On February 1, 2007, John found an Arcade game called “Aerofighters” in an airport, which he misread as “Nerdfighters”.
When he found another one on February 15, 2007, he jokingly proposed the idea of a video game in which the characters would be stereotypical nerds with special powers (e.g., the band geek would have a tuba with super powers; the English nerd would use a lot of Shakespeare quotes) who fought against stereotypical popular high school kids. He followed this thought by saying the “war” between nerds and popular kids does not make sense, as the nerds are represented by worlds leaders and notable people of all classes, naming “Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton, Tiki Barber, Isaac Newton, William Shakespeare, Albert Einstein, Emmanuel Kant, Jane Austen, Bill Gates, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and all four Beatles,” amongst others, as examples of why nerds would win such a “war”. He ended his video with a theme song that would represent nerds.
The term Nerdfighters quickly became adopted by the most engaged members of the audience at the time, and eventually became the name with which community members would identify themselves. Talking about nerds (a group of people who are usually regarded as intellectual but socially impaired) as potential leaders capable of accomplishing great things was an empowering idea for community members. The idea that being a nerd is rewarding became an essential topic of discussion among the Green brothers and audience members over the years. As the Green brothers and the Nerdfighters continued talking about this, a sense of pride of being a nerd was born.
A community was born
Nerdfighter Salute
Throughout Brotherhood 2.0, both Green brothers developed the concept of Nerdfighter as they continued interacting with their audience. On February 27, 2007, John came up with a Nerdfighter salute, which members now use as a gang sign to identify themselves as Nerdfighters. On March 14, 2007, Hank came up with a process to become a Nerdfighter, which involved identifying what type of Nerdfighter one is, and then writing lyrics about that to add to the theme song John had written earlier. He then proceeded to invite viewers to do just that and share their Nerdfighter bios and lyrics on the Brotherhood 2.0 website. These little developments together served as a kind of authentication of the Nerdfighter community, as the most engaged members of the audience following Brotherhood 2.0 had now a way to formalize their membership as part of an official group.
So, who's a Nerdfighter?
By August 30, 2007, the Green brothers explained that whoever wanted to be a Nerdfighter could already consider him or herself one already, and that writing the song on their website was just a technicality. Membership became open and the community began to grow as more Brotherhood 2.0 viewers who identified with the ideas brought up by the Green brothers felt inclined to identify as Nerdfighters.
On July 25, 2007, John came up with a definition of what a Nerdfighter is, saying:
A Nerdfighter is like a regular person, except instead of being composed out of, like, tissues and cells and organs, they’re made out of awesome.
But even before coming up with that definition, John had already reflected on the collective power of the Nerdfighter community to achieve worthy, “awesome” goals by defining "The Law of Compound Nerdfighting".
The Law of Compound Nerdfighting
On July 2, 2007, John explained that Nerdfighters as a group were able to achieve things that Nerdfighters as individuals would not be able to achieve on their own, and he named this assertion the “Law of Compound Nerdfighting”. At the time, John was talking about a successful project that had been carried out at Kiva.org.
At this point, Nerdfighters became a central focal point for the Green brothers. On August 20, 2007, John talked about how seeing the Nerdfighters accomplish all types of worthy endeavors gave him hope in humanity, as he thought maybe more people in the world identified with the same values and ideals as them.
"The more there are of us,
the fewer there will be of them."
As the Nerdfighter community continued to expand and Nerdfighters became more engaged with each other and with their different activities, the Green brothers decided that when Brotherhood 2.0 ended, they would continue to vlog regularly in order to keep the community going. John acknowledged that the Nerdfighters were not about them as the Vlogbrothers, but about "building a community of friends who could get together to do awesome things."
***
The story of how the Nerdfighters came to be is also a narrative that is reproduced among members of the community through various means in different platforms. The features that make it such a prominent narrative are mainly about a breach of canonicity (the way in which an online community grew in such a cohesive and productive way) and about the empowerment of the protagonists—in this case, the nerds who made this community.
The narratives explored in this series of posts are the results of the pre-study I did with the aim of finding the most prominent themes and narratives that emerged throughout the first year of the Nerdfighter Community.
Each of these posts explores the stories and themes that are the basis to understand the culture of this community, its activities and overall atmosphere. Each section explains a theme or narrative that Nerdfighters have adopted as shareable stories through which they make sense of their culture.
More narratives:
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