Things I think about while watching "Chris Chan: a Comprehensive History"
Surely, there's something deeper here than the endless sweetheart cycle...
To watch the full documentary series, check out Geno Samuel’s YouTube channel. I will link episode one below!
Every so often during my journeys on the web, I’ve stumbled upon bits of media that trap me in deep thought cycles. These are the types of content that impact you with such oddity and ill-designed profundity that you have no choice but to know more; the sorts of rabbit holes that spiral on endlessly into the gaping maw of internet lore. All of this to say- in 2019, I discovered the documentary YouTube playlist “Chris Chan: a Comprehensive History,” and I don’t think I’ve been the same person since.
Written and narrated by creator Geno Samuel, the unfinished 85 part series details the life of Christine (formerly Christian) Weston Chandler of Ruckersville Virginia. To the uninitiated, Christine is an autistic transgender artist and lolcow who came to prominence during the wild west of Web 1.0. She was particularly famous for her brand of poorly-drawn comics featuring ‘Sonichu: the Electric Hedgehog Pokemon,’ an impoverished knockoff of the Sonic and Pokemon IPs originally conceived to skirt copyright restrictions in one of her highschool classes. However, Christine’s fate as an internet legend was really sealed when she was discovered by the communities on 4chan and SomethingAwful. Her combination of deep gullibility, odd mannerisms, and genuinely reprehensible behaviours made her an easy target for trolls, leading to a viscous cycle of bullying that would never fly in today’s sanitised social media environment.
This cycle of trolling and later attempts to document Christine’s life (known within the community as ‘Christory’) has produced one of the most compelling tales of the whole odd-internet iceberg. This series of unfortunate events can be seen variably as one of the most detailed portraits of an outsider artist, possibly in human history; a set of incredibly iconic and entertaining moments which live on in our contemporary meme culture; and bouts of debauchery so deeply repulsive and perverse that I shudder to repeat some of the more graphic examples, such as the 2021 revelation that Christine had committed regular sexual assaults against her elderly mother over several months. It’s all so awful. But why can’t I look away?
Despite the dry presentation and the matter-of-fact affect adopted by Geno, the docu-series remains deeply engaging through the sheer absurdity of its contents. I have now re-watched Chris Chan: a Comprehensive History over four times, totalling more than 220 hours of watchtime and about 9 days. Each time I return, I discover new lenses of analysis that give me deeper insight into an aspect of the story that I hadn’t considered before. I have spent a week of my limited time on Earth staring into the abyss of the Chris Chan saga, and if I don’t talk about it with someone right now, I will explode.
So without further ado, here are three thought spirals I’ve fallen into as I’ve experienced my latest marathon of Chris Chan: a Comprehensive History.
1) Chris has ‘egg’ written all over her.
One of the most controversial aspects of Chris’ story amongst Christorians is her gender transition from male to female. Notably, there is a significant ‘discourse’ in that community about whether one should respect her gender pronouns of she/her as opposed to the previous he/him. For his part, Geno attempts to walk the tightrope by using masculine pronouns for Chris prior to her transition and feminine pronouns following her coming out announcement in 2014. As is the case for many transgender women in online spaces, Christine has faced viscous ridicule and critique for living in a way which is authentic to her gender identity. Moreover, her unique brand of oddity, chronic mental illness, and genuinely egregious behaviour has made her something of a poster-child for the alt-right’s caricature of trans women as infantile and perverse. In fact, Christine was featured by talking head Milo Yiannopoulos in some of the university lectures he gave in his attempts to spread trans panic during the Gamer Gate years. Suffice to say, the subject is a little touchy.
In this article, I have no intention of changing anyone’s opinion on this matter. For the most part, those misgendering Christine are not available to be convinced and I don’t really have any interest in trading the same tired culture war talking points anyways. What I can do however, is point out some of the insights I’ve gained on this documentary since becoming an active member in my own local queer community. My work engaging with trans women as both friends and found family has given me a lens to uncover some of the nuances behind Chris’ behaviour that never occured to me during the first watch. Moreover, as an individual who is non-binary, I’ve come to see echoes of my own experience in Christine’s gender journey, as sloppy as it may have been.
