Okay, so hi everybody and as usual I have no idea what to do for this week’s blog soooo I guess I’ll be doing a character analysis of Joe Goldberg from the Netflix series “You.” Joe’s name in real life is Penn Badgley, but that’s irrelevant right now.
Joe is a book fanatic who started off working in a library. He was abused as a child and eventually turned into an orphan where the library owner found him getting into trouble and took him in. As a result of his childhood, Joe clings to people and forms strange attachments to them. Joe doesn’t even have to know a person to become attached to them. If he looks at you and finds you appealing, then no matter how hard he tries, he can’t stay away from you. After Joe starts to find you appealing, he then wants to get to know every little thing about you and that can be a very good or a very bad thing. It can only be decided by how the person treats Joe.
Joe doesn’t get to know a person like you and I. Getting to know a person usually happens by talking to a person, spending time with them, etc. Joe gets to know them by stalking them essentially. He watches everything they do, every place they go, and every they like. The person doesn’t usually notice the stalking right away. It usually takes a couple of weeks, after Joe starts to get sloppy. Then Joe creates this fake scenario in real life where he pretends to run into this person on accident, and then gets to know them. After the encounter with Joe most of them usually grasp a memory and realize that this isn’t the first time they’ve seen Joe, and then they get scared. Remember I said most!
After Joe meets the person, everything he does next depends solely on the person’s reaction. If they get scared, want to call the police, or they confront Joe about what he’s been doing then he usually ends up locking them in a soundproof box he has in the basement of the library, or he knocks them unconscious and tries to resolve with them when they wake up, or he just denies everything they’ve said, but the people that he tends to cling to are typically highly intelligent so they won’t go for the lies.
If they seem calm about it and they continue to interact with him as they would any other normal person, then he gets scared. Joe starts to panic, and Joe usually doesn’t panic. Everything he does is methodical, logical, and well thought out. Joe is a master of control. Anything out of his control scares him. If they are calm about it then he runs, and it’s only one person within the series that his ever been calm about his crazy, and she married him. Her name was Love. He, of course, couldn’t take it because their marriage wasn’t built on love it was built on the fact that they killed for one another and they held it over each other’s heads, so they felt like they owed each other something. They also had a child, but unfortunately Joe had to leave him behind with a nice family when joe killed his mother. In Joe’s defense Love did try to kill him first and he only killed her because of that, and he didn’t want his son to grow up to be like him.
I find Joe’s character very relatable and kind of funny to be honest. I don’t know if that makes me cynical or not, but that’s all for today’s blog see you guys next week!
I want to start this show so bad even more now
I loved this analysis.
as soon as i start rewatching the first season you post this lol
He’s definitely an interesting character