Amarna Forum

Christian Weston Chandler is a very important character, one who warrants study deeper than the gawking and finger-wagging that makes up most online discussion of him. Anyone who grew up in America (or a country in the American sphere of influence) post-1980 will resonate with CWC in a perverse way, for his works - in fact, his entire life - present a perverse corruption of the American Dream.

Chris-Chan was born of generic Anglo-American stock, to a well-off though dysfunctional family. His father was an accomplished engineer, his mother an unremarkable accountant (who nonetheless claimed noble descent); both parents had married, raised children, and divorced prior to settling down together in middle age. After long, eventful lives, Bob and Barb Chandler wanted to have one last child, someone to keep them company, perhaps support them in their golden years; they would end up birthing an abomination and a lifelong burden.


Well, calling him an abomination is a bit of a stretch. Nothing particularly horrible happened to Chris-Chan to make him the way he was. Sure, he was born with autism; but many autistic people - some lower-functioning than him - manage to live dignified and productive lives. Sure, his parents were negligent and coddling, and he no doubt inherited their character; but the poor breeding and upbringing of American "white trash" usually manifests in much more mundane dysfunctions than Chris's: excessive drinking, wife-beating, perhaps a short-lived and life-shortening fentanyl habit. Sure, he was brutally trolled and abused by hundreds of different people; but his most fascinating qualities, the ones that attracted trolls in the first place, were planted firmly in his mind before the internet discovered him, and changed very little despite years of ruthless criticism from both trolls and well-meaning people. In fact, Chris's worst trolls were the ego-syntonic ones, those who appealed to his pre-existing character traits and delusions to manipulate him into doing their bidding.

What makes Chris-Chan's case even more egregious is that he was brought up in a time of American prosperity and cultural dominance. His spectacular failure was a death by a thousand cuts, an overlap of dozens of societal failures - dysgenics, widespread divorce, late marriage, hormonal disruptions, dysfunctional families, failing schools, corrosive pop culture, poor accommodation of the mentally ill - which have since grown to devour the prosperity we used to have. If we measure "Chris-Chan-ness" as a single scalar quantity, the average Zoomer is probably a hundred times more Chris-Chan-like than the average Millennial, and a thousand times more Chris-Chan-like than the average Boomer; in fact, I reckon that Chris would be able to live out some semblance of a functioning life in modern-day Portland or San Francisco.

This is a summary of my thoughts on Chris's life in general. Future posts in this thread will go into the specifics of his upbringing, the Sonichu webcomic, the trolls' impact on his life (or rather, the nigh-total lack thereof), and how he may be able to pass as "normal" nowadays.

(06-05-2022, 04:30 PM)Chud Wrote: [ -> ]how he may be able to pass as "normal" nowadays

While it's true that Chris's weirdness relative to general society had been rapidly decreasing (he embedded himself quite naturally into twitter tranny culture), his arrest definitely shoved him over the line; most people don't come back from writing rambling letters about how they're god. Also, I'm interested to see why you think that trolling didn't have a major impact on Chris; in my opinion the knowledge that he has an "audience" of sorts was a big factor in developing the stunted sense of self that lead to his current divine delusions.

I think Chris Chandler resembles a mentally handicapped L. Ron Hubbard more than anything else:

- inability to separate fantasy from reality
- zero inhibition against plagiarism
- focus on popular escapist art
- creative output based on combining multiple derivative ideas
- sex obsession
- belief that any day now a transformative event will give them godlike powers and fix all of their problems
- delusions of being Christ / Anti-Christ
- lack of any financial discipline
- prone to bouts of severe dejection
- paranoia
- large following dedicated to preserving their works and biographical information



When I heard about the time when Hubbard wrote to President Reagan asking him to abolish the income tax, what struck me is how reminiscent of Chris Chan, how childishly egocentric, it was. If Chris had 20 more IQ points and ended up in severe trouble with the IRS because Sonichu became a best seller he would have done the exact same thing.

