They Could Never Make Me Hate 'You'
In defense of Love Quinn, Guinevere Beck, and Peach Salinger.
They Could Never Make Me Hate ‘You’
In defense of Love Quinn, Guinevere Beck, and Peach Salinger.
Hello, you.
I’ve been trying to think of a good introduction to this for weeks, and I just can’t. So I won’t. Don’t harp on it, let’s move forward.
(Disclaimer: This newsletter too long for email, open in Substack!)
I watched Netflix’s ‘You’ back when it was Lifetime’s ‘You’, I recorded the first 3 episodes on my DVR, and watched them all at once. At the time, I wasn’t viewing it as anything other than a fun stalker show. Which if you know Lifetime, that’s certainly their brand. In 2018, I had just turned 16 years old, which affected my view of the show at the time.
I’ve rewatched it a couple of times since then, and every single time I rewatched it, I’d already entered a new point in my life. I had learned new things about myself, my view of men, and my own internalized misogyny. So every rewatch has been different for me.
The reason I originally wanted to write about ‘You’ was to discuss the character assassination of my favorite character— Love Quinn — in Season 3. I felt like they abandoned who her character was and just started making her “crazy” for entertainment – which we’ll get into. But when I started rewatching the show and discussing it with my friends, I started to realize a deeper issue.
In an Actors on Actors interview with Penn Badgely and Gina Rodriguez, they were discussing their respective shows. ‘You’ on Netflix, and ‘Jane the Virgin’ on the CW. While discussing his show, Badgely says something very interesting to me.
“I think the logline on Lifetime was ‘How far are you willing to go for love?’ [...] To me, it’s like how far are we willing to go to forgive an evil white man?” - Penn Badgely (Actors on Actors)
In every interview that I’ve watched in preparation for this issue, Penn Badgely who plays Joe Goldberg, Sera Gambles the showrunner and writer for ‘You’, and Caroline Kepnes the author of the book series have all described their show as starting a conversation, making a statement and making viewers who “like” Joe or feel bad for Joe look inside themselves.
Do I believe that that was the intention? Maybe. In the first few episodes of the show, it seems like it was getting there. Joe Goldberg’s internal monologue when unsuspecting Guinevere Beck walked into his bookstore was alarming, to say the least. To me, it was clear that this was not the guy I was supposed to be rooting for.
But something shifted.
I do think that being in the head of someone so charming and so funny can be confusing to the average viewer. I do find myself laughing at some of Joe’s lines, or getting nervous for a split second when he almost gets caught. I would constantly have to remind myself, “No, no. We want him to get caught.”
By the end of Season 1, fans had taken to Twitter to state that they loved Joe and were justifying his actions. Penn Badgely ended up responding to some fans and starting a discussion on why this is wrong. He talks about it with Eleanor Stanford of the New York Times.
“To me, Joe is this work in progress in dismantling and dissecting the myriad of privileges that a young, attractive, white man carries with him.” - Penn Badgely (New York Times)
In my opinion, ‘You’ is a drama. It’s a show you tune into to watch this white dude kill people and justify it in his mind. It’s entertaining, it’s suspenseful, it’s terrifying. But it’s not making the statement that they think it is, and there’s one main reason why.
While thinking about this topic, I started comparing ‘You’ to ‘Bojack Horseman’. (Who’s surprised.)
‘Bojack Horseman’ is one of the very few shows that when you’re watching you notice that every last female character is dynamic and has depth in their own way. Whether they have a three-episode arc or in it from beginning to end — you’re left thinking about them and the nuances of their character.
Bojack and Joe are very similar to me, very “self-aware” of their issues, viewing themselves as almost allies to women in a sense because they’re more politically aware than your average man. Joe’s a bit more out of his mind than Bojack is, very delusional, and thinks that he’s God’s gift to any woman he decides to glom onto at the moment.
