User:AAE/Small Town Living, or Chris's Biggest Flaw
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When people wonder what is wrong with Chris, they often turn to the same, oversimplified answer: autism. However, autism alone is hardly enough to explain the sum of Chris's traits. After all, many autistics live successful lives, and many others live humble, unobtrusive lives. If Chris were just some random autistic, we Christorians wouldn't have put countless hours into editing this fine Wiki.
Chris's biggest flaw is in fact his small-town upbringing. Suburbia is already synthetic and isolated as it is, and places like Ruckersville amplify the problem even more. Chris might not be a big fish, but he's in a very small pond.
There are a million Chrises in New York, LA, London, Tokyo, etc. But they are in a huge, huge pond, and quickly realize how small they are by comparison.
Even in smaller places near big cities, like the many suburbs of LA, simply being close to a big city will humble you.
But Ruckersville is a suburb of a suburb. The closest place that you can call a city is Charlottesville, which is only relevant because of UVA and the Monticello. It's historically significant, but it's no Atlanta. It has a small-town feel, and everything is an abundance of copy-pasted strip malls. And it's still a 25-minute drive from Chris's place.
In short, Chris is isolated from the big world. He has few other references to compare himself to, and he feels he has bragging rights to the littlest of claims.
Have you ever noticed that when Chris likes something, he automatically assumes he's good at it? He likes drawing, so he must be a drawing genius! He likes to sing, so he must be a virtuoso! Yet Ruckersville, VA isn't exactly a hotspot for up-and-coming artists. The only reference he had were his fellow peers, typically average kids who take art as an elective.
Even Chris's family is prone to this inflation of self-worth. Bob was surely an accomplished engineer, though he and his family loved to make him sound like he was the second coming of Nikola Tesla himself. Supposedly, he made plastic injection molding possible, but the Wikipedia article for injection molding doesn't even mention Bob. The actual inventor patented injection molding before Bob was even born. All Bob did was design a control panel for one specific molding machine. If he didn't come up with it, someone else would have. Designing an array of buttons isn't rocket surgery.