Line #49 Headscratchers/Unfriended


1	* What did each of the kids do? The final characters were obviously no saints, but what did Ken or Val do beyond simply try to escape the chat session? What earned their doom?
2	** Precisely that. "Laura clearly said if you leave or try to get help you will die."
3	*** Beyond that, was it just by happenstance that Ken was part of the chat session or was it intentional that he'd be there?
4	** Ken also stated that he thought Laura deserved to die, rather nonchalantly on the anniversary of her death, and considering that everyone, or at least Blaire, thought that Val would be the type to hack Laura's account for a prank, she probably wasn't one of Laura's favorite people ever.
5	** Ken said that Laura deserved all the flack she got from the video, not that she deserved to die. Laura killed him because his computer skills were on par with her...demon skills?...and was a threat to her plan. Blair does say "everyone was posting" but Blair is a liar. A Blaire-liar. A Blaire.
6	*** Val messaged Laura that she should kill herself before she died. As for Ken, it was suggested that all of the people in the chat had made Facebook sock puppets to pick on her, he was almost certainly part of that. Beyond that, all of them were all fair-weather friends who failed to show her any support when she needed them.
7	** In short, nothing to deserve being murdered.
8	*** Maybe not to a normal person. To a revenge-obsessed spirit, on the other hand....
9	*** No one's arguing that the kids deserved their gruesome deaths. This is only speculation on why Laura targeted them.
10	*** Yeah, but that still doesn't make sense, even if we assume she was out for revenge. Sure, he was probably part of making fun of her, and he did talk about her deserving to die, but it's implied that all the others did something directly to Laura (such as Val's rejection of taking the video down, Jess defaced her grave, Mitchell uploaded the video, Blaire originally recorded it, only excluding Adam, who was not a very good person, since he roofied a girl and slept with his best friend's girlfriend), and it's implied that Laura was a bully as well, and it could be assumed she bullied Ken. A bullied person would not have good feelings towards the bully, so it makes sense he didn't like her. He was probably not her friend. So Ken seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time more than an actual motivated death.
11	*** Laura was a pretty mean and spiteful person. Her justification for bullying people was something to do with home life.
12	*** Actually, Blaire admitted that all of the kids made anonymous online accounts to bully Laura, meaning Ken ''did'' play a role in Laura's death, albeit a very small one in comparison to the others. Even if she was an unpleasant person, no one deserves to be bullied by their friends because "everyone was doing it too".
13	** It's possible that Val and Ken did have a more direct hand in Laura's death and/or were responsible for some of the more insidious forms of bullying, but they both died before those sins could ever be aired.
14	** She's making an example of them to the others. They're small fry and she's not ''really'' mad at them, but if they could get away with breaking the rules then the others would try too and she'd have to kill them for ''that'' instead of putting them through mind games like she wanted.
15	** "I wish I could forgive you, Blaire." Let's take her literally for a second. She's out for vengeance, yeah, but when you think about it, couldn't her sparing Blaire for the end have been her giving a chance at redemption?
16	* Isn't it weird that these kids hang around each other in the first place? Blaire, Adam, and Mitch especially, what with Blaire obviously being the least trustworthy friend. They obviously don't care that much for her in the first place, why do they bother being friends?
17	** Just to give the film a more diverse/interesting cast, but in real life it would make no sense for someone like Ken to be hanging out with Val and Jess, and the ones you mentioned.
18	*** I call RealityIsUnrealistic on this one, scandalous little love triangles of the variety seen in the film were not unheard of when i was at school/college. As for Ken's friendship with Val and Jess not making sense, I'm not even sure what it is you're getting at, but again, my experience of school was made of "diverse" groups of friends like the one depicted.
19	* Why didn't Blaire just block Laura's profile? The "Report;/Block" button was right above the "Unfriend" button.
20	** If Laura could stop Blaire from unfriending her, she could just as easily stop Blaire from blocking or reporting her.
21	** The button to report;/block button was also visibly broken.
22	*** But after clicking refresh, Blaire DID unfriend Laura, which set much of the movie's events in motion. Why she didn't go straight for the "report/block" choice is beyond me.
