The group self-named Fandom Wank [http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/] came to my attention in bits and pieces over the months, never rising high enough on the horizon to attract my attention — it was mentioned here and there in the fragmentary fracases which track like debris trails over the plethora of communications systems that compose LOTR fandom and which overlap even as we ourselves occupy many fandom niches simultaneously. Only after a longtime lurker (why I do not know — the lurking I mean) chose to gun for myself and other participants in a hot discussion taking place on a fairly obscure and low traffic board which is linked into my main page, Odd Lots, did I examine the phenomenon. What I found in those observations' course is interesting, in a bizarre and morbid way, and contained a rather surprising revelation.

Backstory & Disclosure

If you are reading this at Odd Lots [http://oddlots.digitalspace.net] you probably are at least marginally familiar with the posting board At The Sign Of The Unhinged Mind, whether you post (or lurk) there or not, and with my views on censoring posts or banning posters, no matter how antagonistic or unflattering to myself they may be. Argue till the cows come home, throw apples at each other (and me)  if you will, even — but don't try to spike anyone else's drink with hemlock. Also, for reasons which ought to be obvious, I look very dismally on Gorgias-style rhetoric that doesn't care what the truth is nor to seek for it, but only to engage in a kind of verbal volleyball. Intellectual dishonesty — even if used to defend that which I myself hold and believe — wins nothing but contempt from me. (If anyone thinks he or she can demonstrate why I ought to pander to sloppy thinking and willful self-deception simply because it's being engaged in by Christians, please attempt to do so, and I will stand corrected if you can make a logical case for it.²)

And if you are reading this at Odd Lots, or after having read my works elsewhere, you probably know that a) most of my published work is Silmarillion-based, and b) my magnum opus is the Leithian Script, the modern-language play version of the Lay of Leithian, and that especially in the most recent segments, it deals — as does the Silmarillion explicitly, and to a more subtle degree LOTR and The Hobbit as well — with questions of Good and Evil, Fate and Free Will, Justice and "The Gods" and all that other fun stuff.

The long and complicated and diverging debate on the Problem of Evil which sparked there due to a severe misreading of part of the Script, and in a broader context than that board alone, can be sought out by anyone who "cares to care." It's neither a locked nor a private board, anyone who wants to can talk and argue about anything they please there. I have the power to censure posts on the boards, but I've only once ever removed posts, at the explicit plea of the poster herself (and not on this board, either, it was at the PPC board.) I will, however, say whatever I jolly well please, and attempt to provide proof for it, just as I expect others to do the same (or else forfeit intellectual respect.)

In the course of the increasingly heated argument, some total stranger calling gtst's self "Aja" informed us, with a cute little smiley and an obliging link, that we had "been wanked," — an incomprehensible, unparseable statement by any idiomatic useage of the word. This resulted in my current familiarity with the Fandom Wank entity, (and a certain amount of bawdy humour at the Fandom Wankers' expense.) Because the Fandom Wank does not seem to understand the irony of their situation, namely that although they use the word "wank" as a kind of slang shorthand for everything which they disapprove of or condemn as pointless (which makes it essentially useless as a scientific term in this context) — most people I know would agree that an essentially-closed circle of individuals devoting themselves to nothing but jeering and pointing, with a great deal of mutual back-patting, (often known as a mutual admiration society), would itself be a prime example of analogous mental masturbation.

Case #1. Azusa
"P@L is something of a wanker in general, if you check the link back to her homepage."
http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/87458.html

Now, the individual directly responsible for this exposé, Azusa, is an interesting specimen, as her own website Wanderer of Time [http://azusa.leamonde.net/]is somewhat similar to my own, (but with an anime emphasis, not a Tolkien one) — equally filled with vitriolic rants against bad fanfic and irrational fans, but on a far more personal, and profanity-ridden level, (even containing wishes to inflict grievous bodily harm on the offenders) than anything I have ever posted, so it's peculiarly ironic that she should take me to task for being harsh in an argument.³

The next funny thing is that she doesn't actually disagree with all that was being said at Odd Lots' posting board — in fact, she complains at one point in the thread of being forced to agree with some of the things I said, which galls her because she doesn't like me. It's a free-will universe; she isn't forced to like me, by any means, any more than I'm obliged to respect her — but I'd respect her a hell of a lot more if she were objecting to substance rather than tone. "You're being mean!" is such a wussy way of stifling debate — and ultimately pointless; it didn't work in grade school when beatifically-smiling teachers delivered sonorous mandates to "Be nice and like each other!" after all, and banning heated argument only serves to butter over the real issues without fixing the underlying fault lines. (And face it, there aren't a lot of ways to mitigate, "You've changed the subject again, and you're not answering the question, and you didn't check your facts — again," and really, what's the point?)

