A couple of years ago, I watched this video, which featured Maureen Johnson and Libba Bray, two of my favorite female writers. I had no idea who “Brother John” was, but I thought the video was funny. Then, a couple years later, I stumbled across a Youtube channel called “vlogbrothers”. After a couple videos and the realization that one half of the channel was an author that I had just discovered, John Green. (Yes, “Brother” John). I wrote him a letter back on day 125, which you can read here. (it’s weird that I can say things like that.)
Anyways, as I started to become acclimated with the channel, I started noticing the term “nerdfighter” being thrown around. Searching back through the archives of their videos, I started to come to understand the term, even consider myself to be one of the privileged “elite”.
Urban Dictionary defines “nerdfighter” as “Nerds who fight, usually against popular people. This term originated from the videoblog Brotherhood 2.0. John Green, one of the two participants in the videoblog, noticed a game called Nerd Fighters at an airport. Eventually, the viewers of the videoblog began being dubbed nerdfighters. Nerdfighters are considered to be “made of awesome” by John, Hank (the other participant in the videoblog), and other nerdfighters.”
Clearly, Urban dictionary doesn’t understand the true meaning of Nerdfighters. We don’t fight popular people, that would be silly. Also, it’s not entirely true that only the viewers of their videos are considered nerdfighters, as John and Hank, the “vlogbrothers”, both consider themselves to be nerdfighters. I have three video links for you where these two gentlemen explain the term in their words, much more accurately. (These three video links are included in John and Hank’s FAQ under the question “what is a nerdfighter?”) (Although honestly, this video is probably a lot more helpful to the noobs)
But we’re getting off topic. It’s teeshirt week, not “explain your nerdy pass times” week. That’s every other week. So the red “pizza” shirt at the top of this post includes a picture of John Green’s face, the only time he has ever had a mustache. In fact, the only time that mustache ever saw the light of day was about three seconds at the end of a video. This design with the “pizza” subtitle was actually first seen on a Facebook group called “John Green is Fat”, created by nerdfighters to get John to lose weight. Although the page was later removed because Facebook is a bunch of narcs, John Green absolutely loved it and has lost something like 30 pounds in the past year. Luckily, he and Hank got the pizza face design off of the group before it was removed, and started selling it as a shirt.
The gray shirt down at the bottom is less complicated. Basically, “nerdfighterlike” is the act of liking or falling in love with another nerdfighter. So my plan is to wear this shirt around college every day until I meet another nerdfighter, at which time we will get married. Immediately.
But what this post comes down to is that I love being a nerdfighter, not just because it entitles me to wear awesome shirts, but because it gives me a sense of community like I’ve never had before, a community that actually does things. For example; because of the amount of money nerdfighters alone donated to the Haiti relief, they sent over a plane called the SS DFTBA (Don’t Forget to be Awesome) filled with all of the supplies we were able to buy. If that’s not incredible, I don’t know what is.
DFTBA. See you tomorrow.