23	*** Blaire was clearly not very computer smart.
24	*** That would likely not do anything useful in the long run, either. For heaven's sake, Laura had the ability to literally make functions inside the internet disappear. She would probably just message Blaire like normal with her ghost powers.
25	* Why did Blaire try to get help by going on Chatroulette? Admittedly, it did (sort of) work, but why would that be her first thought?
26	** This Troper's theory is that Blaire realized that after each person tried to call the cops they automatically died. So rather than directly call the cops, Blaire tried to call the cops by proxy.
27	*** When Adam tried to call the police after Val's attack, Laura seemed to have gotten into his phone and pretended to be a dispatcher. This Troper figured that Blaire knew that calling on her own phone would be useless, so she decided to try a random person from god knows where so Laura couldn't get to them. However, we don't know the extent of Laura's powers, so it's possible that she may have done the same thing with the woman on Chatroulette who called the police for Jess.
28	* Why wouldn't anyone confess on who uploaded the video even though Laura demonstrated that she knows ALL of their secrets?
29	** Hope against reason. Maybe there is one chance in a billion that she doesn't know that. So it's OK to deny everything, maybe one of the other will take the blame. Maybe if I can convince me I did nothing she will believe it too ...
30	** It's heavily implied that Blaire is a sociopath who's psychologically incapable of taking responsibility even under threat of death. Even when all her friends/meat shields are gone and Laura has revealed she knows about the full video, she still tries to make excuses and downplay it instead of doing the more reasonable thing and beg for mercy.
31	* Why doesn't Laura just kill the kids right from the start? Does she have to play with her victims like a cat and a mouse? As an aspect of Wrath, she knows all their dirty secrets. She knows what each and every one of them was responsible for. Why even bother with the "Never Have I Ever" game? If she already knows what they did, then the winner of the game is entirely arbitrary and it just makes Blaire a dirty cheater.
32	** [[{{Sadist}} She wanted to make them suffer first.]] To make them feel [[EtTuBrute the pain of betrayal she felt when her best friend Blaire posted that video of her.]]
33	** Also, Laura is as evil as the others. The footage we see of her at the party shows her shoving Val (the friend no one likes) down. When Val stands up and threatens to beat Laura up, but hesitates; Laura ridicules her immediately, enticing everyone at the party to mock and publicly humiliate Val.
34	*** To be fair though, Val can be heard snidely [[SlutShaming 'warning' the guy who was on top of Laura that he should use condoms with Laura.]]
35	** She wants to kill them by using [[DeathByIrony precisely the same methods that led to her suicide]], namely bullying, spreading rumours, revealing their secrets and turning them against one another.
36	** Laura is something of a hypocrite. There's a loose betrayal theme between Blaire and Laura, since Blaire filmed Laura passed out; but during the drinking game, it is revealed that Laura tried to have sex with Blaire's boyfriend Mitch a year before, but he rejected her.
37	** It seems like the whole thing is focused on the group's, and Blaire's in particular, NeverMyFault tendencies. I think Laura wants her friends to admit that what they did was wrong. The people Laura was closest to last the longest. Based on her last message, Laura truly wanted to make up with Blaire, but Blaire refusing to take responsibility for her part in the destruction of their friendship just makes Laura angrier.
38	* Why them specifically? I mean, Blaire and Val make sense, as they personally slighted Laura, but the film implies that the others were targeted because they posted on the Laura Barns Hate Wall or whatever that was. But it's explicitly mentioned that a lot of people did that, so why go after these specific posters? [[FridgeHorror Did she go after everyone else who posted too?]] Or did she just pick them because they were Blaire's friends?
39	** She very well might have gone after everyone else. The film might get a sequel.
40	** She went after them specifically because they were supposed to be ''her'' friends[[note]]save for Val, as shown in the beginning. Laura killed her because she played a part in the bullying AND she shot down Laura's cry for help.[[/note]] and yet, they were the reason why she was being bullied in the first place[[note]] Her best friend Blaire took the video, Mitch posted it on Website/YouTube with the title "Laura Barns Kill Urself", and they all made anonymous accounts to bully and troll her.[[/note]] and also, they disrespected her AFTER she died[[note]]Jess desecrated her grave and Ken nonchalantly talks ill of Laura on the anniversary of her suicide, only to apologize when he realizes he's being heard by Blaire.[[/note]].