The women that Bojack hurt stay with you, you learn about them and their lives. You understand who they are, what they stand for, and what they don’t stand for. And most importantly, you understand that Bojack is the villain in each and every single one of their stories. This is true for every single female character but especially Diane Nguyen and Princess Carolyn.
The thing that’s helpful with Diane and Princess Carolyn’s stories —specifically Diane since she is Bojack’s direct foil —is that we see the effect that Bojack has on them. We see how their specific lives fall apart when he does something to hurt them. We understand that Diane and PC are people with hopes, dreams, baggage and all. They’re not perfect people, they do less than good things, but we see them as they are.
It’s a little different with ‘You’ seeing as we spend 90% of the show from Joe’s point of view. In my opinion, I really like this form of storytelling and I think it does do the job of questioning the audience’s morals, and it almost asks the question – “How far are we willing to let an evil white man go?”
However, we do spend some time outside of his head. If this show’s intention also is to comment on Joe’s unhealthy view of women, and his toxic masculinity — why is it that when we leave his point of view nothing changes? If he’s putting these women in boxes that he created to satisfy his narrative, in Season 1 Episode 4 when we spend time in Beck’s point of view, why don’t we see differences in the way she acts or Peach?
Why isn’t Beck more independent, why doesn’t she have a slightly different personality? Shouldn’t Peach be less of a supervillain who has predatory pictures of Beck on her laptop and just a questionable friend who has a crush?
Even with all the development and the insight we get into characters like Diane and Princess Carolyn, the fandom is still extremely misogynistic to both of them. It’s still baffling to me because I don’t understand how you can misunderstand a show with such a clear message… Do you see where I’m going here?
With the rampant misogyny against characters like Love, Peach, and Beck.. you have to wonder how they got this perception. Now, people will hate female characters who are just breathing, that’s just how it is, unfortunately. But once you’ve marketed yourselves as a show that’s “starting a conversation” you do have to ask yourself, why does it seem like the message is being missed by the majority of your audience? Have you played into their perception of these characters?
“I think that, as a show creator, you have to be very careful what messages you’re putting out into the world. [...] I think it behooves us all to be a little more rigorous about that and to ask ourselves, ‘How are we telling our stories? Is it satire? Is it an examination of something or a celebration of it?’” - Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Creator of Bojack Horseman, Variety.)
If at the end of Season 1, they were confused or disturbed by the audience’s reaction, why were there no tweaks to the way they delivered the story?
In our post-“woke” society, there’s this weird idea that just bringing up a topic is “bringing awareness” to it and “starting a conversation”. But what is the conversation if you have absolutely nothing to add or even say? Just having a bad white male character on screen isn’t inherently teaching a class on toxic masculinity or white privilege.
I don’t need Penn to look into the camera and give me a PSA about stalkers like it’s the end of a Secret Life of an American Teenager episode. But I think the way the female characters are handled could be an astronomical difference to the way the show is perceived.
Pictured above: Francia Raisa giving a Teen Pregnancy PSA at the end of Secret Life of an American Teenager, a show that famously romanticizes not only teen pregnancy but also child brides.
So let’s talk about the portrayal and audience perception of these women. Peach Salinger, Guinevere Beck, and Love Quinn.
PEACH SALINGER
I always knew Peach had feelings for Beck, from the very beginning when Beck would mention guys like Benji or Joe or her Tinder hookups. Peach suddenly became very disinterested and changed the subject. She would sometimes run her hand through Beck’s hair, there were even looks that I read as longing.
My issue with Peach’s character isn’t her crush on Beck, I don’t think it takes away from the story at all. I think it adds to what little we know about her character.
What I think takes away from the story is this predatory label that randomly gets put on her mid-season. Do I think Peach was a good friend? Hell no. Do I think she was a good person? No. She was manipulative, judgemental, and just mean. But I don’t think she was psychopathic enough to keep thousands of secret pictures of Beck’s feet and fingernails.
