#yeah Joe Goldberg has stalked and killed people but can he do this?

[literary-chameleon]

Watched the 4th season of You without watching the 3rd one to establish being a bigger sociopath than Joe Goldberg 😌✌️

[lilicohirukoma]

YOU S4 EP2 LIVEBLOG

Here we go again

- I wouldn’t be too married to the idea its one of the new people here, could always be someone from your past (maybe the guy the Quinn’s send)

- Is this season gonna be Joe’s descend into madness/paranoia? I kinda dig that

- Oh wait an actual murder mystery party? Even more fun!

- But I still don’t get why they want him around so much, like he isnt rich so that can’t be a reason

- YOU KEEP YOUR MOUTH SHUT ABOUT WHODUNNITS MR GOLDBERG

- But then why would she conviently leave a voice mail about him being dead right in front of you?

- Shit okay he made that deduction too I’m gonna go cry now

- Kate’s being sussed out so I feel like its def not her and she might even die

- Ah yes hello Nadia you still exist, how convenient you love the mystery genre

- WHY ARE YOU CALLING ABOUT THIS IN A PUBLIC AREA IDIOT???? GO HOME AND THEN CALL how has Joe never been caught oh my god

- Don’t like being stalked huh Joe

- Delete the app/destroy your phone, clearly they want a game and if you try to deny it they’ll have to make measures to keep you in it and through those measures you could get closer to their identity

- Lady Phoebe is giving me some Annika vibes I love it

- Now hold on a minute... Phoebe might be a bit more manipulative than she looks

- I know Ralph is Ralph Lauren but who tf is Tom

- Liking the Soo siblings a lot and I think one of them will survive, my bet’s on Sophie

- No Kate’s the red herring move on from her

- Louis XIV for Sun King w Dagger? Makes sense for the rich entitled assholes theme the show is going with (as usual)

- His detective superpower is probably gonna he the fact that he’s a serial killer and can thus think like a murdering stalker

- I feel like we are gonna get more crazy stuff from Gemma and Blessing, I think the characters have more to offer

- When charged with a DUI one moves to London and starts an elite club obviously

- WHAT DID I SAY SUN KING LOUIS XIV BABY, thank god he was one of my biggest history hyperfixations

- How much did they pay Adam’s actor for that scene I got to know

- Hmmm why did that lady want a picture of Joe

- EWWWWWW NFTS GET IT OUT OF MY FACE. Kill Simon for me please

- I dont think exposing a piss kink equals murder and framejob

- Wdym Roald Joe smells of New York, Virginia, Vermont and those kinda places

- Do love this snake skin suit Adam has going on

- Yeah I don’t think it’s him either, he’s weird but that isnt a crime

- Red paint meant to symbolize blood I see whats going on

- And ofc Simon immediatly makes performance art out of it

- Didn’t you literally say to stop helping people? Why are you helping Kate out again fool? (Yes its bc hes in love w her I know)

- He sells NFTs of course he stole the other art works

- Nah, he’s an asshole but too casual and laid back to kill someone, frame a person and then fuck around on text about it

- Simon’s gonna get killed I can feel it

- So Malcolm was missing a finger and Simon an ear, both of those had jewelry (a ring and an earring) on those parts so that might be something

- Rhys is getting more and more suspicious but that might also be on purpose

- Kate is just reserved man, not every good act should be for public display

- I love Nadia, if she dies I’m gonna be so mildly disappointed

- OH FUCK YES LETS GOOO GET HIS ASS

[popanalysis99]

Toxic Men in TV Series who are the absolute worst.

(TW: R*pe and Sexual Assault)

While there are some men who seem to be interesting, let’s not deny the fact that there are most male characters who act like their “toxicity” is cool but honestly, it’s horrible and something not to root for. So here are the toxic male characters who are the absolute worst, excuse my misandry:

Kevin McRoberts - Kevin Can F**k Himself

We had to start somewhere from the bottom of the underworld. A recent entry on this list, Kevin is the lead character Allison’s husband who...let’s just say has the brain of a dumb frat bro who is extremely high on pot and hasn’t recovered since then. While most of the sitcoms in the past would portray these so-called goofy and dim-witted husbands as “big fun” and lovable, Kevin is not like that, at all. In this anti-sitcom nightmare, Kevin literally believes that the whole world revolves around him. He plans such stupid unrealistic schemes to seize the day, recklessly spends the savings on stupid irrelevant sports merchandises and doesn’t even let Allison have her own agency outside of his life. Plus he is so petty and spiteful to the point he destroys one good thing that any of the women in the series have, like Allison’s dream job and Patty’s love life. And that latter was because she didn’t bring him a burger! All of this makes him look less funny and more tyrannical. No wonder poor Allison got spurred into wanting to kill him.