I think it's wrong to look and Chris or Ron as products of 'societal failure'. Of course in another time they may have turned out better, but the same could be said of anybody. They were born weird, and if society in general comes to resemble them it's because they were genuine pioneers in some odd way.

Stop misgendering her.

(06-06-2022, 09:02 AM)Guest Wrote: [ -> ]Stop misgendering her.

No.

(06-06-2022, 12:49 AM)obscurefish Wrote: [ -> ]I think Chris Chandler resembles a mentally handicapped L. Ron Hubbard more than anything else:

- inability to separate fantasy from reality
- zero inhibition against plagiarism
- focus on popular escapist art
- creative output based on combining multiple derivative ideas
- sex obsession
- belief that any day now a transformative event will give them godlike powers and fix all of their problems
- delusions of being Christ / Anti-Christ
- lack of any financial discipline
- prone to bouts of severe dejection
- paranoia
- large following dedicated to preserving their works and biographical information



When I heard about the time when Hubbard wrote to President Reagan asking him to abolish the income tax, what struck me is how reminiscent of Chris Chan, how childishly egocentric, it was. If Chris had 20 more IQ points and ended up in severe trouble with the IRS because Sonichu became a best seller he would have done the exact same thing.

I think it's wrong to look and Chris or Ron as products of 'societal failure'. Of course in another time they may have turned out better, but the same could be said of anybody. They were born weird, and if society in general comes to resemble them it's because they were genuine pioneers in some odd way.

The fundamental difference between Chandler and Hubbard is that Chandler's memory is preserved in a completely ironic fashion. No one (except maybe a hundred persons at the extreme) actually cares about what Chris Chan believed or his opinions, except in regards to morbid curiosity BECAUSE of his downfall, not for their own sake. Hubbard on the meanwhile founded an organisation valued in the billions and operates on ever inhabited continent.

That is the distinction. Hubbard lives in the shadow of Scientology, while Sonichu lives in the shadow of Chris.

Josh / Null had a good explanation. He's sort of like a petri dish of what the culture is doing or indicative of where it's going. Chris was a brony before the iteration of the show that became popular. He was also a proto incel. Or incel 1.0 if you will. Also obviously a tranny before the huge explosion of trannys. We can reasonably expect an increase in incest in the coming years too (which I'm seeing evidence of already)

Excellent summation. Chris Chan is also, like KingCobraJFS and other lolcows, a product of too much media saturation. The problem has grown exponentially worse since Chan's heyday on the earliest incarnation of YouTube and other websites. "Touching grass" is hardly viable now when multi-media experiences can be so easily accessed anywhere and at anytime. We live in a hyper-real reality wherein Internet avatars are friends, the Internet is as a real as the material world, and millions of people, especially young Westerners and East Asians, have plugged themselves into the Internet so much that their digital self is the primary "mask" (to use an overwrought psycho-babble term).

Chris Chan is also the most documented man in history, thus leading me to believe that future scholars are going to think some strange things about our civilization.

i had this laying in drafts for a while, it's ill-thought-out and poorly organized

Some thunkful themes in Sonichu:

An anthropomorphic, benevolent, pity-seeking god.

The pagan gods were anthropomorphic, (somewhat) limited to their domains, and human-like in their motives. The Christian God is incorporeal, all-powerful, and wishes infinite good upon human beings to the point where He is willing to suffer on their behalf. Comic-Chris is a fusion of both: anthropomorphic, all-powerful in his world (though impotent in the outer world), and infinitely benevolent (though human in his suffering). Chris gives his heroes everything they need: he ensures they have a high place in society, always triumph over evil, are romantically paired, etc.; all he asks in return is that they sympathize with their lonely, misunderstood creator. There's an evocative scene in "The Rise and Fall of My Heart" (Issue #1 p.40) where Rosechu appears to Chris in the mall as a sort of bicameral projection, relaying news of his good fortune to a cheering crowd back home, then providing counsel to protect him from heartbreak.