I think it’s weird that suddenly she wanted to whisk Beck away to Paris and wanted to get her high on drugs and manipulate her into a threesome. The predatory lesbian plot arriving out of thin air is weird and feels…icky. It automatically makes the audience member want to side with Joe because all of Peach’s criticisms of him are just because she wants Beck all to herself.
Like I said before, it would make complete sense if the reason we were seeing Peach the way we did was because we spent time in Joe’s head and he started reading into things because in truth he just didn’t like the fact that Peach was onto him.
But when we exit Joe’s point of view, it seems like everything is the same. His perception of Peach is still our reality which then validates the audience rooting for Joe. Like yeah okay he’s bad, but he was right about Peach, so….
In doing so, you’re allowing your message to get contradicted.
It makes sense to make the characters questionable, there’s no battle between good and evil. It makes it clear that everyone is doing things that aren’t right and shows that people like Joe aren’t just targeting “innocent” people.
However, in my eyes, a show that’s dismantling privilege would make it abundantly clear that Peach’s death was wrong or uncalled for. Not just because he killed her, and murder is wrong – but because she didn’t deserve the labels that he projected onto her to justify his extreme manipulation of Beck. He didn’t kill Peach for any other reason but to keep Beck all to himself. She was a bad friend, and Beck should’ve cut her off, yes. But we knew that already, way before the extreme hoops that the story jumps through to put her on the same level that Joe is on.
GUINEVERE BECK
Justice for Beck, like seriously.
The way the fandom perceives her is very interesting to me because it is just misogyny. Like, the writers didn’t have to do much to convince people that her death was justified. People just decided because she tweeted that dumb tweet about Mac & Cheese that she must be annihilated.
*dramatic music ensues*
With Beck I could kind of see how it’s less how she’s written and more how people just seem to hate normal, basic girls (I don’t say basic as an insult, she’s just a regular person). The Love vs. Beck debates that still happen to this day prove that.
As a person that does prefer Love over Beck, I have to say the reason that everyone hates her is just because people can’t comprehend a woman that doesn’t fit into a box. If a female character isn’t a badass with sharp quips and super attractive so that you can want to be her or be with her, everyone gets super violent and mean when discussing her.
It’s the most frustrating thing about this form of misogyny to me because it’s not violent, it’s just dumb. It’s just people openly saying she’s not “my type” of woman so she’s not good enough which then leads to more issues. I can’t get into it all because we’ll be here all day so, moving on!
Now that I’ve just defended Beck for being allowed to be uninteresting, I have to come for the way she’s written. Because it’s not just that she’s regular or boring as a person– which would’ve been fine–, she’s unfinished. I feel like we know little tidbits of information about how hard her life is and how much she has suffered but we don’t get to see those things affecting her outside of her relationship with Joe. It’s frustrating because she could be such a dynamic character.
I do wonder if this is on purpose because we do end up dealing with Love, a character that’s so dynamic and has so much depth. So I wonder if they purposefully have Beck be more “simple” to show that it doesn’t matter what kind of woman you are, you can still be a victim to a stalker. Especially since Joe is going to project whatever narrative he sees fit anyway.
But then I wonder, am I giving them too much credit? Because not to beat a dead horse, but we never really see her as anything other than Joe’s perception.
Besides the mac & cheese tweet, another reason that people justify her death or justify not liking her because she’s not “as good as she seems” is because “she cheated” on Joe.
In my personal opinion, I don't think that it counts as cheating because she was going through heavy grief (caused by Joe) after losing Peach and I think Dr. Nicky is very predatory for listening to her describe all her grief and interpersonal thoughts and then begin a relationship with her. But that’s just me.
Also, I do think there’s a level of downplaying the heavy manipulation that Joe beginning a relationship with Beck took. I think it’s done by audience perception but also by the lack of nuance in the writing.
