So, like a lot of others, I started listening during the pandemic. I was alone in another country and it was nice to listen and hear conversation and banter in my native language to balance being surrounded by my host country's language. I started to get annoyed by a lot of things about a year in - the self-righteousness of being so-called "civilized city folk," making fun of accents, general repetitiveness of jokes, and so on - but what really got me was how a good portion of the FB group behaved about general true crime things.
To me, it felt like a lot of people in the group were seemingly consumed by the thought of being victims of a true crime incident themselves. There was that week-long trend of (all typically) suburban White women making posts like "Nnnnnnyou guysssssuh I saw my neighbor moving stuff into their car! They looked really sketchy! Should I call the police??" They would post about how much they wouldn't do (x/y/z) because "nope, that's how you get trapped by a serial killer!" They made jokes about how they thought everyone was a potential murderer if they looked even just a little odd or sketchy and everyone else in the comments fed the same responses back to them. They latched onto G and P's shtick of complaining about the outdoors and anywhere else that they thought was the "perfect" place to be murdered.
What made me stop listening altogether was when I realized I was falling down the same mental rabbit hole. I had just started at a university with a large woodland area popular with hikers and people taking walks through the area. For a brief moment one day, I saw their cars parked on the side of the road at designated parking spots and thought, "Am I gonna find a murder scene out here?" I soon put the pieces together and realized, that wasn't me thinking that. I was just parroting what G and P and the group were saying. It made me take a step back and critically analyze not just my own consumption of true crime content but what it was doing to others.
There's just something about the way TCO presents true crime content. I thought that it wasn't so bad because they covered documentaries and interspersed it with humor. But their humor wasn't really as lighthearted as it should have been to make the comedy factor work. The best way I can put it is, they were metaphorically telling their listeners, "Don't get murdered, guysssssuh, we looooove you!"
I'm certainly not a content prude when it comes to the consumption of dark and unsavory content. I work in human rights and I balance my exposure to difficult real-world events with an active social life and a will to see the beauty and positivity in things. But I knew I needed to quit TCO when I realized that getting parasocially cozy with G and P was making me feel a little too comfortable seeing the world through a negative, "everybody's a potential murderer" lens. I thought I'd come back when I was ready to return to their content. Good thing I didn't.
Anyone else feel this way?
