3.) Nerd culture fans tend to be ridiculously possessive of the objects of their fandom. And this, more than anything, is where I part company. Because I don't care that Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ripped off a shitload of visuals from previous Hong Kong kung fu movies - and it totally did - or that Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh's Mandarin accents were terrible - and they totally were - so long as Crouching Tiger was itself a good movie that also made tons of money and introduced people to the glory of Asian cinema, which it completely did. If you don't think Crouching Tiger isn't responsible for North American wide releases of Hero or Iron Monkey or House of Flying Daggers or any of a dozen other awesome Chinese action epics, you are smoking crack. (And, for that matter, opened the doors for other Asian cinema that didn't have lots of kicking in it, like Wong Kar-wai's luscious romantic movies or Takeshi Kitano's gangster films or etc.) The HK fans who keep complaining about how Ang Lee "ruined" their favorite type of movie need to be taken out back and horsewhipped. Repeatedly. Back in the day, apparently the anime fans complained about Voltron's North American dubs. Does it matter to them that Voltron essentially opened the floodgates for anime in North America, even moreso than Robotech did?
Of course it doesn't, because the sentiment is always the same: we were here first so yay for us we are the best. It's elitist, and it's bullshit. When I see something I like, I tell everybody about it and I tell everybody to watch it, because nothing gets me off (metaphorically speaking) like good entertainment done well and I think everybody should get the chance to get off like I do. When I tell you that you should go see Old Boy, I tell you that because I thought Old Boy was weird and crazy and awesome and unlike any movie I'd seen in years. (He eats a live squid! Let's see Vin Diesel do that.) Not because I have deemed you worthy of being in my personal social club.
I've read that part of the psychology of "early adopters" - and nerds are by definition early and often only adopters - is the conceived partial ownership of what they've adopted. Let's go back to Battlestar Galactica for a moment, and look at the oldschool fans who hate that the new show isn't like the old show. Of course they hate it. This is not their beautiful show! Emphasis on "their". Because who else saw the old show? I'd never seen an episode of the old show until I saw some videos of it when I was twenty-three (and it was ass). This new BSG is not their show - it is everybody's show. And thus they must hate it, for they have lost a tiny bit of their perceived uniqueness. Which is a load of crap, of course, but there you go.
