Ok,
maybe not that last one, but anyway...
If
you've hung around this blog long enough, you've likely noticed that I tend to
talk about "stories" more often than books, and that I use games,
manga, and movies as well as written works to discuss writing concepts. This
is because I think all those stories, in whatever medium, have something
interesting to say, or something worth examining. Yet there exists no decent
word for a person such as myself, a lover of stories, if you will.
Labels
and Categories
I'm
not one to say "I don't like labels", but I do find them lacking
sometimes, usually because there aren't enough of them, or they're not broad
enough
For
example, I'm obviously a nerd and a geek, in that I like nerdy, geeky things. I
enjoy learning and research and school, which I would put under the
"nerd" category, and I like superheroes and fantasy/sci-fi and
comics, which are decidedly "geek". But these don't include my love
of books—not all nerds are bookworms—nor my obsessive devotion to anime and
manga in particular. I guess “weeb” might be a subsection of geek? I don’t
know. Whatever the case, neither nerd nor geek are satisfactory to my quest for
the perfect word to describe myself.
And
what would you call someone who loves movies as much as a bookworm loves books?
A filmworm? (Can we please just make this a thing?). There are terms like “film
enthusiast” and “cinephile”, but I think these imply a knowledge of
movie-making or a love of niche and cult films that I don’t necessarily have.
At the same time, though, I’m not just a casual movie-goer. I really like
movies, and thinking about movies, and talking about movies. Why isn’t there a
word for that?
Stereotypes
from Without
Perhaps
the reason there isn’t a word specifically for someone who’s into movies or
comics the way there is for those who love books is due to stereotyping.
There are people who look down on us movie-watching, game-playing plebeians,
so people have been trained to think that liking comics is dorky, or that liking
movies is for filthy casuals.
Geeks,
I think, have been fighting against this, reclaiming the word for themselves, so to
speak. They’ve done a fairly good job at making geekery mainstream, and yet large numbers of people still
aren't onboard. For example, the writers of The Big Bang Theory have
long labored under the impression that liking Star Wars is a geeky, niche
interest. Star Wars! Was that ever niche, even when it came out in the
70s? Even if it was then, it certainly isn’t now. Yet this stupid idea that
Star Wars was only for geeks, specifically geek men, is how we ended up with
the debacle that is Disney’s new trilogy aimed at a “larger” audience—by which
they meant all seven people in the world who didn’t already like Star Wars.
A
subsection of geeks fighting the good fight for more recognition is the gamers,
and yet this group is not without its stereotypes. Sometimes, this is through
innocent ignorance: my sister and I were geeking out over the plot of Okami in
the break room of a Catholic school were she worked and one of the nuns asked,
tentatively, “Video games have stories?”. She seemed happy to learn that they
do, but this illustrates the point that not every non-gamer knows what
video games have to offer, so of course they might not consider games in the
same category as books or films.
Then
there are worse stereotypes. A coworker of mine pooh-poohed video games because, amongst
other things, they “don’t promote social interaction”. My coworker, remember,
is a librarian... in a library... full of books. When you read a book, that’s six
or more hours of being by yourself, reading. You might choose to go to a
bookclub or talk to a friend about it, but that is hardly part of the reading
experience. Games, on the other hand, often have two-player or online mode. My
younger brother is constantly playing games and constantly talking to his
friends over Discord while doing so. One time, he was playing a single player
game while his friend from out of state was playing the same single player game,
and they were talking to each other about it over headphones. Obviously, this
isn’t true for all games and gamers (I myself like single-player, offline games),
but to act as if games are socially isolating in comparison to books is just inaccurate.
Stereotypes
from Within
Speaking
of books, the label with the most baggage, in my opinion, is bookworm. It’s not
non-bookworms who are the ones responsible for this stereotyping, but the book
lovers themselves.
What
stereotypes am I talking about? For starters, the stereotype that in order
to be a bookworm, you should sneer at other types of media. “The book was
better” is something often lobbed at movies. I usually agree with that; the movies of Harry Potter, Something Wicked this Way Comes, To Kill
A Mockingbird, The Phantom of the Opera, Public Enemies, and every iteration of Sherlock Holmes pale in comparison
to their source material. But some movies are just as good as the book they are
based on. This may be because the movie captures the essence of the book,
like The Princess Bride, Anne of Green Gables, or Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (the 1951
version), or it may be due to the movie deviating from the book but still being equally
enjoyable, as is the case with The Secret of NIMH / Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of
NIMH and most of Disney's fairytale adaptations. And some movies—and I know my bookworm
card might get revoked for saying this—are better than the books, including The
Great Mouse Detective, Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Last Unicorn, and
And Then There Were None.
“Heresy!”
cry the bookworms, but why? Aren’t people allowed to like and dislike whatever
stories they want? And that’s stereotype number two, which is never
encountering a book you don’t like. I usually find this with English majors, some
librarians and library patrons, and bookstagramers who take pretty pictures of objectively bad books (I know I just said people can like what they
want, but let’s be honest, nobody liked The Casual Vacancy, probably not even J.K. Rowling). It’s almost like, to be a bookworm, you can’t have a taste for
certain books and not others. Or rather, you can’t act as if some books are
just, you know, not good. Such bookworms fret about libraries weeding books
from their collections, but as someone who used to do that as a volunteer, I
can tell you, some books are bad. They might be badly written, or boring, or
cringey, or whatever (and that’s why they don’t circulate for years on end, and
that’s why they get weeded). The point is, it’s okay to not like certain books,
and doing so should not make one any less of a bookworm.
The stereotypes go on and on, and I can’t relate to any of them. “Books are
better than clothes”; but I really like fashion. “I can’t resist buying new
books when I’m in a bookstore”; it’s nice that you have all that disposable
income, but I’ll settle for borrowing books and scouring
the free shelf. “I remember staying up late at night as a child with a
flashlight under my covers”; I wasn’t a big reader as a kid, but that didn’t
make me less into stories. And, of course, “I’d rather be reading,” not
daydreaming, or watching movies, or getting lost in the world of a game,
because you can apparently only get lost in a book.
I
know I sound bitter, and that’s because I am. I love books, but books are not
the height of human storytelling, nor its primordial form. Poems,
songs, and plays all predated writing, and as for novels, those didn't come
about until the 11th century in Asia and the 1400s in Europe. Sure, movies and
video games are a lot younger, but that doesn't make them any less valuable,
unless you believe that books are less valuable than plays and poems.
Let
me say it again, in case my non-bookwormish statements have made any of you
doubt: I love books. But I also love games. And movies. And comics. Basically, I love stories. I’m a story enthusiast. Why isn’t there a word for that? Daydreamer?
Fantast? Storyworm?
I suppose the
word isn’t as important as the concept I’m trying to explain. Books and movies
and games and plays are all amazing, each in different ways. So why do we have to
denigrate some forms of storytelling or act like some are better than others? I can see personally preferring one type of media to another, but if you totally eschew one of them
because of some silly stereotype, I think you’ll miss out on a lot of amazing
stories.
Thus,
in the next few posts, I’m going to try to convince you, dear reader, or viewer,
or gamer, (or spy?) that each of the four main storytelling media—books, plays and television, comics, and video games—each have something unique to offer, and are worthy of a
place in the hearts and minds of all story-loving people. Stay tuned!
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