Thanks to Investigation Discovery, the murder channel where any struggling actor has a chance to die in a grainy reenactment, #TedBundy was trending once again.

The ID documentary, Ted Bundy: Mind of a Monster, aired on Sunday night as the first segment of a new true crime anthology in which each episode "explores the inner workings of America's most infamous serial killers." People on Twitter were predictably mad, condemning the media's obsessive coverage of Ted Bundy. Indeed, he's been treated like an American outlaw and anti-hero rather than a rapist, pedophile, and necrophiliac who confessed to murdering over 30 women throughout the 1970s. But while many oppose pop culture's glamorization of mass murderers, certain niche communities on Twitter, namely self-proclaimed serial killer "stans," took issue with something else entirely: Who's more glam, Ted Bundy or Charles Manson?

Yes, it appeared that Manson fans and Bundy fans feuded over which of their favorite homicidal all-stars was the baddest bitch around. One of the earliest Tweets to mobilize murder "stans" came from a K-Pop fan account for the girl group BlackPink. Later, the user scoffed at people taking their trolling so seriously, but the damage was done. The notion that "Charles Manson walked so that Ted Bundy could run bitch sit down," brought "Ted Nation" (no, we're not kidding) out to battle.













Granted, some opted to mix reason and logic into their trolling, declaring their love for Hannibal Lecter, the "supreme FICTIONAL serial killer, who has the superior courtroom fancam."

Have we become so desensitized to chaotic violence (with more mass shootings so far in 2019 than there have been days in the year), so immersed in doomsday thinking (what with the "existential threat" of climate change looming over us until 2050), and so acclimated to daily human rights abuses and obfuscation of truth that human decency is a social construct now, and murder is sexy?!

No, not really. We've always been this gross, but now we have the Internet.

Executed by electric chair on January 24, 1989, Ted Bundy has been resurrected in the public eye by this year's Netflix documentary, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes, and a feature film starring Zac Efron, Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile. Accordingly, there's been a resurgence of Bundy-shaped hybristophilia, a sexual paraphilia and cultural phenomenon in which an individual derives sexual arousal and pleasure from having a sexual partner who is known to have "committed an outrage or crime, such as rape, murder, or armed robbery." They are, by and large, female (like Carol Ann Boone, who fell in love with and conceived Bundy's child while he was on death row), and they're commonly referred to as "prison groupies," "serial killer groupies," and now: serial killer stans.

And let's not forget Quentin Tarantino's recent revisionist history take on the Manson Family's murder of Sharon Tate in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, projected to become his highest-grossing film. Manson is also featured in season 2 of Netflix's crime drama Mindhunter, in which Damon Herriman plays the cult leader as a captivating madman.

But Twitter's collective recoil at young women expressing attraction to serial killers also fuels trolls, who love to goad people into outrage––this time, by posing as Ted Bundy and Charles Manson "stan" accounts.

"Ted Nation" coming for Manson stans began as an inside joke. As one Bundy stan told Rolling Stone (anonymously, of course): "Basically, me and a small group of friends had a long running inside joke over who would win in a fight: Ted Bundy or Charles Manson. It was all 100% ironic and it was about six people in the group the first day." Allegedly, the origin was just a group chat among friends, but then, he says, "Random people obviously found out and made more accounts, a lot of them being actually serious, which I found out this morning when I deactivated my Ted account." The unnamed source added, "A lot of people called us disgusting and told us to get raped or kill ourselves. But we kinda justified this by telling ourselves 'Well, we know we don't actually stan him' and knowing we were just parodies."

But in the age of online irony poisoning and millennial angst-induced nihilism, parody of a real phenomenon is tantamount to the real deal. #TedBundy soon became dominated by people expressing their outrage and disgust over people turning serial killers into lawless, cowboy-esque cultural icons, "parody" or not. Many posts are similar to this one: "Just so we're clear, this man was not a hero. Ted Bundy wasn't someone who was kind or special. He was a misogynist who enjoyed murdering women. He wasn't some playful scamp, so please consider his victims."

Others pointedly re-directed conversations about serial killers' "legacies" to the remembrance of their victims.









"Stanning" serial killers is both a real neurosis and a script with which to act out the glitchy psychology of modern life. On the one hand, it's a deeply unsettling phenomenon that has occurred time and time again when violent men become spectacles of psychosis and societal antipathy. At the same time, bored social scientists have long pointed out that intense celebrity fan worship is correlated with mental health, as "individuals with high levels of celebrity worship are more likely to have poorer mental health as well as clinical symptoms of depression, anxiety, and social dysfunction."

But with the Internet's labyrinthine folds of irony, cynicism, alienation, and our underlying need to make sense of chaos and disorder, we pretty much trust nothing. Why not make a mockery of worship by pretending to worship the darkest sides of humanity? Or mock the idea of a just, moral world by elevating immorality? Everything we've traditionally worshiped as a society, from government to religion, has seemed to fail us, so why not invest your time in boy bands and beauty gurus, conspiracy theories and real-life boogeymen?

Surely, the answers have something to do with respecting victims' memories and their surviving family members, with not glorifying abject violence as not to encourage unhinged individuals to act on their impulses. But amidst tribalist political divides and human rights becoming a social construct, empathy seems to be a sacrifice of the post-irony, modern glitch. Giving into it and joining (or even laughing at) the joke might make us complicit in all the problems we're supposedly fed up with, but then again, it's Twitter: Some people are just assh*oles.