What is the most interesting and ironic thing of all to me is that she must have gone to some great lengths to find the debate as well as to spend time following it enough to then complain about it at length. Mine's a fairly small and private site, it gets moderate traffic, but not a huge amount, historically, and the board itself is only a small offset from the header. She had to work some to get to the point of being offended by us.

—And we're the time-wasters as well as being pretentious and insincere. Oh yes. The Fandom Wankers refuse to believe that anyone could really care about such things. They are offended by the very idea that strangers could take things that don't interest them seriously enough to get into semi-private heated arguments about the topics. Not only are they offended enough to mock the concept, it is itself a concept outside their pea-brains, that we could have been having this debate (these debates, rather, as like all symposiae it diverged into overlapping segments) in all sincerity, and not to impress some fictional audience (after all, we didn't know that Azusa was lurking there, or who is/was or isn't, unless/until they jumped in and started arguing) or to "make ourselves look intelligent" (again, to whom?) by giving ourselves airs…

In other words, they want to make everyone else Be Like Stalks.⁴ They are not interested in metaphysics and theology, therefore anyone who talks about them must be feigning an interest. They do not want to debate the meaning of life; therefore those who do are pretentious time-wasters who should be jeered into silence. It resembles, to me, the scenario of someone going to a cafeteria in a medical school and secretly taping an after-class conversation there about a controversial new treatment, with all its attendant heat and table-pounding — and then being so outraged at this "time-wasting" of conversation talking about silly things like mitochondria and prokaryotes that they then play the tape over and over for their friends, so that they can all comment in outrage at the pretentious medical students using fancy words for ordinary cells. Inaccurately, too, since Asuza wasn't sharp enough to draw the right conclusion out of her correct deduction that she'd walked into a longstanding situation, and nobody on the thread seemed to notice the fact that despite all declarations of intent to stop, Rose was the one who kept leaping back in again.)

(I've decided I'm going to call this "Prolling" from now on: the assertion that all intellectual discussion, and all tastes for non-plebe activities or artifacts (like dictionary reading, classical or ethnic music, voluntary reading of nonfiction, and of course arguing philosophy or theology) are phoney and bad-faith actions of insincere snobs designed only to impress the unwashed masses. Not because, all deities forbid, we actually are madly enthusiastic about words and ideas and things like beetles and the formation of stars…)

And thus we come to the final irony, since I was going to point this ironic fact out to them — surely they'd appreciate it, given that they claim to be willing to laugh at themselves for being too pretentious, no?⁵ — but then I discovered that the Fandom Wank disallows anonymous posting. Now, for those unfamiliar with the LJ and JournalFen conventions, anonymous posting is not the same thing as, say, anonymous accusations — it isn't like accusing someone secretly to the revolutionary tribunal. It's quite possible to post one's name or net-name, e-mail address, web-site and all other relevant contact information, and still do so in technical anonymity.

But the Fandom Wankers don't let anyone who doesn't already belong to their community, the JournalFen setup, to post there. And to log in to JournalFen, you have to be friends with someone who has already been made an Initiate of the Circle, rather like joining a secret society (is there a JournalFen handshake, I wonder, or what would the net equivalent of one be? Some sort of ASCII art?) This, obviously, makes it somewhat difficult for there to be a free, frank, full exchange of views following one of their attacks, in which those who have been publicly targeted (for the mockery itself is not locked to members of the Community only) are given the opportunity to respond and defend themselves.

Now to be fair, after I pointed this irony out to Azusa via email, along with the other ironies and a challenge to defend her mindset, I did receive — not an answer, but a semi-grovel, a sort of half-rolled throat-baring in an admission of the pointlessness of her actions, and an offer to give me a JournalFen code so that I too could engage in the wanky behaviour of their board. This "gift" I refused, being myself consistent; but it was at least a stab at honorable behavior, in allowing the one mocked the opportunity to respond, if only in a limited, belated and hat-in-hand beholden sort of way.

