This one’s personal. It’s got nothing to do with machinima, so feel free to skip if an insight into my head strikes you as either boring or scary.
I recently started up a forum discussion on “cliquery” within my favorite machinima site. The intention being, “Are we a clique? Are we exclusionist?” I won’t link to it, because it blew up in my face like a broken kettle, and the discussion really REALLY needs to stay good and dead. But during that discussion, and in some PM and blog afterthoughts, some people have raised a simple point which for whatever reason struck me as profound. In short:

Yeah… so?

And when I look at the way some dictionaries define the word “clique,” I can see why that would be the response. So then I’m led to ask myself, why is that word - or that concept - so offensive to me? Why does it anger me so to think I might be a part of something like that, even unwittingly?

I guess what it comes down to is, that word/idea has a lot of baggage for me, connotations which stretch far beyond the scope of Merriam-Webster.

I went to high school just like the rest of you. We ALL saw what cliques were there. These social groups may have started up being about common interests, but the “charter” for many of them was one of oppressing others. The cute and popular girls singling out and demeaning the loner goth girl. The varsity athletes and their wannabe entourage picking on the so-called “band geeks.”

And new kids? They were the scourge of ANY clique, the easy target. We moved a lot when I was in school. Need I say more on that topic?

But those experiences ultimately just helped to thicken my skin, made me stronger in the long run. And I made some wonderful friends-of-a-feather in those times. Never many in number, but quality over quantity. If nothing else, if it wasn’t for the years of cowardly pacifism under the oppression of so many cliques in so many places, I doubt I’d have ever been shamed into learning the value of standing up to a bully, nor found the stones for it, nor experienced the unique satisfaction of doing so when the moment called for it.

Funny thing is, it’s not THOSE experiences that represent the largest part of my baggage about “cliques” - the nasty kind. In fact, when I encounter them now as an adult, I tend to react with pity more than anger. They are an unfortunate fact of life. It’s finding yourself party to the xenophobic elitism that can make you long for a bath of the soul.

When I look through my clique-related baggage, I remember Colby. Colby was a new kid in town, the son of someone who worked for my dad, who also happened to have a great interest in my sister. He was a bit of a trouble magnet, seemed to quickly find disfavor with school administrators and teachers, he was a bit of a rowdy guy. He had a troubled family life. The guy needed good influences.

Now I grew up in a evangelical church environment, and there was but one way to show that you were REALLY serious about your Christianity, and that was to invite your “secular” friends to church. “Discipleship”, it was called. I sucked at this. It never felt right, and on top of that I was shy. But we were attending a church at the time which had a sizable teen group and a pretty neat youth pastor, and they’d always been really cool to me, so I thought, what the hey? I approached Colby and invited him to church, with a bit of extra incentive in my reminder that my sister would be there too. Needless to say, he was in.

The first comment directed at Colby from a member of the church teen group? A crack about his shoes. And it went horribly downhill from there. And I actually listened to some teens at the church and became convinced that he’d brought it on himself. Colby never came back, no one ever asked about him again. Soon thereafter, he distanced himself from me and my sister both (understandably); after all, we’d just stood by dumbfounded and did nothing. With friends like us…

It wasn’t until the exact same thing happened to my best friend Brian (who, coincidentally, was also interested in my sister a couple years later) that I knew the horrifying truth. Brian was as nice a guy as he could be; I’d been inviting him to church for years, he finally said yes (sisters can be quite a draw). The youth group treated him like garbage, an explicitly unwanted outsider. And I, a weak and pathetic piece of sh**, was too cowardly to stand up for him, and the best I could do was profusely apologize to him afterwards… and, of course, never insult him with an invite again.

The horrifying truth? This place I’d come to feel like was a haven from all the cliques at school, was itself a xenophobic sect of the worst kind. And I was making myself its pariah, by bringing in these outside and unwanted influences. Absurdly misled into thinking I was doing my “duty,” I was in fact leading innocent acquaintances into a den of lions, mauling their prey under the shadow of a cross.

So yeah, I’ve got issues with the word “clique.” I hate that they exist, anywhere, but they are everywhere. Some harmless, some foreboding. 100% avoidance of them is unrealistic for all but committed hermits. Tolerance of their existence is a fact of life, unless one is a fan of non-stop battles and lost causes.

But I choose not to live in a den. I’d rather be homeless. And when I think I hear someone yell “lion”… I’m gonna look. And apparently, I’m occasionally gonna make a fool out of myself while doing it, and offend left and right when I do so. So be it. It sure beats apathy, and that’s the only other way out of this concern that I can see.