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Does 13 Reasons Why Glorify Suicide?
On March 31st 2017, at 12:30 PM I was in my bed, sick. All of the sudden I start receiving text messages from my friends. They read “LOOK AT WHAT JUST DROPPED” with an image of a show on Netflix, in the picture was the new show 13 Reasons Why and the first two episodes, “Tape 1, Side A”, “Tape 1 Side B.” I texted back instantly because I couldn’t believe that I had forgot! I had read the book by Jay Asher before the show was even announced. I began watching and had finished it by the next day. At first I thought about how amazing it was! How great is it to have your favorite book turned into something real that you could watch over and over again! But as the internet wore down the initial shock of it, and all of the good parts, there was nothing left. I was sick and tired of people talking about how beautiful Hannah Baker, Justin Foley, Jessica and Alex were. I was sick of people saying that it taught them that they should always be nice to people. Did you need a tv show about someone killing themselves to teach you that? The book showed how something so small can affect someone's entire life, and the show represented how suicide affects other people's lives. They did pretty good job of this, so I don’t blame the show, I blame the people. People are turning this into a revenge story, “How a Dead Girl Got Back at People Who Treated Her Badly”. They don’t pick up on what the show is trying to get across and are only seeing that people loved Hannah Baker, and so many people missed her, and that if you died too that there would be memorials and people would realize how they wronged you. This isn’t just harmless thinking, as we saw in Michigan recently a young girl who glorified suicide had made a “prank” where she convinced her 11 year old boyfriend that she had committed suicide. Later that night his mom found him hanging in his closet and he died later that night at Children's Hospital. As someone who has lost someone to suicide, I don’t understand, why would you want to put your friends and family through that because you want to be praised and loved? 13 Reasons Why showed how much Hannah's suicide affected Clay, her school, and her parents but the people who glorify it completely skipped over it. So to answer the question I asked in the beginning, does it glorify suicide? No, but people are interpreting it the wrong way and giving it a positive connotation, which isn’t good.
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