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Our culture is built up of a multitude of media and social interactions shared online which often sway the ways we interact with one another. With social media making a rise within the past 15 years, there has been a shift in the amount of media presence that impacts our day-to-day communication and the information that often works its way into our conversations.
Most people tend to talk about the media they have consumed to the people around them, which frequently leads to a continuous snowball effect where topics spread. With the help of social media, it is especially easy for this to occur.
This summer, specifically, the TV show “The Summer I Turned Pretty” has been all the craze. This show does a modern take on the popular love triangle trope, where viewers can formulate their own opinions on who the protagonist should end up with. This creates more involvement in the fandom, especially online, and is what pulls more people into the show and creates more fanatics. Abby Warmanen, sophomore, has watched the show.
“I would say it’s definitely the show of the summer, because I feel like everyone’s talking about it,” Warmanen said. “It’s everywhere.”
“The Summer I Turned Pretty” started off as a book series published in 2009 and has since become a hit series for the teen demographic. When it was turned into a series and production started in the spring of 2021, the author and executive producer, Jenny Han, made improvements to some of the outdated aspects of the book’s story.
By doing so, her goal was that today’s generation of teens could connect better to the storyline without being confused by the outdated culture that was present in the book series. She did just that, with the show kicking up a storm with its heavy online media presence.
“People in your daily life, you can just ask them about it, and they’ll most likely have watched the show,” Warmanen said. “It’s not just an online thing, or [something] your For You Page has crafted for you to look at, it’s popular because they know you’ve watched it. It’s just genuinely everywhere.”
While the show production itself shows no prejudice or biases towards either side of the love triangle spectrum, its viewers show no mercy when it comes to letting their opinions run free. Many TikTok users tend to spread their opinions on new episodes of the show that have been released each week this summer.
The main aspect of the show that these opinions are based around is on either side of the love triangle in the show, that being Team Jeremiah or Team Conrad, the two brothers the main character is deciding between.
“I think that there’s a lot of hate that goes towards people with different opinions, like if someone’s ‘Team Jeremiah’ and someone’s ‘Team Conrad,’ I think that they have unnecessary hate towards each other just because of their different opinions,” Warmanen said.
Social media users often feel more comfortable spreading hate online and creating discourse within the fandom, especially if it involves a fictional character. Lately, it has been crossing the line between hating certain characters and the actual actors that portray the characters in the show.
“You have your opinions about these characters, but they’re not the actual actors, and that’s not how they are in real life. So I think it’s really unnecessary,” Warmanen said.
Many tend to hate the opposite character they are rooting for in the show. A big issue that has sprouted from this issue in the show’s fandom is the lack of empathy and understanding that just because there is a character on the show you don’t like, it doesn’t mean that that character’s tendencies and personality are reflected off of the actor or actress playing the character– they are two different people and one is fictional.
“I think when people pick sides, it just causes a lot of hate and different opinions that clash with each other,” Warmanen said. “A lot of people always just assume that they’re right, so they don’t like to take anyone else’s opinions.”
This show, although popular, has created the belief system that it is normal fan behavior to bash those online you don’t particularly like in the show, or other fans whom you don’t agree with. This behavior also spreads in person as we consume more of this type of media, and has impacted how we use social media, which is a big part of today’s culture, to spread hate.
