Oh man, where to start.
I was initially pushed to post by some friends - considering that I have a relatable background to Shadman's minus the pedophilia. I'm not Liquid Shadman or anything of the sort, but I do think I can have some interesting input regarding certain things here and there. Note: I am not a professional in these regards in any way, but my personal experiences and what not may allow us for some deeper speculation.
First off, I, myself, am an expat from Europe who had moved to the "first world". But I was hardly living in a yurt back home, rather - I simply wanted a life of more freedom and personal choices. And I had to work through that on my own, as someone who also had to perform a military conscription service like Shad. But unlike him, I completed it and later enlisted further voluntarily to further spring board myself out of the country.
Enough about myself, however. That is just to prove that maybe I understand the perspective and journey better than some others. From here on out, I won't discuss myself directly outside of experiences considering this is not a blog and no one, rightfully, should give a shit. I do want to say, however, that growing up - I had a family member who did drugs. Notably amphetamines and opioids. And the similarities I have seen between Shad's behavior and their's is staggeringly similar.
Judging by just the general phenotype of Shad, I have noticed a certain pattern with individuals like him. These sort of guys who are generally on the shorter, weaker side and the type who have trouble properly firing their own issued firearm. Judging by Shadman's Swiss army conscript days' scores, he is a terrible shot. And I think this is a very large indicator of someone with a significant level of dysfunction.
I have spent plenty of time qualling with rifles and even pistols on military ranges and courses, as well as helping run some of them when I had obtained enough rank and trust. All in all, I noticed that these types of skeleton people who are often among the most sheepishly shy or eccentrically schizoid, have all had a terrible time shooting. Now, the best shot I ever witnessed was a manlet and basically could pass for a halloween decoration with skin, but early on his groupings were far from tight.
One thing about being a conscript or enlisted, your ability as a soldier is entirely dependent on your fitness and ability to qualify on paper with your service weapon, more often than your own specific job ability sometimes. I know some major shitbags who managed to get rank despite being terrible infantryman, terrible tankers, terrible artillery guys, terrible people - but they could shoot and run, so often these things were disregarded because they met the bare minimum of a competent soldier. Everything we know about shad is indictive that he was a terrible conscript and a terrible person, long before he was drawing the things he was drawing.
The childish, vindictive and hateful nature of his sketches during his conscription time really paint this picture of someone who actually was not a bad ass. But merely someone who was a washout, someone who likely got kicked out of the Swiss military for being mentally incapable of withholding his moral obligations to his country and likely someone they did not trust with a gun. More so because he was unable to hit paper half the time.
Not all artists and writer types are like this, but every battalion has an 'artist or writer' type who can excel with a pencil or keyboard, but struggle with guns. I don't know what the correlation is, or the causation, but these guys tend to have difficulty shooting certain guns. I've personally seen a few people unable to properly manually reset their triggers, using too much trigger pull or not enough, unable to hold a stance or find proper sight-picture and alignment. And honestly, you can learn a lot about how someone handles pressure with how they actually handle a firearm. And are given authority to use it, to stand post, etc.
These sort of wash outs, these often skinny or awkwardly pudgy conscripts are often subject to intense scrutiny. They mess up and simply have this Gomer Pyle expression of distance. They are tormented by their inability and their complete dysfunction to actually learn from their mistakes. These people were soups sandwiches, complete hot garbage that got the names of things like stool-pigeon and the like. I think Shad, very much so, was one of these people. As, I have noticed, these shitbags when they eventually leave their moral obligations or get discharged, they actually seem to excel in something niche once outside of the service.
I do believe we can trace back a lot of Shadman's current deviancies to his initial military conscription. He obviously had them before hand, but I think the humilitaiton he faced while serving was what gave him his current defense mechanisms. This narcissistic victim complex that he has been victimized for his art and his personality. And someone who has been demoralized through the likely circumstance of discharge due to debilitating incompetence. From there, he cultivated himself a personality that emulated the very people who abused him. Shadman, the persona, was potentially crafted to mask his own mistakes and to empower himself.
