Having a Fanboy Moment
Originally published at Brian's Universe. You can comment here or there.
I’m what you would call a nerd…a geek…some would even say dork, but I digreess…I am a fan of many things. TV shows, movies, books, music, you name it. Well, there’s a well-documented moment in a fan’s life - when they somehow interact with one of the people that are intimiately involved with their favorite book, TV show, movie or etc - that makes a fan go all squiggly. This is what I like to term, “going fanboy” or “going fangirl.” It’s that moment of squeeness when you have just a tiny little pop of excitement over what, to anyone else, would seem to be an innocuous encounter.
Why do I bring this up? Because I had my own little fanboy moment yesterday, and it got me to thinking about the phenomena. To explain, my favorite book series EVER is The Dresden Files, written by Jim Butcher. They’re revolve around a modern day wizard named Harry Dresden who fights evil in Chicago. Anyway, the author of the series, Jim Butcher - who I’ve gotten to meet once before and has always been REALLY nice - is on Twitter, and I sent a reply to something he posted. He therein replied to my post. This, in turn, gave me that little pop of excitement, and I, for all intents and purposes…squeed. ^_~
Something like this also happened a few months ago at Comic-Con. I was doing roundtable interviews with actors from the recently released movie, “Superman/Batman: Public Enmies,” and one of those actors was Kevin Conroy. Now, Batman: The Animated Series is my favorite cartoon EVER, and Mr. Conroy does the voice of Batman, so I was insanely excited to meet him. When he to our table, I asked someone to take a picture of him and I (squee!), and asked him if I could have a “fanboy moment”. ^_~ When he knelt down to take the picture, he said slowly in the Batman voice, “Fanboy…” I nearly made a hot mess of myself, I kid you not. ^_~
What is it, however, that defines these moments? Is it simply the excitement of meeting a celebrity, someone we admire? Is it the hope that meeting them in person will somehow touch our lives the same way their work has, whether it’s acting, writing, producing or whatever else? I think, honestly, it’s a combination of these things, probably plus a small fantasy element that makes us hope and wish that we’ll imapact them in some way as well, that they’ll remember us.
Whatever the case, I want to hear what you think. ^_^ What do you think gives us this jolt in a moment of fanboy or girl squeeness? What are some of your favorite fanboy/girl moments? I look forward to reading your thoughts and your stories, and thank you for taking the time to read mine. ^_^