13 Reasons Why came out 7 months ago. The show has themes of suicide, rape and mental
health. It’s now pretty irrelevant and very difficult
to criticise constructively, so why am I doing this video? Well, because one of my subs told me to and
I always do what my subs tell me to. Nitpixs got your back bro. The core of the issue with 13 reasons why is that it focusses so much on forwarding
a political and social agenda, that it sacrifices having likeable, interesting characters that
exist in a real tangible world. As a result of this, it’s difficult to be
engaged by the show and it feels less like an unfolding story and more of an experience
of moral battery. So in this video, I will be picking apart everything that worked to the shows detriment
and talking about the negative implications that make 13 reasons why harmful to the very
audience it pretend to protect. But I’m not doing it in 13 parts. That’s just a bit gimmicky. I mean I thought about it, but I’ll probably
just do it in 3. The show mostly takes place at Liberty High High School. This is a standard American Teenage drama
High School. You’ve got your Jocks, the edgy art students
and the nerds Oh he knows who han solo is he really must
be a nerd. You’ve got basketball, cheer leaders and
school dances. So just take your standard high school comedy
romp and desaturate the colours a bit. Because this show is… Dark. The focus of the narrative is on Hannah Baker, a student who committed suicide shortly before
the start of the series. Before her death, she recorded 13 tapes directed
towards people who she believed helped contribute to her eventual suicide. Why tapes I hear you demand aggressively at
the screen. Because tapes are retro and this show needs
to romanticise and stylise every aspect of this girls suicide. During the 13 episodes, the tapes are with
the protagonist of the show, Clay Jenson - Hannah’s unrequited love and all out great guy who
isn’t actually guilty of doing any harm to Hannah. But we’re made to think he is for a narrative
hook. We watch Clay’s miserable descent as he tries desperately to carve out some form of
hopeless vigilante justice and by that, I mean cycling around feeling sad, going up
to people and vaguely confronting them about what he heard on the tapes and those people
saying “What I didn’t do anything me alone Hannah was lying”. The tapes detail Hannah having one of her personal poems published in the school magazine
without her permission, her being stalked by a student who took elicit pictures of her
and then publishing them around the school and witnessing a friend being raped and then
subsequently being raped herself by one of her classmates. The show attempts to deal with serious and complicated issues, but when the backdrop
to these concepts are set in a generic high school environment it’s hard to take it
seriously. despite the show being a drama and being very
dialogue heavy, the characters remain undeveloped and stereotypical all the way through. As these tapes provide insight into the mind of Hannah Baker, you’d think her chatacter
would be complicated and layered and might give the audience a rare look into the darks
thoughts and motivations underlying someone struggling with depression. I thought that too dear listener, oh how foolish
I was. Unfortunately, her character goals seem to
revolve entirely around which boys are giving her attention and her social standing at high
school. Oh no she fell out with her friend group,
a girl she knew for a few days turned out to not be that nice but if only the sweet
charming goofy clay jenson would ask her ouuut then she wouldn’t be depressed anymore. This show framed itself as something progressive
but with her constantly over analysing and over reacting to every single high school
interaction, how is hannah any different from some scribbled out disney channel character. well apart from the suicide and rape… they
didn’t quite get round to that in Hannah montana, but that doesn’t make it better. All it does is give it a posy make pretend
sense of importance. When every character is written in such an inhuman way the feeling of realism that’s
needed to start an engaging dialogue about these things isn’t present. Hitting those all important plot points that
drive a social message take priority over well written dialogue or character motivations. This guy Zac seems like a well liked and kind
guy, but he needs to do something mean to Hannah to belong on the tapes so he just does
a strange 180 like a faulty android. But the show never tries to get to the core
of why these characters do these bad things. Why did this guy stalk and take pictures of
Hannah. I don’t know because it wasn’t explained. Eh if he’s a weird Jesse Esenburg lookalike
no one will question it. The main antagonist of the show, Bryce, rapes
two 17 year old girls, but they don’t provide any motivation or insight into what drives
these acts or makes him think they’re okay or acceptable. Instead he is just a rich jock and all rich
people are psychopaths looking down at the peasents. And this guy, Justin is a dick all the way
through, that’s because he’s poor and has a rough family life. Turns out the bully was being bullied all
along who’d of thought. These lazy undeveloped back stories are like
something you’d find in a young adult novel. Oh. None of these characters feel human. Nothing they do makes any sense. Like remember this gem? Fuck you! Well after getting rejected, he gets revenge
on Hannah by stealing her bunny pictures from her little compliment sack. What..why? Hannah responds to this by pouring out her
