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I'd Use My Name but Internet's avatar

I watched it (it is great) and never once thought about race.

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Jenny's avatar

Perhaps I saw a different drama altogether but for me two things stood out - the frenzied multiple stabbing was the act of a psychopath in the making and not a 13 year old boy angry at being bullied. Likewise the scenes with the forensic psychologist were a study in deep disturbance, manipulation and the exposure of his inner sociopathy. An experienced, trained professional cries and shakes uncontrollably she is so disturbed by his behaviour!! Not normal. In both scenes his response is completely disproportionate to that of a vulnerable 13 year old child caught in a moment of rage.. it made absolutely no narrative sense to me that this was about internet culture alone and that most people seem to not even notice this rupture.

I did hear it was based on a true story of a black boy - clearly that was wrong but I did wonder why Netflix would not have stayed truer to the facts and offered the role of a lifetime to a talented young black actor and his family? I mean this will make many a career - so an important choice. I suspect this was considered by the writers. My suspicion was that there would have been ‘outrage’ that Netflix was vilifying black youth and families. I might be wrong but as a thought experiment it’s worth running.

So it left me wondering if this was more of an attempt to garner votes for online censorship and more hate speech laws by Labour. We are inundated with calls for this in Australia and they always hide behind the ‘vulnerable youth’ stories while at the same time refusing to ban violent porn, have phone free schools etc.

It reminds me of the other social engineering series - Orange Is the New Black when we were presented with the MOST sympathetic black transsexual in a woman’s prison (a hairdresser to boot) and all along we were being primed to ignore the reality of men like Isla Bryson in women’s prisons.

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