Weening
| “ | Fine, make sure you light one where I can see it. Now, I want you to put it in your hand, I wanna see you get burned, you fucking dick. I want to see you see you get burned! I wanna see you get a fuckin' third-degree burn. I WANNA SEE YOU LOSE A FUCKING FINGER!!! Oh, and after— After you, uh— After you, uh, burn it? Shove it up your ass. How does that sound, Chris? Sound like your idea of a good time? Hey, Chris? Chris, wait. It's important. Dammit, listen. You can burn the medallion or shove it up your butt: make your choice. Ah, interrogating autistics, it's so easy. It's so easy, especially with you, Chris. You. Dumb. Fuck. You make it all too easy. | ” |
| BlueSpike, torturing Chris and giving a clear-cut perfect example of weening. | ||
Rounding out the unholy trinity of white knights and A-Logs, weens are several times as annoying as the previous two combined. Both a corruption of the phrase "epic win" and a nod to the music group, weens are wannabe trolls who attempt to recreate the success of prominent trolls, but generally just embarrass themselves due to their lack of originality and wit. In other words, they're the hyperactive preteen cargo-cultists who annoy the shit out of non-weens with their complete lack of talent and insular sense of humor.
Think we're exaggerating? Maybe a video or two will help get the point across.
What Weening consists of
- Elaborate trolling plans.
- Prank calls to Chris's house. Double dumbass points if it's just to yell "JULAAAY!" into the phone.
- A-Logging. While not all weens are A-Logs and vice versa, the vast majority of these dumbasses are both. The original A-Log was as much of a ween as your average A-Log, what with his unfunny MST3K-style "commentaries" that made people who made similar (and much better) videos do a collective facepalm.
- Facebook stalking.
- Scathing e-mails.
- Terrible fanfiction that "wittily" deconstructs Sonichu as a saccharine dystopia. Sorry, folks, but Asperchu already did it; it's time to move on.
- Terrible fanfiction that focuses solely on murdering Sonichu characters. Double dumbass points if focusing predominantly on the slaughter of Sonees and Roseys.
- Terrible fanart of Sonichu that attempts to be wittily macabre by making it even more grotesque, gory, or perverse than it already was.
- Spouting tired old Chris memes in places where the regulars are known to congregate.
- Spouting tired old Chris memes in places where most of the members won't be familiar with Chris at all.
- Making frivolous or exaggerated claims of Chris's misconduct to sites like eBay or YouTube.
- Spoiling Chris's legitimate attempts at participating in contests or e-commerce.
- Any kind of trolling plan, really. But most notably...
- ...breaking the law in pursuit of lulz, such as vandalizing Chris's property, illegally recording telephone conversations, or dishing out death threats. We shouldn't have to say this, but for fuck's sake, people, DON'T DO THIS.
Why you should avoid weening
Yeah, yeah, we know what you're thinking. You're not one of those try-hard 13-year old boys who think that screaming "JULAAAAAY!!!" at Chris is the height of wit. You have a great plan to really get under Chris's skin, bring back the good old days, and blah blah blah. While you may in fact be that guy, 99% of the time, you should just shitcan your trolling plans and move on with your life.
But why?
There are much better targets than Chris
If you're willing to put that much effort into trolling Chris, why not use that effort to choose a better victim? As much as the CWCki examines his odd behaviors and personality flaws, Chris isn't even close to the bottom of the barrel of internet scumbags. Neo-nazis (looking at you, /pol/), abusive lovers and parents, scam artists, hate groups, social justice warriors, pedoforks, corrupt politicians, zoophiles, and other assorted shitbirds are much more deserving of concentrated trolling than Chris will ever be.
Even if you don't give a shit about who the trollbait is as long as you get maximum laughs, the Chris of today just isn't as amenable to trolling as he used to be (discussed in further detail below). The amount of effort you would need to put into piercing his layers of white knights and paranoia would be staggering to say the least. Even if you do manage to bypass these obstacles, what is there left to do to him? Anything amusing about him has already been extracted from years of trolling and information gathering, except perhaps the odd CWC-ism he occasionally makes up. All that is left of him at this point is a withered husk of a lolcow; as much as you may try to milk it, you'll be lucky to get a few cobwebs and a layer of dust in return. With that in mind, you may as well just spend your time on another lolcow who hasn't been inured to years of deceit yet.
For most aspiring trolls, the only reason to pick Chris over any other Internet jackass is because he's relatively (in)famous even today, and you have a ready-made audience available to appreciate your supposedly fine trolling efforts. But that's just you being lazy, not some trolling mastermind.
The best trolls are chosen by fate
With a couple of exceptions, the greatest trolls didn't mean to get into professional trolling. BlueSpike didn't even intend to create the Julie character; he just rolled with it when Chris assumed he was a girl because of his voice. Clyde Cash was an emergent meme and later a collective identity that spread from Chris jerking around his fanbase. Vivian Gee used to be a sincere white knight until she got fed up with Chris's antics. Liquid Chris started out as a YouTube nobody who turned out to be surprisingly good at doing Chris impressions, and was eventually noticed by Chris out of the blue. Jason Kendrick Howell thought that he was making a page on a run-of-the-mill lolcow and had no idea of the clusterfuck he was about to create. Ivy only contacted him to ask for a shout-out; she had no idea that Chris was going to latch onto her so hard.
The biggest factor in whether a trolling plan is successful is flat-out luck, so stop trying to commence shitty trolling plans. Planning really doesn't work with Chris.