deepest and most personal thoughts and feelings into a letter and leaves it in the sack for
zac to nab. Why is Hannah naively sharing this with someone
who’s antagonising her? His response to finding this note is um…
what? Hannah’s then like.. how can this show take any credit for dealing
with the complexity of human psychology if this is how it portrays conflict. Everyone who’s on the tapes is an unforgivable unlikeable bad person without any redeemable
qualities. They meet up like comic book villains and
discuss While, everyone you’re supposed to
like is always in the right and are completely morally untouchable. Every adult in the show lacks any form of cognitive ability to understand what’s going
on with their children, even when they come home from school covered in bruises and have
feverish sweaty nightmares – they still do nothing. This gives the message that young people struggling
with mental health can’t speak to their parents or councillors because they just don’t
get it. When in reality school councillors are much
more likely to help students struggling with depression than this garbage show. If this was just a dumb teenage TV drama, I could accept it for what it is and I probably
wouldn’t have made this video, as I’m certainly not in the demographic this show
is aimed at and to its credit it does have some good performances, scene transitions,
cinematography and good use of music. But the sad irony of this show is that it
may have done the exact the opposite of what it was trying to preach, as 13 reasons why
could cause harm to many people who are currently struggling with suicidal thoughts. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention have recommendations for safe portrayal of
suicide and 13 reasons why didn’t follow a staggering number of them. According to the foundation, the risk of “copycat suicide” following the coverage or portrayal
of suicide “increases when the story explicitly describes the suicide method, uses dramatic/
graphic headlines or images, and repeated/extensive coverage sensationalizes or glamorizes a death.” They suggest avoiding “including photos/videos of the location or method of death, grieving
family, friends, memorials or funerals” along with avoiding the description of suicide
notes or describing a suicide as “inexplicable or without warning.” On top of this, it recommends that the media refers to research findings that mental disorders
and/or substance abuse have been found in 90% of people who have died by suicide and
the foundation specifically states that reducing a suicide’s cause to a singular cause such
as bullying, “leaves the public with an overly simplistic and misleading understanding
of suicide.” And in case anyone doubts the validity of
these guidelines, here’s a list of institutions that support the publication of them: American Association of Suicidology, American
Foundation for Suicide Prevention, Annenberg Public Policy Center, Associated Press Managing
Editors, Canterbury Suicide Project – University of Otago, Christchurch, New Zealand, Columbia
University Department of Psychiatry, ConnectSafely.org, Emotion Technology, International Association
for Suicide Prevention Task Force on Media and Suicide, Medical University of Vienna,
National Alliance on Mental Illness, National Institute of Mental Health, National Press
Photographers Association, New York State Psychiatric Institute, Substance Abuse and
Mental Health Services Administration, Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, Suicide Prevention
Resource Center, The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and UCLA School of Public
Health, Community Health Sciences. The writers of the show suggest that getting help is futile in Hannah’s inability to
get help from her counsellor or peers and present it as if “she didn’t have any
other option. No once do they show anyone helping or treating
Hannah and the audience is made to think that Hannah has to go through this on her own. Adding to this, the idea that all Hannah needed was a sweet guy like Clay Jenson to fall in
love with her is reductive and the show implies that she could only be finally understood
in death. In conclusion ‘13 reasons why’ is an aesthetically pleasing, uncomplicated high school drama
that follows the story of how a girl uses her suicide to get revenge on the people she
blames for it, and how through this she becomes vindicated, almost presenting suicide as a
weapon. This at the core of it is a very bad agenda
to push. A potentially harmful message to it’s demographic
of impressionable high school students. Hannah’s journey is a superficial one, showing graphic imagery and using hard hitting vocabulary
but it never delves into how horrifying the dark mindstate of depression is and how it
can truly affect an individual on a psychological basis. It provides no real help to those struggling
with mental health. I’m not saying that we can’t have media that tackle these issues. It’s essential to talk about them, but we
need to understand how serious and nuanced these subjects are and how they must be handled
with maturity, but what this Netflix original does ultimately is take something that should
be mature and frames it in a simplistic black and white way, and that is the insult of 13
reasons why. If you are struggling with depression or suicidal
thoughts. I’ve put a link where you can get help in
the description. Thanks so much for listening, let me know
what you thought of the show in the comments, subscribe for more, give me a thumb up and
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