Oh, you like Marvel movies and you read Harry Potter? What a total geek lol. You basic fucking bastard.
I think I first noticed the phenomenon in.... 2009? Maybe 10. I stumbled onto the 'nerdfitness' blog while looking into a bodyweight routine. The featured articles almost read like a horoscope -- a giant, disorderly, shotgunned mess of references from all sorts of scifi/fantasy in an attempt to get the reader to connect with the writer. In my case it had the opposite effect because he came across as a try-hard who just read the cliff notes.
His intentions are pure, so I don't want to bash the site too much, but there was a shocking lack of depth with any of his analogies. It's like he watched a New Hope once and then fluttered to the next realm a real nerd suggested he be acquainted with.
For example, from a random article:
"Remember playing Mario Kart, racing past your friends going for the item box, hoping for red shells or star power. Instead, you suddenly explode; it wasn’t a powerup, it was a trap!"
- The "it was a trap" is a hyperlink to Admiral Ackbar in Return of the Jedi. - If you're passing your friends and in a high player rank, the odds for red shells or star power is abysmally low. - What sort of nublet falls for those trap blocks? I mean really. They're mines that get placed in commonly treaded areas but it's usually easy to tell in a row of evenly spaced boxes the one that's just wedged inbetween them