With that out of the way, let’s cut to the chase. In queer culture, an ‘egg’ is someone who thinks that they are straight and/or hetero-normative who has not yet discovered their queer identity. When the egg ‘cracks,’ it is the moment where the individual has a gender epiphany regarding the feelings they’ve been having. Mind you, this is not a universal experience and you don’t have to ‘crack’ to be trans, or indeed any type of queer. However, it is a popular enough framework that I could you tell the exact moment it happened to Christine.
In episode 17 of the Chris Chan docu series, a troll pretending to be Chris’ galpal makes the suggestion that Christine try on a sports bra to help with her exercise routine. For context, Christine was struggling with sensory and weight issues around her chest while jogging. However, as soon as she tried on the bra, these concerns seemed to fade into the background. Chris expressed in a later call with the gal pal how good the bra made her feel, how it looked nice on her body and how it made her feel more comfortable. From this point on, Christine would never stop using sports bras, and would gradually begin identifying with increasingly feminine social roles, starting from ‘tom girl,’ before moving to ‘male lesbian,’ and finally coming out as trans in 2014. While Christine did not immediately realise she was trans the moment she put on the bra, it was an instant where she became aware that crossing the boundaries of gendered clothing was something that served her, and doubtless made her feel more at home in her body. The experience of total gender repression was chipped. The egg had experienced just the slightest sliver of a crack- but a crack nonetheless.
It feels strange for me to admit that I can actually empathise with Chris’ experience, on reflection. Embarrassingly, I had similarly sloppy misadventures with clothing in my tween and teen years, as I recall the intense desire to see my body expressed in feminine clothing like skirts and lingerie. However, with the fear of God’s wrath thoroughly embedded in me, I could never work up the courage to explore this desire in healthy ways. Instead, the repressed expressions tumbled out in ‘moments of weakness,’ as I settled instead for scraps; fishing for clothing and undergarments which had been thrown out or forgotten. If that sounds weird and bad to you, it’s because it definitely was. The internal barriers to admitting what I was experiencing to myself prevented me from gaining the knowledge to steer my expressions productively, and made the outcomes much worse when those desires bubbled to the surface. I just keep thinking about how lucky I am that my egg cracked off camera, something Chris was never able to avoid.
2) The dangers of prescriptive masculinity
What does a childhood immersed in regressive cultural values do to a developing adult? This is a question which has been tackled by psychologists, sociologists, and education specialists. However, I’m interested now in approaching it through a lens of masculinity applied to the Chris Chan saga. Christine as a character is profoundly honest (naive even?) about the way she interacts with the world, and consequently often says the ‘quiet part’ of misogyny and patriarchy out loud. Particularly in the early years, Christine has a habit of extracting ‘rules’ about how to do a masculine performance and then loudly announcing them, to her detriment. The thing that’s fascinating is that some of these rules actually do reflect our cultural expectations for maleness, even if they are executed incompetently. This results in something almost like a peek behind the curtain, as all the ugliness that underpins certain masculine performances is laid bare.
Take, for example, Chris’ infamous attraction sign. This is a big placard that she uses to advertise herself as a prospective mate to women in public contexts like her college campus and local mall. On this sign, Chris frames her desires for her partner through the lens of health and beauty- qualities like ‘average to slender body type,’ ‘white,’ and ‘does NOT drink or smoke.’ Meanwhile, she talks about herself using qualities and skills such as ‘natural salesperson’ and ‘diplomatic.’ This juxtaposition alone seems to reflect so many different ways in which society assigns value based on gender.
