So i'm just curious of what others experiences of this are. I personally have never felt the need to hide my love of the franchise, even although i still receieve the odd accsional "beam me up scotty" remark from work colleagues. I actually thought the JJ movies and The Big Bang Theory would bring Star Trek more into the mainstream and there for, be more acceptable to the wider population. Why is Star Wars accepted by people but not Star Trek? It seems to me most people see Trek as a kids thing. Maybe they are insulted by the fact it's actually more intellectual and so they can't understand it?
Are you teased or bullied for being a Fan?
- Thread starter DertyNerdy
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I've wondered that most of my life.
Spending every weekend watching a team play a game, dressing up like the players, going to events with other fans, talking about the team as if you are part of it, getting tattoos of the team symbol, talking about it endlessly, etc.... perfectly fine, normal behaviour.
Translate even a tenth of that to liking science fiction, and you're a loser and a weirdo.
It's an odd disparity. In fairness, I think it has died away somewhat in the last decade. Fantasy and sci-fi is more mainstream with LotR, Harry Potter, the MCU, Game of Thrones, etc. and it's more acceptable to like it. But there is still a big distinction between the social acceptability of being a serious fan of genre shows and being a fan of, say, football.
Sports are very mainstream and seen as appealing to all kinds of appealing. Trek, along with SF in general, has long been seen as something often appealing to a certain type of person, even if in reality it, too, appeals to many different kinds of people.
The anti-intellectualism that is so apparent today is not a new thing, but it appears to be more apparent now.
The anti-intellectualism that is so apparent today is not a new thing, but it appears to be more apparent now.
No. Never but then when I was watching TOS in syndication I was one of a group of kids watching it. I never 'suffered' for my fandom. I had no idea that the typical stereotypical fan was supposed to be some unsocialized nerdy kid living in his parent's basement and I did not become aware of that until I became an adult. I have never met anyone like that in real life.
When I mention that I am a fan of sci fi/and fantasy and have been for years it raises some eyebrows...I think because I'm female but no one has 'teased' me about it.
When I mention that I am a fan of sci fi/and fantasy and have been for years it raises some eyebrows...I think because I'm female but no one has 'teased' me about it.
To start, I don't generally advertise my every fancy for all of the world to see. For another, nobody I knew - guy, or girl - even watched the show. It just wasn't a part of their world. What's to say on it? They don't even know what I'm talking about. My clique was much more musically inclined. So, instead of cosplaying as Riker, in my mind, we were on our way to playing sold-out shows at Madison Square Garden. And here we were, just making a bunch of noise in some back room in an old Church, or whatever. Besides which, until STAR TREK '09, this franchise hadn't really enjoyed the popular acceptance, or respectability, of even STAR WARS, let's say. And STAR WARS was always well-stocked on geeks, nerds, misfits and degenerates of every kind. It was best to keep a respectable distance from STAR TREK and did just that.
Not by anyone who lived.
I never was as a kid. I'm not exactly shy about being a geek, but I'm also not shy in kicking people who annoy me. I never really let things annoy me, so after one or two comments I'd just take the piss out of the the guy and that was it for the rest of high school.
Never made sense to me. I was pretty much a walking target and no one took aim...
Never made sense to me. I was pretty much a walking target and no one took aim...
Attitudes like this are the reason for the disdain.
They understand it just fine. It's not particularly intellectual. Star Trek fans aren't nearly as smart as they think they are.
I can't recall the last time anybody gave me hard time about being a Trekkie, but then I've been out of grade school for close to forty years and worked in sci-fi publishing for most of my adult life. (Heck, being a Trekkie is practically a job requirement in some circles.)
I remembered being bullied back in junior high, but not because of Trek in particular, but simply because I was your archetypal skinny, four-eyed bookworm type, which probably makes you a target in grade school regardless if you're into Star Trek, Doctor Who, or Conan the Barbarian.
These days I live in a small town where pretty much everybody knows that I'm that guy who writes the weird sci-fi books. (Seriously, I've received mail simply addressed to "Greg Cox, Science Fiction Writer" without any street address.) In general, people seem to find that more amusing than anything else.
In short, I've never really experienced any bullying in the grown-up world.
I remembered being bullied back in junior high, but not because of Trek in particular, but simply because I was your archetypal skinny, four-eyed bookworm type, which probably makes you a target in grade school regardless if you're into Star Trek, Doctor Who, or Conan the Barbarian.
These days I live in a small town where pretty much everybody knows that I'm that guy who writes the weird sci-fi books. (Seriously, I've received mail simply addressed to "Greg Cox, Science Fiction Writer" without any street address.) In general, people seem to find that more amusing than anything else.
