Fandom Introspection: I’m a Pop Culture Junkie

Admitting your problem is the first step in the road to recovery. And I have a serious problem. Not as serious as Amanda Bynes’s, but still. I don’t know if I should read a self-help book, go to an AA meeting or just yield to temptating and be happy. You see, I’m a Pop Culture Junkie. I like Pop Culture to the point of distraction. All of it. Whether is good or bad. I just consume it like oxygen. If it’s good, it gives you such a sense of happiness and belonging that nothing (not even chocolate) can compare. If it’s bad, you just have to consume it even more, cuz you love talking to other Pop Culture crazed people about just how bad it was. If not, Miley Cyrus’s new “l” video wouldn’t have reached 85,629,088 in less than a week. (BTW, was that vid for real???)

All this enjoyment, either gushing or throwing a bashing-party, comes with a set of downsides. And I’m not talking about the dark ages known as the when we really had to work for your addiction because it wasn’t served on a silver platter (aka: Google). I’m talking about the overload of info that’s slowly frying my brain.

There’s so much stuff and so little time!!! Between books, movies, tv shows, books-turned-into-movies, books-turned-into-tv-shows, tv-shows-turned-into-movies, movies-turned-into-tv-shows, books that were a movie and are now a tv show (About a Boy, anyone?), comic-books, music, gaming, shipping, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr… (I need a moment to catch my breath here). And I could keep going. Not only are there like a gazillion categories, but there is a ton of material in each one. Just seeing the new shows coming out on Fall TV Season 2013 gave me a headache (almost 50!!!).

And it’s not only the new stuff that’s coming to get us. It’s the ongoing ones and the old stuff you discover by chance and you just have to consume it. And don’t get me started with real life interfering with my fandom life. It’s so annoying. A weekend has 48 hours. Take a full, 44 minutes per episode, 22 episodes season and you approximately have 8 hours to sleep, eat, use the toilette and shower. That is, IF you sleep and IF you shower. Because there’s the pressing need to watch everything like lighting fast. Which brings us to our problem number two:

Peer pressure. We’ve all experienced it. And we’ve all made some other poor geek’s life miserable. I’m not talking about mocking or being intentionally cruel. It’s just that we are so invested in our fandom that we can’t believe someone hasn’t read all of the Game of Thrones books or hasn’t watched every single Harry Potter movie. Fandom Peer Pressure comes in three forms:

1/ The disbelief attack

When you own up to having never seen a movie, a show or read a book. The intense look of disbelief on the faces of your fellows is guarantied to make you neglect your life for a whole weekend, hide in your shame-filled corner and get updated. You never want to experience that look in your life. When being the center of the disbelief attack, you can totally empathize with an alien who just landed on Earth. You are a total outsider and you just have to be in the inner circle of trust. Which brings us to:

2/ The communication barrier

Want to understand what everyone’s talking about? You have to be deep in pop culture fandom to keep up. Not only about the news, but also about all the references people throw in everyday conversations. If you are a fraking muggle, who came from the wrong faction or district, and can’t understand the important fact that winter is coming, you are so out of your league. Your friends’s conversations about things you don’t have a clue about yet will be total gibberish to you. Or you’ll force your poor friends to speak in a highly cryptic code around you. Or worse, they’ll give each other knowing looks and say things like “we’ll talk about it later” or walk away to talk in hush voices in a sort of football huddle, leaving you as alone as a new foreign exchange student at the cafeteria. All this seeming mean behavior is due to:

3/ The spoiler alert

This is the reason you lock yourself up in your room, with an IV line as your sole source of food, for an entire weekend. This is the reason your friends act like idiots around you. Because you don’t want to have the best episode of the season spoiled for you. You don’t want to know how a 1,000 pages book ends when you are on page number 879. So you don’t eat, you don’t bathe, you don’t sleep, you don’t go out and you don’t talk to other people. You just become the stereotypical characterization of a nerd: someone with no life. But it is all for a good reason!!!

Besides, all of our problems are exacerbated by that fact that we have such easy access to the material. TV, Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and, if you are willing to bend the rules, Torrents, all throw the information at you. You are constantly bombarded with pop culture material. It’s so easy, that we find ourselves flooded with too much. And we are back on problem numero uno: we don’t have time to watch everything! I’m in the middle of Series Two of Downton Abbey and I’m already behind on The White Queen. And soon enough, season 2 of Arrow will start. And I have a damn job that takes up almost all of my time!!! What’s worse, we have to choose. Even if we don’t want to. We must. We are given so many choices that we become an anxious- nervous-ball who just freezes and can’t decide. It’s physically impossible to watch every TV show, every movie and read every book. You just can’t. Once you accept that and mourn all the pop culture you won’t be able to experience, you’ll be a much happy camper. At some point, we just have to face the music. Loki so had a point when he wanted to free us from freedom.

So, do you feel the pressure too? Are you as addicted as me? Should we start a help group?

Oh! And if you are wondering, Miley reached 86,035,321 viewers while I wrote this.