For instance, consider the ways in which we are taught to seek and express value through gender expression. Women are often seen in our world as obtaining high status in their femininity through their aesthetic beauty, vehicles for reproduction rather than persons with the potential for goals and ambitions outside of marriage. Historically, this has largely been the case because of oppression against women within class society, which positions men in places of economic authority and requires women to access this power through seeking relationships. Thus, social capital becomes the primary vector for them to advance, and it is the primary expectation that men have when seeking partnership- as demonstrated by Chris. By contrast, men in our society are valued based on their ability to produce and their competencies, an idea which is expressed through Christine’s decision to highlight her ethics. In a very weird way, we can see how this very sexist dynamic is reflected in one of Christine’s idiosyncrasies- she just didn’t realize you’re supposed to keep the sexism unspoken for it to be acceptable.
Sex is another aspect of Christine’s quest for masculinity that reveals something about the masculine identity broadly. Chris is most definitely horny- she has a history of abusing of pornographic content, makes home videos featuring sex dolls, and has far too many sex tapes floating around online for my (or really anybody’s) comfort. However, sex also appears to play a psychological and gendered role in her life, as it seems that Chris was taught (or picked up from the media she uses) that sex is the only emotional vector for connection with the opposite sex.
This, like Christine’s attraction sign, appears to be a microcosm of a greater trend in our culture that reflects how men relate to sex. Chris was never taught that sex isn’t the same as intimacy. Neither was she told that it’s okay to seek friendship with the opposite gender for its own sake, nor that her life’s problems will not be solved by sex. I suspect that her parents’ traditional values about marriage translated into Chris’ understanding of partnership as accessing a new caretaker to hold responsibility for her self-indulgent failings- a mommy she could fuck.
When I say these things about Christine, they make her sound pathetic and emotionally castrated. That being said, I would argue that the same is true for many men today. Sex is often framed to men as some sort of ultimate goal- that people who are AMAB need to extend their ethos of production over personal expression to the bedroom. Emotionally, men are often discouraged from expressing themselves in ways other than fucking or fighting. As a result, many men become emotional eunuchs with very few vectors for understanding themselves and the feelings they innately experiences as human beings.
This has the nasty side effect of perpetuating cycles of harm onto the ones closest to us, those who we are supposed to love. For instance, I personally had no direction on how to navigate healthy relationships outside of ‘wait for marriage’ and ‘God will reveal you a wife’ from my parents. Consequently, I had to go through two messy relationships and a long period of self hatred and chronic yearning before I could understand that sex and relationships aren’t some sort of checkered flag to race for. Rather, they are happy side effects of a life filled with personal cultivation and authenticity.
This point on masculinity also ties into the previous theme we’ve established in Christine’s queerness. Y’know how its a trope that some of the most homophobic pastors will routinely be discovered having messy gay sex in the bathroom of a Jack-in-the-Box or some equivalent? Turns out, its a trope for a reason. Men are told from childhood that being ‘gay’ is bad and that you will be socially punished and ostracised for it. For most young men who are straight, this is an easy enough idea to hold. But for those of us who grew up as boys discovering queerness, it was a fundamental contradiction that had potentially catastrophic consequences. The solution? Shove it down. Don’t think about it. You’re not gay. You can’t be gay.
In many cases, the most queer-repressed individuals will manifest this angst in vitriol towards others as a way to compensate for their own perceived moral shortcomings. Chris’ story is one of the clearest examples of this phenomena I’ve witnessed in modern media. Her trolls consistently weaponize homophobia and queerness against her as a means of taunting and prodding, implying her weakness and (ironically) her lack of masculinity. This is not a nice experience for any guy who has had their masculinity questioned by group of other men- and this is especially the case for a repressed non-man.
Christine responds to this assault by being routinely and aggressively homophobic. She overcompensates for her perceived failings by making videos quoting the biblical passages that condemn gays, adopts slurs and anti-gay messaging throughout her channel, and even canonically introduces a ‘vaccine for gayness’ into her Sonichu comics. To me, this reads as Chris responding to the contradictions between the truths she is learning about herself internally and the identity she has always been told to take on externally. The anxiety and angst of experiencing this appears to bubble up in ways that make it all the more apparent that something is odd (queer) about her experience. But then again, these are realities only Christine can truly and honestly understand.
