Wave of Wardposts sliding across my dash reminding me I have unresolved issues with the fact that Chris is one of the most categorically telling fumbles in Ward.
Like you have a character who touches on:
The way that the physical form links to the mind and how embodiment is part of identity
Living with severe harm done to you by a sibling
Forging a future for yourself while struggling with the expectations of an abusive parent of who they made you to be
The strain of pushing yourself to constantly perform new stunts with your power in ways that don't necessarily align with its 'intention'
Dealing with a 'villainous' origin and the stigma of that in the world of capes
The difficulty of forming relationships when you're kind of an asshole
Chris has one of the most 'easy to make thematically relevant' powers in the therapy group to boot. And we can't say it's too high concept and convoluted to make legible to readers because let us consider some of the other fucking powers in Ward. 'Guy mutates based on emotional states he wants to evoke' is pretty straightforward compared to some!
But for reasons that remain beyond me Chris betrays the therapy group because...it was time for the scheduled shocking betrayal, and he did it because...reasons that don't quite follow from prior characterization but okay, well, surely Villain Chris will provide some kind of interesting - ah no never mind he's just apathetically Evil now in ways that occasionally show a glimmer of promise but ultimately conclude in "our viewpoint character doesn't care about the interiority of people who aren't her + Wildbow was in the weeds by that point".
And I could dissect this all more but the way Chris' potential is spilled like a soda behind sticky theatre seats feels like a symptom of the many ways Ward did that with everything. We got rid of Chris so we could, bless her, spend approximately one million years resolving Rain's issues as a central hinge of Ward's dissolving thematic tissue only to - and this part also gets me - not resolve Rain's issues or arc to the extent of concluding a major part of it offscreen.
Salvaging Chris wouldn't have saved Ward and it's far from the biggest issue with Ward, but in the version of Ward in my head that's good Chris sticks around to force Victoria to have ongoing beef with a child in orthodontic headgear. I think it would be funny.
also chris is the one character who consistently offers counterarguments to the way victoria wants to do things and how she justifies them, including pointing out that someone will say anything if they're threatened with having their arms and legs broken or how exiling people to a tundra devoid of other humans (much less actual civilization) might've negatively contributed to the titans situation, but because he's nonspecifically Evil tm those are things you can just dismiss without further consideration
I haven't quite been able to stop thinking about Chris since Ward ended, and I do think the latter half did him dirty, but I want to properly frame exactly why I think that properly.
Back when we had his interlude and found out what his actual deal was, I wrote about what the story was doing with Breakthrough, about how it was challenging Victoria by bringing the specific issues of the other members of the team ever closer to her Amy-related trauma, and asking her how close is too close, with Chris being both Birdcage-related and 'their power lets them manipulate other people's biology in horrifying ways'-related.
I also pointed out the structure of Ward (when it was good) was built around catastrophising about the members of Breakthrough, teasing us with bits of information about what happened to them and what they did, just enough to send everyone into a tailspin of speculation, often assuming the worst.
And then we find out. With every one of them, we see their perspective, we see what happened, what they did, what has been done to them, what they did to themselves, and then the story stops and asks Victoria, and us as the readers: 'Now what? Now that you have this information, what will you do? How will you treat these people? What are you willing to accept? What are you willing to forgive?' We can see that Victoria's boundaries on what she's willing to forgive have been pushed quite far already, when comparing who she is now to who she was when talking to Madison. She's accepted a member of the Fallen, a member of the Slaughterhouse 9, and, by and large, so have we. The reason we have is that the story didn't stop after this revelation, this moment of clarity. Their lives continue, and they continue to struggle with their trauma and we're along for the ride. We see what they're doing to get better, and we're rooting for them.
And I was excited to see the same pattern unfold for Chris, but then that didn't actually end up happening for him.
And I don't even think it's necessarily bad to portray someone falling off the wagon, as it were, to portray someone abandoning the recovery process. After all, setting up a therapy group is replete with competing access needs, and with Jessica Yamada dropping off the radar for a good bit, it would be weird for the group to stay together without a hitch.
The problem I have with Ward's treatment of Chris is that the text never really gets around to addressing why he fell out with the rest of the group, even though it's totally obvious.
Because it's Victoria from start to finish.
We learn that Chris was starting to open up to the rest of the group, and he proves throughout Ward, pre-split, that he genuinely cares about these people, so it's not like that was an act. Yet once Victoria joined, Chris clammed shut again, for reasons that are, honestly, very reasonable:
He's sitting on a terrible secret that he needs help with, and that cannot possibly trust these people to not freak out about, especially not when one, ah, very judgmental person shows up.
And the way Victoria ends up bullying Chris out of the group is very interesting, which is why it's a tragedy it doesn't get addressed in the text at all:
Victoria's pulling a Carol.
