Explaining The Joke, Here
....a Dean of Student Affairs at the Piedmont Virginia Community College*, by the name of Mary Lee Walsh, is confronted with a student creating a problem. The student, one Christian Weston Chandler, is soliciting newsletters based on his plagiarized children's comic strip that explicitly ask for a boyfriend-free girl, and publicly carrying a sign doing the same. The dean sees him as a public nuisance at the lowest, but since the dean is also a member of the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance, perhaps she suspects something worse about this creepy little student.
So the dean reprimands the student and tells him to stop spamming the campus with his desperation. But the student ignores her warning and continues to carry his " Attraction Sign " and distribute his " Sonichu's News Dash " papers. The dean, obviously annoyed by her authority being ignored, calls the student into her office, and orders him to stop. She uses very blunt but accurate language, saying that the student would never get a girlfriend this or any other way. He angrily screams at her, but all it does is get him expelled for a year.
But the dean doesn't hear the last of the student. The student works the dean into his plagiarized children's comic strip as an evil witch, who spends her spare time plotting against love itself. The student, on the other hand, is reinvented as the hero who fights for the sake of love. After a tense** fight, she is defeated when the hero teams up with his plagiarized cartoon " son ", pooling their powers together for a massive energy blast that defeats her. For now.
But it doesn't end there. While the dean doesn't dignify the student with a response, the group of internet users devoted to following the student's terrible life and work take note. And seeing the badly drawn image of the evil witch Mary Lee Walsh, they interpret her golden helmet as a shock of blonde hair with horns, and draw her as a sexy succubus. Some fan stories even cast her as a heroine, fighting against the corrupt regime of the student's ego-based imaginary town.
So the elderly dean of a southern US community college, simply by doing her job, becomes turned into an online sex symbol that doubles as a troll symbol. And here's the punchline...
This isn't a joke. All this shit actually happened.
And nothing I say can top that.
* You can find the full story here; yes, an entire Wiki has become devoted to Chandler's failures.
** If by " Tense ", you mean " badly drawn Pokemon moves followed by Mary Lee Walsh tapping Chris-Chan Sonichu on his neck, causing him to revert back to Chris-Chan in the dumbest weakness since Thor turning back to mortal Dr. Don Blake if he lets go of his hammer for 60 seconds ", then yes, it was quite " tense ".
*** Courtesy of Sonichu Finale, one of many entertaining fan works that redeem Chandler's " creations " with good writing and art. And one of many fan works replete with Metal Gear Solid references.
I'm both relieved and disturbed to learn of this wiki. Relieved, because it explains how you've been writing these entries with insider knowledge without becoming a stalker; disturbed because discovering an entire community devoted to stalking this guy is beyond creepy.
ReplyDeleteWell, just be glad that they haven't used this level of collective surveillance against anyone who actually matters.
ReplyDeleteThree things immediately spring to mind:
ReplyDelete1) Mary Lee Walsh probably has grounds for a substantial lawsuit against Chandler. Do any of his trolls actually harass or otherwise try to contact her directly? I'd be more than a little pissed off if people started bothering me in my own private life because of something some overwrought manchild drew in an online comic.
2) I think the difference between something like the "stalking" we see here and actual cyberbulling is that, in many respects, Chandler actively continues to solicit and interact with this type of attention. Somehow I doubt that if he stopped posting his comics, didn't get into online pissing matches with trolls, or actually tried to take some responsibility for his life, his "followers" wouldn't take as much of an interest in him, or would at least leave him alone once they found someone else to laugh at.
I mean, Neil posts comics that have personal meaning to him, but they actually have a plot and a greater overall theme rather than just his idealized Peter Pan-like fantasies. I still live at home, but people typically don't judge me because I actively help around the house and am usually either gainfully employed or actively searching for a job.
Chandler doesn't do any of those things.
.......wait, what?
ReplyDeleteSeriously, what?
The words, they fail me.
I forgot to mention the third thing:
ReplyDelete3) For a lot of people, watching Chandler is a lot like watching a particularly gruesome car wreck or train accident. It's downright disturbing, but for some reason you can't take your eyes off it.
Thanks, Jared. It's worth noting that Chandler's individual traits-- using his comics to being a virgin, living with his parents, liking toys and games targetted below his age range, being autistic-- aren't inherently bad. While he incorporates those traits into his identity in a twisted and extreme fashion, it's vital that everyone see the difference between the traits of Chandler's identity that are socially stigmatized, and the things he actually does that are worth the social stigma.
ReplyDeleteThe attraction sign being a prime example.
>Well, just be glad that they haven't used this level of collective surveillance against anyone who actually matters.
ReplyDeleteNitz, forget about people who "matter," I've got a schizophrenic friend who would be validated by this behaviour. And not in a good way.
Sorry, MH, I should clarify; by " matters ", I meant " is a reasonably decent person who doesn't bring this upon themselves with full capacity to realize the situation and make better choices ". Chandler has threatened to leave the internet for good many times, and has always ended up returning. He knows that his presence on the internet is just bringing him trouble, yet he keeps going back, if only to upload videos of himself in blackface.
ReplyDeleteI know the trolls go too far, but since Chandler doesn't show tolerance towards anyone else and expects to simultaneously be exempt from having to take responsibility for his actions while wanting to be treated like a normal person ( he's said many times that he would take a cure for autism if he could, so he's definitely not a neurodiversity proponent ). Between this and all the other disgusting things he's done, I can't really develop any sympathy for him, even on principle.
Personally, the act of passively standing back, watching, reading about and laughing at the stuff this guy is putting up online for the world to see, or the look we're seeing here at the thought-processes behind his comics, it has, as said above, the train-wreck appeal that even though it feels wrong, I just can't stop myself looking.
ReplyDeleteThe people actively stalking and victimising him, on the other hand, no matter how bad a person he is, I can't approve of them, and the paranoiac in me knows if they could do it to him, they could just as easily do the same to any of us.
i hate to say this but why does this guy even matter, you shouldn't make fun of him so much, your comics aren't much better than his, so have some sympathy. he has a disability and so do you. if anything you should understand why hes inept at sound logical reasoning... is he worth a dime complaining about?
ReplyDeleteif its for sheer entertainment i can see where your coming from, otherwise what is the point of making him look smaller than he already is?
you showed this kind of disability acceptance in your comic recently...
and your other articles are much more pertinent than this.
Facebook Student,
ReplyDelete1.)" Not much better " than Sonichu? Can you explain that, or did you just not bother to read my stuff? I've actually got a coherent story, characters who have faults, and a narrative that's not a Peter Pan fantasy and draws from outside fandom experiences. And while I'll be the first to admit that I'm still learning to draw, even my earliest Ruby's World work isn't anywhere near as flat, crude, and inconsistent as Chandler's artistic excrement.
2.) Chandler is an ablist. The fact that he has autism himself doesn't excuse him. He frequently rages against people with Asperger's for taking attention away from the " real autistics ", refuses to associate with other autistics ( who he often calls " slow-in-the-minds " ) because they bother him, and knowingly uses his condition to excuse himself from responsibilities and get free money from the government.
3.) I don't approve of a lot of the things the trolls do, particularly the way their insults become ablist themselves. However, I'm not complaining about Sonichu ( that would imply that I expected it to be good ) so much as critiquing it as an unwittingly complex psychodrama.