Being on the internet for as long as I’ve been, you see a lot of the same arguments crop up again and again. Are you making your man a plate? Are you allowed to like nepo babies? Can you work for a bomb manufacturer and be a good person? (No!)
This year, the tenor/vibe seemed to shift to something more keening, something more worrisome. I’ve talked about the trauma-ification of reality tv and the trauma-ification of the internet on TikTok, but this year seemed to bring out a particular need to be the injured party in every situation. As Nene once said: it’s getting weird!
This isn’t solely an internet phenomenon. On The Buccaneers and Black Cake, two literary adaptations (on Apple TV and Hulu, respectively), victimhood has become the vehicle for the audience to understand character journeys. The Case Against the Trauma Plot was published three years ago, but it seems that for the modern audience, self pity is still the easiest way to identify with characters whose journeys might not mirror our own.
Nan, one of the five main characters on The Buccaneers, is introduced as a fun loving, free spirited heiress during the Gilded Age. An adaptation of an unpublished Edith Wharton novel, the show is about five American girls who go to England to marry nobility and the inevitable culture clashes that ensue when new money meets rigid, caste obsessed old world ancient money. This is enough for a show! This is a fantastic premise, and as someone obsessed with the Gilded Age (book recs coming soon!), there’s more than enough here for writers to dig into and create compelling television.
Instead, (spoilers) Nan discovers her mother isn’t her biological mother, and she’s the result of an affair between her philandering father and an unnamed woman. This causes a five episode spiral where Nan mopes, whines, cries, screams, and is basically unbearable, complaining about how her life is a lie and she’s the only person who has ever suffered in the history of the world. The melodrama is also ahistorical— during this time period, where women had virtually no options or freedoms, a young woman would never tell everyone she met that she was a lovechild, as that would render her un-marriageable. It’s frustrating and feels distinctly 2023: the only way for the audience to feel sorry for her is to make her feel sorry for herself. Thankfully, she gets called out in-text during an argument with her love interest:
Nan: You don’t understand! This is about me.Theo: Isn’t everything?Gagged her.
Black Cake, an adaptation of Charmaine Wilkerson’s 2022 novel, tackles the story of a Jamaican immigrant in California telling her life story to her two children.
The eldest, Byron, a striving ocean scientist who suppresses every emotion, is the picture of Caribbean masculine repression (as a first-gen child of an immigrant mother hyper focused on academic success in his twenties, I understand him on a molecular level). The youngest, Benny, is a queer artist who flops her way through her twenties, wielding her pain like a cudgel.
In the book, Byron is repressed but analytical, understanding situations are complicated and nuanced while highlighting his complete emotional unavailability. On the show, Byron flings accusations at his sister, fights with his girlfriend, and generally mopes in a way that was surprising to me as a reader of the novel. Benny is also transformed from a young woman struggling to reconcile her failures with the expectations of her parents to a self-pitying monster, becoming a caricature of Tumblr liberals in coastal cities.
I’m trying to be kind, but it was shocking how annoying she was on the show. On Reddit, multiple people talked about how frustrating it was to be forced to watch someone refract every detail, every conversation, every interaction, and somehow turn it into an attack against themselves. Her parents didn’t hate her because she was queer, her parents were frustrated because she dropped out of college… and culinary school… and art school. They had valid reasons to be frustrated with her!
(Edit right before posting to say: it’s a strange choice for the adaptation to make the main female character so unlikable, especially considering how little compassion modern audiences have for female characters. Here is a defense of Benny, and I’m reiterating that she was a much more likable character in the book!)
On Twitter, I knew we had lost the plot when people were arguing about who was allowed to claim poverty after a woman complained she only had $200 left in her paycheck after paying her bills. In her replies, people rushed to talk about how little money they had, and attacked her for “cosplaying poverty” when she could afford to pay her bills. The comments devolved into some bizarre version of poverty Olympics, where people openly discussed how little they had and tore each other apart for having literal dollars and cents left over in their paychecks. It felt dystopian, watching people fight for the right to call themselves the truly poor and the truly downtrodden. Is this who we are?
Elsewhere on X, someone innocuously tweeting “being over 25 and having no savings is concerning”, and someone immediately interpreted it as an attack on “poor people”. Simple statements fail logic tests and become condemnations, leaving people to ask: how can I make this about me? How can I hurt my own feelings constantly? It seems exhausting to exist this way, living in what I’ve called the perpetual crouch. It’s hard to grow as a person when you’re living your life defensively, not only anticipating attacks but seeking them, yearning to be cast as the aggrieved party.
I’m not even going to talk about the policing of race on Twitter: the argument of who is Black, who isn’t, and who experiences the most racism is asinine. But I beg people to think about why it’s so important to police people’s experiences and claim they’ve actually had worse. If we’re all sharing our experiences with racism in this country, why do you need to win?
We see this again and again. Telling someone you didn’t like a movie is a personal attack. Telling someone they should try spicy food is ableist. Everywhere you look online, you’ll find someone suffering, you’ll see someone who’s aggrieved, you’ll find someone furious.
I’m afraid to make my final point, but I’ll push through: when I was putting together examples for this, Taylor Swift was named Time’s Person of the Year. I talked about Taylor before in my Sore Winners video, and almost exactly one year later, Taylor is once again (or still, depending on how you look at it) beating the drum of victimhood .
Sociologically, I think the explanation for this obsession is that due to American misogyny, the general public won’t accept a woman achieving the level of success Taylor has without the story: overcoming her bullies and cancellation, taking win after win and framing them as moral victories against the Cerberus of Kim, Kanye, and Scooter Braun.
Still, it’s fascinating. Taylor is the most successful artist in the world. The Eras Tour has achieved historic financial success, the public once again loves her, despite the Matty Healy of it all, she’s in a relationship that’s allegedly thriving. Why are we still talking about people being mean to her online eight years ago? Why is it so important that despite being the most successful and privileged person in the world, Taylor still needs to frame herself as a victim?
(I almost included a point about Selena Gomez and her being a victim of everything everywhere all at once—rightfully being attacked for her post about the conflict and then making it about her, but I don’t believe in punching down. After the Benny Blanco war in her own Instagram comments, I think something is up and won’t be talking about her again.)
All I can do is notice these things and point them out. I didn’t even include a study I found about people who purport to be victims online are much more likely to cyberbully (welcome to Tumblr 2013 and TikTok comments in 2023). We live in an era where victimhood is the ultimate prize online, and we’re all racing each other to the bottom to prove we’ve suffered more than anyone else. It’s trite to tell people to be themselves, to stand in their truth, to accept the cards they’ve been dealt without lashing out online, but someone needs to.
I leave you with one of my favorite quotes, one I think about every new year: “I believe in waking up in the middle of the night and packing our bags and leaving our worst selves for our better ones.” It’s time.
Wow, the questions you pose here are so interesting to me. At the end of the day, attention is the goal, and sympathy is the path, and no one really cares how they get there.
wow love this