Comic Strips

Woman: So when you're not swiping, what do you do?

Men 1-7: It sounds weird, but I'm really into WAR! ... Christoph Waltz was sooo creepy as Hans Landa! You have to see it! ... so each week both uncredentialled "historians" talk about their favorite times when thousands of men stabbed or shot each other! ... and then the good guy took his gun-knife and started prying teeth and slicing ears off the dead guys... literally an entire generation of men was decimated or psychologically damaged... But [Game of Thrones/The Walking Dead/Band of Brothers] is my go-to. What do you watch?

Woman: Mostly cartoons.

More seriously, I'd guess that many, maybe even most people have some level of morbid fascination with the type of violent, high stakes scenarios that people they identify with have been subject to. It's just kind of weird not to acknowledge that a lot of basically well-adjusted men (I flatter myself that I'm in that group) are into stuff that's objectively terrifying.

Adventure Time lore is far more complex than any true crime 😤

People are drawn to and fascinated by taboo topics, and one's experiences and upbringing determine the relationship with those taboos a person has.

Women have personal experiences with creepy/dangerous men, it's a "known danger" they hear about from a young age, and serial killers represent the extreme example of this -- it's not really surprising "true crime" type media is popular with women.

I've sat through 2 murder trials and between the testimony and pictures I can confidently say I'm really not interested in the detailed reality of horrific murders.

But to each their own, I guess.

My wife claims its so women can learn patterns to look out for.

Women are obsessed with true crime because we feel vulnerable, and so learning about it helps to hone our instincts to avoid dangerous situations. There's almost always some warning sign that people ignored and they ended up getting murdered. There's nothing wrong with true crime used as a cautionary tale. Are children sick because they read fairy tales about wolves eating grandmothers or witches cooking and eating children? Of course not. It's the same thing.

It's ok to enjoy weird media, but if you're using sensationalist narrations about very fringe cases to make generalizations about what you may or may not find in real life, you have a problem. If it makes you feel any better, most humans are generally dumb enough to fall for it from time to time, but you should still strive to do better.

Replace the last frame with "Mostly TNG" and this is a scary accurate boiled down representation of Lemmy.

We do but I also love cartoons

You know I find this to kind of be a somewhat depressing stereotype. Depressing both in the fact that these works are clearly marketed towards women as a sort of, precautionary measure against the somewhat justified paranoia, right, and the fact that this paranoia is somewhat justified is also depressing.

But it's also depressing in that I'm pretty sure it's not actually going to do anything to help you prevent yourself from being serially murdered, especially as I'm pretty sure serial murderers aren't all that common. Most of these things are going to focus on your much less likely scenarios, and are going to just flood people with a sort of paranoid delusion that everyone is out to get them at all times. Which is kind of a hellish way to live your life.

I'm also not sure there's realistically a chance most people have of catching a committed serial murderer. It's sort of like how, the safest option for a cop to engage in, most times, is just to shoot everyone all the time, because anyone could be carrying a gun on them, and if they're carrying a gun, then the people who win gunfights most of the time are the people who shoot first. It is very hard to protect against bad faith behavior, and against overwhelming opposing force. Or even mildly whelming force, if you're just not really expecting it. Just as it is relatively hard for a committed, high profile criminal to escape justice for a longer period of time (especially if the cops have a good incentive to catch the perp, like, they're a cop-killer, or a terrorist, or what have you), it is extremely hard to ensure that you're not just gonna get taken advantage of by someone.

That's not really to dissuade people from taking BJJ classes, or carrying pepper spray, or a whistle, or a gun on you, though, those things can still be effective and are pretty easy to integrate into your daily life. Especially in the case of BJJ, that might just be good exercise, but maybe the jury's still out on whether or not your joints will be completely destroyed by the age of 50.

So, I think most people would probably be better served by understanding more thoroughly the warning signs of, say, a just straight up abusive or emotionally manipulative relationship, right, more common crimes, that don't involve serial killers or the extreme and marketable violence featured in true crime. But then, as we've seen with the buzzwordification of "gaslighting", and things of this nature, you can't really be so sure that said education wouldn't just be co-opted and used by the abusers themselves into more easily laundering their behavior. It's probably still beneficial, in that if you know the identifying features of a duck, it's harder for a duck to pose as not-a-duck, even if the duck knows what a duck is, right, but, yeah, it still has problems.

Then maybe the answer lies in, say, some sort of unironic self-help or therapeutic content, right, because that helps everyone, including potential abusers, but then that can be just as vulnerable to abuse. Not necessarily from abusers, but abuse from the financial nature of said content, which will be likely to provide easy solutions and shitty information just to make a quick buck, ime.

I'd still criticize all of this shit, this genre, on the basis of what I've all said, right, and I'd also criticize it in the format and execution of it's entertainment, but I also think, right, we're probably all better off if we just remain conscious of why we're actually engaging with entertainment, instead of trying to come up with some sort of justification which doesn't really pass the reality test. It's mostly escapism. The pretense of reality is what everything uses to make itself more legitimate. That's why men watch war history videos, and videos on guns that convince them they need to become right wing NRA wingnut prepper guys. Pretense of reality. As the other commenters have pointed out, there are parallels, here.

Sexist garbage. I'm a woman and i would run a mile from anyone into true crime. It's creepy as hell.

I fell into the true crime podcast hole once. I’m never climbing back in again.

initially read it as different discrete responses to the first panel, and 1+3 is just...

> So when you're not swiping, what do you do?
> Serial Killers!