When I heard “First victim of targeted abuse by the internet” I knew it was Chris Chan and knew this was going to be a very sad episode. Humans can be terrifying

i WAS casually listening to this in the bg and oh, the cold chill that ran through me when the word "kiwifarms" filtered into my active consciousness 💀💀

"what do you know about Chrischan?" Oh no...

The reasons bullying is allowed to go on is because the school system treats it like an equal dispute when one student TORTURES another. It is NOT an equal dispute, and treating it that way trivializes the victim's experience and makes them less likely to seek help in the future. Teachers see the VICTIM as the problem because they're the one complaining. Everyone tells them that if they'd only done x,y,z, we wouldn't have this problem... The problem where your fellow students get a free pass to pick pick pick until you want to die and YOU get suspended for having an outburst. It's disgusting.

I knew the internet was trash since 2003 when shortly after my dads suicide people starting coming online with slightly different AOL Screen names as mine, declaring thing such as “I masturbate in the brain and bone of my dead dad.” Never did much social media after that

I realize this is an old episode and well past the point where this info would be useful to Robert/Sophie/et al but Chris-Chan also frequently goes by CWC, and those initials haven't changed since she transitioned. It kind of simplifies things when you're talking about them pre- and post- transition so you don't have to keep trying to stay vigilant when reading accounts from people whose only real interest in her is in tormenting her.

19:29 For the record, triggering an autistic kid into melting down is an incredibly common way that autistic kids/autistic people in general get fucked with and bullied. Oh boy, that shit brings back memories (bad ones). This bullying technique has the "benefit" of making the target come off as much more of a troublemaker and much less of a conventional "victim" of bullying than they otherwise (usually) would. (And pretty much the only way to avoid an autistic meltdown is basically to not get overwhelmed/not overwhelm the person, so "not showing [their] weaknesses" doesn't really, usually work well for us.)

I am so happy to hear Chris Chan receiving attention from people who aren't pathetic psychopaths with an overinflated sense of self-worth. The world needs to learn the names of each of those bastards and they need to pay for what they have done.

I'm glad to hear your take on Ol' Chris Chan. Y'all are really compassionate compared to some of the others, with much less of a "Christorian" take, and more of a general history. I hope to enjoy the rest soon!

I had a friend that got a job working for a group home for adults with special needs about ten years ago. During his training, they used Chris Chan as a cautionary tale to explain that when a client's file says "no unsupervised internet time," it MEANS "no unsupervised internet time," and what happened to Chris Chan is exactly what can happen to any of our clients if you let them talk you into letting them online without supervision.

I was only ever vaguely aware of Chris Chan and the campaign of harassment against them. The details in this episode (and particularly part 2) were worse than I had any idea about. Really fucking sad.

The scream I scrumpt when I realized this was going to be The Chris Chan episode of BTB. Buckle up kids, it’s going to get dark.

Margaret is such a great guest

05:15 **hears "Kiwi Farms"** Oh God dammit... It should say a lot about a community if someone who's never been there and doesn't engage with the genre of predatory content knows that people there jump into a cesspool when they want to get a breath of fresh air.

I used to spend a lot of time on 4chan at that time. I don't recall seeing stuff about Chris Chan. So I've either forgotten or was on the wrong boards. I'm glad that I wasn't too corrupted by that hellsite.

Dang. When you started reading her requirements for a boyfriend-free girl, I realized that you were talking about my first experience of Internet-based misogyny. Someone passed either the article or just the post around when I was in Middle School.

As a person who works with special needs people, all the stuff I hear about Chris-Chan is one of the few things that triggers my fear inside. It's a harrowing to find internet drama making a sideshow of people with mental illnesses who need help or separation from the internet by legal guardians. I'd also be lying is I didn't say that I stress out about being the butt of jokes or "cringe" and have trouble opening up to any strangers online and in life. There's still pangs of paranoia and regret whenever I share personal details about myself, too. Beyond teaching people about better socialization or becoming an unconnected internet hermit, I don't know what can be done about this.

Bro how was it so easy to guess the content of this episode beforehand. Great script on the topic. What I appreciate about Robert is seeing that terminology is outdated since a previous episode and easing it into the convo. That easy.

