How to Tell If Someone Is Fake Geek

By Rebecca Pahle | Lists | July 31, 2014 |

By Rebecca Pahle | Lists | July 31, 2014 |

If you’re a person who does things on the Internet, you might be aware that the National Review is catching a bit of heat for their cover story about a sneaky wave of liberal intelligentsia who are feigning interest in geeky pursuits in order to appear smart. You may scoff, but the fact is that this is a real problem. These geek posers are infiltrating our spaces, making a mockery of all the things we, real geeks, hold dear!

They have to be stopped. But before we can do that, we must identify them. Here are ten ways to know if someone’s a fake geek. Use your knowledge well.

1) As National Review writer C.W. Cooke points out, instead of Star Trek they prefer Star Wars, which as everyone knows is the realm of mainstream sheeple. They also shoot jets of diet cola out of their butts every morning at 10.

2) They own a Batman shirt, but they’ve never read a single Batman comic. Also, they have 12 fingers on each hand, a physical trait that allows them to be uniformly excellent at playing the ukelele.

3) They want to get into a TV show/game/comic book run, but they really don’t know where to start, so they ask someone with more knowledge than them for advice. A real geek would spend hours wading through Wikipedia! Where’s their nerd cred?!

4) They play video games, but only casual gamer bullshit like Candy Crush and Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. They are literally five-headed dragons.

5) When at comic conventions, they dress in revealing cosplay explicitly so that they may fulfill a lifelong dream of being groped by gross, obnoxious dudebros. They’re covered in fur and survive on a diet of blue glitter and paste.

6) They don’t know the backstory of every single character on [INSERT TV SHOW HERE] or stalk the cast on Twitter. Who are they fooling?! Also, they’re incapable of any sort of physical movement that’s not Prancersize.

7) They point out, on occasion, that there are issues in the geek sphere with discrimination, including sexism, racism, and homophobia. They respectfully ask that things might be a bit more inclusive, because they want to take everything from us real geeks and ruin it by making it PC! They spend their entire lives living inside the left breast of Betty White.

8) They watch comic book movies and appreciate the attractive actors therein, because they don’t take stories about alien gods with magic hammers seriously enough for the rest of us. They are the aliens who built the pyramids.

9) They’re proooobably women, amirite guys? Plus, heat vision!

10) They’re anyone who doesn’t like the exact same things you like in the exact same way you like them. Also, they’re motherfucking unicorns, because fake geeks do not exist. You are a geek if you say you’re a geek. Case fucking closed.

(Rebecca is an Associate Editor at The Mary Sue, where she got to write a post today about a 1997 instructional video on cybersex, so that was fun. You can follow her on Twitter.)