On Thursday night’s Parks and Recreation, Patton Oswalt played a Star Wars-loving Pawneean who mounted an epic filibuster under a little-known provision of the rules governing the City Council. It’s a great meta cameo for a guy who’s a nerd icon. But watching the whole thing, which Parks and Rec wisely released online several days in advance of the episode’s air date, I got to thinking that Oswalt’s pitch for a new Star Wars movie, which would mash up Thanos, and Tony Stark, and the X-Men, not to mention Robot Chewbacca actually says a lot about the state of nerd franchises as geek culture has taken over the world and become big business:

Oswalt’s grand mashup speaks to the mass enthusiasm that has made comic book movies and science fiction franchises such generally dependable moneymakers for studios despite the significant upfront costs required to make and to market them. But it’s also a reminder that there is enormous corporate consolidation of geek properties, particularly in Disney, which owns Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, and in the form of J.J. Abrams, who now controls both the Star Trek franchise and the core narrative of the forthcoming Star Wars sequels. These companies—and Abrams and Joss Whedon, is acting as an overall creative consultant of the Marvel movie universe—are absolutely capable. But this consolidation does represent a narrowing of perspectives.

And in Oswalt’s monologue, the things that fit together about all of these universes is their gee-whiz elements, their Infinity Gauntlets and jets and X-Wings and Iron Man suits. They’re all worlds in which amazing things can occur, of course. But this kind of enthusiasm strikes me as besides the point, and makes me a little sad. X-Men is an engine for exploring ideas about collective identity, about genetics as a source of identity, about the Holocaust, about the regulation of extraordinary abilities. The toys are extras, not the point. Ditto for Star Trek, where things like warp drives and beaming are a way of getting the characters rapidly into a lot of different situations that are about opening up everything from interracial relationships to the question of whether artificial intelligences have rights. If those ideas get lost in the rise of geek culture as a massively consumed corporate product, we’re losing a lot of what made those franchises so deeply engaging, and objects of such deep identification and debate in the first place.

Corporate consolidation, in other words, is the Infinity Gauntlet. It’s granted beloved geek figures like Abrams and Whedon enormous amounts of control over Time, Space, Mind, Soul, Reality, and Power. But we’re at a critical point where we’ll see if the concentration of all of that creative and financial power actually lets science fiction and fantasy conquer pop culture in all of its multifarious inventiveness, or if it just means that a narrow, relatively homogenized set of stories and set of characters takes over the world, bringing a narrow set of ideas with it.

I’ve always found the controversy over so-called Fake Geek Girls more than a little preposterous, given the variety inherent in geekdom. My midichlorian count may be off the scales when it comes to Star Wars, but I’ll freely admit that my favorite Star Trek movie is the one with the whales, in part for its SDS references. I haven’t read the Wheel of Time, but I’m probably the mainstream feminist critic who’s spent the most time over the last few years writing about A Song Of Ice And Fire. And for anyone who doesn’t want to stamp my geek card until I’ve satisfied his or her knowledge of his favorite franchise, I’ll show you mine as soon as you break down the treatment of social inequality in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall novels. There is no Grand High Geek Council issuing citizenship papers, no border fence, and that’s one of my favorite things about joining the particular voluntary communities that have been so important to me over the years.

But it’s become clear that there are a lot of people who would like there to be. And the debate over whether there are women who are “fake geeks” or not has become a proxy for the conversation. The thing is, though, at the root of this conversation isn’t really about the inclusion of women, or certain kinds of women, in geekdom. It’s about a slow and uneven shift in which some geeks and some kinds of geekdom have accumulated an enormous amount of social capital. And that shift has revealed that we don’t always know how to spend it wisely, magnanimously, or in ways that don’t repeat the ugly marginalization of geeks that came before.

In a post on io9, Rachel Edidin, who is an associate editor at Dark Horse Comics explains why some geeks, like those who complain that female cosplayers only want attention—by which, of course, they mean those women only want certain kinds of attention and want to draw certain boundaries about how they’re treated in costume—explains why fandoms and geek communities can be so resistant to change:

Geek culture is a haven for guys who can’t or don’t want to fall in step with the set of cultural trappings and priorities of traditional manhood in America. At least in theory, geek culture fosters a more cerebral and less violent model of masculinity, supported by a complementary range of alternative values. But the social cost of that alternative model—chosen or imposed—is high, and it’s often extorted violently—socially or physically. The fringe is a scary place to live, and it leaves you raw and defensive, eager to create your own approximation of a center. Instead of rejecting the rigid duality of the culture they’re nominally breaking from, geek communities intensify it, distilled through the defensive bitterness that comes with marginalization. And so masculinity is policed incredibly aggressively in geek communities, as much as in any locker room or frat house.

It’s tremendously difficult to make the transition from being culturally powerless to being culturally powerful. And it’s even harder when a societal shift happens, when Steve Jobs is everyone’s favorite CEO, J.J. Abrams can do whatever he wants in film and television, when hackers become heroes and supervillians, and those social inversions don’t actually filter all the way down. Just because lots of geeky traits, like knowledge about technology, obsessive interest, and superheroes, have become assets doesn’t mean that, say, our preferred male body types have radically shifted, or that, movies like 21 Jump Street aside, high school’s shrugged off the quarterback of the football team for the captain of the Mathletes, or that on OkCupid, a figurine collection is suddenly more valuable than a job on Wall Street. Geeks are getting asked to be magnanimous, to be self-reflected, to open up communities as if they possess privilege that it may not always feel like they do. Of course, the question of whether you feel like you have privilege isn’t solely determinative of whether you do, and whether it’s acknowledged or not, having your cultural fantasies catered to is a kind of privilege. But the point remains: the range of how much social capital and privilege individual geeks have is gigantic. And that makes it very hard to move a community as a whole.
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I was flipping through Amazon’s gift guides, and it turns out they have a Geek category of suggestions for what to get your friendly neighborhood enthusiast. The subcategories include:

-Cult Movies on DVD (a little Doctor Who and Star Wars heavy, and I have mixed feelings about seeing rape revenge flick I Spit On Your Grave here, but I appreciate the inclusion of the Man With No Name trilogy)
-Robotic Vacuums
-Digital SLRs
-Webcams
-High-end Espresso Machines
-Freestanding Beverage Chillers
-Upper-body Coverage
-Video Games
-Macintosh Software
-Gags and Practical Jokes
-Cocktail Shakers
-Microwaves
-Caffeinated Energy Drinks
-Table Tennis
-Air Hockey
-Manga (someone more versed than me in both this genre and Anime would have to assess the lists)
-Anime
-Blu-ray Disc Players

I’m surprised there isn’t a comics category. But otherwise, this is kind of a perfect distillation of how corporate America sees the range of geekdom. No matter how much Amazon may claim “Gone are the days of floods and pocket protectors. High-tech brainiacs now rule the world,” there’s still that suspicion that geeks are the kind of people who don’t want to work out with their shirts off.