u/AdGreedy1880

Ever since season 5 came out people have been saying that Joe would have accepted Love because he is no longer in denial and has accepted himself.

But the self acceptance that Joe has at the end of season 4 and into season 5 would not change the fact that Joe still wouldn’t want Love. I see three reasons for this.

1. Joe is a control freak, he needs to have control of his environment and the people around him. He stalks, monitors and gathers information to remain in control of his narrative so he can feel at ease and make things play out to his desires. Love ruins this because she is just like him. She is chaotic, violent, manipulative and a predator, not to mention extremely impulsive. Joe can’t control what she does or predict what she’ll do because she is so insane and cunning. He loses his control and power over the narrative when Love is involved, he despises this.

2. Joe wants a vulnerable innocent woman to white knight for, not a partner in crime. Joe has never been looking for an equal or someone like him. He is a predator and he targets vulnerable women. He wants a woman who is the light in contrast to his darkness, the beauty to his beast. Love is the complete opposite of this since she is a predator herself and just like him.

3. He’s a narcissist and even if he does the same things as Love, he simply can’t interpret it that way. He views Love’s violence as uncontrolled, psychotic and unjustified. While he sees his own as controlled, necessary and for the greater good. He views Love’s violence as the opposite to his.

Season 5 Joe has accepted the fact that he enjoys killing, but just because he has accepted that for himself does not mean he’s not going to detest others for doing the same. He’s a massive hypocrite.

She’s literally beautiful. How high are people’s standards?

So selective.

Let’s hear it.

The fact he even comments about how young she looks in it and then just jerks off to the photo anyway is 🤢

I forgot all about this scene as well, makes me glad he got his shit shot off.

It’s common knowledge that Joe is a perverted guy and his behaviours are disgusting; stealing underwear and used tampons, jerking off while watching someone else and also looking at explicit images of people. All of that is very wrong and disgusting. Joe gets a lot of hateful and disgusted reactions for his perversion and rightfully so.

But why is Peach not getting the same treatment? This woman had a whole gallery of explicit photos that she had been hoarding for years, which she likely used for personal pleasure. She watched Beck bathe and dressed her up like a doll in a revealing dress. She drugs Beck and tries to initiate a threesome. She literally uses a moment where Beck is relaxed and clearly not in a right state of mind to kiss her and attempt to have sex with her, that is so vile. And even the morning after, she gaslights Beck about what happened and tries to make it seem like Beck was the one initiating and Peach was the one who went along with it. I can’t even describe how fucked up that is.

She did all of that yet nobody seems to talk about it or give her the same treatment that Joe gets for his perversion. And given everything Peach did, i’d argue that she is a more evil sexual predator and more perverse than Joe.

I guarantee that if Joe was the one to drug Beck and attempt to have sex with her like that, then he’d be getting a whole load of hate for it but since Peach was the one who did it, it gets overlooked.

(Before I state anything else, I have to clarify that I am not defending Joe in this post, he is very much an evil person.)

There’s a lot of instances in the show where Joe will see that someone is in danger and step in immediately without really thinking about it or being able to calculate how risky it is for him or what he will have to gain by doing so.

-He rushes in immediately to save Beck from the train tracks when she falls.
-Once he realises Paco is in danger from Ron he rushes out to find them and protect Paco.
-When he believes someone is breaking into Love’s home he goes right up there to save her with the awareness that she’ll know he was watching her.
-He steps in between Milo and Forty when Milo assaults Forty and tries to defuse the situation.
-He rushes up stairs when he hears Marianne screaming because of Ryan and immediately defuses the situation.
-He sees Kate being robbed and goes in to save her.
-With Lady Phoebe, there’s two instances where he goes to save her. He hears her scream in the second episode of S4 and immediately Joe picks up an object and goes right in to help her. Then again when she is kidnapped by Dawn, Joe immediately begins to formulate a plan to find her and searches for her. When he does find her he attempts to defuse the situation and convince Dawn to let Phoebe go. (Joe does use this situation to frame Dawn for his crimes, but he had no idea going in that it would be an opportunity to do so.)
-He saves Bronte from Clayton when he is getting physical with her.

And the one that stands out to me the most is when he goes to kidnap and Kill Reagan for the first time. He notices someone else breaking in and believes they have the intent of killing her too, so he decides to just let them take her out for him. But when he notices they’re trying to rape her, Joe is about to expose himself and ruin his plan to save Reagan from being raped who he despises and wants to kill himself.

