Not too long ago there was a post on Mythic producer Josh Drescher’s blog about how San Diego Comic-Con is like “The Geek Prom”. That’s actually pretty accurate except for the fact that I don’t recall my high school prom having every other person dressed in spandex or having to deal with the fact that the food and drink was probably as unhealthy as injecting caffeine directly into your head.
It’s interesting to see how those of the geeky persuasion tend to lament the media coverage of such events. Yeah, sure, there appear to be two modes that the mainstream media tend to approach covering a convention of nerdy folks. Those modes are 1: Poorly Hidden Confusion and 2: Look at the Weird People. And yeah, when the media person chooses to interview the person who likes to dress in a chicken costume and talk loudly about cock all day, it might not put geeks like you or I in a positive light.
But geeks shouldn’t hide from this kind of exposure. In fact, they should embrace it. The thing of it all, is that conventions are perhaps the one time out of the year for many people when they can feel good about being the square peg in the round hole of society. You don’t like the fact that people give you funny looks when you show them your extensive Sailor Moon DVD collection, even though you’re male? It’s accepted at a con. You ever see a blank look in the eyes of your “normal” co-workers when you show up to your job with your hair dyed like the Green Lantern, complete with cool decoder ring? No problem for cons. What about the fact that you’re able to recite the entire season 1 episode finale of Heroes and can haltingly speak Japanese like Hiro? That’s all good too.
Geeks may have shunned, or not been able to act normal enough to ask someone to, the prom, but at a convention, even the geeks can get laid, even if it’s with someone who most certainly had trouble fitting into their Japanese high school student outfit. There’s hope, and if the media wants to look at you the same way as it looks at a 5 car and 1 beer truck pileup on the highway, then so be it.
As a convention worker (if you thought attending cons was weird, try staffing them), the best part of a con that I chaired one year was watching a real, actual high school prom who had had the unfortunate luck of being in the same facility as us. Despite our insistence that a picture of someone who thought they could be a ninja at 340 pounds was not the background ambience their event needed, they still wanted to show up. As the normal prom-goers showed up, wearing the latest and greatest in fashion and looking all the world like a 17 year old version of GQ magazine, they were quickly and suddenly surrounded and overwhelmed by costume-wearing, catgirl-calling, decidedly average looking masses of geekdom. And as the geeks looked at the oddly dressed teens with the same looks they got every day in school, you knew this was the modern Revenge of the Nerds.
I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. And neither should you.