Mailbag
On 19 November 2009, the sysop of CWCipedia created a new page for Chris to answer fan e-mails. This Mailbag marked the first time the words of other humans appeared on CWCipedia, which up to that point had been all Chris all the time.
The Mailbag quickly overflowed from its original page into a series of numbered pages, each one containing a random assortment of fanmail for Chris to respond to with his own special brand of Honest Content. This quickly became the best way to ask Chris any manner of questions about his deeply disturbing life, though Chris has become disillusioned with the practice over time (especially as letters increasingly focused on his many failures and other shortcomings). Chris ceased answering the letters in February 2010, during which he was more focused on The Wallflower than his works and left them to rot after he "abandoned" the Internet and the original CWCipedia was deleted.
Insight
This direct line into Chris's thoughts allowed curious trolls a brand new way to find the answers they so desperately sought: asking politely. Through these messages, several aspects of Chris's personality were either exposed or reinforced.
- Chris doesn't want to help his fans. Fanmail sections are supposed to be about the author going an extra mile for pleasing, informing, and otherwise helping the reader. Chris simply assumes that the way he does things is the only possible way of handling the Mailbag; he doesn't even stop to consider that there are some established conventions in answering fanmail, and that he's failing to uphold them. Basic politeness has long since gone out of window. So have any displays of effort in answering the e-mails. He also has the knack of stalling the discussions by requiring effort from the reader: he's — no kidding — asking for definitions of words which could be found with two seconds of Googling.[1][2] He can't even be bothered to make his replies easy to read for his fans with the use of bullet points, and instead. Autistically. Opts. For. One. Word. Replies. After. Another.
- Chris absolutely despises being corrected. Repeatedly, Chris insisted that Asperger syndrome was "nothing" like autism, and refused to even look at information that would suggest otherwise, outright saying that he was "closed-minded" on the subject.
- Chris's aversion to certain words is as strong as ever. While Chris has apparently got over using the word "dick", his reliance on CWC-isms remains unchecked, the most notable example would be referring to a swastika as a "four-boomerang-shaped symbol". In a Common Questions section, however, he did use the word "swastika", so he may be improving in this area.
- Chris is fully aware of the fact that he's plagiarizing. When speaking about his inspiration, he said that his ideas were sometimes "borrowed from a TV show or movie." He also treated fan suggestions as though he was going to take every single one of them rather than coming up with his own ideas, at one point giving a fan "permission" to submit a character for Chris to use in a future story.
- Chris sure does hate gay people. Not consistently, though. When Chris isn't going on about how he's going to cure homosexuality or hoping that the homos all die in foreign wars, he's making vague attempts at damage control, saying things like he wouldn't hate a guy "for just one reason." It seems like he's aware that his homophobia offends his audience, but his hatred is so visceral that he can't always keep it under wraps.
- Chris thinks the things he does are groundbreaking. In response to a letter about inventions, Chris says that necessity is the mother of inventions and proceeded to name Sonichu and CWCville as inventions. Take that, China!
- Chris is largely unaware of the outside world. Obvious, of course, but he has now received letters from people claiming to be corrupt dictators (or their kids), serial murderers, a few Nazis, brilliant artists, famous video game designers, fictional characters, rock stars, internationally famous lounge singers, a bisexual German cannibal, the heroes of various cult-favorite video games, a deceased porn star offering a conditional date, and the Devil himself.[3] The only person Chris has managed to recognize is horror author Stephen King in Mailbag #26, probably because Chris was familiar with the Stephen King-related Family Guy episode. In Alec Benson Leary Phone Call #8, he says he confused "Mike Jackson" with Michael Jackson, painfully oblivious to the fact that there are a lot of people with same names, or that people could use pen names that happen to be inspired by famous people.
- Chris thinks girlfriends solve everything. Inevitably, his advice to most of his correspondents who are having any kind of problem is that they should find a girlfriend. Since Chris imagines a girlfriend as a nurturing mother figure who provides for your every need in addition to giving up the china, he reckons that they're the solution to any and all emotional or practical difficulties. In particular, this is his response to anyone who is worried that they might be experiencing "homo urges".
Censorship
Perhaps the most telling part of the Mailbags are not Chris's answers, but the letters Chris refuses to answer. In the first few Mailbags, all e-mails that did not lavish adequate amounts of praise on Chris were promptly deleted. A few that did lavish praise on him were also deleted, because they were written by people whom Chris found objectionable. These "unwanted" individuals generally consisted of gays, blacks, and atheists. A couple of other individuals were silenced when they confused Chris with the other, better Chris. Finally, one e-mail was only partially deleted, because the author stated that he was not fond of Michael Bay's Transformers movies.
In later Mailbags, Chris deleted less mail, notably after a few messages called him out on his suppression of the press. His choices for deletion however, became more erratic, deleting messages from people who wanted to actually help him, or from people asking serious honest questions. Eventually Chris added a Rejected Mailbag page to the CWCipedia, as a place for e-mails he rejected, saying that they had "offensive, or mislabeling, content that I, Christian W. Chandler, would not care to respond to." Oddly, he then typed full responses to several of these "rejected" letters, making the whole thing pointless.
His newest trick, though, is to use strikeouts (like this) to edit letters that make him uncomfortable. Mostly he edits out anything related to homosexuality, and replaces it with non-homo stuff. However, he has gone back and undone some of these strikeouts.
In the early hours of 19 January, Chris deleted the entirety of Mailbag #41 and uploaded a manifesto in its place banning Asperchu-related mail. This did not stem the flow of questions and comments about Asperchu, but Chris's hatred of the subject inspired him to once again carve up the Mailbags with gusto. Mailbag #46, for instance, saw three of its seven letters consigned to the memory hole.
Alec Benson Leary Phone Call #3 shows that Chris knew that anyone can see the deleted mails through the page history. Yet, due to his general obliviousness, he doesn't know what people usually think when they see the Mailbag has been tampered with. Transparency can have averse effects on people.
With Mailbag 52, Chris has started a new sort of reply beyond deleting everything. Ten e-mails, many of which were derogatory (and even one coming from the widow of the man he helped push to suicide), were all answered with this response:
| “ | Your letter has been read fully, and your thoughts have been inputed and accepted for better improvement. Thank you for your time and efforts. | ” |
The heartlessness of such a "canned" reply has earned the ire of many fans.
The Twitter feed
- Main article: Twitter
On 25 December 2009, the WikiSysop added a live Twitter feed to the Mailbag. This was short-lived, as on the early morning of 27 December, Chris removed it in a fit of rage and added the following note:
| “ | o I will have NO DISCUSSIONS GOING ON BEHIND MY BACK ON MY OWN WEBSITE WHATSOEVER!
I DO NOT SUPPORT YOU GOD DAMN GAYS!!! I F***ING HATE ALL OF YOU WHO ARE THE MAJORITY OF TROLLS WHO MESS WITH ME AND MY LIFE! GO GET YOUR OWN LIFE AND LEAVE ME ALONE!!! NO TWITTER ALLOWED!!! |
” |
|
--ChrisChanSonichu 04:31, 27 December 2009 (CET) | ||
Exactly five minutes later Chris would create a special page for the Twitter feed, and delete the homophobic outburst quoted above. Chris would create a Twitter account for himself the very next day, regaling his fans with stories of him doing yardwork.
Sources
- ↑ Mailbag 48
- ↑ Mailbag #54
- ↑ See Mailbag/References for the full list of famous individuals whose identities were used by mailers.
See also
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