What are Geek Feels?

Yesterday I went to see the 50th Doctor Who Anniversary Special in cinema and it was an experience geeks like me do not forget very quickly. You are in a tiny crowded space with people just like you, with geek clothing items everywhere and Doctor Who quotes flying around the room non-stop. And then the cinema experience starts and you laugh and gasp along with everyone else at the geeky inside-jokes your fandom has. And then the movie is over and it’s time to leave the cinema, stepping back into the real world.

And that’s when the magical word is suddenly on people’s lips – Feels. Although it is very obvious to many, I did have people ask me a few times, what I was talking about when I said: “I just have so many feels” or “This movie gave me all kinds of feels.”

So this mini-post will try to answer the simple question of what geek feels are?

If you are an active internet user, you will probably at some point come across some of the following gifs. If you are a geek, who practically lives online, like me, then you will probably see them quite a lot:

 

What I like about these gifs is that they really represent the intensity of feels. According to my personal definition, and that of course is entirely subjective and may not apply to everyone, feels are a series of intense emotions that suddenly overwhelm you during or after a specific exposure to a medium or event. They are overwhelming and most of all, hard to define. They can be sad in nature, yes, but most of the time I experience feels like this: I am happy, I am excited, I am fangirling, yet at the same time I want to cry and just hug someone. It’s literally like this first gif – there is a wave of feelings crushing over you.

And you know what, it’s an amazing experience. I love having the feels thanks to fandoms I love. I think feels show a true appreciation of a certain medium. I mean, real soccer fans have the feels too, they just don’t necessarily call them such. I think it really is a term mostly limited to the internet and geek world and I am happy about being part of a community that manages to come up with a simple world to describe an emotionally complex process that may last from just a few seconds to an entire sleepless night of feels.

Yes, feels may be exaggerated, but so what? As I said before, having feels about or thanks to something just shows that you are a passionate person and I can’t see anything wrong with that.

And that’s why Im still like this thanks to the amazing thing that was the Doctor Who special: