3 Fan Communities That Hate Their Own Members

3 Comic Books

I have spent more money on comic books and superhero merchandise than I have on my wedding. I used to mow lawns to pay for comic books. Tim Burton's Batman was the first movie I remember seeing in an American movie theater. I own a M.O.D.O.K. T-shirt, a M.O.D.O.K. action figure, and a M.O.D.O.K. coffee mug. M.O.D.O.K. is not a bandwagon character. M.O.D.O.K. is the equivalent of a teardrop tattoo. You know somebody is hardcore if they're talking about goddamned M.O.D.O.K.

And despite all that, I still get nervous every time I walk into a comic book shop, like they're all silently judging me. This is a holdover from when I was a little kid and would walk into comic book stores and the guys behind the counter would instantly start making fun of me if I stupidly asked them any questions, thereby admitting my shameless audacity for not having committed the layout of their store to memory. For some reason, the default setting for comic book nerds is "ridicule." The secondary setting is "snacks."

It's not a groundless fear -- comic fans are ruthless. The instant you say something about a character or storyline that they disagree with, they immediately do their very best to exclude you from the community. Girls get it the worst -- a girl can't wear an Aquaman T-shirt to any kind of nerdy gathering without getting accused of not being a true fan (whatever the hell that means) and being grilled with Aquaman trivia questions that no human being should be able to answer. (The correct answer to "If you're such a big fan, then in what issue of Aquaman did we learn the name of Aquaman's father?" is "Fuck you -- Arthur, Prince of the Sea, belongs to everyone.")

When I wrote a column a few months back outlining the reasons that Ben Affleck will probably be totally fine as Batman, I was inundated with people accusing me of never having read a comic book before in my life. Many rage-quaking Batman fans wanted my comic book membership card burned in an iron brazier and extinguished with the tears of my friends and family. It was as if I had broken into their bedrooms and shotgunned a violent Batman-shaped dump into their pillowcases (which are likely also decorated with pictures of Batman, making it a hate crime according to current federal legislation).

I think this is because many people in the comic book community are unable to separate themselves from their favorite characters or understand that the specific connection they feel to a particular character or storyline is literally the same personal connection that every single other fan feels. It's like the feeling you get when listening to a favorite album; it takes you to a specific time and place in your life, and the experience can be almost religious. But the thing is, every other comic fan has that exact same connection. Their fan worship is but one in a sea of millions. So why is any one person's idea of what is cool for Batman any more or less correct than anyone else's? (Unless you are Joel Schumacher, in which case your concept of Batman is so incorrect that it stabs straight through the X-axis of every "Batman Correctness" graph like a dagger of spiteful hatred.)

Comics are a business; they depend on fans to survive. And yet the influx of new fans that comes along with every comic book movie is something that the comic community in general greets with elitist derision. Why is it so terrible if a pretty girl who'd never heard of the Guardians of the Galaxy until two months ago suddenly walks into your comic shop and wants to read about them? Nobody erupted from the womb implanted with the knowledge of the mystical origin story of Dr. Stephen Strange -- somebody introduced you to that character, and the community grew by extension. Other people should be allowed to join, too, regardless of whether they were introduced by some movie they liked.

2 Gaming

I always backed the wrong nerd games growing up. When Magic: The Gathering came out, I bought Spellfire. Warhammer 40K? No thanks, guys, I'll play Mutant Chronicles. Pokemon, you say? Keep it -- I'm going to ride this Marvel Overpower wave and see where it takes me.

Anyway, when I used to go into my local gaming shop, which was located right next door to the sandwich shop where I would later work and witness several felonies, the guys behind the counter wasted no time informing me how incorrect all of my interests were. I'm not talking about friendly jests, either -- if you go into a hardcore gaming boutique and ask for the wrong thing, the proprietor will tremulously stroke his Scott Ian wizard beard and tell you in no uncertain terms to never come back ever again as long as you live. You could be a golden avatar of disposable income who sweats cash and farts diamond dust, and it wouldn't matter -- they don't want any of your dirty, wrong-game-playing money.

It's a niche market, to be sure, but even niche markets have to grow (see "comics," above). For example, Magic: The Gathering is a fairly new game on the timeline of nerdery -- it came out in 1993. We were already decades deep into Dungeons & Dragons and all the Games Workshop stuff. The first kid who bought a box of Magic cards probably received the tabletop nerd equivalent of an ass-kicking, which is "adults firing malicious barbs of sarcasm at meek children." But then Magic hung in there, and now it's a grizzled old mainstay that can no longer appreciate how ridiculous it is, like those fantasy gaming magazines with elaborately painted covers featuring scantily clad warrior princesses with chest orbs so massive, they have their own gravitational pull. Magic: The Gathering went from edgy fringe lunatic Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon making joyful Three Stooges references while winking at the camera to Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon 4 talking about Joe Pesci's pet frog over his dead wife's tombstone, completely unaware that cameras are anywhere in the area.

Even if you purchase the right game, you aren't immediately granted entry into the Kingdom of Nerdaria. You will invariably get grilled to test your knowledge about whatever game it is you claim to be a fan of. Essentially, you have to prove your knowledge before you will be allowed to cross the Bridge of Champions unmolested. Only Red Otis Thunderdump, the shift manager at the Hardee's down the street, has ever answered all of his indoctrinating gaming trivia questions correctly, and he had a subscription to Dragon magazine.

