February 4th, 2008
1. Star Trek
It's the elephant in the nerdy-obsessions room, and in the Venn diagram of nerd-dom, it may be the meeting point for everything else on this list, with good reason. The original Star Trek—there are only 80 episodes—spawned movies, TV series both good and bad, and a billion fantasies about leadership and green poontang. That's probably because it's simultaneously heady and ridiculous, smart and overwhelmingly dumb. For a brilliant taste of the cult Star Trek has spawned, see Trekkies, a feature-length documentary hosted by Star Trek: The Next Generation star Denise Crosby. It gently, hilariously examines fans whose obsession with the franchise takes up a huge portion of their lives—a teen who's inspired to make his own Trek movie, a copy-shop worker who insists on being called "Commander," and a woman so obsessed with Brent Spiner's cyborg character Data that she takes "Brent breaks."
2. Renaissance faires
"Huzzah! A shilling for the king! Enjoy thy mead, kind sirrah." No, dude, it's not a shilling, it's $8. And it's not mead, it's Bud Light in a plastic cup with a picture of a unicorn on it. Don't get us wrong, the notion of spending a Saturday visiting a reconstituted medieval village is all good fun, with the jousting and the turkey legs and the roaming Shakespearian clowns yelling insults at people. But it's all too easy to see the cardboard-and-felt façade that most ren-fests are built on, and the compromises necessary to make a true medieval experience palatable to a modern audience. (The true Middle Ages lifestyle involved more plague rats, religious persecution, and plumbing "systems" that are really just buckets tossed out of your front window.)
3. Fantasy sports leagues
That scene in Knocked Up says it all: A woman who suspects her husband of infidelity instead finds him shacked up with a bunch of pot-bellied dudes in jerseys and caps, deep into a mock draft. In the moment, she's so horrified by what she's witnessing that she thinks it's worse than him cheating on her. That may be overly harsh, but even rotisserie addicts are likely to admit that pretending to be the general manager of your own baseball or football team is a bit pathetic, like being the asthmatic boy who watches the other kids play from his bedroom window. And fantasy-sports junkies can't claim superiority over face-painting superfan yahoos, either, because they watch every game with conflicting rooting interests. If you're a Chicago Cubs fan in the real world and own St. Louis Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols on your fantasy squad, you have to root for Pujols to rack up HR, RBI, R, OBP, and SLG numbers while hoping the Cubbies survive the onslaught. There's no loyalty to it, and little satisfaction beyond the bloodless accounting it takes to win. (Mitigating factor: Thanks to Michael Lewis' Moneyball—and the stat-centered baseball revolution described therein—the nerds have the upper hand on the jocks, at least in the front office.)
4. Michael Jackson
It should come as no surprise that Michael Jackson has inspired overwhelming obsession: For a while, he seemed to be the most famous person on the planet. But now that he's gotten certifiably creepy, that African tribe that crowned him king probably wants their crown back. Still, anyone who can maintain millions of diehard fans while fighting court battles and not releasing much/any new music has clearly done something right. There's plenty of Jacko fanfic and poetry to be found on the web, but the fact that his supporters follow his every move and still show up to support him at his court appearances probably means more than all of that.
5. Wikipedia
We could have filled this entire inventory out just by going down the list of interests, habits, and abilities "Weird Al" Yankovic credits himself with in his hit song "White & Nerdy." But his proclamation "I edit Wikipedia!" seems particularly apt, given the amount of tinkery focus and emotional energy people put into it. Wikipedia represents a lot of admirable goals, and it's a damn useful jumping-off point for any research project, but the process of keeping it up to date, accurate, and informative requires a lot of people to be monomaniacal about maintaining it, and particularly about fighting endlessly over whether a given entry is detailed enough, objective enough, deserving of splitting or cleanup or deletion or being folded into another entry, etc. Which is geekier, dedicating weeks to making sure that every single episode of Battlestar Galactica in all its various iterations is listed on a website for future fans, or spending hours furiously arguing with other diehard fans over the structure of the Galactica pages?
6. Battlestar Galactica
Speaking of which… a science-fiction series doesn't have to be super-successful to inspire crazed devotion. Battlestar Galactica capitalized on Star Wars mania in 1978 as a film and a quickly cancelled TV series. A sequel series, Galactica 1980, was also quickly dropped, but a cult of followers still formed. Twenty-five years later, the SCI FI Channel debuted a re-imagined version, which quickly spawned a new generation of BSG nerds. For whatever reason, all rabid science-fiction fans love starring in related amateur live-action videos, and SCI FI has obliged its contingent with a "Video Maker Toolkit," supplying the life-deprived hordes with BSG sounds and visuals to incorporate into poorly produced clips. (Giggle at them here.) Die-hards on vacation can head to Vancouver, where the show is filmed, to tour spots around town depicted as the robot-controlled planet Caprica; those who still hold the original series dear can book a spot on the Galacticruise, which sets out to sea this year with cast members on board.
7. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
A rite of passage for every high-school theater geek, Rocky Horror is designed to be off-putting to outsiders. It's an intentionally cheesy movie-musical with audience heckling built into the script; the only way to really understand why people are throwing toast and toilet paper in the air or shouting "asshole" at seemingly random moments is to see it, preferably a couple of times, with people who already know what's going on. Insularity breeds dorkiness, which becomes accentuated when you add in the not-ready-for-dinner-theater live shows that grace many Rocky Horror screenings. Of course, the whole point of Rocky Horror is that you should never be ashamed to be different, so it isn't surprising that its subculture embraces that ideal.
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