Ross Geller - Friends

Ross may seemed like a “nice guy”, but let’s just agree it was a facade. Ross believes that he knows what’s best for the women he dates in the series and thinks he is superior and is always right about everything. He is seems extremely disturbed over the fact that his ex-wife, Carol is a lesbian and is jilted towards her current wife, Susan and snarks at the latter for it. And then there is her extreme control and jealousy towards Rachel, especially in her career. While Rachel is no saint either, Ross jumps to the conclusion that the man who got her a perfect job wants to sleep with her, then goes out of his way to humiliate and mark his territory on her and even if it’s revealed that the said guy has a girlfriend of his own, Ross still doesn’t abandon his theory, unless he believes that the guy is cheating on his girlfriend with Rachel. And then there is the fact that he joined his student girlfriend on a spring break just to have her all to himself, not caring about the fact that what if one of his students or colleagues would’ve seen him on TV with her and that could’ve put him in a huge scrutiny.

Joe Goldberg - You

The show is basically built around how toxic Joe is, but this didn’t stop him from having his own fanbase apparently, with most of them glossing over his actions. But Joe is not a dream boyfriend at all. Once he sees a woman in front of him, he immediately gets obsessed with her and believes she belongs to him and him only. And to achieve that, he stalks her, he checks everything about her, kills people he believes are harmful to her when he himself is the same and when the woman finds out about him and rejects him, he kidnaps and kills her and the cycle begins again.

Chuck Bass - Gossip Girl

What is it with the teen drama industry’s obsession with the “Bad Boy who can be redeemed with love” trope? Chuck Bass is “the bad boy” of Gossip Girl. If his attempted rape of Serena and Jenny didn’t give fans an indication that how deranged he is, his violent and emotional abuse of his girlfriend Blair cements him as this. He slut-shamed women around him, hit Blair once and even traded her for a hotel ownership and somehow he gets a happy ending with her at the end! What?

Nate Jacobs - Euphoria

Nate is a star quarterback of his high school football team and seems like he has it all, but underneath, he is fucking deranged. His untamed manly rage causes him to physically and emotionally abuse his girlfriend Maddy and blackmail Jules, who didn’t do anything wrong but just sleep with his father, which makes me think that Nate is blackmailing her into lying to the cops about his assault on Maddy when she wasn’t even there when it happened just because it’s fun for him. Honestly, I’d like to see the imagine Rue and Jules had of killing him become a reality someday.

Dawson Leery - Dawson’s Creek

Just because the show is named after him since he is the protagonist, doesn’t justify his actions. Dawson sees himself as some sort of a Nice Guy hero who believes he is entitled to everything. He has this extreme view on women and how they should fulfil his fantasies of his Rom-Com world. He is extremely critical of Jen when he finds out about her promiscuous past and tells her that she should be ashamed of herself for it, and gets jealous when his two best friends Joey and Pacey begin dating. And when he was briefly in the movie business, he was a rookie but was already a primadonna with the director and crew of the movie was working on and insulted a film critic for criticising his movie which was actually bad.

Kilgrave - Jessica Jones

Kilgrave is the main villain of the Marvel-Netflix series Jessica Jones. He becomes obsessed with the titular heroine when she breaks off from his mind-control. Before that, he spent years treating her as his sex slave and raping her constantly, which left her traumatised. He begins to stalker and believe it will be a “lover’s reunion” when he will see her again someday. He manipulates and brainwashes everyone around him to his whim and treats most women as objects but despite all that, sees himself as the good guy of the situation. Even after Jessica finally gives him his just desserts, he still haunts her everyday.

