Our Generation’s Depraved Obsession With Killers and Abusers

A critique on BookTok, the TCC, and TikTok fangirls.

Wade Wilson, a 30 year old killer from Florida, was sentenced to the death penalty on August 27 for the brutal murders of two women, Kristine Melton and Diane Ruiz. Wilson’s tattooed face features not one, but two swastikas. 

TikTok user @oceansoleil has only one video, an edit of Wade Wilson in handcuffs in front of the court, with the song Criminal by Britney Spears in the background, and the lyrics, “but mama I’m in love with a criminal” over the video of him. The edit has 62.3k likes, and 4,643 comments as of August 30. 

One of the most concerning top comments was posted by the account @lindy8435. 

“Wade…you are in the top spot for setting TT [TikTok] alight with your gorgeous face, the way you walk into the courtroom with your beautiful suits and confidence. Absolutely wonderful.” 

This exemplifies just one of the hundreds of videos on the social media app praising Wilson, and one of the many Tik Tok users infatuated with a real serial killer and abuser.

“[...] If you were in that family's situation, and he killed part of your family, you would not be thirsting over him,” sophomore Alexis Prout said.

Mooning over a criminal is called into question, even in the online world, but people turn a blind eye when one declares their love for a fictional killer. Although the harm wasn’t seen before, with the mass amounts of people frantically fiending over fictional criminals like Tate Langdon from “American Horror Story”, Cal and Andre from “Zero Day”, or even the Joker, it opens up a gateway to an obsession with actual criminals who have taken away lives.

There's been a noticeable spike in the amount of women tolerating and even defending abusive, and criminal behavior in men that are famously terrible people like Johnny Depp, Harvey Weinstien, Woody Allen, R. Kelly, Mike Tyson, and James Franco. One of the root causes of this phenomenon  is BookTok. Short for ‘Book TikTok’ it's a community of users who share the same knack for reading, a space for those individuals to share their ideas, and communicate with each other through a mutual love of books. 

Instead, writers like Colleen Hoover and H.D Carlton, authors of “It Ends With Us” and “Haunting Adeline”, have been on the rise. The authors willingly publish romance novels targeted towards young women that romanticize abusive relationships. ‘BookTok’ has turned from a community celebrating literature, to a community that idealizes abusive relationships in the form of arguably poorly written books.

In Hoover's book, “It Ends With Us”, the plot follows main character Lily Bloom, and her fall into a domestically abusive relationship with a man named Ryle. 

Yet if readers were to look up what the book is about, there is no mention of the abuse factor. “Ryle is assertive, stubborn, maybe even a little arrogant. He’s also sensitive, brilliant, and has a total soft spot for Lily. And the way he looks in scrubs certainly doesn’t hurt. Lily can’t get him out of her head,” describes Ryle in the summary of “It Ends With Us” on Colleen Hoover's website. 

“Combining a captivating romance with a cast of all-too-human characters, It Ends With Us is an unforgettable tale of love that comes at the ultimate price,” Hoover said on her website.

Throwing his wife down the stairs, almost raping her, and banging her head against cabinets, as Ryle does to Lily in the book, shouldn’t be considered ‘all too human.’ The story of “It Ends With Us” should be a warning to women about a very real issue that takes place all too frequently, not labeled as a love story.

Another so-called “dark romance” novel, “Haunting Adeline” is about a young author, Adeline, who develops an extremely unhealthy and abusive relationship with her stalker, Zade. 

“There is no reason that I should be getting this unhinged over a man who is stalking this poor innocent unassuming girl, ”Sarah Pederson said in a TikTok video, her username @sarahpier107, explaining her adoration for the character Zade in “Haunting Adeline”, a character who stalks and rapes Adeline. 

“It Ends With Us” and “Haunting Adeline” normalize extremely abusive relationships by marketing their writing as ‘romance’ or ‘dark romance’, while in reality it just exploits sensitive topics like rape, abuse, and domestic violence. If women don’t understand the dangers of abusive relationships, and how these relationships can literally lead to death, it’s likely to see the increase of casualties in the future. 

