@RickiTarr i think people are fascinated by motive, and by crime
but i know that when someone i knew gets murdered, then much later, someone i knew murdered someone, it becames a hell of lot less interesting.
i also know someone who testified in a murder trial to get another person off - a person was found dead, kinda sorta looked like suicide by they suspected the boyfriend. and this person i knew gave him an alibi. it was insane.
(all these murders from living in Baltimore? dunno)
I was never interested, but didn't think too much about it until many years ago I was listening to a radio show about this, and a woman was talking about her mother's murder being people's entertainment.
@RickiTarr Are people actually obsessed with murder?
…Outside of its being a reliable plot device as old as Cain and Abel.
…And of war & genocide.
…& not including of the ongoing sacrifice of human lives to the voracious gods of capitalism.
…Also not including domestic violence and the other generally banal scenarios in which most instances of actual people actually killing each other take place.
@RickiTarr I think most people just like solving mysteries, but there are some who get a little too into it. I met a girl in high school and when I went to her house I was shocked to see her bedroom walls covered in pictures, posters, and newspaper clippings of serial killers. Then she pulled out letters she had exchanged with serial killers in prison. She was in love with Richard Ramirez in particular and had a ton of letters from him. No idea what was going on there.
@QuietLurker@RickiTarr That's actually amazing. My partner has a framed selfie with Ted Bundy's car. We drove to the crime museum pretty much solely to see it, though the rest of the place was cool too.
@odessa@QuietLurker@RickiTarr Then you might have more insight into it than I do because while I understand the fascination on an intellectual level, dissecting the psychology and motivations, I don’t understand the admiration or idolization.
@QuietLurker@RickiTarr We are intellectually fascinated, there's no admiration. I'm also intellectually fascinated by someone who would have that kind of admiration.
@RickiTarr because nobody wants to get murdered. And if we learn as much as possible about murder, maybe we can avoid it!
I do think this explains why women are such a huge audience for true crime. Women are often the victims of violent crime and it feels protective to learn about it.
Also, nobody wants to be accused of murder, so watching the forensic procedural stuff also feels protective.
@RickiTarr@TheBreadmonkey I used to get asked about serial killers when I worked in criminology. Now I work in psychology I get asked about psychopaths, even though my role is absolutely nothing to do with forensics. People love to hear about the lurid extremes. They would find most murderers very boring if they met them irl
@Kierkegaanks I even like some of those, but Holy Crap, yeah just bizarrely gruesome. I guess you get desensitized. I remember one time hubs walked in while I was watching Bones, and he was like I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS ON NETWORK TV
@RickiTarr 1. If you're sufficiently far removed from it and are not emotionally involved, it is a brain teaser/ puzzle to solve.
2. Protective instict: if we see the signs, we can stop this from happening to us and our loved ones.
@RickiTarr Considering the number of times I've seen reTHUGliCONs saying stupid, authoritarian, and christo-fascist shit, stranging always comes to my mind as a viable solution....
Morbid curiosity is in our instinct. I took a class on gothic horror film and literature. The professor proposed that horror and comedy were the natural complements in our primal psychology, rather than comedy and tragedy.
I don't like murder, but I do love a good murder mystery movie.
If the movie is made well I too get obsessed with trying to discover who the killer is.
The ones I really like are the ones that have those sudden twists in the plot halfway in, it's like oh no, now we have to start all over again 😀
@maddad I love mysteries too, murder or otherwise, I've really appreciated these particularly lush Kenneth Branagh Poirot movies. Idk figuring stuff out is fun! So are beautiful cities around the world, and if you actually get me, and I can't figure it out, I'm really impressed
I very rarely guess the killer if they keep the killers identity hidden through the whole movie.
That is the fun part for me too, it's the hunt for the killer, watching for clues and all the rest of the detective stuff.
@maddad Yeah sometimes they make it impossible to guess! When I watch my Murder TV shows, my husband has gotten so good at guessing before they even get into the clues, it's funny, but he's like there's always a formula and he's right, once you see it you see it
@RickiTarr Perhaps the same reason people like rollercoasters and horror movies, the sensation of danger in a controlled environment.
But I also think it's also a different question if we're talking about fictional or real-life murders.
I very much enjoy fictional murders, in books and an on screen. I struggle to say why, but I think it's to do with problem solving in a high stakes environment; it wouldn't be nearly as entertaining if the detective was tracking down a serial parking offender. A good detective fiction writer gives you a series of puzzle pieces assembled bit-by-bit, combined with regular shocks of horror when the killer does something terrible again.
I suppose that real-life murders have a significant element of voyeurism, but I have to say, I don't really understand the appeal. With a true crime story I spend most of the time thinking about the very real victims. Sometimes it's handled sensitively - there was a very good Danish drama about the death of Kim Wall a few years ago, which neither showed the murder nor gave attention to the killer (it didn't even say the killer's name, let alone have him in the story). But usually true crime murder shows just feel to me like they're exploitative.
With fiction, I can be comfortable that however terrible the actions are, the victims aren't real.
@RickiTarr Maybe because the religion they hold central in their lives is based on a murder? This guy didn’t just die ‘for their sins’ - he was killed. 🤷🏻♂️
There's a lot of interesting thoughts here but I'm gonna throw a tangent out just to highlight how weird murder is to our brains: video games. They often engage in what's called ludonarrative dissonance - when the narrative is ludicrous but the viewer expects it. TV shows do it a lot too.
You'll have characters go on murderous rampages of countless nameless baddies but suddenly they have enough emotion for a cut scene where one of their loved ones is killed. And we expect it.
When the first first person shooter I played came out it seemed very weird and I was conflicted about it. But it was Nazis, so....
I wouldn't shoot the dogs though.
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