Depiction Is Not "Glorification"
The Euphoria characters aren't real, they can't hurt you
For a while now, I’ve suspected that many people have simply lost their ability to differentiate between the depiction of something in film or TV, and the endorsement of that thing. These people also struggle to differentiate fictional characters from the real-life actors who play them.
We saw a little bit of this earlier this year when people were horrified to learn that Timothee Chalamet is not, in fact, a consumptive little French orphan boy, perpetually wearing a tattered scarf and writing poetry, but just some guy who thinks ballet is lame and Kylie Jenner is hot.
At the time, I didn’t even bother writing about this (that’s right, I publish almost daily and it didn’t even meet MY threshold) because I chalked it up to a specific contingent of especially weird Chalamet stans. But I was probably too quick to dismiss it—after all, I am old enough to remember when people held decades-long grudges against Lena Dunham for things she wrote into her TV show, Girls. People still deride Dunham for declaring herself “the voice of a generation,” even though this was a line she wrote for a fictional (intentionally annoying) character.
The latest show in the crossfire of the media illiterate: Euphoria. Specifically, Sydney Sweeney’s character, Cassie, and a new plot point where Cassie attempts to monetize her sexuality online via what appears to be increasingly ridiculous and degrading sex acts on OnlyFans (the one which has gotten the most publicity is some kind of BDSM puppygirl role play, another image from the show appears to depict Cassie attempting some kind of “adult baby” thing too.)
And people are mad. Outraged, even! The reasons they’re mad are multifaceted, and yet so, so incurious. They are mad that Sydney Sweeney would agree to play a character who does these horrible things (which is, in and of itself, questionable, unless we’re going to yell at Edward Norton for being “willing” to play a Nazi in American History X) but some of them seem genuinely mad at…Cassie? Like, the character? And others have gone full Qanon, convinced that the brief snippet of Cassie sucking on a pacifier is part of a mass grooming event to “glorify pedophilia” to the vulnerable twenty-five-year-olds forced to watch Euphoria (they can just ask their parents to change their HBO password, and any temptation will be removed!)
It almost feels too obvious to say, “None of these people are real and none of this stuff is being glorified just because it’s being shown,” but like, yeah. This is a fictional show full of fictional characters! Fictional characters do fictional things all the time! Some of these things are, checks notes, bad. This is why horror movies exist. I hate to break it to you, but you are NOT supposed to identify with Pennywise the Clown and it is #problematic in fact, to eat children in the sewers.
