User:Dude/Egotism

"Firstly, YOU WISH YOU WERE ME..."

- Chris, Mailbag 10 (Rejected) Egotism, out of all of Chris's flaws, is the most important and self-destructive. It is this egotism that may one day lead to someone playing Kick the Autistic for real.

Origins
Why is Chris such an egotist? In his sheltered childhood, his enabling parents taught him to shift blame for all of his troubles to other people. A sense of entitlement, again homegrown, skewed his perception of the proportionality between his problems and those of other people. Chris doesn't completely lack empathy; he isn't a sociopath, but the internal 'scale' by which he weighs the feelings of others is completely twisted. His autism compounded the problem by making it difficult for him to understand social cues and relate normally to his peers. He grew up in a different world.

But that explains why Chris was an egotist, struggled with egotism, or has tendencies towards egotism. While Chris's childhood was less than ideal, it shouldn't have been crippling. Time and experience should have helped temper his ego, but Chris's development appears to have completely stopped. Chris is still an egotist because he lives in a social time-capsule that has allowed him to carry on for the better part of a decade without a single life lesson. And he still lives in that time-capsule because it is easy, it is comfortable, people let him, and he is extremely lazy.

The Enablers
"He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes."

- Proverbs 13:24

Chris's parents are enablers par excellence. There is no earthly reason why (barring unrelated catastrophes) a 30-year-old with autism should live at home with his parents, especially one as "high functioning" as Chris's activity and his documentation show him to be. Adults with far more crippling mental health problems (from emotional disorders to mental retardation) live more independently than Chris does, whether alone, alone with supervision, or in group homes.

For a child like Chris, public school special education is generally geared toward helping the child understand how their disorder affects their life, and what strategies they can use to minimize its impact. This is a well-documented and well-supported strategy, but it relies on "buy-in." Chris's parents clearly never bought into the strategies, because they never fostered any interest in independence in Chris. This undermined the entire regimen of special education, and gave them a man-child with entitlement issues.

Monthly Tugboat
Regardless of whether Chris is abusing the welfare system, his parents are abusing it through him, or the system itself is flawed, the fact remains that the Monthly Tugboat is a major factor in making Chris's lifestyle—and thus his worldview—sustainable.

Blind Fucking Luck and the Cherry Picking Fallacy
A contest or two here; a two-second local TV blip there. The results are that outside events most people never experience have stroked Chris's already monstrous ego.

Consider that Chris has produced a huge volume of fanmail, letters-to-the-editor, internet commentary, and other drivel. Each letter to Nintendo is a message in a bottle: most of them never return,  but the one that does—on official letterhead, and addressed to Mr. C. W. Chandler—is confirmation of his celebrity.

As if Chris didn't think his shit was golden to begin with, he got a second nod from Nintendo Power for his epic Animal Crossing Documentary, and a page in PVCC's Forum as icing on the cake. Even before his e-fame, Chris had plenty of evidence to convince himself that he was creative, and not just a high-volume douchenozzle that had pestered his way to acknowledgment. As he graduated from PVCC in 2006, his writing shows that Sonichu was, in his mind, already tested: there was just some small threshold of notoriety or connections that needed to be breached, in order to become a true media sensation.

On top of that, Chris has a huge amount of free time to inject himself into situations like the McIntire Park meetings, which allows him to cherry-pick more moments of recognition. A tongue-in-cheek acknowledgment by the local council seems cute to us, but is serious business to him. And since Chris cherry-picks only the reinforcement that he wants, his legions of trolls just add to the fire. Delusion has led him to believe that he has a legion of fans; a few hundred emails in his Inbox confirm it.

Manifestations
Chris's egotism manifests itself in many ways.

Unwarranted Self-Importance

 * See Also: True and Loyal Fanbase

As overwhelming as Chris's Unwarranted Self-Importance is, it's easy for the novice observer to get lost in the sea of Sonichu shit and assume that he's just confident in his e-fame. "Of course," you say, "He's got a billion hits on YouTube, and a thousand emails in his mailbox. He's going to think he's hot shit, like every other retard on the internet."

But nothing sums up Chris's deep and abiding USI like this missive to Mary Lee Walsh :

E-fame just adds a whole new dimension. He was a misunderstood genius before; now he's a misunderstood genius with a personal army.

"III'M. WOR-KIN'. ON IT! LET ME DO THAT STUPID VIDEO SO I CAN TELL E'RRYBODY, IN MY COMMAND, TO GET EVERYTHIN'- HELP ME GET EVERYTHIN' OFF THE INTERNET!"

- Chris, THAT IS MY HOUSE

It's so bad now that when Chris meets someone new who claims not to know who he is, he seems skeptical and surprised.

"Y'all should know me by now, but if you don't, I am Christian Weston Chandler, the original creator of Sonichu, the Electric Hedgehog Pokemon, back on March 17th, 2000."

- Chris, in his second YouTube video

The instant-gratification, instant-acknowledgment, and instant-attention—good or bad—that has come with his minor e-fame of the last few years has thoroughly convinced Chris that people do read everything he writes, and that his YouTube messages invariably get to his target audience.