Obviously this was just Maddie and Harrisons role play but he genuinely believed at first that it was Reagan and a real attacker.
I think there’s more instances as well but these are the ones that came to mind.

You can argue that Joe only does this to make himself feel like a protector and to benefit himself. But these are split second responses and realistically Joe doesn’t have time to calculate how he will be able to benefit from doing this. He just immediately acts on impulse to help the person in danger while also putting himself in danger.

I believe the only time Joe ever thinks about the consequences of doing this is when he thinks Love is about to be attacked by someone breaking into her home and he says something along the lines of “But if I go up there, you’ll know I was watching you.” Even then he still decides to do it anyway.

In my opinion, his protective instinct is genuine and he does feel emotional concern and urgency to help someone. But as his way of thinking and world view is so distorted, he interprets the fact that he saves someone as a sign that they need him to always protect them which he can use to rationalise stalking them and not allowing them autonomy.

God, why couldn’t they just love him? He works so hard.

Obviously Penn is handsome as ever, but it surprises me that none of the other men on the show really get any appreciation for their good looks as well. Let’s share the appreciation.

Contrary to popular belief, Joe is not some covert narcissist, he’s not some perverted stalker, he’s not a serial killer who takes pleasure in the act of taking a life. These are all speculations but they couldn’t be more further from the truth and the fandom has completely misread what Joe Goldberg actually is and what he actually wanted with all his obsessions.

It’s not control, it’s not sex and it’s not even love. To put it quite simply, it’s just food. Joe is literally just a hungry guy and all he wanted was food, nothing else. I can’t believe I have to make this clear but i’ll do what I must.

With all of his obsessions, the obsession has never been truly the person or his fantasy, it’s all just a connection to food. He obsesses over Beck because her house is filled with frozen food and she brings him donuts. He obsesses over Love because she’s literally a baker and makes him amazing meals. He followed Marianne to Paris because that’s where all the amazing French food is. He marries Kate because she’s rich which allows him to eat the highest quality of food. He gets obsessed with Rhys because like Joe, Rhys also knows what’s it’s like to grow up with an empty stomach. And finally he was obsessed with Bronte because he wanted to show off his cooking skills that he’s learned over the years, hence why he makes her a pizza.

You may be asking yourself, why is this what Joe actually wants? Well, it’s just because of his childhood. As a child he barely had any food growing up which has caused his brain to not develop properly hence why sometimes he may do some questionable things. The reason he seeks food out in his partners is because it allows him to feel secure and well nourished. He’s getting what he didn’t have as a child from his obsession and that’s literally just sustenance.

Let’s stop throwing labels at him and acting as if he was hungry for power or control, when he was literally just hungry in general.

She literally gave them a gun and said she’d free one of them if they shot their spouse, that’s so dark. She tried to get a married couple who were both parents to kill one and other.

And she literally only did that because Sherry told her that her Marriage was terrible. I think it gets overlooked just how evil and terrifying Love truly is.

Liking a fictional character does NOT reflect your own real world morals.

I refuse to believe otherwise.

(This is just my opinion btw.)

It’s a pretty common trope in both real life and fiction for the men being the abusers and women being the victims, in the sense of that theme.

I understand the emphasis on the abuse given out by the male characters as our protagonist is a man himself and a main theme of the show is toxic masculinity. But I don’t like how the show and the fandom seem to undermine the female abusers and mainly focus on the male ones. Because abusers come in all forms and the abuse that both women and men give out should have an equal amount of emphasis or at least not be downplayed for one specific type.

The show and the fandom doesn’t ignore the fact that women can also be abusive, but I feel like it gets downplayed and undermined compared to the abuse from characters like Joe, Ron, Henderson, Ryan and Tom. The abuse that comes from characters like Peach, Love and Reagan seems to be downplayed or not taken as seriously.

Peach is a very abusive person. She manipulates Beck and sabotages her constantly because she wants Beck to be hers. She keeps a folder of explicit photos of Beck, tries to push her to partake in a threesome and initiates a lot when Beck has a boyfriend and isn’t into her that way and then she gaslights her so hard about it the next day and tries to make it seem like Beck is the real issue in their friendship. The show does show us a lot of the abuse Peach did but it feels undermined to me, like Beck acknowledges that Peach was toxic to her but doesn’t fully realise or empathise the weight of it. It feels brushed off as “Peach was a bad friend.” When in reality, she was a lot more than just a bad friend.