(Apparently, Fandom Wank was "obliged" to muzzle free speech and limit posting to its own self-contained little community because they were afflicted by flamers. There might be a moral in that story — something to the effect of glass houses, perhaps, or something about spitting in the air, or not setting fires if you can't take the heat, even.)

It was amusing, in a twisted sort of way: it certainly didn't (I think) have the desired effect of causing us shame or humiliation, certainly not to stop debating on their account, until the virtual symposium had run its course; but it did serve to make me aware of the FW, as I had not been — and those things which have been brought to my attention once, I usually check back in on at least one more time. And lo and behold! another LOTR fandom situation was simmering there, coincidentally dealing with yet another locale where I have a certain interest (being indeed a founding member): the HASA archive. [http://www.henneth-annun.net]

Case #2. Kookaburra
"Who says it's a bad idea to throw stones at beehives?"
[http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/104233.html#cutid1]

Azusa was merely pathetic — someone so threatened by the fact that other people out there in the world are discussing things that she does not understand, with great energy, that she must spend much energy of her own attacking the phenomenon and seeking out others equally ignorant and proud of it to affirm her insecurity. Kookaburra, however, is quite another story. Here we have a case of malicious vandalism masking self-righteously as reforming zeal, hiding behind the ironist's winking mask while remaining utterly oblivious of the inherent irony in all her words and actions. And thus she too is cause, in a different Aristotelian sense, of this exposé — because I don't usually bother to deal publicly with people who only mess with me personally; I save that energy for defending those people and things that I care about, for matters of principle. And Kookaburra manages quite handily to mess with all of those at a single go.

In this thread, Kookaburra complains — protesting far too much — that she has neither the interest nor the time to waste perusing the self-indulgent time-wasting threads at HA-Yahoo. And then proceeds to copy-and-paste huge chunks of them (a severe violation of list etiquette) AND to go through and highlight them, carefully, with HTML markup so that she can point out the bits she's particularly piqued by.

We have now entered the world of the surreal and deluded.

In the course of the subsequent thread, it is revealed again that it is not only the content of the posts to which she objects, which is what would be the course in a normal literary debate commenting on another literary debate (or in any field, for that matter.) That would be a rational behavior, and these are the Fandom Wankers.

What ultimately is eating her, as was eating Azusa, is the fact that there are people out there who take something more seriously than she does, and who are willing to devote more time and energy to it than she, regardless of whether or not she agrees with their positions or not. Their very being is what offends her, not what they say. This is inarguable. You cannot disprove the point of someone who has no point but indiscriminate scorn.

We can, however, examine and analyze it, both for our own amusement, and for our edification, as a study in rhetoric and in a kind of recessive behaviour — an angling for a Social Darwin Award, so to speak. For there is something weirdly awe-inspiring about people so blatantly exposing themselves as villains and vandals, with so little awareness that the same technology which makes the JournalFen community possible — the hypertext protocol and the hyperlink — makes it a matter of random chance that her self-exposure not be witnessed by the very people she is so gleefully and indiscriminately mocking.

Fortune favours the bold, true — but the Lady with the Wheel is also notoriously fickle, and that was not a safe gamble on Kookaburra/Paula's part. For by following her own self-posted hyperlinks, [http://www.geocities.com/barngoddess110/] it's possible to track down her own web page and fanfiction projects and her associates and her other aliases — all posted in public for anyone with eyes to see. Those of us who issue our challenges in public and post them in forums where all are free to enter the debate and counter-attack have little to fear from the Common Hyperlink; we are easy to contact, and we don't try to silence others' speech, to us or about us. I've always been at pains to make it clear that Philosopher At Large is bellatrys,⁶ and though I don't go by my given name because it's already been well established as the nom-de-net of another author in the fandom, everyone who's communicated with me by email knows it. (I also answer to "Hey you!" when necessary.)

And I've never written and submitted deliberate badfic to a jury in order to bollix up a review system, out of sheer contempt for the very idea of an archive endeavoring to host fiction above the minimal standards of literary competence…

Which is exactly what Kookaburra admits to — nay, brags of — a little further downthread. (http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/104233.html?thread=3743785)
Yup, we have Trolling to go along with the Prolling. We have admission of egregious and easily-correllated submissions of egregiously bad badfic, proclaimed with glee. (And all archived down by myself in HTML, for evidence, should there be any more of the intellectual dishonesty which is the hallmark of this board by way of deleting these posts.)

