User:Manwithoutabody/Lord, I Was Born a Ramblin' Man

Mostly just because MoarLurk made it look like such fun.

Why do we hate Sonees and Roseys so much?

After all, none of Chris' characters are well-rounded or believable. One would assume that we would hate them all, more or less equally. But such is not the case. Let's take a look at why:

• Their voices. This is the most obvious one, and requires little explanation, really. Whether in print form ("Thank you for having me help you. I had fun. I wuv you.") or voice-acted by Chris ("I had fun in a dweeeeeeeam!"), his attempt at creating a childlike speech impediment is unspeakable.
• Their appearances. I've noticed that in works like A Very Sonichu Adventure (which is awesome, by the way) the character design of the children receives a lot of hate. There's a lot of attention paid to their stubby arms in particular. Why is this? Kirby has similiar arms, and he, too, has comically enormous feet, yet Kirby is genuinely cute. I think it's because Kirby's design is quite subdued: he's just a ball with rudimentary limbs and a happy face. Nobody can object to that. Rosey and Sonee, however, are trying too hard to be cute. They've got the pointy ears, the chubby bodies, the ":3" harelip faces, the enormous eyes... Sonee has those pink Pikachu cheeks and Rosey even has a bow and can use her skirt as a parachute. They've got every "cute" trait Chris could call to mind, all rolled together, but with none of what made these traits work in the first place. The real key to it is...
• Their expressions. E.T. was hideous and malformed, but there was something about his manner and expression that made him cute anyway. Joseph Merrick, in both real life and the David Lynch movie with John Hurt, was covered in hideous tumours and was by no stretch a handsome man, but he was still very appealing and sweet. TVTropes calls this "Ugly Cute". These kids are the opposite: all of their babyish features look repellent to us because, probably as a result of Chris' lack of Artistic skill, their faces seem unnatural. Sure, they smile all the time, but it's an unnatural smile, like on a clown. Now, even that can be made appealing if you're good enough at expressions: in The Man Who Laughs, Conrad Veidt's character has his psycho grin on the whole time, but his eyes are still imbued with great feeling, so we can sympathize with him. Chris, however, has negated any such possibility: in his determination to convey a childlike innocence onto their faces, he gave them utterly blank eyes. Unlike with Hurt or Veidt, there is nothing going on behind those eyes.
• What they represent. These characters are obviously special to Chris, so it's fun to torture them just for the sake of annoying him, but there's more to it than that. They represent Chris' desire to be physically a child again, so that his behaviour will be more acceptable: on a kid, it's called innocence, but on an adult, it's called ignorance. Chris uses Robbie to relive his own childhood, because he's a narcissist. Cerah and Christine exist simply to complete Robbie's perfect youth, because Chris enjoys female companionship, whether sexual or otherwise, and because, as far as Chris is concerned, women only exist for the benefit of men. The infant Sonees and Roseys are Chris' attempt at making his own failure to grow up into an endearing trait and a perfect crystallization (pardon the pun) of his narcissistic belief that his own childhood was deeply interesting and idyllic.

If you can think of another reason why they're so universally reviled, go ahead and tell me. I'm interested in why YOU find them so repulsive.

Why Adults Write Kids' Shows

Many kids in their early teens might make up exaggeratedly cute characters, because they're going through some serious changes and this is their way of saying goodbye to childhood. Sexual motifs start creeping in, and it can be a bit disturbing: 12-year olds come up with anthropomorphic whatevers with boobs, but they quickly grow out of that and go with one side or the other - it's either human characters who have sex and drink booze, or else it's cuddly, kid-friendly aminals [sic]. If an adult continues making up childlike stuff, then one of three things will happen:

• It's a kids' show, with an audience of children. The creator keeps doing it because he/she enjoyed his/her own childhood, and wants to help today's kids enjoy their own. It can be a lovingly-crafted monument to innocence that entertains parents as much as kids (Sesame Street) or it can be a cheaply-made throwaway work that assumes all kids are idiots (The Care Bears).
• It's a pastiche of kids' shows, deriving humour from the juxtaposition of cutesy characters and childlike references with adult concepts like sexuality and alcohol. The creator keeps doing it because he/she wishes to comment on the entertainment of his/her own childhood, and people will watch it because it caters specifically to their generation. It can be a clever and affectionate caper (Homestar Runner), an angry but ingenious satire (The Venture Brothers), or an unfunny mess that relies on shock value (Avenue Q).
• It's a warped horror with an audience consisting of the author and a few other pieces of human rubbish. The creator keeps doing it because they personally find it titillating, but it's probably a cry for help. The author, like everybody in the audience, is a demented man-/womanchild who is stuck in that adolescent limbo, having failed to reconcile his/her adult and childish interests, so instead combines the two, not in a humourous way as above, but with dead seriousness. Hence the internet's obsession with Lolita. Hence furries. Hence people who can't differentiate between cute (childlike, inspiring our compassion and parental instincts) and cute (sexy). This ranges from the awful (most fanfiction) to the incredibly awful (Sonichu).

