PacSol said:
To be fair, a big part of increasing one's Hurtful Truth Threshold comes from not increasing the threshold directly (mentally toughening oneself up), but by improving ourselves such that Hurtful Truths lose their sting by becoming Untruths. Chris, on the other hand...
If he's not even doing his own laundry, it's hard to imagine that he's going to seek treatment for the bent
that Jackie pointed out that he had.
The whole Hurtful Truth Level, exceeding of, came in the discussion with Jackie where "she" told him quite bluntly what women look for in a casual hookup, and how he had none of those characteristics. The salient point of the discussion was that when Chris heard too
much of what he knew perfectly well was true (e.g. her detailed descriptions of how fat he was), it came in his ears as "You have a huge gut" and was interpreted by his brain as "I hate you." In his autistic way, OPL was trying to say that she had exceeded social norms -- most of us know, or are, a person with one or more unfortunate features or characteristics, but society would hardly run well if we all went around going, "Hey, Jeff, how are you doing? Man, your nose is looking pretty big today. Okay, gotta go do those spreadsheets, see ya."
The point of the Jackie Saga as I see it, obviously not having been in it, was to hold a mirror to his inadequacies. They had discussed by that point that he couldn't do one pull-up, that he couldn't go a month without a particular
type of vidya (notice he still owned and played a Wii after the smashing of the PS3), and that he was too incompetent or lazy to follow really clear and detailed instructions in making videos for Jackie -- e.g. in the Bollywood video, he couldn't even be arsed to steal one of Barb's lipsticks or use some tempera paint, and paint a dot on his forehead, even though that was specifically mentioned in the instructions. So the Hurtful Truth Level exchange was his Don Quixote moment (although he wouldn't even have fought the windmill, just flipped it off and run, but whatever) -- he admitted that he has to keep a barrier between himself and reality at all times to survive. Given his reality, though, that doesn't seem particularly weird.