Now, given that a lot of people worked very hard and continue to do so to continually improve the offending archive in a variety of aspects, for Kookaburra to proclaim that not only does she despise its purpose and nature, but it's too hard to use so she hasn't been back there in six months is both more socially recessive behaviour, and further evidence of both stupidity and negativity. (Amazing stupidity, given this admission, and the fact that she couldn't even tell that the Mithril Awards were not identical with HASA.) In the quest to balance features and usability, the effort to improve both is continuous and communal. For most people on the list and site, navigation issues were something to point out in the development stages so that it could be refined and experimented with. And like any large, complex, unprecedented project, there were and continue to be issues.

However, nobody's compelling Kookaburra to use (or like) HASA. There is and always was, another archive for the likes of those who aren't willing to make positive efforts when given a chance to contribute their own input, and who think the idea of a searchable, sortable, single-fandom archive with quality-control efforts to be ludicrous. Nobody was preventing her from remaining at ffnet either. So, for what did she, and her anonymous (possibly non-existing, call me paranoid if you will) friends who collaborated in this Trolling escapade (the story mentioned on the thread was "Bree Games" I & II, for interested parties' reference and recollection) have to try to tear down what others built and cherished?

This, after all, goes beyond the more passive time-wasting of copying, coding, and commenting on the list discussions which offended her: this is an active and aggressive behaviour, and much more involved. If Kookaburra & her fellow kooks had only taken the time and energy they put into sating their resentments and used them creatively to improve their own writing instead, how much more could they have accomplished! A lot of this can be explained thus: the Fandom Wankers are young, with the high tempers and low frustration levels of youth, and it's easier to devote energy to vandalism than to building. But that, while it goes far, does not entirely explain their venom and vim — and the amazing amount of time they waste on it.

Analysis
 
 

Now, one particularly interesting thing about all the Fandom Wankers, is that they are extremely narrow-minded in their focus. They don't seem to fully realize that there is a wider world out there than their own particular fandom, despite their stated aims of mocking those who take fandom too seriously on a panfandom level. Instead, they each mistakenly believe that their own fandoms are the worst, the only circles of human civilization filled with such pettiness and concern for issues of such triviality (q.v. Azusa's rants on anime fans.)

If they just got out more, they would swiftly realize that not only is all of fandom similarly afflicted, all of civilization is the same way. Every discipline, be it literary, or of another branch of liberal studies, or even (oh yes) in the hard sciences — or in any communal group whatsoever, church, synagogue, hiking club, you name it — you will find factionalism and pettiness … and you will also find specialization and legitmate debates taking place at levels outside your immediate understanding.

This is where the Self-Hating Fen aspect comes into serious play. On the one hand, they want to be sophisticated, more so than the embarrassing relatives who argue with such earnestness about the minutiae of a role-playing game or a bunch of made-up cartoon animals' private lives. They wish to join the the lit snobs of the London Times (one of whom is also a Self-Hating Ex-Fan) and Edmund Wilson (not the cool ant guy, the other one) in their mockery of fantasy, sf, comics, and all such recreations as "juvenile." (They are, in fact, iterations of a type savagely mocked themselves in The Screwtape Letters, the pretentious twenty-somethings who don't know anything about anything, actually, but laugh at it all over their cigarettes and cocktails and think themselves so much cooler than anyone else.)

But, sadly, at the same time they cannot get away, truly. They are doomed. FIAWOL — Fandom Is A Way Of Life, GAFIA be damned.⁷ You cannot escape your former loves; their ghosts will always haunt you, even if it is only in your own fevered brain as you mock and deride them. Macross or Metropolis or Middle-earth, or Enterprise in all her incarnations, or a blue emergency call box, a Greece that never existed, the Skylark, or the Sandworms, or Built Worlds far more obscure: that they were dear to you once is the reason that you became part of a community of fellow True Believers, and the only reason that your disillusionment when you realize that other fen are but golems after all is so bitter is that you did care so much.

Those of us with a wider experience and/or understanding of human nature realize that this is not the fault of our fandom/s, not the fault of any specific community or group - that it is simply the human condition to have feet of clay, and that for social animals we don't do all that well at it, really. And we deal with it, either by Getting Away From It All or laughing at folly, our own included, and recognizing that People Are Strange, and doing our best to not be ground down or to let the actions and words of cranks grind us down too much, with more or less success.

