I’ve had a couple of people express confusion about the fact that I hate this kid so much more than the genuinely gross asshole creep Kawazu, so let’s go on a tangent and talk about someone I hate talking about in any way, shape, or form: Christine Weston Chandler.
And boy howdy should you stop reading here if you don’t like hearing about this creep, because--not joking--my autistic ass has nightmares about her.
CWC is the autistic author of the infamously awful webcomic Sonichu, wherein a Sonic/Pikachu OC has adventures in a utopian town populated by other Sonic character/Pokemon fusions. It’s poorly drawn, even more poorly written, and would have been consigned to the heap of innocently terrible internet fancomics except for two things.
First, Sonichu caught the attention of 4chan.
Second, Sonichu held the attention of 4chan, because Christine is the walking fusion of the worst social stereotypes of autistic people and basement-dwelling neckbeards.
We’re talking about someone who once walked through a crowded mall trailing a paper heart on a string, “fishing” for a true love. Completely seriously. Someone who has been banned from several places for creeping on people and given restraining orders multiple times if I recall correctly. Someone who would sign off the end of Sonichu chapters with a completely serious “Remember, stay straight, kids!” That’s just a small sampling of her antics--which she completely unironically thought were normal behavior, mind you--and that’s not even getting into her squabbles with 4chan.
4chan mocked CWC, as 4chan is wont to do. CWC responded directly, attempting to refute their mocking jabs as if you could argue with trolls in any kind of successful manner. When they ramped up their mockery in return, she ramped up alongside them, eventually culminating in trolling wars with such highlights as tracing her dick to prove it wasn’t weirdly shaped and devoting an entire section of Sonichu to a trial of her biggest and most vocal trolls that ended with their torture and violent deaths.
God, this is just the tip of the iceberg. I spent a couple nights voraciously reading up everything I could on her back when I stumbled across this walking nightmare in college, and have regretted it ever since. If this account sounds vague, it’s because I’ve blotted out and aggressively avoided anything to do with CWC in the last five years or so because of what she does to me psychologically. Talking about her tends to give me panic attacks, actually, but since Paranoia Agent episodes seem to be the Loreweaver Talks About Mental Illness Power Hour, let’s lay this out.
I am autistic. I was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome at age 21 prior to it being merged with the general autism diagnosis, and that retroactively explained SO much about the way I acted as a child and growing up--the stuff that was in retrospect sensory issues or my having the social skills of a dry clam, for example. (One of the primary defining traits of autistic folk, as far as I have experienced, is that we simply don’t come packaged with the mental software that absorbs, processes, and replicates subtle, situational, or nonverbal social cues and language that neurotypical people have installed right out of the gate.) As a child, my only diagnoses were ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder; the doctors at the time didn’t even think to think that somebody as evidently “functional” as me, with a high tested IQ, could be described as autistic. Medical understanding of autism has come a long way since then, but growing up, all I knew was that other kids thought I was weird, and that I got interesting reactions out of them by playing it up and taunting them about it.
That all changed when I was a little older than Yuichi.
Heading out of middle school, I was upset that people didn’t like me--what wasn’t to like? I was so much smarter and more fun than any of them--and lamenting the cruelty of the world when I got to thinking.
It’s a long story and this post is already getting long, but the short version is that I figured out the whole “If everyone you meet is an asshole, you’re probably the asshole” principle, and then dedicated my teenage years to mentally beating myself up if I stepped out of line from how I thought a neurotypical person would act. I didn’t know the words “pass for neurotypical” at the time, of course, but I wrapped myself tighter and tighter around those vague and nebulous rules until I started to crack under the pressure. I developed chronic depression and an untreated anxiety disorder, and that little voice in the back of your head? The one that lists out every embarrassing thing you’ve done when it’s three in the morning and you’re begging your body for sleep? That was on full blast, all the time.
I am who I am today because I forced myself to learn how to understand and appreciate other people, but I did it in such a damaging way that it was essentially chronic self-harm...and when I see other people who don’t understand the lessons I whipped myself with all those years, who act not just in socially clueless ways but in actively creepy ways or condescending narcissistic ways, that voice in the back of my head starts shouting again about how terrible I am and how many mistakes I’ve made.
Every time I come across CWC in a discussion on the internet, this happens. Every time. I’m having kind of a rough time typing all of this out, actually. CWC is the worst timeline version of myself. She’s emotionally stunted, narcissistic, arrogant in spite of her incompetence, and most importantly, at least when I last looked into her seriously, was completely incurious and unwilling to consider self-improvement. She is my worst self-loathing made flesh, and my emotional reaction to coming across people that embody the worst aspects of myself, the ones I’ve done my best to purge over the years? It’s high-strung, turbulent anger.
In the same way that I see a lot of who I could have become in CWC, I see a lot of who I was in Yuichi--the smugness, the arrogance, the self-importance, the condescension, the narcissism. Unlike Kawazu, who has underdog elements and actually is shown working and struggling for his goals to some extent--and whose job is literally to ask questions and investigate things--Yuichi is just...an ass. THAT is why I react so much more violently to him than to Kawazu. Kawazu is regular, mundane awfulness; Yuichi is a dark mirror of myself.
Man, that sounds pretentious, doesn’t it.
Anyways. I’m gonna go take a quick break after typing all of this up. Whoof. That’s why I dislike the kid so much, emotional reactions, self-loathing, yadda yadda. See you in a couple minutes for the rest of the session.