There is a certain time in military conscription where you either become the ghost, the rockstar or the serial killer. The guy who is smart enough to not let anyone know their name, the guy who is an eccentric but follows the rules enough to get away with a lot and the serial killer - the guy we all eyed on the range, thinking that one day he would toe the line and hold himself hostage with his qual-gun. I truthfully will assert that Shad is the ghost, pretending to be both the serial killer and the rockstar.
He supposed posted screenshots of a discord conversation with his mother (?? what the fuck is up with that) and she eludes briefly to her having a similar hardship to shad's psychosexual problems. If I remember right, (note that I spent a few days speed reading this entire thread, so forgive me if I am wrong) she eluded to being abused herself.
What is it with these pedophilic individuals and the fact they come from very specific households? While we like to think that most pedophiles are not the Epstein rich guy types and that its mostly these overweight cartoon characters in stinky wife-beaters in their mother's basement, we have to acknowledge that there are some very privilaged and fortunately born people, dudes who literally won the parent-financial-stability gacha in life, that have developed these intense psychosexual disorders.
Rather than developed, I'd argue that they are inherited. Looking at people like Epstein and all the wealthy, influential people he knew and had them by the balls with his black book. The pedophile is much like a zombie, its main force of food is also its main force of reproduction. They evolve their communities as the nobility of yore in Europe had, subjugating heir families to incestuous practices to maintain the blue blood of nobility... and also, have always had a taste for younger individuals.
It is unnatural for humans to live without the consequence of their actions. People like Shad has had influential people in his life for years guarding his clout like loyal dogs, but not only that - he has money. It is an inevitability of the fact that his Creole father's family owns many prominent restaurants and married a fellow, similarly rich Swiss woman. I am not going to expel any economic ideology here, but there is certainly a correlation between the rich and privilaged and pedophilia, while not a direct causation. I believe it is simply that wealth allows you to escape the ramifications of such harmful habits.
Shad left Switzerland, a country that he has disgraced himself in for his art and for his miserly conscription performance, only to be a miserly person in America - living in an unironic grey space of freedom from the 'persecution' he fled. He has become this super ego driven persona, a coping mechanism that has turned into his shroud. And his estrangement from reality is likely born from the estrangement from consequences. In one of the screenshots he, himself, posted - someone is mentioning he can 'become a new man' somewhere else. It is advice that is given to someone who has done it before. Shad has already left his home country to be a different person in a different country and to capitalize off of it.
I don't what it is about the unfortunate circumstances of certain military services (I know for a fact the Swiss army did not put him through the shit I had to go through, for example, but the fact still remains its an absurd requirement to ask of a young man) that push people into certain directions. But heroin is very common in the branches I had served in. I think the constant stress and the lack of sleep, the anxiety, creates this need to simmer down. I would not be surprised if this is where Shad found his love of chain smoking and alcohol to chill. Socialization is one of the key aspects of keeping sane in such an environment and it sometimes leads to intense indulgences. It is like overeating. When you are running 15km a day and doing sets of 40 push ups on your fists two or three times, you can afford to eat and drink and do whatever. When you get out, the body suffers.
We have seen pictures of Shad apparently looking fit and it is likely that this has been either completely undone by his heroin addiction or those images were simply not himself. A strong reason for shad's masked persona is that he does not need to find images of other people to hide his true self. The mask acting as a wall to prevent a certain level of intimacy with others and also to guard his insecurities while empowering his attributes - shockfactor baiting and edgy hard-personality olympics.
The fact Shad is using someone else's face as his twitter icon rn, and has likely even gone through either intense body training only to lose it or went through the effort of hiring a cosplayer, I think are indictive that in his early internet adolescence he had used similar methods to further project this lie-dependent character that he wants to be. Obviously, this method is very successful for narcissistic victims like himself, as angry reactions deflect off of him because he is not vulnerable with the mask on. (a gimmick he also likely completely stole from the Czech rapper Reznik, who himself has jokingly eluded to himself as being a pedophile and a serial killer, etc etc) This literal mask has allowed him to take these blows because he is convinced that the character of Shadman is not himself and through that, every insult rolls off him like rain from a raincoat. However, by emulating this persona he has by no doubt, become completely engulfed in the illusion that he is an anarchist above others.