I was already somewhat aware of Chris Chan from several years ago having heard some of the stories about her life. It is kind of mind blowing to see how the life of this one person rippled outwards to influence _so much_ of internet culture (for worse or even worst) to this day.

Chris Chan is... messy. Absolutely a victim of abuse, but given what she did to her own mother, the fact that she's not still in prison is pretty disgusting. Living proof of the whole 'being part of an overly targeted minority doesn't stop you being a shitty human being' thing, really. She should've gotten therapy long before things got as bad as they did, but her parents were enablers.

Autistic person here. A few comments on a few different things in this episode: 1) The thing about Chris-Chan having difficulty moving past it whenever she feels unfairly slighted is a really common thing with autistic people; autistic people commonly have a very strong sense of justice (this is a widely-observed and documented trait, not just something I'm pulling out of my ass), and I myself still feel a lot of rage over certain situations that happened *years* ago where I was treated unjustly and there was no resolution to the conflict. 2) Something I find kind of interesting about Chris-Chan explicitly saying "low-functioning autistics need not apply" when describing her requirements for a potential romantic partner is that by explicitly excluding them, in a way she's (albeit most likely unintentionally) attributing a degree of agency to autistic people who are perceived as "low-functioning" that they're rarely given. She's acknowledging that they're capable of having romantic and sexual desire rather than infantilizing them. So she's simultaneously being incredibly ableist while at the same time being *less* ableist than most people because she's implicitly presuming competence. Again, I doubt that was conscious on her part but it is something I find very ironic. 3) On that note regarding functioning labels: thank you Robert for noting that "high-functioning" is no longer a term that gets used. I'll also add that the "updated" equivalent of labeling it "ASD Level 1/2/3" is also inaccurate and harmful and I encourage anyone unfamiliar with the reasons why to visit Neuroclastic's website to find articles on why the common perception of autism being a *linear* spectrum (i.e. that people range from "mildly" to "severely" autistic) is wrong. 4) Another thing I'll add as someone who was present in these kinds of communities back when making fun of Chris-Chan was "in vogue" (2010-2012 for me) and laughed along with the bullying at the time is that another factor that drove a lot of this is that a lot of autistic people (myself included) were desperate to prove that we weren't "like that" and that we were each "one of the good ones." The language and community of the neurodiversity movement hadn't been developed yet and a lot of us were desperate for acceptance, and autistic people like myself gave a lot of legitimacy to the bullying because the people directly bullying Chris-chan could (and did) point to us and say: "See look: even other autistic people hate her!"

I've always followed the chris chan story but when I saw that people aren't just interested in this excentic person but actually are just gigantic bullies who want chris chan to die it's always shocked me how cruel they are

had no clue this would be the topic of the episode. its gonna be hard to get through but i trust robert to be the most respectful person to ever talk about this (which is pretty depressing actually)

The actual name of Kiwi Farms comes from a slurring of the words Cwcki Forums, an earlier site dedicated solely to Chris Chan, whose initials are CWC.

You’re missing a few things. like the mall arrest, she had been warned multiple times by security to stop harassing customers. The problem is her parents completely failed as parents. They transferred her to a different school district after they suggested to put her in a class with other developmentally disabled children ti get the help she needs. Her parents enabled all of her worst behaviors and refused to get any sort of help. There is a reason Barbs children all hate her and none of their other children wanted anything to do with them.

Tragic. She may not be a great person, but I dont know that she ever had a chance w/ everything in her life.

I dunno really how much we really can blame Christine for her own problems, TBH, they have always seemed to be possibly developmentally challenged, brought up in a not particularly decent environment. They have made some very poor choices throughout their life, obviously, but I really question how much agency they have ever really had. EDIT: Did not know about the actual autism diagnosis.

There's something weirdly nostalgic about the Sonichu comics; not nostalgic for the time when I first saw them but for the time when I too drew childish drawings of my bad characters giving me super powers so we could save the world and then go on to rule it from our favorite shopping mall. I think everyone has Sonichu-like thought exercises, even if most people have abandoned them long before the age that Chris started dreaming them up.

