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People comment to me sometimes about the wall of insults I keep on my profile and seem to wonder what I did to become so reviled within large segments of this community, and I won't pretend it's a topic I don't think about myself. I've grown to like that reputation, yeah, but it's still something that I wonder "why" on. I'll write this as my thoughts on the matter just to have a ready response for it, for when the next "damn bruh what'd you do to make people that mad lol" profile comment pops up.

Why a lot of non-ecchi fans don't like me

This one feels like it's most obvious. I'm a prick.

I can be competitive about discussion in a way that will rub people the wrong way, and when you combine that with how willing I am to talk shit to people and mock them, that competitive drive can seem cruel as well. I want to win. I want to be smarter than people. And usually I carry myself like I am smarter than them, whether I feel like I am or not withstanding.

This will make people go "lol why would you want to win an online argument, loser?" - but why wouldn't I? I want to make the best posts. I want to be informative and well-learned on the topics I like to discuss. I want to be the best at talking about my favorite things. I want to be smart. I'm not happy settling in with mediocrity. I don't want to shout one-liners into a void, just to get ignored by pretty much everyone around me.

There isn't really much point to a discussion board without discussion, and I think that if you don't go into a discussion wanting to make the best post in the thread, then you're wasting your time. There's no point in forming an opinion if you don't want to put in the time and effort to be informed on the topic. There's not much of a point in forming an opinion if you don't want to try to make it well-thought out. There's no point in taking a stance if you're unwilling to consider why you think that stance is right against its antithesis.

So yeah, I will try to win. I will try to beat you and be better than you in an online argument. I find pushing myself to try to have the best opinion fun, and I find it rewarding when it pays off and people begin simplifying and reiterating my ideas.

But do you really find that person who wants to be better than you pleasant to talk to? The answer is probably no, and that's where a lot of these people on my profile are coming from. They're irritated. In their mind, they just want to share their opinion and I'm coming in and trying to beat it into the ground. It makes me seem hostile. It makes me seem mean. And well, I am, because I usually think what they have to say is really fucking stupid.

The other way I can be a dick is that I'm grumpy. I don't like a lot of these people myself. I don't relate to them. I don't feel like I belong anywhere with them, and I feel like a lot of them would try to exclude me independent of my actions, just by association.

Because of that, my continued forum presence is both meant to be for visibility for H&E as well as just to refuse to actually go away. Like, that's it. I do hate it there, but I also think the biggest loss I'd take is to just run away and *not* try to beat people over at every opportunity.

I will be surly. I will speak poorly of non-ecchi fans. I will speak poorly of ecchi fans that seem like they sell out too much to outsider whims. I will speak poorly of and towards a lot of people. I probably don't want to be your friend because you're not an ecchi fan. I also am perfectly fine with this and any backlash that comes my way because of it.

Why a lot of ecchi fans don't like me

I think that, within the ecchi fandom, there is an extremely prominent ethos of rebellion, kind of like they want to carry themselves like "fuck you I won't do what you tell me" and take pride in that. I think this ethos makes us especially prone to alt-right ideologuing, which I find worrisome, but at its roots I think it's very much against a perceived establishment of media criticism, as well as how that can often tie into (what I feel to often be very unfair) stigmas and lifestyle projections against fans of this type of content.

To give a general idea, think about ideas like "This is how real art should be, and this ecchi junk is corporate sell out garbage." "It would be so much more tasteful if she was sexualized like this, this is trashy." Even if many can't articulate it, there's an ethos against those notions, and the more people rattle them off as anti-ecchi rhetoric, the stronger that ethos grows - the more "Fuck you, then, I don't have to conform to your ideas of expression or tastefulness to be validated" will multiply and the more people will want to put up symbols and tie themselves into expressing that.

Think IPreferEcchi. Think Mamster. Think guys like that, who embody the popular ethos within this fandom. I both like and respect Mamster and I intensely dislike IPE as a person, but at the same time they end up representing a similar ideal.

In contrast, I don't carry myself within that ideal. I don't try to carry myself with mic drops and simplicity. I use what I feel to be an approach similar to the type of things people who do represent that ideal are supposed to be the antithesis of. That makes me come off as kind of pristine, kind of clean. I'm not one of them. People will ping me if there's a serious argument about ecchi, but when it comes to straight up ecchi fans, it's always people like IPE and Mamster that get mentioned, not Manaban. They way they carry themselves in regards to being an ecchi fan is just more relatable to a lot of people in our fandom than how I carry myself. At best, some like my eagerness to try to beat non-ecchi fans in arguments, but even many of them will probably dislike the way I carry myself in an argument.

Combine that with my status within the ecchi fandom on this site. I don't just own the most successful ecchi club on this site - I also own the majority of ecchi clubs on this site. I write arguments people reiterate, and I'm incredibly difficult to avoid in this sect of the fandom because all roads for a lot of smaller clubs just end up going back to H&E. They're either affiliated with and somewhat integrated into my own club, or I just own them outright and do resource consolidation with H&E.

It's easy to cast H&E staff members as being this Cobra Kai-esque entity internally because of this. We don't take public applications for any position whatsoever, we hand select our members by vote that requires unanimous internal agreement. We're large. We have the most activity. We have an entire in-house GFX team instead of having to rely on other clubs. We have a long history that we openly advertise on our wall. We're exclusive, we want for little, and we plaster H&E stuff all over our profiles and forum sets.

I feel like, for a sports metaphor, we're not the college basketball squad composed of rebellious inner city youth that a lot of ecchi fans would identify with. Instead, we're Duke. And who sits at the head of that staff? Who drew up most of the systems that seem exclusive and kind of unfair? Who expanded and made a lot of ecchi clubs part of the biggest one? Who is the face of that?

I carry myself closer to what a lot of ecchi fans will see as the establishment they're rebelling against. I don't carry myself like an insider, I carry myself like an outsider to an extent. Compound that with the fact that I am, on this site, in a position where it's easy to assert me as being the establishment, this makes a lot of people internally dislike me. I represent the worst type of ecchi fan to them - the ones that work within the establishment rather than trying to burn it down.

I don't consider that image to be entirely correct, mind you, but I feel like it's the one I have and I'm not especially interested in trying to change as much.

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These elements to my MAL persona - competitiveness, harshness, representing the establishment, not carrying myself within a specific type of image or ideal and instead going for what that ideal is supposed to be a response *against* - create an environment where I'm a very easy person to hate.

And I've grown to like it. I put those things on my profile to kind of brag about them, in a way. At first when the hate would pour in so frequently, it bothered me. It did shake my confidence somewhat and I won't say it didn't, but when you look at it as less life-or-death serious and more like a game, it feels like I'm the villain.

That's my role. People want me to lose. People want to root against me. And then they end up expressing that frustration with what I represent in vulgar and often comical ways because they don't know how to deal with it otherwise whenever I'm not losing. It's become more fun to me to embrace it, and keeping a log of the dumbest shit people say when they get mad at me is a way of expressing that embracement of what I feel to be my role. I'm taunting people with it.

So there ya go. There's your canned answer to the question about the posts I keep track of on my profile.