Delusions
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| “ | I wanna say that I'm about, 10 to 15 percent of the world population... As far as how many people have seen my videos... I wanna say it's about 700 million. | ” |
| — Daniel when asked about how many fans he has in the Monkeyman Interview. | ||
Daniel Larson's most notable trait are his delusions, which are false beliefs or judgments about external reality, which are held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary. Daniel holds many delusional beliefs, mainly due to his his mental illnesses and manipulation by trolls.
Because of this, Daniel's perception of reality has been on a downward spiral since his first appearances on the Internet. The case can be made, however, that it was never quite that strong in the first place, and trolls only gave the final push rather than being the underlying cause of his poor sense of reality.
Despite many trying to break his delusions, Daniel still holds on strongly to these beliefs, even while institutionalized.
Origins
| "Delusions" is incomplete or missing content. |
As noted, an answer as to why Daniel experiences delusions is because of his various mental illnesses, most notably Bipolar Disorder, and Schizophrenia.[1][2]
List of known Delusions
 | This is a list that may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by adding missing items with reliable sources. |
Fame
Daniel believes that he is a world-renowned, international celebrity singer-songwriter (and to a lesser extent, fashion model) with billions of fans. This delusion in particular ties into his delusions of grandeur, mainly brought on by his schizophrenia. While Daniel does have "fans" (If that is even the right word to refer to them by), it is not because of his music. Instead, people follow him purely because of his eccentric and disturbing behavior online. As noted in the Monkeyman Interview, Daniel genuinely believes that 10-15 percent of the Earths population are fans of him. This would mean that roughly 750,000,000 people in the world are fans of him. This is obviously untrue. It should be noted that the #DanielLarson hashtag on TikTok has over 1 billion views, but overall, this is not representative of Daniel's fame as a supposed "celebrity."
To further put things into perspective, Daniel has around 37,300+ monthly listeners on (now hacked) Spotify;[3] while Michael Jackson has 41.9 million; Taylor Swift, the top artist on Spotify, has 114.6 million. Needless to say, Daniel has a long way to go until he reaches the top charts, let alone have almost a billion fans. The reality of this situation seems to not phase Daniel, though.
This delusion of grandeur causes Daniel to continually believe that he needs a contract with a record label or management, leading to trolls manipulating him under the guise of it being for his music career. Daniel has signed with many "record labels," rotating through them at the drop of a hat, unlike most celebrities.
Relationship with Grace VanderWaal
Daniel's second-most infamous trait about him is his obsession with Grace VanderWaal, a former America's Got Talent star who is now a low-level celebrity, musician and actress. Daniel's infatuation with Grace was said to have began when he was watching America's Got Talent with his grandmother. Nancy allegedly remarked that Daniel could maybe sing with Grace on stage one day, and when hearing this, our future president took that it heart. While it's very likely that Nancy did not intend for it, Daniel became obsessed with Grace while she was only 12 years old.
It's been displayed multiple times by trolls impersonating her that, when it comes to Grace, Daniel is willing to do just about anything to please her and/or increase his chances of getting romantically involved with her. His belief of being in a relationship with her even developed so much to a point where Daniel now believes that Grace and him are engaged, and soon to be married.
Despite him being institutionalized twice during the Second Jail Arc, his delusions about Grace have not stopped; to the contrary, they seemed to have gotten stronger, as presumably thoughts of her had been allowed to stew in his warped mind as he rotted in FCI Englewood.
Finances
Daniel will use fake bank account apps or budget tracker apps to create a "situation" in which he needs money. He is probably attempting to trick fans into giving him money by doing this, that is, he's begging with extra steps. Sometimes Daniel will declare an emergency about being a few billion dollars in debt.[4]