I know it is preposterous to start this article by explaining what a serial killer is to you, a Modern Human Being, but articles have to start somehow, and we at Sneer Campaign love stating the obvious. A serial killer is just a person, usually a white man but there are exceptions occasionally, who gives in to their urge to murder one after the other, in a serial fashion. After every killing, they probably think to themselves, “to be continued…” and every homicide detective on the scene is thinking “please don’t let this be a prequel, sequel, a nine part trilogy of trilogies, et cetera.”
While a serial killer is active, it isn’t always clear that one is at work. They don’t always have a type that they go after, but I suppose they often do. The general public is TERRIFIED. People fear that they or someone they know will be maimed and killed, raped before or after, tortured or any such thing as that. The news channels eat it up and generate ratings, froth up the people. They have always done that, even in the 1800s.
Have serial killers fallen to the wayside? They seemed pretty prolific in the seedy 1970s, probably because it was the worst modern decade. The combination of patterns and colors triggered a murder response in susceptible brains that quite honestly I can relate to. If I had to all the time see those elephant legged, bellbottomed pant monstrosities that were all the rage, I might have been driven to kill, too.
These days, though, it seems like “”mass murderers”” are the default outrageous death bringer. Lazy, sloppy work, imo. Although at least it makes us all afraid ALL the time! But mass murderers probably also get the treatment that I am eventually going to ramble about in this post.
For as long as there have been sensational murder trials, there have been people around who are a little too fascinated by the criminal mind. I’m saying this delicately and a little misleadingly. Let’s just say that these people are too transfixed by the criminal pants, if you catch my meaning. Do you get what I am saying? I’m elbowing you in the side and waggling my brows. Now I am frowning.
“True Crime” is a bigtime genre of television programming, Netflix funded binge-worthy shows, and podcasts. I have seen it said that women make up a large part of the audience, and that is a little puzzling and I’m actually not going to speculate fully as to why that is. I’d like to think it is a bit of that “know your enemy” thing and feel comfortable with that and also I guess the psychology of a broken dangerous human is interesting, but then one day I happened upon a tumblr (yes, I know) that was just posts about serial killers. “Some people’s hobbies!” I laughed while I went to the archives to read every single post without looking in the mirror at my own hobbies. But then I noticed that the person showed special attention to mainly three serial killers of old: Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Richard Ramirez. Almost as if this person was a FAN of those three.
There were repetitions of the accounts of their murders, quotes from them, gif collages of flattering photos of them, and even memes reposted a thousand times where they could have replaced a michevious puppy or a grouchy cat. As I kept reading, because of course I did, I realized that I had not happened upon a fluke. There were a whole lot of people who were treating them like rock star martyrs. It made me understand how people can still support problematic celebrities, if apparently people are sitting around fawning all over these literal human monsters who ended dozens of lives horrifically.
Netflix made that Ted Bundy documentary series somewhat recently. I watched most of it which was more than enough to learn that he was actually a pretty irritating kind of guy, just listening to how he talked. But I also saw that Netflix put out a statement that was like “do we have to remind you that he wasn’t “hot” he was a KILLER” or something to that effect. Don’t you dare make me look up the actual tweet. I’m not that kind of gal.
While at first it seems absurd to think that they would need to say that to people, people who were evidently publicly saying salacious things about him, what was most ridiculous is that it was so obvious that Netflix planned for such a reaction. That documentary mentioned like every three minutes that he was “handsome and charismatic.” So the entirety of all of Netflix itself can be categorized as a fan of a serial killer and there is so much about the world I still don’t understand.
I have kind of an issue with fan mentality in the first place (which I will inevitably write about on another day), but hankering for a pankering with these remorseless types, (I’m looking at you especially, Ramirez), is not something I can even pretend to get.
And, since I guess the alternate title of this article could be “Wherein I Casually Mention Small Mistakes That I Make” I will also go ahead and say that I was reading comments on the internet — YES I KNOW. But someone was trying to defend their crush on Dahmer, and their fetish of imagining him incapacitating them and eating them. Whaaat. It is true that these DARK FANTASIES hurt no one, but what!! “I wish I knew what it felt like for someone to love me that much” We are not praying mantises! That’s not love! What is happening! Halp!
I regret to inform you that this is one of those articles that has no actual conclusion. I have no solutions. At this point I am only thinking of the following gif, which is much better than everything I was just thinking about:
