well, yeah, if by geek culture you mean men

Wake Up, Geek Culture, in which I think I am reading a geek shaking a virtual cane at people getting their anime too easily, too many people of the ungeeky classes being interested in geek turf, and remix culture because it's killing originality and then I got lost in the Etewaf, which is apparently really bad, but kind of sounds like my perfect life.

...I'm not sure.

I want to approach this from like, multiple are you kidding angles because hello, kind of my entire identity being geek, remix, and also, I like anime and God would I have killed to have access to it in my teens. Or like, knew it existed.

Academics have covered remix culture, and the mainstreaming of geekdom is like, a constant refrain everywhere, so not even going to bother, mostly because he froze me up at the Etewaf horror--very Lovecraftian, that--in which everyone has easy access to everything and that's like, really bad.

Let's not romanticize the past in which we had to wait for years and go uphill both ways to get our manga, okay? That shit isn't nostalgic; that sucked. It sucked. Yes, we had lively discussions waiting for new issues for about an hour and then geeks went to war, and geek war isn't like mundane war; most of us enter with a vocabulary not limited to languages that actually exist and a lot of us grew up beneath the thumb of mainstream contempt and high school bullying and whoo boy did we carry that into every conversation ever? Oh, we did. Harry Potter books had what, a one to two year wait or average? Did you see that fandom? And let me just say, thank God Star Trek II didn't come out during internet culture and have the waiting period before Star Trek III came out: bloodshed, people.

Geek culture was expensive; it was very much the territory of middle and upper middle class who could afford to import direct from Japan or knew someone who could if the titles you wanted weren't here. Even domestic products weren't cheap or easy; it's not that long ago that VHS tapes were this new and exciting thing that allowed recording instead of staring at the television listings for a hopeful glance of something not a rerun of fifties era programming and being really disappointed on a daily basis. Cable still isnt' universally accessible even in the US, and certainly not in rural Texas, much less internet. Working class geek meant used bookstores because hardcovers or even new paperback were for birthdays, Christmas, and when it was something my entire family would want to read (which luckily, we overlapped taste in a lot of things). Buying movies was an event that was considered carefully.

[I'd love to hit a real discussion of classism in geekdom because along with shitty race issues and shitty sexism issues, geek cultural development wasn't just white and male, it was white, male, and specific to certain economic classes as well. It's not that POCs, women, and the non-middle-class weren't geeky or didn't develop their own geek-related culture but geek as it is presented to mainstream culture is--well, white, male, and very obviously both.

[I'm still boggling at people who are utterly shocked that POC and women attended and still attend sci-fi conventions and are interested in the same things that mainstream geek culture is; yes, we've been here all along, and the question you should be asking is not 'where have you been' but 'why didn't I see that?' No one asks that, though. It's weird.]

Geek culture was difficult unless you lived in a city; I was a geek culture of one at my school K through 12 and you think your clique had it hard? Please. I never even met a D&Der until college and a LARPer after that. I met geek culture in college without any geek socialization skills--and we do have them, believe it or not--and I was the geek that geeks didn't like, since I was a feral geek who developed independently in the high school library reading encyclopedias* from 1976 because I'd finished the fantasy section before my freshman year of high school ended.

[* Encyclopedia Brittanica. Accept no substitutes.]

You city geeks had it easy, baby; the nearest used bookstore was one almost-large room and I was buying third rate sci fi where the high point was finding Mercedes Lackey*--say it with me, that was the high point--and Anne McCaffrey* and God help me that shitty Thomas Covenant series that I read in desperation because it's not like there was a lot of choice there. But also Sydney Van Scyoc was awesome with the first time I ever saw a sci-fi matriarchal culture that treated it with such utter, utter normality that I barely noticed I was being taught my first lessons in feminism. Also, no one was raped. New books were the nearest large city--forty miles away--or Wal-Mart--Wal-Mart--and we were so rural we couldn't even get cable, so I never had a meaningful relationship with Fraggle Rock and dear God am I bitter about that.

[I am not saying they're bad; I'm saying, think about a world where my sci-fi pinnacle was Anne McCaffrey.]

Yes, yes, the icky mainstream are all making your geek all less than special; those of us who, let me say this again, were reduced to rapey incesty Thomas of white gold ringness and the Gor novels unironically shelved beside the sci-fi aisle saw the dawn of Amazon.com, hulu, and bittorrent like the second goddamn coming, okay? I waited half my life to fall madly, desperately in love with a million things and Geek!Seperis of the dark days before the internet and access to Amazon would like to say, are you kidding me?

