“when the escapist fantasies of geek culture become a denial of reality, then they become a problem"
I think another issue is that for a lot of people who enjoy these things, they honestly, truly, and I think even rightfully feel that it's their culture. They're emotionally and intellectually invested in it and so it's something they keep very near and dear to themselves. When they see something that subverts it, appropriate from it, corrupt it, or in some other way attack it, they feel that a part of them is being attacked as well. Let's face it. Geek culture has gone mainstream and they view people who weren't originally part of it as barbarians at the gates.The simple questions about their attachment ("Why do you feel compelled to pre-order games? Why do you stay in line for blockbuster franchise movies? Why do you go to Comic Con? Why do you do all these things where you never really feel satisfied?") provoke these hostile reactions, as if you are somehow making them doubt their own identity.
Hmm. I'd argue that it was more of the nooks and crannies of mainstream culture. Comic books, video games, science fiction television shows, pen and paper roll playing games. They were a part of pop culture, but they were never the widely embraced, celebrated part of pop culture. The snobbery that you bring up is part of the problem. They're creating an us vs. them barrier. That barrier, now more than ever, is being broken down and a lot of the hardcore geeks are really starting to feel threatened. The things that they used to escape, to feel safe, is no longer theirs to call their own.Geek culture is and always has been mainstream culture in one form or another; it was never about rejecting mainstream culture but obsessively focusing on some aspect of it.
What's really lost in the sands of time, though, is when geeks started becoming positively snobby as a rule. There's been comic book snobbery for a while: Comic Book Guy was a 90's creation, for example, but you have earlier examples like when the early comic book industry stopped publishing their romance lines in the Golden Age. But now there's a rule to attack women and other such "normies" as if they were this existential threat.