Chris Chan and the Theater of Suffering
The internet’s most famous character stands accused of an unspeakable crime
When I began this post, I was surprised to learn how little attention the mainstream media has paid to Christine Weston Chandler, the living legend of internet lore better known as Chris Chan, who is now accused of one of the most heinous crimes imaginable: a few breaking news reports last year; an article from Input; a 2016 mention in New York magazine; a handful of throwaway Insider pieces, but nothing more significant. No sprawling 8,000-word article in The New York Times, no melancholic profile in The New Yorker. No best-selling book or award-winning indie documentary by a digital ethnographer. No viral op-ed. Nothing.
Chandler was scheduled for a grand jury hearing in Virginia yesterday on charges of incest that stem from leaked phone calls in which he described regularly having sex with his elderly mother while she was suffering from dementia. Though Chandler changed his name to Christine and has used female pronouns online in the past, he was booked in court as a male, so we will refer to him using “he/him” throughout this article.
The assaults allegedly took place at the behest of Isabella Janke, a Texas college student Chandler had met online. As macabre as the alleged crime is, it was not exactly unforeseeable in the context of Chandler’s life. For more than a decade, “The Chris Chan Show” has been the center of an obsessive fandom online that was drawn to its tragic and freakish aspects and treated it as a form of interactive reality entertainment—like The Truman Show, but much darker and more dystopian. The Chris Chan backstory is so sprawling and central to the formation of the internet as we understand it, I’m not sure I can do it justice in just one short article. This is, at least, a start.
When the accusations against Chandler first made the news last year, most headlines described him as “some” YouTuber or “some” internet personality. But Chandler isn’t famous only because of his involvement in a horrific crime, with an unimpressive YouTube career as a footnote. Chris Chan is one of the most significant characters in the history of the internet. The story about his mother was disturbing on its face, but also disturbing in how inevitable it felt. Chandler has been the main character of a perverse Greek tragedy since at least 2007: Of course, the third act would include a psychopathic troll manipulating him into rape. It couldn’t have ended any other way.
Chandler is known for being an autistic, tenuously transgender internet personality and creator of the webcomic Sonichu (a portmanteau of Sonic and Pikachu) who became an internet celebrity after being posted to the website SomethingAwful.
Initially, Chandler and his childlike Sonic/Pikachu crossover fan art was just a sideshow attraction. As was his “Love Quest,” wherein he hung up a series of bizarre posters around his community college in search of a boyfriend-free girl. But as interest grew in the human freakshow aspects of Chandler’s life, he became more than just a curio.
A feedback loop was born. As more and more of the faceless horde appeared in front of Chandler to ogle at his life, he offered more of himself in exchange. Not everyone was a mere voyeur, though, or just a passive commenter. Chandler also attracted countless trolls who delighted in prodding and tormenting him to get a reaction. Thus, the obviously damaged person craving attention became the target of countless trolling campaigns, often ones that goaded him into increasingly self-destructive episodes.
Not only did Chandler share grotesque details of his life with reckless abandon—e.g., his attempts to perform at-home gender reassignment surgery or his decision to drink a cup of Fanta spiked with his own semen—but also thousands of people have endeavored to record these details for the past 15-odd years. These people are known as Christorians. All the attention generated by the feedback loop turned Chandler into perhaps the most documented person online.
The efforts of Christorians have not been trivial. They’ve spawned tens of thousands of hours of videos and audio; the forum Kiwi Farms, which has evolved into something of a catchall encyclopedia of unstable internet personalities; several wikis; and a multitude of YouTube channels, including Chris Chan: A Comprehensive History, a 65-episode documentary series, to name a few. I cannot overstate the amount of content out there that’s devoted to turning the actual person Christine Weston Chandler into the digital folklore of Chris Chan.
There are spin-off forums, imageboards, subreddits, and Discord servers. There’s fan fiction and fan art. There are thousands of smaller chats of people discussing his life as if it’s the latest episode of their favorite HBO drama—I am in two. There is probably more Chris Chan content than any of us will ever know. Other strange, drama-prone people (other lolcows, like Ana Mardoll) are likely recorded in the way that they are because of the precedent set by Christorians. Perhaps all internet rubbernecking is a derivative of Chris Chan content.
I think it’s important to take a step back and put the “most documented person online” into perspective. We live in a world oversaturated with obsessive fandoms—a community type known for its incredible attention-to-detail, archival impulse, and thirst for more—and still, there is almost nothing else that rivals the amount of information out there about Chandler. On Kiwi Farms alone, there are 74 pages of threads about Chandler, and that’s just one website. And while there might be a higher raw number of posts about the boyband One Direction, I’d be surprised if there was more documented information about them.
That impact doesn’t stop with the way we document and archive High Internet Strangeness, though. What’s also crucial about this story is the role that trolling has played in its narrative development. Chandler’s life has been fueled by a theater of suffering, in which members of the audience periodically take it upon themselves to step onstage and start directing the performance themselves.
That’s what Janke, the woman who allegedly manipulated him into assaulting his mother, appears to have done. The alleged motivation, taken from chat logs shared on Kiwi Farms, was that she wanted to be one of the worst trolls in (Chris)tory. There would be no “Christory” to be a part of were it not for the wanton cruelty enacted by strangers that fuels so much of digital culture.
While Chandler’s behavior in the past 15-odd years has been nothing short of horrific, and it would be misleading to describe him as some innocent, autistic fawn who’d been led astray by troll campaigns, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t also been a victim. It can be difficult for people who are aware of all the intimate details of Chandler’s life to feel compassion for him; he is not a sympathetic protagonist. But the flaw in that thinking is revealed even in my own description of events: narrative, protagonist, stage. Chandler is a deeply flawed, deeply disturbed person, not an art-object born of the internet, available for our detached analysis as armchair internet historians and psychoanalysts. This isn’t a decades-long performance art piece; at the center of this are several real human lives. He doesn’t need to be likable. There doesn’t need to be an intelligible denouement to his story, because that’s not how life works.
The lack of more mainstream attention in light of all this—the scope, the cruelty, the breadth of information—is mind-boggling. But like all things native to the internet that don’t have an immediate political utility, Chandler is seen as somehow unserious. I would imagine the work of Christorians is also written off as unserious, because that’s how these things always go.
People like Geno Samuel, the man behind the 65-part Chris Chan documentary series, toil on the internet in relative obscurity, only for their work to be reappropriated by someone better resourced and with more impressive credentials. They’re the weirdos online who get a nod if they’re lucky but are rarely seen as valuable on their own terms. People often ask me, “Where are all the internet historians?” and my answer is, “All around you.” On YouTube, on Twitter, on Substack, on lolcow, on Kiwi Farms—like it or not, they’re the faceless anons. It’s only when the journalist who’s on a YouTube or Kiwi Farms safari chooses to surface this content that it becomes “worth” paying attention to.
There are some exceptions to this rule: Media fandoms certainly have been getting their due since the press began paying attention to them in the mid-2010s, but fandom can also help sell things; fandom is safe. Fandom can be neatly tucked into a political narrative; fandom can be used as a vehicle for stories about social justice. Stories like Chandler’s, and the people who’ve become his scribes, though? They simmer in the background until they’re useful, or until somebody with more institutional cred goes content-mining. Next time, we hit the mines.
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