Nerds, Geeks, and Genre Preferences

I'm not sure why that's supposed to be an insult. Would you be insulted if I called you creative or something?

For all of human history, people have been striving to find meaning in life; to find out what it means to be a man, or a woman; to find acceptance in the eyes of their families and communities; to find acceptance in themselves. We've invented gods with aspects of man and beast, and gods above men, and spirits and goblins and devils. All of this, and yet everyone has to learn for themselves the complicated and beautiful (and sometimes terrible) dance of human interaction.

But I'm glad you've solved that, we're all just a bunch of proteins, problem solved let's packup & go home.

Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; the unexamined life is one not worth living.

To your edit: internal conflicts aren't just people waffling around because they can't think things through. It can come from being forced into a dilemma where two of the character's values are in conflict, or from the character having to do something that they wouldn't have expected themselves to do, and trying to incorporate the fact that they did that into their conception of themselves. It can even be just someone coping with the emotional stress of a difficult situation. It's not limited just to people being indecisive because they can't evaluate the situation fully, and the whole purpose of internal struggles like that is to give the story a human, emotional element to connect with, so that the characters aren't just soulless robots going through their motions.

In reply to your post: no, I wouldn't be offended if you called me creative. That's not an insult. Being called emotionless or a robot is kind of an insult.

^^Ding! Saw that cliche coming about two pages ago.

Just a difference in outlooks here. A person filters the exterior world through their senses and makes of it whatever they will. Or whatever they can. In a story you can vary the input or vary the reception of the input, or if really good, you can do both.

So, making changes to the setting has a purpose, as it shows how people could receive the difference. Following a person's thoughts/feelings about the changes tell us something about being human.

People do write books that are all about people receiving the ordinary world, examining it sometimes at great length and detail. These stories have their place. Not at the top of too many bestseller lists, but a place.

edited 30th Aug '12 7:52:33 PM by FastEddie

Who said anything about unexamined? Life has been examined, it's a chemical reaction. It's a big complex reaction, and it's one that results in attempts to self perpetuate, but it's still a chemical reaction. There's no meaning to life, it's just something that happened. If you need more than that, I'm not sure what to tell you since anything more is a myth or something you make up for yourself.

Edit: it's only an insult if you believe it is.

edited 30th Aug '12 7:55:15 PM by Deboss

Hmm. Well, I can agree that human life is the result of along series of chemical interactions, but humans have evolved into a species that has one of its strongest features a possibility to model future events. We do it with a questionable accuracy, but we do do it. And it has saved our bacon pretty often.

So, yes, these are things we make up. Good for us. They help us model our way out trouble.

edited 30th Aug '12 8:04:26 PM by FastEddie

There's no purpose to life, but there can be meaning. Purpose comes from an outside source; meaning can be given but a person can also find or define the meaning to their own life.

You say life has been examined and it's simply a collection of chemicals, and that's true—but thought is something to be examined too. Thought is a function of human life, and we know far, far less than we'd like to know about it. There's no one right answer to philosophy.

I feel like this is at most tangential to characters with internal conflicts though. They're not searching for the purpose of their existence, they're just trying to understand their own nature when their nature is put into conflict. It's something normal people can understand, as normal people go through having to figure out their own identity. Identity isn't some easy thing that you can just think about and poof, that's you—you're a confusing collection of all your prior experiences and your thoughts and your various feelings.

And also, it's still an insult even if you don't want to let it bother you. You're acting like emotions and philosophy are meaningless because science exists, but science and philosophy have been intertwined for centuries. Humans have feelings and thoughts, and those aren't going away just because we're atoms.

edited 30th Aug '12 8:08:10 PM by Kotep

I think it's discussions like this as to why geeks don't get into literature.

Who says we don't get into literature. Someone who defines literature as something very narrow and people who don't like that narrow slice as geeks?

I mean, the chances that a "genre" fan has actually read the books people think of when the subject is literature is much higher than it would be for most people. Fans read.

edited 30th Aug '12 8:25:35 PM by FastEddie

I think this is more enlightening as to why Deboss doesn't get into literature, personally. I wouldn't say all geeks are as averse to emotions.

Although according to the definition in the OP (being in the fields of science/math/engineering) I don't apply to the definition, so I can't use myself as evidence to the contrary.

Well, I suppose it's possible that most genres are enjoyed by geeks of some sort, but only technological oriented geeks focus on the internet? I mean, don't romance novels keep pace with scifi novels in sales and what not? Perhaps there's a large body of geeks that scifi geeks just don't interact with on a sufficient level and we don't discuss things across those boundaries?

