User:Canine/TV Tropes

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For several years, not only has Christian and the Hedgehog Boys's music been featured on their So Bad It's Horrible pages and did he have a list on the Memetic Mutation page, TV Tropes has featured an article on Sonichu. As is the case with nearly any work, the article chronicled "devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations". Being the massive pile of fail that it is, Sonichu provided plenty.

However, the page also led to vast amounts of edit-warring, trolling, and complaining — all of which have caused many a headache on TV Tropes. Sometime in mid-2010, the main article was locked so that only administrators could edit it, and pared down to have a less negative tone. All the tropes pertaining to Chris in real life were also removed, as TV Tropes admins especially dislike negativity and/or complaining that pertains to real people. The pages for Asperchu were also cut down in a similar fashion. Many other TV Tropes articles on complaint magnets such as My Immortal, Fifty Shades of Grey, and Fox News Channel have been similarly locked.[1] As with any other page that is locked, those wishing to make alterations to the article may inquire at this thread.

The article once contained subpages for "Just Bugs Me" (now called Headscratchers), in which editors could raise questions about a work, and "Wild Mass Guessing", mainly for making joke-y predictions about a work's future. These were also deleted to help stem the complaining and trolling. At one point, a biographical article on Chris existed at the title "CWC". Its contents are unknown, but they were likely identical to the real-life section seen below. The "CWC" page was quickly deleted, and it was probably locked around the same time as the main Sonichu article to prevent re-creation. Another Sonichu-related page that disappeared in this timeframe was the one on Moon-Pals, although this was as much due to that work going offline as it was for the negativity towards Chris.

Around the time that the Sonichu page was locked, the site introduced several more tabs to help in the diffusion of tropes. "YMMV" lists tropes that are subjective in nature; "Characters" is meant to list tropes that pertain only to an individual character; and "Trivia" for facts on a work that are not really tropes, but still worth noting. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Sonichu's "YMMV" tab is also locked.) Several tropes, such as "So Bad, It's Horrible" and "Wall Banger", have migrated to a subsection called the "Darth Wiki" and their pages explicitly say not to list them on main articles, and "Wall Banger" was later deleted entirely.

Below is an archive of the Sonichu article on TV Tropes dating from approximately June 2010, shortly before admins took a chainsaw to it. Note that several tropes have since been renamed, while "Did Not Do the Research" has been deleted due to mass complaining and misuse. Also, TV Tropes no longer supports strikethrough code due to abuse. Outside the replacement of links using the now-outdated "ptitle" system (a former method of customizing page titles), and the updating of links to the CWCipedia archive and the new Encyclopedia Dramatica, no links have been changed.


For the Just Bugs Me and Wild Mass Guessing pages, see this page.



Go! Sonichu! Go out and zap to the extreme!
Sonichu #0
Tell me about it on CWC. Geez, when you have me facepalming at you, you have got to be pretty bad off.
David Gonterman

There is Artemis' Lover. There is Agony In Pink. There is The Girl Who Lived. There is My Immortal. There is My Inner Life. Many demonstrations could be made for the ascendant terribleness of such works, putting them above all lesser bad fanworks.

But then, standing resplendent above them all, there is Sonichu.

Sonichu was a fan TRUE and ORIGINAL webcomic created by one Christian Weston Chandler, starring (at least initially) the eponymous Electric Hedgehog Pokémon and his friends. The comic itself would be remarkable only for how unbelievably bad it is, but it has in recent years gained notoriety due to the author's antics in response to trolling and other harassment. The result is a perversely-fascinating, deeply-dysfunctional, symbiotic relationship - Mr. Chandler's creation has been saved from the curse of obscurity at the price of a "fanbase" devoted to making his life a living hell.

Sonichu started as some sort of Pokémon/Sonic The Hedgehog crossover world, and the first few issues focus on Sonichu's origin, his meeting with his "heartsweet" Rosechu (based heavily on Amy Rose), and a supporting cast of other Hedgehog Pokémon of various types. But in issue #2 and from issues #4-7, the series crystallizes into its present form, as Christian himself takes center stage and encounters and battles his enemies in real life, from mall cops to the dean of his local community college to internet trolls. Needless to say, the supposed main plot, a search for the Sonichu Bal- sorry, Sonichu Crystals, in order to use their powers to free Christian's Distaff Counterpart and "dream sibling", Crystal, from a mirror the aforementioned dean have trapped her in, takes a backseat.

