| |
|
Essentially, if you are an anorak about football, or an anorak about automotive repair, nobody hassles you for it. If you are an anorak about fantasy role-playing or comics or the much-underrated Star Trek novels of Peter David, you are.
Football and cars are popularly-understood interests, so being a football anorak doesn't make you intrinsically weird, just extreme. In fact it can be a means of appearing more normal to be interested in these things.
On the other hand, being an anorak about something nobody else has heard of and doesn't have a subculture means you're weird but not necessarily sad - you're not a member of a group that can be stereotyped, you don't have weird outsider rituals, you're essentially "one of us" but a bit odd.
Being a comics or star trek anorak or a gamer, though, means you're identifiably part of a subculture with its own strange behaviour patterns. You're also associated with childhood - sad culture that we live in, the idea of playing and fantasising is seen as immature. So you've got not only outsider status but also are apparently unwilling to grow up and be a proper adult. |
|
|
