Fellowship of the Fans

General - "Gone Woke" and Anti-Nerd/Fandom

If woke means being awake/aware to the social issues, then there's no getting around the fact the real anti-woke is those who've gone woke, as they're not awake/aware of the social issues they keep claiming they are awake/aware of. Everything from them is biased and one-sided, aka in their mindset, there is only one way to be awake/aware of the social issues.

I think one of the major things forgotten by those practicing what's come to be called "woke ideology" is those nerds is actually a minority group. This group has long been ostracized for the simple fact the nerd was different from your typical straight white male. Yet, they proceed to lump them in with your typical straight white male while continuing to measure them by the standard those other straight white male set out, that nerd culture is something to be ridiculed and made fun of?

But in this case, instead of merely sticking with ridiculing and making fun of nerd culture for what it is, there is this push to radicalize it, change it, to gatekeep it; the real gatekeeping doesn't come from the ones they, those who practice "woke ideology" claim are trying to gatekeep, but the woke individuals themselves.

One of the youtube videos I watched recently showed an image that sums it up quite well, that it comes in four stages, but here are the four stages in my own words from what I remember being said.

Stage One -- The woke complain that our nerdy spaces aren't inclusive enough for them to let them in despite the fact nerdy spaces, aka fandom, have always been very inclusive places.

Now, I'm not saying there weren't males in certain nerdy spaces that were sexist about us girls participating, but in reality the nerd culture one sees in, oh, I don't know, Stranger Things, is actually far more like what nerd culture as a whole is; in fact, my experience has been that the men, say in comics/gaming/role playing/etc., actually came to my defense, the few times (and by few, I mean rare) some guys gave me a hard time for being a girl.

In addition to this, there have been spaces that have been dominantly female, such as fanfiction, which is where the term Mary Sue was coined. In that, there is this forgetfulness when someone lambasts the word as sexist that is where the word started, but I find it also pretty ironic that when men started using the term, attempted making the term more inclusive by talking about the male side of fandom, including male characters who didn't pass the Mary Sue test and were Gary Stus -- that is when we started seeing the term called sexist ramping up.

True, there were maybe one or two people calling it that, but they were quickly shut down. It's when some woman decided to take a synposis of Batman, remove the name and change the pronouns and presented it saying, "oh, you would claim this character is a Mary Sue, right? Well guess what? This is just Batman, huh?"

And it was like, well, no. It's not the traits that make a character a Mary Sue and how they're used, which in turn opened up a wonderful discussion about how certain traits of Batman are indeed a Gary Stu, something men agreed with, but they pointed out more often than not he isn't this way.

Yet--

Uh, a lot of stuff has now gone that way?

Whereas with Batman we're shown he is as unique as he is, the new stuff coming out -- the audience is informed of these character traits rather than shown, because the writers of these works, fundimentally in the end, don't understand why the traits need to be shown rather than informed, in part because they're focused so much on their identity as a minority, which is all about informing people about these traits despite the fact quite a few should be obvious without having to inform someone of these traits.

Well, it's the same people who claim the term Mary Sue is sexist who threw a stinker about women supposidly not being allowed in DCU fandom, but I say DCU out of reference to the fact that one article about changing the pronouns would suddenly make Batman a Mary Sue.