In short, I've never really experienced any bullying in the grown-up world.
When I was in school, yes. Not since I left school, however. Lesson learned: school is a horrible place to be.
I have been politely teased on and off the whole time, but the only time I'd say I was bullied that involved Trek was in my freshman year of high school.
I was going through A LOT at home that year as the culmination of many years of being abused psychologically and displaced (we moved 21 times in my first 14 years, with me making friends and having them ripped away over and over), so I was kind of losing my mind. I would go through days of refusing to speak to other students except in Klingon and in "Vulcan" - really, a bunch of garbledygook that I was loosely basing on the conversation between Spock and Saavik in the turbolift in Star Trek II - because I didn't really want to talk to anyone about anything real at all, but at the same time I desperately needed to talk to someone. I would "shut down" for a while, and when I would "boot back up", I would count up my memory out loud. I took notes in our classes in video game based hieroglyphics (and could read them back later - I wasn't just doodling). And they didn't really know me to begin with, and so they responded with what I suspect is an evolutionary drive to hurt someone who is acting really out of the norm physically and emotionally until they either get their sh*t straight or remove themselves from the gene pool.
I don't blame Trek one bit - on the contrary, I'm thankful to Spock and Diane Duane (along with Superman and Asimov's Laws of Robotics - but that's another story) for helping me get through that time. And I really don't blame most of those kids. Kids their age just aren't generally equipped to know how to deal with that sort of thing properly. Their reactions - and the fact that my parents weren't together and fighting anymore - helped me to actually be one of the most globally liked students at my last school after that 15th and final move with mom but not dad. And many of them have grown up to be good people - I'm friends with some of them on Facebook. And I've come to realize that the ones that abused me the worst had their own issues and were almost certainly being abused at home, themselves.
I was going through A LOT at home that year as the culmination of many years of being abused psychologically and displaced (we moved 21 times in my first 14 years, with me making friends and having them ripped away over and over), so I was kind of losing my mind. I would go through days of refusing to speak to other students except in Klingon and in "Vulcan" - really, a bunch of garbledygook that I was loosely basing on the conversation between Spock and Saavik in the turbolift in Star Trek II - because I didn't really want to talk to anyone about anything real at all, but at the same time I desperately needed to talk to someone. I would "shut down" for a while, and when I would "boot back up", I would count up my memory out loud. I took notes in our classes in video game based hieroglyphics (and could read them back later - I wasn't just doodling). And they didn't really know me to begin with, and so they responded with what I suspect is an evolutionary drive to hurt someone who is acting really out of the norm physically and emotionally until they either get their sh*t straight or remove themselves from the gene pool.
I don't blame Trek one bit - on the contrary, I'm thankful to Spock and Diane Duane (along with Superman and Asimov's Laws of Robotics - but that's another story) for helping me get through that time. And I really don't blame most of those kids. Kids their age just aren't generally equipped to know how to deal with that sort of thing properly. Their reactions - and the fact that my parents weren't together and fighting anymore - helped me to actually be one of the most globally liked students at my last school after that 15th and final move with mom but not dad. And many of them have grown up to be good people - I'm friends with some of them on Facebook. And I've come to realize that the ones that abused me the worst had their own issues and were almost certainly being abused at home, themselves.
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Yes, kids are cruel and school sucks.
I remember the transition from elementary school, where everybody was nice to each other, to middle school, where I was suddenly treated like an outsider, even by some of the same kids who were nice to me in the previous year!
It may have been because I didn't have the designer clothes that their rich parents bought them, and it may have been because I was into science fiction. High school was better because I hung out with the alt-rock , skater and punk crowd. We were all outsiders, so it was OK!
As an adult, liking sci-fi hasn't really been an issue.
And I agree that it's pretty hypocritical to think that going to a sports game and screaming your head off with your face painted in your team's colors, along with matching costumes and big novelty headgear, is perfectly acceptable, while ostracizing people who dress up as their favorite SF&F characters to go to a convention.
Kor
I remember the transition from elementary school, where everybody was nice to each other, to middle school, where I was suddenly treated like an outsider, even by some of the same kids who were nice to me in the previous year!
It may have been because I didn't have the designer clothes that their rich parents bought them, and it may have been because I was into science fiction. High school was better because I hung out with the alt-rock , skater and punk crowd. We were all outsiders, so it was OK!As an adult, liking sci-fi hasn't really been an issue.
And I agree that it's pretty hypocritical to think that going to a sports game and screaming your head off with your face painted in your team's colors, along with matching costumes and big novelty headgear, is perfectly acceptable, while ostracizing people who dress up as their favorite SF&F characters to go to a convention.
Kor
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