tOY ROBOTS FANS are relatively hardcore, meaning thier cores are denser because they are small

During Thanksgiving my wife invited some of her friends (aka normal people) over for dinner. Her friends made up our entire Thanksgiving get together because despite living here for two years I still haven't met any South Dakotans who would want to visit me on purpose. During the course of the evening one of her friends called me a nerd twice, which I thought was incredible because he never even saw my robot room. I think I transmit robot nerd beams or something. Maybe it was because I made everyone watch the Transformers movie after they ate the turkey. I guess being called a nerd by my wife's friend was supposed to be some high honor because he's an engineer and he said he meant it "repectfully", whatever that means. I'm pretty much uneducated brown trash so it was weird to have an engineer call me a nerd "respectfully", as if it were the equivalent of being crowned Roboplastico Laureate of western South Dakota.

I was suprised by my new title of "nerd even to engineers" because the only people I ever heard calling someone a robot nerd were other robot nerds. I didn't think the concept of "robot nerd" had leeched into the public conciousness. All of this is strange because I thought me being the mexican Luke Skywalker helped mask my Transformer nerdiness. I guess it's a wake up call. Sometimes when you live La Vida Robo, you lose perspective and start assuming that everyone has a couple thousand toy robots in their laundry rooms like it's a normal facet of the human condition. To have someone outside of my sphere of insanity confirm that I am indeed a weirdo by current societal standards tells me that I am suffering a hobbylogical backfire. These toy robots are not escapes from my mundane existence, they are now so integrally part of my mundane existence they define it and give it meaning.

My ego-mechanical issues aside, being called a nerd by a normal person also tells me something about the state of transformers fandom. It tells me Transformers nerds are not just being noticed, they're at the cusp of being taken seriously by the public. It's a dangerous time because it could go either way. Fandom legitimacy is important and the public image of Transformers fans is in an embryonic state. Today's grown men buying toy robots will determine whether the world takes them seriously or not. It is an awesome responsibility. There is a fine line between being perceived as a fandom of a legitimate pop culture franchise (e.g. Star Wars, Superman) and being perceived as a bunch of freaks with a shared mental disorder (e.g. Nascar, wrestling fans).

A guy in a cheetah costume at Botcon wouldn't just set the fandom back 10 years, it would kill the whole Transformers franchise. Plus its a sign of the apocalypse.

This is a dangerous and exciting time for toy robots fans. If you take all geekdom at large, Transformers fans are pretty much the bottom of the barrel when it comes to geek cred. Even Star Trek psychos are elite pop culture high society compared to toy robots fans. We are the equivalent of pop culture trailer trash. This is not a bad thing, this is a good thing. That makes robots fans more cool to people like women. I realize I would have been a more legitimate weirdo in the eyes of normal people if I had wasted my life on Star Wars instead, but I knew this robot gig would pay off one day. Just because Star Wars was born of the fertile imaginations of the gods of moviemaking but the Transformers movie comes from the guy who directed the music video for "I Touch Myself" doesn't mean you can't get laid for liking Optimus Prime. There is still a chance!

Unfortunately there is also a chance to totally mess it all up. If some guy dresses up as Cheetor at the next Botcon you may as well set all of your robot toys on fire because it'll be armageddon for the franchise. Transformers is not as resilient as the Star Wars fandom, which can withstand fat girls dressing up as slave Leia and still be taken seriously. Others are not so resilient. Star Trek is a good example of a fandom ridiculed by the masses. Everyone on the planet can be loosely considered a Star Wars fan, but if you like Trek you're labeled a "Trekkie". I don't know what pop culture franchise furries represent (although I suspect it's Thundercats) but they got an '-ies' suffix, too. The '-ies' suffix is the kiss of death. If your fandom gets tagged with a descriptor that has an -ies suffix, you guys are totally fucked.

We must remember that legitimacy for a pop culture entertainment franchise is not having a movie or bubble bath bottles shaped like the main protagonist, legitimacy is having people not laugh at you when you quote lines from that movie in public or tell people you use that bubble bath. Legitimacy is also how many people go to your conventions. I don't consider anime conventions legitimate despite their big attendance because "anime" is a broad banner under which thousands of totally different franchises fall. I'll bet if I threw a convention for people who like to breathe I would get good numbers, too. When I go to an anime convention I think-'Look at all these nerds with absolutely nothing in common'. That's why I'm proud of Botcon although it has a fraction of the attendance numbers of Anime Expo or Otakon. When I go to Botcon I think-'Look at all these nerds with so much in common'.

So here's to all the toy robots fans with their podcasts and websites that I love. You guys are doing a better job at positively shaping the public's perception of the fandom than I am. People think I'm a nerd!