You tell somebody what you are interested in and they will often say something like “why? It’s so childish.” This is often heard when your interests are in the area of fantasy, gaming, science fiction, comic book movie adaptations, and speculative fiction. Just to name a few areas. People hear about these things and they automatically relate them to childhood and to things that are no longer in their lives. They have been overrun with societal expectations and have somewhere along their path have been pushed towards being conventional and overly responsible. This is something that should not happen without a fight.

Why is there a fear of childish things? Is it really a fear or is it merely a lack of understanding? While listening to people who have questioned someone’s interests and passions a clear pattern has emerged. They have a basic lack of understanding about these topics and a lack of understanding often leads to blatant disregard. The things they are minimizing and questioning are the very things that they loved as children. Comic books, cartoon characters, childhood movies such as Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Princess Bride, and Back to the Future. They have faint memories of loving these things and almost no memory of when they let these things fall by the wayside and “grew up.”

A working hypothesis of why this happens looks something like this…. these people struggle with these topics because they are difficult to understand. The Marvel Universe and how it is tied in together with various characters, plot lines, and back-stories is difficult to understand. It makes a person think and it makes them wonder. Speculative fiction demands that you are able to suspend current views and look forward to things that do not actually yet exist. It demands a head in the clouds approach to the world while at the same time demanding a basic understanding of science, technology, and mathematics. The basic rules of Dungeons and Dragons are 104 pages long. This is the instruction manual to just get started in the game. Read these game rules…I dare you.

Those that see these things as “childish” often think of them as firmly grounded in the real world. They are all about having a job and making a good living. They pride themselves on being practical and want to minimize the nonsense in their lives. Fine. Let us talk a bit about simple economics. The video game industry employs. Let us give these practical people the benefit of the doubt and look at numbers from 2009. The Game Developer Census by Game Developer Research showed that 44,806 people were employed in the industry in 2009. This is just in the United States. In the last six years, these numbers of gone up and up. People employed in well paying positions. Practical at the very core. Let us move on to movies and look at the earnings of Marvel movies. These are movies based on “childish” comic book heroes. According to Box Office Mojo, Marvel movies have earned $7,031,799,883. That is billion. That is serious NERD money. This kind of success gives an entire new meaning to “Revenge of the Nerds.”

I feel sorry for those people who cannot find any joy in things from childhood. It is sad that they simply do not want to look at the amount of fun information that is out in the world. They want to feel safe in their structures lives that offer very little in the way of fantasy (Fifty Shades of Grey does not count) and do not want to look beyond the world of work, Wal-Mart, and the occasional exciting trip to the next town over.