Netflix's You and how 'nice guys' became the real villains | Hacker News Reader

Netflix's You and how 'nice guys' became the real villains

bbc.com

8 pointsadrian_mrd10 comments

I have watched only one season of 'You' but the protagonist isn't a nice guy - he's a psychopath.

It doesn't change.

If we are talking about who to be afraid of, numbers would be a better guide.

Can superficially nice, patient, respectable people do horrible things with no warning? Sure. But how often does that happen? Is it enough to be afraid? Or is it just a more exciting story (in fiction or the news)?

I'm inclined to think our normal cues for fear of people are at least somewhat tuned to reality. That people about to do something bad give away their intentions (or their volatility/impulsiveness) in many ways before they do something bad.

People's risk perceptions actually don't match reality no matter how much we wish they did. Given that, superficially nice people are likely a much greater threat to us all than we'd expect. And that's not to mention all of the dangerous encodings of social control (i.e. powerlessness) in that scenario.

Search term: "risk perceptions"

I said specifically our fear of people, and I said "somewhat" tuned to reality (not perfectly).

General risk perceptions are all over the map because we have no instinct to process risks like flying in an airplane.

But people have needed to judge the safety of other people for a long time. It would be weird if our sense of fear was not somewhat aligned with danger in that area.

I wonder if "nice guys" are more likely to let bad behavior go on around them? I doubt they are more likely to initiate bad behavior, but perhaps not be assertive enough to stop it.

"shows up on the doorstep"

It seems a stretch to tie romcom plotlines involving weird gestures to heinous crimes.

Yeah, that was a weird leap of logic. How dare that guy show up at his friends house, and tell Keira's character "sorry things got weird there, I'm in love with you but I'm moving on with my life"

his method of gaining information on the women he supposedly has romantic feelings for is to stalk them, hack their communications, break into their homes and steal their things. If anyone gets in his way he is content to kidnap and kill them

I haven't seen this programme but what on earth has criminal sociopathic behaviour like that got to do with the much-maligned-recently "nice guy" type?

I think this is a maligning of the "nice guy" type. I think part of the trope is that "nice guys" are secretly frustrated and angry and misogynistic. The more common part of the trope is simply that nice guys aren't sexually attractive to women, or that a bland personality or social shyness manifests as being a "nice guy", and this is kind of just an extrapolation of that.

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