Weening
| “ | Are you 6-years-old or somethin'? | ” |
| Bob Chandler outsmarting a ween attempting to prank call Chris. | ||
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 reference to the experimental rock band, 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 failed prank call or two will help get the point across.
What Weening Consists Of
- Elaborate trolling plans.
- Prank calls to Chris's house and/or cellphone. Double dumbass points if it's just to yell "JULAAAY, JULAAAAAAY!" or "IAN BRANDON ANDERSON/SOMETHING!" into the phone.
- A-Logging. While not all weens are A-Logs and vice versa, the two often overlap. A-Log himself was as much of a ween as your average A-Log, what with his terminally unfunny "commentaries" on Chris.
- Facebook stalking that goes far beyond merely checking up on what he's doing and adding it to a month-of-the-year page.
- Spamming Chris's Facebook pages with random pictures of Sonic's redesign in Sonic Boom.
- Scathing e-mails or letters.
- Attempting to contact people who once interacted with Chris but have since cut off all ties with him (Megan, Cole, the Wallflower, etc.) and drag them back into the spotlight.
- Terrible fanfiction that "wittily" deconstructs Sonichu as a saccharine dystopia. Sorry, folks, but Asperchu and Sonichu: The Animated Series already did it; it's time to move on.
- Terrible fanfiction and fanart that focuses solely on murdering Sonichu characters, as seen in the picture below-right. 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 Christorians lurk, or even in places where most of the members don't even know about Chris. Either way, it's very annoying.
- Making frivolous or exaggerated claims of Chris's misconduct in feedback on sites like eBay or YouTube.
- Spoiling Chris's legitimate attempts at participating in contests or e-commerce.
- Making terrible rap songs about Chris. Double dumbass points for making excuses like it being a demo, claiming you had a sore throat that day, or both.
- Any kind of trolling plan, really. But especially...
- ...breaking the law in pursuit of lulz, such as vandalizing Chris's property, illegally recording telephone conversations, stalking him or his mother, or threatening him with violence or even death. We shouldn't have to say it, but for fuck's sake, DON'T DO THIS.
Why you should avoid weening
We know what you're thinking. You're not one of those try-hard 13-year old boys who still think that screaming "JULAAAAAY!!!" at Chris is the height of wit. You've come up with a great plan to really get under Chris's skin, bring back the good old days and all that shit. While you may in fact be that guy, 99.9% of the time, you should just shitcan your trolling plans and move on with your life.
Why, you ask?
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 and discusses his numerous odd behaviors and personality flaws, Chris isn't even close to the bottom of the barrel of internet scumbags. Neo-Nazis, abusive lovers and parents, scam artists, hate groups, social justice warriors, pedophiles, corrupt politicians and corporations, religious zealots, zoophiles, malware writers, gang members, and many 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 Laughs Under Lucricities, 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. And 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, and other shit he does on his own initiative (also discussed further below). 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 hard-pressed not to get some cobwebs and dust in return. With that in mind, you may as well just spend your time on another lolcow similar to Chris 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 well-known even today, and you have a ready-made audience available to appreciate your 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 even mean to get into professional trolling. BlueSpike never intended 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. Liquid Chris started out as a YouTube nobody who had a YouTube celebrity as a brother; then, he discovered he was surprisingly good at Chris impressions, and was eventually noticed by Chris himself 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 asked him for a shout-out; she had no idea that Chris was going to latch onto her so hard.
Ask any of Chris's seasoned trolls, and they'll tell you meticulous trolling plans really don't work with Chris, because it's not always so easy to predict how he'll react to anything. On one hand, he completely shrugged off "Blanca"'s theft and destruction of the original medallions, yet on the other hand has completely overreacted to what could be considered quite minor triggers in comparison. At most, people who troll Chris successfully just go in with a rough outline and let Chris fill in the details as they go. So quit with the elaborate planning, because it doesn't work and only makes you look obsessed; coincidentally, this is exactly what turned the trolls' attention to A-Log.