For myself, a similar dynamic emerged in my own string of edge-lord behaviour during my young adult years. I was the guy that made abrupt attack-helicopter remarks during the anthropology class on gender and sexuality because it was funny and cool to dunk on the woke agenda. In a far more shameful example, I made transphobic jokes at the expense of the only trans man who attended my high school. These quips were made to gird my non-existent sense of internal masculinity- something I knew I was supposed to have but could never pin down. Since then, I’ve learned that you don’t actually need to have a gender in the traditional sense, just as Christine has found that moving from different poles of the gender spectrum is equally valid.
3) Autism and internalised ableism in troll culture.
When I was a kid in elementary school, I was a bully. From grades 4-6, I was an individual who chose to pick on others with less social standing than me because I thought it was funny. In one particularly awful case, I drew a series of swastikas on one of my classmate’s notebooks alongside notes telling him to leave school and stop being so girly. When I went to recess one day, I saw him crying quietly in the arms of a teacher, huddled in a nook of the school library. I understood deeply that I had caused this.
Throughout Christine’s mythos, bullying is the engine which propels the narrative forward. Her story is inhabited by trollsome characters who mean to deceive, manipulate, and emotionally abuse her at every turn, leading to twists in the plotline that Chris tries to navigate with an uncommon earnesty. Some of the most notorious villains of the Chris-Chan story emerge from this group, such as the 13 year old BlueSpike, who tricked Chris into committing sex acts on camera and blackmailed her into anally defiling herself with the crushed remains of her prized Sonichu medallion. Similarly heinous were the Idea Guys, a troll group who defrauded thousands of dollars from Christine and gaslit her into believing she had psychic powers before being stopped by other trolls with less malicious intent. Even within arcs of the documentary that are renowned for hosting more affable trolls, such as the case with Liquid Chris, the community’s humour relied on distressing a developmentally disabled person by convincing her that her identity was being stolen and her work co-opted. In every case, we see the same archetype of predator descend on Chris for an easy kill.
Why are people awful to one another? This is a question of ethics we’ve been asking ourselves since the dawn of history. But deep down, we all know the answers are never really that complicated, are they? Looking back, the reason I was a bully was because it felt good to make someone else squirm. It was nice to have someone lower on the totem pole when I myself came from an emotionally abusive household where I had very little control over the environment around me. It was especially nice to know that the actions that I performed would always have clear and readable social results. If I wrote nasty things on a peer’s book, they would feel bad. The logic was linear, unlike when other kids smiled to my face and laughed behind my back. I’ve since learned that not being able to intuitively interpret the social world we inhabit is a sign of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Though I have not officially pursued a diagnosis, I heavily suspect I have ASD co-morbid with ADHD.
Similarly, though I cannot diagnose an entire community of trolls and the individuals who make it up, I have been a lurker on sites like 4chan long enough to know autistic internet behaviour when I see it. I’m just gonna say it: creating a wiki page with over 2000 articles on a random weirdo you saw on the net is not neurotypical behaviour. Neither is investing hundreds (possibly thousands) of collective man hours and dollars into building and maintaining fake identities, websites, social media accounts, and relationships. I too have made the “weaponized autism” jokes, and frankly, I think the term holds more descriptive power than we often give it credit for. I believe it’s possible to harbour an abusive and problematic special interest, and Chris Chan’s detractors are proof of it.
