It’s essential, of course, to think seriously about the challenges your young nerds will face, stacking up against the world’s normaloids, with whom they will inevitably contend; but let me argue, if I may, that it is just as important that they stack up well against other nerds.
Sheldon’s battles with Wil Wheaton aside, nerd v. nerd need not be contentious! Under most circumstances, it is great fun! True, it gets ugly sometimes on the Internet – fanboys are not the most gracious beings under any circumstance, but social media is of course the world’s great amplifier – but it doesn’t have to. The true nerd views these friendly confrontations in the same light one would consider panels at scientific conferences: unified quests for truth!
Your young nerds will want to train up for them – and you will want to be their coach, as you’ve doubtless seen your share of such battles! Here are a few of the classics:12
Star Wars vs. Star
This classic match-up has been going on for ages, but even more so in the current flood of new television series for both. The past few years have seen the release of The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi on the SW side, and Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, and Prodigy on the Trek side.13
It’s true that there’s really no either/or here, and most contemporary nerds are of the BBT stripe, embracing both; but, being experts in each, have much to argue about their respective virtues and shortcomings. It’s not so much about actually making a case for one being “better” than the other; it’s much more about nerd social dominance – demonstrating, conclusively, that you know more about both Star Wars and Star Trek than any of the poor shlubs who would dare challenge you.
Your first job as a parent, in your quest to prepare your young nerd for such confrontations, is to fling wide open the door to both: get your ass in gear on those Disney+ and Paramount+ subscriptions!
But your second job remains: make sure they are fluent in those respective virtues and shortcomings! Here’s a primer:
Starships
Star Wars: Two words – Millennium Falcon. No ship on Trek was ever that cool! Beyond that, SW wins on sheer variety: you’ve got everything from the Blockade Runner to the Imperial Star Destroyers to the mighty Death Star itself. Starships are simply more interesting in SW because there are lots more kinds to see and experience.
They move through hyperspace, and unlike, say, the Battlestar Galactica, they take some abbreviated period of time to get from here to there, rather than simply jumping in a non-moment (they have this in common with Trek starships).
The downside is that their shields don’t seem to work against small craft like X-Wing fighters. This seems monumentally stupid.
Star Trek: Trek’s starships are superior because Trek presents us with some technology to back them up – the ship’s nacelles warp space, antimatter reaction generates the power for the nacelles, dilithium focuses the reaction. This is what you want and need in a believable universe, because the tech itself creates dramatic opportunity. How many plots did we get, just about antimatter and dilithium? Nothing like that in SW!
Plus, Star Trek’s starships are clearly communities. You’ve got cabins, dining halls, rec rooms - a bowling alley! People live there! We don’t even know where people pee in the Millennium Falcon.
On the other hand, Starfleet seems unwilling or unable to build anything big, on a Star Destroyer or Imperial Carrier scale, even though there seems to be no earthly reason why not. Learn fighting the Borg much? A Star Destroyer could make short work of one of those cubes...
Tech
Star Wars: Two words – light saber! Or maybe one word. Not sure about that. Are phasers anywhere as cool? Of course not!
Communicators – not much difference in the hand-held stuff. But holographic messaging! How cool is that?
And the medical tech may be pretty much the same, but isn’t Luke Skywalker’s robot hand a thousand times more boss than Picard’s artificial heart?
Star Trek: One word – transporters. SW doesn’t have anything nearly as awesome as the transporter.
And even if Trek didn’t have the transporter, it would still have the universal translator (Han Solo and C-3PO don’t count) and holodecks and replicators...
Characters
Star Wars: The characters are iconic – there's the young man on a hero’s journey (Luke), a princess (Leia), a lovable rogue (Han), a wise old wizard (Obi-Wan), trusty sidekicks (Chewie, Lando), comic relief (C-3PO and R2-D2), and the great villain ever (Darth Vader). Trek’s characters are almost all Starfleet officers – basically all the same, in motivation, behavioral code, moral character. Boring.
Even the aliens on Trek are boring! Klingons? All the same. Romulans? All the same. You get the odd Trelane or Charlie X or Edith Keeler here and there, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
Star Trek: That there is so much variety in personality in characters who are all on the same mission is a strength, not a weakness! Picard is nothing like Kirk; Riker is nothing like Spock! Put all the doctors side by side, there is wild diversity. Same for the engineers! Same for the helmspeople!
