Fake Geek Girls is a podcast looking at nerdy pop culture from both a fan and critical perspective, encouraging the things we love to do better.
By that, we mean we value pop culture for what it is—entertainment for the masses—and for what it tells us—what our culture values—and the interconnected relationship of how culture shapes media and media shapes culture. We’re critical in the sense that we think critically (though sometimes we can be just regular ol’ critical, too), and we almost always choose topics we’re interested in. When we’re negative, it’s not out of spite or hatred or dismissal. Pop culture has value.
Our goal with this podcast is not to tell everybody what it’s okay to like—we’re not the grand arbiters of taste, and we like plenty of things considered problematic, weird, or just plain bad. But understanding them contextually, as representations of cultural desires and anxieties, is our goal, not tearing popular things down just because they’re popular.
We have two primary kinds of episodes: regular, full-length episodes (you’ll know these because they’ll be titled “Episode ##”) and “what we’ve been up to” episodes, which cover exactly what it sounds like (these will always be titled “WWBUT ##”). Up until about episode 100, we combined both of these topics, but we switched to doing weekly episodes and separating them out to help with focus and length.
We also have a handful of “Stay Posi, Emo Kid” episodes, which is the podcast we’d do on “emo” (as inclusive a definition of emo as you can imagine) if we had more time than we do.
Who We Are
Melissa Brinks (AKA Missy) is a writer, critic, editor, and connoisseur of the finest pop-culture garbage. She studied English in college, but mostly she just reads and has a lot of opinions. She edits sidequest.zone and can be found on Twitter, Instagram, and her own website, where nobody can bother her.
Merri is a marketer and your friendly neighborhood emo kid. She often can be found binge-watching, dreaming of Kylo Ren, planning her next Disneyland trip, or listening to emo and pop music. Come for her hot takes, stay for her bad jokes.