Pictured: the hover-hand is strong with this one
There’s a nerd war going on. You sense it in the air, right after you wade through the sea of Attack on Titan cosplayers clogging up the place like some sort of weird Hitler Youth in their identical uniforms. And it’s not a war of ‘cosplay is not consent’ either. It’s a battle to the death (cue Kirk vs Spock dueling music) between the old school ‘we earned the right to be nerds and incidentally be misogynist’ crowd and the barbarians at the gate: internet-taught nerds who are stubbornly polyamorous and pansexual. And on a clear day at Comiccon you can see it with the naked eye, like the Death Star exploding in the sky over the moon of Endor. It’s a classic tale of sex and espionage.
Pictured: fuck me gently with that chainsaw
We’re inside ur conz, stealin ur nerdz
National Intelligence Agencies are absolutely, positively *not* recruiting at Comiccon. This type of sieving disenfranchised nerds to harness their frustrated, undiagnosed asperger’s syndrome tendencies is categorically not happening at the Gold Star fandom and geek event for the entire world.
Oh wait, it totally is.
After a lifetime of waving the nerd flag I have never been baptized under the holy cloud of packed nerd pheromones within the hallowed alleyways of merch vendors that is Comiccon. I’ve been to plenty of cons before, but what I like to describe as ‘dirty cons’; meaning small, disreputable and completely unstylish. Cons where guest stars were the writers and illustrators – creative types who imagined content – instead of the actors who popularized the characters thought up one lonely night fueled by caffeine, rage and regret in their writer-cave or drawing board. We can argue all day about the commercialization of nerd culture and whether Comiccon is nothing but a grift by corporations who smelled all the nerds just waiting to throw their money at the first major movie studio to listen. But its easy math for me; one thing you’d never, ever find at some painted-on-cardboard old-school con was a government spy agency recruitment booth.
Welcome to the big leagues, Comiccon; you earned your wings and now even national security has noticed you.
Being fingered by Ops to man the recruiting station for the agency this year was my first chance to bust off my Comiccon cherry. Because I deal in plausible deniability let me just say I can neither confirm nor deny a shadowy internet surveillance agency is headhunting sweaty cosplayers with obsessive search skills who are easily drawn into secret societies due to a lifetime of unfulfilled inclusion to any group and an obsessive ability to parse data from the chaff if millions of web sites in search of elusive otaku treasures. Nor would I be disposed to discuss any such recruitment if it were to, in fact, exist.
And let me just say an organization that carries out covert operations had a booth. People came up to the booth and I absolutely did not try to recruit them. Crammed between an indie film horror movie display and a wall of MLP Brony paraphernalia typical conversations went like this:
(Totally not a) Potential Intelligence Analyst: so are you only recruiting people just graduating or…
Me (following handbook): We don’t actually have any openings at this time so we’re not actually recruiting.
(TNA) PIA: (disappointed) oh, okay
Me: wait, where are you going? Don’t you want one of these pamphlets listing all the types of employees we’re looking for?
(TNA) PIA: but I thought you said…
Me: hey doofus, what’s the first rule of Project Mayhem?
(TNA) PIA: [thinks about it, wheels clearly turning]
Me: You know that scene in Fight Club where they try to discourage anyone from joining Project Mayhem by telling them they aren’t qualified and only the ones dedicated enough to stick around actually can get in?
(TNA) PIA: Yeah, of course.
Me: …
(TNA) PIA: Ohhh. Can you tell me about any of the positions you’re not staffing?
Me: I thought you’d never ask.
But why are spies bothering, you ask?
The rationale is simple: people who study the psychology of what makes a good intelligence analyst settled on nerds as the ideal candidates; typically technology oriented, bespectacled loners with poor social skills and fewer attachments to the real world leave nerds with A) no social life, meaning less chance of association with questionable groups involved in illegal or subversive activities; they pass background checks easily because there’s nothing to check. And B) a loose moral attitude towards ‘the rules’ when applied to themselves due to being marginalized by the proles; society has taught these chubby, Cheetos speckled youths though a thousand wedgies, ostracizations and outright social torture that society is, by and large, composed of arrogant assholes protected by privilege who are already so guilty you don’t even need to train them to hate the people they spy on. The average national intelligence employee will pay as much attention to citizen’s begging for privacy as those citizens listened to your cries for mercy when they gave you a swirly in a piss-filled toilet at the prom.