And you can’t really muster much of an argument about sameness in aliens in Trek, when SW’s aliens, biologically diverse as they appear to be, hardly ever stick around for more than one camera shot (Cantina scene, anybody?).
The God-like
Star Wars: Emperor Palpatine, aka Darth Sidious. Most powerful being in all of SW, by far – unchallenged master of the Force, nemesis of all free peoples, lord of the known universe!
Palpatine is evil incarnate, but more than just an empty Sauron figure: his dual-identity approach to conquest shows layers of intelligence and cunning, a complex individual who is formidable not just for his power but for his vision and will, dark as they are. He is a breathtaking foe of truly god-like proportions.
So vastly superior to Q, whose power is random and undisciplined, and in its unlimited abundance, a dramatic cheat!
Star Trek: Q is purposeful, strategic, clever, motivated – no mere two-dimensional villain, like the Emperor, but a brilliant and focused vessel for the unlimited power at his fingertips. His intrusions into the lives of Trek’s characters may seem random and cruel, but they are inevitably impactful in lasting ways. We have only to look at the character’s end, in Star Trek: Picard Season 2, to make that case.
The inclusion of an omnipotent being in the Trek universe is both philosophically and dramatically compelling. Yes, a character that can do anything offers an opportunity for narrative cheating, but in the case of Q it more powerfully emphasizes the consequences of the choices of the other characters who are not likewise empowered. Picard comes to terms with both his potential and his limitations, because of Q’s persistent attention.
If a god Q be, more power to Him!
Enemies
Star Wars: The leaders and soldiers of the Empire are formidable precisely because they are human, like the story’s heroes – they have won the struggle for dominance of the SW universe, and in confronting them, Luke and Han and Leia et al are echoing our own struggles against authoritarianism in the here-and-now; and isn’t echoing the here-and-now exactly what Trek claims to be best at? How is it better if you’re setting up token Russians or Chinese to make your point by giving them goofy foreheads? Isn’t that just a little racist?
Okay, maybe points off because they’re all such lousy shots...
Star Trek: One word – Borg!
That’s all it takes to wrap this one up, because nothing in either universe compares to the Borg, an enemy so unrelatable as to be beyond comprehension. There is no way to reason with them, to negotiate with them – hell, there’s no way to even understand them. They are the perfect enemy, because they strip away all our pretenses about what it is we’re fighting for. With the Borg, we let go of political fables and historical allegory and get right down to it: survival. That’s what a real enemy is about!
Concession: Yeah, your stormtroopers are incompetent boobs, but our red shirts admittedly aren’t exactly the Dirty Dozen...
Androids
Star Wars: Are there any droids more beloved in all of time and space than C-3PO and R2-D2? They’re loved for a reason – they aren’t just fun distractions, they are essential moving parts of the plot! And the personal traits they present – loyalty, determination, self-sacrifice – gotta love 'em! And the cool stuff they can do make them that much more interesting (and important to the story).
Star Trek: Data. Data! Just Data.
Data can do lots more cool shit than 3PO and R2 combined, and he’s got loyalty and determination and self-sacrifice out the wazoo (if he even has a wazoo). But the best part of Data is that his sentience isn’t just served up as an incidental feature, like it is with SW droids; he’s unique, and that means we get to grapple with what it means to be sentient, and how rare and important that is. We don’t watch C-3PO and find ourselves pondering the nature of consciousness...
Ideology
Star Wars: The SW ideology is simple: good and evil have always been in constant tension, are in constant tension now, and always will be. The characters must choose sides, which is a reflection of the world as it really is; that’s why fans are so drawn to the story! Rooting for Luke and Leia – or, at the other extreme, Darth Vader and the Emperor – is self-expression of the best kind.
Trek’s utopian pie-in-the-sky, everybody-just-gets-along society is just goofy. That’s just not how life really is.
Star Trek: SW is a libertarian fever dream – everyone for themselves, and if you don’t have Han Solo’s wits and luck, you’re screwed! Not a vision of the future worth embracing. Call Trek socialist, call it communist, whatever; it’s a vision of species cooperation that doesn’t just exalt homo sapiens – it’s a blueprint for what we need to be, heading out into the universe!