But the poor Fandom Wankers are stuck in their circles of private hell, obsessing over the behaviour which offends them, and doing absolutely nothing creative⁸ about it (well, they can't, since what offends them is nothing specific, really) but puffing themselves up with spiritual pride over this negative status as universal critics — when they merely are like the Bandar-log, the howling monkeys of the Mowgli stories, envying the world of sentients, first seeking to mimic it, and then in spite mocking it when they cannot accomplish it themselves, for their limited attention spans and abilities.

Now, is this article, in turn, a waste of my time? Not at all. Analyzing the behaviour of the agora is an important activity for my profession, in all its hellacious helter-skelter incoherence. (Those ivory towers get stuffy anyway, and you can't get good pizza up there… —Now, was that the helter-skelter incoherence of the agora I meant there, or of doing dialectic on the fly? The problems of language…) And trying to figure out thought patterns and motives gets a lot easier when the subjects practically do it for you, by blatant exhibitionism. True, it isn't quite as bizarrely hilarious as the antics that have been going on in another sub-corner of fandom these past days, what with culprits playing multiple roles and talking to themselves in public in different voices, but it's still fascinating stuff — both the confessional aspects and the public responses for and agin it. (Frex, it's amazing how many FanWankers are willing to mock but not to have what is still dear to them mocked back…)

And people were getting suspicious of the number of low-quality entries to the HASA archive recently, anyway. Discovering — in all senses of the word — that these suspicions were well-founded is rather in the nature of a public service. It isn't evil, really. (Chaotic Good in the service of Order, I assure you — which admittedly does look somewhat similar at a distance.) Consider it a kind of abbreviated kharma, providing correction and opportunities for future return to the path of dharma. (Though an unlikely hope for enlightenment aka perspective, given the lack of any self-awareness or conscience displayed by Kookaburra, at least; she should probably start looking for a tarn as I doubt there are any ponds deep enough at this point.⁹)

 Then again, throwing stones at dangerous critters for the hell of it is precisely what is known as Recessive Behaviour, in Real Life — Darwinism in action, on a societal level. A bit harsh, perhaps — but then, no one who has ever read any of my rants, short or long, has any grounds to be surprised by that. Wrangle and debate may take foolish forms, as any human endeavor, but the pomposity of the Fandom Wankers, believing themselves to be above it all, by refusing to consider any earnest argument whatsoever, reduces them all to the level of a pack of jeering adolescents cawing or guffawing at anyone who passes them by and displays the least sign of difference — even those whose chronological age leaves them not even the minimal excuse of being teenagers. (It would be a neat sociological study to see what proportion of the FW are older, and yet act so immature, right along with trying to discover why so many of them are so misogynistic, given that they mostly are female. This last may simply reflect trends in society at large, as it seems to be a problem endemic panfandomwide.)

Conclusion and Summary
"I don't even know what fandom this is, but ... WANK!"

Make no mistake about it, there is nothing constructive whatsoever about the Fandom Wank. They do not mock in order to inspire reform, they do not offer any suggestions for improvement of the problems they mock, they do not themselves seek to make clear the points under debate — because they do not care, about anything. And yet — they care enough to spend hours complaining about it all, in depth and in great detail. Which only goes to show—

Well, let's look around at them; it isn't a personal thing between my affronted self and them, you'll soon see. There is, I think, something undeniably bizarre in the spectacle of someone lurking in a fandom that holds no interest for her, watching a debate started by a work of fanfiction she has not even read, and then going off to rant at length about the character of us debaters. There is something even weirder, imo, in someone pouring hours upon hours into creating a forgery and attempting to hoax a fan community for which she avows no interest and respect. But here

[http://www.journalfen.net/community/fandom_wank/125312.html]

we have someone, apparently without any irony at all, complaining in distress that her (guy) friends like to talk about things through the night! It's shocking and dismaying (to her) that anyone could care about anything so much (let alone many such things) as to actually carry on intense conversations over them. She has to seek refuge in video games, and the comfort of fellow FanWankers' mutual incomprehension. Now there is all sorts of evidence here for my gender-egalitarian arguments refuting the stereotypes of inarticulate males, communicative females and which sex would rather play violent video games than talk… but the point I'm focusing on here is gender-neutral: the Fandom Wankers are dolts. And they don't even realize it. They actually think they're smarter and cooler than we trufen whom they mock. Which only goes to show—

People are weird. And easily threatened by many things, including that which they do not understand.¹⁰ And the Internet has given stupid people the power to form groups with which to jeer and point and throw dung far larger than those which former generations could manage with mere physical transportation and mundane communications materials. However, they don't seem to be able to actually accomplish much with it, when all the hooting and bottom-baring of the baboons is over.

