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Hypnosis Doesn't Work Like That!/Alex Chastaine
A long-standing member of discussion and review forum Critical Mass; mostly known by the username Locke.
He and Adi were both members a couple of years before the events of Hypnosis Doesn't Work Like That!. They were both involved in reviewing the most popular threads on a popular image board, rating them as if they were literary works. However, they eventually grew bored of the repetitiveness of this, so Locke held a poll of his followers and instead moved on to reviewing sports matches. He treated them as if they were dramatised events, like the matches in a sports TV series, rather than actual competitions; rating an imagined "director" for pacing, style, tension, and similar. After a year of this, he gradually narrowed his focus to reviewing sports commentary rather than the match itself.
He continued to follow Adi's work (and vice versa), and was one of the members to notice when she stopped posting regularly.
Around the time Adi's school broke up for exams, he was involved in some scandal with an over-aggressive critique of an amateur commentator on a school basketball game which had been posted online. It turned out that the commentator was an established CritMasser (8VinylScratch69), and took the review as a personal attack. Many of Locke's fans announced a "boycot" of his work as a result of this, while others started following him just to keep up with the drama. Others (especially those who were already following both people) decided to leave the site entirely because they didn't like the negativity. This wasn't helped by a tongue-in-cheek post by PeterKhan providing a review of the war between two posters. He was worried at the time that Adi might have been among the people leaving due to this drama, so sent her several messages during the period she was too babyish to respond. (events briefly summarised in chapters 284/285)
Locke believed Adi to be confused about her gender identity. When they were both reviewing flame wars, he took her for a slightly older closeted gay boy, as she occasionally lashed out at perceived effeminate behaviour on the forums. In reality this was because she was copying put downs and metaphors from other people to make herself look more witty; but Locke thought it might be the internalised self-loathing of a boy who couldn't accept his own tendency to slightly girly behaviour. When she moved to reviewing r63 fanfic, Locke saw this as a way of subconsciously testing if she would feel more comfortable identifying as trans girl than a feminine boy. As Adi had no stated gender on her profile, and no picture, there was no reason for him to guess her gender; and the apparent gender of her writing swung all over the map because of her tendency to save particularly emotive sentences or metaphors from other people's work and reuse them later.
