Last Saturday I went to a mall for the first time in pretty much ten years.

Walking into Woodland Mall on a weekend afternoon in 2024 feels like an instant refutation of the “malls are dead” stereotype, with its packed parking lot, crowded halls, and stores where one wrong move would send a family of four toppling to the ground. As my friends and I sat at one of a half-dozen identical and crowded tables to eat our Auntie Annie’s, the passing crush of humanity reminded me of the people watching I’ve done at some of the most kaleidoscopic gatherings I’d ever been to: “It’s like being at an anime con,” I said.

“Yeah, but for normies,” one of my friends added.

And while many of the people we watched were dressed in a “normal” sort of way, plenty others were not. You could turn your head and see a man in a crop top with pants made of what appear to be studded belts or a teenage girl wearing knee-high fuzzy boots and cat ears. But these people weren’t exceptions to my friend’s comment about “normies”; they were included.

We were the nerds here—you see, the first reason my friends and I were at the mall was for the K-pop related shop that had opened up there earlier this year, where you can pick up a variety of BTS merch and, if you’re lucky, maybe a special release album from another band—but mostly BTS merch. (RIP my friend the Stray Kids fan.)

And the other reason was for the Lego store, and that was for me.

I’ve been an on-again, off-again Lego fan since they released their first Lord of the Rings sets back in the 2010s, so it was unsurprising how easily they were able to lure me back when they released a couple of gorgeous and eye-wateringly expensive Lord of the Rings sets over the last year. Today wasn’t about Lord of the Rings, though; I was going to the Lego store to spend an embarrassing amount of money on a different recent release, the Lego Dungeons & Dragons set.

D&D, you probably know, was once the pinnacle of nerdery, an open excuse to be made fun of and the easiest way to code your 90s sitcom character as a dork. D&D now is a multimillion dollar industry with its own celebrities and a well-recieved movie that came out just last year. The clerk at the Lego store wasn’t a D&D regular (I asked), but he had played before in a game his sister set up for her husband’s birthday. My friends and I may still be a bit ahead of the curve on this one (one of the friends I was with got proposed to during a D&D game), but playing Dungeons & Dragons is normal. So is listening to K-pop. So is watching anime, so much so that there’s going to be a Lord of the Rings anime coming out in theaters at the end of this year (a sentence that probably would have killed me in 2009).

Walking through Woodland Mall made me realize that all of our interests—anime, manga, D&D, board games, video games, fantasy novels, K- and J-pop (many of them things that I’d once avoided mentioning outside my inner circle because they were so uncool)—were well represented in the stores and people we passed.

You have to wonder, then: Is everything mainstream now?

No, obviously.

But also maybe?

My specific, once-niche hobbies seem to be, though, so maybe I just need to get into something nerdier, like styling cosplay wigs or long division. I celebrate the mainstreaming of my nerd hobbies for the most part (because I remember what it was like to have to find a new piracy website every three months as none of the shows you wanted to watch were available legally… and also that D&D Lego is one of the coolest things I own now), but the increase in access comes at a price. It comes at the price of commercialization, and monopolies, and corporate sanitization, and microtransactions, and the deweirdification of spaces that have traditionally been wonderfully and uniquely strange.

It also comes at the literal price of $359.99, which is a ludicrous amount to pay for a Lego set on a librarian’s salary. And also what I did.

Who’s the normine now?

(It’s me.)

2 Comments

  1. Sophia Medawar

    So true, I’ve noticed this shift as well! Very well articulated. Even Hamilton made musicals mainstream!! Is nothing nerdy / sacred anymore?!

    Reply
  2. Sam T

    I wonder if it’s less “everything is mainstream” and more “it’s easier to find a community of people to gather around niche interests due to the internet.”

    Reply

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