With Love, this is where it annoys me the most because it’s a reverse of the roles but still the abuse Love inflicts onto others really isn’t talked about that much or is downplayed compared to Joe when she is just as bad as he is. She ruined Forty’s life by making him believe that he had killed the woman he thought he loved, that’s an insane thing to do to your twin brother. This causes Forty’s mental health to be unstable, making him dependent on Love because she is obsessed with being needed and wanted.

That’s a great deal of psychological abuse but like, who really acknowledged it? Love thinks she was helping him, Joe doesn’t mention it at all and Dottie just acknowledges that Loves enjoys fixing people. When Love hallucinates Forty in season 3, what she actually did to Forty is completely ignored and it’s mainly just the hallucination of Forty comforting Love. “Don’t be sorry for surviving.” Sorry what?

I get it’s a hallucination from Love’s mind but why is what she did treated as just a mistake and not real abuse? When Joe hallucinates Beck and she reveals the marks on her neck, it exposes him. It exposes the abuse he inflicted onto her and empathises he is bad, this doesn’t happen with Love.

The fandom also seems to kind of gloss over how abusive Love was and feels sorry for her since Joe killed her. I think this is mainly because she is a fan favourite character but still it isn’t right.

And then there’s Reagan. I haven’t rewatched season 5 so if my knowledge is off then I apologise for that. Reagan was a very abusive and a malicious person, constantly antagonistic to the people around her, including her husband, daughter and her twin sister. She destroyed Maddie’s self esteem and claims she is expendable and worth nothing, even going as far as to say that it’d be easy for her to make the decision to let Maddie die. She did a lot more as well, although my memory isn’t great rn.

I don’t really have too much of an issue in this specific case because the show does empathise a lot about how Reagan is bad and how she has been ruining Maddie and the other people around her. The fandom doesn’t seem to really speak of her or her abuse that much, but I understand that as season 5 was pretty terrible and this is the season where Joe is at his most evil, so obviously he is the focus.

Obviously what Joe has done to his victims is a lot worse than what the female abusers have done, excluding Love. But Idk, it just seems rather unfair to undermine how abusive the female abusers are just because the main character is a man and most of the victims in the show are women.

What do you think?

Being put in a cage sucks, but being put in a cage without food sucks harder, Joe never lets the latter happen.

Sorry, don’t know anyone named Marianne 🤷‍♂️

I feel like an idiot for asking this but what did Forty actually mean when he said “You think I don’t know what you’re capable of?”

Did he know that Love was a killer or that she just had issues of her own? And if he did know she was a killer and capable of such violence, how does he know that?

He believes he killed Sophia and there wasn’t a way for him to know about Candace and Delilah. That just leaves James but we aren’t told if anyone other than Dottie suspected that Love had killed him and Forty himself doesn’t mention it.

Season 2 Joe is regarded as the best version of Joe because his bad behaviours are toned down. He only kills two bad people, he doesn’t stalk Love as much as he did with Beck, he protects Ellie and lets Will out of the cage. So yeah, Joe does less damage and not as much evil as his other versions but this isn’t because Joe has actually became a better person, he just didn’t have as many opportunities to do evil as he did in season 1.

Joe’s Baseline - Joe’s personality and baseline behaviours are still all the same. He’s still narcissistic, perverted, spiteful of others and is still under the delusion that he’s a protector. He is more self aware but is still very much trapped by his delusions. He still stalks people, he still steals items from his obsession, he still locks people in the cage and still manipulates others.

The good he did - I think we’d all agree that the best things Joe did in season 2 was letting Will out of the cage and protecting Ellie. While these things are objectively good, it is not that simple.

Joe attacked Will, kidnapped him, locked him in a cage and stole his identity, as well as threatening to kill him. Joe does Will out in the end but let’s not forget that Joe literally tried to hand Will over to Jasper who would quite possibly do very bad things to him. He did this to try and get Jasper off his back, but it doesn’t work out because Jasper decides to just try and kill Joe instead.

I think a big part of letting Will out the cage was because he was low risk. He was a criminal himself and he was an accomplice in what happened to Henderson. Joe had also made Will believe that he’s a good person and that he just made a mistake, manipulating Will into feeling sympathy for him. It was a low risk decision that made Joe feel better as a person and it also got Will out of his hair.

