Tuesday, September 21, 2021

You don't need to box up everything, you fucking geeks


The box is empty. The box is always empty.

The dorks won and we'll be suffering for that for a long time. The geekiest of geek behaviours have been seeping into general pop culture for decades, for better and for worse. Sure, everyone knows who T'Challa is now, but that's not worth the toxic bullshit that has been imported into general society

The absolute and tragic sense of entitlement that fans of comics and science fiction and shit feel towards things is in our culture, and it's fucking everywhere. In our sports, in our politics, in our workplaces. Social media is as mainstream as it gets and its full of the kind of thing you used to see in fanzine letter columns. The same dull wit, the same snide superiorities, the same old bullshit.

And everything has to have a label put on it. Fan histories are full of long arguments about whether something is a particular genre, whether something is a horror or a fantasy or whatever, as if that ever really mattered. 

This is all excruciatingly backwards, but this insatiable desire to put everything in the right place, is everywhere now. Making everything nice and neat might make sense when you're cataloguing your  Detective Comics collection, but this does not apply to the vast complexities of actual human beings.

And now you've got people losing their minds over what gender goes into boxes, as if the human goddamn condition isn't a multi-faceted thing, and no two are alike, all have their own needs and wants and it's all good. They don't have to go into boxes they don't want to go into. Only you can decide what bix fits you.

The joy that can be seen in my trans and gender fluid friends, colleagues and neighbors is absolutely delightful and divine and they can go into any damn box they feel like. You can't seal up that kind of beauty, no matter how fucking men or dorky you are about it.


No comments: