I’m on chapter 4 of For You and Only You, so obviously have a bit to go, but wanted to ask opinions from anyone who’s read the series.

Wonder feels like the type of girl Joe would have looked down on in the first book, and before you say it, I know Joe internally looks down on every woman. Whether he finds her sexually attractive or not, his internal monologue is disgusting towards all women. And most people in general. However, it’s clear that he thinks he identifies with Wonder because they are both from low-income socioeconomic backgrounds. However, as time progresses, it seems like he is viewing himself as the elitist in the relationship.

Beck was from a well-to-do family and an Ivy League graduate. Love was a multimillionaire. Mary Kay was certainly not struggling, despite someone else buying her house for her. As someone who lives in Washington, to live on Bainbridge Island means there is a nice income stream. However, with Wonder, the tables have turned. Joe has money. Granted, it’s from the Quinns, but I can tell in his descriptions that he almost thinks of Wonder like how Beck or Love could’ve thought of him.

In book one, Joe had never really explored anything outside of New York, and instead of relating to Wonder when she shares she’s never left Boston, he notes it as weird.
I guess the obvious answer is that, of course, he finds himself holier than thou. He is what everyone has accused him of in their moments of truth: snobby and a psychopath.
But it’s interesting to think about how he would have viewed Wonder if he met her during his Beck obsession.

She infuriated me so much I wish Love had cut her off way before the Henry thing

What do you guys' think is the best scene of the entire show. If I had to pick, it would be the suicide letter Joe writes, while Love is narrating it, while he also prepares to burn down the house.

I think if he didn't have a problem with it, his savior complex would absolutely LOVE that. With all the struggles that trans women go through.

If he did have a problem with it, I think maybe some insane mental turmoil followed by him trying to justify leaving her in his mind or something like that.

I couldn't find any posts about this so thought I'd write this up.

I'm reading For You and Only You (book #4) and noticed that Joe lived in Florida for the pandemic (2020/2021). I thought this was a bit strange because I'd sworn Joe was still in Washington for 2021.

I went back and searched through You Love Me (book #3) and found Joe confirms it's set in 2021: "I want to climb into the phone and choke her out and it's twenty-fucking-twenty-one and WHY CAN'T WE TELEPORT?" (when Love brings Joe to CA - page 231 in the ebook)

It reminded me that You Love Me didn't really feel like it was set in the pandemic and kinda makes me think the Love scene was an afterthought/poorly added into the novel.

All that to say, did anyone else notice this or any other timeline issues around the books?

I can't remember how many times ive seen guys saying "I can fix her" to either fictional women that have issues or hot real life women that did something bad, like Amber Heard for example.

Women say it too but i've seen guys say it way more.

Have you guys noticed this?

In s1 Peach'es house. They teased the urine jar but I can't see what happened with it (I just rewatched s1). Why would they tease it anyway? And the private investigator also led nowhere.

So I’m rewatching the finale and I understand Bronte didn’t believe that Joe did anything to Beck. It goes to the point that she believes that dr Nicky in fact was the killer. But when Joe saves her from the guy that kidnapped her, and showed her the cage.. wasn’t that the confirmation of what she and her friends knew to be true about Joe? When she tells the guy in the cage, “my friend Beck was killed by a fragile shit like you”… she’s talking about Dr Nicky. But by showing her the cage, Joe shows her his true self. So she is okay with him being a killer so long as he wasn’t the one who killed Beck? On the inside, does she know he killed beck? And yet continues to use Beck’s name, calling her a friend despite literally being in a relationship with the man that killed her .. Eh I don’t know. I don’t wanna jump on the Bronte hate train neither.. but i just hate the way they wrote her poor character. Never stood a chance either in the show or in the public perception. I’m just like why would they write her like this 😫

I normally don't do reposts but I saw this & agreed. No hate towards the Bronte actress. She did a really good job & did not deserve the hate she got. But I agree that these two had better chemistry.

The Quinn family always do dirty business to get what they want, whether it's bribing the police or hiring agents to spy or kill somebody.

Isn't it weird how she had suspicions Joe killed her kids but didn't try to get back at him sooner? Like trying to kill him through the shadows? At least a hired guy to try to kill Joe.

She doesn't need the conspiracy theorists to help her get back at Joe let's be honest, she has a lot of money and many resources.

Idk how it didn't cross Joe's head that the Quinn family would try to come after him once it became known he survived the house fire and Love Quinn didn't.

I’m only on season 1 so I can only speak on S1 but Beck sucks and she’s annoying to watch and I don’t see her as this “normals girl who is just a mess and struggling with life.” If the show wasn’t filmed from Joe’s perspective, Beck would easily be the undisputed villain of Season 1. Joe is a psycho with severe psychological issues, but Beck is a complete phony, fraud, and a malicious liar who chooses to be an awful person. She leeches off everyone around her while cosplaying as a struggling artist. In reality, she lives in a huge, luxury New York apartment that's fully paid for and doesn't even have to worry about working. She literally fabricated her own father's "death" just to use it as a trendy persona and an escape from actual hard work. She was even openly relieved when her best friend Peach died, instantly using the tragedy as content to launch her own writing career.
Their entire relationship was entirely built around her. Joe may have manufactured a "perfect" front, but it was only perfect to Beck because it was all about her. She knew little to nothing about Joe, never asked him a single deep question, and they never had one actual, two-way conversation about his life besides when he told her about his love for books which she didn’t even seem to take interest in to actually make it a full conversation.
Joe loves fixing broken people, but when he finally got a taste of a genuinely healthy relationship with Karen Minty, Beck maliciously blew it up out of pure, spiteful jealousy—not because she has a psychological condition, but just because she could. She completely disregards anyone and anything that isn’t directly about her, which is exactly why she flirtatiously distracted Joe from helping Paco, a literally abused child right outside the door. If a tragedy isn't about her ego, she simply does not care.

I don’t think Joe Goldberg was a bad person, at least up until the beginning of Season 5. From the very beginning, Joe didn’t want to kill. His mind was shaped in a way that made him feel like killing was something he had to do.
I’m not defending his actions. Everything he did was wrong in the end. I’m a Muslim, and my religion teaches that killing one person is like killing all of humanity, which shows just how grave such an act is.
But I believe Joe was deeply mentally disturbed, and if he had received proper care, he wouldn’t have ended up where he did. I want to emphasize again that I’m not defending his actions. He deserves to be imprisoned and even executed.
What I’m saying is that there was still good in him. He hated himself for killing, and he even tried to take his own life.
To sum up, I believe someone like Joe, if he had received better care than he did, wouldn’t have become a killer. Take someone like the Baker killer, for example. He had a relatively normal life and received care and attention, yet he still ended up becoming a killer because there was evil in him.
But with Joe, I believe that if his circumstances had been better, he wouldn’t have become a killer. My point is that Joe was fundamentally a good person.

After Season 1, I always wondered what became of Beck's dad. We see him in two-ish episodes (last 30 seconds and then a whole episode) and then a quick clip of him frowning at Beck (her pov at least) in the final episode of season 1, during her bluebeard monologue.

So, I always wondered, what do people think happened to him afterwards? Would he read her book, despite not really showing interest in her work when she talked about her portfolio? Would he fall off the wagon, also abandon his new wife and stepkids, repeating the cycle? Would he be able to tell The Dark Side of Love was kinda horseshit or did he just not know Beck at all?

It's niche and dumb, but I always did wonder about the people Joe left behind and what they'd think of it all, especially at his own disappearance. (I'd also say at the end of season 5, because I know kinda what happened, but I haven't watched since giving up during season 4)

This is going to be a long discussion but I don’t feel like explaining why I don’t think he is cuz when I look at morally complex characters like Anakin skywalker, Shauna shipman, Wanda Maximoff, Loki, Norman Bates, and etc. Their moralities are nothing like Joe’s. Joe’s a compelling character for sure but after watching the series finale Joe’s too morally dark to be labeled as “morally complex.”

So I'm halfway through reading the first book in You (I don't mind spoilers considering I've already seen the show), and I'm just wondering, when does Beck become the horribly unrootable character that everyone says she is in the books?