Batman v. Superman
Batman vs. Superman, over the years, became a hypothetical match-up that dwarfed even Ali-Frazier in the Battle of the Century domain. Comic book god Frank Miller actually served it up, once and for all, in the 1986 masterpiece The Dark Knight Returns.
The two of them actually duked it out – and then did so again in the movie Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice in 2016. That cinematic battle borrowed much from the comic book version: Batman took down Superman by getting some kryptonite in his pocket and wearing an exosuit that both made him super-strong and less vulnerable.
But the deadlier battle between the two happens when fanboys get ahold of them: which is the superior hero?
Superman: How is this even a question? Superman has so many powers, it’s hard to list them all without leaving something out! Per Bruce Wayne himself, in Justice League, Batman has only one: “I’m rich!” Batman’s powers are all about toys; Superman really is super.
Batman: Superman is dull; they call him the Big Blue Boy Scout precisely because he’s so predictable, with his rules-following, cat-rescuing code of honor, that he’s just incapable of wrestling with moral ambiguity.
Batman is the very definition of moral ambiguity, having seen evil up close; yes, they’re both orphans emergent from tragedy, but Kal-El was too young to even remember his parents – his experience doesn’t compare with Bruce seeing his parents gunned down! Powers be damned; Batman is the superior hero because he bears that burden and still manages to have a code of honor (flexible though it may be)...
Okay, this one’s personal: my two sons have given me all kinds of hell over the years for my dogged loyalty to Superman, which they think is silly and misguided. Clark Kent’s Kansas conservatism, they argue, render his moral machinery almost robotic; Bruce Wayne, they maintain, is endlessly interesting, because his psyche is now and forever unsettled... there’s no telling where he will wind up, in the end...
Batman v. Iron Man
Finally, we must recognize that the Batman v. contest isn’t just DC-internal; anyone who’s seen Robert Downey Jr. on the big screen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe might naturally compare Tony Stark’s character to his DC Extended Universe counterpart Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck).
Consider:
Both are billionaire playboys
Both own vast tech empires, capable of creating whatever tech they please
Both are brimming with inner demons
Both have frequent trouble playing well with other
Let’s compare them a little more closely; such a comparison, carefully considered, will equip your young nerd to defend one or the other, depending on their mood.
Tech
Iron Man: Tony Stark’s tech is truly formidable – super, no question. The Arc Reactor is the core of it all, of course, powering his palm repulsors and jet-boots. He can fly. He can trade blasts with supervillains and starships alike. And the computer tech embedded in his helmet is equal to anything in the Batcave or the Batmobile dashboard.
Batman: It would be easy to hold Iron Man’s flying ability over Batman’s head, so to speak, but since the Christopher Nolan films, Batman has been able to fly. Admittedly, he’s not transcontinental, but he can match his namesake, and he tends to not travel abroad so much anyway.
Batman’s tech includes not just the cape, but all kinds of stuff in that nifty utility belt:
Explosives
Gas pellets of all kinds
Bat-a-rangs and grapple guns
Sonar vision
The Batmobile and other assorted vehicles
We’ll set aside the Bat Shark-Repellent.
Bottom line: Batman’s tech is more varied and versatile, while Iron Man’s has the most raw power.
Intelligence/Engineering skills
Call it even, if anyone ever hits your kid with this one: Tony might be the better engineer, but Bruce isn’t far behind; Bruce is the better strategist, but Tony isn’t far behind. Both are geniuses virtually without peer.
Aide-de-camp
Batman: What would Batman be without Alfred? Bruce’s butler-guardian raised him, protected him, and also trained him to fight. Whenever Batman is out there doing his thing, Alfred is right there in his ear, providing intelligence and tactical reinforcement.
Iron Man: Jarvis is no Alfred, of course; Tony’s relationship to his own butler is less intimate and strictly hierarchical, but Jarvis – now an AI – boasts a utility that not even the resourceful Alfred can match.
Suggest that your young nerd call this one even, too; wouldn’t you be perfectly happy with either an Alfred or a Jarvis?
And there you have it: a veritable textbook for nerd debate, equipping your nerdling with all the salient details and relevant considerations. The great thing is, you can help them practice to your heart’s content! Next time you’re out in the family SUV, toss out a casual, “Who would do better against Thanos? The Death Star or Q?” and watch what happens...
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