Your chances of being invited to join a play group are slim, and even if you get there, your chances of enjoying yourself are even slimmer. You see, every game, even cooperative ones like D&D, becomes a poisonous competition designed to ruin friendships before they even begin. It's the scorched earth method of social interaction, which is what happens when aggressively antisocial people are forced to be around each other for an entire evening. That's especially baffling because tabletop gaming is a community that literally depends on interacting with other people. It's way different from playing games on Xbox Live -- threats and insults take on a psychologically bitter reality when you're actually sitting in the same room with a person calling you a "faggot foot" in a scream-cloud of spittle-flecked fury. It makes no sense for people who hate other human beings so much to join a community that requires you to gather a group of them around a table for several hours a night.

As I mentioned, even cooperative role-playing games, where you're supposed to be working together as a team, can be a troller-coaster ride of petty wounding. And like the comic book scene, it is worse for girls. My fiancee joined a Dungeons & Dragons group wherein the DM (that's nerd shorthand for Dungeon Master, the guy who runs the game) decided that he would make the game so brutally unfun for her that she would never want to play again. Imagine a referee forbidding your little league team to use bats or gloves, then following you to Chuck E. Cheese's after the game to shit all over everyone's pizza and rape the animatronic characters to death with a hedge trimmer. That's basically the same thing. Even her fellow players worked against her -- one of her teammates stole her character's only possession and threw it into a river, for no other reason than to be a dick. It didn't advance the game in any way, and it had no other strategic purpose. He just wanted to hurt her feelings. Making it so that she never wanted to play again was more important to them than actually enjoying the game, because somewhere along the line, the tabletop and video gaming community decided its sole purpose was to make sure that nobody has any fun.

1 Indie Music

I spent my college years struggling in the independent music scene, playing woefully uncomplicated songs on an acoustic guitar like it was the coolest thing in the world, apparently unaware that several people way more talented than me had attempted this very thing before.

Without exception, every single musician I have ever played a show with has been gracious, encouraging, and welcoming. Amazingly, it's the people who are on the fringes of the scene that are the problem. Record store owners, show promoters, and fans ("fans" here meaning "fans of the scene" and not "fans of music") tend to be some of the shittiest people you can imagine. It's a collection of professional armchair critics who risk absolutely nothing yet can't be bothered to nurture the community or create any music themselves. The scene is more important than the music to them, and they want to keep the scene in as tiny a bubble as they possibly can. So they ridicule any newcomers that weren't approved by college radio or Pitchfork magazine by simply repeating opinions they have either heard or read without offering anything of their own to the mix. (Because if you do, you might say the wrong thing and lose your scene points, and then you will be shipped off to rap metal camp.)

Case in point: One night at an open mic, some classic beard-glasses hipster in the back looked up from his computer after I'd finished playing my first song and asked if I took requests. This is a terrifying question, because I don't know how to play too many songs besides the ones I have specifically written with my limited vocal range and skill set in mind. I kind of mumbled something along the lines of "Well, I'll try, what do you want to hear?" And Baldo McBeardface (he was bald, too -- the universe stole his hair for being a cock trumpet) proudly announced, "I will give you $10 to stop playing."

I will be the first to admit that I am by no means a mind-blowing talent. I will never be able to make my living as a musician, and I will never achieve the respect and adoration of a Haddaway or a Justin Guarini. But give this a listen for a minute or so, if you can:

Regardless of whether you like the song, it probably isn't the absolute worst thing you've ever heard. It is by no means the most aggressively unforgivable mountain of fiendshit ever bled from the anus of a Goatwhore roadie. At worst it's utterly forgettable. However, rather than simply ignoring me and continuing to troll Friendster for the teenage James Joyce fans he was still capable of impressing, Beardhead Q. Taintbutter decided to show the entire coffee shop how clever he was by belittling the 20-year-old kid perched clumsily on a stool in the front for singing songs he wrote in his bedroom to anyone who wanted to listen. I mean, it was open mic night. The whole point of an open mic is for people to get together and perform stuff without any expectations. If you're just there to watch, dead silence or polite applause is really all you're supposed to contribute unless somebody is up there spitting racism into a microphone. But that's absolutely the norm for tons of scenesters -- hate everything, but don't contribute. Then you win, I guess.

There was a seriously trendy record store near my college that had shows once or twice a week, and I bothered these guys constantly to let me play, even just a 10-minute set to open for another band. And I gave them a copy of my first album as soon as I got it pressed (you can still find it on iTunes and Amazon if you're feeling really, really charitable about decade-old CDs today) and asked them if they could please review it on their website. I didn't sell them a copy, mind you, or ask for a good review. I gave them a copy for free, as a local musician whose face they recognized because I came into their store all the time, and I asked them to write whatever they wanted about it, just to get it out there.

Keep in mind that this wasn't in Seattle or New York or Los Angeles or D.C. The scene where I lived wasn't fiercely competitive so much as nonexistent. But they never agreed to let me play, and they never wrote a single thing about my album. In fact, I came into the store a few weeks later and saw it priced for sale in their used record section. I gave them an album that I'd spent what little money I had to record and produce as a struggling young musician in the very scene they claimed to support, and although they wouldn't deign to write even a shitty review about it on their website, they were more than happy to turn around and sell it for a 100 percent profit. The joke is on them, though, because I am certain that no one ever bought it.

Tom is probably singing songs in his M.O.D.O.K. shirt this very instant. Read his novel Stitches and follow him on Twitter and Tumblr.

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