I may have asked this before -- we all may have -- but just how did he get so messed up?"
An aspect of this guy which floats below the surface a little, but which I think is quite revealing in its way, is that he seems to regard himself as a
pedagogue of sorts: a lot of his art is intended to have instructional value of one sort or another. And at least some of the stuff he presents in the "educational" vein is actually fairly conventional, once you cut through the :autism::autism::autism: of the art: lots of stuff in the way of like, being tolerant of differences, social-skills and difficult-situation advice for children, etc. His (relatively) recent fixation on various fantasy presentations of child-friendly medical information is particularly indicative of his desire to lecture children, I think. And then as a sub-genre of this you have the pictures where characters offer qualitative assessments of oscilloscopes, "hoon cars", etc.
As to where all this actually comes from, I assume he must have gone through special ed as a kid: I could imagine him having interactions of this dry, condescending, basic-life-advice sort of nature with teaching or other authority figures -- him then internalising these kinds of interactions in a robotic, autistic way and then, thanks to his unwarranted self-importance, trying to "educate" other people in a similar manner.
He says in the heading to
his "Social Situations" folder on DA:
"when I was a young child, I was encouraged to include a social situation in my pieces," which I think is a revealing comment -- I can picture people really trying to to hammer basic inter-personal skills into his brain at some point.
He's also got this quite straightforwardly child-like fixation with "forbidden" behaviour, which I think is sort of the inverse of his moralistic good-behaviour obsession. See all the references to/depictions of characters acting in ways Bryce has been told are wrong or naughty: toilet duck insertions, "hooning," over-eating junk food, etc. -- this I feel has to be him working through his desires to actually do this stuff himself.
Separately, he's clearly right-wing in his political disposition (as far as he has politics capable of being mapped conventionally), and seems to think that Australia, in its natural state, is the same. He seems to view perceived left-wing influences as being "external" in one way or another: see for example his complaints against American advertising-standards organisations and fixation on censorship of non-Australian websites (censorship which
aligns with his views rather than opposes them). Underpinning this all is I think a desire to close off Australia from what he regards as corrupting, liberalising foreign influence.
He's a complicated fellow, certainly.
