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The YouTube homepage is a haphazardly tossed salad. A wall of content plastered with thumbnails begging you to click them. You scroll past tiers of music videos, celebrity interviews and gameplays. Then, you see a thumbnail. The Youtuber’s expression is pulled into that uncanny-eyes-glazed-jaw-dropped-dead-inside-fake-shock face that influencers favour. A spread of food lies before them, enough to feed an army, juxtaposed with grainy images of a victim. The title: Why Were His Foot & Head Detached?… Giant McRib Mukbang. Interspersed with the gruesome details, the YouTuber makes comments about how delicious their McDonald’s tastes.
Murder has never whet my appetite, but there’s more true crime content for those who lack the iron stomach needed to hear about gory crimes while watching someone eat half their body weight in junk food. Scrolling a little further, you may find another influencer pouting their lipstick-red mouth at the camera and showing off their neon eyeshadow, while the image of a cannibal looms over their shoulder. The title: The Cannibal Cop - He Wanted To Cook and Eat His Wife & Friends?! - Mystery & Makeup.
Unfortunately, both titles mentioned are from real YouTube videos. Though the former has been deleted, the latter remains up with a whopping 3.1 million views. It is definitely a popular genre, as though these are examples of some of the more clickbaity, sensationalist titles, there are still tons of mukbang and makeup tutorial true crime videos up today. Tons of influencers jabbing a makeup brush in your face or talking through half-full mouths in hushed, gossipy tones, like they aren’t discussing the scariest, most brutal events known to man.
It is this casual tone that adds another layer of disrespect, and this tends to bleed over into a format that is all tone: true crime podcasts. Shows like Rotten Mango have description sections on Spotify noting how they discuss the “darkest crimes”, highlighting how they pay close attention to the gory details. Immediately after this, the description continues: “don’t worry it all comes with a seasoning of comedy/sweetness.” If anything, I’m more worried.
Other podcasts like Morbid and Last Podcast On The Left reinforce this idea of merging the horrid nature of these real crime cases with “comedy/sweetness”. Morbid’s description on Spotify calls their content “a lighthearted nightmare”, stating there is a ”dash of comedy thrown in for flavour”. I’m starting to see a disturbing pattern with food analogies associated with murder here. The idea of the covering of true crime cases, which include horrific crimes like violent murders, assaults and tortures, being associated with comedy and lightheartedness is further reinforced in Last Podcast On The Left, which is classified under both the Comedy and True Crime genre, words that in my opinion, should never have to be placed next to each other. One episode covers JonBenet Ramsey’s case, who was a child pageant beauty queen who was murdered at the age of six. To adequately cover this tragedy, the hosts of Last Podcast On The Left found it appropriate to laugh about her being “the perfect victim”, “great for newspapers”, and digress by making jokes about competing in child beauty pageants themselves. Very funny.
Acting like these horrible crimes are subjects for idle, humorous dinner conversation (if dinner is a giant McRib) has genuine impacts on real people. Remember, it’s true crime. These cases are not simply macabre stories for us to gawk at and for the media to make a spectacle of for our entertainment. These are highly traumatic, brutal events that have impacted the lives of real people: the victims, the survivors, and their families and friends.
A year ago, an anonymous account posted on a Reddit thread discussing the social media content of Stephanie Soo, host of Rotten Mango, former true crime mukbanger and general true crime content machine. The account identified as a child of a victim, and highlighted how she was upset at Stephanie’s depiction of her mother’s murder. According to the account, this video featured Stephanie eating and making sexual jokes, while “the most traumatic day of my life where I was told my mom was gone and she is not coming back was put down to a causal (sic) story time mukbang video.”
The account remained anonymous, as she claimed she had previously spoken out about true crime influencers in the past, and was doxxed as a result. As such, there is no way of confirming that this is truly the child of a murder victim that was covered in a Stephanie Soo video, but it is certainly a reasonably realistic look into the reaction of a loved one when a deeply personal traumatic event is covered with the lack of respect that, unfortunately, too many true crime influencers approach their subjects with.
It is difficult to define a “right” way to cover true crime. Each case is naturally extremely personal and traumatic for the people involved, and thus needs to be approached with the appropriate solemnity that is unfortunately lacking in a lot of true crime content. Even still, the issue is complicated by how, understandably, the people involved, be it victims, survivors, or their loved ones, may not want these deeply traumatic events to be publicised in the first place in order to receive closure.
Some influencers, including Stephanie Soo, use their platform to advocate for and support programmes and organisations like the Arizona-Trafficking Network, Abraham’s Oasis, Sanctuary for Families and many more, helping to give back by protecting vulnerable groups and preventing future crimes, and even raising awareness and attempting to source for information to aid ongoing cases. These are extremely important and noble ways to give back to the community. But is it enough for these influencers to give back to the community, when they take so much from the victims in the first place?
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