Fan fiction.
Seriously, there really should not be any argument here. And this is coming from a person, by the way, who sees fantasy footballers run off to do errands, then run back to work late in the day because they can’t miss their dumb little fantasy draft before opening day (after which I strike them with my withering glare). Fantasy football is stupid, even from my perspective as a rabid Seahawks fan.
Plus, I, in fact, am guilty of writing fan faction, so I can attest to at least partaking in that hobby.
Still, fan fiction is much, much stupider.
There’s been some talk that fan fiction and fantasy football are equal on a geekiness scale. To that, I offer the following retort:
- Had a bad fantasy football campaign? No problem. There’s always next year. Wrote bad fan fiction? Reading it is like getting all of your teeth pulled out by a jackhammer.
- The fan fiction community is way too supportive. I have to say 99% of fan fiction ever written is an abomination to the English language. However, it is guaranteed that 70% of the comments section will be filled by people who loved the story, with a 50% percent chance that some of them will say that it’s the best story they’ve ever read. On the other hand, people will make fun of you if you picked Reggie Bush and he as a subpar year. And they would be right in doing so.
- At no point in fantasy football does anyone create a player who is a pale representation of themselves except that they are some sort of anthropomorphic fox and has perfect stats. You know why no one does that? Because it’s LAME.
- Writing fan fiction takes up approximately 40 hours to write something that will, in all likelihood be utter garbage. Now, no matter how your fantasy football league turns out, it really only takes up one draft day, and that’s it. You don’t even have to sit through games. ESPN.com tracks the stats for you. It is infinitely less time-intensive.
- On the other hand, fantasy football players are actually more knowledgeable. Look, people, Bones does not have a 14-year-old genius kid sister who’s kinda shy and is totally crushing on Seely Booth. THAT CHARACTER DOES NOT EXIST. And it’s not just the Mary Sues. Quality control in fan fiction is very, very poor. You’d think with the internet that House fan fiction writers could google up a credible disease, but it’s always some made-up portmanteau of a word combining some animal with “flu” or “cold.”
I don’t know if football fan knowledge can match, really, but I do know that Terrell Owens has a Twitter and just the other day, dude was quoting Psalms 50:23. That’s way more character development than your typical fan fiction.
- And finally, there’s the nature of the beast: writing demands quality. Picking people from a list doesn’t. Given than the quality of the writing in fan fiction is very, very low and downright embarassing, fantasy football wins just for fulfilling its list-picking abilities.
So there you go.
Fantasy football: lame.
Fan fiction: lamer than the lamest lame that ever lamed.
Rooktopia 
Overall, I probably agree with this. However, in defense of fan fiction (fantasy fantasy?), it seems a lot of these, especially #6, come down to fantasy sports having, in a sense, lower standards (we humans don’t experience it in the same way aesthetically; it can’t “hurt” our eyes and ears). As for #3, that’s obviously unfair — you can’t normally “create characters” in the first place, and if they could, there’s no question the anthropomorphic foxes would crawl all out of the astroturf. Well, maybe not foxes, but something equivalently geeky/silly for football fans. That’s what people like to do — diddle with our imaginations.
Of course, this is all silly apples and oranges anyway. I’m very much reminded of the back-and-forth (well, maybe more back than forth) in this Onion article: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38664 .