Chris is the only person who could possibly enjoy his comics in anything other than a so-bad-it's-good way. He makes solipsistic references that most readers wouldn't get, indulges his own fantasies and fetishes, builds himself up, and does nothing whatever to make the comic entertaining for anyone other than himself. Since Sonichu is written with no audience in mind but its author, it's much more a "slice of the author's mind" than a professional, published work, or even an amateur work created by someone who cares about his/her viewers. Works we create entirely for our own benefit should probably not see the light of day without being edited first.

On the individual roles of Sonichu and Rosechu's Children

Let's note that Robbie is the youngest of the three, because Chris wishes he were younger than he is. Although in his Love Quest he limits himself to younger women, this is probably just because he heard somewhere that it's more socially acceptable. Considering that he expects his sweetheart to initiate things and then support him utterly, he certainly wants her to be emotionally older, if not literally. Note that Sonichu is derived from a Pikachu, whereas Rosechu is part-Raichu. Note also that in Robbie's infamous dweeeeam (a fantasy existing within a fantasy), Cera saves him from some kind of nonspecific danger.

When Chris talks about how STRONG he is and how he looks like a trucker, that's his half-hearted attempt at being what he thinks society demands of a MAN. But what he really WANTS to be is a baby; an adorable, bunny-eared baby who is allowed to relieve himself wherever he wants, even on lizards.

Cerah is really bland, because Chris didn't actually know much about Sarah Hammer's personality. Like most of his female characters, she's just sort of "generic girl".

Christine, however, is Shiny (read: unique/speshul) and terribly vain. Who else do we know who is inordinately proud of peculiar colouration and inherent speshulness, loves staring at mirrors, and is incredibly vain? Who else loves being on stage and considers the loss of virginity to be an unambiguously good thing? Christine, like Crystal, shares many traits with Chris. In fact, it's probably not a coincidence that Christine was practicing her lines in front of a mirror, Chris needed to study his appearance in a mirror, and Crystal got trapped inside a mirror. So if both Christine and Robbie are basically the same person as Chris, this says a lot of unsurprising things about how Chris envisions an ideal childhood: there'd be him, another person exactly like him, and a stand-in for someone who really was there (regardless of how she actually treated him). I'm not sure which he'd rather bone.

Narcissism, Chauvinism, and Incest

It's easy to understand why Chris' work has so many incestuous undertones. It shows up in Byron's work, too. The only difference is that Byron was marginally (though only marginally) more talented than Chris. I really, really hate Byron

Anyway, in the typical, egotistical Romantic fantasy (I'm using 'fantasy' in the non-Tolkienian sense and in more of a wish fulfillment sense), we've got our egomaniacal, angsty, brooding protagonist, and we've got his Young Love, who is now dead. She's probably not too bright (or if she is, it's an informed attribute that never really comes up), and she's usually really happy and saintly and childlike and above all, innocent. She represents the protagonist's lost innocence - since most of the Romantics were ragingly chauvinistic or misogynistic, it's not surprising that a female character should be defined only in her relationship to the male protagonist. When she dies, it's somehow his fault and he goes on a giant angst rampage. That's basically the plot to Manfred right there.

Chris and Byron have a similiar idea of how their ideal woman should be: she's sweet and caring and nurturing and all that Jorth stuff. She's the image of classical, Pleistocene femininity. But she can't be completely universal; she has to be like this only around him. A major defining trait of the Young Love is that she's the only one who really understands him, because they've known each other their whole lives and because she's utterly devoted to Manfred, and he, too, is utterly devoted to Manfred. So all their conversations are mostly about how he needs to lighten up, see the good in people, etc. It's never about her, because she only exists for him. And he's such a narcissist that he finds this appealing: the only reason he could ever love anyone other than himself is because she's fanatically devoted to him.

