YMMV / Black Mirror: Joan is Awful

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation : Joan being much happier being a manager of a coffee shop could be interpreted as the show telling us that it isn't worth it to keep toxic relationships in your life and you should strive to do what makes you happy. Trying to have a good relationship with your boyfriend or an exboyfriend after there are serious issues is only going to make things worse. Also, working at a job where everyone hates you is only going to make you hate yourself even more. There is a certain level of healthy selfishness you need to have in your life to improve better as a person.
• Fanfic Fuel: Just how many fictive levels can there be? How exaggerated was Mona Javadi's haughty, fictive self compared to her source self, or anyone else for that matter? Just how exaggerated will the characters' negative traits become as the fictive levels go deeper?
• Harsher in Hindsight: The episode premiered at the same time as a major writer's strike where the use of AI in the entertainment industry was a major point of contention between the writer's union and the entertainment companies, tying into the episode's themes. The episode came to a lot of people's minds again in July 2023, when the actors' union SAG-AFTRA joined the strike too, and the National Executive Director and Chief Negotiator said the AMPTP had proposed an agreement where background actors would get paid for one day's work to have their likeness scanned and those models would then be owned by the company in perpetuity to be used for whatever they wanted, without the actor's consent or any compensation for them; it all felt eerily similar to the events in the episode involving actors having their likeness scanned and used by Streamberry for AI-generated shows and not being able to protest when their image was used in ways they didn't agree with.

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