Freaks and Geeks

(No, not the TV show.)

So I know I owe y’all a big continuation of the Nice Guys exploration and I promise I’ll be getting to it, but I’m so ridiculously swamped right now, you have no idea. Meanwhile, here’s two interesting posts by Sarah Rees Brennan and Justine Larbalestier about the Blank Page Heroine — or the personality-less girl that often serves as either a male fantasy or a stand-in for female readers to insert themselves into the story and run off with the hot hero. One of the big tips in writing romance novels is to have a hero your reader wants to fall in love with an a heroine your reader wants to be. Relatable != Personality-free.

Go read those posts. In the comments section of Justine’s post, PixelFish brings up the topic of geeky characters, which is one type of personality that doesn’t get a lot of play in traditional romances:

I also wanna mention Meg Cabot who writes some geeky heroines in her adult romances. (My favourite is a short redhead who reads gossip columns, watches the weather channel and has a Princess Xen action figure.) I compare that to another writer who I will refrain from naming who claimed to write about geeks but only wrote Hollywood geeks–ie. beautiful people who just needed to take their glasses off to find love. Whereas Meg Cabot’s geeks are geeks to the bone. Her character wasn’t going to stop watching the Weather Channel or ditch the Xena figure just to get a guy.

I started thinking about geeky characters, and their portrayal in fiction. I have recently finished watching all the available episodes of GREEK, and among my myriad problems with the show (inconsistent characterizations, sexism, massively bad stereotyping) is the way they codify geekiness. It’s not “quite” as bad as watching an episode of Saved By the Bell, but it’s close.

For instance, the two main characters, Casey and Rusty Cartwright, are a brother and sister who fall firmly among the “popular cheerleader” “geek loser” lines. Casey, the older sister, is a gorgeous blonde who is the leader of her “best sorority on campus,” has an active social and sex life, and is time and again shown to be very shallow (picking taps pledges based on their hotness factor). It is established that her younger brother Rusty is a “loser” whom she doesn’t even acknowledge to her closest friends, predicated mainly on the fact that he wears striped polo shirts, turned down MIT to come to this state school and study “Honors engineering” and is a “genius” who doesn’t do tequila shots. Rusty wishes to join a fraternity, and is quickly welcomes into the embrace of the “loser” frat on campus, Gamma Tau. (And by “loser” they seem to mean “Animal House” not “Revenge of the Nerds” as this frat clearly throws amazing parties that seem to be populated every weekend by hundreds of students. Later in the series it is established that there is a frat for “nerds” called something that sounds like “sci fi” but is made of Greek letters, where the members all wear glasses and watch Star Trek.)

The members of Casey’s sorority, though they are the “hottest” girls on campus, are constantly worried about being associated more often with this “loser” party frat than with the blazer-wearing trust-fund frat Sigma Chi, who are supposedly the “hottest” guys on campus — DESPITE the fact that the leader of the “loser” frat is easily the most attractive and interesting person on the show, is tapped for the super special senior secret society that the leader of the “best” fraternity is also tapped for, has a long string of hotties to date and regularly dates the members of Casey’s so called “best” sorority (later, this becomes an issue, as apparently their intimate connection to the “loser” frat brings down their reputation on campus). Meanwhile, the members of this “hottest fraternity” are mostly either openly gay or closeted (thereby negating the purpose of being a source of dates for their “best sorority partners) or butt ugly (as evinced by the short, pale, pugilistic crew cut red head currenlty rallying the other frat members against the Jason Dohring lookalike frat leader)…

To make a long story short, I don’t really grok the understood and unstated value system which informs every plotline on the show, but that might be because I’m the kind of person who knows what grok means. To the characters of Greek, I would be a geek/loser relegated to (undeniably popular and sociable) fraternities, if I managed to make it into one at all.

I have a hard time understanding that. I didn’t go to a big frat school. I don’t even know if any of the frats were residential, but I do know that I had sorority girls as roommates (and my husband had fraternity boys) as upperclassmen. I always imagined there was a frat for every flavor at the schools where frats are a thing. And I have a really tough time understanding why the frat with the reputation for throwing the best parties on campus could be simultaneously regarded as “losers” — especially since time and again, the characters say they joined the greek system “for the parties.”

It’s a similar problem to the one I find watching The Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother, where often, in adjacent episodes, the characters make the EXACT SAME geeky reference (often to Star Wars). In the former show, the characters are drawn as out of touch losers with no friends outside their circle and zero romantic opportunities. In the latter show, the characters are drawn as attractive, sociable members of society with hot wives, hot girlfriends, and an endless parade of hot one night stands. (Also in the latter, the hot girl dates make geeky references too.) Since when does liking science fiction and academia turn you into an unsocialized loser?

Honestly, HIMYM feels way more realistic to me. Geeks come in all shapes and sizes, and some of us have happy, sociable, romantically fulfilled lives with our cool, cute geek husbands, thank you very much. We don’t live in Revenge of the Nerds or Saved by the Bell, people. Look around. The geeks have inherited the Earth.

