Joe and Ryan O’Connell are ascended fanboys.

Why do I always say that, and where does the phrase come from?  TV Tropes.

TV Tropes is a wiki-styled site where people store away cultural references and catalog the use of certain recurring tropes in fiction.  The scope is large and its users proudly forgo wikipedia’s notability guidelines.  Any trope that is used in film, television, literature, animation, comics, or even reality can be added to the database.

A lot of the tropes are humorous or at least they’re humorously named and you can easily spend hours clicking from trope to trope, putting names to age-old story telling traditions.

And this one trope has become a part of my regular vocabulary.  The Ascended Fanboy.

The trope describes a character who is totally obsessed with a topic when he is suddenly sucked into his obsession and gets to be the subject of his own fantasies.  (SOUND FAMILIAR?)  You can talk about The Last Starfighter, TRON, or that dude in the Judas Priest tribute band who ended up replacing the lead singer of Judas Priest.   Or Eli Wallace in the new Stargate Universe where a college dropout is recruited into a top secret government project to explore new galaxies because he solves a puzzle in a video game.   I guess we’re less passive than most of those examples.  More like Monkey D. Luffy from One Piece who is so obsessed with the world’s greatest pirates that he ends up becoming a really bad ass pirate.  .  . I’m rambling.

At O’Vineyards, you’ll find two ascended fanboys.  My dad and I just really love wine.  We liked drinking it and hearing about how it was made and where it came from and the trials and tribulations of the people who make it.  And we just really wanted to immerse ourselves in wine.  And now we do that on a daily basis, sometimes literally.  We’re the wino fanboys who get to run a vineyard.

I feel weird adding myself to the tvtropes page as “real-life” examples of ascended fanboys… although there is no notability guideline.  Maybe I will add myself … what do you think?