I have a lot of questions for the folks in the You Season 5 writer’s room. What happened to Dante and Lansing? How did Joe keep getting away with all of his shenanigans? Why didn’t John Stamos ever come back for an episode? And, my most pressing question of all… do y’all really think Gen Z talks like that? IDK about you, but the use of Gen Z slang in You Season 5 has me a little heated.
If you’re a Gen Zer who watched Season 5 of You, then you’d know exactly what I’m talking about. While apparent in previous seasons, the overused and wrongly-used Gen Z slang in the final season of the Netflix show was simply too much to ignore. And I’m breaking my silence on it.
It all started when Joe’s new lover interest, Bronte, broke into Mooney’s and — when approached by a literal murderer — began lamenting about how old buildings are getting “slurped up by capitalists like bone marrow,” before escaping death and hitting Joe with an “OK, I see you,” on the way out of the door. Like, huh?
But it only goes downhill from there. In the next episode, Bronte says that a chair is giving “Edgar Allen Poe post-menty-B” which could be its “own subgenre of cottagecore E-boy maximalism.” I’m an editor of a Gen Z publication, and I still cannot tell you what that means. It’s almost as if someone looked up “Gen Z slang” on Urban Dictionary and threw it up into one weird, slightly-outdated sentence. In the words of Gen Alpha, negative aura.
It’s not just Bronte, either. Her friends also talk like that, but worse. When introduced to Clayton, he says that he’s the “main character” even though the dude is, like, 30. Bronte’s other friend, Dominique, after exposing Joe for murdering Clayton, tells their followers to “pop off” with any information people have about his murderous tendencies. Then, there’s also that Heidi Gardner cameo, where she’s clearly on an app like TikTok, telling fans to “like and subscribe” for more content. Come on, y’all, we all know it’s “following” instead of “subscribing” these days (for the most part).
Look, I get it: When you’re writing for a show as big as You, it’s natural to want to make the dialogue as relatable as possible. And with a predominantly Gen Z fanbase, I bet the You writers wanted to showcase dialogue and themes that are hip with the kids — or whatever. However, the problem with Season 5 is that the dialogue isn’t relatable at all. Yes, while characters do use Gen Z slang, it’s used so incorrectly and so blatantly that I literally had to pause the show and take a lap every single time Bronte or her friends talked. (I’m not joking. My step count was high during Season 5.)
While the use (or, in some cases, misuse) of the Gen Z slang in You Season 5 is certainly annoying, it’s more than that: it’s not representative of Gen Z at all. For Gen Z specifically, there’s a difference between how we talk on the internet versus how we communicate IRL. People who aren’t Gen Z assume that our internet speak — including terms like cottagecore and E-boy — is how we speak in real life, so that’s how they write the dialogue in film and television. In reality? We speak pretty normally — at least that’s what I think.Â
Season 5 of You isn’t bad, it’s just flawed — like all shows are. Could it have benefited from a Gen Zer or two in the writer’s room? Probably! Could we have done without random rants on capitalism and grown folks calling each other “babe”? Definitely.