13 Reasons Why. Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past month, you’ve probably heard people talking about this, it’s a Netflix original based on a book of the same name that revolves around Hannah Baker, a high school teenager who committed suicide, and Clay Jensen, a friend of Hannah’s, who finds a box full of cassette tapes detailing why she did what she did. at his front door after the incident. If you’ve watched it, great! I have someone to share my thoughts with. If you have not watched it, i highly recommended you do, and i would suggest that you stop reading at this point, as this post will contain spoilers. Lots and lots of them. However if you do not plan to watch it, you may proceed, but I’m telling you, you will regret not experiencing it yourself, and also most of the things here probably won’t make much sense to you. So from here on out i’m just assuming that you’ve watched everything I won’t waste time explaining who the characters are and what not.
There are a bunch of things that make 13rw a great series, one of which is the character development. In the span of 13 episodes, we see Clay go from “I didn’t really know Hannah” to “fuck everybody they’re gonna pay for what they did” to “all of us killed Hannah”, and alas finding his resolve, it’s pretty intense stuff and i think the directors and actor really nailed it. We see this even in minor characters: Alex owning up to his mistakes, Justin confronting Bryce for what he did, Tony opening up to his boyfriend. You don’t really expect that from a short series, so props to the writers for doing such a great job.
I cannot say enough about the characters. There were alot of great characters(Clay, Clay’s parents, Zach, Jeff, Alex, etc). They made you feel involved, they made you feel as if you were them, they trigger your emotions. Clay has to be one of my favorite main characters, maybe because I see some of myself in him, maybe we all do. Throughout all 13 episodes it feels as if you were in his feet, you don’t for one second fail to understand his struggles, why he does what he does, you emphatize with him. The same can be said about Alex, i liked him from the start, he was very clever, he stood up for himself when he was pushed around, just a really likable guy. With that said, all of them are flawed, the story doesn’t try to deify anyone, not even Hannah. You become very aware very early on that there’s no “good guy” in this story, the closest you can get to that Clay, and even then.
Normally if the writer wanted a character to die in order to make some sort of impact to the reader, they set you up, they make you feel attached to the character, then they kill him/her off somewhere along the line, and you’re left with the thoughts of what could have been. The best example i could think of was Looking For Alaska, John Green made you fall in love with Alaska, her wit, her sarcasm, her intelligence. He then metaphorically fucked you in the ass by taking Alaska away from you, by taking Alaska away from Pudge, and you follow Pudge as he desperately searches for his resolve, and that journey is truly heart-breaking. But 13rw is different, Hannah was dead from the start, we all knew that, but the flashbacks every time Clay listens to a tape, they get to you, you see how Clay develops feelings for her, how she slowly develops feelings for him too, you listen to the little things they talk about, you see what they go through, and you can’t help but hope they’ll end up together, but at the end of every flashback you are constantly reminded of one cold hard truth: Hannah is dead. That’s what really fucked me up, the way they told the story.
There are a bunch of other things i really liked, i liked how they made Clay fall from the bike so he would get band-aids on his forehead, and that would be how we knew if we were at the past or present, how they showed certain inconsistencies between Hannah’s tapes and the truth, such as Zach’s note, so we’re reminded that Hannah isn’t a perfect narrator, and that what we’re hearing is Hannah’s truth, and there might have been some things that happened differently. The suicide scene was really explicit and intense, I didn’t see that coming, even though from the very start we already knew how she killed herself.
There are still a ton of questions i have. Did Alex die? What did Mr Porter do with the tapes? What happens to the court case? What about Tyler, why did he get a gun? Does Bryce go to jail? Do any of the kids face legal consequences? With so many unanswered questions it kinda feels like they’re planning to milk this series with a season 2, even though the original book ended with the last episode, i honestly wouldn’t be surprised if Netflix decided to extend the story themselves given the huge success.
There’s just so much more i want to say about this, but it’s getting late and I need sleep more than anything else. I needed to write about this, felt like it needed to get off my chest, and it’s too good to not tell anybody, but would I watch it again? No, i wouldn’t want to go through that shit again. Oh and, fuck Courtney.
Life of a Ken 