Fernando Vera - Mr. Robot

This spawn of satan is the reason why I decided to write this list in the first place. Where do I even start? He is first introduced into the series when he forces Shayla to go on a date with her and later rape her. This is what causes the misandrist vigilante Elliot to sell him out to the FBI and this apparently turns on Vera and moves his unhealthy obsession to Elliot. He has Shayla killed when he tricks Elliot into breaking him out of prison, then returns to have him all to himself by kidnapping his therapist Krista and forcing information out of her about Elliot so that he could “break him and build him back up”, like a fucked up version of The Taming Of The Shrew. He psychologically abuses Elliot into remembering being sexually abused by his father as a child and proceeds to gaslight him into thinking that he was just helping him. The huge problem with Vera is that he sees himself as some sort of Christian Grey who believes that his abuse towards both Shayla and Elliot is charming. Whenever someone failed his desires, he immediately gets bored of them and moves onto someone else, like when he got Shayla killed and moved onto Elliot. That’s why it felt so cathartic when Krista killed him.

Tate Langdon - American Horror Story

Apparently, he is Tate Langdon and he is...hot?? While most of the AHS fans glorified him due to his emo bad boy nature, let’s not forget the fact that he was a school shooter who murdered innocent students and staff and was in general possessive and toxic towards Violet. So no way he is boyfriend material!

Don Draper - Mad Men

Don Draper was the main protagonist of Mad Men. He was an advertisement and marketing executive who had a lot of vices and did a lot of horrible things such as cheat on his wife and treat almost every women and colleagues like crap.

Dexter Morgan - Dexter

While Dexter might seem like the serial-killer killer, there are a lot of things about him which are unadmirable. He gaslights those he is close to so that they could get off his back, obstructs evidence pointing out to him, captures those who didn’t even fit his victims like Doakes and caused the deaths of LaGuerta, Rita and finally his sister Debra. Yeah I think you should stay away from him.

Walter White - Breaking Bad

Aaah..the worst of the worst. Walter White is the protagonist of the series Breaking Bad. He first starts off as a pushover high school teacher who isn’t respected by anyone. When he gets diagnosed with Lung Cancer, he gets into the meth business so that he could support his family, but we all know that it’s not true. He relishes on the power and glory from being a drug dealer and then kingpin and because of that he ends up abusing both Jesse and Skyler, emotionally abusing and selling out the former to the sadistic Nazis and raping the latter several times. He is so petty and spiteful that he kills anyone insulting his ego, just ask Mike. And even after all this, he still claims that it’s all for his family. Like what?

[mrs-nate-humphrey]

idk how far along you are watching "you" but do u think Joe's just a meta progression of dan. I don't. Gossip dan? sure but otherwise no. Also I feel like if one has a dan hc chances are there's a Joe scene for that lol. But they are wildly similar just attitude wise.

agreed! i do not think joe is a progression of dan. i know penn has joked about it and about like, joe being “dan with a knife”, but he’s talking about gossip girl dan specifically, and i REALLY think he’s being sarcastic and joking because he is talking about how gossip dan doesn’t make sense. THIS QUOTE! the sass. i love it.

so, to me, I think having to consider that reality which obviously the last ten minutes of an entire series wasn't able to do, you know to whatever degree that anybody wants to connect those dots and draw the parallels and connect the... make a throughline (?) - maybe it exists a little bit.

sorry abt linking this interview KLHDKLFH i couldn’t resist! it is just so good. elizabeth lail’s reaction to everything penn is saying about gossip dan is just. SAME!!! okay, enough piggybacking on penn badgley’s opinions, time to do the ivy-blogging now.  

i think the person joe pretends to be is the person dan actually is? bookstore clerk, nice to kids, “hey, can i recommend you a book,” look at my garden, bruh, i am so cottagecore, *stares intentely at people with those doe eyes* - these are all dan humphrey traits! they are all joe goldberg traits, too, but joe is actively using them as a cover. 

joe to me is - i haven’t watched enough of you, im just 9 eps in, so this is based off that, of course - he’s like. violent on the inside, but actively presents as non-threatening and sweet in order to get away with it? (which is what abusers irl do, which is why i actually LOVE the show because im like. yes! it’s a show about abuse that shows people how FUCKED up abuse is while also playing around with the whole idea of “romance”!!! fascinating stuff. ) 

dan on the other hand isn’t pretending to be sweet or anything, dan cares about being a good person. but when things get fucked up for dan, he can be sneaky and resort to behaving in shady ways, which isn’t who he wants to be, it’s just a coping mechanism (not justifying, just analysing.) so i would maybe even say that like dan is the opposite of joe in that way - he cares so deeply about people and wants to help them and loves so much, too much, and to shield himself from getting hurt, he can resort to being shady and doing things that he knows are wrong. on the contrary, joe is past caring about people, the part of him that cared about people just doesn’t exist anymore (if it ever did, i have to watch more of this show to say?). joe uses being nice as a cover to hide that he is evil. and dan uses being evil as a cover to hide that he is actually nice!! 

