The other day, I was following an argument about one of the comic book conventions when the subject turned to girl gamers, and at first was as I expected: Every guy on the forum was for them. And then the conversation turned sour, really sour. And that’s when it started to attract my attention. At one point, the conversation turned to the subject of Felicia Day, which started out positive, and then it, too, turned negative. And that’s when I started to realize there was something going on that might get missed by a lot of people. Let me explain.
For those of you who don’t know, Felicia Day is an actress who stars in her own web series The Guild, which is about a bunch of really nerdy people who play an Everquest/World of Warcraft-like online, persistent universe game. The characters are quite funny, including an always out of work guild leader, a slacker who works at a run-down fast food place, an overweight housewife who loves the game more than her family, an Asian temptress woman who has no actual skills other than the game, a second generation Indian-U.S. citizen who has a crush on Felicia Day, and of course, Felicia as a semi-employed, overthinking teenage (or older) girl who is addicted to the game but can’t seem to make her real world work out in spite of the online world. Their adventures are somewhat expected, and funny, and every now and then a somewhat famous actor will show up as a bit character in the series (like Wil Wheaton from Star Trek: The Next Generation fame as Wesley Crusher).
Anyway, now that you know a little bit about the web series, it’s probably significant to point out that before this series became famous, Felicia Day was in a few other shows, most notably a small character arc in Buffy: The Vampire Slayer series. However, since Guild fame, Felicia Day has started showing up in a lot of other geek-related shows like a prominent part in the last few seasons of Eureka, and Dragon Age: Redemption. For those who are fans of Felicia Day, there’s never been a debate over how her attractiveness has attracted a lot of guys to her banner, especially when she has a tendency to star in geek-related types of shows.
And this is where the debate headed when I caught onto the discussion. One individual pointed out that while Felicia Day may be funny at parts in her series, he also suspected that without the appeal to geekness, there’s a strong chance that Felicia Day would have been ignored as just another semi-attractive female actress when there are so many more attractive ones out there instead. So, the argument morphed into a belief that Felicia’s appeal to geekness is for audience value, not because she happens to be an actual geek/nerd who loves all of the things that geeks/nerds like. Basicallly, the argument goes that she found a niche she could fill and is trying hard to bankroll it as much as she can before someone else more attractive comes along.
Recently, there’s been a pretty large backlash against attractive women who try to make a living off of geek-related appearances, such as comic book conventions where infamous “booth babes” are there to convince horny geek guys to buy the wares of their benefactors. But this has been a complaint for many years, and yet it hasn’t stopped major companies from hiring voiceless babes to sell products to average guy gamers out there.
But the complaint isn’t really even about those types of women. The complaint is about a fakeness of the women who pretend to be geeks in hopes of becoming THE geek girl that guys are interested in. There used to be an old joke at geek venues, where a semi-attractive woman would be considered a goddess at a geek convention but not get a second look at the local mall where so many other attractive women would get even more attention. And there’s something to be said for that.
What’s interesting is that there have been massive appeals to geeks these days in hopes of winning them over with “geek girls”. A lot of television shows are centered around this premise. An example is The Big Bang Theory, which is a semi-humorous show that basically tells the same joke over and over again but changes the wording. It has one generally attractive woman named Penny who immediately becomes the love lust of one of the main characters. And then it becomes the infamous: How can such a geek ever win the love of such a beautiful woman? This subject has been covered ad nauseum by so many other shows and movies in the past, yet the laugh track tries to make it appear as if they’re breaking new ground. The girl who plays Penny is now on the level of supermodel fandom, and to be honest, she’s really not all that attractive, nor is she really all that great of an actress.
We’re starting to see a lot of this concept played over and over again, and each time it happens it becomes more annoying than the last time. Summer Glau, who was the young girl who played the crazy young girl in Serenity (and the series Firefly) has made a name for herself by showing up in all sorts of geek types of shows. At some point, if you were watching something very geeky, it almost became an expectation that she was going to show up at some point. I remember thinking that while watching the abysmally bad The Cape once, and then the next moment, there she was. Attractive girl. Semi-okay actress. But there’s this expectation that somehow she’s now the go to girl for geek shows.
I think that’s becoming somewhat problematic. It’s almost as if really hot actresses are thinking that they can build a career for themselves if they appeal to geek guys that they would never date in the real world. And then when those guys try to approach them at comic book events, they shun them as leppers, proving that they really only wanted the money and fame but really aren’t the geek girls they claimed to be.
With television trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator, we’ll probably see a lot more of this n the future. It’s always been my impression that there are actresses out there who would rather skip the hard work of entertainment and just jump into the winning circle, which they seem to think that appealing to geeks will allow them to do. However, when more and more keep trying to become part of the dynamic, it makes it that much harder for the ones who actually are part of that original circle (actual geek girls).
Now, I don’t know Felicia Day personally, but she’s always appeared, at least to me, to be on the surface about being a geek, or part of the geek environment. But the comments of others make it hard to escape the possibility that she might just be part of that cadre of people who saw an easy audience and went after it, while biting their lips about how disgusted they are at the members of that particular audience.