41	* Near the beginning, we see Blaire or somebody has bruises and it's never brought up, so I have to ask what were those all about?
42	** She had a moment of klutziness and fell over or ran into something. People get bruised for mundane reasons all the time, and nobody thought it important enough to bring up when they were distracted by the ghost after them.
43	* How did Laura manage to shoot herself at school? She didn't seem to have anything to carry the gun in to hide it, and the video recording of her suicide on that [=LiveLeak=] article shows that someone at the school saw her with the gun before she shot herself. How did she get the gun onto the school grounds successfully, and how/why did no one (staff or student) try to intervene?
44	** None of the teens arguably were good suicide counselors. Also, bullied teen with gun can easily go off on one of them. They weren't going to get shot to try to stop her.
45	*** One student recorded Laura's suicide on their phone. If that student was able to record the suicide on their phone, then they should've been able to call the police to tell them that Laura had a gun on school grounds. Either that or another student with a cell phone should've been able to have noticed and called the police to tell them that Laura had a gun on school grounds.
46	*** If they didn't see the gun until Laura brought it out to shoot herself, the police wouldn't have gotten there until after she'd already shot herself.
47	*** If Laura was holding the gun and didn't have a bag to hold the gun in, then someone would've noticed before she even got outside and thus would've tried calling the police even earlier than that.
48	*** Personal experience here, but the school this Troper went to had an incident where a bullied girl shot herself in a bathroom INSIDE the school, so sneaking a gun into a school for suicidal purposes is sadly plausible. As for the lack of anyone doing anything when they actually SEE her with the gun, considering how badly she was bullied and how little anyone cared about her, it would make sense that people would either not think it’s real, or not expect her to do anything with it.
49	* Why the HELL did Laura shoot herself at arm's length?
50	** The filmmakers were likely trying to steer the viewer into thinking there was another possessing spirit controlling her, instead of her being an actual suicide.
51	** So it could be more visible on camera I guess.
52	* Why is Blaire so bad with technology/so stupid? Think about this for a second. She's a 17 year old girl in 2014 with a laptop in a middle class family. She's a millennial & yet she has such a bad handle on technology that she, for some reason, keeps seeding a torrent of an SNL episode, has to be told how to do things, keeps having to press the "send" button on the Facebook chat (& moves the mouse away & back & doesn't have the "press enter to send" box checked to pad the runtime even further than necessary), keeps manually highlighting text to replace it rather than hitting "command A" & then "delete", etc. I find this very hard to believe for someone in her situation.
53	** The meta explanation is that all of these things play better for the audience--using the cursor shows up on screen, while keyboard shortcuts like command+A and pressing enter don't, and they needed a way to work in exposition for audience members who aren't familiar with the programs the characters are using. In-universe, well, just being a teenager with a laptop doesn't automatically make someone tech-savvy, and even skilled computer users don't necessarily use torrents or keyboard shortcuts.
54	* Okay, just how in the f- did Blaire, Laura's ''best friend'', not know Laura's Skype username?! You can see pictures of them together on Facebook, so clearly they didn't just avoid each other on social media for some reason.
55	** The way Skype works, you have a username and a nickname. The username is just what you type to log in; the nickname is what you're seen as to all friends. It's likely that Blaire and Laura added each other long ago, and eventually Blaire forgot what Laura's username was because her nickname was just "Laura" (or something like that) while her username was something like "billie" which has no immediate correlation to Laura without context. And when Laura's spirit took over, she presumably reverted her nickname back to her username to catch them off guard.
56	* If Blaire is so incompetent using technology to the point of barely knowing how to properly empty her recycling bin, how the hell does she know how to torrent SNL.
57	** Maybe she got it from a friend through a file-sharing program.
58	* How does not a single person involved think to just close their laptop?
59	** They think it's a prank at first and are too scared to do so once people start dying.
60	** Laura states that if they leave the skype chat, they die. Closing your laptop means leaving the chat.

Context Headscratchers / Unfriended