As a dedicated lurker on the SA forums in the 2000’s, I remember the threads about Chris-chan. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”

Robert saying he's still a Pathfinder guy *chef's kiss* man of taste I see

Also, yeah, it was funny. We all laughed the first time we saw Sonichu. We all laughed at the phrase "boyfriend-free girl" and at the pictures of Chris. It was funny, at first. The fact that I laughed at it 15 years ago just adds an atmosphere of despair and sadness that makes the whole story just that much more special to know so much about.

The whole Chris Chan saga is just a really sad story with no one to root for. On one hand, you read about their home life, the general lack of support and the unfathomable levels of awful bile that's been thrown their direction on a daily basis for the past decade and a half and you want to feel sorry for them. But then you find that they're giving excruciatingly detailed accounts of things that no one in their right mind would admit to in public, and for every time you want to feel bad for them, they'll say or do something that immediately throws any sympathy out the window. And when you look at the big picture and where it all ended up, it's like, how could it not end this way?

Nice to see someone talking about this who isn't evil. One funny thing to not about her childhood friend tricking her to go in the crawlspace under the porch is that Christine went unto the crawlspace because the "friend" said that Casper the Friendly Ghost was down there

Me, a former emo who loved MCR, hearing it called goth 👁👄👁

Look up what happened to Kathy Sierra back in like 2007. She survived, but she ended up withdrawing her online presence. She's lucky it happened while social media was still in its infancy.

As someone who is too nerdy for goth culture and therefore mostly knows things via the mountain goats - oh THAT’s who Andrew Eldritch is!

You should consider having the face of the guest and/or other staff members appearing in the episode next to Robert's.

I was typing the name 'ChrisChan' when Robert got around to. Now, there's a genuinely heart-worming story, just the kind of thing that makes you want to shove some Mr. Mike brand pencils in your eyes until they come out the back of your skull. Also, I think Robert is wrong about Chris in one sense: if you look at essentially every "bad decision" they have made, you'll find somebody influencing that decision. Left to his own devices, Christian would probably be living a relatively uneventful life of severe autism. I use the male pronoun in reference to Chris' identity back then, which I seriously doubt he would ever have changed, had not a series of trolls convinced him to do so over a several year period. I mean, if you haven't followed the whole story, you literally have no idea how incredibly consistent and continuous and deliberate were the concerted attempts to just f&ck with this person's head on ever possible level. Convincing her to have sex with her senile mom was just the final boss battle for these incredibly evil garbage human beings. I only hope I never meet a person who tells me they were part of it, because I don't want to spend the rest of my life in prison.

This was a really entertaining episode!!

Does anyone else start these episodes by yelling "HITLERRRRR!!" at the top of their voice now?

I have no idea what any of this Internet stuff means, but I did play D&D from 1988 to 2000. 3.x is still the best.

"oh hey, this episode was released around the middle of 2022! wonder what the latest happenings were around that time-- oh. oh /no/"

fuck this is just so sad, like not even in the rage inducing way that most of this is, but fuck it's just soooo sad

That's emo, Robert. That's emo music.

I haven't listened to all of this yet, but you're all talking about D&D! I also started with AD&D! And 5e is definitely my favorite edition at this point. Now, I did actually like 4e. It was a very different game, but if you just think of it as its own thing, it's not bad. But 5e is my favorite, for sure. Ah, Kiwi Farms. They harassed a youtuber friend of mine as well. Okay I should probably actually listen to this now...

This whole first act, I’m at the edge of my seat, worried that Robert won’t be able to talk about the God in the Bear

28:04 CWC would actually over a fairly long period frequently advocate for schools to add a dating and relationships course.

"So these cops are harassing and abusing her-" ME: this must be the origin of jerkops "- and I say 'cops' here, but she calls them 'jerkops'" ME: there we go

Oh boy you guys are finally covering Chris-Chan. IYKYK; if you don't, buckle up.

Charlottesville, Virginia. Ahhh...greaaat.

Chris was always doomed, but like... The internet definitely didn't make it BETTER.

She didn’t dress like Ash Ketchum, she dressed like Ness Earthbound. Ash don’t wear a striped shirt ya boomer

I didn't know about Chris Chan until their own SA scandal happened. I guess a product of being never in college and 38

Kiwi farm gives Kiwi’s (the people) such a bad name. I’ve met Americans whose strongest association with the word Kiwi was the monsters on Kiwifarms.

You guys should do an episode on Thomas Midgley, Jr. He's basically the single biggest mass murderer in human history, and nobody knows about him.

