Nerd Culture Then vs. Now: An 80s Kid’s Honest Take
I am not sure who reads my blog, as very few of you comment. I assume, as the traffic suggests, that most of you come to read and then go about your day. It’s either that or, just maybe, the dead internet theory is real. It’s not a theory; it is real. Nevertheless, for those of you who venture in, I thank you immensely.
Don’t worry, this isn’t my spiel about why I started this website. Obviously, it was to make some money. Obviously, the purpose was to write posts about anime I’ve watched and those I thought others might like, even if I wasn’t necessarily a fan of them. Do you really think that every post is a series I like? Hell no. I remember the first time I watched Tokyo Revengers; I plodded through it, but it wasn’t enjoyable. It wasn’t a mediocre series; it just wasn’t my series. There are only so many anime with punks I could support, and conversely, I did not read the source material, so I did not have the disdain felt by many when Tokyo Revengers: Tenjiku-hen and Tokyo Revengers: Seiya Kessen-hen were released.
My point in saying that it wasn’t my series was the same way I felt when Outkast dropped Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, ATLiens, and Aquemini. I thought Aquemini was the pinnacle of their body of work, and I despised Stankonia. It wasn’t a mediocre album; it just wasn’t my album. I wasn’t ready to move on. It took a year and a half before I revisited Stankonia and season three of Tokyo Revengers and gave them another chance. I love Stankonia and likewise became immersed in the Tokyo Revengers franchise.
What I mean is that this anime thing has been a learning experience. I never knew that kids in high school ostracized each other for liking anime. Now, I will say that in high school, it might hurt you on the dating side, but there were nerd girls and geek girls long before Sam Johnson started his Kickstarter comic projects, so there was that.
From what I remember, anime put you in the same category as bringing Transformers and GI Joe action figures to school in sixth grade to play with during recess. It wasn’t limited to toys either; comics, baseball cards, and video games put you in a box, but the box wasn’t a monolith. The guy who is great in sports, handsome, and popular isn’t in the same category as the nerd. That’s obvious, but the nerd who was also, say, connected to a popular cousin notorious for fighting is also in a different box. That was me. My cousin and I went to the same school until he moved. I didn’t get bullied because of him. After he left, I did get picked on, but by then, as one person put it, twenty years later, when I was a junior, I was known as one of the popular bad kids. Graffiti art became my obsession, and many of the people in that group were taggers and artists. Krylon is free, and I’ll say less.
It could have been my sophomore year, though. I think it was a creative writing course that I took in which I called my teacher a b*tch in one of my journals. I can see her face but can’t remember her name. But I am grateful to her even if I did shrink in my chair after she read it out loud. I did make amends to her before I knew what those were, but I am grateful to her, as those journals were a lifeline.
So in my mind, the nerd thing was different, as crass as it was: Revenge of the Nerds, Sixteen Candles, Goonies, Explorers, and 3 O’clock High were my shows. The latter is one of my favorite non-John Hughes movies. And though I was a so-called Black kid, you couldn’t tell me that I couldn’t be Louis, River Phoenix, or the king of the geeks, Anthony Michael Hall. Not that it matters, but I could probably write a heavy opinion piece that argues that it’s these nerds out here f*cking up the planet and shaping the algorithm to keep you divided.
Eighties Hollywood reframed what it meant to be a nerd. Every nerd had to win in the end. Nerds had to fight back, and the other thing is, nerds had friends who had their backs. Oh, and before you mention the creepy nerd aesthetic of the 90s and 2000s, we had it in the 80s, too. They also had creepy friends.
For those of you who call yourselves nerds (or any variation of that word), this isn’t to diminish whatever struggle or situation you’re going through. All I’m saying is, the way I hear it now, being a nerd is actually being cool. I guess that can be credited to the influx of corporate dollars. I know people don’t like corporations. They use funny words like “corpos,” as if a corporation isn’t made up of individual people. So if the corporation is just awful, the people who run it may or may not be? One really isn’t separate from the other. But give corporations and money credit: corporations helped popularize what it means to be a nerd. So is it still tough out there to be a nerd for you? And when you were growing up, what was your story?
I didn’t want to make this a big, huge, long essay. I want to start a conversation about what it means to be a nerd and about nerd culture. Personally, I don’t like the word. I think—at the end of Revenge of the Nerds, the first one—everybody comes up to the stage, and they’re like, “I’m a nerd.” And it really wasn’t about being a nerd. It was about being an outcast.
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