Yesterday my son began a sentence with “A REAL Pokemon fan is someone who…” and then rattled off a list of things like knowing stats and attacks of all the Pokemon, building your own trading card game (TCG) deck, etc.
I said to him “A real Pokemon fan loves Pokemon. End of sentence. What you’re doing is called gatekeeping and it’s not fair or kind. I don’t know a quarter of the stuff you know, yet I’ve been a fan of Pokemon since the late 90s. You can’t say I’m not a real fan, right? I’m the one who got you into it in the first place.”
So we had a bit more of a discussion on being inclusive and kind and celebrating common interests regardless of how much someone knows about Charizard’s strongest attack in the TCG.
Yes, the kid’s got a rather encyclopedic knowledge when it comes to his interests, but that just means he can teach and lead instead of keeping people out because of some arbitrary test of facts and stats. I’m NOT raising Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. 😂
