True or False?

I am of the growing opinion that the true crime community is becoming less of a space to enjoy a specific kind of content and raise awareness about those topics and more about glamorizing and profiting off of actual peoples pain and suffering. 

As always, I am referring to a certain group within the wider web of people and as such it should be clear I'm not generalizing. These specific creators and netizens do not represent the whole sphere but unfortunately happen to be louder than most. 

I'm not someone who personally is a huge true crime fan, mostly because it's hard to watch and the topic of discussion is very raw and depressing. That being said, there are a lot of people who do like watching true crime media because its either informative, interesting or just something that you enjoy watching. Nothing wrong with that. 

However, recently it has become somewhat of a trend of profit off of the stories of events that occurred in real life by making a documentary, a mini series or a feature film about it. This is not a new trend of course. If you take a look at David Fincher's catalogue alone his movies are a mix of real and fictious events that fall under the true crime category. This has been going on since people understood that other people are curious about what drives crime and criminals. We are the proverbial cat that gets killed by curiosity. 

This is something I've mentioned before when talking about media saturation and biopic-obsession.  You check any streaming site and you will find at least 10 separate stories about a serial killer or a murderer or some awful event. There's a demand for the content. That's not what I have a problem with. It's not my particular brand of poison but I don't have any problem with others consuming it. 

No, my problem arises when the people take it too far. 

So let's address the issue by splitting 'the people' into two:

1) The ones who make the content and,

2) The ones who consume it. 

1) The people who make the content should be equally held responsible about the information they are providing to the viewers. Let's face it, the average person is not going to fact-check a TV show on Netflix that claims to be 99% accurate. It is up to the creator to make sure that the core facts remain the same. This is not actually ever taking place because directors, in the name artistic reimagination, create additional nonsense all the time. The problem is when you are adding that to an actual event, it no longer remains grounded in reality. 

If, I as a director, choose to represent a serial killer as a sympathetic individual and once again CHOSE (because it is a purposeful choice) to portray a victim, that was an actual living person, as morally wrong, that is me actively changing the audience's perception of events. They do not know that this is untrue and as such they will have opinions about the victim and killer based on what I chose to show. 

I'm explaining in depth because you see this all the time of the internet. A person who has only watched a show will talk about a crime in a biased way because of the limited information they have received. It's extremely harmful to the actual victims and families because we seem to forget that these events happened. People had to experience horrible things in real time. Watching about it years later and education ourself is but we do not know what it was like and we never will. 

I'm going to use this time to talk about Ryan Murphy and Netflix. They have a series called Monsters where they plan on detailing the stories of several high-profile murder cases. So far they've released a Jeffrey Dahmer one and a Menendez brothers one. He did receive permission from the families of Dahmer's victims or the Menendez brothers to do so. His depictions of these events are extremely biased and vile. And he profits off of this 'media'. I'm not going to say more because it genuinely pisses me off how disgusting the concept of the series is but its vile. 

If you want actual information about any cases, do your research, watch a documentary (preferably not Netflix) and stay away from limited series or dramatized depictions of these events. It's never accurate and usually an excuse to get away with the directors weird conceptions around murder. 

2) The ones who consume it this content are equally culpable in being really weird. They refuse to see these people are human beings and instead make them characters as if its just your regular TV show. They make edits, they sexualize them, and they some how attempt to revise history and facts because they didn't like it. 

Now their go-to excuse is to claim that they don't mean any of it towards the actual person but towards the actors. They don't actually think Jeffrey Dahmer is attractive, Evan Peters is. Except there are actual people who watch these shows and movies and glamorize the serial killer, not the actor. And besides, its still weird because the actor is portraying an actual person. This is not the same as making edits or fanfiction about Hannibal Lector or Joe from You. Those are purely fictional characters. 

People also discuss about these events as if its a bedtime story and point out plot holes like its a episode of Columbo. It's not. You'd think it wouldn't be hard to be respectful, but its the internet, where there's an abundance of audacity. 

(This applies to internet content creators who make storytime/makeup videos about crimes. It's just a strange format, like why?)

It's reached a point where you don't really see the actual true crime fans. The one's who watch to be aware, to be informed and because its compelling stuff. Now all you see is people who thirst over actors and make fake videos to enrage or sadden the viewers. The marketability of true crime is...a crime. 

It's the one genre that shouldn't be serialized and commercialized for the mass market. Nothing good will come out of that.

If you wanna watch less serious but thrill-inducing media, watch horror folks. It's got everything and doesn't harm other individuals while existing. 

Cool, I'm gonna go watch an Adam Sandler movie, which is my take on horror. 

🐄