Even Nerds Have Standards
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OK, now you've crossed over into the realm of supernerds, whereby even regular nerds steal your lunch money and throw rocks at you. —Ethan, Ctrl+Alt+Del
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Basically this is the notion that Nerd interests can be tiered, and that what's on the lower tiers can make other nerds glad they aren't that nerdy.
Sometimes expressed in the form of "You're the kind of nerd that other nerds would beat up and steal your lunch money". Often when Nerds Love Tough Schoolwork, the regular nerds will mock those nerds.
This can also stem from the idea that Nerds Are Virgins doesn't apply to moderate or light nerds. The more nerdy you are, the more You Need to Get Laid.
A Sub-Trope of Everyone Has Standards.
Compare with Acceptable Hobby Targets, Hypocritical Fandom.
No real life examples, please; this can lead to Broken Bases accusing the other side of being more geeky, but we don't need to note that here. Besides, articulation of such arguments tends to be, well, geekier than either side.
Comic Books
- In comic book version of The Simpsons: The school was once ruled by those with a high intelligence and strict attendance, which meant nerds were the bullies. Jimbo was targeted by them, before becoming the bully he’s known today.
- Even the Legion of Substitute Heroes wasn’t willing to include Arm-Fall-Off-Boy, as the name suggest his main power is removing his arms to use as clubs.
Film
- Roger Ebert described the title character of Napoleon Dynamite as "the kind of nerd other nerds avoid."
- Welcome to The Dollhouse: Dawn "Weiner Dog" Weiner sees some kids beat up some nerdy kid. She goes over to him, asking if he's okay. His response: "Get away from me, Weiner Dog!"
- In Shrek the Third, even the school nerds pick on class loser Arthur.
- Ted: John is even told to get lost by a bullied classmate.
Literature
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: When Douglas Adams revealed that the question which produced the Ultimate Answer (42) was What is six times nine?, somebody pointed out that the math actually did add up... if you use base 13. Adams responded, "I may be a sad individual, but I don't make jokes in base 13."
- Stanley Howler from the Discworld book Going Postal is so obsessed with his pin collection, even the other pin collectors in Ankh-Morpork think he's "a bit weird about pins". Then Moist von Lipwig invents the postage stamp, and Stanley proceeds to obsess over those, inventing stamp collecting (and becoming incredibly dismissive about people who are "still" collecting pins).
Live-Action TV
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: When Buffy fails to get on the cheerleading squad early in Season 1, her mother suggests that she join the yearbook staff. Buffy responds, "Have you seen the people that work on the yearbook? Nerds pick on them."
- Some of the Krelboyne kids in Malcolm in the Middle.
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Dabney: I know you think I'm a mama's boy. |
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- From Two of a Kind:
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Mary Kate: Dad, you know those kids who blow their nose and then spend just a little too much time looking at it in the tissue? |
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- In Red Dwarf, Arnold Rimmer maybe an Extroverted Nerd, but he even believes that Dwayne Dibbley “so geeky, he couldn't even get into a science fiction convention”.
Video Games
- Backyard Sports' Dmitri, a nerd who loves statistics, thinks Reese, who is a nerd who plays way too many video games and collects way too many stamps and action figures, is way too nerdy.
- Ratchet & Clank: In the first game, Ratchet calls Al a “nerd” when Al talking about robotics despite being curious about space travel and wanting to meet Captain Qwark himself.
Web Comics
- DM of the Rings had a roleplaying specific version in strip #10.
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Even more reviled than a typical roleplayer is a roleplayer who insists on roleplaying. When the dorks need to feel superior, this is the guy they denounce as a dork. Honestly. The only person worse than him is the DM himself. |
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- In this Ctrl+Alt+Del strip, Ethan said that Lucas had "crossed over into the realm of supernerds, whereby even regular nerds steal your lunch money and throw rocks at you" over his excitement on having discovered the A Song of Ice and Fire CCG.
- The hierarchy is referenced in this page of Weregeek.
- Despite this one instance though the comic in general averts this showing all forms of Geek as people out to have harmless fun (who also may or may not be monsters of some kind).
- Dork Tower has a running joke about furries being the absolute bottom rung of the gaming community.
- And then there's...
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Ken: The geeks beat you up in school when the jocks were finished with you, didn't they... |
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- In one strip, Matt imagines strangling and screaming at an overexcited roleplayer who can't stop telling strangers everything about his character, because it makes normal people think all roleplayers are freaks like him.
