Why I haven’t written / Update
There’s a bunch of reasons that answer the question in the subject line. But before I go into some 2K word paragraph I want to say that this is my own opinion/belief. You do you. I would appreciate if you read the entirety of it though.
I have hella issues with the show.
I started watching 13rw after seeing so many of my friends tweet about it. I finished within two, three? days and watched the last episode at my job. A few weeks past, and it really set in that this show really pissed me off.
Three people in my life have told me when they were self-harming/suicidal. The first person was my best friend in the 6th grade. Second, my best friend my junior year of high school. Third, a close friend in my sophomore year of college (this past year). For the record, I skipped a grade, so the first time someone I loved hurt themselves, and told me not to tell anyone, I was ten. Then I was fifteen. Now I am eighteen. I say this to say, having the weight of the life of someone else in your hands, at any age, is not healthy. It is not okay. I was not qualified then to help, and I’m not qualified now.
That being said, there are a shit ton of things I don’t agree with when it comes to 13rw. I tried to focus on just my issues with the show and not the characters, but I want to emphasize that when I say Hannah I mean Hannah, not Katherine or any of the other cast members.
1. The whole thing is a revenge suicide. She didn’t leave anything for her parents. Nothing for her best friend Kat (sp?). No goodbye to the people she knew loved her. But she spent days planning, buying the nail polish to paint every tape with, recording cassette tapes, plotting who she was giving the tapes to, what order they would go in, consequences for not finishing, consequences for not passing on the tapes for people who she felt deserved to feel like they killed her. That’s vindictive. That’s revenge. Placing the blame of taking her own life on 13 other people (Bryce was justified), is revenge. I can’t even blame the show because that’s the whole fucking plot. No one is saying the show glamorized suicide. I am however saying that they sure as hell showed the concept of suicide as a final word to get back at people. In both the show and the novel that is fucked up.
2. That one part, where Skye (referring to her scars from self-harm) says “this is what you do instead of killing yourself” is absolutely. inexcusable. for a showrunner to have on a television show that would be marketed to anywhere from middle schoolers to young adults. That is not what you do. You seek help. How come in the whole goddamn season there was NO. HELP. she didn’t call a suicide hotline. Didn’t talk to her parents or anyone about how she felt (at least not, non-cryptically). This isn’t even about Hannah, this is about a show choosing to say if you don’t want to kill yourself, you can self-harm. Side note: how many times did the show, post the number to the suicide hotline.
3. They didn’t show any sign of mental illness when concerning Hannah. I’m not saying that mental illness makes you suicidal. I’m saying that 90% of individuals who die by suicide experience mental illness (https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-Conditions/Related-Conditions/Suicide) (http://depts.washington.edu/mhreport/facts_suicide.php), and even if you want to debate that statistic it is above 40%. I understand that someone, somewhere, would say “[insert mental illness] isn’t like that”, nothing affects two people exactly the same. However, because they didn’t depict Hannah with anything. She comes off as an overdramatic teenager. Which in many cases, is not the cause of suicide.
4. The suicide itself is probably my BIGGEST issue. I can’t lie as first I was so amazed that they showed how gruesome it was, I felt sick to my stomach watching. But then I learned that mental health experts advise NEVER to show suicide on any mass media. It causes suicide clusters and copycat suicide (the Werther Effect). So despite the fact that it didn’t make me feel suicidal, it might have given someone the push to. That in itself is a reason to not show it. Don’t take my word for it though, here are some links. But Google works just the same.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK207262/ “Evidence has accumulated to support the idea that suicidal behavior is “contagious” in that it can be transmitted, directly or indirectly, from one person to another (Gould, 1990). This evidence is derived from three bodies of research: studies of the impact of media reporting on suicide, studies of suicide clusters, and studies of the impact on adolescents of exposure to a suicidal peer.”
http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/television/7776785/selena-gomez-13-reasons-why-criticism-teen-suicide (in which Selena Gomez and all the other producers who are not mental health experts, proudly ignore the advice of mental health experts)
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/hs/medical/bioethics/nyspi/material/SuicideAndTheMedia.pdf “There is overwhelming evidence that the magnitude of the increase in suicidal behavior after newspaper coverage is related to the amount of publicity given to the story and the prominence of the placement of the story in the newspaper.”
Like I said, 3 of my friends have told me they have hurt themselves and they want to kill themselves. I have tried to hurt myself. I understand. But I cannot condone whatever the hell that show parades as a ‘real life depiction’ when they knew damn well it could cause more damage than good.
You want good depiction? Watch the movie, About Alex. Watch The Skeleton Twins. Watch something that doesn’t write teenage women as melodramatic people incapable of handling their emotions.
And for so long, I watched TV shows and movies (I’m a film major now) with no one that looked like me in them. It is only this past year, my 2nd year of college, 18 years old, that I stopped the internalized racism and started loving myself. In doing so I have consumed so much POC media I am proud of myself. Because POC are neglected in TV and movies and have been for too damn long. I watched
Hidden Figures (main characters: black women)
Moonlight (main characters: gay impoverished black men)
The Get Down (main characters: latinx/black/and lgbt+ men and women)
Master of None (main characters: Indian men)
Chewing Gum, DOPE, Being Mary Jane etc.
Despite how good the content is, having a few POC as background characters doesn’t make a show diverse. It’s bullshit. @StrangerThings @13rw, especially when they are only there to be villains @Riverdale, or use a poc who is white-passing as an excuse.
Now shows like The Get Down (whose main latinx female lead doesn’t want a boyfriend so she can focus on her career, whose main afro-latinx male lead is incredibly smart, whose main black male lead is a part of the lgbt+ community and in an interracial relationship in the 70′s in the Bronx, who shows the trans community not as a prop, but as people) and Sense8 (ngl I’m finishing Being Mary Jane first) are getting cancelled. When a show with all the aforementioned PROBLEMS is getting a second season for no reason.
So yeah, I’m a little pissed. I am going to finish all of the requests I have. Then I am going to take a hiatus.
I started writing the day after I met Steven Silver (Marcus). I started writing because I liked the characters and I liked their potential. I need to get back to that.
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