Chris and manipulation

“	For every trolling saga, there was a bunch of stuff happening in the background. [Chris's] reactions on youtube were highly inflated by troll girlfriends whispering shit to him behind the scenes. "Oh Chris, you're not just going to take that, are you? Chris, I need a man who can stand up for himself, not just a little wuss..." It takes quite a bit to whip Chris up into a frenzy. And it's hard to keep it going.	”
The Man in the Pickle Suit on how trolls manipulated Chris into performing in many of his rage videos.

Chris's experience with the trolls in a nutshell

Manipulation is a psychological tactic aimed at taking advantage of someone in order for them to perform a specific action. This has been a key technique used by Chris's trolls, his enablers, and his mother.

Overview

It isn’t particularly difficult to trick Chris into anything. In fact, doing so proved to be as simple as 1 2 3. All any of his manipulators had to do was follow a simple 3 step procedure to convince him into doing anything they wanted him to:

1. Bribery: Give Chris an offer for something he’d really want. Alternatively, feed into Chris’s beliefs.
2. Instructions: Provide Chris with over the top steps he can take to take the offer or so that he can roleplay with you.
3. Betrayal: Watch him do it, and betray him. Rinse, Dry and Repeat.

As an example, Chris’s history of being manipulated began with him being tricked into crawling into a tight space by childhood friend Sarah Hammer when she told him that she found Casper the Friendly Ghost there. Sarah simply noticed that Chris had a fascination with cartoon characters being real, and knew this was the perfect opportunity to give Chris the offer of meeting him in person (step 1). She then told him that he could see Casper if he would crawl into the hole (step 2). Finally, she got to lock him in, and began watching the events that would follow. (step 3)

Behind the scenes of trolling

“	Trolling is necessary for Chris to be as funny as everyone expects him to be. People don't like to hear this, because they want to believe Chris is a crazy, three ring circus of fun, 24/7. But he's really not. He's got his moments, but he's a phenomenon that needs to be curated if you want to experience the old school trolling days.	”
The Man in the Pickle Suit

One of Chris's former trolls, The Man in the Pickle Suit, has often posted on Kiwi Farms on how trolls manipulated Chris behind the scenes. Hundreds of hours worth of calls between Chris and the trolls took place - much of it never released. Information was also omitted on the CWCki, which several trolls were members of, to paint a funnier picture of Chris - a side-effect of which has created a skewed impression of him to fans.

In the background calls, people would plant ideas in Chris's head and goad him into making videos. One such example is Twin Falling Towers, a 2009 video in which Chris invoked the 9/11 tragedy to diss Clyde Cash. The Man in the Pickle Suit described how the trolls talked to Chris behind the scenes to get him to make the video as:

be sure to mention that you think he's weak! call him weak, like some sort of big disaster, like a bridge collapsing. ooh, or compare him to 9/11! that'll embarrass him!

Other examples include CWC Calls Out Three Naïve YouTubers, a set of videos in which Chris lambasted fan Sonichuizcool (trolls had planted the idea in his head that she was secretly a troll); the Cwcsicle video in which he jammed his penis in the snow; and the Liquid Chris saga (Chris originally didn't want to react to Liquid but the trolls forced his hand with artificial reasons)

Trolls also exploited their knowledge of Chris's psychology to goad him to get angry in his videos:

Chris usually reacts to a specific stimulus, and has a short memory about those sorts of things. Like a goldfish. So in any video where Chris is specifically trying to act like Johnny Bravo, that was almost always in response to a request by us no older than 24 hours. We would hype Chris up about how he's being called a pussy, and how if he doesn't make a video soon, he'll lose the rights to Sonichu.

The Truman Show

Chris's situation with the trolls has been compared to The Truman Show, a fictional film with a plot about the main character being unaware he is living in a reality TV show. In Chris’s case, he has been manipulated by trolls for the sole purpose of making him into a circus act for people to laugh at. A lot of where Chris is now is in part due to past interactions with trolls.

Boiling frog fable

In the years post-2011, Chris has become increasingly vulnerable to the concept of 'creeping normality', often represented through the fable of the boiling frog, in which it was thought that by slowly heating a pan of water with a frog inside to a boil, the frog would not recognise it was in danger and leave, instead being cooked in the water, as opposed to immediately putting it in already hot water, in which case it would quickly jump out. In a manner similar to the boiling frog, Chris is increasingly unable to recognise when he has been the target of manipulation without being told outright by others that said manipulation has taken place. In 2018, when the Idea Guys manipulated Chris in ways darker than had ever been attempted before, including systematically dismantling his imaginary world and its cast of characters, extorting vast sums of money from him and threatening to report him to the FBI on false allegations of paedophilia, Chris was gaslit to the point of completely believing everything the Idea Guys said to him.