Joe turned himself into a person that Beck would fall in love with, he studied her, entered her apartment, and learned the details of her life. Then, he curated situations for them to bump into each other and tailored their conversations to things that he knew she would be interested in. He knew that for her entire life, she had been looking for someone to understand her and he used that.
When Peach accused him of things that he knew (and we knew) that he did – he made Beck feel like a bad girlfriend for not defending him. He constantly lashed out at her and made her come crawling back to him every single time. He isolated her from everyone around her and made himself her only ally. Not only is he a murderer, but he abuses the women that he actively seeks out. There is nothing redeemable about that man.
They do kind of give Beck a powerful moment that I liked, when she finally gets out of the cage and locks Joe inside she says to him:
“You actually believe that all of this is somehow justified. You are insane. You think that you did some bad shit and I did some bad shit and this is equivalent? Yeah, I lied. I cheated. But I didn’t stalk you, I didn’t hit you. I didn’t kill people. I didn’t do any of this!” — Guinevere Beck (You Season 1, Episode 10 “Bluebeard’s Castle”)
Of course, while she is monologuing at him I am screaming at her. Girl, run! I will defend women until the ends of the earth but it’s no secret that she was not smart.
When I heard this line during this most recent rewatch, I was like okay I can kind of see where they think this is contributing to the movement. Also, the audience’s opinion of Beck was going to be bad anyway and unfortunately, you can’t control people’s interpretation of a show even if you might want to.
Plus this was the first season, they don’t have access to the viewers’ opinions at first so let’s just call Peach and Beck a trial run. Surely, things will get better with time, right?
LOVE QUINN
If the thesis for Season 1 was supposed to be “how much will we let an evil white man get away with?” then the thesis for Season 2 would be “if a woman did the same thing that evil white man did, how would we react?”
The answer is: Terribly.
The tweets about Love being “too reckless and emotional” and “annoying” while Joe gets praised for being “smart” and “calculated” go viral every time ‘You’ is trending again. Which has always been odd to me, considering Joe almost gets caught like 4 times an episode and Love successfully had everyone fooled. Joe wasn’t even suspicious of her. Sure, one could argue this is because “love” makes him blind– but the point still stands that only one of them is dumb and it’s not Love.
I’m not even going to address the annoying allegations because y’all just hate when women cry, there’s nothing else to say there.
She did exactly what Joe did to Beck in Season 1. She studied him, curated situations where they would meet, and tailored their conversations to things she knew he would be interested in. All while allowing him to think he was doing it to her. A mastermind, word to Taylor Swift.
I’m going to try not to come off as biased here, because not only is Love my favorite character but Victoria Pedretti is one of my favorite actresses. If I tried I could justify every last one of her kills, but I won’t. Don’t make that face… Y’all defend Joe every chance you get and I’m standing beside a woman and I’m the bad guy?
Things start to get interesting with the dynamic between Love and Joe because neither Beck nor Peach did anything to warrant Joe killing them. But one could – and they do – argue that Love deserved to die because she was a killer too.
While I will never argue that Love is a good person, I do think her character begins to get assassinated in favor of Joe.
Love’s character had a specific purpose at first. When Joe discovers that she killed Candace and then later Delilah, he’s automatically convinced that he ruined her, that she was so innocent and pure that her breaking his fantasy was nobody’s fault but his own. And the second that he realizes this is who she is, he’s disgusted by her immediately.
“You know why this is happening? Because while I was seeing you, really seeing you. You were busy gazing at a goddamn fantasy. A perfectly imperfect girl. You saw what you wanted to see. But I was always right here, the whole time.” — Love Quinn (You Season 2, Episode 10. “Love, Actually”)
Before we get too deep into Love’s character, I do want to take a moment to talk about Candace. This issue isn’t really “in defense” of her, because she’s barely a character or a threat. But for that very reason, I do think she is worth mentioning. Candace is supposed to be our antagonist of the season, she makes Joe nervous for like an episode and a half. But from the moment she steps on the scene, it’s obvious the girl is very unintelligent. She has no plan, she’s very reckless, a bad liar, and fails miserably at getting close to Love and Forty’s family to protect them from Joe.
