'Main character syndrome'?

Baby Reindeer (Miniseries, E1-7; 2024)
Director: Weronika Tofilska & Josephine Bornebusch

(Based on the autobiography of Richard Ladd)

I learned a new term today: main character syndrome. In a world where only I, me and myself, which people really care about, it is logical for people to think that they are indeed at the centre of the Universe. The sun and all the planets revolve around them. They naturally become the main characters in a story they narrate. Even though the story is their point of view, it looks like the other characters are just there to fill up space without giving any substance to the story.

This is what the other characters in this true story are saying.

This story is about a shy Scottish lad, Donny, who wants to be a comedian. It is an autobiography, actually. To sustain himself, he works as a bartender. In the course of his work, he meets a friendly lawyer whom he finds interesting.

He is not much of a comedian, really. He is not funny. Nobody laughs at his gigs. A TV scriptwriter takes Donny under his wing and promises to make him a star. The scriptwriter turns out to be a pervert who drugs him and rapes him.

Meanwhile, the lawyer he met at the bar turns out to be a stalker who goes to great lengths to make Donny's life a living hell. Donny has a transexual person for his girlfriend. The whole story is about how Donny emerges from the shadow of his past and handles his stalker to try to make something of his life. The trouble is that Donny appears drawn back to his past as if he enjoys the pain and lives to dwell in negativity.

Even though the storyteller tries to empathise with the stalker and the abuser, in biopics like these, the aggrieved party will have his own account of the whole event. So now, the stalker and the said abuser, which netizens can easily find out with all their wisdom, are thinking of taking legal action against Netflix for screening such a film. Unable to tell her version of what actually transpired during the whole fiasco, she accuses that writer of suffering from 'main character syndrome'.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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