While the efforts of the Guard Dogs minimally restored Chris's self-awareness to the point that he will level angry asides at the Idea Guys for their extortion in his videos, as demonstrated in those during the Soft Exile saga, Chris still wholeheartedly believes in modifications the Idea Guys made to both the Sonichu canon and real world aspects of Chris's life, to the point that he appears from the outside to be no longer able to discern this 'new normal' from that which came before it, thus being affected by creeping normality.

Social engineering

“	Chris believes in crazy tv hacker stereotypes. That's why we always so easily told him we hacked into his phone or his email and blamed all our leaks on that. Our various troll girlfriends got away, scot-free.	”
The Man in the Pickle Suit

Trolls exploited Chris's naive nature to gain access to his accounts in order to leak emails or videos. After they had gained Chris's trust via a girlfriend persona, she would ask him for passwords and then blame any leaks that occurred on hacking. Chris would then change his password while simply handing the e-girlfriend the new one since he still trusted her.

This practice came to a farcical head during the Teen Troon Squad saga, when the Squad and Guard Dogs factions engaged in a tug-of-war over Chris. The Squad would log into Chris's accounts and post "information" from Magi-Chan about the Dimensional Merge, and the Guard Dogs, also having Chris's passwords, countered with their own "information" trying to lead Chris away from thinking about the Merge, the conflict causing confusion in Chris, who wanted to trust both sides.

Chris in-between the trolling

“	Without stimuli like the trolls [goading him to get angry], Chris just kind of fell back into his natural state: being a manchild, playing with toys, and wanting his heartsweet to take care of him.	”
The Man in the Pickle Suit

Since his discovery by the internet in 2007, there have been instances where activity fell to the point that Chris was temporarily without manipulation from trolls or enablers. Left to his own devices, Chris would drop off the internet and concentrate on the real world instead. In one instance in July 2009, taking place at a time when trolling activity was less concentrated than it had previously been, Chris even attempted to carry out a bit of manipulation of his own through the video Rollin' and Trollin', a failed effort to get his internet followers off his back by manipulating them into thinking he had been faking every aspect of his presence online since his discovery; this ironically only resulted in further attention being directed towards him rather than it being taken away.

“	We held him online. If someone's not actively compelling Chris to do stupid stuff online, he slides off.	”
The Man in the Pickle Suit

An example of this can be seen in Chris's internet activity following his father's death. At that point, the classic troll cabal voluntarily relinquished their control over Chris to allow him to grieve. As a direct result, Chris stopped recording wacky videos online (hence the abrupt end of the Calling Out saga). After gradually overcoming his paranoia after years of troll manipulation, Chris began to make real world friendships, such as his Pokémon League friends.

Manipulators at War: Sockness and Co. vs. MKR and Co.

During the latter half of 2019, tensions between Chris's Enablers and manipulators came to a head, especially as Jacob Sockness, one of Chris's principal manipulators at the time, was attempting to close his jaws firmly around Chris's imaginary world and even worm his way into a physical relationship. Sockness and his ilk came under fire from a separate group of enablers headed by MKRNightVee, another enabler vying for Chris's attention. In a vain attempt to gain control over the situation, Sockness and his key allies attempted to manipulate Chris into believing that MKR and her allies were against him, and were enemies of the supposed prophecy Sockness claimed would take place if he were to meet Chris in person. As Sockness attempted to mastermind this plan, he even ended up getting into conflict with Chris-themed YouTubers and observers such as GiBi and Dillin Thomas, attempting to silence their coverage of the growing shitstorm.

Ultimately, it took Chris himself standing in the way of Sockness's efforts to put an end to his plan; With Chris being Chris, he believed that the Enablers were his friends, and torn between who to believe, chose to rebuke Sockness for this attempt to turn his supposed friends against him, in a rare moment of clarity not commonly seen since the arrival of the Idea Guys the year previously. Notably, even though Chris stood between Sockness's manipulation and those he believed to be on his side, he failed to realise that even the Enablers acting out of some misguided sense of duty were manipulators themselves.

Chris's mother

Barbara is often blamed for essentially being Chris’s original enabler, in that she was the one who made him puerile and egocentric in the first place. She is also deemed to be the one responsible for Chris constantly taking orders from random strangers without giving it a second thought. In the past, some of Barb's attempts at controlling Chris were nothing short of manipulation; examples include threatening to lock Chris out of the house and leave him homeless if he dared travel further than a few miles out of town after the Ohio Trip, as well as feigning cardiac arrest to bring Chris into line, terrifying him to the point of calling 911 on several occasions.

Perhaps the most notable incident involving this sort of manipulation took place in 2011; Chris had planned to visit that year's MAGfest convention, but realised that he didn't have enough of his Monthly Tugboat left to afford a hotel room, so he instead opted to sleep in his car. After informing his parents of his plans, Barb gaslit him into backpedalling, firstly by claiming he could be at risk from a combination of criminals and cold temperatures, then by again threatening to leave him homeless, and finally by implying that she would commit suicide if Chris went to the convention. A distraught Chris cancelled his plans, and received only further guilt tripping (and a small dose of vidya) as consolation.

See Also

• Trolls
• Enablers