this is only tangentially related, but i gotta say it. my friend @mydearestprongs​ said something jokingly about how s6 dan is actually joe, and conversation moved from there to like, the idea of a post s5 au in which joe kills dan and pretends to be him, which i think was her idea, but i haven’t been able to stop thinking about. it makes so much sense! joe goldberg is gossip girl!! remember how he lurks on social media to stalk beck? this is a skill he canonically has! and he is evil enough to actually do everything gg did and feel no remorse!

anyway.... it’s been months since we spoke about this and she did sort of give me permission to write a s6 au in which dan is dead and joe is pretending to be dan. this is also a concept my sister and i discussed in great detail. we came up with the following:

serena would also end up dying. RIP. i just think that joe would kill her, but i hate that. maybe after the derena wedding. uh... “derena” wedding. joerena wedding? dksllkfhfg goodBYE.

nate would be the only person who realises something is wrong with “dan.” the moment joe realises that this is what’s happening, nate is killed, too. 

there was some subplot involving blair and chuck that i don’t remember 

i think jenny kills joe in the end.

yeah, you can see why i didn’t write it. WORSE ENDING THAN S6 FINALE AND BOYYY, THAT’S REALLY SAYING SOMETHING! :(

[hellyeahomeland]

I was fully prepared to write a recommendation of the first season of You as a show that wouldn’t ruin your life. This is a show that Netflix first recommended to me about a year ago, back when it was all anyone could talk about. I watched the trailer and learned it was about Penn Badgley, Gossip Girl himself, stalking a woman. And I was supposed to find this sexy and/or dramatically compelling. Pass. 

(Mild-ish spoilers follow but I’m sure you can glean it all from a trailer. This show is really not about the ending but the journey.)

And pass I did, for about a full year. Last weekend, I finally caved. Penn Badgley plays Joe Goldberg, a New York City bookstore clerk (sorry, manager) who meets Guinevere Beck (known just as Beck), an aspiring poet. They hit it off because they both read books. This is literally the reason they hit if off. Oh, then he begins stalking her. Like, truly, breaking-and-entering, panty-sniffing, creeping-on-the-subway-level stalking. HE DOES IT BECAUSE HE IS ~*~IN LOVE~*~ WITH HER!!!!! This is all narrated drily and tongue-in-cheek by Joe. The show wants us to like Joe. Or, they want us to feel for Joe. Or, they want us to understand Joe. We are in his head via this narration almost 24/7. The dramatic irony in this show is off the charts! 

But, NEWSFLASH, Joe is a fucking creep. Penn Badgley plays this very well. If you didn’t think Dan Humphrey was a creep, I don’t know what show you were watching in 2007. Very quickly, You picks up. Joe digs himself deeper and deeper into his obsession with Beck. The show grinds with this narrative force as Joe crosses any and all lines for Beck, all in the name of love. 

What is more remarkable--dare I say, addictive--about this dumb fucking show is that Beck starts to fall for him too! We are actually witnessing their “love” story. Is it romantic? Fuck no!!! Is it sexy? HELL NO, HE STALKED HER!!! Can I stop watching? ALSO NO.

I want to stop watching because this behavior goes against everything I believe and yet I physically cannot. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him! And yet....fuck I hate myself, I literally looked up “joe beck you” YouTube videos when I finished the season. I only watched one. It was set to “Toxic” by Britney Spears. I’m sorry! Did I mention I am trash? 

(PAUSE to just acknowledge, yeah, I fell in love with another codependent mess of a female character SO WHAT. Beck, I love you!!!!) (And that is at least 85% of the reason I became obsessed.)

This show has a bizarro meta layer that sits on top of all the plot and characters and is sort of breathtaking. It’s what takes it beyond a run-of-the-mill thriller and into real “wtf did I just watch,” “I can’t stop thinking about this” territory. Like, we hate Joe. We really do. We know he is a creep and a psycho and a killer. (Although apparently some viewers truly find him attractive in a real way and to those people I say #FindGod.) The show knows this, too. The show knows that we know. We are in a Friends “they know that we know that they know that we know” realm. 

