Backdating this because of a combination of things: it's nerdy, I can't imagine anyone else but me would want to read it, I'm sick and am probably writing like shit, and also most of the links are very decidedly not work safe. So there you have it.

Because I think the strangest things when I'm unwell, I spent a good chunk of this morning trying to explain why it is I think that fandom_wank, hereafter known as F_W, is better at cataloguing online drama than Encyclopedia Dramatica, or ED for short. Because I'm me and also ill and allowed to be judgement-impaired, I decided that this could make a rather amusing LJ rant, even if nobody else agreed with me. So, here it is.

To keep this rant somewhat briefer than it could be otherwise - because, as I mentioned, I'm not entirely well - here are a few of the reasons F_W users (commonly known as wankas) generally conduct themselves a lot better than those on ED (often referred to as EDiots), and why I think that the general tone of F_W is a lot less destructive than that of ED:

• Wankas don't delude themselves that they invented internet comedy.
  
• ED articles all to often rely very heavily on ad hominem attacks and straw man arguments.
  
• A lot of EDiots seem to think nihilism and total emotional disconnection are cool.
  
• Where ED revels in poking the crazy to make things even worse, the moderation team at F_W strongly discourage trolling.
  
• Where ED seem to consider anyone online fair game for mockery, F_W do not allow users to post wank reports about minors.
  
• ED seems to think the rest of the net has no right to appropriate its memes, never mind that it's the whole point of them.
  
• Far too many EDiots seem to think stalking and harassment, both crimes, are fine if they're done anonymously.
  
• A lot of ED's 'humor' is the humor of a third-rate gross-out comedy.
  
• F_W is aware that all the funniest e-drama creates itself and is self-sustaining.

and, finally and perhaps most importantly:

• Users on F_W are aware that some things, like school shootings and suicide, are really not fucking funny.

The major problem with ED, aside from the utterly callous attitude it often exhibits to things that are genuinely tragic or disturbing, is that its emphasis on enabling trolling and encouraging lame-ass 'raids' on its targets means that its users all too often have no clue about when to leave well enough alone. Many of the funniest articles on the site - most of which, to my mind, can be found through the DeviantArt or Furry portals - are funny precisely because the individual in question was a wanky dramallama long before ED got hold of them. There's no need to create artificial drama to get them to overreact when they're creating quite enough drama, and overreacting badly enough to very small slights, by themselves. A lot of these people need absolutely no encouragement to make wanky idiots of themselves. Why not just leave them to it?

Every so often, EDiots take it upon itself to 'raid' someone who has an article, to provide further fodder for it. This usually takes the form of flaming them, trolling their homepages, and trying to hack their user accounts on the sites they frequent to get them banned. If they can get in, they'll post fake journal entries as that person, delete their artwork and replace it with shock images, and otherwise generally make asshats of themselves. Of course, they get their reaction - but it's a pretty cheap trick, as pretty much anyone human would be left angry and upset by having something like that done to them. You don't have to be a wanky dramallama to find something like that upsetting or to react by UNLEASHING THE FUCKING FURY. The individual in question may be silly or infuriating or deeply bizarre, but that doesn't make them fair game for harassment. Pointing and laughing, yes. Flaming, online stalking and trolling, no.

F_W doesn't do this: they simply mock the stupid. Wankas don't try and provoke people into creating drama just so they can mock them for it, and users who do post grudewanky reports tend to get called on it and slapped down hard for it. What does end up there is usually far funnier as a result - because it's not manufactured or built up into something it's not.

Take F_W's attude to the My Ponies Hate You wank, and the now-legendary otakuoftomobiki, formerly known as Otakuoftomobiki.

If you choose to follow that link to his - yes, he's a guy in his forties - LJ, be warned that he has a colossally slow-loading and annnoying to look at animated background: ?style=mine will be your friend. It's worth it for his profile page, though.

And, while I'm here digressing, a quick explanation on what the deal is with the links. F_W itself is a Journalfen community. The F_W wiki, which I'm using as my main source for F_W links, provide brief explanations of the main points of each wank and further links to the wank reports themselves. The wank reports and comment threads are to F_W what Wiki articles are to ED, but as far as famous wanks go it's easiest to link to the wiki.