Candace does give us a glimpse of how scary and dangerous Joe is and always has been. In Season 2 episode 5, there are a few flashbacks of the trauma she experiences being kidnapped and buried alive by him. However, as the season moves forward, her character starts to lessen and her “plan” (which we’ve established is non-existent) becomes unclear – a necessary form the story has to take to keep us in Joe’s corner.
I’m a little torn on what the root of this is, like is it written this way because it’s a poorly written attempt of making sure Joe gets out of everything or is it to play into this idea that no character is as smart as Joe? Which just tells the audience that even if they did want to root against him, there’d be no point. (Which could be interesting if done right, if him getting away with everything was framed to be the unhappy ending of each season. But I think it would only work if we had been watching Candace almost get him caught, and the way that he gets out of everything was actually thought out and not rushed.)
There’s a clear difference of portrayal here. Evident in all every single one of his relationships with the women but especially Love Quinn’s.
Both Joe and Love justify their actions because of different forms of “love”. Joe’s justification is romantic “love”. He kills to protect the women he’s obsessed with. Love’s justification is familial “love”. She kills to protect her family.
We know that we’re not supposed to be rooting for either of them, both of them are serial killers, and both of them are bad people. But in Episode 1 of Season 3, the way Joe refers to Love as a “monster” and “crazy”. It’s clear that in his mind he’s better than her.
I would’ve enjoyed playing with the different perspectives within Love and Joe’s separate points of view, especially considering Love is just as “crazy” as Joe. If we would’ve hopped in between their narration, having both of them embellish and leave out parts of the story making us question our reality in a way that really does comment on our morality. Who do you side with? Do you side with nobody? Do you “get both sides”? At what point does motive come into question, when doesn't it matter? Do you find yourself being harder on Love because she’s a woman? Because she’s less funny, less sarcastic, more emotional, and less pretentious? (Yes, that was a dig.)
Instead of doing that though, we just get a whole season of “You thought Joe was bad? Check out this wench.” and it’s exhausting. It’s just scene after scene of them trying to convince us that Love has to go because she’s not “stable” enough to handle their lifestyle. Or them trying to convince us that she’s worse than him because he cares about and protects kids, she is willing to sleep with a teenager because she’s not getting enough attention in the marriage she trapped Joe into! Crazy bitch!
Mind you, Love kills her and Forty’s au pair because she was an older woman trying to take advantage of him. Love was protecting him, that’s been her motive all along. Keeping her family safe. She explicitly calls that au pair a predator. Nothing about the character we got to know would repeat that cycle. Especially since they make it a point to refer to Theo as someone who reminds everyone of Forty (going as far as to have the ghost of Forty say “he reminds me of me.”).
If Love and Theo had a mentor/mentee relationship where he would come to help her work at the bakery while she was holding onto the big secret that she killed his stepmom (to protect herself and also because she begins to care for him because he reminds her so much of Forty), that would be just as compelling and still make her look bad. It would still be just as chilling when she tries to kill him after he finds her out. There are so many ways to display the differences between Love and Joe while still establishing that they’re both terrible it’s frustrating.
So, how can we salvage this? Well for starters, Joe should die. Sorry, but if you’ve seen one murderous misogynist then you’ve seen them all. And he simply cannot keep getting away with this.
It would be cool if Marienne got to kill him, just to cement the fact that so far Black women do not die at the hands of Joe. (Shoutout to Karen, from Season 1.)
In my opinion, Season 4 needs to flip the entire show on its head. If the show’s goal is to do what they say, then there needs to be some kind of reveal that Joe is an unreliable narrator, watch him fall apart entirely and have the stress, the guilt, and whatever else he feels get to him. I mentioned earlier that we should’ve been playing with different points of view in Season 3, I think they might be able to also make it work in Season 4. Leaving his POV and going into Marienne’s (or the other characters) and seeing Joe for who he is, a place we’ve never really gotten to see could be crucial for the ending of the show. (If they plan to end it at Season 4, I truly could not see this show making it past that.)
