Teens On TikTok Are Revealing Their Inner Creep By Transforming Into Joe From ‘You’
"Me after finding someone's social media after only knowing their first name."
We all know that Joe Goldberg from You is pretty much as toxic as it gets.
Since we met Joe in New York City back in 2018, he’s been a questionable character. Sure, Joe is attractive and seemingly charming but it’s too easy to confuse his forced and calculated planning as romance. Simply put, Joe is toxic, crazy and a stalker.
Joe Goldberg, or Will Bettelheim if you’ve watched the second season, has only fallen into relationships with his love interests by forceful planning. His chance meeting with Love in Anavrin wasn’t by chance at all, and after meeting Beck at Mooney’s bookstore, Joe didn’t let her out of his sight.
While he does try to change in Season 2, Joe ends up becoming the same man we met in the first season. Donning his trusty baseball cap, which he clearly believes has the same power as an invisibility cloak, Joe stalks not only Love, but Ellie, Candace and Henderson too. Yes, yes, some of his stalking was technically for the greater good, but it was stalking nonetheless.
In saying this, we do have to admit that all of us have some stalker-ish traits of our own. Of course, not anywhere even close to Joe’s level, but this idea of making calculated moves for a chance meeting or interaction isn’t totally foreign.
And In That Moment, We We’re All Joe Goldberg
Teens on TikTok have noticed this and have started drawing parallels between their actions and those of You‘s main character. Set to one of Joe Goldberg’s infamous speeches and to a slow, haunting rendition of ‘Tonight You Belong To Me’, all the videos describe instances of light stalking.
“I just need to know who you really are. You are special. You’re talented. You’re passionate. You’re smart,” the audio plays as a slideshow of images flash on screen. Using TikTok’s morph feature, the photos of the person eventually transform into the one and only, Joe Goldberg.
The trend was started by @gabesco who likened himself to Joe for creating a master plan to get his crush to notice him.
People then began sharing their similar slightly stalkerish traits, ranging from their sleuthing powers on social media all the way to strategic positioning in lines at school.
Some even got super specific with the trend, describing times where they used their detective skills to find out where celebrities lived.
People have also used the trend to poke fun at situations where they’ve acted like other characters from the show. Particularly when the stalker situation is reversed and they’ve become the Beck or Peach in a Joe-type situation.
But the best one of all is the TikTok that proves that Dan Humphrey and Joe Goldberg are basically the same damn person.