February 4th, 2008
8. Joss Whedon
We need a Venn diagram for this one, too. (Maybe diagram-making deserves its own entry?) Map out one with traditional geeky obsessions (vampires, spaceships, superheroes) in one portion, a desire to see strong female characters (see clip below) in a second portion, and a gift for wittily unforced and infinitely quotable dialogue in the third portion, and you'll find Joss Whedon's work in the overlap. It's an almost perfect storm for rabid fandom, and Whedon fans have risen to the occasion. Those folks you see at comic conventions wearing Joss Whedon Is My Master T-shirtsare only half-kidding. It doesn't hurt that Whedon has remained humble and approachable in spite of the raving fan-love his shows Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly have sparked. On the fan site whedonesque.com, he comes off more like one of the gang than like a creative overlord. (Of course, some high-profile setbacks might also help keep his ego in check.) But beyond that, Whedon has become an unassumingly inspiring figure, using his entertainment as a Trojan horse for social commentary and dedicating his free time to good causes like Equality Now, as in this clip:
9. Media-specific role-playing
You know what's totally cooler than watching Buffy The Vampire Slayer endlessly on DVD? Actually getting to be Buffy the vampire slayer. At least virtually. Especially since you can probably make much better life choices than she did, even if you can't manage the banter. To that end, Eden Studios published a handful of rulebooks for role-playing in the Buffyverse, letting would-be slayers (and witches, and Watchers, and so forth) create their own Buffyverse characters, or use pre-modeled statistics to pretend to be pre-existing characters from Buffy and Angel. Nor is Buffy the only show with an official, licensed role-playing tie-in: Other publishers have released rulebooks to let players officially bang around in the universes of Firefly, Star Wars, Star Trek, Hercules and Xena, Dr. Who, James Bond, Species, Highlander, and Stargate. And that isn't even getting into the at-least-thousands of unlicensed, fan-created fora, MUDs, MUSHes, AIM channels, etc. that let people get together for the express purpose of pretending to be their favorite characters from Pirates Of The Caribbean, Anne Rice novels, and especially the Harry Potter series. Some people just can't let go of their favorite fictional world, even once the authors and creators have; others want to experience what it's like to be cool, like their chosen characters, instead of dorky, like the people who want to role-play them. And still others just prefer for their netsex to be flavored with a lot of angsty, complicated backstory. Ohhh, Draco!
10. Magic: The Gathering
Pretty much any collectible card game could go on this list—the entire CCG industry rests on the assumption that players will become obsessively nerdy over certain games, and pour an endless stream of money into the quest to be the best. But Magic, at least in America, is the granddaddy of them all: an endlessly variable pyramid scheme in which the most successful players have to sink vast amounts of money into buying all the latest and greatest cards, in order to keep their complicated strategies up to date. Actual Magic games tend to be fairly short, often 10 minutes or less; it's the shopping, strategizing, and endless deck-refining that eats years of players' lives. Dedicated players have thousands of cards, but have to choose only a bare handful of them for each game, which makes deck-building and deck-tuning a major obsession. Aggro or control? Creatures or spells? One-color deck or mixed colors? Is Akroma's Memorial worth it if you don't know whether your opponent is playing a black or red deck? Are thallids worth the work? Argh! Only hours of Internet arguments and days of painstaking sorting, planning, and thinking through card interactions could possibly answer these fiddly, incredibly trivial questions.
11. World Of Warcraft
Similarly, the vast number of variables in complicated video games like World Of Warcraft call out for serious wankery, as players choose races, classes, professions, specializations, guilds, abilities, and strategies, then grind their way obsessively toward becoming the ass-kickingest of the virtual ass-kickers. Five minutes in a room with any two World Of Warcraft players will drive any non-player mad, amid jargony babble like "Next time we run MC, sheep one of the core hounds while I rush in and pull aggro. Damn, I wish they hadn't nerfed paladins." That's if the players are actually talking, rather than editing together funny little WoW videos for YouTube, reading the WoW comic, shopping online for WoW collectable figures, playing the WoW board or card game, or, more likely, silently hitting their 14th straight hour of playing WoW.
12. The Simpsons
Everybody loves The Simpsons. It's one of the few things in this world you can call "great" and have it almost qualify as fact, rather than mere subjective judgment. But some folks (not pointing any fingers here) approach Simpsons fandom with a zeal and passion that would creep out David Koresh. It isn't just that super-fans speak in the densely coded language of Simpsons references—shoehorning Ralph Wiggum quotes into conversations about anything—or that they start frothing at the mouth the moment somebody suggests the show maybe kinda sorta is not all that funny anymore. It's that these people clearly prefer the Simpsons universe to the one in which real people reside. And given the liberal use of the Simpsons trademark for every kind of merchandise under the sun, it's frighteningly easy to live in the fictional Springfield.
13. Doctor Who
As nerdy as a Star Trek fan can be, the potential nerdiness of the Doctor Who fan is far greater. That's not a knock on the quality of either show (please, let's not start that debate), but the result of two other factors: Trek's much greater mainstream success, with half a dozen TV series and 10 feature films boosting the brand, means that when someone says "Beam me up, Scotty," at least people know what the hell they're referencing. The relative obscurity of Doctor Who, especially in the days when it was only viewable in America on PBS, kept it further underground. And the fact that the central character of Doctor Who is a flamboyant eccentric who wears things like a 25-foot scarf or a piece of celery on his lapel, whereas Star Trek favors dashing ladies' men in uniform—well, at best, you can say that one encourages individualism where the other encourages conformity. But dress like the Doctor in real life, and your ensemble is only barely missing a KICK ME sign. (That's less true of the new BBC series, at least.)
14. Frank Zappa
Because Frank Zappa was so prodigious, so eclectic, and so keen on parodying modern music, fans of his work can dive in so deep that they rarely listen to anything else. (After all, what Zappa fan can be expected to take doo-wop seriously after hearing Cruising With Ruben And The Jets?) Zappa's style and sensibility—combining the ambition of prog, the improvisation of jazz, and the chummy snark of Steve Allen—particularly appeals to misfits and music-theory majors, who respect Zappa's musicality and identify with his superior attitude. Those fans often aspire to become as smart and skilled as Zappa, so that they too can, with authority, mock a culture that they perceive as excluding them.
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