Joe seems like he could be building up to a complete spiral. The more we move throughout, the more he seems to be successfully (?) convincing himself that every move he makes is for the greater good, which makes sense, but it’s not being built up well. If we get to Season 4, and he suddenly starts getting condemned for his actions I think I would be disappointed because at this point we’ve been watching him get away with it and watching him essentially get applauded for it.
Throughout the seasons, Joe starts to go through phases. His phase in Season 2 is just gaslighting himself into thinking that he’s “not the same person anymore” all while finding convoluted excuses to be... the exact same person. In Season 3, he’s convinced that his wife is the problem and that he’s trying to clean up her mess and rehabilitate himself so that he can move on with Marienne.
I think seeing him slowly lose the sense of self he’s fabricated to justify his actions and watching him make big mistakes – forgetting to do the things he usually does to successfully stalk and/or kill someone. Maybe even finally put a child in danger, because that seems to be the thing that keeps him in the good graces of not only the audience but even himself. He clearly projects his childhood onto the children that he meets, Paco, Ellie, and later his child. If he were to meet a child that reminds him of him and hurt them or get them hurt, I could see that shattering his self-confidence.
This show has all the ingredients to thoughtfully tell this story, but they aren’t following the recipe. The way that it’s clear through Joe’s narration that he’s wrongfully justifying his actions but every character just so happens to be worse, the way that Beck and Love have lines condemning Joe for his clear hypocrisy but there are no other indications that he is wrong which then turns around to make Love and Beck look stupid. The way they portray Joe’s mother as a stressor for his actions but instead of making a commentary on how abusive men seem to blame their mothers for their toxic households instead of blaming their father for putting their mothers in that position, they frame Joe’s mother as a villain, there’s no evidence of sympathy for her even as an abuse victim. She’s just the first woman to ever leave him.
Being in Joe’s head does not stop his mother’s story from being told from a sympathetic lens at all. There’s certainly a way we could’ve seen his pain and his mother’s pain sharing the same stage. It’s called storytelling. The reason that the messaging gets lost so quickly is because it’s become clear that Joe’s character is loved in that writer’s room. That’s not saying he doesn’t deserve sympathy, because his childhood was rough and he shouldn't have had to deal with that. But there’s a way to have sympathy for a child and still hold the adult accountable. It doesn’t feel like the writers are aware of all the nuances it takes to tell a story like this. And maybe that’s the real issue.
“We discovered you don’t have to lean in, all of us who grew up with those great love stories, those romantic comedies– we’re kind of hard-wired to root for the love story. So if you just present a cute-meet in a bookstore, you’re gonna want them to be together. [...] We are as a culture very very quick to look for ways to judge women and forgive men in these stories. So that’s kind of the fun mind trick of watching the game.” – Sera Gamble (Show-runner of ‘You’ on Netflix, BUILD Series)
If the writers are aware of the hatred and vitriol that female characters get in media, I don’t understand their perspective on how this show is written. It bugs me because I can’t seem to figure it out. They’re clearly interested in making a political statement, and Joe is constantly (and ironically) the mouthpiece for their politics (even though, I find they miss the mark a lot). What exactly do they think they’re accomplishing?
If this show was more intentional about how the female characters were framed, the entire show would be different. Do you guys remember how everyone felt when we thought Joe had killed Delilah? Everyone who had been defending Joe up until that point had been ready to turn on him. And when it was revealed that it was Love, everyone turned on her. I feel like they can’t be completely oblivious to that fact, there’s no way.
Moral of the story: Everything doesn’t have to be a message. If you want to make a show where we all sit around with our snacks and watch women get murdered and the man gets away with it in the end – then make that show.
Spoiler alert: You already are.