YOU aspires to be an edgy drama from the perspective of a deluded abuser. But that’s not how all viewers are taking it. Some fans are defending its protagonist. The show’s creators and a handful of journalists have fired back, explaining that abuse is bad and these naive viewers missed the point.

But they haven’t. Whatever the creators intended, the events of the show overwhelmingly justify and romanticize its hero’s abuse.

YOU’s hero, Joe, sees all of his actions — innocent and criminal — as selfless acts of love. It’s not until the climax that his victim offers an alternative point of view. He tries to justify his actions by explaining that he was just cleaning up her messed up life. At this point, she delivers the thesis of the show:

Yes, but it was MY life. It was MY mess. And I didn’t need some sociopath on a white horse to clean house. What gives you the right???

This is actually an interesting question. Because the elephant in the room is that for the entire show, Joe has been effectively omniscient.

After a 30 second conversation with Beck, he thinks she might be the one. She quickly falls for him and becomes his girlfriend.

In the first scene, he predicts which types of books a customer will purchase. He’s right.

After two evenings of stalking, he decides Beck’s best friend is a problem. Lo and behold, she’s in obsessive love with Beck, which means sabotaging her career, manipulating her via fake suicide, and secretly photographing her while she sleeps and undresses.

Joe thinks Beck could be a successful writer, if she didn’t spend so much time with her friends. He intercedes. It works. She goes from struggling in obscurity to a prominent author.

After scrolling past a picture of Beck’s sorta boyfriend, Joe concludes that he’s a douche. We quickly learn that he doesn’t care about Beck, tells strings of pretentious lies, stabbed his business partner in the back, and even helped murder a kid in a hazing ritual gone wrong.

Drunk on a quiet subway platform, Beck stumbles onto the yellow line. Joe is horrified, positive she’ll fall onto the tracks. Inevitably, she does! After making no attempt to correct her situation, Joe rescues her from a speeding train. If he hadn’t stalked her there, apparently, she would have died.

After a bout of writers block and a tense conversation with her dad, Joe suggests she cope with her feelings by writing about it. She lashes out, telling him he’s overstepped. He graciously apologizes and gives her space. That could have been the end of it. But then that night, she writes a poem about her dad, and it’s the best thing she’s ever written!! So she gives Joe sex and tells him he was right all along.

After Joe murders her best friend, Beck starts seeing a therapist to help handle her grief. Out of nowhere, Joe decides she’s having an affair with him. She is.

This absurd dynamic hits a fever pitch in the show’s climax. Joe has locked Beck in the workshop under his bookstore. The scene is intercut with Joe’s adoptive dad locking up a teenage Joe in the same workshop. The show is trying to say something about the cycle of abuse.

But…is this abuse? Is it abuse for a father to lock his disrespectful son in his room? And isn’t the justification that a parent knows better and is doing what’s best for his kid?

How is that different from Joe and Beck? If Joe is literally omniscient, isn’t the gap in knowledge so much wider for them? Doesn’t she admit that he’s radically improved every area of his life? If this is abuse, are we all in an abusive relationship with God??

(Quick note: It’s implied that Joe’s dad may have hit Joe off screen. That’s definitely abuse. But, again, it’s only implied, and caged-Beck and caged-teen-Joe is the only direct parallel.)

So, okay, maybe Joe did have a right to meddle. But what if his motives weren’t pure? Beck asserts that he’s driven by a perverse need to violate her autonomy.

But her theory doesn’t hold up. Joe manifestly doesn’t control her the way real abusers do. He doesn’t disrupt her healthy friendships, even though her friends drive him nuts. Pre-monogamy, he graciously accepts her right to bang randos from Tindr. When she dumps him, he respects her decision. When he discovers that she’s cheating on him, he forgives her as soon as she apologizes. Once he’s cleaned up a few messes, he stops meddling altogether. If Beck hadn’t discovered the murders, they would have lived happily ever after, right? Right??