The original post: /r/television by /u/moal09 on 2025-05-03 09:53:12.
The show itself does a great job of providing that nuance by offering layered characters with an intensely believable setting, and then I see so many threads of people either exclusively victim-blaming in defense of Jamie or insisting that Jamie is a demon and the only message of the series is that toxic masculinity needs to be curbed at all costs. People are trying to apply simple black and white lessons to a series that deliberately presents a lot of greys.
To me, at the end of the day, the series is about tragedy. Both for Jamie, his victim and the families involved. So many lives were destroyed by his actions, and the cause behind those actions is multi-faceted and not easily nailed down to just any one thing.
I don’t see the cold calculating killer that some people seem to describe either. I see a really troubled young kid with serious self esteem issues, constant feelings of shame and inadequacy coupled with being bullied on social media that leads to wild emotional outbursts and a lingering, seething sense of injustice and rage. These are common issues affecting tons of otherwise normal kids. Jamie’s not a psychopath for being this way. The thing that makes him different is that he eventually uses these emotions to justify committing a horrifically violent act.
I feel like people just see his emotional instability and conclude that he’s a psycho because of that, but I remember being an bitter, insecure teenager mad at the world. When he’s pacing around trying to calm himself down after throwing a fit, I can sort of empathize because I remember flying off the handle like that and then knowing it was wrong and trying to calm myself down, but then I would also be embarrassed and ashamed that I lost my cool in front of someone, which would paradoxically enrage me again and potentially cause another outburst at the person I wanted to apologize to.
This is something he seems to also do, as he appears apologetic after his fits, but at the same time, the shame of having lost his cool and apologizing bruises his ego, and he has a hard time reconciling that, so he almost immediately insults the psychologist again to make himself feel less small. I don’t think that’s a tactic, as it doesn’t aid his goal of appearing innocent in any way. He just doesn’t have the emotional maturity and restraint needed to stop himself (and honestly, who does at 13).
I know people also like to say he’s a sociopath because he kept saying he did nothing wrong, but to me, that was mostly a deluded way for him to rationalize in his own mind that he wasn’t the monster people thought he was. You can see his desperation for some sort of approval when he tearfully begs the psychologist to say she liked something about him and that he wasn’t irredeemable. He doesn’t even ask her to believe that he was innocent. He just wants to hear her say he’s not a complete piece of shit. I don’t think that was an act. I think that was a genuine desperate attempt to convince himself that he isn’t just some horrible murderer because he does know killing is wrong, and he needs to believe the person truly deserved it on some level to be able to sleep at night.
Again, I’m not saying any of this to even remotely justify anything that he did. More just that he’s a much more human character than a lot of viewers seem to give him credit for. People are taking his actions at face value and are overlooking the things he’s trying to mask by acting like that.
The whole “toxic masculinity” element definitely does play a role, and it should absolutely be discussed even though I feel that term itself can often be a bit reductive and needlessly polarizing. Emotionally vulnerable kids like him are prime candidates for extreme rhetoric that validates their sense of injustice and powerlessness. It’s much easier to shift blame to women or some other specific group for making you feel bad when in reality it’s a variety of factors in how everyone in your life has interacted with you (and vice versa) that tends to make you like that. You can see there’s a very wounded kid under the surface, but it’s buried under the facade of a tough guy who doesn’t give a fuck because that’s what his macho guy culture tells him he needs to do.
Still, I think that trying to boil the entire series down to being only about cyber bullying or the dangers of incel culture is missing much of the point of the story the writers were trying to tell. I would argue that the larger message is about the general lack of empathy we all tend to have for each other at that age and how that can be catastrophic when the feelings of worthlessness, resentment and anger that come from that are not dealt with properly – especially in an online environment where they can find unhealthy validation for those feelings from other bitter, disaffected people. Which just adds to the element of tragedy for me when the kid is so young and ended up destroying his own life and the lives of others before the right people could intervene in his life. I think back to when I was his age and wonder how I might’ve been influenced at my worst if modern social media had been around at the time. I severely doubt it would’ve led to murder, but who knows what kind of person I might’ve become with how misanthropic I could be at the time.
Another pretty sad and scary thing to me is that Jamie isn’t some psychopathic outlier that we all need to watch out for. He’s a relatively normal disaffected kid that ended up doing something really horrible. We like to tell ourselves the comfortable lie that killers aren’t like us, but the truth is that many of us are capable of terrible things given the right or wrong circumstances.
There are tons of reasons why he turned out the way he did. Lack of empathy from the people around him, a tough guy culture of bottling up your emotions and being the cool guy getting laid, loving but emotionally unavailable parents, extreme rhetoric online adding fuel to the fire, the list goes on. To me, focusing on only one of those elements really undermines the strength of the amazing writing and acting.