The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA

When did the default hacker character in tv shows shift from awkward unattractive nerd guy to faux-awkward atttactive nerd girl? They don’t even bother putting nerd glasses on the characters anymore. Examples: Felicity in Arrow, Cable in Bull, Riley in MacGyver.

Reminds me of that curious phenomenon of straight male gamers preferring hot female avatars in games. I read somewhere that it was about looking at a sexual object during game play rather than closeted gender identities.

Presumably the main audience for many such shows is male and they prefer the stock hacker character to be eye candy, since the tech plot points are garbage anyway and they don’t identify with them even if they themselves identify as hackers.

The Jurassic Park hacker character was a child, so doesn’t count. Plus hacker characters in the 80s were default male I think, like Matthew Broderick in War Games or Ferris’s Bueller.https://twitter.com/yyolk/status/1395591261600505857 …

Felicia Day probably had something to do with it, though I first saw her in Eureka (2011 -), after she’d already acquired a gamer celeb reputation.