EFFORTPOST COMMUNITY NOTED The curious case of the Chris Watts defenders - or, how someone managed to be so annoying on facebook that redditors will celebrate their tragic murder

Background

Chris Watts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_family_murders) is a family annihilator who murdered his pregnant wife Shannan and two young children 2018. They were a striving middle class family in a mcmansion, with Shannan being a a stay at home mother/MLM scammer/influencer, and Chris earning relatively large sums on the oil fields. They had no recorded domestic violence history, no real criminal history, and were famously white attractive. Case got a lot of attention because the police released a lot of information, including bodycam footage of the moment Chris is confronted with evidence that his wife couldn't have run away with the kids in the way he claimed. After a day or two of telling the media he misses his disappeared family, he confesses to the crime and hundreds of hours of true crime content is born. He gets fan mail from crazies in jail to this day.

The defenders

Who would defend such a man, you ask? To answer that, we have to understand the volumous internet presence Shannan had on social media up until her murder. She posted several times a day, including livestreams, in order to shill her MLM product and present a curated picture of her 'perfect' life. These posts and streams are a morbid curiosity to people because Chris featured often, and people say you can tell he seems disinterested and disengaged even back then (to me he just seems like a guy bored by his wife's incessesant posting and filming, tbh).

Here is a compilation of relevant social media videos from Shannan to give a sense of her tone online:

Because of how widespread this is, it's near impossible to gaze upon any discussion of the topic without noticing how many people seem focussed on how unlikeable Shannan is, how hard Chris must have had it. At least until recently, reddit had snark-style subs dedicated to pooping on Shannan's online presence (which seems like a dead end considering there is only so much content she will ever produce). Shannan's personality on social media is so fundarnetally annoying and unlikeable, apparently, that hordes of people are more compelled by that than the cold blooded triple murder by her husband.

From the comments of the video above:

>Chris did not like being on camera, you can tell.

>Did she really record these massively long videos and post them on Facebook? I feel like the average person would not watch the majority of these lol

>The first one is so cringe. Everybody trying to act like they're rockin' and rollin' to some shitty cover band with zero attendance. Ick.

>She is annoying but that doesn't warrant murder

>If you are constantly filming, I don't think you are truly engaged in the moment.

>This woman was so desperately addicted to posting everything about her life online that 3 hours of online silence was all her neighbor needed to know something was wrong

(this refers to the fact that Shannan's loved ones got police involved mere hours after her middle-of-the-night murder simply because she hadn't yet posted an obnoxious video or livestream on FB that day lol)

>The dude should have just left her, the constant filming would have been enough for me. Totally unhinged behavior, when I see families in restaurants all on their phones, I just think I'm so glad I'm not you. Zero parental skills.

>He should've got the balls to tell her that, "her job isn't real, social media isn't real and I think I'm falling out of love with you."

>Shes very dismissive of Chris making him look like he's really awkward.

>I can't imagine live in relationship when my partner record everything all the time and post it ...

And so on. This isn't even one half of it. And these comments are about a woman who was violently killed by her husband while she slept.

Reddit

Anyway, Reddit somehow has allowed a large community of Shannan Watts (murder victim) snark subs to thrive. Some key posts:

https://old.reddit.com/r/WattsFree4All/comments/16zkuoe/shannon_watts_and_the_ridiculous_shirts/

In this post, redditors mock her for tacky t-shirts and clothes she put on the children (before their murder)

https://old.reddit.com/r/WattsFree4All/comments/1g1s63h/lupus_shmupus/

In this post, Shannan is mocked for at one point saying she might have lupus but posting things on facebook that indicate she may not have lupus.

https://old.reddit.com/r/WattsFree4All/comments/1cigxc2/having_no_balls/

Redditors theorise to what extent did Shannan emasculate Chris, prior to her murder.

https://old.reddit.com/r/WattsFree4All/comments/16t49mb/i_thought_it_was_just_me/

A redditor rejoices at finding a sub of like-minded people who, like them, also hate the murder victim:

>When I first heard of this case, I was so shocked. But from the very beginning, what I learned of SW irked me. After watching the TV shows, including Netfix, I really disliked everything about her. But every media thing I read praised her. The videos I found showed her in a shining light, lol. I finally dropped it and moved on.

Lmao OP saw the coverage "woman and her two kids murdered in cold blood" and really laser focussed in how irritating the victim was.

Anyway, you can explore the sub yourself - search by top posts for most dramatic and angry redditors.

The point

I never promised I had a point. I suppose I find this drama-worthy because it's truly fascinating to me that this woman was apparently so annoying, and hit on so many of reddit's sore spots (fake disroder cringe, influence life) that it overrode the normal reddit instinct to find a female victim of her husband murdering her and her kids sympathetic. To be clear, none of these people met Shannan while she was alive or even saw her posts prior to her death. They have created an image of her post-mortem they find so infuriating they are posting about it six years later. Majority of the reddit users are women, which further excludes inceldom as a

primary motivator.

I, for one, strive to be such an annoying person that my eventual death by murder is the least interesting thing about me.

Happy hannukah!