In the movie Comedians of Comedy, Brian Posehn does a bit where he says that he’s been a nerd for 30 years, not counting the first eight years of his life, because nobody considers anyone eight and under to be a nerd. I relate to this idea a lot, because until I hit my pre-teens, I wasn’t really a geek. I was just a kid who liked to read more than run. My relatives poked fun at me for being engrossed in television and movies, and I was so competitive when it came to games that eventually I stopped joining in, for fear of embarrassing myself should I lose and burst into tears. But it wasn’t until I stayed up all night watching my cousin play the original Super Mario Brothers on an ancient NES in a rented lakehouse that I realized I might be a little more interested in games and other media than the average young girl.
I lost my mind when we got a brand new Nintendo 64 for Christmas. My family was one of hand-me-downs and no new gadgets, we shopped the sales racks and drooled with covetous envy at our cousins’ new GameBoys, so new toys were treasured. I had sleepovers dedicated to watching the Lord of the Rings extended editions. I went to midnight showings of new movies. I felt part of something enormous and at the same time apart from it, for a multitude of reasons: most of my friends didn’t get it, I was a girl geek in a boy geek’s world, Chicana/o culture in southern California does not exactly revolve around D&D and Mario, and I never saw anyone who looked like me in much of the media I consumed. That “in-betweener” feeling has informed much of my understanding of geek culture, as well as my personal life. How does someone like me reconcile their feelings of exclusion with their intense passion for that which is excluding them? Well, the internet was a start (isn’t it always), and my hope is that Geekquality can take it to the next level.
Since my childhood I have involved myself in many a fandom, pored over many a puzzle in Zelda’s temples, and otherwise dedicated the entirety of my free time, if not my life, to geekdom. I’ve stuck around so long because not only do I genuinely love things like Star Wars and Pokemon and Disney, I love thinking about them, I love discussing them with other people, I love analyzing them. Getting involved in Geekquality was a stroke of luck for me, but this community that reads and watches and thinks and picks apart and supports and loves, so strongly and so passionately, has always been my destination. These discussions and these questions are one hundred percent of who I am, and I couldn’t be happier that I’ve found such smart, supportive people to share it with.
~ Elyse
