I’m gonna be sick. Look what they did to him. Imagine what it was like during those ten years at FearCo. Ten years. Over a decade of slow mental torture. And it shows.
Years dedicated and ultimately wasted on someone who doesn’t even see you as a person. Just to barely make enough money to stay alive.
Years spent solely on work and obedience and a single purpose, all while hanging onto the barely lingering hope that HE cares.
When deep down he knows, or has known for a while, that he doesn’t. And likely never has.
How does this relate to grooming, you may ask? Johnny doesn’t even like Chet.
But that’s it. He doesn’t like him, but he never pushes him away or gets rid of him because he’s USEFUL. He’s good for being used like a tool, as long as he feeds him little crumbs of attention just enough to make him think he cares.
And it never failed to reel him back in, in all those ten years.
And the worst part is the slow realization that the person you adore, who you think is the only one who loves you, never cared. And you’ve wasted your life on them, and now you’re nothing but an empty husk.
Grooming isn’t about attraction. It’s about having control over someone ‘weak’ and ruining their life by stripping them of their individuality and making them rely on you.
(Yes I am aware it’s ’not that deep’. Just let me indulge in my literary analysis)
Johnny is signing his paychecks, however small they may be. Chet, as far as Johnny is concerned, has no one. He literally has his life in his hands.
Do you think the baseball game was the first time in a while Chet got to go out and do something not (entirely) work related? And Johnny didn’t even let him play, even when he asked. He made him watch.
Chet’s notes also support this. “The ROR meetup was great, maybe next time I can join too” (not verbatim, something along those lines). That. Johnny has meet ups with the RORs but doesn’t include Chet. He is isolating him.
Chet is visibly suffering from depression. You can practically see how the light has left his eye since university. The nonstop work and abuse has left him a husk of his former self.
He doesn’t even have a cubicle. He’s just sat at a desk in the hallway by himself to further isolate him while he’s at work.
Even small details, down to the framed picture of him and Johnny on his desk. How it’s turned away from him, as if seeing how he used to be upsets him in some way. The picture itself also says a lot. The way Chet is blurry implies he moved into frame as the photo was being taken. He wasn’t supposed to be there. An afterthought.
At least Johnny didn’t immediately throw it out. At the very least.
His life revolves entirely around working, he doesn’t have the time, energy, or money to do anything for himself. He eats hot dogs over his kitchen sink for dinner.
And then Randall comes along. You can see how uncomfortable Chet gets around him, especially when he’s touching him.
This is the face of ‘Please god don’t touch me’. And of course the first thing Randall does is belittle and humiliate him.
I think Chet decided to ‘betray’ Johnny once Tylor brought up the risk of mixing laugh and screams.
Not for himself, but because other people’s safety was at stake.
Besides his final line to Johnny, he never really confronted him or stood up to him. Which is completely understandable if you know how terrifying it is to face the person who’s been controlling you.
We don’t know what happens to him after that, but I can only imagine how scary it’d be. What now? The person you’ve devoted your existence to is gone. You’re free, but at what cost?
Maybe there’s times where he regrets getting him arrested. Where he wants to go back just so he can have a sense of normalcy and purpose again, to run back into the cage or beg for forgiveness even though Chet knows what happened to him was wrong.
Everything he’s done was for Johnny. What does he have now that he’s gone? He gave everything, and now he’s empty inside. Ten years, all gone.
I know he’s a comedic relief character, but I can’t help but notice how incredibly tragic his story is, and in such a realistic way, too.
