If you've spent more than five minutes on the Net during the past few years, chances are you've come across one of cyber-age's more vigorous footsoldiers... the fanboy.
These dudes - and they are usually dudes - are admirably defined by Urban Dictionary, that estimable vault of contemporary parlance, thus:
Fanboy: noun, a passionate fan of various elements of geek culture (eg: sci-fi, comics, Star Wars, video games, animé, hobbits, Magic: the Gathering, etc) who lets his passion override social graces.
Eg, I almost got mowed over by some Dragonball Z fanboy on his skateboard at the mall.
This week's release of the Prince of Persia movie is bound to incite fanboy ire. See, nothing delights these yokels more than being able to point out infinitesimal differences between seminal videogames/ comic-books and their cinematic adaptations. A cursory scan of website IMDb's message board for the film yielded this emblematic instance of fanboy ideology:
"Don't tell me they changed her name to Tamina (from Farah, as in the videogame)... the movie should be exactly like the videogame. Because the game was awesome, changing it will be a mistake!!" (sic)
Any deviations from ardently studied source material is vituperatively denounced as sacrilegious and a personal affront.
"Fanboy" is an intensification of the watered down term "fan" and signifies an obsession with the minutiae of a narrow frame of (usually nerdy) interest. They have disturbingly large replica light saber collections and their dream girl is some 14-year-old Japanese animé character with eyes as big as saucers who frequently flashes her white cotton panties.
Fanboys have always been around, lurking throughout the ages in dark rooms with bad posture, supercilious sneers and ambiguous facial hair. Chances are that at the instance of creation, some amoeba with (some early instance of fanboy behaviour) pooped out a speech bubble containing the words "first, n00bs!".
The Net has ushered in the golden age of the fanboy. Online forums and message boards are the provinces over which they rule with grammatical impunity. The chosen patois is a bastardised hacker language based on a combination of numbers and letters, commonly referred to as 1337 spawning words like "pwned", "X0RZ", "d00d" and "@ss".
Their high level of brand loyalty gives them an undisclosed amount of leverage in Hollywood. Directors like Bryan Singer, Jon Favreau, McG, Kenneth Branagh and our own Gavin Hood have expressed their efforts to appease fanboys while appealing to a broader fanbase. There was even Fanboys (2008), a movie about Star Wars devotees.
All of which points to an insidious advance of fanboy culture.
Be @fr@1d. Be very @fr@1d.
- zane. [email protected]