[I won't even go into women in geek culture, because being a feral geek, my early interactions with geek (male) culture were so off that I didn't get the joy and delight of trading sexual harassment for interaction and second class acceptance. My regret, it's legion, really.]

The days when geek culture belonged to the urban middle class male is over; we all own it now. Don't look like that; we're not saying you have to leave. See, we like to share. That's kind of the entire point.

Comments

[cleverthylacine]

I have to admit I stopped reading after he completely got the meaning of 'otaku' wrong. 'otaku' began as a really stilted, formal way to say 'you' which was characteristic of the bookish, nerdy male obsessive manga/anime fan who was generally afraid of girls with more than two dimensions, and became pejorative because there was an otaku serial killer in the late 80s or early 90s (I am forgetting which). It's still really pejorative and Japanese fans are often irritated that American fans use it for American anime fans and think that they will not mind having it applied to them too.

What I remember is that in the Midwest and the south anime fandom was largely white, middle class--but on the West Coast it was Asian, often 2d generation Americans who were buying the stuff for themselves and then at school connected with the white fans and that they were the first link in the supply chain for things like fansubs, which at that time, were made by copying the VHS tapes Japanese grocery stores imported (I used to actually have some retired ones of these) or copying laserdiscs to VHS and putting the subtitles on, then copying the copies, so that it mattered how many generations removed your copy was because the quality degenerated.

(In northern California, there was also a group called BAAS. All the officers were black or Asian. I love those people still. I keep meaning to go back to it, it was a big part of my life for years, but they're not as active as they once were.)

I must have had hundreds of those old VHS tapes.

And I remember how ANGRY and MEAN the boys' club was, and how much really rapey art and fic there was, when Sailor Moon first came out. (And also how much money you could make going into Chinatown and buying Sailor Moon toys and Pokemon toys and the like and selling them to folks in the midwest, even if you did shell out the cash to buy licenced stuff to sell.)

And how I loathed the dub because the story was bowdlerised, but a lot of people loathed the dub because suddenly there were all these young girls trying to join anime fandom, and the guys couldn't make up their minds whether to hate them or be sexually predatory toward them or in many cases both, and all the nasty homophobia that surfaced when Matt Thorn started translating and popularising yaoi, and Ai no Kusabi came over, and how angry all these guys who were into yuri doujinshi were that women liked yaoi, and how even angrier they were that some gay men liked it.

I used to think I lost interest in anime fandom after my favourite shows all died out in the mid-90s because I moved on to being into music and other things (HP, ugh ugh ugh) but to tell you the truth I think part of it was that the fandom got so ugly and polarised, and also I kind of associated it all with my third marriage, but I remember also being really tired of all the scary doujinshi and not even having a name to put to why.
Outside of BAAS and a few other yaoi-friendly groups, especially on Usenet and outside of Hitoshi Doi and Matt Thorn's mailing lists, a lot of white, middle class guys were working really hard at being disgusting enough to keep anime fandom from falling to the likes of me and my sparkly pink ass with our Sailor Moon and our yaoi and our costumes and dolls.

And to tell you the truth what brought them down was money--the money that people were willing to spend on Sailor Moon and Pokemon and the recognition that there was a market out there. They will never admit that the REASON anime has so well penetrated the American market is because of us girls.

[idiothole]

Hey, I'm only tangentially in the anime fandom but I found your comment really fascinating and illuminating, as somebody who's watched anime as a kid but not been into the fandom until I found the internet aged 13. I remember going to a fantasy roleplaying store that sold tons of Warhammer and a little manga, and how the store has little by little transformed into being half-fantasy/RP/scif-fi and half-manga/anime/merchandise.

how angry all these guys who were into yuri doujinshi were that women liked yaoi, and how even angrier they were that some gay men liked it.
Ugh I can only imagine.

[cleverthylacine]

I used to go around pointing out to them that if they wanted to date women who shared their interests they needed to STFU.

Because I really thought they did, they said they did.

[topazera.livejournal.com]

Wow, I found this comment very interesting too and it makes me glad I wasn't a bit older when I got into anime. I experienced the very tail end of fansubbing on VHS tapes, through Sailor Moon. I remember thinking as a young teen how kind the community was, how unexpectedly great it was to find people on the internet who would mail you these precious tapes that couldn't be found anywhere just for the cost of the materials. It wasn't until years later that I was exposed to a broader spectrum of anime fans but it's still nice to remember that first impression. :)

They will never admit that the REASON anime has so well penetrated the American market is because of us girls.
Oh surely not. Unless it is to gripe about how things were so much better when anime was more exclusive, then maybe.