In her article about transgender teens in the magazine this week, Margaret Talbot quotes Annette Bening and Warren Beatty’s son Stephen calling himself, among other things, a “nerdfighter.” It might escape the average reader’s notice that this term is more than the sum of its parts. In the teen-age population, “nerdfighter” has a very specific meaning and etymology. Primarily, it identifies the teen-ager in question as a follower of John Green. Green is a former divinity student who dropped his plans to join the ordained ministry after a stint as a hospital chaplain. But you could say that, in his career as a young-adult novelist, he’s become another sort of evangelist. His “A Fault in Our Stars” débuted at No. 1 on the children’s best-seller lists about a year ago. It is about a love affair between two teen-aged cancer sufferers, and was drawn, in part, from his experience as a chaplain.
Green has been writing about teen-agers who don’t quite fit in, albeit in less epidemiologically significant ways, for some time. His first novel, “Looking for Alaska,” in which a boarding-school student puzzles out what happened to his friend when she died in murky circumstances, showed a knack for the alienated-whip-smart-teen-ager genre. Some people might mutter something here about formula. But, for his readers, Green did what David Foster Wallace said good fiction did: he made them feel less alone. The book was not an instant best-seller when it appeared, in 2006, but it was something almost better: a cult hit. And, as such, it gave Green the beginnings of an online following.
In 2007, Green and his brother, Hank, began video blogging, or vlogging, as a hobby. They called their efforts “Brotherhood 2.0.” The idea was that the two brothers would communicate exclusively in that fashion for an entire year. “When we started making videos,” he wrote to me by e-mail, “we hoped that we’d build a small but active community of viewers who would join us in projects.” Their first one had about ten thousand participants, who were already calling themselves the “nerdfighters.” Their mission is to “increase awesome and decrease suck” in the world, largely through charity initiatives, but also through developing a sense of a community for the otherwise out-of-sync.
The idea caught on. At the end of their 2007 “experiment,” the Green brothers just kept going, setting up a Web site for their followers and continuing to put out videos. As of this writing, their YouTube channel has 1,018,140 subscribers and 301,759,611 individual views of its videos. There is also a Wiki and a hand sign derived from the old Vulcan greeting. About a month ago, after the State of the Union, Green was one of five citizens that President Obama joined in a Google hangout. Green and his wife, Sarah, asked the President if he preferred the name Eleanor or Alice for their unborn child. Ever the diplomat, the President declined to answer, saying he worried that if he went the wrong way on the question the child would forever know that the President didn’t like her name. Then he told Green and his wife to tell the child “not to forget to be awesome,” one of the nerdfighter mantras. “I assume someone whispered that into the President’s ear while he was talking to me,” Green wrote to me, “but, regardless, it was a very generous thing of him to say.”
The history of “nerdfighteria” suggests that Green perennially underestimates his influence. The term “nerdfighter” itself was originally just a joke. Early in 2007, Green filmed one of his vlogs in the Savannah, Georgia, airport, in front of an arcade game whose logo appeared to read “Nerdfighters.” (In fact, the game was called Aero Fighters.) Green found the name funny, and said, in a later video, “Here’s my question about Nerdfighters: Is Nerdfighters a game about people who fight against nerds, or is it a game about nerds who fight against other people? I’ve come to believe that Nerdfighters is a game about nerds who fight, nerds who tackle the scourge of popular people. And I’ve been thinking to myself… this would be a great video game.” Quickly, his viewers, in their own vlogs and blogs, began to refer to themselves as nerdfighters, and a social movement was born. That might sound glib. Yet one measure of the popularity of the term is the very active nerdfighter tag on Tumblr, which, when I checked it yesterday, contained, among other entries, a comparison of Green to a modern-day Dante, leading his followers through the circles of Hell. That only sounds hyperbolic until you confront the profound loneliness at the heart of a lot of youthful angst. The totemic possibilities of the right book, the right video, the right kind word, are naturally larger.
But there can be such a thing as too big. “One of the reasons Hank and I have always resisted being on television is that we don’t really want nerdfighters to be a mainstream cultural phenomenon,” Green wrote me. “I worry that mainstream cultural phenomena need, like, Message Singularity and A Brand and an Institutional Voice and stuff. That kind of thing does not interest us at all. We just want to make cool stuff with people we like.” You can see his point: the more everyone knows just what a nerdfighter is, the more the definition hardens. The most beautiful and intriguing parts of any identity tend to be the fluid ones. And the young people nerdfighteria attracts, after all, are often as confused and lonely and frustrated as they are because they don’t fit into the boxes, a problem that can hardly be resolved by creating a new one.
We hear a lot about the perils of the Internet for the young. And yet, it does have another function. It is a place where the horizons of self-definition are widely set, where those interesting, fluid moments of identity can be explored. As Green puts it, “I am very proud that Stephen [Ira] considers himself a nerdfighter, and I hope that nerdfighteria is a place where young trans people feel welcome and safe, because there aren’t enough of those places, online or off.” An in-joke of a name, it turns out, is a signpost of a much-needed port in the storm.
Read Margaret Talbot’s article on transgender adolescents. She also blogged about the video diaries of transgender teens.
