I’d say there’s actually a fair amount of belief of hierarchy among nerdfighters. I repeatedly see GIF sets of John Green deriding or insulting people who are stupid or have stupid hobbies. It’s just hard to have a movement built around being nice.

This is what I don’t like! It’s all, “Hey, I was made fun of for having the ‘wrong’ hobbies but guess what: I think your hobbies are wrong! What now?” (or, “I just want to be accepted so I’m gonna start my own club and exclude you!” It never works out well, did you learn nothing from Saturday morning cartoons?)

The problem is the word “Nerd,” I think. Given its derogatory history, it’s a divisive word used to define a specific group of people.

John Green was spot-on when he said, “Being a nerd means you like things,” because being a nerd does mean you like things. Yet they (apparently) have to be the weird things, the counterculture, the intellectual, the crafty, the lesser-known, the hobbies of the underdogs. Jock sports nerds and mainstream pop culture nerds and grease-monkey car nerds and yuppie tech nerds are goddamn everywhere, but they’re not accepted as part of the “nerd culture” (as far as I’ve seen) because they’ve been on top already (really because they sneer at the D&D basement-dweller nerds, the most-portrayed nerds in recent times). “Nerd” needs to become all-encompassing because anyone can be a nerd as long as there’s passion and knowledge.

The “nerdfighter” movement at large seems like it isn’t about just having passions or passionately liking something anymore, because the truth is practically everybody has a passion. There is hardly anyone who straight-up doesn’t like anything, not even hipsters. So now you have a bunch of underdog nerds with an even more inflated sense of entitlement (we have entitlement issues, you know it’s true) openly hating on “mainstream” nerds and it’s just the same circle with players in different positions.

It’s hard to have a movement based on being nice, but the movement (if you want to call it that) should be focused on self-esteem and self-worth and basically, what Leyla said: not being ashamed to like what you like how you like it. Just applied to everyone.

Hate begets hate, you guys.