Seibertron.com Energon Pub Forums

I own less than 30 TF's and if I eliminate KO's I own less than 20

I'm a fan of Dr. Who

I'm a Trekkie

I want to learn Klingon

I like Star wars

I read Fanfiction

I am not bothered by shipping though sometimes it just creeps me out not all shipping just some.

Well I've never been to any of the Botcons or other TF cons, so I really haven't had the chance to have a face-to-face with another Transformers fan, ever. I'm a normal college guy myself, though. Most of my friends are the same way, just with different areas of passion - one of my friends is a mecha nut, another is a huge Spider-Man fan and watches a ton of anime, one is a hardcore gamer (and I mean hardcore, nonstop, beat a game on launch day and brag about it type), and another is really into steampunk. I know them mostly by their favorite interests, and they know me as the Transformers nut. They come to me if they have a question about something they saw in ROTF or Animated or whatever, and I come to them for questions on mecha, Star Wars, steampunk, anime, Spider-Man, etc. We all feed off each other, and usually get really interested in each other's passions as a result.

My passion for TF has never been a problem in relationships either, despite more than one girl pointing out the fact that I troll toy aisles at Wal-Mart where toddlers are looking at the same figures I am, lol. But it's viewed as a pretty normal passion, I'd say. Most adult men nowadays have a passing interest in Transformers, or at least an appreciation for the cool factor of the classic 80s series and the live-action movies. Hell, my Facebook profile has a picture of ROTF Legends Grindor instead of my face, and no one seems to really think anything of it.

Transformer and GIJoe fans on the average do seem more normalized than others and a bit more grounded in reality. Oh there are a number of ass-clowns but on the whole that's true for about every fandom regardless of what it is.

Wow. A 2 year bump. Impressive.

I'm a relatively normal guy. I'm 32, married with two kids. I work a full time job and a part time one at Gamestop. I'm outgoing and pretty accepting of everyone, and I'm rarely ever serious. I like to keep things light. I'm the guy at work who is always laughing and kidding around. I'm very slow to anger, and it's rare to ever see me actually angry (you can assume almost anything I post on these boards has a kidding, laughing tone to it).

I'm very lucky in that I found a woman who accepts me for who I am, so my hobbies (video games, comics, Transformers, etc.) have never been an issue. The people at work (my full time is a small locally owned business) don't mind my nerdiness, and we all get along great. Most of my friends are people I met working at Gamestop after high school, so among them, my interests aren't anywhere out of the ordinary.

I'm a jeans and t-shirt guy (usually something with comics or something on it). It's not hard to tell what kind of stuff I'm into if you pay attention to the things I wear.

I laughingly refer to myself as a dual-class geek. I'm into all the above mentioned stuff, and I can build a computer from the ground up, but I'm also into hunting, hiking, fishing and lots of other manly stuff. I'm a weird mix of interests I guess.

LoRANeHUdsOn wrote:Transformer and GIJoe fans on the average do seem more normalized than others and a bit more grounded in reality. Oh there are a number of ass-clowns but on the whole that's true for about every fandom regardless of what it is.

I'd hazard that older fans of anything, on average, tend to be a bit more grounded just from having a couple of decades on the teen fandoms.

Look at fandoms for pre-80s media, and in particular fandoms for media which never got subsequent revivals in later decades. Fandoms for things like Blakes 7 and The Prisoner tend to have a lot of people closer to retirement age than college age, and while they still may hold conventions and write fanfic, they don't tend to have the levels of teen/tween drama seen in things like the Twilight fandom.

Then there are fandoms where revivals or strong differences across generations of the product lead to stratification and cliqueiness amongst the fans. We ourselves experienced it soon after Beast Wars hit the screens. Look at things like the My Little Pony fandom, or (for a more extreme example) the Lord of the Rings fandom when the movies came out. We still have a little of it, but we're more integrated now that the extreme GeeWunners took themselves off in a huff.

Look at fans of even older products and media, including early 20th-C and even the preceding centuries, and you'll tend to find older fans who are less 'weird', for want of a better word. Even if they do have an entire library for renditions of Bach, or a workroom which is wall-to-wall miniature trains or wooden soldiers.