I hate anime fans because they are conceited, anal-retentive, silly, thickheaded, ignorant, inane and elitist. It is true that every human being displays these traits at some point in their lives, but most anime fans seem to have gotten an extra helping of them.

If you're one of the sorts of people who expounds at length on webpages and bulletin boards about the "incredible beauty and power" of SM, why the last episode is the greatest masterpiece of cinema since "Citizen Kane", and how Usagi is a metaphor for Jesus, please do the rest of us a favor and garrote yourself with piano wire. (And yes, before you ask, I have seen the Original Real Japanese Version. I don't want to get started on this. I'm not saying that it's a bad show-- only that most fans take it entirely too seriously.)

I don't think I've ever told anyone to go garrote themselves (possibly because it wouldn't work very well — ahem! I mean, it wouldn't be nice — though I've frequently told people to go re/read or re/watch the originals before writing, being "mean" you know) and I've noticed this passive-aggressive business of making declarations and then saying "but I don't want to argue about it" over and over again in this crowd. These Parthian shots are just so — wussy. If you believe it, then argue it, dammit; if you don't want to argue it, for whatever reason, then don't brag on your high principles or standards to the rest of us.

Believe it or not (and you may not after reading what I have to say here), I actually AM a nice person. However, sometimes the strain of being nice and forgiving and kindly to everyone becomes too much for me to handle and spills over into a homicidal ra-- *coughs* --er, into vile, churning hatred against relatively innocuous targets. So, in the probably misguided belief that anyone actually cares about this, I'm sticking 'em here.

You may be offended by some of the material herein if you take yourself/your work too seriously. Proceed with caution.

Irony much? There's a certain Emperor's New Clothes aspect to these people going all high-and-mighty about the rest of us foolish fen taking ourselves too seriously. Now, there are some things in her rants which as noted above, are consonant with things I've argued myself — but since she's incapable of expressing herself without the monotonous profanity of your average trucker, I'm not willing to quote them on my page.

http://www.journalfen.net/userinfo.bml?user=fandom_wank

Unfortunately, to date I've seen scant evidence that any of the last-mentioned activity  is actually going on there…

I'm cutting the rest of this- bewarned, I'm c&p-ing whole list mails, so it's a long one. My comments are in bold.

It's always been MHO that HA was incredibly wanky by default. I mean, any archive that screens fics for 'quality' is. I don't even get emails from the list anymore, because I couldn't stand the wank. So imagine my (un)suprise when I stumbled across some still steaming wank while checking up on the list messages. (I happened to be checking to see if a kerfluffle had started over a trashy interspecies fic one of my friends had submitted to the archives to get a rise out of them. Who says it's a bad idea to throw stones at beehives?)"

All this — unlike what Kookaburra then proceeds to quote — is open to the public in the Fandom Wank (after all, it would rather defeat the purpose if they were only pointing and jeering from behind a one-way glass) and so no strictures are violated by my revealing it. The clearest example of the negativity and utter uselessness of the Fandom Wank is illustrated in her following boasts, in which she and her nameless  friends are crowing over the earnest attempts of kinder people than myself to help the "author" of the badfic to improve:

The point is that it's fun to throw stones at beehives, as long as there's a handy pond nearby. I said I find ALL selective archives to be wanky by default- but I certainly don't feel 'persecuted' because they exist, or think that they shouldn't exist. I just enjoy having a good laugh over the indignant reviewers who responded to my friend's little joke. (Actually, the really funny ones were the people who tried to say in a nice way that Frodo would never become a hooker, and perhaps she should explore other facets of his personality.)

This is just as interesting and important as the original complainers whinging away on the Fandom Wank — the number of people who are too wussy to object themselves on the board, but who are happy to jump on the bandwagon of point-'n'-jeer, and who don't seem to realize that they're not veiled to public scrutiny there, really, except by Fortuna's whim. You know who you are. And now, so do we.