I make it no secret that I am a tremendous antisocial pessimist but even I don't believe this interpretation. And trust me, its a common interpretation. I think the people who act smug about invading nerd culture are the symptom, not the disease. Like that smugness is the result of their effort to become accepted in those groups. I recall dealing with this in my high school years when I started hosting game nights. The people who I remained friends with were more interested in the game or in the social small talk as the game played out. The people who bragged, acted like we were weird, didn't want to engage in banter or small talk were usually always told the same thing.
"Yeah yeah dude, just shut up and play the game."
I think its some kind of ego thing. Like when these people enter a situation they have to dominate it, and they feel uncomfortable or self-conscious when they aren't the center of attention. Not out of malice but just like out of some sort of caveman instinct. I primarily recognize it because I have kind of the same instinct, just a bit more subdued. Nobody likes to be ignored at the end of the day. I think maybe nerds are just better at dealing with it than the average person is. Relating back to RLM, they actually kind of brought this up in one of their Quarantine Catchup movies when they made fun of celebrities freaking out on Twitter because nobody is paying attention to them.
That's my point though, it's motivated by their egos, it's not about the thing itself, it's about how they can use Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel etc to assemble an identity around themselves, ergo they think it makes them "cool", real nerds don't give a shit whether people consider this stuff cool, we'd like this stuff even if it wasn't "cool" as Devo said "We're Through Being Cool"
And in the old days many nerds had to put up with violent bullying because of it and did so anyway, meanwhile today these people are all just bandwagon hoppers because "Geek chic" took off, if that hadn't happened they never would have looked twice at comics, video games, Star Wars, Star Trek etc, they are not people willing to take a punch in the face for it, that's the key difference.
But in today's identity politics obsessed era there's another element to it and that's the spiteful element, you may disagree but I've seen plenty of this stuff, SJWs get off on the idea of making the "manbabies" mad by taking away their things, peep this comic for example
https://thenib.com/video-gays/, literally flipping us off and telling us to "die angry about it"
For me personally I'm less concerned about trend chasing posers, you don't necessarily
have to be willing to take a punch in the face for nerd culture, we could have been a sandbox big enough for everyone to play in, but if you're going to come along and show nothing but hate and contempt for those that came before, for those that
would take a punch for it and you're going to gloat about taking it away from those people and not show a single shred of proper respect, then you can kindly fuck the hell off.
In other words Geek chic was fine but it was ruined by a bunch of toxic, spiteful and flat out evil people.