I personally consider myself a tool user and maker, so I tend to gravitate toward interesting discussions of tools and their applications. Who created the tool is far less interesting than the tool itself to me.

Right, so why does such a simple question of "who am I" add to that? Creating a reasonable facsimile of an answer would take almost as much time to list almost every event in your life.

I mean I may enjoy the occasional Dotsoevsky and Faulkner, but any sort of conversation you end up having with the people who like them are like this — them telling you that figuring out the meaning of life is more important than what-if, when trying to figure out the meaning of life all the time in every single book you read is exhausting. It is an all-consuming question that is monstrous in its scope, devouring all that approach it. I don't want to spend my time reading for pleasure dancing around its maw.

A character trying to understand who they are is a way to explore their complexity and to allow the reader to also understand the complexities of who they are. Because real people are these confusing messes, we can empathize with fictional people who have difficulty understanding who they are.

That's why I felt like we were getting off topic. Not every book has to deal with the mysteries of life, but I'd argue that a great book should feel like its characters are full and human. It doesn't mean people sit around and sip tea while discussing metaphysics every day, and it doesn't mean the absence of speculative elements.

If you want to see something that I think perfectly encapsulates both speculative and introspective fiction, I'd suggest the Bradbury short story Tomorrow's Child. It shows something strange and alien and sci-fi but at the same time, it shows the people affected by this strange, alien thing and shows them reacting as people. It ends up resonating with human truths without making you have to question The Meaning Of Life Itself or anything.

I'm not saying that philosophical debates are more interesting than speculative fiction either—but I think that speculative fiction can benefit from complexity and philosophical thought put into their development. Being exciting is great, but being exciting and intellectually stimulating is wonderful.

Ah, it's one of those attempts to make a character "relatable" by adding generic drama into the mix.

Still, I feel that "who am I" is an inherently redundant question since it's built on something beyond testing out how you feel about certain things being true.

edited 30th Aug '12 8:52:40 PM by Deboss

Any sort of internal conflict is not 'generic drama'. Unless you mean drama in the purely abstract ancient Greek sense meaning simply 'action'. Do you think that the only conflicts a character can feel have to come from an external source or they're generic drama? It's not just about making them relateable, it's about making them into characters that seem to be human beings in their own right, and not just placeholders or cardboard cutouts.

It's not the end of the world if you don't like more complex characters and internal conflicts, but don't expect people to agree that complex charcters and internal conflicts are bad writing or generic drama. Because they're not. Like anything, they can be used poorly, but they're an important part of literature—even speculative works benefit greatly from their use.

There's a difference between intelligence and sophistication. Math skills have very little connection to your taste in literature. Programmers don't make good poets. Playwrights often can't do their taxes without a calculator.

Our society has a view of the "genius" which is, frankly, a creation of stupid people. Different people are great at different things. The odds of being brilliant in several totally different fields are quite low.

So we believe there are two kinds of people, "smart" and "normal." Then, surprise surprise, most of the "smart" people are fond of some childish, stupid or simple things. But instead of reexamining our worldview, we squeeze those interests into preexisting stereotypes.

This.

Just because I find science fascinating and have geeky interests and am creative enough to make art doesnt mean i know shit about quantum physics or writing a symphony.

Reading this, I guess you could rephrase my original question as 'why don't the scientific elite and the cultural elite overlap more.' And probably is the closest we'll get to an answer.

It's not a matter of sci-fi being inferior, some of my favourite stories etc. Plus, I don't consider the two labels mutually exclusive. This whole tangent was started with Ever 9 claiming that sci-fi was somehow deeper than literary fiction, and Deboss acting like a walking stereotype.

Deboss, just because something can't be measured in milliamps or centimetres doesn't mean that it doesn't exist or isn't important. People may be ultimately made up of protein chains, but I defy you to predict human behaviour from molecular first principles. You can't, we're too complicated, and people - even geneticists or molecular chemists - don't perceive people in that way.

Back on-topic, I think that a large reason nerds as a group like sci-fi&fantasy is because that is what is marketed towards them.

First of all, I didn't say that geeks are aspies. In fact, I specifically said that I'm NOT saying that (since most geeks are obviously not disfunctional). I just said that most of us might be kinda on the same track as them.

Second, I didn't say anything about why nerds don't like literary fiction and arthouse films, I was only talking about why nerds are obsessed with things that no one else cares about, like anime, narrative video games, graphic novels, etc.

When I said that it's because they are just finely stylized for us instead of being too complex, I didn't talk about complexity of intelligence, to contrast them with arthouse films, but about the complexity of nonverbal communication in them, to contrast them with Reality TV, Live Action, and with all three-dimensional characterization.

