r/Snorkblot • u/EsseNorway • Aug 17 '26
Opinion [Hated Trope] Nerdy characters who don’t understand nerdy things
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u/Longjumping-Pop9374 Aug 19 '26
Or human decency. Mayim Bialik fuckin SUCKS
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u/SavinForLatter Aug 19 '26
What'd she do?
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u/Longjumping-Pop9374 Aug 19 '26
She's a zionist and doesn't consider what israel is doing to the Palestinians as genocide.
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u/SavinForLatter Aug 19 '26
Ahhh that fucking sucks. Didn't like her much anyways but now a solid fuck her.
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u/cha0sb1ade Aug 19 '26
I've never understood how someone makes a D20 game part of a story if they don't already know the rules, or at least care enough to make the game related dialogues make sense.
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u/EnderSword Aug 20 '26
I think the people writing it do know the rules, but they know 95% of the audience does not, so it has to be changed to something absorbable and that fits into a story.
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u/nolandz1 Aug 20 '26
No D&D episode would be improved by including scenes where the DM consults the jumping or encumbrance rules
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u/Nice_Try4389 Aug 20 '26
Pretty sure Brennan Lee Mulligan could.
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u/nolandz1 Aug 20 '26
Yeah well they didn't call him back
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u/Nice_Try4389 Aug 20 '26
I am guessing you haven’t seen the Brennan Lee Mulligan episode of Ted because it is amazing.
I am also guessing you don’t know who Brennan Lee Mulligan is given your response.
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u/Wonderful_Night9071 Aug 20 '26
honestly there are ways of keeping things short and sweet (and funny) while still resembling the actual game/RPG/etc they're supposedly playing. I wouldn't agree "it has to be changed" in the ways things always are, certainly not as consistently as they are
same as minor details like WoW mentions in SG1 - so easy to just use the actual words from the game, but instead super sloppy errors that make no sense, and no real difference except for annoying fans (which is probably a fair overlap for SF/F shows)
afaik either writers don't know, don't care, or do know but don't care. honestly the amount of sheer "who gives a shit" mediocrity in the world, especially in sit-com writing, is impossible to ever truly comprehend. hence: the state of the world
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u/cha0sb1ade Aug 20 '26
Including a D&D scene in a show is never going to add entertainment or appeal to someone who isn't a player. So if you get it wrong, you've irritated the only audience that scene wasn't already wasted on.
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u/marcelsmudda Aug 20 '26
I somehow have the feeling that Chuck Lorre hates nerd culture.
2.5 men became shit with Ashton Kutcher as the tech billionaire, with plenty of jokes a la "look, a nerd".
Big bang theory the same, just kver many seasons.
Young Sheldon was so much better and, oh look, way less chuck lorre influence...
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u/cha0sb1ade Aug 21 '26
Big Bang wasn't really for nerdy and dorky people, but was 100% about making fun of nerdy and dorky people. It always felt like someone looking at nerd culture from the outside, feeling insecure about it for whatever reason, and deciding to diminish it by poking fun. I can't say that's what it is, because I'm no psychologist and I'm not especially media literate or good at reading between the lines. That was just what the show always felt like to me. It still had its moments, but overall it felt like someone poking fun at things they didn't understand, and couldn't be bothered with trying to actually connect with. It's like someone sucked at math and science in high school, and the kids who were doing well happened to be into to dorky stuff, and someone just decided to take their insecurity out on a subculture years later. LOL
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u/marcelsmudda Aug 21 '26
Yeah, basically. Or he still has the jock vs nerd mindset and sees himself as a jock, and carries that into his profession, meaning that everything those nerds do is inherently childish, and thus funny if a grown man does it.
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u/HappiestIguana Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 22 '26
Dan Harmon definitely knows how to actually play D&D. He just took a lot of creative liberties to make the episode funnier and easier to follow for the unfamiliar.
You can just chalk most of it up to Abed being a terrible DM.
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u/brothegaminghero Aug 22 '26
That sounds more or less right, hes mostly a film nerd, and I doubt abed actually had enough freinds to play dnd with growing up.
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u/CuAnnan Aug 21 '26
TBBT was written for the mainstream about nerds. Nerds are the butt of the joke.
Community is all round a better show.
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u/Ed_Injury Aug 22 '26
When Big Bang first started, it seemed like there were enough genuine science/nerd culture references that it would be really fun and cross cultural boundaries, but it became clear that the audience they were aiming for just heard "ha ha nerdy man says big words". One of my (now adult) kids called it 'nerd blackface'
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u/Foreskin-Aficionado Aug 19 '26
Internet nerds struggle to understand that writing nerds have to make nerdy things easier to understand for non-nerds and need to cut out DnD mechanics to make it more accessible.
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u/SpecificInterest5150 Aug 20 '26
This reminds me how little I still know of the 40k universe after stumbling upon it over 5 years ago.
It's important to understand that media consumption primarily caters to the least common denominator.
It's why every Batman movie requires his origin story being told.
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u/nwbrown Aug 20 '26
Also not every nerd is an expert on every nerdy thing. If you don't know DnD rules or the Linux filesystem, you can still be a nerd.
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u/EnderSword Aug 20 '26
There's one specific trope that is used a lot for D&D that actually totally threw off myself and a friend when we started playing.
Most depictions of it always show some person or persons are the experienced people and others are new, and the experienced people always play their experienced decade old character with the new group.
So a friend and I were playing with a group of our friends, all new players, did that for several weeks, then 2 of us wanted to go join a group starting at a local comic book store, so we just thought that's how it works, you've just got your character and you take your character from group to group.
So we got there an the DM explained no, we're starting this group fresh everyone make level 1 characters, figure out party mix etc... just didn't realize characters are campaign-specific not something portable, because all the depictions are like Fat Neil taking his lvl 20 warrior into a new group and stuff.
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u/BRoriler Aug 20 '26
That entirely depends on the setting and the DM though, my group has had plenty of cases of transporting the same character to a different campaign for example.
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u/mastercat202 Aug 21 '26
That us true. Adventurer league you can do fhat. Take youe character from group to group. It might have been more popular in the past.
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u/nolandz1 Aug 20 '26
Community's D&D episode not getting bogged down in the rules of AD&D doesn't bother me because it still fits the experience of playing with a first time party. It's not whatever the fuck BBT was doing.
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Aug 21 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/awesome9001 Aug 21 '26
Obviously it was a different version than the one u personally play. And if thats not good enough they didnt specifically say dungeon and dragons only dnd which could be different. Not good enough? In their respective universes they play a game thats just extremely similar to dnd. Still not enough? Yeah they probably shoulda did the bare minimum of research
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