Persecution Complex


Chris has a lot of problems, and even the ones he 'takes responsibility for' are still out of his hands.


 * His school was mean to him.
 * He didn't deserve that F in English.
 * Or the one in CADD.

And if that wasn't enough, every authority figure in the land is conspiring against his Love Quest:

"Then in Mid-October, the Quote/Unquote "Dean of Student Services," Mary Lee Walsh, approached me and pulled my sign away from me and told me, "You're NOT ALLOWED TO FIND TRUE LOVE HERE." MY HEART WAS SHATTERED that very moment."

- Chris, on his Wikipedia Page

It doesn't help that he's engaged in a quagmire of a war against the homo rumors that those DAMNED TROLLS keep spreading about him, with a second front versus the copyright violating thieves.

"It's out of my control! I don't know where to go! I DUNNO KNOW WHERE TA GO!"

- Chris, THAT IS MY HOUSE

It has never—and likely will never—occur to him that he needs to go outside, get a job, and get off the damned internet.

Naivete
Chris's simple-mindedness and gullibility are legendary. The man is like the Sith: he only deals in absolutes. Either you're with him or you're a troll. This has been very obvious in his answers to the Mailbag, where he refuses to listen to any talk - even from professionals - about the similarities between Asperger Syndrome and autism, denies that there are any shortcomings in his work, and shrugs off any advice about how to improve his health or appearance, labelling anyone who suggests he has any kind of shortcoming a troll.

His gullibility is astounding. No matter how many times it's happened before, Chris is easily led around by the nose by trolls promising China or threatening Sonichu. The earlier trolling schemes, such as Blanca, PandaHalo and Jimmy Hill, got Chris to jump through hoops and exposed so much information about Chris and his personality that they had to start a wiki to keep track of it all.

Hubris: The Pride Before the Fall
"I should have been Highly Recognized for my ARTISTIC TALENTS I showed in my Many Art Classes for the Award Ceremonies before Graduation Day. I felt crestfallen greatly from not getting recognized for any of my Talents. I EXCELLED IN MATH TOO FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!"

- Chris, on his Wikipedia page

"I'd say... I'd say I'm all around. You see, the problem is that I have too many skills that I am good at. You might say that I am a jack of all trades and a master of none."

- Chris, Mumble 3

Chris's mindset in general seems to be that if he has done anything at all, and let the world know, then he's automatically famous, or at very least entitled to fame. Now, a rational person might consider creating the Sonichu comic a minor achievement in itself, if more than a little bit on the lame side; not many people would be capable of creating hundreds of pages of comics, even if the end results were relatively crappy. But the mere fact that the comic was created tells Chris that people should respect him for that fact alone — not the quality or wide readership of the comic. He thinks that merely making the comic available makes him famous; he subsequently feels it necessary to say "you all should know me by now." Likewise, he feels everyone should "know him by now" by merely participating in the LittleBigPlanet community and creating something, oblivious to the fact that quite a few people have been confirmed to have actually purchased the game.

But he feels that he is destined to win everything and that, if he loses, the winner cheated in some way.



Ego and the Real World
Chris's ego is one of amazement and wonder for the trolls. From one incident to the next, nothing seems to faze him. Even more amazing is that whenever he attempts to do something, he puts more focus on himself than the task at hand.

An interesting point Chris likes to make is that he thinks that he is a major celebrity, going so far as to add himself into the Wikipedia articles for Anne Boleyn, because of some (pretend) ancestry, and Vanessa Hudgens, because of a "hook up" between the two (troll). This was due to Chris somehow believing that he actually had a big fan base for his Sonichu comics, not realizing that, in actuality, they were all trolls. This was made worse when a horrible troll scheme backfired, causing Chris to win the GameStop Be A Star Sweepstakes without realizing what the actual prize was. Chris now believes he has an army of loyal fans at his beck and call, ready to get rid of annoying trolls or to get rid of videos.

Another thing that Chris enjoys doing is divulging every last detail about his life. Nothing is too candid for Chris - getting haircuts, drinking his own navy, even giving away his phone number! The only thing he hasn't done with wild abandon is give away his Social Security number and when that happens, look out!

Numerous times, Chris has shown that he believes he has powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal autistics. This line of thinking was caused by Chris's assumption that he had killed Ryan Cash just by withholding the comic and would worsen when he believed that his Curse-ye-ha-me-ha actually caused Liquid Chris to have some sort of horror befall him.

War against the ego
One of the main forces opposing Chris's ego are the white knights. These misguided souls have attempted to get Chris to understand that what he's doing is ridiculous and that he needs to grow up. Instead, he brushed them all aside, assuring himself that he was TRUE and HONEST, and could do no wrong. One of the more popular white knights, Vivian Gee, became a troll when she couldn't get through to Chris.

When asked to get real, psychiatric help, Chris has said that his church counselor, Rocky Shoemaker, is enough for him, and that she could do so much more than someone with an actual degree in that field. He seems to believe that because her title includes the word "counselor," she is every bit as qualified as a real doctor (the fact that most pastoral counselors see people for free probably helps as well, since Chris would never spend part of his precious monthly tugboat on something useful when there are video games to buy).