Third, I'm not saying that nerds don't like any of those things, just that we, unlike most people, won't demand it as a necessary feature, because we are partially blind to it anyways. While a normal person could never seriously care for the emotional drama of a video game figure, or an anime character, or a comic book drawing, and thus they are limiting these media to the "for children's shows and comical works only" folder, but for us, they are like a 2D movie for a stereoblind person.

The same partially applies to live action genre fiction. The exaggeratedly straightforward tropes, categories, character archetypes, make them childish, but only for a certain neurotypical frame of mind. Someone who doesn't have that frame of mind, can still appreciate their complexity in other areas, like an elaborate plot development, a realistically applied sci-fi science, a large cast with lots of interactions, a clever symbolic message, but it is not as much through the subtleties of acting and dialogue-writing.

edited 31st Aug '12 3:34:59 AM by Ever9

Er. What.

I seriously think you are talking about a ghetto here rather than an actual issue between someone who is neurotypical versus not. I mean while both Pixar and Miyazaki, say, make "children's" films, they're still widely enjoyed by adults and are considered worthy and emotionally rich enough by the general public. People are able to take the drama in Persepolis and Maus seriously despite the simplistic art styles. Etc.

Also, there's the fact that a lot of the SF/F novels that do gain a wider audience than just SF/F are not really more emotionally complex than the general genre but are usually easier, prosaically, to read than much of the genre.

edited 31st Aug '12 5:27:36 AM by ohsointocats

I may like "geeky" things but I actually hate math, even failed a math class twice (and barely passed third time around).

Of course I'm talking about the ghetto, I'm talking about why the ghetto might exist to begin with, or at least one of the partial reasons for it.

You bring up counterexamples, but what do you want to prove with them? That I'm wrong and these media are taken as equals to others? That the ghetto doesn't exist? Because these two are the same thing.

Besides, your examples are less than perfect. Miyazaki cartoons, or Pesepolis, are not "widely enjoyed" in the mainstream, they wouldn't be recognized by one in a hundred random people. They just happen to have a Periphery Demographic of High Art critics. (who often do have a taste for the surreal, the symbolic, and the stylistic, over realism).

Pixar, the only really popular one of these, is on the othar hand, in a way, a compromise. Current CGI animated movies follow the public's demand for more and more visual fidelity and verisimilitude by their switching from 2D to 3D, while still being stylized enough to attract the children and the nerds. But how often do you hear people on this very forum bitching about the death of serious 2D Western Animation since the Disney Renaissance? Pixar is a compromise as it is "quite realistic for a cartoon", while it is still "quite cartoony for a realistic movie".

Something similar is happening in the gaming industry. As graphical fidelity increases, games like COD or GTA are getting more and more popular, while at the same time, there is a backlash on most hardcore gamer sites against realism, and forming a cult of more stylized indie games.

Then there are events like that random CEO commenting on how photorealism will give help gaming to grow, and make more emotional games in genres like drama and romance, and gamers reacted by screaming about how it's nonsense because they already cried at the end of Ico or whatever, and gaming is already so emotional, forgetting that we might be unique that way, and the average person didn't consider it that.

Yes, that's a good example of my first post, before I started this tangent on the neural aspect, that SF/F isn't inherently nerdy to begin with, it is obscurity and unpopularity itself that is considered nerdy, not spaceships and dragons.

The main difference between the SF/F ghetto and the rest of the ghettoes, is exactly that SF/F can be so popular, in fact, it's the single most dominant element of mainstream entertainment, as I said, five out of five of the past decade's highest-grossing movies are sci-fi or fantasy. It's "ghetto" comes from High Art critics looking down on it for being pulp, weird, and "nerdy".

Meanwhile, Animation/Comic Books/Video Games are in the exact opposite situation. They can occasionally be highly regarded by critics, but their mainstream acceptance as "serious entertainment" is in inverse proportion to their established stylized content format.

edited 31st Aug '12 6:42:16 AM by Ever9

Do non-nerds read sci-fi/fantasy books? I don't think so. There are exceptions like Harry Potter and Twilight, but those are children's/young teen books.

The sci-fi films that are popular are also mostly big spectacle films. Star Wars doesn't have a particularly deep setting or interesting concepts or any of that other stuff nerds claim to love about SF, but it does have lots of explosions and laser swords. They're popular with mainstream audiences for the same reasons that action films are.

Television... is a little more complicated.

I am making a comment on that it's absurd to say that only pictures of real people can evoke emotions. I don't know. HAL and the Wyoming countryside were the most soulful characters in 2001 A Space Odessy and Brokeback Mountain, respectvely, and they don't even have faces.