She keeps using social niceties and expectations to put Chris on the spot:
âYou donât have to tell us anything, but if you wanted to tell us stuff weâd like it?â Chrisâs tone was sarcastic, almost mocking. ... âAll Iâm saying is that it seems kind of manipulative, the power-players in the group dish out their personal dirt, team mom Sveta plays nice and tries to rug-sweep-â ... âWhy donât we just drop it entirely? You said what you needed to say, fine, whatever. But it doesnât need to be a conversation. If itâs a conversation then that means itâs going somewhere. And that somewhere is just more pressure and expectations that we talk about shit.â
Putting Chris in positions where he has to either reveal more about himself than he wants to or seem incredibly unreasonable, and because he's less socially adroit, even calling this out makes him look like the asshole to the rest of the group.
Not to mention that Victoria takes the first, convenient excuse she can find to go snoop on Chris' living situation, despite his explicit boundary not to do that, and when he calls her out on that, she downplays it, justifies it and makes it clear she'll be doing it again.
She doesn't think of this as being pushy and unreasonable, but when Kenzie almost gives Carol her address, she freaks the fuck out about it, because good god she doesn't want her mother showing up on her doorstep.
Because Chris isn't just the Amy to Victoria's... Victoria, Victoria is also the Carol to Chris' Amy, and this would be such an interesting thing to explore within Victoria as a character! The way she is manipulative and learned so many of her social skills from someone who never dealt with her own trauma and learned to abuse social norms to get her way. This is a fascinating character flaw for Victoria to have, especially with how unconscious she is of it! Being made to realise that Carol still has her hooks in her like that would be genuinely compelling character development on Victoria's part!
It does get explored a little when Damsel and Carol argue, Victoria sees a slightly-less-diplomatic version of her own perspective from the outside and is made quite uncomfortable by it. This would've been an excellent set-up, because this is very much what pushed Chris away from Breakthrough!
It just never really gets brought up or resolved. Chris never even gets that moment where he lets himself be vulnerable enough to call Victoria out for all of this, and the text seems to fall prey to Victoria's own aura enough it seemingly forgets about all the set-up it did for this character beat, so nothing comes of it.
Which is a shame.
Absolutely, and I feel validated in some of my other Chris Thoughts by the comparisons being drawn between Carol and Victoria's behavior here - I misplaced the part of my brain that remembered Victoria did literally flip out in the exact same situation she inflicted on Chris. The parallels are so clear they have to be intentional, but they just didn't play out.
I think you've come up with a version of how 'Chris leaves Breakthrough' could have gone which could have stayed interesting, and truthfully that departure mostly annoys me because I enjoyed his dynamic with the group and wanted more of it. Still, if we'd gotten follow up on anything like you outlined, that would have served the story and character arcs better.
Reviewing Chris, again, I also found myself hung up on the final imperative Chris has activate:
Imperative four: Take action, and whatever it is we do, it needs to be big.
That's such a compelling hook, isn't it! And one of the things I find interesting about it is that it dovetails with Victoria's trauma-driven 'need' to be an active agent making big moves, something Ward explicitly calls out about her. Chris' compulsion is more explicitly hardcoded than Victoria's in a literal sense, but in the Parahumans scope of powers and their effects as frequently metaphorical the distinction feels paper thin to me.
They both feel a drive to be agents, not subjects, for reasons that are very similar! Acting is how they differentiate themselves from the 'helpless' victim-selves they're trying to claw away from, which also plays into a lot of the ways they're very unpleasant to people they perceive as unacceptably 'passive'. If you're not acting, if you're not making big moves, you're 'letting' yourself be subject to other people's choices. Neither of them can stand that.
So coming back to Chris' fourth imperative: a person might note that nowhere in it is it specified 'and that big action must be villainous'. The nature of the action is undefined except in magnitude, which is a smart contingency if you're looking at an end of the world scenario where you have no idea what the possible future might look like.
In Lab Rat's original plan for Chris he likely assumed specifying wasn't necessary, because both the conditioning he subjected Chris to and the nature of Chris' powers don't lend themselves to anything but moves similar to what Lab Rat would have done. In Ward-that-is, what Chris actually does probably maps not that far off from what Lab Rat would have done with those resources.
But in a version of Ward where we really got to follow early Ward thematic promise through to the end, what a killer opportunity that open scope could have been. What kind of big moves could a version of Chris afforded more development in line with the reveal we got have made?
To wrap up an already long response to an excellent analysis: I think about the couple who took Chris 'home' sometimes. Two unnamed 'civilians' who, in the middle of the absolute disruption of their lives, took a child they didn't know in their car and drove in the wrong direction to try to see if he might have people he was trying to get back to. Two people who died following that same child into a clearly dangerous situation trying to keep him safe.
That felt like it should have been a critical hook, didn't it? When Chris was utterly helpless, on the verge of dying en route to Lab Rat's contingency and failing his imperatives right there, two people tried to help him get 'home' despite there being no conceivable material gain that outweighed the potential - and then realized - cost of doing so.
So how does that intersect with Chris' cynicism and reflexive clawing insistence on independence? How could that have integrated into paralleling the genuine care he showed for Breakthrough even when there wasn't anything in it for him? How might that have informed his stance on compassion and selflessness? We don't really know, because it just did not get followed up on, but there was such good stuff there.
It really is just a shame.


