This thought, though merely anecdotal at the moment, does make sense in the wider context of internet culture and society. Within the configuration of info-capitalism, managing and generating social capital (i.e. developing relationships) is one of the most important resources one can cultivate. This is particularly true when compared to the previous industrial model, where one might work 9-5 at their factory station and never have to speak a word to a coworker in 30 years. One’s ability to thrive in the office environments of the late 90s and early 2000s corresponded with one’s ability to conform, to fit in. It would not surprise me, then, if deviance from this model was more severely discouraged to many of the young people going through the school system at that time. This certainly manifested in Christine’s own school experiences, where she often compared herself to other ‘slow-in-the-minds’ at her high school and tried to draw a distinction between her high-functioning autism and those with more severe disabilities.
The internet has been a veritable Mecca for outcasts, weirdos, and pariahs of all flavours, particularly those on various neurodivergent spectra. Trolling for many such individuals is a form of alternative identity which holds social value and power within their online community, particularly when they are still unable to access the same level of notoriety in the real world. Coming up with hair brained schemes to harass lolcows with devastating levels of detail does not require a PhD in normie-speak. Rather, all you need is a willingness to be persistent and aggressive, as well as the ability to compartmentalise away your empathy for someone less fortunate. To me, that’s the root of the thorn-bush- a system which concentrates unhappy neurodivergent people in one place and rewards them for tearing each other apart.
The profound irony (or perhaps deep tragedy) of this dynamic is that Christine finds herself bullied by people who are not all that different from her. Underneath the pomp and bravado of Chris’ trolls is the faint, yet unmistakable, signature of festering insecurity. Perhaps the best case of this affect is reflected in the troll ‘Jack Thadeus’ during a conversation between him and Chris in episode 21 of the Geno Samuel series. Throughout this talk, Jack pathetically stumbles over words, nervously laughs at his own jokes, and nearly falls apart when Christine puts up the barest self defence. The troll gives off the impression of a shambling bag of self-doubt, barely held together by spit and ducktape. Jack attempts to punch into Chris’ life but comes off weak and uncertain in the process, particularly when Christine stands her ground.
What ultimately attracts this ilk of neurodivergent, low self esteem people to Christine cannot be fully understood, but if I were to hazard a guess, I would argue a major factor is Christine’s earnestness and authenticity. Say what you want about Christine, but she is incredibly confident in her role as an auteur and artist, even if she’s wrong. The thing which jumps out to me is how such confidence and unapologetic celebration of autistic identity are traits which are punishable through group exclusion or physical retribution in many contexts. I suspect that many of Chris’ trolls have struggled with this punishment and used their edgelord personas to cope. I know this because I cloaked myself in the same anti-social nihilism throughout highschool. Shockingly, this leads one to the conclusion that the trolls aren’t just picking on Christine because she’s weak, they do it because they’re jealous. For all her failings, entitlement, and awfulness, Chris is earnest, and they hate her for it.
The life of Christine Weston Chandler, to me, reads more like a twisted fun house mirror of my own experience than anything other media I can think of. As with all great pieces of documentary work, Geno’s series compels us to examine our own relationship with the subject. In my case, I see dark reflections of a person I could have become with a little more social awkwardness and a lot less friends. Chris was a child of the early internet, a social outcast from a regressive conservative household with parents who at best mishandled her development into a responsible adult and at worst purposefully hampered it. I’m similarly of that classic web generation who found cheap thrills in spelunking the dark web and scrolling through 4chan. I too was a misfit with parents whose expectations and values for me reflected neither my internal truth, nor the evolving values of the social world. Now, Christine finds herself stewing in the consequences- a lonely virgin with rage transformed into one of the most infamous rogues of the modern internet. Meanwhile, I can do nothing but gape at how lucky I was to find a support group that could pull me off the train tracks.
Chris Chan remains a testament to the dangers and idiosyncrasies of the web, a goddess in the canon of internet mythology if there ever was one. It seems that as long as she remains, there will be a group of trolls to tempt her towards deeper depravity, a wash of Christorians like Geno to document the auto-wreck, and regrettable fools like myself to gawk from the theatre gallery. One hopes that we find the strength to step off the merry-go-round once and for all.