Now onto the main reason I made this post, the fact that he is acting like a full blown heroin addict. Likely, if he is doing black tar, he did not start on it. His exposure to the "scene" in Burbank had likely given him some ground to experiment with the 'party' society of intellectuals. (Heroin is a 'party' drunk where I am from and while my own family member may have started doing heroin ironically, doing their own military conscription, the 'party' scene afterwards is where they managed to score significant habits)
Someone like Shad is very habitual and ritualistic. Especially as a creative person of any sort, ritual and routine is a system of progression, effort, error, rebuilding and recreation. Progression being that any art and all art is practice for doing greater things. Effort being that doing anything at all should be rewarded. Error being able to accept that there are mistakes and acknowledging you can do better. Rebuilding being the ability to come down from the actual artistic act and recreation being the reward. Booze and cigarettes are probably not just the favourite R and R packages of soldiers and conscripts, but artists especially.
The problem with addiction is that it becomes the progression -> effort -> error -> rebuilding and recreation pipeline that creative work does. Which explains why Shad has all but completely given upon art. As an artist, he likely abused stimulants before, starting with energy drinks and the like. When you work with deadlines and need to maintain yourself through burnout, caffeine and the likes sometimes are entirely necessary to keep the brain actually creative alongside the mechanical function of your hands. And man, are an artist's and writer's hands sometimes different than a lot of other people's.
From there, I theorize that Shad had used the military method of "keeping himself sharp". Relying heavily on energy drinks that he is still apparently addicted to, having productive days with slow and sluggish nights emphasized by a "down" process. Everyone with an obsessive workload has to unwind. I enjoy an ice cold beer sometimes, sometimes a cigar and three fingers of bourbon. But this ritual can be dangerous if mixed with media. You've seen it before, probably, a family member drinking beers mindlessly. Or even smoking weed while reading a book.
The problem with someone like Shad is that he already has an addictive personality to the point of causing himself significant harm. How else would he be into so many sexually deprived things? Pornography addiction along with drugs is an ugly combination. I believe that Shad mindlessly consumed media, both pornographic and otherwise, in excessive amounts in between his artistic career and was promptly 'downing' while doing so. A reward system of "oh yeah, I'll finish this work, smoke, cum and sleep and then post it tomorrow with a nice description."
From there, it is possible his progression became impeded by his habits. Lack of progression meant his stimulants went to amphetamines, starting with things like Adderall and probably going on from there. Then he had a new problem, he had trouble putting in effort due to the frantic and fast moving state of his thoughts. As a result, his art stagnates and he begins to mass produce things that are easier to correlate with his current motivation and drive. Then he hits errors, he further stagnates his style and artistic career, focusing entirely on easy shock and typically below average art to once again, correlate and compensate for the new oddities in his production pipeline. Then he gets to rebuilding and recreation... he has to come down.
It starts with beers to get less wired, but tolerance goes up. From there, Shad begins to get into weed and cbd. At first, he wants to chill. But then he realized that its not just art that stresses him, it is life. The pipeline gets rustier as he eventually gravitates to the people around him, desperate for some social guidance as an absurdist, godless man. Someone in California introduces him to the ultimate party drug. The drug that ENDS the party. Drink and adderall it up all night, but put yourself to sleep with the dragon's piss in your veins.
Then we are back to problem one. Rebuilding and recreation has built a bed too deep for even Shad to sleep in. He has to get up and grind. He starts doing a lot more Adderall. Just to wake up. As Hunter S Thompson once put it, he started his day with cocaine, punctuated it with cocaine - but when it came time to WORK? He would do "cocaine seriously". And the difference must have been staggering. For one to be just functional and the other to pull out the brain from the gutter inside of you. At this point, I theorize Shadman had gone full on into the hardest pitfall possible. Overworking and over achieving.
His art gets a bit better, he puts more effort into it, because now he can get REALLY high and productive and hyper focused, all while being able to come down HARD. PLAY HARD, SLEEP HARD. Life goes by fast and it helps him masturbate even more. The sexual depravity deepens because heroin steals happiness from your future. Shad knows that one day, he'll be in a dark empty room and the heroin habit will be his only blanket to snuggle with at night. So he does his best to self improve. Maybe seeking fitness. This whole time, he is sterilizing his needles and injection points with cotton swabs and q-tips and alcohol. But at this point, he's using the worst heroin possible and he's bending spoons to cook it.