Are you ready for the kicker? The twist ending of Manfred is that she (I don't even think she gets a name) was also his sister. Not only was her entire existence based on him, but she was also as genetically close to him as possible. She's a copy of him. It's worth saying that Byron was sexually involved with his own half-sister, and Manfred (like most of Byron's protagonists) is a giant Marty Stu.

So how does this relate to Chris? We know that he thrives on wish-fulfillment fantasies; he retells episodes of his own life to cast himself in a better light, he comforts himself with ideas of us as losers without lives of our own, and he creates his own dream world in CWCville. Now, CWCville is much brighter and sunnier than Byron's gloomy, thunderstormy landscape which he stole from Goth writers like Horace Walpole, but that's not the point. The point is that both of them are/were determined to be the hero, even though they are/were, in fact, horrible people. Chris has had boners for many, many women, but the two that I consider to be the most interesting are Sarah Hammer and Crystal (sister, but daughter works just as well). I say this because there was nothing particularly strange about his crush on Megan or Ivy; sure, they motivated him to do strange and creepy things, but the attraction itself wasn't too noteworthy.

Sarah, however, was a childhood friend. Now, I hate hate hate it when, in fiction, the hero falls in love with his childhood best friend, because it's creepy and full of incestuous undertones. There will be this big deal made about childhood memories they've shared together, most of which are the sort of memories that most of us share with our siblings. I suspect that I find incest even more disgusting than most other people do.

Anyway, back to Sarah. Chris wanted to do her even though, according to the Westermarck Effect (if you've seen a reference to it anywhere on this wiki, I probably put it there because I think more writers need to know it exists) he should probably see her as a sister figure. It's possible that they didn't really know each other that well, so maybe the Effect never took hold. However, this seems doubtful for two reasons:

• Chris lived next door to Sarah between the ages of two and ten. The first six years are the critical age for the Effect to kick in, so it had plenty of time.
• Sarah gets a Rosey avatar, and that avatar is Robbie's sister. This means that she was integral enough a part of his childhood that he had to include her in Robbie's. This also means that he really could see her as both sister and lover.

When Chris was trying to get with Sarah, he really played up the childhood friends angle. He was trying to turn their childhood into Manfred's, with her as his Young Love and they reconnect and all that bullshit. There was a twist in that he was being even more self-pitying by going on about how she tricked him about Casper and always beat him in hide-and-seek. In fact, I think he was trying to turn himself into HER Young Love. Think about it: when the Young Love doesn't die and ends up living happily with the protagonist, there's a lot of guilt involved. If he doesn't marry her, then he's abandoning her, betraying her. He somehow owes it to her, by virtue of her being the first girl he met. Chris was trying a gender swap again, but it was only partial: he gave himself the whininess and the saintly victimhood of the Young Love, but, being Chris, he couldn't give up the Byronic self-obsession.

Now, I'm not saying Chris read Byron and got his ideas from him. I'm saying that Chris' mind works in a similiarly egotistic way that Byron's did. Similiar fantasies appealed to them both. Furthermore, Byron isn't the only writer to use this motif; he just took it to its logical and horrible conclusion. Chris has probably seen the Romance-With-A-Childhood-Friend in other works of fiction. Did Sailor Moon ever do this? I never saw that show. Anyway, we know that he takes everything he sees on TV at face value.

Now, I can't confirm that Chris fantasized about having sex with either Crystal, but I would still argue that he did. Probably with both. We mustn't ignore just how lovingly Chris detailed Crystal's breasts, or her alarming resemblance to the "Girlfriend's Gift" trading card, or the whole business with the Rosechu medallion.

What I think happened with the trading card is this: before Chris came up with the idea of Crystal, he drew this as a Lovely Weather-like speculation of what his eventual true love would look like. What with his incredible masturbatory ego, she naturally dressed exactly like him and probably shared his beliefs on homos, those dumb laws, and all that fun stuff. Later on, as she became more and more exactly like him, she gradually became his twin. And he saw nothing wrong with that.

Would you be surprised if Chris' ideal woman were basically him, but with breasts? Most of us want to be with people who will help us to improve and grow ( opposites attract, after all), but Chris clearly wants no such thing. His ideal woman would be someone who flatters him completely by agreeing with him about everything. She's completely devoted to him, like Byron's Young Love.

