He is utterly convinced. I can't approach the topic with him at all. The first thing he asked me when we started talking was if I believed in the alternate dimensions and I said no. He got very mad, started describing his adventures, and I had to walk it back by saying "I can only speak on experience".
While I'm no means an expert, via experience, I may be able to give some insight here.
I've studied Chris a long time, and I've worked with Autistic kids for roughly the same length of time. Back when I was still working for the school district, we had a lot of work with
severely Autistic kids - ones who came from broken homes, or ones that had severe neurological issues. Many of these kids were trying their
damnedest to learn, and to make something of themselves, despite the mother of all shit hands they'd been saddled with.
In Chris's case, he's basically always maintained this belief that anything "official" written about CWCVille or Sonichu can concievably become so ipso facto by the power of lore. You can see traces of this in the early days of Chris trolling, when newcomers would be added to the comics only to depart just as quickly, Chris' need to correct people in the mailbag, and so on. As time went on, and Chris gained experience, he gained a sort of emotional callous over his setting and refused to allow edits to canon by anyone but the Great Director Chandler himself and those he specifically deemed worthy. You can thank the Evan saga for a lot of this, since Chris suffered some real hardship in killing off Simonla, to the point where it gave him an IRL crisis.
While all of the above was cruel, you can make a credible argument that it formed a mandatory protective ward over the whole of Chris' setting. In and of itself, this
should have been enough to deter casual predators like Boyd and Wise. Chris had suffered previously for letting barbarians past the gate before, so conventional wisdom was that he wasn't going to make that mistake again, and all evidence, for a time, was that he wasn't.
What none of us counted on was how Barb would make him especially vulnerable to predators like these.
Once Boyd and Wise found a way past Chris' emotional defense grid, Chris
had no further defenses for his setting. Once they said they agreed with Chris' theory about cartoon characters and alternate dimensions, they found ways to exploit that fucking
ruthlessly, as you can read for yourself in that fucking horror show of a log collection. Chris' isolation made him impressionable, and his naivete and ease of manipulation made him an easy one to control. These characters are real
to Chris, because each, in their own way, are reflective of aspects of Chris himself. Once inside Chris' bubble, they fucking worked their damnedest to
destroy him, and their willingness to use Chris' own psychological quirks and naivete made it disturbingly easy for Chris to believe something completely batshit. Chris was willing to do anything to save his setting because it's all he had to take joy or comfort in, and they were intent on taking that and perverting it until he could no longer.
Like I said in the previous thread, smarter, better people fall for dumber scams than Chris' all the time. The only difference between Boyd and Wise and those is that these two degenerates decided to prey on someone solely to make him suffer, and did so solely for their own amusement, knowing full well that they were doing something that even many of Chris' A-Logs would find fucking abhorrent.