Then it all hits at once. Or rather, it stops hitting at all. Productivity ends entirely, because the uppers and stimulants don't work. They keep him in a somewhat lucid state and its a living hell where he can't do anything but be himself. The person he hates the most. He doubles down on his big personality and becomes this super-man persona once more. He's taking moral stances over others. He thinks he is a functional addict. And true, he was functional before but now the check and balances are bounced checks and he's balancing between ruin and ruinous powers.
For some reason, this state of mind, this inner eccentric schizoid that has guarded the avoidant atypical person he was in life - remains while his body decays. Why do people insistently protect and stay friends with someone like Shad? Because he had a big personality that they appreciated. The narcissistic victim was willing to put himself on the cross, to carry it too and with a hard dick the entire time. But this charming aspect of Shad, that attracted his friends to him so much, have fallen away. Because Shad himself has proven he's a fake person, unable to stand on his own beyond his mask and his persona. And a lot of that is because his denial of help and perpetual victimhood has proven that he's not someone you want around. He's the guy who is going to be lying and scheming, getting money from you even when he doesn't need it because if he can score a buck, you're the idiot and he's the genius in his head.
He's addicted to the routine of it all now. The habit, the ritual. Shooting up and going crazy, breaking his own shit and lazily lounging in his filth - it is all apart of coming down, getting up, getting high, coming down and then putting himself to sleep to start it all up again. If Shad isn't doing H, he's chasing a more literal dragon. Alcoholism, social reclusion and his own eccentric personality has backfired into an amalgamation of delusional behavior and episodes. Mania-like egoism that is superficially decorating his altar of desecration. He plays a Destroyer because he lacks mastery over these things he cannot control. It is easier to break something than to repair it, when you've given up on learning how it works, how it unscrews and comes apart and back together again. Shad has lost himself, he doesn't know where his seams start and he's on fire, but only everyone else can see it.
Shad got shot with the sweetest gun. The one that puts pure piss in his veins and now he's drowning in it. Whether the heroin is metaphorical or literal in this case is almost irrelevant in the fact that he has become reclusive from others, despite openly exploding like a Syrian van near an army checkpoint. If it is true, (likely not), that he started HRT and was going through self sissification, the introduction of hormones would have only made his behaviours more erratic. He'd find himself crying more and having more inappropriate emotional reactions of high degrees of intensity. Giving him all the more reason to indulge. And when you have nothing but big thoughts and narcissistic, perpetual victimhood as your running motivator in being 'different', you are bound to simply turn yourself out with drugs and alcohol. The ugly things you hide about yourself the most eventually come spilling out, involuntarily more often than not.
That is really all I have to say. Do forgive me for my english, as I consider it very substandard and I know that my way of speaking is at times incomprehensible and messy. It is my third language and I learned most of it through academic reading and recreational reading, thus why I know a lot of bigger words and phrases but I am unable to satisfyingly explain anything in less verbose ways. For that I do apologize.
I want to say also that I tried to say all of this without any ego or projecting or overly large ideological standpoints. While also not being emotionally driven. I resent Shadman as an entity that has gotten away with everything somehow, but I do not mindlessly hate him and wish him dead. I am rather apathetic about where he ends up as I do not know him personally nor do I claim to. I have merely met people like him, however.
I'm actually a really stupid bastard. There are bound to be mistakes and incorrect assumptions here, feel free to disprove them! I am in no way a profession. I just felt it was an interesting thing to do, to try and crisscross similarities and suggest a theoretical timeline of events that have lead Shad to where he is now.
Also, this ended up being very long and needlessly so. But I feel like editing it would remove a lot of contextual paragraphs and it would become incomprehensible. If this is spam or needlessly off topic, feel free to delete, ignore or whatever. My intention was to suggest my own hypothesis and encourage further analysis and speculations.
Cheers.
Oh and are you implying that Chris didn't do that? That he went BEYOND!?