2024's Chris is not (quite) as gullible as he used to be
Granted, almost no one on Earth is as naïve as 2007's Chris was. However, Chris himself has actually learned that when he's contacted by people claiming to be Shigeru Miyamoto or Vanessa Hudgens, or someone from his past, chances are he's just being trolled. In fact, the naivety of the younger Chris has been swapped for an extreme paranoia, to the extent where he's even turned down attempts to get in touch by people he actually knew at high school or college. Needless to say, he no longer responds to any random dork who contacts him, meaning that most trolling plans nowadays will fail to even get off the ground.
Your idea is probably not original
Whatever it is, it's probably been done before, probably better. It's pretty much impossible to top getting Chris to believe that the President of Nintendo was interested in his work, or that there was a dang, dirty imposter whom everyone else truly thought was the real Chris and stealing his richly deserved fame. By and large, most modern trolling plans tend to be some minor variation on something that's already been done, like 'what if we got his high school ring?' or 'what if we got him to see another stock parody of his comic?', so if the trolls have already done it, then Chris has already seen it, too.
Weenery discourages Chris from producing content
Most of Chris's content came from a time when he believed he had lots of fans and everyone, barring a few trolls here and there, loved him. The constant amount of epic weenery has made him think of himself as a victim who won't be able to do anything without being harassed. As a result, he's wised up and become far more private, meaning barely any content for us.
It is also worth mentioning that Chris produces better content by himself rather than due to being harassed by weens. Since his semi-retreat from the public eye after his father's death, Chris has been prosecuted (twice), made outlandish conspiracy theories about someone he hasn't even spoken to for years, accidentally burned down his house, and swapped his already unappealing wardrobe for an even worse one; all without any impetus from the trolls. Don't try and rush the master of America's favorite game.
If you fail hard enough you will become a target for trolls
Anthony "A-Log" LoGatto is the touchstone for trolling backfiring on the troll, and it's important to remember that he would never have attracted the attention of the internet if he had either toned down the vitriol, or at least reined himself in enough to make it less obvious that he was absolutely obsessed with attacking Chris. It was thereafter a fairly obvious leap in intuition to assume that someone with that level of hysteria and monomania over someone they had never even met in real life would have had some skeletons in their own closet.
By the same token, obsessive or excessive weenery is very likely to get you noticed by other trolls, who will in turn start trolling you because of that and anything else they notice, hoisting you on your own petard. In other words, it's akin to plugging in a big neon sign pointing the trolls straight to your collection of Goku x Anne Frank slash fiction and dusty boy band CDs from years past.
Even if you do succeed, you may regret it later
Sometimes, trolls that somehow manage to succeed in extracting lulz from Chris may get more than they bargained for. Liquid Chris is probably going to have to fend off accusations from people outside of the Chris-Chan bubble of tormenting an autistic virgin for his own amusement for the rest of his life. BlueSpike will turn 30 someday and will still be thought of as the crazed, sadistic pervert who willingly listened to a slow-in-the-mind mass debate for hours on end and forced him to cram a clay medallion up his ass.
To add to the irony, people who didn't intentionally mean to upset Chris are still getting unwanted attention from weens. How much money do you want to bet that Adam Stackhouse dreads seeing another 'you prevented Chris from raping Megan, congrats!' message from some unoriginal ween? Do you think that Mary Lee Walsh enjoys seeing herself as a nubile anime blonde who exists solely to torment a virgin with rage every time she or her students uses Google? And do you think that Michael Snyder enjoys being constantly reminded by various weens of almost becoming the victim of vehicular homicide in attempts to congratulate him? In all these cases, the answer is a big, fat NO.
Chris is still the undisputed trolling champion
Lest that we think that the current drought in content is because of a shortage of trolling triggers, consider that we would be having a windfall in content of unprecedented scale right now, had Chris not given up on making frequent videos. A lot has happened over the last year or so, although you wouldn't know it from the intermittent updates. Chris has learned that Catherine was fake, been led to believe his gal-pals never liked him, flushed down his eBay and commission money on Lego, accidentally set his house alight, and began what will probably be a long crusade against blue arms. If Chris still had his old enthusiasm for content creation, we'd be utterly spoiled.
In fact, even in the "golden age" of trolling, many of Chris's most fondly-remembered moments had little or no active involvement from the trolls. Chris spilled the beans about his DIRTY, CRAPPED BRIEFS during an IRC chat about a mostly unrelated subject. THAT IS MY HOUSE came out of the seemingly innocuous act of him videotaping the inside of his house and putting it up on YouTube. The events of 28 October 2011 would likely have taken much longer to come to light if not for Chris himself posting pictures of Michael Snyder and various other details to this very wiki within hours of him getting home from jail. Chris's macing of a GameStop employee was provoked by a minor change to a cartoon hedgehog's design that was done by professional video game designers unaware of the vitriol they'd receive from Chris in turn. And one can only imagine what on Earth possessed him to not only draw ShecameforCWC.JPG, but to post it online and proudly proclaim that it depicted Megan, one of the few real friends he's ever had.
Chris is so good at turning his own life into a rolling disaster that not even the triumphant return of Clyde Cash could top how he's trolling himself. So just sit back, relax, and enjoy the show.
See also
- Trolls - Examples of doing it right.
- A-Logging - Examples of doing it wrong.
- Michael Snyder / Adam Stackhouse / Mary Lee Walsh - Examples of doing it by complete accident.