okay, so, the Age of the Geek, 2010-2013, let's talk about this

obviously geek culture and the mainstream are hardly strangers, PART of that is that Geek Culture (or Geek) is REALLY good at assimilating formerly biggest things in Mainstream that didn't end up "vintage" like the Universal Monsters or '60s James Bond

basically this is because Geek is a lot closer to Camp than a lot of proponents of Geek like to admit but that's a discussion for a totally different thread

however, there have been times when Geek and Mainstream came together like Planet of the Apes, Star Wars, X-Files, but those were singular rare occurrences that mostly ended up with the geeky thing having to change to become more pop friendly

like you'd have Star Wars, this big expansive space opera and it inspires stuff like Ghostbusters, where you scrub all the geekiness out of the product and turn it into an ultra-accessible comedy romp (I like both but let's not lie about what Ghostbusters IS people)

and that's basically where Geek was in the 2000s, making concessions on its geekiness to secure mainstream appeal, every exception producing more rule followers, for Lord of the Rings you get Harry Potter 3 the street clothes one

Spider-Man gets a faithful movie but Spider-Man belongs to America, and he spurs stuff like Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Hulk, Ghost Rider, Elektra, Batman Begins, even Transformers becomes this HUGE box office hit for the price of scraping away every Geek thing in it

2008 and 2009 though start to feel like a change to this, yes you have Dark Knight doing the "make Geek into a cop movie and it'll be huge" but you also had Iron Man and Hellboy 2 and Star Trek (which LOOKED like Star Trek, that bought SO much goodwill at the time)

and in 2010 with Iron Man 2 it was basically cemented that this wasn't going away BUT something else was going on too, Geek's audience was growing up into college bound young adults with dorm room taste & some disposable income

so suddenly for the first time Geek wasn't being sold to 30-something single nerds or the families of young children but young PEOPLE age 18-24 (and it was young PEOPLE thanks to Twilight becoming a huge phenomenon)

so Geek became a brand you were getting sold by major outlets and not just the places where Geek & Alternative met like Hot Topic's love of GIR, this was the time when you'd see popular people wearing geek branded clothes because that was what was considered cool

this was the age of Sharknado & Channel Awesome & Birdemic & Cards Against Humanity & College Humor & Cracked & ThinkGeek

Geeks With Buying Power was suddenly a mainstream phenomena, for once the story wasn't "if we rework this geek property to a mainstream genre it'll be a big hit" it was "people want to buy geek" and that's how you get Game of Thrones & Once Upon A Time

it was the era when Call of Duty went from a passable realistic shooter to king of the fucking universe and a staple of Frat Parties on college campuses across the nation...and that's also why it ended

what THING could've happened in 2014 that brought the popularity and mainstream appeal of geek culture CRASHING down in? do you need a hint?

seriously if you want to know what killed the Buying Power of the Geeks it's absolutely this, Geek got to be mainstream because it was friendly and uncomplicated, it spoke to the high of millennial hegemony after the 2012 Obama victory, it wasn't supposed to be THIS

suddenly everything horrible, exclusionary, scummy, and self-centered you'd ever heard about "nerds" came crashing into the cultural space that was supposed to be a fun respite from the world of Ferguson and Ebola

like you want a real dose of context? 1 year earlier Geek was here- Batkid, remember that? yeah, and ALL of that goodwill got pissed away in about year and suddenly "geek" becomes a bunch of angry white men harassing people till they have to speak to the UN

and instead of going away it just spread out to infect OTHER things

it wasn't adorkable and it wasn't geek chic it was just exhausting so of course mainstream culture turned away, year after year of angry young men shouting at women that "do you even know the thing you're wearing a t-shirt from?!"

and now we're basically post-Geek, you still have geek properties like Star Wars & the MCU entrenched in culture to become fixtures but the buying power, the mainstream appeal of geek aesthetics and merchandise, that's all gone, new "geek" stuff now is purposely distanced