Deadheads, Trekkies, Potterheads. Each of these represents a person who claims to be a super fan of something, whether it’s music, television or books. Another term that can be added to this is Nerdfighters.
“We don’t fight nerds,” said MacKenzie Cox, a sophomore secondary math education major. “We fight for nerds. We fight for the acceptance of nerds.”
Nerdfighters can simply be described as fans of brothers John and Hank Green. John Green is an award-winning novelist of books such as “Looking for Alaska” and “Paper Towns.” His most recent novel, “The Fault of Our Stars,” released Jan. 10, 2012, was named TIME Magazine’s #1 Fiction Book of 2012.
Hank Green is a musician and the creator and executive producer of “The Lizzie Bennett Diaries,” a webseries modernizing Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice.”
Together, they are known as the Vlog Brothers. The duo creates videos for a YouTube channel under this name for both educational and entertainment purposes.
According to a Nerdfigther fan site, the brothers began the project in 2007 as a way to reconnect with each other, even though John lives in Indianapolis and Hank lives in Montana. Six years later, their channel is still running with about 1,000 videos, more than 900,000 subscribers and nearly 300 million video views.
“Being a Nerdfighter means completely different things to each individual person,” said Hannah Lindgren, a senior film and TV studies telecommunications major.
Lindgren said the label can be put on people who are fans only of John’s books or only of the VlogBrothers channel. But for some it goes far beyond that, she said.
“[It] involves who you are as a person. Nerdfighters are caring, empathetic, giving and want to help Worldsuck,” Lindgren said, referring to a term coined by the Greens as the amount of “suck” in the world.
WORLDSUCK
Lindgren is wrapping up her senior honors thesis, which is a film called “A Film to Decrease Worldsuck.” Originally, she intended to focus on the brothers, but they were unable to do interviews with her, so she changed course.
“It would be the story of Nerdfighteria told by Nerdfighters, for Nerdfighters,” said Lindgren, who anticipates finishing the film by the end of March.
Once it is completed, a grant she received from the Ball State Aspire program will allow her to host 10 screenings of her film worldwide. However, she’s not just talking the talk of Nerdfighters working to decrease Worldsuck – she’s helping them take a step in this direction.
“Each screening will be tied to a local charity,” Lindgren said. “For example, our screening in Indianapolis in May will be to help Indy Reads, a used bookstore that helps promote adult literacy and holds classes. The admission fee to get into the screening will be a donation of a used book.”
Lindgren’s project has been a worldwide collaborative endeavor. She traveled to VidCon in Anaheim, Calif., last summer to spread the word and begin collecting footage.
Lindgren has been able to set up a program where she has Nerdfighters collecting interviews from all over the world. So far she has received interviews from people in places such as Boston, Washington, D.C., Ireland and Argentina.
This reinforces what Cox believes is one of the core aspects of Nerdfighteria: community.
“It’s being accepted in a world where there’s not much acceptance,” Cox said. “I remember the moment I called myself a Nerdfighter, and you felt like it was supposed to happen, like you’re supposed to be a Nerdfighter, like you’re supposed to be where you are.
“You feel like you’re part of the whole that matters; you feel like the world has stopped spinning for about 30 seconds.”
But Cox doesn’t think a Nerdfighter necessarily has to be a Green fan.
“If you’re interested in something obscure, or weird, then I think, by definition, you are a Nerdfighter,” she said.
Cox said she receives messages from friends wanting to know what John Green books they should read because they’re not Nerdfighters, but she assures them that they are already Nerdfighters because they want to read.
COMMUNITY
On campus, people don’t need to look far to find a fellow Nerdfighter.
“When you find out that someone else is a Nerdfighter, you’re like, ‘Oh, they’re really cool,’ and you know you probably have stuff in common with them,” Tara Olivero, a junior education major, said. “I have Nerdfighter friends in real life, like through high school and college, and also on the Internet, so it’s cool to have those two different places where you can have a community of people that you can talk to.”
The Ball State Nerdfighter Facebook group consists of more than 40 members. Even outside of that group, Olivero said she’s seen a lot of people on campus wearing Nerdfighter T-shirts or items with the Nerdfighter slogan of sorts: DFTBA, or Don’t Forget To Be Awesome.
“It’s a reminder for all of us that [we] are full of awesome,” Cox said. “We are people who are capable of being awesome, and we must live that awesomeness every day to it’s fullest; that even though we are nerds, we are just as much human as everyone else.”
Although what each individual takes away from John and Hank Green is different, the brothers have ultimately created an environment for people to connect with one another on a deep level while still feeling safe.
“Meeting Nerdfighters has shown me how much [John] and Hank have affected the lives of others, and seeing how much of an inspiration they are to others has inspired me,” Lindgren said. “Nerdfighters have given me hope for my generation and the generations just below mine.”
