“‘nerd’ is a title that is given to people in school anyway...it holds no weight in normal life in my opinion”
Those wise words were texted to me courtesy my highly excellent boyfriend during my lunch break today. I had been ranting to him about what I will very soon rant to you, so buckle up.
As I may have already mentioned, I’m working at school over the summer for Campus Events, which basically means I am a glorified toilet-cleaner who occasionally sets up for the various conferences and sports camps that Messiah rents out their space to over the course of the summer. This past week there was a girls’ volleyball camp, and we ate lunch at the same time as them today. Many of the girls were sporting homemade shirts with the Batman symbol drawn on them, as well as the phrase “the dark spikes.” Which by all means is a clever nod to pop culture, but I couldn’t help feeling a little bitter look at them all. I mean, when I was in high school and I thought Batman was cool, I got ink put on my locker door.
I’ve started to read the book ‘Supergods,’ by Grant Morrison, and it is supposed to be about the rise of popularity for superheroes like the caped crusader in recent years and how they are culturally relevant, as well as why the modern masses are eating up the Man of Steel and Xavier’s gifted youngsters.
Morrison writes, “I’ve been aware of comic books’ range, and of the big ideas and emotions they can communicate, for a long time now, so it’s with amazement and a little pride that I’ve watched the ongoing, bloodless surrender of mainstream culture to relentless colonization from the geek hinterlands. Names that once were arcane outsider shibboleths now front global marketing campaigns” (Morrison, p vxi).
I wish I shared his triumphant outlook, and some days I feel like I do. But when I hear one thirteen-year-old girl explain to her friend about her shirt bearing the Avengers logo, “We put superhero names on the back, from the Avengers. Like the Flash, and Superman," I don’t want to live on this planet anymore. From the deepest and most selfish parts of me a Kraken-like monster wells up, proclaiming, “I was here first! I earned this!” And I watch in terror and rage as the next generation of kids who made my life hell in junior high and high school, who made me feel excluded and worthless, stampede through my safe haven of tights and shields, taking what I somehow feel is rightfully mine and desecrating it.
I feel kind of stupid for getting so worked up about this kind of thing. It’s just, when I didn’t have the popularity or the athletic skills that made life worthwhile in those tender teenage years, I had enthusiasm and knowledge about things like the X-Men, and Transformers. Now, girls who have all the things I lacked when I was their age are in addition taking my sacred ground for their own. Maybe I hang on to my “nerdy” interests because without them, I feel like I have very little to offer. If I'm honest, I feel like they don't deserve to like the things I like. They don't understand it well enough, they don't care about it as much as I do, it doesn't mean as much them, and therefore they should not have it. For whatever reason, I think I am doing it right and they are doing it wrong. But it's not their fault that Batman's masked face is everywhere, that superhero movies have been the latest and biggest to-do all summer.
And who knows, maybe The Dark Knight is the hero they deserve. Maybe the concepts I so identified with when I was younger can impart new insights and thought processes into their Bieber-filled brains. Maybe a mainstream superhero culture will deter this round of high-schoolers from putting ink on the locker of someone who thinks Batman is cool.
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