2024's Chris is not (quite) as gullible as he used to be
Granted, almost no one on Earth is as naïve as Chris was in 2007. However, Chris has gradually learned that when he's contacted by people claiming to be Shigeru Miyamoto, Batman, Vanessa Hudgens, someone from his past, or even his own relatives, chances are he's just being trolled. In fact, the naivety of the younger Chris has been swapped for an extreme paranoia and distrust of anyone who tries to contact him, to the extent where he's even turned down legitimate attempts to get in touch by people he actually knew at high school or college. This hasn't been helped by weens--according to senior trolls, Chris was once contacted by 10 people claiming to be Megan at the same time.
Needless to say, he no longer responds to any random dork who contacts him, meaning that most trolling plans nowadays will simply fail to get off the ground.
Your idea is probably not original
Whatever it is, it's probably been done before, and most likely 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 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 parody of his comic?" In short, you're wasting your time trying to rehash older trolling events, because we've all seen it before; more importantly, so has Chris, so he probably knows where you're going with 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 stream of weenery over the years 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 has become far more private, meaning barely any content for us.
It is also worth mentioning that Chris produces better content of his own accord, without any input from trolls or weens. Since his semi-retreat from the public eye after his father's death, Chris has been prosecuted twice, concocted outlandish conspiracy theories centered on someone he hasn't spoken to for years, accidentally set fire to his house, and swapped his already unappealing wardrobe for an even worse one; all of this 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 yourself
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 simply toned down the vitriol, or at the very least reined himself in enough to make it less obvious that he was absolutely obsessed with 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--and as it turns out, A-Log had more than a few. These included homemade yiff fanfiction featuring an exceptionally well-endowed fox OC, a cache of disturbing cartoon pornography stashed for fetishistic reasons, and a video where A-Log does an excruciatingly unfunny stand-up "comedy" bit, revolving almost entirely around attacking Chris and what the radio was playing at the time--before a crowd who, judging by their reaction, had never even heard of Chris.
By the same token, obsessive and 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 about you, 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 old Tiger Beat magazines with boy bands mugging on the front.
Even if you do succeed, you may regret it later
Sometimes, trolls that somehow manage to succeed in extracting lulz from Chris end up getting more than they bargained for. Liquid Chris may have to spend a long time fending off accusations from people outside of the Chris-Chan bubble of tormenting an emotionally vulnerable autistic man for his own amusement. BlueSpike will turn 30 someday, and even then will still be thought of on the internet 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 broken clay medallion up his ass, all at 13 no less.
To add to the irony, people who didn't intentionally upset Chris are still getting unwanted attention from weens. Do you think Adam Stackhouse enjoys being inundated by various unwanted "you prevented Chris from raping Megan, congrats!" messages in his e-mail inbox? Or 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? Or that Michael Snyder would like being constantly reminded by various weens of almost becoming the victim of vehicular homicide in misguided attempts to congratulate him? In all these cases, the answer is a big, fat NO.
Chris is still the undisputed trolling champion
Lest we think the current drought in content is because of a shortage of active trolls, consider that we would be having a windfall in content of unprecedented magnitude right now, had Chris not given up on making frequent videos. A lot has happened over the past 4 years, although you wouldn't know it from his near-invisible updates; Chris had another girlfriend whom he eventually discovered was fake, was led to believe his gal-pals never liked him, threw away all of his eBay and commission money on Lego bricks and custom Amiibo, eventually dumped eBay for Etsy, caused a house fire after brewing coffee in his bathroom at 2 in the morning, began what will probably be a long crusade against Omar Woodley and the blue-armed bandit, and been arrested again as a result of it. And that's just the tip of the iceberg; if Chris still had his old enthusiasm for 24/7 content creation, we'd be utterly spoiled.
Honestly, most of the bullshit in his life has been his own fault; even in the "golden age" of trolling, many Christorians' most fondly-remembered incidents had little or no active involvement from the trolls. Chris unexpectedly 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 unfettered by the vitriol they'd receive from obsessive fans like Chris; and as with the incident in 2011, several details of his misadventures at GameStop would've taken a lot longer to come to light, had he not posted his own mind-blowingly self-serving account of the incident on Facebook within days of being released on bail. 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.
An old saying among Christorians applies here: "Nobody trolls Chris better than Chris." In other words, even without active trolling, 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.