I don’t like Joe. In fact, I hate him. But I do enjoy watching him. I enjoy watching him and Beck together. I love Beck, and so I want her to be rid of this fucker. But I understand why she stays (again, mess. Also, daddy issues). Do I ship them? No, I don’t. I don’t want them together because I know he’s gonna fucking murder her! That is not an exaggeration. But I also don’t not want them together?????? (Again, I am  t r a s h.) I want to know what will happen next, even as I know that the thing that will ultimately happen is he will hurt her and kill her. In fact, the ending feels so set in stone it’s actually miraculous that the show builds up so much tension and suspense as it hurdles toward what is largely a predetermined conclusion. This sick, twisted fuck, waste of a man will end her life. And then move on to the next poor codependent, desperate mess of a woman whose life he can infiltrate and ruin. 

The conflict that this creates inside me--of being a person who said “no thanks!!!!!” for a year to a show about a man stalking a woman and then watched the whole first season in 24 hours--is something I don’t know how to deal with. The best way to describe it is “mindfuck.” 

There is a line toward the beginning of the series where Joe is talking with a few of Beck’s vapid friends who are basically uniformly terrible and in voiceover he says something like, “God, am I the only feminist here?” It’s a hysterical line. This show is often hysterical. But thinking back to it now it has this whole new meaning: what does it say about me (and my feminist values) that I find this horrifying and horrifyingly violent show entertaining--no, thrilling? That I can’t stop thinking about it? The show doesn’t endorse the violence and abuse (of all varieties) that take place. And I know it’s fiction. I know the show is saying that our romantic ideal of Prince Charming doesn’t exist. I know that people we want to see as heroes are actually villains. I know this. I did not need these reminders. But I still let it ruin my life, didn’t I? 

Edit: well.... season two is not it. We stay stanning Guinevere Beck though! 

[prettylittleliarsxxxx]

This is the shot: A slim, twentysomething white man, pale and dark-haired, waits in the center of the frame, head tilted fractionally to catch a glimpse of something (someone?) the viewer can’t see. He is wearing a dark jacket with a high collar, and a dark ball cap, even though he is inside, even though it is night. The collar is pulled up to obscure his too-romantic silhouette; the cap is pulled down to obscure his too-soulful eyes. This is the kind of man who literary heroines—or at least literary-minded ones—swoon over, but with so much of his face obscured, it is only his cheekbones, high and almost too pronounced, that signal such classic desirability.

Such a signal is important. Because everything else about this shot shouts that this man is a stalker: From the blurring of important details in the background, to the juuuust too-closeness of it, to the shadows cast from odder angles than seem natural, every aspect makes us want to scream at the heroine, RUN AWAY, LEAVE, HOW CAN YOU NOT SEE WHO THIS PSYCHO IS???. And so we need something, some small thing, to remind us, when this man is not actually dressed to kill, when he’s not staring at the device he’s got tracking her every digital step, why she can’t see what we see. And that small thing is: He is attractive.

Duh.

This, of course, is why this man’s story works. The fight-or-flight reflex his behavior should provoke in the object of his obsessions is counteracted by his charming physical appeal—lust, at least initially, wins out over fear, and as it does, provides the tension necessary to drive the narrative we keep tuning in for.

The trick is, how the show wants to resolve that tension is a question of cultural time. As in, when the handsome stalker was Ezra Fitz (Ian Harding) in Freeform’s teen thriller, Pretty Little Liars, just four short (long) years ago, the romantic hero vs. predator tension was invoked only as a means of creating a temporary road block to eventual nuptial bliss between A Good Man and his (high-schooler) sweetheart. Now, when the handsome stalker is Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) in Lifetime’s adult thriller You, here in the year of Goddammit Are We Collectively Still Not Taking #MeToo Seriously (a.k.a. 2018), the tension is very clearly meant to resolve not only in Joe’s psychopathy being found out, but in his sweetheart’s (and our) delusions of obsession-as-romance shattering completely.

