It kind of gets lost in the Gedde Watanabe-ness and the rape, but Anthony Michael Hall’s character in Sixteen Candles (a movie I still like) is mostly referred to as the geek. He has a name; he is inexplicably referred to as Farmer Ted. But he’s actually credited as IMDb as “Geek.” We don’t even know, from what I can tell, how the word moved from “sideshow freak” to “person obsessed with science/certain pastimes,” but I can assure that, when I was growing up, the word still very much had negative connotation.

I think, some time long about the mid-’90s, a bunch of us decided we’d “take back” the word. I don’t remember a conscious decision, but then, I’ve always self-identified as a nerd anyway. (Bookish rather than scientific, you understand.) And I mean always, as long as I’d known what “nerd” meant. It may be some sort of weird offshoot of the self-esteem movement. We know that we’re like this, we can’t help it, and we’re tired of being insulted over it. Or it may be that those dorks from Sixteen Candles who bet one another floppy discs came to make quite a lot of money, as time went on. But the word has shifted sufficiently since 1983, when it was first traced in its current sense, so that anyone can believe that someone would “fake” being a geek in order to attract men, that men to whom the term might be applied can be considered desirable.

This also ties in to why I don’t think superhero movies are ever going to go away. To the nerd/geek demographic’s astonishment, one of their stereotypical obsessions is making quite a lot of money these days, even when the product is acknowledged to be bad. (No, I haven’t seen a certain superhero movie yet; does anyone want to babysit so I can?) We’re going to hold onto that for dear life, I think, even when the product really starts dropping in consistent quality. We’ll take a few outliers if it means that there’s even a chance of a Wonder Woman movie, or any version at all of Captain Marvel.

You see, I remember when Batman came out. It was a huge hit. Superman had been a big hit before then—some ten years before then, in fact. But no one rushed to make a whole slew of other superhero movies. Yes, there was The Rocketeer, and I don’t mean to denigrate The Rocketeer, because I love it. But it is kind of a litmus test; if you’ve seen it, you really care about superhero movies, or maybe just Alan Arkin or Timothy Dalton or Jennifer Connelly. It did pretty much sink without a trace.

Or to move away from superheroes, consider Star Wars. Space opera. Epic. Phenomenal box office success that spawned a few imitators—essentially all of which sank without a trace. Sure, that was because they were bad, because the lesson that seems hardest to learn in Hollywood is “good movies are usually more successful,” but my whole life, there was this assumption that Star Wars was for kids, and there’s something wrong with adults who are still interested. Gods forbid you be over the age of about seventeen and still interested in going to Star Trek conventions, too.

I wonder sometimes if this is part of why geekier films do so badly with the Academy; few of its members grew up in a time when anyone was willing to admit that they loved Flash Gordon. There’s a cultural shift these days, and it seems the film establishment is having a hard time keeping up with that. No one in Hollywood seems to really understand the geek/nerd demographic, which is why you get that tone-deaf line in the middle of Deadpool about how the women in the audience had been told by their boyfriends that it was a superhero movie. Never mind the sizeable female demographic whose interest was in seeing Morena Baccarin in something other than Firefly, where we’d loved her.

Even though I accepted the label, people still used “nerd” to wound me, when I was growing up. This may be the hardest thing to explain, that a word can be a unifier and an excluder at the same time. Maybe one of the reasons that fandom gets so obsessive is that we remember when we had to cling to one another in defense. Maybe that’s why fandoms can be so exclusionary, too; maybe, we are remembering the time when those who didn’t share our interests mocked us for them. Maybe we are all still cowering away from the jocks and the cheerleaders and the various other Cool Kids, whoever the Cool Kids were at our respective schools. Maybe the reason so many people write so many defensive articles about how the critics “just don’t get it” is that we remember the days when a movie made for us came along only every few years, and we’re afraid of having this, too, taken from us.

And, I mean, some of us are just jerks. There’s some in every crowd, right?