Perhaps this should be where the conversation stops–The Instagram account of Zelda Williams–Robin Williams’ 25-year-old daughter.
This social media thread should also perhaps be the final rallying point, guest book, or sympathy card in social media. But sadly, it is not. A quick scour of both Robin Williams’ account as well as his daughter will immediately show that the need to post a comment somewhere knows no boundaries. Pictures unrelated to you and I have become some kind of cathartic canvas upon which unrelated people have chosen to vent their grief.
The need to be seen–a veritable whoring for vertical position has the same cumulative feel any riot has: Once one neighborhood is torn up, liquor stores looted, electronics stores are plundered, it becomes a mundane task to root through the rubble and find your take. Nope. We’re moving to the NEXT neighborhood.
I simply could not believe it. Picture after picture on both accounts started to fill with references to Williams’ death–even if the picture contained neither he nor his daughter. People who had never graced either account (including myself to that end.) started jockeying to be the “first reverberating sage” on each pic. One account managed to do it on a number of pics–as if they heard the news about his death and their FIRST reflex was to capitalize on it by gaining visibility.
If that’s where it stopped, then fine. But the algorithm gets worse:
1) Ten people start posting Insta-eulogies.
2) One person questions whether Williams’ daughter was to blame for “not seeing this coming.”
3) Fifty people come back and start fighting over Williams’ virtual casket because the troll was successful.
One person even posited that since Williams “had gone over to entertain” our baby-killing troops in Iraq, that he was suffering some cumulative karma.
That’s right. Fifty-thousand more Galahads to the rescue.
The problem is, the daughter is now carrying the gripless emotional anvil of her father’s suicide. Even if she stated reading the condolences, I guarantee you this. She has stopped. The sheer two-dimensionality of selfishness is brought into relief in a death that DOESN’T violate the gaming codes–much less one in which a little girl stares at the sky and asks why her daddy left her.
But it doesn’t stop there. Journalists–perhaps the most vacant, empty-headed and self-important messiahs of the culture–have to make sure you and I know they “once interviewed Williams” about his “demons.”
They make sure you know that if THEY couldn’t have seen this coming, then you and I should just take comfort in the fact that NOBODY could.
Shut up. Shut up and get back to ignoring the massacre of Christians.
Here’s a tip geniuses: Robin can’t read your eulogies and vain exploits in vetting trolls with classless, Quixotic charges in the viewing parlor.
Get over yourselves.
Master Of None 
Well said, my friend, well said. So sad. And no one can blame anyone or exalt themselves as if they knew this was coming. Depression is an ugly, mystifying disease that can’t be put into a neat, tidy classification. What a beautiful tribute by Ms. Williams to her precious father.
Amen.
It’s one big deceptive, vain, and – for lack of a better word – masturbatory showcase of false grieving. People did not care about him anymore, plain and simple. His movies were bombing, his depression was neglected by the masses.
But, of course, now has arisen the opportunity to exhibit how pious and considerate one is to all one’s friends. If I believed in Satan, this (which includes the other facets of modern attention whoring) would be highly Satanic behaviour on a mass scale.
I fully agree. Self-centeredness is is principal Luciferian trait.
I do think his death/suicide has far-reaching implications. As I’ve said before in this blog, I usually HATE populist rhetoric. But the level of awareness raised by this is extraordinary.