The Joys and Frustrations of Geek Culture: We're Damned If We Do, We're Damned If We Don’t
Fan art by Florey
I’ve been a geek my whole life. I couldn’t help it! It’s something I was just born into. My childhood was filled with action figures, cartoons, comic books, movies, and video games that consisted of things such as G.I. Joe, Transformers, Star Wars, He-Man, E.T., Marvel, DC, The Goonies, and Star Trek, and that barely scratches the surface of the awesomeness I was exposed to! These things helped mold my personality, tastes, and style. They are all the reasons why I started this website!
There’s something about being a geek that makes a person very opinionated and that’s awesome. If you’ve been a reader of GeekTyrant for awhile, you know I’m a very opinionated individual, and those opinions spark the opinions of others geeks which makes for great fun conversations — and then, of course, sometimes they bring out a lot of hateful remarks. It’s just the nature of being a geek. If someone doesn’t like my opinion about something or the opinions of our other writers, the reader reacts in two ways. The first is in a civilized manner that respectfully disagrees and offers a constructive argument or criticism. Then there’s the other extreme, which could involve death threats. It’s madness! But that’s seriously how passionate people get about the things that they love.
One of the most recent examples that comes to mind is Ben's Deadpool review. Even though I didn't fully agree with it, it's good to get a different perspective on a film. Some readers appreciated what he was saying while others were telling us to fire him for sharing his opinion. Why would we fire someone because they have a different voice? That's the complete opposite of what GeekTyrant stands for. We want people to have a unique voice and an opinion. It's something we encourage.
I’ve been running GeekTyrant for over seven years now and in that time we’ve paid attention to our readers and what they are saying. We read your comments we see your enthusiasm and we’ve also seen your complaints. In that time we’ve adjusted certain aspects of the website to try and meet everyone’s needs, but in the crazy world of geekdom there’s one universal truth that I’ve learned, and that is that no matter what we do, we're damned if we do and we're damned if we don’t.
I have the kind of personality where I like a lot of stuff. I’m an easy person to please. Most of the reviews I write for the site are positive because it’s easy for me to see the good qualities of a movie. One of the reasons why I started GeekTyrant is because I freakin’ love watching movies and playing video games! I watch movies every chance I get, both good and bad. I find joy in watching movies and so when I write a review, I like to write about the things I enjoyed about them. I tend to get a lot of crap from some people because as I've been told, “I like everything,” but then when I actually write a negative review about something I really didn’t like, there’s a whole new group of people ready and waiting to pounce on me and tear me apart for not liking a movie. It’s a rare thing for me to write a bad review, but when I do write one it’s because I’m affected so much that makes me want to unleash the firey fury of a thousand suns. Thus…I’m damned if I like everything and I’m damned if I don’t. The fact of the matter is if I didn’t have as much fun as I do watching movies then what in the hell would I want to do this job for? So yeah, I like a lot of movies and for the most part, I’m a positive individual unless something sucks to high hell...then I let the ranting commence.
It’s simply impossible to make everyone happy. As much as I would love to do that, it’s not going to happen. So first things first, I have to be honest with myself. Every article I write, every review I post, I am giving you my truthful, unbiased opinion and a piece of myself. We are an independent site that’s not owned by any big corporation — unlike a lot of the other sites out in the online universe. This allows myself and our writing staff to let their personalities flourish and shine on the site. Everyone is different and that’s what makes being a geek so damn amazing! Geeks are a colorful group of people, so why not encourage it? The studios don’t tell us what to write and they certainly don’t pay us to write positive reviews. If they did, I’d be a rich man!
GeekTyrant would be a pretty boring website to read if there was a uniform style and if all the writers sounded exactly the same. It’s the same with the readers and the commenters. I love that we have such a wide variety of personalities sharing their opinions with us. I don’t want that to ever change.
Of course, all those different personalities come with its own set of issues and chaos that we have to manage and I’d be lying if I didn’t say it was frustrating at times. For example, we always try to avoid putting spoilery information in the title of our posts and this is received in a few different ways. We try to hit a medium ground by giving you enough information for it not to be considered clickbait, but we also don’t want to spoil anything for our audience. This is something we are still constantly playing with because we have a group of people that call us out on clickbait which we don’t mean to do, and then we get called out for spoiling stuff, which we don’t mean to do either. The post has to have a title, though! This is another one of the many scenarios in which we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.
I just want you all to know that we really are trying to make sure people are happy with the articles we post and how they are presented to you. We are also trying to do that without sacrificing the integrity of the site, our writers, and our relationship with you, the readers. I freakin’ love our GeekTyrant community and I just want to make it better, bigger, and stronger.