My Take on Season 3 of You: Deconstructing Narrative Tropes

You is an interesting concept. Not only is the bad guy the main character (protagonist), we hear his inner monologue throughout the show. It adds a little skeeve, don’t you think?

Anyways, if you remember the first two seasons, Joe Goldberg becomes obsessed with a Grad student in New York, and decides he’s going to end up with her, no matter how many people he has to “save her from.” He lives in New York until he kills so many people (including the girl he claims to love)  that his ex-girlfriend (buried alive girl, remember her?) shows up and scares him so badly he runs away to LA. 

In LA, according to Joe “the Worst City Ever,” Joe/Will meets Love Quinn. Insert ‘similar-pattern-of-killing-people, (even though he’s “trying to be better for her”) and generally wreaking havoc on an admittedly toxic group of people’ here. The surprise of this season is that Love ALSO enjoys killing people who threaten the person she’s obsessed with. For whatever reason, instead of Joe accepting this smoke show of a soulmate, he decides she’s evil, and only spares her life because she’s pregnant with his child. And then they live happily ever after in suburban California.

Well, it’s pretty obvious that that’s a lie. After all, they both have an unfortunate habit of murdering people when they’re jealous, which is always.

You’re probably wondering why they couldn’t just get it together and stop adding to their body counts (in more than ONE sense of that phrase), but both Joe’s and Love’s actions this season make a whole lot more sense when you consider this: Joe is an unreliable narrator.

There are quite a few spoilers ahead, as this is a pretty in-depth look into our favorite baddies. If you haven’t finished the season, I’d stop reading now and come back when you have.

Otherwise. . . 

Hello, You.

I bet you’re wondering what I mean when I say Joe is an unreliable narrator . . .  But you’re smart. Driven. If you’re reading this article, you likely know a few of these tropes. What can I say, we like readers here at Her Campus.

Here are a couple tropes I’ve noticed in this menagerie of horrible people:

1. Unreliable Narrator

I’m going to blow your mind here. Peach (and Benji and Candace and Beck and Love) probably aren’t the monsters Joe makes them out to be. Joe’s sense of morality is, in essence, f*cked up beyond repair. In his story, his internal monologue, he isn’t going to cast himself (one of the only people killing other people) as the bad guy. He’s going to prune and tweak the facts to justify his actions. Candace could very well have been a horrible and manipulative person, but we’ll never know because she was brutally murdered by Love at the end of season 2.

2. Puppy Kicker

This is how Joe proves he’s not the bad guy. He always goes after someone who is (objectively) bad. Ron was physically and emotionally abusive to Paco and Claudia (though he was right about Joe having “Freak Eyes”). Hendy is a pedophile and sexual predator. Ryan is not only emotionally abusive to Marianne, he continues using drugs while withholding custody of their daughter from Marianne for the same reason (even though she is sober at this point). By comparing himself to these “Puppy kickers” he attempts to distinguish his actions from theirs. This also makes him the hero when he kills them.

All of these intertwine to give us a bad guy who thinks he’s the good guy. While Joe seems to have changed during his stay in Madre Linda, at the end of season 3, we find him right back where he started: going to great lengths (Paris) to follow a woman he’s obsessed with.

Let’s just hope Emily in Paris doesn’t take place in the same cinematic universe.

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