An incomplete investigation of an insular cultural group

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This article was published 21/03/2018 (3135 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For the purposes of understanding this documentary, geeks are defined as individuals who are super-enthusiastic in their appreciation of a particular cultural niche, including — but not limited to — comic books, science fiction, anime and cosplay.

Montreal writer-director Gina Hara considers herself a member of that club. But she found herself at a disadvantage when she went to Japan to a Comiket convention, which targets the otaku (ultra-geek) for the purposes of researching this documentary. She was stunned to find herself largely shunned because female geeks proved reluctant to discuss their passions on camera and on the record.

Hara persisted, and her subsequent four-year investigation into that reticence is the nub of Geek Girls, a documentary that would be an outright celebration of girl geeks if not for its acknowledgment that whenever women or girls are having fun, there always has to be a male out there trying to debase or diminish their efforts.

If male geeks tend to be outcasts, Hara says, female geeks are “outcasts of the outcasts.”

The most extreme manifestation of this tendency is Gamergate, a particularly vile campaign of harassment and doxing of female game designers and journalists by an army of anonymous online misogynists.

Hara doesn’t delve deep into that particular slough, but she does interview Montreal gamer Stephanie Harvey on how equality on the gaming battlefield is still withheld if players know they’re competing against a woman.

Prejudice transcends all cultures, even in the country Hara calls “the place where geek history began,” where a couple of self-described “otaku” admit that, in Japan, an admission of nerdiness is tantamount to social suicide.

In the U.S., Jamie Broadnax, the founder of the website Black Girl Nerds, is upfront about how her own passion for sci-fi was deemed less valid than that of her brother. Broadnax inspiringly defines a nerd as “someone who lacks conformity.”

That definition applies to Mia Moore. She is a star in the realm of cosplay, who explains that dressing up as a character is more about fulfilling a desire in herself as opposed to gratifying the Game of Thrones-inspired sex fantasies of male convention attendees.

Hara’s film is intended to let women and girls know it’s OK to be a geek.

In that capacity, the film is more of an effort to galvanize the geeks than an investigation into the conflict.

The only hostility we actually witness against these women in the context of the film is a few angry diatribes on message boards.

Hara doesn’t talk to anyone — male or female — that represents the repression these women face.

In short, the film seeks to comfort the afflicted geek more than afflict the comfortable geek. There is social value in that.

But one still wishes the film dived deeper.

A degree of insularity is undoubtedly an aspect of geek culture, but it is also anathema to the implicit journalistic mission of a feature documentary.

randall.king@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @FreepKing