Pro-Joe

Season 5, Episode 5

Potential spoilers for all previous episodes below.

Why can't I love both? <3

I mean I wanted Joe and Love to be endgame, I adore Love so much but I still also love Joe. Joe, my insane guy who keeps doing the same thing over and over again, my stupid little baby boy.

Spoilers Alert.

Please do not read if you have not watched Season 3 yet.

Also, if you like Joe, this is going to burst your bubble. Sorry.

Sharing this with Joe Goldberg fans alike.

A quick decoding exercise in Joe’s psyche…

Joe’s biggest flaw was a toxic trinity of delusion, cowardice and narcissism. Without delving into clinical terms, he was emotionally bankrupt and empty of true care. His cycle: Idealize → possess → get bored → devalue → move on, all masked as romantic tragedy, but really, it was just ego preservation. Love Quinn held a mirror to Joe, only without the lies. He could not stand his own image and had to shatter it. Love’s character was a narcissistic injury to Joe's ego: she matched and exposed his pathology, rather than romanticizing it. He eliminated her because he had to protect the illusion of his persona. Joe’s reaction to Love wasn’t just rejection but existential panic. She wasn’t just “like him.” She outpaced him. She beat him at his own game, emotionally, strategically and violently. Love was unapologetically dark. And for someone like Joe, who needed to feel mysterious and in control of the narrative, that was unbearable. Can someone like Joe ever change? Unlikely. Here is why: JG lacks true insight into his own damage. His narrative constantly paints him as a victim or reluctant monster. He justifies, projects and repeats. At the end of the day a pattern emerges: peeling off the layers of initial charm, there lurks internal system failure: no capacity for sustained intimacy, no acceptance of self without fantasy and no confrontation with guilt, only rationalizations. Love embraces whom she is whereas Joe escapes from it. He is not a monster or a tragic man. He is a recursive loop. A function that runs the same destructive code over and over again lacking the necessary insight and self-awareness. And loops don’t change unless the code breaks. Joe is therefore an algorithm of self-deception: he has become a farce of his own story. While some of his behavior mimics obsessive love, Joe is not a real yandere. Joe is a mockery of obsessive love, yet another shitty excuse of a man like David from the dystopian Twisted Seduction (2010).

I think if you hadn't prefaced this with "if you like Joe, this is going to burst your bubble. Sorry." I wouldn't have instantly tensed up because honestly your analysis was pretty spot on until you hit the end. Joe falls for illusions, for that face we put on for other people and as soon as their true human selves reveal themselves, he falls out of love. Every girl was perfect, until they were revealed to be flawed like himself. I mean I still like Joe despite all this though, I want him to find happiness.