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Escobarbarian posted:Oh yeah, DoggPickle, what constitutes "looking and speaking gay"? Tv and movies have a very precise vocabulary that they refined over the course of the 60s and employed up until the turn of the century with great precision and regularity. Of course it's offensive and inaccurate and that's why it disappeared, but it seems unfair to the poster who brought it up to act like they're the bigot for acknowledging that those media conventions exist.
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# ¿ Feb 11, 2025 02:25 |
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What's the movie poster with the giant head hanging in Hannah's bedroom? It's so distracting in every scene, but there's always something in front of the title.
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I feel like that kind of keeps with the show's own theme of teenagers being dumb, though. This is hardly a romantic depiction of suicide as measured against other art that supposedly inspired waves of suicides.
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Even her revenge recedes in importance compared to things like her parents' suffering and Clay getting hosed up to the point of auditory and visual hallucinations, or an approaching spree shooing. The show also dramatizes the absence of the suicidal person in the present by consistently cutting back to her as a vibrant and full living person with feelings and relationships and then just showing a world where she's not there. That seems to really cut against the fantasy of suicide as a way to hurt others, because the narrative focuses on her absence from the world and how she's not there to feel or experience anything. It's not like everyone sits around missing her and wishing she were back, but just that she's gone and people keep living and she doesn't get to. She's an idea or an object that people worry about in the present, but that's nothing compared to being alive. I would want teenagers to see that, though perhaps I am naive in hoping they would.
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sweetmercifulcrap posted:- I feel that they made it just apparent enough that Hannah had underlying mental issues that the whole thing worked for me and I don't have any complaints about it. She kept everything inside the entire show and she actively pushed away those who did try to help her (Clay, the poetry people, her parents, etc). There is one final nod to this right before she commits suicide from the librarian guy. I found it entirely believable, a person prone to depression could be driven toward suicide after getting caught in a downward spiral of poo poo. Yeah, I don't understand the responses to the show that say it dismisses or undersells the role of mental illness in suicide. She shows some pretty distorted thinking in the final episodes. In addition to blowing off the librarian without seeming to understand what he's telling her, she totally ignores her mother and uses the conversation with the guidance counselor as an arbitrary metric for whether she should keep living, putting everything on whether he'll follow her out of his office within a window of 30 seconds to a minute. And to defend him, he's getting some kind of very important personal phone call during their scene together that he seems to feel he has to take (cell rings twice and he throws it in a drawer, office phone rings and he hangs up, office phone rings again and he picks it up once she leaves). There's also the fantasy she has about what dating Clay would be like, where she just decides that's impossible and will never happen, even though they haven't gone on a single date and have at most done some light flirting. That fantasy also has a scene where she imagines enjoying watching Clay and her mother get along, which underlines exactly what a good relationship she has with her mom and how highly she thinks of her, but it never occurs to her to reach out at all. Those seem like very good demonstrations that she's no longer thinking clearly at all, even if it's not visible to the other characters. Really, there's a lot of mental illness in the series. Clay's parents and teachers kind of drop the ball on not getting him psychiatric help for his many auditory and visual hallucinations and violent freakouts. There's a point where he gets into psych hold territory.
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They were obviously going for a Cameron Frye thing with him, but he's better than the original in that with him it's actually plausible that he could have a friend who is just a hallucination like in that stupid fan theory about Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
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Is that not a believable thing for a kid to gently caress up, though? Nor is really dwelt on beyond providing some background to her state of mind.
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You watched 12 episodes in two hours?
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Despera posted:I'm guessing by episode 12 she doesnt have a roundabout and decides making people feel bad because of her decisions is a stupid thing to do . It would be one thing if the whole town was complicit in her murder but you can't by definition force someone to commit suicide. Just because she dies doesn't mean it's not a stupid thing to do. Your perspective may differ, but I think it does a good job of presenting the distorted thinking of a depressed person along with the confusion experienced by people unable to fully articulate the strong emotions they're feeling. Nor does every character respond in the same way to any of the bad things that happen to the suicidal character, like how there are multiple rapes and many forms of terrible abuse, but many different responses by individual characters--I don't think her suicide is presented as inevitable or justifiable, or even completely explicable at all. It's a very sad thing and the narrative dramatizes how much suffering it causes to others, like the parents, who will be miserable and plagued with impossible questions for the rest of their lives.
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Despera posted:Suicide is presented as both an acceptable option and a means of petty revenge. Which is odd because most people present depression as rage turned inward and most suicide notes blame the suicidee. We're not going to get anywhere arguing about this, but those judgments belong to the character and are both clearly wrong. One of her final thoughts is about her mother and what a positive relationship she has with her, yet she never considers the effect her suicide will have on her mother and completely brushes off an explicit invitation by her mother to talk about what's happening in her life. Characters in drama can misunderstand themselves and their world just like real people can.
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Despera posted:If you want to argue this show doesn't present suicide as an acceptable option when the shows name is 13 reasons I committed suicide you might have a tough sell. Hey I just want to mention that it seems like this might not be a great time for you to watch a narrative like this and that's totally ok. You definitely don't have to spend another minute thinking about something that you'd rather not and I don't think anyone here wants to cause any distress.
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That's a terrible idea, unless it's just a bergmanesque drama about the parents' process of grief and the strains their marriage undergoes.
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Hannah's cousin comes to town to solve the mystery of her suicide, until Principal Steven Webber sends her back to Missoula, Montana in the gripping finale. Katherine Langford plays the role but uses her actual accent. In Season 3 Clay starts wearing flannel and waders a lot, and Tony leaves town for a series of boring on-the-road adventures.
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Kevyn posted:I just want more Kat. I thought they did a really good job of not objectifying her body, like not even incidentally. That's kind of a rare achievement for tv.
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# ¿ Feb 11, 2025 02:25 |
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-Blackadder- posted:Yeah, this. The show put's this huge responsibility on the bullying when the reality is she was a mentally ill person who wanted to kill herself. The bullying was a factor, but to portray it as black and white as they do is disingenuous. I think the show does a pretty good job of dramatizing the main character's downward spiral into severely distorted thinking and irrational action, not least of all by having a number of other characters react differently (but seriously) to traumas similar to hers. She starts off kind of cynical but also naive and romantic in the beginning but is totally out of touch with her emotions at the end, and the choice to externalize them in a passive-aggressive act of revenge instead of opening the phone book and finding a psychiatrist (or taking her mother up on her invitation, or taking the librarian up on his invitation) is really profoundly tragic. Talking about the show as didactic or offering some kind of concrete lesson overlooks the ways it's a character study that makes you watch something really bad happen to somebody over 12 episodes. If the argument is over what factors make the main character kill herself, the answer really is that it has to do with who she is as a character and how she responds to the world around her. You could also ask why her friend who knocks over the stop sign doesn't attempt suicide deliberately but does pursue increasingly self-destructive behaviors that might kill her, like getting her rapist drunk and giving him guns. Stories are things to contemplate. You're not supposed to solve them.
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