High school story choices tv#

High school story choices tv#

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” set beside other millennial Goth classics like the music of “My Chemical Romance,” demonstrated to the preteen Phillips that “high school is a horror show.” “Black Panther,” and its version of Wakanda, opened up “a world rich with resources, its main export being Black ingenuity.” Other Black media, from the TV show “The Boondocks” to Marlon James’s novel “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” had an impact too, showing Phillips that “my Blackness was not separate from my nerdy identity.” “X-Men: The Animated Series,” a Saturday morning cartoon from the ’90s, invited young viewers to a great, populous, intricate (and queer- and disability-friendly) universe that they otherwise may have found intimidating, or never found at all. In “Nerd,” Phillips collects nine essays about her favorite nerd media, mostly American and Japanese TV and film from the 1990s forward, and discusses their impact on her life and the lessons they’ve taught her.Įach essay, like a longsword, has both an edge and a point. Instead, it’s a look at what millennial nerds read and watch, which together create what we call nerd culture. The poet and New York Times critic Maya Phillips’s breezy, personal, engaging first book of prose is not a study of nerds, nor a look at their history. Journalists and scholars now study the origins and the nature of the nerd: You can read histories of the nerd as a cultural figure (Benjamin Nugent’s fine “American Nerd”) as well as sociological studies of nerdy practices (Camille Bacon-Smith’s underrated “Science Fiction Culture”). Today the word has come to imply a devotion to things found at comic book and science fiction conventions, from niche works (Joanna Russ’s fiction) to the absolutely mainstream (“The Avengers”).

Who wants to be a nerd? Fifty years ago the word was a schoolyard insult 25 years ago it connoted job opportunities in the dot-com boom. NERD: Adventures in Fandom From This Universe to the Multiverse, by Maya Phillips