As for Crystal the daughter, it's really the same issue: he wants a daughter because he wants someone raised to understand him and see his way of doing things as "normal". Once again, he's determined to be understood and to force people to accept him. While it's doubtful that Chris is an actual pedophile, I don't see it as particularly out of character for him to molest postpubescent daughter. Why?

Sandy Rosechu. She's basically the same person as her mother. Now, some of this is just because Chris cares more about getting revenge on Evan than about telling a story, but he seems to see children as exact clones of their parents, not just genetically but socially. Sandy has the exact same relationship to Zapina as Simonla did. Although Chris probably wouldn't dare to show it on the page, I think that in his mind, she has the same relationship to Wild as Simonla did, too. When we look at how Wild forced her into adulthood, we really worry.

If Crystal were ever born, the moment she reached puberty, Chris would become attracted to her. He'd see a woman who looked like a (hypothetical) woman he'd banged, and who shared all of his views and agreed with him about everything, including "those dumb laws". And we've seen how well Chris behaves when he's attracted to someone.

On the potential of Sonees and Roseys

One of the most irritating things about the Mailbag was that Chris could always respond with smugness or canned responses. And with this relative dry spell we've been having for the first half of 2010, we need something to shock Chris back into action. In past, we had three tactics, which have worked pretty well:

• A sweetheart. The idea that his comic might one day get him laid has been one of Chris' most treasured delusions since the beginning. Sadly, he's becoming increasingly wary of this one, although the video where he demonstrates his cunnilingus technique was pretty funny.
• Infringe on his identity. Liquid, Jimmy Hill, Asperchu, that whole kerfuffle over the Audiobooks, UNLIMITED RICE PUDDING! ETCETERA! ETCETERA! Sonichu Season 2 was meant to do that, but we haven't had much reaction from Chris yet, so maybe this one's running dry, too.
• Question his sexuality, either by suggesting he's gay (which I've never found particularly funny, because homophobia was supposed to be his thing, not ours), suggesting that he's a pedo, or by suggesting Rosechu to be a sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania. This, too, has lost some of its power as he's just ignoring us a lot of the time, probably on Rocky's advice.

All those have been fun, but to jolt Chris out of apathy and PS3, we may need to try a new tactic. Either that, or we just wait for him to get mad at something trivial again, but I get impatient sometimes.

Go to Mailbag 54 and read the email about Creepichu, who I believe would have been a wonderful character. Look at Chris' reaction to the thought of anything bad happening to Sonees. Even though the sender is obviously not condoning this but asking Chris to be forgiving (like in the story of Joseph), Chris still gets all screamy and horrified by the mere suggestion, a fairly rare occurrence on the Mailbag.

Look at Chris' reaction to the rape fanart about Sonees and Roseys. You guys really hit a nerve with that. Why? Partly his standard defensive reaction to allegations of unorthodox sexual practices (whether by his characters or Chris himself, since his characters are all basically just him anyway), partly the frequent depiction of Rosechu with a wiener, but I think there was even more to it than that. Whether sexually or otherwise, when those kids are threatened in any way, Chris gets very upset.

Infrequent though their appearances are, the kids are very important to Chris. Perhaps the reason they appear so infrequently (serious, you'd think he'd have given them and Heather Iglesias a plot ripped off of Mary Poppins by now) is that they're so special he's afraid he won't do it right, or he's too lazy to put in as much care as he thinks they deserve, or maybe he wants to keep them special and avoid overuse.

I believe that if we can get his attention again, and attract it to something like A Very Sonichu Adventure, we could reinvigorate Chris and maybe get him to start writing the comic again. Maybe he'd do an arc focusing on the kids, showing how their parents don't rape them, or he'd have Sonichu and the gang violently murder potential child molesters, like in M but without the satire (also, Chris isn't as charming as Peter Lorre). Frankly, I'd love to see more of Robbie and Co. specifically because of how vile they are. If we didn't want to read awful shit, we wouldn't be reading Sonichu.

I'm probably getting over-excited, but I do think we could be on to something. And considering how much we all hate those little fuzzbags, it would be 31 flavours of fun.

Chris-Chan the Superhero

Whenever anyone calls Chris on his unwarranted self-importance, he always insists that he doesn't think he's perfect. And the first (and last) flaw he admits to is his autism. He does this in one of the Alec phone calls; I can't remember which, and don't feel like looking it up. In Mailbags, Chris has occasionally said that he wishes he didn't have his autism.

