by Jamari Saint Cyr
There’s a clear difference between fascination and romanticizing. Something that I’ve been recently annoyed with is seeing people, predominantly teenagers, glorifying serial killers and psychopaths. This is something that has been most prominent ever since we’ve entered the age of social media and with the existence of ‘Fandoms’.
If you go onto any social media platform, Twitter, Instagram or especially Tumblr, if you search up the name of any serial killer you will likely receive a number of results of fan accounts (*sigh* yes fan accounts) dedicated to that serial killer. A majority of times what you’ll likely see on these fan pages are photos of those serial killers with descriptions from the account user praising them on how attractive they are or how they are their “favorite serial killer”.
It’s one thing find a serial killer physically attractive or to find them fascinating from a physiological standpoint but it’s another thing to humanize and romanticize them and their behavior to the point where you are glorifying their wrongdoings.
To see people in the 21st-century look at killers like Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez or even the Columbine murderers and glorify them and praise that they ‘deserved better’ is something I view to be completely disheartening and disrespectful to the victims and their families. They don’t deserve to be received as good humans in the public eye.
Not that anyone truly ever deserves to be ‘vilified’ but I see visible boundaries between undeserved vilification and deserved. Serial killers, for the most part, are the last people on earth that deserve to be glorified for their actions.