Combining the complexly ordered collection of Bob and Barbara’s hoarding, it’s no surprise that Chris acquired the pathological relationship towards possessions he did. This relationship towards objects however, had another component which informed the intense strangeness of it, that is his autistic typology of personhood. There is an anecdote he gives, where he lost his ability to speak for several years, regaining it via reading the text on the back of a toy’s packaging. This can be read as something deeply pivotal in the structuring of his mind. Reading or watching even a surface level amount of his content will reveal one striking fact about all of it - it is completely informed in its form by media. His comics have odd arrangements and devices, all of which are such through being poor imitations of other tropes of staging and arrangement seen in animation or cartoons elsewhere. His speech is inflected in the same way, with each sentence being noticeably composed so as to be an imitation of a cartoon character’s voice, without real regard to the specificity of that character.
Bob’s career as a mid-level engineer awarded him with a great deal of comfort and status in his local society, the fruits of which can be seen in the parodic views Chris reflected in speaking of politics while he was alive. Bob’s life is one best shown in the funhouse reflection of Kacey’s Father, a character Chris has a phone conversation with in which he is berated using a variety of standard American conservative talking points on the virtue of work and the immorality of Chris’ consumptive life. In Kacey’s Father, is the ethos that sustained Bob, an altogether mediocre and petty man, following it dutifully in wageslavery and reaping the rewards of the American middle class.
For this middle class ethos, there is an equation of consumption and labor that structures their life. Bob and Kacey’s Father balanced the equation perfectly and thus have nothing but contempt for Chris, who refuses to one end of the life, he exists in consumption without justifying himself through work. Many have reacted to Chris with the sentiment that their fascination comes from how easily it could have been them in the sonichu medallion and rugby shirt, displaying the horror of imbalance, the horror of the perfect equation of labor and consumption going out of balance.
Throughout this post, the term “middle class” has been used uncritically, but this is suspension is only in order to let it down easily. In a basic Marxian analysis, the middle class is fundamentally illusory. Still relying on wage labor to sustain themselves, owning no profit-generating property, they are simply a class of laborer fed with excess fats of the wealthiest nations on Earth, giving the delusion to something different from the common prole. Yet their enrichment is not out of some altruistic or accidental means, but rather has a specific function, shown in the other half of the equation. With the actual production being done through colonialism and its attendant slavery (always infinitely more foundational for capitalism than the urban prole ever was), the middle class is often tasked with useless work, managerial or clerical busywork, abstractions upon abstractions of paperwork liked by none. While this often has the basic utility of managing larger economic engines, it has no need to do this. It is perfectly possible to have a completely useless middle class worker for the reason that their true economic role is not production or management, but stimulating capital flow for its own sake. The middle class is encouraged in a way the upper and lower classes are not, to consume endlessly, sold endless piles of products and goods to structure their lifestyle with. Their wages are so high in order that they can go towards purchasing of these goods, thus converting production into liquid capital and stimulating the flow of value by not only giving value to and then discarding produced goods, but also returning value as liquid capital. The middle class exists for this and this alone, as a class of purchasers, tasked with stimulating capital flow, in order to keep the markets of production and distribution generating liquid profit.
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