I find this offensive on several levels. Not least of which is I’m sick and tired of my kind being stereotyped. Have we not, as a society, passed the point where we assume nerds are underwashed, overweight rejects who can’t function in the real world and have retreated to the comforting world of fandom? I mean, sure, you ask manglecramps this question and he wouldn’t even know what you’re talking about, because he is that high-functioning autistic with a Charisma score of 6. I ran into maglecramps just outside the main doors while I was taking a much needed break from the endless Brownian motion of hundreds of bodies packed together, trying to move through the aisles between vender booths. He’d already been there 16 hours out of the last 24. Guy was fresh out of a Bruce Campbell panel and absolutely high as balls from shaking his hand.
Everyone in the first row just got pregnant
But forget that guy, there’s a Next Wave of geekdom quite unaware of their supposed role as social Omega Males. All those old-school nerds pissed off that you can learn everything they know in a five minute Google search can suck it. Which is pretty much what I told your mom the other night while she was cleaning herself up. Zing.
By the way, nerds are having way more weird sex than you
I’ll be honest, I passed my Top Secret security clearance not because I’m squeaky clean, but because my anti-social behaviour means I systematically redact my indiscretions from everyone around me. It’s perfect spy training. I’ve been pretending to be normal and avoiding real social interactions with family, friends and neighbors for so long that keeping secrets isn’t even keeping secrets anymore, it’s just… hiding spoilers from people who are really better off not knowing.
This nerd sex problem came up at last year’s Comiccon where attendance was deflated like George Lucas’ neck pouch when you stab it with a pin. It was bigger, had more vendors and panel members. If anything boosting the attendance should have been low-hanging fruit (like I described my balls to your mom) since literally everyone under the age of 40 is now a huge fan of Walking Dead and Game of Thrones, and there still wasn’t the anticipated turnout. The simple answer is that the National Adult Sexpo was happening at the same time and you just can’t double-book nerds that way.
Make no mistake the same crowd was going to both events. Like that famous line from Revenge of the Nerds: “All jocks ever think about is sports. All nerds ever think about is sex.” And given a choice between posing with a time-travelling DeLorean for a $30 photo shoot or seeing a burlesque show, the nerd will always choose sex. I know the internet makes its sausage meat on jokes about nerds but I’ve yet to meet the fangirl or boy who would rather indulge their geek fetish over their fetish-fetish. Salty, wet orgasms win every time. I’d say there’s more time spent trying to somehow marry the two together than any other activity on the internet.
As anyone who has ever actually played Dungeons and Dragons can tell you it’s not so much a gateway game to Satanism as it is to BDSM. As a kid I played at medieval combat in leather costumes for hours every week and as an adult it’s not hard to segue into Sex Dungeons. LARPers RPG gamers and cosplay have a lot more already in common with fetish than the rest of the ‘straight’ community (as opposed to the kink community). They already have costumes, role-playing and yes, dungeons. It’s like surf and turf: sooner or later you start to run out of reasons NOT to enjoy these two things together. It’s a short step from rescuing amazon princesses to being captured by a dominatrix and being whipped before you sexually pleasure her.
Owing to my less than proud ownership of the tail end of a of a body-destroying flu I was in no shape to man the recruiting booth Friday, however by Saturday morning on a sticky sunny day I pushed through the week of atrophied bed-ridden fatigue and waged a personal battle with agoraphobia through Comiccon crowds just to wring what sexual pleasure could be salvaged from the weekend. Best case scenario I’d be going down on a rule 63 animatronic Martha Washington from Bioshock Infinite in a handicapped washroom by the end of the day. I was weak and kittenish, had lost ten pounds, and the world swam by in front of me like I was on the inside of a slightly dirty aquarium.
The first thing you notice is the smell. Part of it, of course, is the offgassing of PVC and plastic toys and part the musty staleness of comic book paper and vintage memorabilia. But it’s the great, sweaty cloud of pheromones that hits you hardest. The combined sexual reek of packed nerds in their natural state: semi-aroused by cat-girl anime body pillows. Much has been made of the lack of hygiene when you venture into places like Comiccon but that’s just the vanilla normals talking. To the nerd, that’s red wine and roses.
And that’s why nerds are having more sex than you: not just their smell, but their willingness to accept that once you give up these preconceived vanilla gawker notions of propriety you’re going to get your junk wet. Granted, you may not be getting the kinds of sex you want, but then what happens in the furry scritching pile stays in the furry scritching pile.
