm seeing discussed that could "ruin" the film:
1) He doesn't have Red Hair, Thor is supposed to have Red Hair!
Look, kids. Norse myth Thor is indeed a redhead. Marvel Thor? Nope. And this is a Marvel movie. Now if that's always bothered you and shit? Well, that's fine. But you're decades too late to declare how that's going to make the character not commercially viable.
2) The Hammer is too small!Fun fact: The hammer in Norse myth had a very short handle due to various bits of legend. It was kinda half-finished. Thor's hammer has always been small in that sense compared to his overall body size, which is often supposed to be pretty damned big. Now Marvel hasn't stuck to that, but various artists over the years have done different versions of the hammer and it's never been all that massively huge. If you want to see a massive, throbbing hammer...look for Nate Fillion's penis in Dr. Horrible.
3) It's an Origin Story! Why does it have to be an Origin Story!
Uh yeah...this one isn't about you. I can tell you the origin of Thor. Some of you probably know it. Unless we're going to buy 1,000 tickets each? People need to be told what they're seeing. Why they should care. Also, most of the most successful superhero films? Origin stories. And whenever someone tries to do a crawl or voice over long enough to
really give an origin? Snore. Some form of origin stories work and are usually necessary, stop whining.
Note I'm a colossal nerd and if I were an advisor on this film even I'd be saying "Look, ignore that crap. Make a good film that works. We'll be fine." And those are just three examples. The complaints go on and on and range well outside Thor into...nearly everything else geek-oriented. But it serves to illustrate a larger point- geeks collectively make a shitty audience.
Look at sports fans. They will bitch about every little part of a game. And the free agent trades. And armchair coaching. And so on. But at the end of the day if the team wins? They're happy. If it was a good game and the crowd was entertained? They're content.
Geeks, by contrast, too often will bitch until the end of time itself if things don't match the magic film in their head. Look at
Avatar. Here's a scifi film so big and generally well received even Jesus saw it. And he thought it was at least worth his two and half hours and ten bucks. But if you want to find the crazy naysayers who claim it really didn't make money and it was terrible and racist and whatever? Yup, hit the geek websites and blogs. But then again, a lot of geeks liked it too. Hence, as an identifiable audience? We suck.
And so we shouldn't be nearly as surprised as we act when our input is often ignored. Because we really aren't "an audience." I probably think at least one thing you're sure "geeks love" is at best okay. I might think it's terrible. Or just a bit overrated. And I'm pretty sure even if I'm not right on some cosmic objective scale, my opinion is equally valid.
So yeah, to mangle a Men in Black quote:
A geek is smart. Geeks are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. 30 years ago everybody knew the Star Wars was the greatest movie franchise ever. 15 years, everybody knew you couldn't film Lord of the Rings, and five years ago, you knew that we'd never see another Kirk and Spock Trek film. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow. So yeah, I love my fellow geeks. Individually. And I hope Hollywood and video game companies and the like do too. Because we make them a lot of money. But as a group? Eh, sorry, I'm just not that into you.