Understanding that this is You’s endgame is helped, of course, by the fact that (spoilers) Joe straight-up whacks a romantic rival in the skull with a book mallet in the series’ pilot, then kills him with peanut oil after holding him hostage for all of episode two. But even if he didn’t go that far, that early, series creators Greg Berlanti (of the Arrowverse) and Sera Gamble (of The Magicians) make no effort to suggest that we in the audience should be ambivalent about Joe’s character, who addresses the narration of nearly every sequence to an idealized fantasy of Beck (Elizabeth Lail), the “you”-object of his affections, whom he spies from the other side of the book shop he manages in the series’ opening scene and immediately starts scheming to own. In fact, if Berlanti and Gamble make any effort in any direction, it is to keep reminding us that Joe is bad: Take centuries of art romanticizing the unwavering fixation of a handsome man on a single woman and add to it the sea of mundanely callous dudes in the modern dating scene, and you get an audience that’s been trained out of any ability to keep an attentive, clever, present guy, who likes books and making jokes and who is, on top of it all, moppily handsome, at any kind of wait-and-see remove. Like cognitive behavioral therapy, but for the propagation of violent loopholes in rape culture—without intervention from the puppeteers behind Joe’s dark adventures, we might trip over those loopholes and fall to our Joe-shaped doom.

It’s tempting to think that they aren’t doing this, as so much of You is staged as the exact kind of dreamy romance Joe imagines himself to be facilitating and Beck believes herself to be living. Each episode opens on a series of slow, bird’s-eye pans of New York City in early autumn, set to some kind of unobtrusively sweet indie-ish acoustic background music. Scenes with Joe and Beck together are filmed with a warm, golden filter, the background details and even the edges of the foreground taking on a comfortable kind of soft-focus that seems to snuggle them together like a big, metaphorical duvet. If they are outside, the melody of bird song is prominent. If they’re inside, the shush of pages turning and life being lived together is turned high. But when juxtaposed with the brittle, hard-focus, doom-soundtracked reality of the scenes of Joe’s life outside of his and Beck’s “romance,” the delusionally fantastic nature of those softer scenes is made obvious: They are all in Joe’s head, and while Beck may be living in the same fantasy at the moment, Joe’s head is a bad, dangerous place.

“Yeah, but he loves her, but he’s sweet, but it’s a love story!” Badgley imagined eventual fans arguing when he and Lail sat down for an interview with E! News earlier this summer. “In what world?! I don’t believe that’s love. I don’t think that love equals this, so I think we have to question, what is love, and if we think this is love, where are we mistaken?”

Where is throughout all of hetero-romantic pop culture. More acutely, where, I would (and already started to) argue, is in Pretty Little Liars, which not only features Joe’s stalker ancestor in the form of Ezra “I’ll Be Watching You” Fitz, but is in actuality one of the two other shows about attractive young people swept up in cyberstalking that every elevator pitch of You invokes. (The other, of course, is Gossip Girl. ) I spent the better part of three years and many hundreds of thousands of words arguing exactly how many rape culture/toxic masculinity balls Pretty Little Liars and the creator-blessed endgame of #Ezria dropped, so I neither need nor want to retread rageful ground here. But I do need to point out that none of those elevator pitches invoking Pretty Little Liars are doing so for the fact that You is finally juggling all the poisonous balls PLL, and, in its earlier way, GG, let fall—they’re doing so because stalking is a superficial thread throughout all three, and because You’s stars include PLL’s Shay Mitchell and GG’s Badgley. That’s it.

The thing is, the fact that You is treating the subject of violent masculine entitlement and obsessive, possessive “love” with more deadly gravity than either of its teen predecessors isn’t subtle; watch the first five minutes of the pilot and you’ll get that. But that’s the point I’m trying to make: You have to watch the first five minutes of the pilot to see it. If you just look to the promo interviews and red carpet soundbites and fluffy entertainment news tweets and headlines, our collective inability to accept the violent potential of the bad men in our midst is laid bare: Joe’s psychopathic character is translated as him being a mere “creepazoid,” according to the photo caption in Vulture’s review, while You itself is cheerfully summed up as a “messy, murderous romp.” According to a teaser interview with Entertainment Tonight last fall, Mitchell declared the show to be “juicy… It still has all those elements that PLL had with it being sort of a mystery, there’s a romance part to it and it’s just exciting.” Back on E! News, while the article anchoring Badgley and Lail’s interview sports the title, “Penn Badgley Is ‘Really Troubled’ By Anyone Thinking You Is a Love Story,” it eventually can’t help but suggest that, “What Joe does is not really harassment from what Beck can see, but from the viewer’s perspective, it’s not quite not harassment and also not quite not [sic] love.”

!!!!!!!

