Chris Chan, legally Christine Weston Chandler, is a Virginia woman known for three things: creating the Sonichu webcomic in 2000, pleading down a 2014 felony after macing a GameStop employee, and being arrested in August 2021 on a felony incest charge involving her elderly mother. The incest charge was dismissed in August 2023 after her attorney secured an autism disorder deferred disposition. What Chris Chan did, in the sense most people are asking, ranges from a two-decade run as one of the internet’s most documented private individuals to two separate criminal cases in her home state.
Creating Sonichu
In March 2000, Chandler drew a character called Sonichu for a school project, combining Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu into a single hybrid. The CD cover assignment grew into a self-published webcomic set in a fictional city called CWCville, which functioned as a thinly veiled version of Chandler’s own town and life. She built a website for the character by August 2000 and finished the first full issue by 2005.
Sonichu borrows directly from designs owned by Sega and Nintendo, and Chandler has always maintained the hybrid is her original creation. Neither company has pursued legal action, likely because the comic has no commercial reach worth the trouble. Online disputes over who could use or parody the character became constant, and by 2007 the comics had been picked up on 4chan. From there, Chandler’s day-to-day life became material for forums, wikis, and more than a decade of coordinated trolling campaigns that shaped nearly everything that followed.
The 2014 GameStop Mace Incident
On December 26, 2014, Chandler walked into a GameStop in Charlottesville, Virginia, from which she had already been banned. She was angry about the design of Sonic in the game Sonic Boom, where the character’s arms had been colored blue. She vandalized a store display, and when an employee started calling security, she sprayed him with mace on her way out.
Virginia treats the unlawful use of mace or tear gas in a place of business as a Class 6 felony when there is no malicious intent, punishable by one to five years in prison.1Virginia Code Commission. Virginia Code Title 18.2, Chapter 7, Article 8 – Miscellaneous Dangerous Conduct If the act is malicious and causes bodily injury, it becomes a Class 3 felony carrying five to twenty years.2Virginia Code Commission. Virginia Code 18.2-10 – Punishment for Conviction of Felony; Penalty After a series of continuances in 2015, Chandler’s felony was reduced to a misdemeanor. She paid a $541 fine the following year.
The GameStop ban was not an isolated one. Several retailers in the area had already issued formal trespass notices against her, and under Virginia law entering a property after such a notice can bring additional charges.
The 2021 Incest Arrest
In late July 2021, audio recordings surfaced online in which Chandler described sexual contact with her mother, Barbara Chandler, who was in her late seventies and required regular care. The Greene County Sheriff’s Office opened an investigation. On August 1, 2021, deputies found Chandler at a hotel outside Charlottesville and arrested her without incident. She was charged with one count of incest and held without bond at the Central Virginia Regional Jail in Orange County.
Virginia classifies sexual intercourse between a parent and child as a Class 5 felony.3Virginia Code Commission. Virginia Code 18.2-366 – Sexual Intercourse by Persons Forbidden to Marry; Incest; Penalties A Class 5 felony carries one to ten years in prison, or alternatively up to twelve months in jail and a fine of up to $2,500 at the court’s discretion.2Virginia Code Commission. Virginia Code 18.2-10 – Punishment for Conviction of Felony; Penalty
The allegations raised questions about capacity to consent. Barbara Chandler was elderly and in declining health, and a person who cannot understand and agree to sexual contact cannot provide valid consent regardless of whether they verbally object.
How the Case Was Dismissed
Chandler spent roughly nineteen months in custody before being released from jail on March 27, 2023. On August 8, 2023, Judge Worrell of the Greene County Circuit Court dismissed the incest charge. The dismissal came on a motion from her defense attorney, David Heilberg, for an autism disorder deferred disposition, a mechanism Virginia courts can use to resolve cases involving defendants with intellectual or developmental disabilities.
Judge Worrell sealed the case after dismissing it, which prevents the prosecution from publicly discussing how the resolution was structured. Whether supervision, treatment, or other conditions were attached is not part of the public record. What is public is that the felony no longer stands.
What Chris Chan Is Doing Now
Since her release, Chandler has returned to posting online. Through 2025 she has uploaded dozens of YouTube videos, most of them reviews of custom Transformers figures and readings from unreleased Sonichu material. She maintains accounts on Twitter and Bluesky, sells merchandise on Etsy, and takes digital art commissions. She has also set up a Character.AI chatbot trained on herself and directs fans to use it rather than messaging her directly.
The retail trespass bans issued years ago remain in effect where they were posted, and the forums that spent years cataloging her life are still running. One piece of context sits behind all of this: Chandler was the target of sustained organized harassment from roughly 2007 onward, including a group known as the “Idea Guys” who allegedly extorted her and manipulated her psychologically from late 2017 into 2018. That history does not erase what she was charged with, but it is part of any honest account of what Chris Chan did and what was done to her.