Film The new nerds: how Avengers and Game of Thrones made everyone geek out Fans have followed – and pored over – the incredibly long, detailed and complicated narratives of the Marvel Universe and the Westeros saga for a decade. Will we ever scale such heights of geekdom again? Steve Rose -- In our speeded-up world, last weekend could be considered uneventful, but in one respect it will go down in human history. This was Peak-Geek Weekend – a moment of unprecedented, unrepeatable pop-cultural excitement – that was global in scale. Never, in the field of human geekdom, has so much geeking out been done by so many, over the long-awaited climaxes of two of the most supremely geeky properties ever made. -- violent, labyrinthine Westerosian power-politics, and have just three episodes left. While we’re at it, let’s not forget another colossal, geek-friendly saga is coming to a climax this year, with Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker – the finale to a triple trilogy that began more than 40 years ago. Will we ever scale such heights of geekdom again? This is not the first time in modern history a hit movie or TV show has -- Karen Gillan as Nebula in Avengers: Endgame. Photograph: null/AP Geek status used to connote a small subsection of society who took an obsessive interest in stuff the mainstream didn’t and invariably paid the price in terms of social exclusion. Now you’re an outcast if you’re -- We have been scaling this nerd mountain for some time now, steadily placing geekier personalities at the helm of the movie industry (Steven Spielberg is still at it, alongside upstarts such as JJ Abrams, Edgar Wright, Phil Lord and Chris Miller) and the tech industry (Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs). As well as superheroes and fantasy dynasties, this trend has made modern heroes of geeky outsiders such as, say, the Stranger Things posse, the IT Crowd, the Big Bang Theory team, hacker-with-dragon-tattoo Lisbeth Salander, or unthreatening -- now cultural events and Comic-Con is as cool as Coachella. Now that geeks have inherited the earth – or pop culture at least – do terms like “nerd” hold any meaning any more? Outsider status used to be part of what it meant to be a geek or nerd, but that’s difficult to claim now that everyone’s in on it. When the president of the US is referencing Game of Thrones to gloat at his adversaries, and kids who would have been bullied for their geeky interests are now themselves accused of being bullies, we appear to have come full circle. Abrams, a self-identified geek, acknowledged that the meaning has changed. “When I started, a geek was an undeniable loser,” he told the Guardian in 2011. “Long-necked, trips over his own feet, a complete outcast. And now geek means someone who likes science fiction. When I was a kid, it was a huge insult to be a geek. Now it’s a point of pride.” Nakia, T’Challa and Okoye in Black Panther. -- Yet that pride can be corrosive. Along with the general rise of online bigotry and incivility, we have seen uglier extremes of geek culture entering the mainstream in recent years. There was Gamergate, for example, in which female game developers and critics of video game -- community. A similar hate campaign – Comicsgate – was directed at comic book creators deemed to have embraced progressive, feminist or leftwing values, on the part of what could be seen as a far-right geek fringe. One comic’s artist claimed they were “standing up against what they see as a hard push by social justice warriors into their hobby”. The hatred -- able-bodied white men who are socially awkward and/or not good at sports,” she says. “It’s incredibly frustrating how this misperception persists, because it’s such a narrow view of who geeks are and can be, and it contributes to a lot of problems with things like misogyny, racism, ableism, cissexism and heterosexism in geek culture.” These elements reveal how geek culture can be policed from within as well as without. It is no longer a matter of the mainstream rejecting sci-fi nerds and comic-book fans; now it is the other way around. The “outsider” status can lead to claims of victimisation, and an impulse to attack and exclude others. A 2012 essay by the academics Kom Kunyosying and Carter Soles refers to geek status as a “simulated ethnicity” – a term they use “to describe the way geeks melodramatically cast themselves as members of a marginalised identity to foreground their validity and authenticity”. Portrayals of non-alpha white males, in particular, in popular culture, have cast geekdom as “a put-upon status equivalent to the markedness of a marginalised identity such as that of a person of colour”. -- exclusive clubhouse.” In that sense, at least, the mainstreaming of geek culture has removed these gatekeepers. There are no longer “real” geeks and “fake” geeks any more. We are all on a spectrum that permits varying levels of engagement. As the sci-fi writer and geek champion John Scalzi put it: “Geekdom is a nation with open borders. There are many affiliations and many doors into it … Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think – and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking – that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing.” -- Which is not to say that there are no issues of representation in mainstream geek culture, looking at, say, the lingering orientalism in the Marvel Universe (Tilda Swinton’s Ancient One makes a return in Avengers) or its representation of women of colour (you can count them