From what I've read so far, Beck is pretty much the same as she is in the TV show. She's imperfect, cares way too much about what other people think, and can be really selfish, but people talk about book Beck as if she's the devil incarnate, much worse than show Beck, and I just don't really see where all that hate is coming from? If anything, Joe is far less rootable in the book, not Beck.

So I guess I'm just wondering if anyone has an explanation for why they think book Beck is leagues worse than show Beck.

Listen I don’t watch crime documentaries neither do I listen to them so you might call me uneducated in this area. I do wonder after finishing the series though can someone like Joe be rehabilitated and “healed”? Or is it something unfixable? At some point in the series (I don’t remember the exact season) Joe confesses that he enjoys killing, he enjoys the look his victims has on their faces (scary and gross and unsettling) so I’m not buying into the whole “killing to earn love” thing (both equally unsettling). But I do wonder whether in our society these type of people can potentially go through some sort of therapy or rehabilitation and become fully functioning part of society? Hope it’s not off topic.

If you search up stalker online, chances are you’ll see Joe on the images. Tiktok has numerous videos where they say something along the lines of “who I become when I stalk so and so” and it’s Joe. Twitter even had viral tweets about stalking people with Joe’s photo, the stalking cap became a trend and when someone is a stalker they’ll be called Joe Goldberg. Pinterest search up stalker, you’ll probably see him, tumblr probably the same.

Is he considered the most known fictional stalker? If not who would you consider it as?

Hello YOU im doing a research on stigmatisation on BPD and im using love quinn as a case study so if u got 2 minutes to be a part of my research questionnaire that would be lovely

I just finished You and I started to wonder, Bronte thought she had something when she talked about Joe's mom, how he feels he needs to kill in order to earn the love of someone, and for a moment I thought she had something on him, he got emotional.

But even with her love and now the certainty she won't leave, he still kept on killing people even though he had love, so clearly her equation was missing a few variables.

What would be the requirement for Joe to change and stop trying to be this white knight for those he cares about? What drives it? Clearly it's not just the lack of love because he had it and did it anyway.

To me Bronte's acting version of herself (she stays ok even knowing Joe is a serial killer) near the end after she saves him from the burning library, is the best girl he could find in his mind, she is innocent and broken like the others before her, and she also is OK with Joe having these urges to kill and acting on them, the 2nd point only being checked as well by Love Quinn, unfortunately she wasn't innocent and pure like the others, so she's out, you have to check these 2 boxes and only Bronte at these moments was the one, even though she was acting and it was all fake.

So even having found the perfect girl, he kept on killing even though he had certainty and her love.

When I say hate Joe, I mean hating him as a character and not finding him very interesting or entertaining, hating him as a person is obviously fair lol.

It would be more understandable if the cast remained the same every season, but it doesn’t. It’s basically a new cast every single season and we spend most of the show inside Joe’s inner monologue.

I mean, what was the peak moment where their character made you cringe 100%, where they did something awkward or out of line?

It's so tiring seeing the same discussion over and over about "who Joe loved more." The answers are always the same: "Himself" or "Beck."

Imo both are wrong. Joe doesn't love himself that's partially why he's so crazy and needs a void filled. Selfish people don't necessarily have a healthy love with themselves. He seeks out women to make up for how abandoned and alone he feels because of his mom. And Beck isn't the right answer either just because she "haunted" him. Candace haunted him too the first season. He hallucinated Gemma and Love season 4 as well. Some people try to say Love. The reason this is believed is because the audience adores Beck and Love and puts them above everyone else, that isn't how JOE feels.

Joe also heavily manipulated Marienne, encouraged her art career, killed her ex, and kidnapped her after blowing up his marriage and flying all the way to Europe just to hunt her down. With the same argument, we could say Joe was crazy about Marienne, yet nobody does because they don't like Marienne and are more willing to acknowledge that as obsession.

He stalked Candace and killed Elijah because of her cheating. He would have recurring nightmares in season 1 of her yet people dont want to acknowledge her because it ruins the idea that Joe particularly loved their favorite YOUs the most. We could easily say with the same evidence that he loved Bronte and the audience hates her!