Why does it seem more socially acceptable for someone to paint himself yellow and green, wear a foam black of cheese on his head, and go shirtless at Lambeau Field when it’s 20 below, but if someone dresses up in a homemade Borg costume, he is considered a geek ( and not in a good way)? Every year my brother will have multiple fantasy baseball and football teams, but if I mention DnD, I’m the nerd. In fact, they are both fantasy role playing games. I have two beagles and was excited to see Uno win Best in Show at Westminster last night. But when I look at dog show people, I think to myself, what a bunch of weirdos. My wife loves Stat Trek, has many books, blueprints of ships, etc. However, she can’t fathom the idea of putting a on a Klingon forehead when going to a convention. When I lived in Ft. Lauderdale, I had a friend who was a CRAZY Dolphins fan, but he kept all his memorabilia in one room in his house. We met a lady who named her oldest son Marino.
There are a million examples: from fan fiction to the lady who wore her Star Trek uniform to the Whitewater hearings, from being a Red Sox fan to watching ESPN all the time and knowing every stat of every player, from enjoying music to following a band from town to town.
Why is being a fan of one activity more acceptable than being a fan of a different activity? Also, when does a fan become a fanatic and when does it become fanaticism?
Sports fan outnumber science fiction fans by probably a few hundred thousand to one. The more people, the more acceptable the activity. Sports are seen as manly and character-building, etc. Science fiction fandom is seen as weak wimpy guys in a basement. Why? They just are.
I’ve heard this question asked for 30 years, no offense to the OP, but the answer has always struck me as being as simple as that.
EDIT: I have a friend who has a houseful of Cincinatti Reds memorabilia. It’s stacked everywhere and in his garage. He happily accepts that he is a fanatic. So, at that point, when it puts you out of home, or puts friction between you and the ones you love, it is fanaticism, imo.
Sir Rhosis, science fiction and sports fan, who wouldn’t dress in either of their costumes
To which I’d add, that baseball and football really exist in a sense that Klingons and elves do not. So, if you dress up like someone out of Star Trek, there’s always the hint of a suspicion that you can’t distinguish between reality and fantasy, and that you either aren’t or don’t want to be living in the real world.
Actually, many sports fans do make fun of the Cheeseheads. They are very mockable. There is nothing normal about them and they are as weird as the Klingons. I am a baseball fanatic and I have been to Gencon and a Star Trek convention. The dress up as Klingon Trek Geeks were the geekiest and only outdone by the Star Wars geeks from what I recall. D&D players were/are just geeky, the role players that went over the top to self parody like the Cheese Heads were the ones a few years back into the Vampire game.
Shit, well maybe my high school should take back my Varsity Chess Team Letters.
Well, I think there’s a pretty strong distinction between being a fan of a sports team (or even a dog show) where there is real competition and the outcome of each event is not known beforehand, and being a fan of, for example a movie or genre of film.
I’m not discounting being a fan of either one, but I don’t think they’re the same thing at all.
I don’t think that people who dress up as Klingons or elves believe that Klingons and elves really exist, no more than people who go to see Romeo and Juliet in a theatre believe that the actors really are in love with each other and really die on stage.
Getting emotionally invested in a live competition – and perhaps believing that your fanaticism can affect that outcome – is way different than getting dressed up for a sci-fi convention.
I would equate a guy dressing up like a Klingon with a guy who paints his face green and yells at the screen to watch a video tape of a Packers game.
I don’t think that’s a good analogy. People who dress up for conventions are going to meet and share with like-minded fans, not sitting alone by themselves in a costume. I honestly don’t see any difference between them and the sports fans who dress up in ‘costume’ to go meet and spend time with like minded fans. The only things that makes obsessed sports fans more accepted are 1)tradition and 2)sheer number.
Most regular folks would look at both the guy who paints his body and stands out in zero degree weather with no shirt AND the guy who dresses as a Klingon as a bit out of kilter.