And yet he is unusually proud of it at other times. It's usually one of the first things about himself he brings up when meeting a new person, or on his dating site profiles.

I've got a big ugly hairy birthmark on my leg, just above the knee. I've wished I didn't have it sometimes, and I've worried that it might be socially off-putting at pool parties. It may be part of the reason I don't wear shorts much. The point is, I don't bring up this birthmark at every possible opportunity the way Chris brings up his autism. I try not to think about it, because that way I can move past it. Chris doesn't want to move past his autism. He is, on some level, proud of it.

In Chris' mind, autism is like a superpower. He will gleefully use it to link himself to other famous Aspies like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo Buonarroti, both of whom were only probably autistic and were certainly gay as maypoles (seriously, have you ever really looked at the Sistine Chapel ceiling?). Chris doesn't mention Nicola Tesla much, because he's probably not learned enough to know who he was. Anyway, there have been many autistic people who were extremely talented (although I maintain that Raphael and Caravaggio were better painters than Leonardo and Michelangelo). Movies like Rain Man and its impersonators have mystified the hell out of autism; all fictional autistics are mathematical geniuses, brilliant code-crackers, or just plain psychic. Note that in The Areas of my Expertise, the only one who can understand the clicking language of the giant cockroaches from the movie Mimic is a small autistic child playing the spoons. That sentence probably makes no sense if you haven't read the book. So read it.

Anyway, when Chris says his autism is his one flaw, he doesn't really mean it. He sees it as a superpower that makes him smarter. It may seem counter-intuitive, then, for him to list it as a flaw, but ask yourself this: how many superheroes can you name who are unambiguously happy with their powers? There are a couple, like Human Torch or the occasional Green Lantern, but they mostly stand out in contrast. Spider-Man is always going on about how his powers are a curse. Superman never made any money for saving the world from Solomon Grundy. The 1602 version of Thor worries that his powers are a danger to his immortal soul. Utterly embracing your superpowers and admitting that they're a fantastic thing is more the realm of villains: guys like Magneto, Darryl Revok, General Zod, Voldemort, Green Goblin... I could go on. These guys want to enslave us normals and take their "rightful" place as king.

Chris thinks his autism is a superpower, but he wants to act humble about it because he thinks he's a superhero, and for his TV-raised mind, humility is part and parcel with heroics. Enjoy the paradox: he's pretending to be humble out of pompousness.

Chris the Rules Lawyer

On the Attraction Sign, Chris always limited himself to women 18 and up. The only restriction on his desire to nail Meg Griffin is the fact that Seth MacFarlane has to let her turn 18 first. But he makes no attempt to hide the fact that he finds her hot now. And he's gone on record as saying he thinks the legal age of consent should be lowered to 16.

Now, most of us would be capable of having sex with a girl (or guy, depending) who was a year or two underage. We could, but we wouldn't, because it's not appropriate. Balance of power, formative years, etc. Whereas with a 10-year old, we just plain couldn't. Ephebophilia is criminal, but it isn't necessarily perverted.

Perhaps partly due to his autism, Chris doesn't quite understand the subtle shades here. For him, everything is dichotomous: either something is legal and okay, or it's illegal and not okay. So if it became legal for him to go after 16-year olds, he'd do it in a heartbeat. It wouldn't occur to him that a lot of people would still look down on him for it, although if it did, he'd probably do it anyway.

When Chris condemned Jason Kendrick Howell for dating a girl who was below the legal age limit, I don't think that was just him being a hypocrite again (although his pursuit of Christina Trevillian certainly was). Chris (or so he tells himself) wouldn't go after underage girls unless it was legal. Jason was doing it already, and although he was probably only 19 or so at the time and most people wouldn't have much problem with the two-year age gap, this angered Chris. Possibly out of jealousy.

What Jason and Kathleen were doing (assuming they did it at all; I'm not sure they ever even dated, much less had sex) was technically illegal (I think; I'm not sure how Tennessee does it, but up here in Canada we've got a degree of wiggle room), but most people would find it socially acceptable. What Chris wants to do would be legal under the proposed circumstances, and that makes all the difference. He's not condemning their having sex, but he's condemning their violation of those dumb laws. Even though he thinks they're dumb, he still fears and obeys them.

What Chris cares about is the law itself, and not the reasoning for it or the social implications of it.