- A variation in Mac Hall here.
Web Original
- In Berserk Abridged, Guts, who is a Zack Cosplayer, thinks LARPing is too nerdy for him.
- A common joke in Sci Fi Debris reviews.
- The Nostalgia Chick, who portrays herself as an obsessively geeky shut-in, delights in mocking squealing fangirls and people who write bad fanfiction.
- Of course, the Chick (as opposed to Lindsay Ellis) is a Closet Geek in denial about her own nerdiness.
- She also has a few obligatory swipes at LARPers in her Labyrinth review.
- Yahtzee of Zero Punctuation describes EVE Online players as "the nerds who are to nerds what nerds are to normal people", with an appropriate series of illustrations.
- The "Geek Hierarchy" chart by Lore Sjoberg, originally published at the Brunching Shuttlecocks humour site.
- Commodore HUSTLE includes this delightful exchange:
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Graham: They're LARPers. It's like what Jer does with the dice and the bits of paper, except the people Jer hangs out with look down on these guys. |
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- The Cracked.com series After Hours is entirely about four geeks who sit around a diner discussing pop culture as Serious Business. Nevertheless one of them, Daniel O'Brien, is even geekier than the others and tends to get a lot of looks of mixed confusion/scorn/pity when he says something particularly nerdy. It's Self-Deprecation, of course, Dan is the show's writer.
- The Angry Video Game Nerd: Atari Sports episode, the nerd calls out on sport fans.
- He also appeared never wanting to play ET: The Extraterrestrial – Atari Game as seen as the end of Spielberg Games. This was before a team of research actually found the cartridges in a New Mexican Desert, just as plans for film about it was in production.
- In the web video series called Doppelgänger, Victor isn’t allowed to join a clique of nerds.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons visit Ikea:
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Lisa: (picks up a pencil holder) Ooh, I want to get the krünk. |
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- And when Bart accidentally revealed that he has a stamp collection, even Lisa laughed at him.
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Nelson: Stamp collection? Ha ha! |
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- Lisa also laughed at Bart when he accidentally joined the Junior Campers during a Squishy bender
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Lisa: The few. The proud. The geeky. |
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- On a Halloween episode tale, "Don't Have a Cow, Mankind", Lisa checks a book Homer was about to attack Bart with. When she sees it was "Arsenio" book, Lisa lets Homer go for it for a while to learn Bart is immune to the zombie outbreak.
- In "Diggs", even Millhouse didn’t want Bart to sit next to him after eating a dead frog, though he’s already shared a comb with the boy who had thrown up on a boy who wet his pants at the winter carnival… in other words, he wouldn’t gave Bart 20 dollars for the stunt.
- On Phineas and Ferb, even Baljeet considers Irving to be a nerd.
- Another episode has a sci-fi and fantasy convention, fresh off a war between the two fandoms, unite in mocking a teenage fan of the kiddie character Ducky Momo.
- In The Fairly OddParents younger Cosmo, who is apparently the biggest loser in his school, gets beat up by every clique group, even the nerds.
- Family Guy: Meg Griffin may as well be the black sleep of the family, but even she won’t date Neil Goldman, a classmate who’s a geeky outcast like her.
- In the South Park episode "Return of the Fellowship of the Ring to the Two Towers", the kids are playing like they are characters in The Lord of the Rings, but Cartman then makes fun of kids who are playing like they are in Harry Potter.
- In the end of the Danny Phantom episode "Lucky in Love", the nerd calls Danny, Tucker, and Sam "losers".
- In the early season, Tucker himself hates being called a "nerd" and "Techno-Geek". In one episode, he has gotten sick of it, but by the end he started to like being a "Techno-Geek".
- In the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Canned", Rocko passes two comic book geeks, one of which is gushing about how he thinks the "elf wenches" in his favorite fantasy comic are way hotter than real women. The other geek responds "Wow... you're an idiot."
- Total Drama inverts this—according to his online bio, the reason Cody thinks of himself as cool is because he hangs out with a bunch of friends even geekier than he is.
- In The Looney Tunes Show, there's a flashback to everyone's high school days, and we find out that even Pete Puma and Marvin Martian, established losers in this particular continuity, refused to sit with Daffy.
- Static Shock: Nerds even attacked Eddie Felson, known as Weird Eddie, who would later become the villain, Speedwarp.