Due to criticism over such a self-centered plotline, Christian eventually gets trapped in a timestream, leaving Sonichu to take up his heroic mantle of defender of CWCville. The war against Encyclopedia Dramatica and "Four-Cent Garbage" rages on, interrupted by the occasional furry sex scene, until issue #9 changes focus (again) to dating education (no, not sex education) and Christian's crude interpretation of how relationships work.

The last chapter of issue 9 depicts a lengthy battle against invading forces from the PVCC, and ends with Sonichu and friends beating them with as much resistance as a team of Mary Sues typically gets. Christian's Author Avatar is released from the timestream shortly afterwards, and this cues the beginning of Issue #10, which can best be described as a combination of undisguised Wish Fulfillment and Christian's attempt to get back at his internet antagonizers by turning both his avatar and Sonichu into bigger God Mode Sues than ever, via the Sonichu Crystals Balls, and depict them punishing in-comic representations of his enemies by either killing or injuring them, destroying their property or making them pray to him for forgiveness. As the story progresses, Christian's feud with his "enemies" from real life becomes increasingly more disturbing, and its culmination in issue #10 finale can be most charitably described as the ultimate proof that Christian is in dire need of psychiatric help. It's worth noting that in this issue Christian frequently derailed the plot so he could devote several pages to "punishing" comic books versions of people who "wronged" him most recently; by contrast, (supposedly) important plot threads (such as Crystal being trapped in Dark Mirror Hole, or Christian's feud with college dean) were resolved quickly and anticlimactically. This sequence of events create probably the most unplanned and, for newcomers, incomprehensible storyline so far in Sonichu. Christian (once again) promised that in the future issues he will give the spotlight to Sonichu and that his Author Avatar won't appear so often. However, he isn't famous for keeping his promises (having made this exact one before), so future issues can be expected to be similar storyline-wise to Sonichu 10, with new real life-based enemies introduced as more trolling undoubtedly will continue to rain down upon him. (That is, of course, assuming there will be new issues at all, which might not happen in the foreseeable future. Christian hasn't uploaded any new pages since February 2010 and is deeply offended even by mere suggestions that he should update his own webcomic. It seems that he decided to devote his time to more entertaining activities instead, such as masturbating, playing video games and whining about them on the internet, continuing his Quest For Sex on the internet, condemning internet and claiming that he is "active within his community".)

Since this comic blurs the line between fiction and reality so much, a deep understanding of Mr. Chandler's life and psyche is required to make any sense of it. The best source would be the CWCki, an entire wiki cataloging Mr. Chandler's life and works (warning: some pages and images are definitely Not Sage For Work or your mental health), while the even more NSFW Encyclopedia Dramatica page that started this whole mess can be found here. Mr. Chandler's own websites tend to be hacked and deleted with some degree of regularity. He used to have his own Sonichu wiki which could be found here; however, in response to trolls hacking and vandalizing his precious wiki (again), on 27 May 2010 he announced his decision to "relinquish what was the Cwcipedia" while "keeping ownership of what it was before yesterday". In response Vivian Gee and Alec Benson Leary took control of CWCipedia and claimed all rights to Sonichu; at the beginning of June 2010 the control of CWCipedia apparently was taken over by a mysterious individual who may or may not be the TRUE and HONEST CWC.* Well, actually it's definitely not CWC, but it's fun to pretend otherwise. And who knows, maybe it's a beginning of new saga...

Compare the Gonter Verse, Silent Hill, Hell. See also Asperchu and Moon-Pals, two much better series that you probably should be reading instead of this one, if you aren't already.

Please note that several links on this page are not work safe. Don't forget to keep the Brain Bleach close by should you decide to visit any of them, worksafe or otherwise.




But the Sonichu phenomenon cannot be contained by the comic itself. Because Christian Weston Chandler's life is inextricably intertwined with the stories he writes and his interactions with his "fanbase", just as many tropes can be applied to his not-so-private life as to his comic. Sonichu has also inspired a unique type of FanFic, the "trollfic" (not to be confused with a Troll Fic), a normal fanfic with the characters' moral alignments usually flipped. Meanwhile the blogcasts and chat channels the author uses to communicate with people can be more interesting than the actual comic, and offer profound insights into the mind of Mr. Chandler.



References

External Links