Got called out at a comic con for not knowing a character

I was at WonderCon last month standing in line for a signing and this guy next to me starts talking about a deep cut from the 90s X-Men run. I nodded along but he caught me making a blank face and said 'you don't actually know that do you?' I felt pretty dumb and admitted I was just being polite. After that I told him to explain it and we ended up talking for 20 minutes. Has anyone else gotten busted fandom bluffing at a show?

3 comments

3 Comments

jessem5910d ago

Flip it around though - maybe the guy was being kind of a jerk by calling you out like that. I've been going to cons for years and half the fun is just vibing with people, not quizzing each other like it's a fandom exam. If I'm chatting with someone about a run I don't know well, I'll straight up say 'that's before my time, man' and they usually just get excited to explain it. You were being polite, he made it weird, and then he got to lecture you for 20 minutes which is a pretty sweet deal for him.

david_reed2210d ago

Oh man, I've been busted worse than a kid with his hand in the cookie jar at cons before. Getting called out like that stings, but at least you ended up learning something instead of just standing there sweating. Sounds like you turned an awkward moment into a pretty decent conversation, which is more than I can say for the time I tried to bluff my way through a conversation about Wolverine's origins.

wood.uma10d ago

Three weeks ago at ECCC, I literally watched two dudes get into a 15 minute argument about whether a certain background character in the original Star Wars trilogy was retconned or just a different actor. I was standing two feet away eating a hot dog and they never once asked me what I thought. The thing nobody's mentioning here is that sometimes the person doing the calling out is actually the one who's nervous too. That guy at WonderCon might have been standing there awkwardly trying to make conversation and your blank face was just him panicking and reaching for the one thing he knew he could talk about. The 20 minute explanation was probably him trying to save face after he realized he came off like a jerk. I've been that guy before, the one who blurts out something dumb because I'm more scared of standing in silence with a stranger than I am of sounding like a gatekeeper.