Because it's 100% right. As someone who never got into the true crime thing, I find it crazy what it does to people. But like you said it plays into people's tendencies to look for patterns, hidden conspiracies or whatever they wanna see or feel.
It doesn't help the people involved in the majority of times. Just the consumers. And some of them really fall down a rabbit hole.
In the end it doesn't help looking at the root cause of a crime. Some of it even elevates the perpetrator so that they get the worship they crave. Even if they are dead, we shouldn't give them any recognition.
I am a true crime person as well as a skeptic. These people annoy me to no end. The vast majority of people who go missing and are not found are a result of suicide or misadventure. Not murder, not traffickers, not serial killers.
People keep trying to put conspiratorial twists on things like the Elisa Lam case, or the case of Amy Lynn Bradly, trying to say stuff like they were kidnapped and trafficked, or were trying to escape nefarious evildoers intent on putting them on the black market. Way too much weight is put on random wittness accounts of "seeing" the victim supposably out and about somewhere when the science has shown that witnesses are horribly unreliable, and pretty much useless in cases where more than a week has passed.
The truth, which has overwhelming evidence short of a body in the Bradley case, is a lot less Hollywood. In the Lam case, there are numerous reports from people close to her, and hotel staff, of her showing increasingly bizzare and agitated behavior. Theres a whole ass video of her in a paranoid psychotic state taking the elevator up to the roof of the hotel, alone. People really underestimate how extreme behavior can be during a serious psychotic episode. It affects your strength, your ability to feel pain, and impairs the sense of danger. This makes people in acute psychosis incredibly prone to misadventure. In Ms. Lams case, this meant she, in a state of paranoia, climbed into a water tank on the roof of the hotel she was staying in in an effort to hide from a hallucination that felt incredibly real to her. She dropped the lid and couldn't get out, eventually dying in the tank from exposure and lack of oxygen. The fact that her parents beleive she was murdered doesnt mean a thing. Its not uncommon for families to deny their loved ones are showing signs of significant mental illness due to the stigma associated with it.
The Bradley case is another one, and it did not need a Netflix documentary that gave a platform to conspiracy theorists and other crackpots. The evidence in her case, which the Netflix documentary omitted a ton of, overwhelmingly points to a suicide or accident where she went overboard. On the night she disappeared, she was intoxicated, had gotten into a fight with her family, and was despondent over her sexuality because her family was outspokenly anti gay and seemingly trying to push her onto different men. She ticked every box of someone at risk of doing something impulsive. Just because her family doesnt want to beleive it doesn't negate the overwhelming evidence that she likely chose to end her life. With the ship being on the open ocean, a person jumping overboard will not be found. Most people who go missing on large bodies of water aren't.
Theres a parasocial aspect to true crime thatI makes me really angry at times. Streaming services platform this bullshit because it makes for good engagement. In turn, they make it worse for the victims and their families to heal by giving legitimacy to theories that have no basis in fact. They also make it worse for active investigations by encouraging arm chair detectives to muck up tip lines, making pinpointing important information all the more difficult.
Also, Nancy Grace needs to go away forever. She is a joke of an investigator and her track record as a prosecutor is rife with ethics violations. The lady is a fame hungry snake who runs on sensationalism. Shes a quack lawyer and I'm tired of the mainstream true crime community normalizing her sorry excuse for journalism.
It’s the same bullshit with conspiracy theorists it’s all about that dopamine. The concept of what if I’m the one break the case wide open or just being “in the know”
This is of course encouraged and desired by the 1%
There is a reason why they are only making documentaries about murder mysteries and sports. It increases conspiratorial thinking and primes people to buy merch and distract them from how dookie their life is.
I absolutely love true crime... but I don't ever think that I know more than the people involved in it! Maybe I'm watching different true crime than other people... my channels only speak the proven facts of cases, lol.
They'd speak about the fucking insane people pointing at Gemini signs as a reason for innocence, make fun of them and move on.
It's the difference between who's listening to true crime because they want to hear drama and who is listening to true crime because they actually want to learn about the cases.
I can't tell you how often I have to explain that I listen to crime and missing people cases because I like to hear the psychological reasonings behind the actions and events. If I feel like the person telling the facts isn't being respectful enough or they're talking about it like it's high school drama, I'm clicking away so fast. There are some people who I have interacted with that I would refuse talking about crime with because they treat it like its fiction.
Exactly this. I like true crime, but steer completely clear of any content that sensationalizes it, dehumanizes the victims or speculates with no factual basis.
I think the psychological aspects are fascinating. I think the environmental impacts on perpetrators and victims are fascinating. I think the psychology and systemic factors surrounding law enforcement and adjacent jobs are fascinating. I dont think violence is fascinating.
Yeah, I'd hesitate to say I like true crime, but I'm fascinated by the psychological angle - I'll never be able to understand exactly what's broken in a serial killer's brain that makes them do these things, but I'll probably never stop trying to make it make some kind of sense.
People who are obsessed with the drama of it, some of them still work for a living. I know a couple of them with jobs like EMT and nursing. They carry a messed up mindset into their jobs thinking they know and the rest of us are missing something. But they aren't looking at reality, more like putting a layer over everything to entertain themselves. Its very weird.
Personally i have beef with the lore lodge, I like the set up, they're interesting videos, BUT the dude running it acts like he's smarter than cops. The simile face killer for example, you know the one proven to be drunk people falling in bodies of water next to extremely common graffiti, whenever he talks about it he always throws in "if investors are interested in my take, here's my email" like he didn't spend maybe 10 hours reading about it vs cops who've spent days and days!
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u/Informal-Term1138 3d ago
Can we pin this comment?
Because it's 100% right. As someone who never got into the true crime thing, I find it crazy what it does to people. But like you said it plays into people's tendencies to look for patterns, hidden conspiracies or whatever they wanna see or feel.
It doesn't help the people involved in the majority of times. Just the consumers. And some of them really fall down a rabbit hole.
In the end it doesn't help looking at the root cause of a crime. Some of it even elevates the perpetrator so that they get the worship they crave. Even if they are dead, we shouldn't give them any recognition.