The Christian God was willing to sacrifice his only Son for the good of mankind; the God Christian skips the self-sacrifice part, opting instead to grant Electric-Hedgehog-Kind infinite good as long as they act as his personal therapy support group.

A creator who hides nothing from his creation.

Sonichu knows that Chris created him; endowed him with his current motives and abilities; and occasionally comes down from the heavens, armed with godlike powers, to discuss the process of creation with the residents of his comic universe (see Issue #0 p.27). None of this disturbs him in the slightest. He submits to Chris of his own free will, and jumps headfirst into new adventures reassured by the knowledge that author-God is on his side.

The idea that your very existence is at a creator's whim is a terrifying one, and this terror undergirds all monotheistic religions. Works of fiction where the main characters are trapped in such a predicament usually center around rebellion (ex. the Matrix) or despair (ex. this concept album from the perspective of malfunctioning Vocaloid software). But with neither of those human responses present things start to get creepy.

I remember being very young and feeling a deep sense of uncanny-valley at live-action kids' shows. I wasn't old enough to "get" suspension of disbelief, so the fact that the whole universe obviously centered around the TV camera disturbed me. I wasn't old enough to "get" groyperous sadism either, so the fact that I was watching slaves engaging in completely pointless escapades inside a glass box upset me greatly. Sonichu evokes that same kind of uncanny but in a funny way because the creator is so stupid and his intentions so obvious. It's a plain record of an adult child playing with his toys.

(07-28-2022, 06:34 PM)Michael Wrote: [ -> ]We can reasonably expect an increase in incest in the coming years too (which I'm seeing evidence of already)

All right, back to this thread as promised. I'm pleased to see our friend obscurefish's post above, the direction I want to take this thread isn't totally untouched.

I greatly admire Chris Chan as an outsider artist. As we went into in the shoutbox before, it's a question of audacity. This shameless egotism which is one of the essential parts of successful genius. And a strange point where genius overlaps with the moron and the criminal character. His approach to "art" and creation is instinctively unconstrained. He does not bother with how things are supposed to be and what he is or is not allowed to do. I believe that this is a very hard thing to do. And his magpie like relationship with existing media that he likes I believe is also completely correct and proper. A healthy artistic instinct he is not intelligent enough to develop a disrupting neurosis over.







This is what healthy artists from healthy cultures do.

When Chris Chan wants to create he simply sets to work piling up and synthesising everything he enjoys. His creation process is a chaotic workshop of pure self satisfaction. And as for the results, it's a simple fact that his work holds the attention of the world far better than the overwhelming majority of aspiring online artists.

Yes, this is due to the widespread interest in Chris-Chan as an individual. But that's more to the strength of his art. That it is so shamelessly and utterly personal. If you are interested in Chris you read him clearly by looking at his creative output. And if you are interested in his creative output you clearly read him through it. If only all artists could be so spiritually correct.

This video is one of his more modest and less talked about efforts, but I believe it to be one of his strongest showings. I'm also a fan of his LittleBigPlanet showings. What I love about this is how utterly personal it is. And look at the date. Chris Chan arguably created the Let's Play. And I would also say that he was the best at it. The internet is now loaded with countless hours of ostensibly similar projects. But here I am sharing this one of all of them. I genuinely cannot tell you a clear point to why the majority of let's plays exist. They are at heart merely neurotic and half-hearted attempts at what Chris Chan unconsciously perfected first try before the idea was a seed in anybody else's minds. The point of a Let's Play is to make a display of yourself through somebody else's creation. And Chris Chan is more interesting than most people who have ever used the internet, and puts more of himself into his let's play than anybody else who has ever dared follow him.



Another post or thread could be made on how heavily youtube was pioneered by a similar spirit of retard-audacity. Chris Chan, James Rolfe, and Doug Walker are three of the most culturally influential men alive today because of a combination of bravery and lateral thinking on how to use and combine media to create new things. I may post more on Chris's art in the near future but for now I think I'll let the point settle, and hopefully stoke some more interest in this thread and subject.