I’ve followed Chris Chan’s antics since August of ‘08, when they uploaded their second message to the internet. I doubt a week has gone by that I haven’t checked up on them. Chris didn’t come out of no where. If ever there was an example of someone who was failed at every single fundamental level of their development as a human being, it would be Chris. They’re certainly not perfect, and there have been times when Chris was nearly as bad as the trolls. But Chris has been fucked since they took their first breath. I feel like the cards have always been stacked against Chris, mostly due to circumstances beyond their control as a child, which partially contributed to the horrible decisions they made as an adult.

Man, I was down for D&D talk.

I really like how Robert keeps pointing out how weird engineering dudes are. STEM is so prevalent in our modern society that we develop a bit of an ego in college/highschool. Getting reminded that we are just weirdos like everyone else and that our skills just happen to be easily exploited to make money for capital which makes society view us as more "useful" is something that should happen more frequently.

40:51 Crayola model magic

Andrew Eldritch is 100% someone you could play D&D with. The Sisters of Mercy 404 page used to be this whole interactive-fiction riff, it was pretty amazing. Not sure if it's still up, but if not, I'm sure the wayback machine can find it for you.

I always see people misgender her and try to validate that because she has said she transitioned to try to pull Chicks. Like, so what? Still don't misgender her. 😐

I'm just here for Sisters of Mercy and D&D banter

Damn, doesn't stutter on the "How do you feel about" only to drop that line

It's weird, they skip some of Chrischan's very worst early activities or seem to downplay then...like Chrischan's racism, homophobia, antisemitism, misandry, and total disrespect of boundaries

Oh no...

I would love a coolzone media D&D game

If it weren't for Hurricane Rita, I'd still have 3.0 books, DM,PM, & MM 1&2 with a few supplements. Cut my teeth on 3, refined on 3.5. Tried 5, didn't like it. The skill checks were made too simplified

Also 5e is fine, but I too like 3.5 better. And I consider D&D Beyond the worst interface possible.

They didn't bleep Blue Apron!

I cant consider chris chan as bad or good in a moral sense cause shes mentally stunted to be quick about it, personal responsibility sure but how she is didnt come to be out of vacuum. Its mainly cause thats the main thing people point to justify their gang stalking

Talking d&d... You could always talk those kids of gygax. Fits the show, let's you do d&d geekiness.

Why was this re-uploaded? This was uploaded in 2022 originally. I'm just curious. :)

The Dean is clearly evil.

Chris Chandle's burnt out long before............. her legend ever willllllllllllllllllllllllllllll

Why did this get re-uploaded?

You forgot god bear Also Chris Chan uses and is fine with the use of male pronouns when talking about her past self pre transition So that’s how this tale will be told Before Chris Chan was Christine he was Christian and before he was Christian he was Christopher One day Christopher went to the mall. Very few people were there that day so he got lots of attention from the animatronic bear Lenard Bearstien (or something like that). The guy hidden away who spoke through a speaker and listened through a mic misheard Christopher as Christian. Chris and Bob (his dad) did not correct him, in fact they took this as a sign from god calling for a name change. Bob was quoted to have said he was originally planning to name him Christian “but I chickened out” ? Later Christian would speak of “God, Jesus, and The Bear” as part of his and later her view of Christianity.

Chris Chan wanted a white gf certainly because she was racist (or as she would say “old fashioned) but the real reason it had to be a white girl is because she had a vision of her daughter and in the vision she was white

If you like this subject, contrapoints covers a similar theme in her video about cringe

"4e was an obvious nightmare": I don't come to BTB to hear bad D&D takes. 4e was unironically great.

I think you spent this episode defending atrocious behavior because the person doing the really bad stuff had other people do bad stuff to them. Kind of an outlier in your work and im not sure why when both parties in this story are equally bastardian

...tell me you never actually interacted with Kiwi Farms without telling me.

Situation where near killed himself is completely unsubstantiated there's literally no records of his death. also prior to his quote unquote death he tried to Blackmail the owner and operator of the Kiwi Farms to get his information taken down. It is believed he is doing this because the Japanese government (he was living in Japan) was cracking down on emulators and believe that his information could have been reached by them on the website. Also to note his thread was not active for years until the incident