I see my brother regularly; let’s call him Yan. Yan is a famous curmudgeon, dissatisfied with just about every movies, TV show, or book he’s ever digested, and we often have long talks about what he doesn’t like about The Entertainments the universe offers him. He’s usually pretty savvy in his criticisms, though I’m more forgiving and can accept imperfection as long as there are compensating pleasures offered and so we don’t usually agree on what qualifies as ‘good’ in TV or movies.

One of the things we often discuss is a tendency by bad writers to view any Science Fiction or Fantasy story as a license to do anything, to toss out the very laws of physics. I’m not talking about magic here, you see – I’m talking about the assumption by hack writers that just because a story is SFnal, anything can happen. It’s one thing to have magic in your story. The Jedi can do just about anything, okay, fine – that gets established early on in the Star Wars world and so when Yoda lifts the X-Wing out of the swamp, or when Vader chokes the life out of someone who’s on a completely different ship, well, you just shrug and accept it. The rules of The Force are established and that’s fine.

Sometimes, though, you have writers who decide that just because you have, say, a psychic or a spaceship in the story, well, anything is possible. That if a character has one special power or ability, he or she should be able to sprout new ones whenever the plot requires a solution. Of course, sometimes a character with unspecified abilities can believably display a heretofore unknown aspect of them – take Spock stuffing his soul into Bones McCoy in Star Trek 2 – so to a certain extent it depends on how it’s handled.

For the clearest example of the acidic effect this attitude has on SF writing, I direct your suffering eyes to Highlander 2: The Quickening. The special sauce of this movie is the idea that since it’s a SF story, anything goes! And I do mean anything. Though to be fair this movie apparently suffered from meddlesome investors who took a bad movie and made it indescribably terrible, the fact remains that the writers of this movie heard ‘immortals’ and ‘science fiction’ and decided that whatever batshit crazy stuff they came up with would work.

You can, of course, let your imagination run when writing SF/F work, but there have to be rules of some sort. Especially in serial works when a character has, say, dozens of episodes or novels to develop and display their abilities. Suddenly granting them the one power which would solve your plotting problems will not fly, my friend. But then, my brother and I are bitter, bitter people. For example: I still intend to get my $7 back from the producers of Highlander 2. Oh, some day, they will pay me back. I swears it.

Friends, I’m used to being Not Cool. I’ve actually pretty much based my social persona on being Not Cool and Proud of It, though of course I cry tiny tears of drama sometimes when the fact is pointed out to me. Which it is about once a week by some of my hurtful friends. You know who you are. Actually, you don’t, because none of my friends actually read my blog, the bastards.

So the fact that I am apparently the only nerd on Earth who has never read Watchmen doesn’t alarm me, much. It’s a little strange, though, how everyone seems to assume that I have, you know? Like this was some sort of seismic event in culture, a shared moment of wonder. For folks who did read the Graphic novel, I’m sure it was. It’s just the assumption that Nerd = Read Watchmen that somehow irritates me.

I’m not sure why. I realized long ago that just because my old friends and I can and do have entire conversations using Simpsons references and quotes doesn’t mean this is universal, and that people I like and enjoy can, in fact, not enjoy or be very meh about things I love. My brother, for example, is a fun guy to talk to about things, but we score very low on shared cultural experiences because he just doesn’t like the same things I do, and vice versa. So why, then, does it seem like every blog post or magazine article i read assumes that if I’m reading that blog post, I must have read and loved Watchmen? I feel like I have to assimilate or be scorned.

Of course, by all accounts Watchmen is worth my attention, so I should put down my Scotch, get over my instinctive resistance to any suggestion made by anyone, any time, and just read the thing. Ah, but should I wait to see the movie? On the one hand any movie worth watching does not require you to read the source material to be appreciated. On the other hand, how will I know about the in-jokes and meta references if I don’t? How will I pass amongst the True Nerds if I can’t speak the secrets? Well, the usual: I will carry smoke bombs, and whenever someone asks me something I can’t answer, I dash it to the floor, laugh like a hyena, and make a run for it. 46% of the time, it works every time.

Man, we need Nerd Boy Cliff’s Notes for Failed Nerds like me.