Alicia Moreira, who grad uated in 2013 with a mas ter’s degree in English, is in Ravenclaw, and her favorite Doctor is Tom Baker, because of his curly hair and giant scarf. Christopher Ruocchio, a junior in English, considers Gandalf his favorite Lord of the Rings character, and his favorite spaceship is either the Serenity or the Nor mandy. Both said they have loved science-fiction and fantasy since they were kids and wanted to share their enthusiasm.

Last semester, the two started the Science-Fiction and Fantasy Club, which has been meeting to watch films and read books about quests in space and through mythi cal lands ever since.

“We actually started online — like a lot of nerd clubs do — because we’d never met in person,” Moreira said.

Ruocchio and Moreira met through the group because they were both members of the Dr. Who at NCSU Face book page, Moreira said. When Ruocchio made a post about someone starting a more general science-fiction and fantasy club, Moreira said she loved the idea.

“So I messaged him and I was like ‘Well then, let’s do it!’ and bullied him into making the constitution,” Moreira said jokingly. “Three months later, right before the club was about to meet, we finally met in person, and I was like ‘Yep, that’s enough social interaction, we’re done for the year.’”

The club’s only goal is a good, nerdy time. Moreira laughed about pitching it at the Brickyard during the Campus Crawl.

“We were telling everyone, ‘We have no idea what we’re doing, but come out and we will just geek out for an hour a week,’” Moreira said.

Ruocchio said there wasn’t any purpose-driven mission — they just want to hang out and watch movies, as well as a few other occasional activi ties such as book readings.

“We did a book reading and [Ruocchio] did the riddle ex change between Gollum and Bilbo Baggins and it was Gol lum’s part and all of a sudden he hops up in a chair like that and it was fantastic — he does a pretty mean Gollum imper sonation,” Moreira said.

Ruocchio said the club is interested in anything nerdy, though he said they do try to stay away from what the an ime club and the table-top gaming clubs already do.

“We don’t really need to ac complish anything — it’s just so it exists,” Ruocchio said.

Last week’s meeting began with an energetic conversa tion about Klingon pronun ciations, while people wrote on the whiteboard, filling out the “Great recommendation list of doom” for books, mov ies, television shows and vid eogames.

The club members then watched part of the science-fiction mini-series Dune, which, according to Ruocchio came out in 2000 and is the mostwatched production Sci- Fi channel has ever done. The second-most-watched SciFi channel production was its sequel, Children of Dune, he said, and third-most-watched production, unfortunately, is Sharknado.

“If you like a show and you want other people to see it, you can throw it out there and see if other people have seen it, if they like it, or if no one’s seen it — we’ve had a couple shows where it was like an introduction meeting, and we would pick, like, Battlestar Gallactica, and we watched it because lots of people hadn’t seen it,” Moreira said

Though the first meeting had about 60 participants, the numbers have dwindled since then to about 10 due to initial disorganization.

“It’s just like a group of friends that happen to bor row a classroom,” Ruocchio said.

Even as an alumnus, Moreira comes back every week.

“It really is fun and we’ve made quite a few friends, and we always joke that this is more social interaction than we normally get,” Moreira said.

Hayden Russell, junior in English, said he just started attending the club because of his interest in Tolkien. His favorite dragon is Smaug and favorite mythical beast is a griffin.

“I don’t remember ever thinking slaying dragons or fighting in space wasn’t cool,” Russell said.

Moreira said she became interested in the genre for similar reasons.

“It shows that there could be other species and all this other stuff—it’s not all clean cut like today’s world,” Moreira said “It’s just inter esting because, like a lot of lit erature, there are things that aren’t realistic and probably won’t ever happen, but it’s nice to have that creativity and imagination.”