this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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I'm so cynical that I think this was all a psyop to get things like Marvel movies accepted by the mainstream, plus of course a way to sell things like Funko Pops.
I hear what you're saying, but having lived through it, I'm pretty sure the ball was already rolling before Hollywood capitalized on it. The "nerds are cool now" thing was more a byproduct of the social media age, particularly YouTube. It was the meat and potatoes of a lot of big early YouTube names, Loading.Ready.Run is one property that comes to mind (not to shit on those guys, they seem like nice enough people), as well as Angry Video Game Nerd and Channel Awesome (who seem less cool). The media elite may have encouraged it once they realized they could make big bucks off of it, but I think the beginnings were organic based on what I recall.
In my experience, the Lord of the Rings movies seemed to break the membrane to begin with. There was a qualitative shift then, which the money first meandered then rushed into until extraction had ramped up to maximum.
A psyop to enable another psyop.
We can get everybody to watch lots of movies that are vetted by the DoD, but first everybody has to be open to comics.