Of course, you and Brannon are exactly right. The fringe are good for an entertaining documentary, but you shouldn't assume all Trek fans are like that, just like not all football fans wear jerseys or play fantasy football or even bet on games. Some fanaticism is a lot less fanatical than you'd expect.
The trouble with most of the people in these movies is that their fandom defines who they are. Without Star Trek, they are empty shells. And I don't care what a person likes or what hobbies they have, if your Self would wither and die without a TV show, it's sad. Fortunately for them, they have the support of tens of thousands of adherents. People who will tell them, directly or indirectly, that their obsession isn't really that extreme.
Honestly, I don't even care about that. The Little Rock woman is clearly deranged, if she thinks that a Star Fleet uniform is the same as army BDUs. The army is real. If she can show me around her spaceship, then I'll call her "commander," but until then, no. She's decisively disconnected herself from reality, in a fundamental way. No, she's not harming anyone, but it's troubling that she compares wearing a baseball jersey to the store and wearing a costume from a TV show, complete with communicator and phaser and whatever the hell else, to court. Wear whatever you want, but at least acknowledge that it's weird.
And that's what REALLY pi$$es me off about a lot of these people -- they know they look ridiculous. They put that stuff on before they left the house, they knew what they looked like. They are OBVIOUSLY enjoying being so "fringe" and wacky. They're trying to draw attention to themselves and say, "look how different I am! How I'm going against the grain! Yes, my life revolves around a tv show (or movies), but check out how I'm so different!" But then they'll turn around and whine about how people look at them funny or say, "oh, you're one of THEM?" and roll their eyes. This is the exact reactions they're going for, when they go out in public. If no one even blinked at their outfits, they'd be kind of disheartened. And it would be because they're not able to see themselves as fringe-dwelling victims. What they claim to want is to always be as comfortable as they feel at, say, a convention, where everyone likes what they like and dresses how they dress. But if they actually had to live like that, they'd hate it. They wouldn't be "crazy" and different.
I just hate it when people set themselves up to be "weirdos" and then complain that people think they're weird. Morons, you did this to yourself, on purpose.
Also, how "fringe" can you really be when there are hundreds of thousands of people Just Like You at hundreds of conventions around the world, every single year? Yeah, maybe you're not the rare and precious snowflake you thought you were, huh? Better come back to the real world, where you can count on people to make you feel special by not being so fanatically devoted to your favorite tv show, huh?
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