Now if a woman wants to paint her chest and stand outside or dress in some kinky Sailor Moon get up, I say more power to them.
Here’s a comparison I’ve made in the past for people confused about geekiness. Let us consider Live Action Role Players, widely considered to be among the geekiest of geeks, and American football players, the archetypal jocks.
LARPers dress up in armor, which may or may not be made of plastic, and hit other players.
Football players dress up in plastic armor and hit other players.
LARPers yell numbers to indicate what they’re planning/doing.
Football players yell numbers to indicate what they’re planning/doing.
LARPers follow an elaborate set of rules to lend structure to their game and provide a reasonable level of safety.
Football players follow an elaborate set of rules to lend structure to their game and provide a reasonable level of safety.
LARPers have game masters watching and enforcing the rules.
Football players have referees watching and enforcing the rules.
Many thousand of people spend money for tickets to watch football players play, and advertisers pay big bucks to team owners for the right to broadcast the games.
As said by tanstaafl, LARPers… DOH!
I guess that’s the real difference. Sports have had go-get-em, shameless promoters go out and hawk tickets to their games for 100+ years, while LARPers haven’t. LARPers need their own Bill Veecks, Knute Rocknes & Pete Rozelles to go out and drum up interest and sell tickets. Tony Hawk managed to promote his (IMHO stupid) sport into a money making proposition, so it can be done.
Pretending to do or be something you’re not is (rightly or wrongly, I’m not making a judgment) usually considered to be an activity for children. Sure, adults might think “wouldn’t it be nice to do/have/be…” every once in a while, but kids do it frequently, and tend to do it in a more elaborate fashion.
Children “play house” with fake food and plastic dishes and stuffed animals as friends. They pretend to be cops and robbers, or cowboys and Indians, or pirates and ninjas. They’ll dress up or build a blanket house or set up a “command post” or whatever.
The difference between all LARPers (some but not all geeky convention goers fit into this group as well) and athletes/fans is that athletes and fans aren’t “pretending” anything. They aren’t pretending they’re on a battlefield for the ultimate conflict between good and evil (regardless of what the commercials say). It’s a game with a ball on a field, and that’s it. It doesn’t stand for anything else.
The ball isn’t the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch and the points don’t represent gold dubloons and the yard lines and hash marks aren’t territories. It applies to the fans too – their cheesehead wedge doesn’t give the team +3 to defensive line ability and the yellow paint doesn’t add a penalty to their Jersey of Invisibility. I suppose for a small number of superstitious fans you could argue that they really are pretending their magic necklace helps the team, but they’re the exception – ALL LARPers pretend, because that’s the point.
Also, fantasy sports can be played in a few different ways. Some (and what I think are the most popular) just involve assembling a roster of real players and keeping track of their actual stats. It’s not just making stuff up out of whole cloth – the actual players and the actual stats are used. There’s a scoring system to determine what each stat is worth, and your group of players’ score is tabulated and put up against another team. It’s not “pretend,” – it uses actual, real-life performances. There ARE ones that use completely made-up players and stats, and mathematical engines to pit them against each other, but I think these are far less common.
Again, I’m not saying one is right and the other is wrong. just that the essence of one is “playing pretend,” something our society closely associates with children, while the other is not.
One issue is that people think that people do get dressed in costume at science fiction conventions. Other than a masquerade (which only a handful of conventions have), I haven’t seen anyone at a con in costume in at least ten years, and it wasn’t a common thing as far back as the late 80s.
So people look down upon science fiction fans in part because they only see the inaccurate images from TV and literature, all promulgated by people who have never been to a con and only repeat the derogatory stereotypes.
At a con, people usually wear t-shirts with a science fiction theme (usually quite clever ones, too, often with some very nice professional art).
Of course, the people who stand shirtless a 0 degrees or paint themselves in team colors are also a small portion of the audience, but no one assumes they are the majority.
