take any subject. take war, for example, any war. there are so many types of war history nerds:
nerds who want to talk about weapons & watch war movies
nerds who want to examine the historical significance of weapons advancement & analyze historical inaccuracies in war movies
nerds who are interested in the ethics of how weapons were used & misused, and the way civilian lives were impacted
nerds who are interested not in the weapons but in any of a thousand other aspects of war, like battlefield medicine, or the impact on scientific advancement, or the longterm sociopolitical repercussions, or the way societies recover & trauma lingers, and how cycles of violence & unrest repeat throughout history.
nerds who are interested in the way everyday lives were impacted
nerds who came for the guns & costumes and stayed bc they got invested in the stories
nerds who want to hear about military life
nerds would rather hear about the actions of women and civilians and resistance members, and the way people fought outside of battlegrounds
nerds who want to hear about the clothes, my god, the clothing
writers nerds who want to engage in a very specific fantasy of being a lesbian nurse in a battlefield hospital caring for a mysterious and tragically wounded young officer who wears men’s clothing and signed up for the army under their brother’s name, and now it’s up to their clever and sympathetic lesbian nurse to hide their identity from the doctors.
espionage nerds who know everything about carrier pigeons
and that’s just war. and even among all those types of history nerds, they’re still going to individually have different relationships w/ the subject matter. and that’s not even getting into motivation! nerds have so many different motives for studying history. some people find historical minutiae fascinating or relaxing. some have a strong sense of injustice or excitement, or want to understand why the modern world is the way it is. some people like to indulge in nostalgia for an era that never really existed. and some people use history to fuel their rage and political leanings.
sometimes these relationships are healthy, or maladaptive, or even toxic. it’s why you get so many angry white male history nerds with extremist views, but also so many women & poc & queer people who are equally fascinated with the same time period. and you just never know what type of nerd someone is until you meet them! anyways i’m a nerd about history nerds
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