Fan Service is Not Consent
On my lunch break stroll down the first avenue of vendors I remembered there are only two motivating factors behind fandom: whimsy and sexual frustration. In other words, once you remove the whimsical (and nostalgia falls in here) everything else you’re left with is an expression of wanting sex, having sex or thinking about improving the sex you just had. For my money the kang member with a foam Klingon forehead is at least as much an expression of sexual machismo as any kind of greased-up shirtless Chippendales guy. Probably more so. You tell me who is more clothed in masculine icons: the guy in leather, chainmail and an enormous broadsword or a depilated man-beef in tear-away pants and a banana hammock?
I got about as far as the massive display of the 501st Imperial Guard on the far side of the room before an ugly aspect of nerd sex thrust its barely-legal self in front of my gaze. A gang of teenage sailor-scout cosplayers appeared out of the crowd. There were plenty of more scantily-dressed cosplayers; for example I had to admire the set of ovaries on the Mystique cosplayer wearing almost nothing but blue body paint. But purposefully underage cosplay is the worst.
Pictured: illegal in most countries
Having an attraction to Sailor Mars while you’re university age is borderline at best – it’s part of that Japanese pedo-culture crossover where cartoons for little girls somehow became coopted by horny Japanese men in their 20s. But viewing the shortness of their skirts alone is a criminal act for someone my age. I made a sickly groan that seemed to scare some Dr Who cosplayers (number 5 and 10) and quickly turned away from the sailor scouts, averting my gaze towards the full-scale Tardis on display. It’s like the end of Raiders when the Ark gets opened; you want to look, you MUST look, but you must look away instead. Soon after that I came across a stupidly hot (and far more age appropriate) cosplay of The Baroness from GI Joe that merely made me feel like a dirty old man instead of a pedophile.
Consent in cosplay is one of those horribly necessary concepts that has only emerged in nerdom over the last decade or so and is best attributed to the attitude of the old-school social outcast nerd. The same nerds the agency thinks make good spies. Cons, according to the Comiccon attendees people like me may or may not be trying to recruit, used to be where socially handicapped males could get together and celebrate the things they obsessively love without having to worry about what anyone else thought of them; and by ‘anyone else’ they mean ‘girls’. To the old-school, recruitable, nerd having nerd-girls and hot cosplay is an invasion into the purity of what used to be a monastery-like seclusion from temptations of the real world.
Pictured: distraction
But to the modern, sexually liberated, nerd there’s only one rule: make girls feel safe dressed up as a half-naked cat girl so that they will keep doing it. For the love of all that is holy don’t discourage the miracle that is our geek fandoms made flesh in the shape of females cosplaying. You don’t need to be cute, or skinny, to attract a nerd. Simply open to the possibility you’re the subject of someone’s Voltron fetish. It’s exciting to a nerd that flesh and blood females share the same interests. But its more exciting that there’s a version of the nerd thing you love the most that has a vagina.
The old-school con attendee, the socially inept and infinitely recruitable male nerd, invented rule 34 (ie if you can imagine it, there’s a porn site for it) In other words the rule 34 factor is the ability to make a sexy version of pretty much anything you can think of. Rule 34 is an expression of mainstream concepts of sexy and sexiness that borrows other icons, so, for example, in 2005 the BBC had to kill a porn movie entitled Abducted by Daleks, which mainly featured three lesbians running around a Dalek spacecraft. But a Next Wave Nerd has the ability to fetishize everything for its intrinsic value, not simply put a costume of a porn star. A Next Wave Nerd would make a fetish for the Dalek itself, would sexualize an alien cyborg xenophobic murder-machine by, say, posing for a picture with it and making an awkward ‘you can spot a virgin by’ hoverhand which (I thought) cleverly made fun of myself and turned the dalek into an overly-aggressive sperm whale dildo.
Pictured: dalek jizzing
I don’t know if national intelligence is actually going to recruit anyone from cons this year. But there were an awful lot of free lens cleaners and lanyards given out with a QR barcode on them, which I’m absolutely positive will not be used to track your phone and location when you scan it to find information about becoming a spy. I do know that intelligence services recruit from geek conventions and national law enforcement agencies recruit mostly from guys with sports scholarships who couldn’t make it into the big leagues, the utter lack of inter-departmental cooperation starts to make way more sense.
[Update: manglecramps didn’t make it back to the bunker for his next shift rotation today. I’d like to think he got lucky but it’s more likely he passed out after spending the last three days without sleep; last I saw him he was trying to use all his VIP privileges to catch a Star Trek actor in a skype panel that cost $200.]
SPOILER ALERT: False Positive 