13 Reasons Why I Ended up Binge Watching the Show

1. I heard amazing things about the book years ago. However, I read the summary, and I was terrified. I felt like reading the book would expose me to some emotions I wasn’t ready for. So I decided to not read the book, even though I kept lingering on it whenever I visited a bookstore. Damn. Then the show came out. And I just had to.
2. Selena Gomez kept promoting the show on Instagram. I mean, how could I resist? She just posted tons, and people reposted. Because that’s what Instagram does, poison you into buying things.
3. Netflix encouraged it. Netflix kept playing the next episode. I believe that I put up a good fight. “No, Netflix, later,” never happened as the moment I finished watching the whole show, it was too late.
4. What a show. It was ridiculously good. So good.
5. Well written. For those of you who don’t know, the story is about a boy, Clay Jensen, who was grieving over the death of a girl he’d loved for some time, Hannah Baker. He found a box of tapes delivered to him one day, and in each tape was Hannah’s confession as to why she ended up committing suicide. The tapes were passed along from one person to another, people who made it to Hannah’s list and drove her to end her life.
6. I feel like the show did the book justice, even though they changed some stuff from the book. But it’s still enjoyable.
7. The actors were convincing enough that I was invested in their characters. Also, it helped that a lot of them were new faces, or faces that aren’t marked (for instance, if you see Raven you think That’s So Raven) so it helped with associating them right away to their roles.
8. The pace was perfect. The fact that we got to listen to one (side) tape per episode was good. It wasn’t too fast or too slow. Just right.
9. The tone. Anyone noticed how the tone changes between the past and present? And how it reflects how Clay feels?
10. We can relate to this, because high school life is tough. We know how dramatic people can be, how cruel and unforgiving, and how difficult it is sometimes to go to school knowing that everyone hates you.
11. It touches a lot of issues that we tend to ignore. For instance, “Girls are just asking to be raped,” becomes an excuse in the story for a boy to just rape every girl in sight. Because no, girls aren’t asking for anything. Especially rape. Or that sometimes crimes like that aren’t taken care of right away and tend to be ignored. No. Justice needs to be done.
12. Little things matter. Every little thing. An act of kindness. A mean text. We need to know that everyone’s got his or her own story, and that it’s important that we try to put ourselves in their shoes. For instance, I’m not saying that Hannah is perfect, because she does take some things too dramatically as well at times, but if she’s opened up to Clay maybe things would turn out differently. Just maybe.
13. The message is what we all need. Because we never know when we’re saving people just by being there for them. Just by listening to someone can apparently save a life. But we don’t know that. We don’t care. And it’s about time that we do. It’s hard to stop watching the show midway, because we’re curious to see the real push to why Hannah killed herself, and in a way, we’re forcing ourselves into taking this lesson in. To be better. To be kind. To do more.