It’s true, as Kathryn VanArendonk argues in that Vulture review above, that the tone of You isn’t steady, but I’d argue in response that this is less an indicator of the show not being serious enough to be more than a romp, and more a reminder that we are not, as a species, that great at metabolizing the idea that multiple, contradictory things can be true about a person or a situation at the same time. Especially if that person is a man, and especially if the contradictions involve a woman. I am filing this piece on the weekend before the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to hear testimony in the alleged violent attempted rape of a 15-year-old girl by then-17-year-old Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and likely no one reading these words is unaware that “boys with be boys,” “that was just horseplay,” and “what is harassment anyway???” have resurfaced, in response, as an apparently reasonable foundation for the debate between men’s ability to gain fame and fortune and women’s basic humanity. “Two things can be true at the same time” has become a kind of clarion call across justice-minded social media, but that doesn’t mean it has been absorbed by everyone, on every level.

And so we get: Romp. Juicy. Romance. Not quite harassment. We get Ezra Fitz as pop culture’s most recently successful romantic stalker model. We get the urge to make excuses and carve a path for a bad man’s not-all-badness, even being inside Joe’s head in a way we could never be in Fitz’s, even knowing how he thinks, how he watches, how he transgresses Beck’s digital and physical privacy—even knowing how he murders people to get closer to her. We get that urge because we are also getting Joe swinging from murderously delusional to relatably jokey (his inner monologue as he disposes of his romantic rival’s body in episode three, and later as he picks up jogging to better follow Mitchell’s Peach, is particularly funny) to empathetically invested in making the daily life of his neglected kid neighbor just a bit richer and safer and less sad in a way that isn’t inconsistent so much as it is human, and in its humanity is challenging for us to accept.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the most emphatically unequivocating take I’ve found on the non-romance of You comes from Badgley himself, whose every interview has centered his utter rejection of anything positive one might try to shake out of Joe, or Beck, or Joe and Beck’s “relationship.” One of the most illuminating is the one he did with Devon Ivie at Vulture. It is worth reading in its entirety, but his response to why he took on a stalker role now, in 2018, stands out:

“Now that we’ve made the first season and I’ve been gauging reactions with critics and friends and viewers, I can say there’s a certain accountability—an emotional and psychological responsibility—that we hold the viewers and Joe to. It’s not this wildly irresponsible, escapist fantasy at the perfectly wrong time. I think the show came out at the right time, because any other time, we wouldn’t have had the courage at a social level and have conversations about why we’re drawn to it, but also why we know we shouldn’t reward it. We don’t want to reward Joe more than how he’s already being rewarded.

And as to whether or not he thinks that “viewers will cheer on this depraved man for being a self-described ‘fool in love’,” Badgley responded, “To me, a conversation I hope it starts is, What is it about the show that’s compelling? Why am I watching it? Am I enjoying it? Am I agreeing with Joe? What about all of this do I enjoy most? […] The degrees of which you’re enticed and excited by a show, there’s a lot more scrutiny in terms of the stories we’re interested in telling and consuming—the things we’re still charmed by and attracted to. Because Joe shouldn’t be allowed to behave the way he does. But only the viewer can decide.”

Shortly before Pretty Little Liars was set to air the last half of its seventh and final season, I flew out to Los Angeles to join my co-recappers at the show’s final PaleyFest panel. There were still ten episodes to go before the finale, and we held out hope that the series that had, in its bravest moments, been the most subversively anti-rape culture on television, might be about to burn the whole of Rosewood’s toxic patriarchy to the ground. The viewers who congregated in our comments section every week had certainly decided that that was the only way Pretty Little Liarscould end with integrity. Ten episodes! Ezra could STILL be A! His stalking could be revealed as the toxic danger it always was! But then we got to PaleyFest, and the entire theater was filled with fans whose only interests were the romantic lives of the cast, both onscreen and off, with the #Ezria endgame front and center.

Reader: #Ezria was endgame. And after giving fans like me a single fever dream of the show’s best character beating the daylights out of a jailed Ezra before letting his high-school sweetheart forgive him, the show was so proud of its own cleverness.

It’s 2018 now. #MeToo is only growing stronger as it complexifies, and as more projects like You get made by people who, like Badgley, Berlanti and Gamble, are entirely disinterested in giving bad men a path to not-all-badness. Joe is an outlier, but our willingness to soften the evil of his—fictional, patently obvious, easily condemned—violent obsession is the water we’ve been swimming in for too long. We can decide, as viewers and as people, to start demanding cleaner pools.

You airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on Lifetime.