The self-fulfilling prophecy I genuinely did not expect.

• We have a 5-star ranking system on this sub and it operates legitimately without much acknowledgement. (Nosedive)
• New line-up of episodes, coming to your favorite streaming platform, featuring and marketed with all your favorite faces in Hollywood!!! (Joan is Awful)
• Fighting about the arcs, values, and messaging in the content without acknowledging how commodification devalues these things. (Waldo)
• People are posting to a forum for karma points, aggressively defending their opinion against content most people have not seen. (Fifteen Million Merits? White Bear? USS Callister? Get.Off.The.Internet?)

Black Mirror blew up as a show for people who wanted to be stimulated intellectually (being disturbed counts, here). It was a sort of thought experiment, and a wildly successful one. It blew up during an era of edgy, hyperviolent (Utopia), and overdramatized (Shameless, post-Skins) television.

What I see today, when I frolic over here... is a subreddit of people debating character decisions with fragments of context (Reality TV discourse), fighting about who said what on other threads, and linking to "real world stories that sound like Black Mirror..." generated by AI. Did y'all even watch the show?

So... this is a post wondering if this sub is full of fans who are actually as reactive and unthoughtful as Netflix's Black Mirror thinks they are. Ten years ago (yes, am that old), this show was almost explicitly used in conversations that were provocative and seemed important. Today, the conversation appears to be drowned in petty fights and tier lists. I do love tier lists though, so please, nobody stop. Let's just talk.

TL;DR (because I want the skim-readers too)

Please raise your hand if this sub looks like a practically meta and unaware episode of Black Mirror, and you're surprised anybody can be a fan while acting in a way this show would deem "dystopic." Including the company producing it.