I didn’t set out to write “geek” characters. The characters of Secret Society Girl are, granted, far more “geeky” — by Greek standards! — just by dint of studying hard enough to make it into an Ivy League school. I had to laugh at Pixelfish’s suggestion of “taking off the glasses to find love,” since the hottest and most popular guy in my books by far is George Prescott, who wears glasses and gets the girl. He also rocks a mean Star Wars reference on many occasions.

Poe, however, is a character whose geekiness is overlaid by general anti-social behavior. It’s not just that he wears old, ill-fitting clothes as a poor undergrad and owns a giant pet snake named Voldemort and was probably a D&D Dungeonmaster growing up. It’s that he doesn’t seem to want to be friends with most people and most people return the favor.

None of the girls in SSG are coded as geeks, either, and really, that’s part of the point. When I got to college, I realized that many of the interests that might have gotten you in trouble in the rigid high school hierarchy no longer existed. There was a larger pool of students from which you could draw your own social group, and even the most party animal of kids (again, I suppose “party animal” is coded as “loser” on Greek) were bookish nerds about something, otherwise, they wouldn’t have been at Yale.

Jenny, probably the shyest of the taps, is a computer engineer, but she has a large group of friends in both her computer and religious circles and can hold her own in most social situations.Her shyness is a cover, because she also has a smart mouth, and I always imagine her being much more outspoken online and probably more used to that in her day to day life — until the Diggers got their hands on her.

And part of it also is that I was writing about young adults at a highly competitive college. They were 21 years old and, for the most part had come to terms with their personality types and the friendships those engendered. That was the whole point of the society — to break them out of that mold and make them friends with people that weren’t part of their social group. (Greek has something similar with the leaders of rival frats joining the same secret society.) But I could also play with the hierarchy label, especially in the first book, where Amy’s insecurities about George and Clarissa are not even recognized by the other two characters. Amy’s whole reason for hating Clarissa is because she knew that Clarissa talked bad about her freshman year. Back when they were teenagers. Back when Clarissa and Amy were both more caught up in the idea of high school-style hierarchy. Clarissa, at 21, doesn’t even remember it. It’s no longer part of her personality or worldview.

And then I wrote a YA novel, and I got to bring the whole high school hierarchy back into play.

Astrid, in Rampant, comes from a high school society far more focused on sports (Phil is popular because she plays volleyball, Brandt is popular because he swims) but her borderline status is due to her own shyness, her mother’s reputation around town and family as a crazy person, and the fact that a lot of 16 year old boys are put off by 16 year old girls who are smarter than them, especially in the sciences. Nevertheless, she is, at the start of the novel, dating someone, and she gets another boyfriend in Rome.

I didn’t realize this as writing it, but I’ve had teen girls come up to me and say that Astrid must be very beautiful and popular, to have two boyfriends. I don’t really think of it that way, given the nature of her relationship with Brandt. He was her first boyfriend, and he’s the kind of guy who dates a lot of girls. Personally, I think he’s taking advantage of Astrid’s place in the social pecking order, especially in her first year at school where she doesn’t have Phil around as an anchor. But though Astrid’s love of science might code her as a geek, her mother’s reputation pushes her more into the “freak” realm. Either way, her social standing at school is far from secure. And then I take her out of that environment and put her in the Cloisters, where she suddenly finds herself to be at the top of the totem pole, part of an inner clique among unicorn hunters — a social structure that would be utterly alien to the kids on Greek. And she feels just as uncomfortable there.

I wonder if YA fiction is written about more “geeks” — more people who feel out of place in their environment. Because I think almost every kid does, no matter where they truly stand in society. I can think of very few books (outside the Gossip Girl and knock off group) written about the most popular girl and usually they are “the popular girl brought low” variety — like SKINNED by Robin Wasserman, which is a futuristic sci-fi take on destroying the life of the popular girl. And even Gossip Girl has that outsider perspective, the perspective of the gossip girl narrator.

My own high school experience was fine. Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of relationship drama, and a lot of the time I felt like I was on the outs with certain groups, but I also had plenty of friends. I went to a small high school (~60 people per grade) and lines weren’t drawn that way. The captain of the soccer team (we didn’t have football) was also the lead in the school play. The student body president was also the artsy, guitar-playing party kid (I dated him — in fact, he was my only high school boyfriend, an experience that proved I was so not ready for the whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing at 16). We didn’t have much of a geek/cool kid divide. People hung out in different groups, but there was also tons of crossover and no one really looked down on any other group. I remember talking to one of my good friends, who was definitely part of the jock crowd and partied more than most of my friends, but was also in highest AP calculus and ended up at Princeton, and he was marveling about how the stereotype at most schools is that the “mean, popular” kids were all the jocks, but the theater kids in my school were way more stuck up. I was a theater kid, and had been, I believe, regaling him with tales of the latest theater crowd drama.

What do you think? Do you like books about geeks? Do you like geeky romantic interests? Do you think that YA books get the lion’s share of geeky characters? What book reminds you most of your own high school experience?

Oh, and for those of you who went to large, frat-focused school. Is Greek right about their take on that society? Why would people join frats “for the parties” then look down on the frat that throws the best ones?