During her summer vacation, my brilliant child has taught herself to ride a bicycle, adopted the use of the word “hypothesis,” and created her own super-hero team “The Super-Weirdos,” as well as their nemeses, “The Super-Lame-Os”, led by the terrifying Evil Doctor Cat-Head-In-A-Jar. Their continuity is already several stories deep, and features the most wonderful character of all, a buck-toothed monosyllabic and amorphous creature known only as ‘Boing.’ It’s wonderful to see her absorbing not only my love of super-dupers, but an appreciation of the absurd, and her art skills have pretty much outstripped my own already. I’m glad to have been able to teach her about the stuff that I like, and even more happy to find that she seems to like some things (notably Super Sentai and ‘Tales of the Beanworld’) on their own merits, for her own reasons, which begs a query…
The MS-QOTD (pronounced, as always, “misquoted”) believes that children are the future, teach them well and blah blah blah fishcakes something about beauty, asking: What aspect of your nerdery would you most want to share with your theoretical offspring?
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My kids are both into comics following after me. My son in particular is a big fan of Marvel heroes. I’m quite proud.
I already have a teenage goddaughter that is almost an exact duplicate of my geek loves, with only a few differences in the focus of which characters from which franchise we like best. We speak the occasional Elvish, Klingon and other fictional alien language words to pepper our conversations, we often greet each other with the Transformers universal greeting, we argue over who has the best chance of dating a cute Super Sentai heroine… This doesn’t even include the fact she has a homemade TARDIS closet, T-shirts of every Lantern corps up on her wall (and duplicates of most in her closet) and shelves that much like mine are an occasionally rotated display of toys and collectibles of various corners of geekdom.
Then my other goddaughter who is only a few years old has already started trying to make everything have something to do with superheroes and Star Wars. Every single stuffed doll she has has had a cape added to it, she never leaves the house without her toy lightsaber and she tries to use the Jedi Mind trick (such as “It is not my bedtime” while waving her hand).
I’d like to influence my kid with Star Trek and comics, especially those of the 70s & 80s. That way my kid will be even out of date than I am.
Ok, so I don’t even want theoretical children, but I do have neices and nephews whom I love dearly. The nerd-values that I want to pass on to them are mainly a love of Fantasy and Sci-Fi literature; The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Lemony Snicket, Star Trek, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy(Once they’re old enough, of course). Comics as well, I practically grew up on Batman and X-Men comics and shows.
Now on to the reasoning behind this. I want them to experience lots of different worlds and people and cultures, I want them to be interested in the world! I want them to find lessons and games and to learn to think about the world complexly. I learned to do this through fiction and really enjoy reading and learning about new and strange worlds, fictional or not.
In short, I want them to read and to enjoy reading.
When it comes to my the who shall be referred to as “the boy” and inheriting my geekness I have several thing I hope that he acquires. First and foremost I hope that he will look at most comic books “heroes” with a grain of salt. He already enjoys Spider-man, Superman and Batman. I presume mostly because he likes the colors. Hopefully this will lead him into other titles and will bring him as much entertainment as It has me but realizes that they really are egotistical whack jobs.
After that it would be cool if he took the ideas that have been presented him in those titles and then come up with an original one of his own.
I’m 23 years old and the idea of marriage is a crazy distant dream, much less the idea of kids, but I’ve known this answer for a while now – I am deeply excited at the idea of being able to show them the Justice League animated series – it remains to date my favourite Justice League ever, and one of my favourite portrayals of each of the characters in there, no matter how many comics I read. The Superman and Batman animated series too, and Batman Beyond, but I’ve only seen a smattering of episodes from those – from what I remember they’re just as good.
I do worry they won’t enjoy it as much as I did. That would be sad on various levels.
I watch the JL toon (and the previous Batman and Superman series) with all my friend’s kids, and there isn’t a single one of them that doesn’t enjoy them (although a couple of the girls were initially reluctant to watch superhero cartoons until they actually watched them).
The only downside is I’m not usually awake for the airings of Justice League on the CW’s Saturday Morning block so I don’t know which episodes the younger ones are talking about when they try to excitedly tell me what was going on, but use vague terms like “The guy” and “They did this and then they did that thing”.
Just the love of reading.