Then there’s Ellie. Joe does look out for her and saves her from being taken advantage of, but again it’s not all that clean. He crosses boundaries, he puts tracking software on her phone and monitors her movements. And when she is at Hendersons he allows her to be drugged so he can get his shot at Henderson. Ellie proceeds to later find out what Henderson was doing and what he did to Delilah. How is Ellie supposed to feel when she passed out in the home of a child predator, knowing what he did to her sister and others? Joe lets that happen because he wanted the opportunity to get Henderson.

The reduced damage compared to season 1- In season 2, Joe does not engage in his regular behaviours as much he did previously, but that’s due to different circumstances. Joe didn’t stalk Love as much as he did with Beck because he didn’t need to. They worked together, she threw herself at him and kept including him in every part of her life. Beck wasn’t as into Joe as Love was, she didn’t work with him originally, she didn’t invite him into her life as much and had more boundaries. His surveillance and manipulation of things are toned down because the new circumstances don’t require him to do them as much.

I also want to talk about Joe’s kills. He kills Jasper in self defence and Henderson who was a child predator. I think most of us see these kills as fine given the circumstances which makes Joe seem less evil.

However his kill count is only lower and less relevant because he didn’t get the opportunities to kill. There was no Benji or Peach in S2 that were after Love’s attention, no other competitors. Joe does attempt to kill multiple people but he fails in doing so.

.He broke into Candace’s home with the intention of killing her. He didn’t succeed because she wasn’t home and he got ambushed by her roommate. Love then pays Candace to go away and later kills her, solving the problem for Joe.

.Joe was moments away from killing Forty in the hotel room, he literally had a shard of glass in his hand while he was internally reassuring himself that it’d be okay to do so. He doesn’t end up doing it because Forty shares his story and also reveals that he doesn’t actually know that it was Joe who killed Beck.

-When Milo comes into the picture, Joe starts learning about him and begins stalking him. He doesn’t get far in doing so because he is physically unable to keep up with Milo while jogging and then he runs into Gabe. Milo then attacks Forty, causing Love to end things with him and the problem goes away on its own.

I can’t be certain that Joe was going to kill Milo, but it absolutely fits his pattern and it really did seem that way. Especially since Forty kept telling Joe about how bad Milo was, giving Joe the justification he needs.

.Then there’s Delilah. Of course Joe didn’t kill her in the end but he did put her in the situation to be killed by locking her in the cage. We also don’t know if Joe would have killed Delilah but honestly, it seems unlike him not to. After his reconciliation with Love he runs to the cage to make sure Delilah doesn’t escape. I guess there was a chance that he was going to look for a different way, but it seems unlikely that she’d make it out that cage alive given she was a reporter and had learned Joe’s secret. I think Love just sped up the process.

.And finally he was seconds away from slitting Love’s throat but stopped in the end because she revealed she was pregnant. (Though Love was keeping him captive and was also a killer.)

So to sum it all up, Joe is technically better in the sense that he didn’t do as much damage as he did in season 1. But not better in a real sense because he is very much the same and just didn’t need to or get the opportunities to do as much evil, compared to season 1.

If we put season 1 Joe into season 2, it would play out basically the same. Joe never truly became a better person or changed.

I’m not usually one for comparing morality but I’m interested to hear people’s answers for this because as a society, we tend to see people who harm children as the worst types of monsters which is obviously understandable. But we also tend to consider anyone who has harmed children just worse than any other evil people who are objectively worse and have done more damage.

He doesn’t hallucinate Beck, Love and Gemma because he feels guilty about killing them. Killing them makes him feel ashamed because it conflicts with who he believes himself to be. He thinks he’s a good person and a protector but he’s also done objectively horrific things, it’s extremely hard for those things to co exist even if he can justify what he does to himself.

His mind can’t handle both things so it creates versions of the people he’s killed that challenge him and serve as internal critics. But even then he deflects blame and reframes events to minimise responsibility. This is him protecting his self image due to the shame, not the guilt.

If Joe felt genuine guilt then he wouldn’t be able to do as much evil as he does. Guilt usually leads to fixing things and putting a stop or cap on bad behaviour. While Shame usually leads to hiding, withdrawal or defensiveness, Joe does all 3.

The last thing any man wants to hear is how dry his girlfriend’s mothers vagina is, that’s fact!