Hello YOU…

TW (Trigger Warning): If you have experienced being in a violent/toxic relationship or having been stalked, it is best advised that you DO NOT read the following post.

It’s been another successful year for Netflix and its original shows and movies.

During the earlier part of 2019, a certain show that was released on Netflix became the talk/trend on just about every social media platform—specifically, twitter. It was so popular that for weeks I’m sure most of us saw nothing but tweets and pictures/memes and polls about this specific show all up and down our timelines. As people who make up the community of pop culture, we have multiple ways of making the best. . . .and worst out of anything that intrigues us.

Now, what’s the show? YOU

YOU is a psychological thriller/suspense/semi-romance show adapted from the book written by Caroline Kepnes in 2014. The show was originally aired on Lifetime in 2018 until Netflix gained the rights to continue the series in 2019 now making it a Netflix Original. Season two aired on December 26, 2019, following the story of the second book in the YOU series: Hidden Bodies (2016).

After constantly seeing tweets about the show and how some people were saying that they wanted a Joe in their life and where could they find him, while others were saying he needed to be put in jail (period); I decided to see what all the hype was about. I binged all ten episodes of the first season in about a week. It was a genre of television that I never thought I would be able to grasp right away, but after a few episodes of seeing how brilliantly charming the main male character was— I was practically begging for more. The main character Joe Goldberg is played by Penn Badgley. Most of us are probably more familiar with him from Gossip Girl and Easy A, but this new role that he plays is something some of us never thought we would see him portray. The way he played Joe made me hate and love him, as he owned my eyes through the television screen. After having watched the show, part of me knew I needed to read the book in order to have the entire story understood; I just hadn’t expected it all to be from Joe’s psychotic, manipulative, selfish point of view.

It all screams psychopath.

When we first meet Joe, he already has his eyes on a girl that walks into his place of work, he helps her using the customer service skills he was taught, they flirt, and he begins to read her. . . deeply. Thus, starting a full-fledged woman hunt for Ms. Guinevere Beck. He lurks on her social media(s), learns her detailed schedule of her whereabouts, googles her home address where he would sometimes “go for a jog” even though it’s on the other side of the city, supposedly “run into her coincidentally” so they’d meet again, and the rest is history.

Joe falls in love more than once in both books. He makes sure that by all means, he does what he has to do to keep his love. No matter the people or things that seems to be in the way of his relationship; he finds ways of dealing with those said “problems”. He could really be a professor and teach a course on “How To Get Away With Murder”… .if it were legal. As I read, I started to question if his feelings were genuine, if he was actually feeling those feelings and not forcing them. If my information is correct, psychopaths are deemed as individuals who express certain emotions such as happiness, sadness, sympathy, and the two most powerful emotions— anger and love; but they express them in a facade type manner. They force those feelings to help show their “normality” like others surrounding them, without pure intentions, which later leads to irrational consequences. In Joe’s case that was homicidal behavior.

Caroline Kepnes wrote: “We all get our hearts broken. We get messed up and throw up and we cry and listen to sad songs and say we’re never doing that again. But to be alive is to do it again. To love is to risk everything.”