I won't go into massive detail about the wank - that's all out there already. That said this article from his LJ, screencapped from Google cache, is worth the read to illustrate why his behavior got mocked at all. It's lengthy, but bear with it: it's the whole reason he made it onto F_W in the first place. It's called Otakuoftomobiki - The Illustrated Truth, and it's a monument to extreme self-absorption and staggering self-delusion.

Unsurprisingly, he still doesn't get quite why those of us on F_W found his Second Life exploits so hilarious - if not, however, 'the biggest joke [we'd] ever seen'. (Doesn't overrate himself much, does he?) Hilarious though his little story was, his wasn't even on the InuGrrrl level. It's nowhere near up to the epic absurdity that was the Snapewives, Victoria Bitter, Cassie Claire and The Ms. Scribe Story. He still doesn't quite seem to get that people weren't laughing at him for roleplaying on Second Life so much as they were for his massive self-delusion and insistence on blaming everything that went wrong as a result of the fallout from said roleplay on his ex-girlfriend for blowing his cover, not on him for deciding that it wasn't enough to have a female avatar, he had to pretend that the person behind said bunnygirl was a young disabled woman, not a 46-year-old guy from Baltimore 'who has more My Little Ponies, Sailor Moon, and PowerPuff Girl crap than a 9-year-old girl'.

He also doesn't quite realize that he's damn lucky this stayed on F_W, and didn't make it to ED. All the average wanka does with the crazy is point and laugh and then move onto the next wank report. If he hadn't come and insisted on commenting all over the Wank Report, he would never have had to so much as talk to F_W members. They don't stalk, they don't harrass, they don't repeatedly troll. They look, laugh, and move on... unless, of course, the person whose wankery they're mocking comes to them. Which otakuoftomobiki did.

EDiots would have eaten this guy alive, and then come back for more.

There are noticeable differences in the way F_W and ED will write about and deal with the same person, group, or entity. Take, for example, the following sets of articles:

• Fandom_Secrets on Fandom_Wank
  
• Fandom_Secrets on Encyclopedia Dramatica

• Usagi Kou on Fandom_Wank
  
• Usagi Kou on Encyclopedia Dramatica

• Darkhorseman on Fandom_Wank
  
• Darkhorseman on Encyclopedia Dramatica

The difference in attitudes and behavior between two communities with very similar aims can probably be attributed to the different user demographics. Wankas tend to be largely female and have to be over 18 to even get user accounts on JournalFen, which has free account creation turned off by default. Most of the users seem to be in their mid-twenties at least. ED users, by contrast, are mainly male and, from the quality of the site's humor, appear to be mainly high school and college age, and mostly pretty damn spoiled by white male privelige.

Much of the site's humor is crude, and a lot of it is extremely cruel. A lot of it is also misogynistic, homophobic, or racist - perhaps in an attempt to try and look provocatively edgy. Some contributors, to be fair, don't seem entirely serious about it and are pretty even-handed in seeming to hate everybody, but plenty of them genuinely do seem to hold pretty much everyone who isn't another white male in contempt. Gay people come in for a lot of abuse - someone really needs to tell some of these guys that gays aren't inherently funny just for being gay. So, too, do women.

The attitude displayed to women in a lot of ED articles is really pretty damn ugly. Girls and women who have ED articles often get subjected to ad hominems about their weight, their looks, or their taste in clothing which very often have nothing to do with what makes them mockworthy. Any woman who's more than a perfect size 10 is fat. Any woman who doesn't look like Tyra Banks is ugly. Girls who dress attractively are probably sluts, girls who don't are probably lesbians. It's a bit much - especially when one considers that a lot of the contributors to the site won't exactly be the epitome of male beauty. Maybe there's something in the idea that the longer guys go without actually starting to seriously date, the more unrealistic his expectations about women in general and the kind of woman he can expect to reasonably attract in particular become.

Worse, one girl with an ED article is apparently taunted for having been sexually assualted, an attitude anyone posessing any damn human empathy at all should find disgusting. Mocking somebody for pretending to have been assaulted for attention - sadly, not unknown for some attention whores - is one thing, but pouring scorn on someone for actually being assaulted is appalling.

That said, though, their articles on Ladder Theory, the so-called Friend Zone and self-proclaimed Nice Guys are pretty refreshing, though rather surprising to see in the middle of all that misogyny.