Your fandom is not a competition.

It’s a wonderful time to be a geek. All of our geeky hobbies are starting to cross into the mainstream. You can go to the mall and pick up a sonic screwdriver! How awesome is that? But after years of being bullied for our hobbies, some of us aren’t comfortable with this turn of events. We want to keep our hobby safe. And in turn, we’re becoming the bullies ourselves.

I see this frequently. Proclaiming someone isn’t really a Whovian because they’ve only seen Doctors 9 and later. Telling people they can’t be Star Wars fans if they enjoy the prequels. Judging people who have seen the JJ Abrams Star Trek movies, but not the original movies. We add up our geek points to say “see, I’m better than you.

And that’s not OK.

We’re taking ourselves too seriously. And worse than that, we’re expecting others to raise up to meet us. Sometimes, I wonder if we no longer know how to just enjoy something. How to enjoy it without analyzing it to death. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a time and a place for analyzing something, but when we do it to the degree that we can no longer turn it off it becomes a problem.

I encourage all of you to go to your fandom/hobby/whatever and just enjoy it. Watch a movie without analyzing character development. Read a book without reading all the details about symbolism (decide what the symbolism is to you). Just enjoy it. And when you hear someone else say they enjoy it too, be excited you found someone else in your clan. Don’t try to shut them down.