More than four thousand women die each year due to domestic violence, as well as countless more severely injured, according to the Domestic Abuse Shelter Florida Keys.. The reality of this issue being fully overlooked by members of BookTok, and if anything, this section of social media is portraying these kinds of relationships as wholly acceptable.

Due to the size of the BookTok community,  it makes it easier for people, especially online, to distort the line that defines fiction and reality. Who's to say that serial killer Wade Wilson isn’t just a carbon copy of the ‘beloved’ Zade from “Haunting Adeline;”? Or that he isn’t just a misunderstood and complex character like Ryle from “It Ends With Us”?

On April 20, 1999, 13 students were shot and killed at Columbine High School, 21 others wounded, from minor injuries, to ones that will affect them the rest of their lives. 

Death and injury tolls don’t include the amount of students that suffered emotional and psychological trauma from the shooting. The two perpetrators have a fanbase, self-called ‘Columbiners.’ These people support and defend the assailants’ actions, and hold the two to a godlike standard. 

Although the massacre at Columbine took place many years ago, the number of people who still view the events that day as something to celebrate is concerning. “I've seen a lot of Tik Toks of people romanticizing and making compilations of ‘attractive’ video clips of these school shooters, and they get famous and get hundreds of thousands of likes,” junior Olivia Jackson said.

An explanation for the continued support of the perpetrators could be due to the TCC, or the ‘True Crime Community.’ This is a community of people online interested in true crime events. Although in more recent years, the TCC has fallen away from a place for information to be spread, to a place where content is more centered around entertainment. There's merchandise for this community with phrases like “true crime obsessed” and “true crime junkie” on different apparel. 

Most unfortunately, there's T-shirts and hoodies with the face of Richard Rameriz readily available for purchase on Amazon. There's even a business dedicated to using infamous brutal killers as a way to make money, the True Crime Collective. 

True Crime Collective sells an abundance of different items with designs of criminals' faces or quotes on them. People like Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffery Dahmer, and Ted Bundy’s faces are all printed on T-shirts, under a tab called ‘Killer Clothing’. The insensitivity of this website and others like it contribute to the amount of perverse true crime fans, like Columbiners. 

Another viable contributing factor to the life of the TCC and ‘Columbiners’ is a movie called “Zero Day”. This indie film was released in 2002, and directed by Ben Coccio. The movie was heavily influenced by the Columbine massacre. The film follows characters Andre Kriegman and Cal Gabriel in their attempt to shoot up their high school. “[...] Columbine is clearly the factual inspiration.  It's also a metaphysical inspiration too, but this isn't a movie about Columbine.  There are obviously a lot of similarities, but Columbine was Columbine, and this is a movie,” Coccio said in his interview with Evan Spigelman about “Zero Day”, " and “Zero Day” is just that, a movie,  many online seem to view it as more.

The film has risen in popularity during recent years, and quite a large fandom for this film has grown on social media. Many of these online fans consider themselves a part of the TCC,  setting their profile pictures as either Cal or Andre from the movie, or the real life inspiration for those characters. 

Sometimes these profile pictures will include images of bows, rainbows, stars, or cats laid over the image of the fictional or nonfictional shooter. The fans will defend their favorite real school shooter, or fictional shooter based on a real one. 

Jackson saw one of these videos supporting the Columbine shooters, and decided to speak out.  “[...]I commented and I was like, ‘You shouldn’t try to make this popular, like a bunch of kids died,’” she said. The response she got from people was disgusting, but not surprising. 

“[...] I got like 15 comments responding to my comment saying that ‘it's not that deep’ and that ‘the killers can be attractive and you can separate that from their actions’, which is just absolutely terrible, and I can't believe that we've even come to this,” Jackson said. 

The most unfortunate thing about school shooters being ‘cool’ and ‘loveable,’ is that it doesn’t just extend to the Columbine killers. It reaches many perpetrators of the most brutal shootings, such as Sandy Hook Elementary, and Parkland High School.

Entire communities and fan bases being built on the worst tragedies our country has seen is cause for concern, especially because the people in these communities are very young, and very impressionable. And they'll be rendered even more dangerously impressionable if social media continues glorifying killers and abusers.

Article Written by Shiva Vahmani.