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This is about theAmerican Vandalfinale!
Dont read this if you dont want to be spoiled!
Our existences are simultaneously experienced and curated presented, packaged, polished, for our own protection.
The speech is meant as a capstone.
Its also, sadly, the weakest moment of the whole season.
Part of the genius ofAmerican Vandals first seasonwas its refusal to land on an easy, reductive message.
There were no pat answers, and nothing about it felt pedantic or simple.
Peters final speech in season two gestures in the same direction.
Social medias notjustevil, he says.
Social media is a place to grow, discover, reinvent.
It has a purpose.
Social medias only useful if you’re able to ignore it, he tells us.
But Kevin is also glad he met Peter and Sam, and he tells them so.
You know, Peter, Sam, I really mean this, he says.
I hope that we keep in touch.
On social, you know.
Or … in real life.
Social media can, in fact, be bad!
It can bevery, verybad far worse, in fact, than anythingAmerican Vandals second season ever depicts.
(For instance: death threats and Nazis!)
And even in its short hundred-or-so words, the monologue doesnt quite hang together.
This is why social media needs to be a mask, he says.
Its a form of protection.
But that idea is inherently contradictory.
Is it a mask, or is it exposure?
Is it protection, or is it vulnerability?
It can be a veil and an unveiling.
ForAmerican Vandal, the lesson of that experience was that it was all a disastrous fake.
Kevins love interest wasnt real, and so the entire experience was both painful and criminal.
Itd be the way these kids finally found someone who saw them for who they were.
Social media isbad, and you need only look further into Grayson Wentzs crimes to see it.
Even that attempt at complexity still boils down to a fist-shaking young people these days!
ForAmerican Vandal, there is no echoing positivity anywhere on the social-media landscape.
Much of the joy ofAmerican Vandals first season came from the palpable truth of its teen characters.
They were unimpeachably themselves, neither falsely nostalgic or oddly adult.
Kevins almost unbearable quirkiness is plausible to the point of feeling excruciating.
That clunky last line, I hope we keep in touch.
On social, you know, is something no teen would dare utter (on social?!).
And the cheesy, stilted follow-up, or … in real life would makeanyonecringe, no matter the age.
Its too bad the ending gets tied off with such a clean, reductive, frustratingly grown-up conclusion.
