Taking Accountability, Part 1

Freeze! We’re holding you accountable.

When I started posting cartoons to Instagram around 2017, I felt I knew what certain words meant. Everyone else was using them, and with context clues I could figure out what the general gist was, if not the specific usages. Like everything we see on the internet, we can’t always be sure from where bits of information slip into our conscious or unconscious, what topics feel as if they’ve always been there but were in fact scooped up Katamari Damacy style by the latest infographic, video, or slideshow, now enmeshed into the hulking, shapeless mass of our brain as warped by the internet.

As a Bravo fan, I have of course been invested in the Summer House Scandal the past few weeks. Why cheating gets so much national attention in the midst of other unthinkable horrors happening in our world is both obvious and alarming, but skipping all that, I’ve been interested in the repeated use—still, in 2026—of the world “accountable” in describing what Amanda and West (the cheaters, if you don’t know anything, let’s just say that) must do moving forward. On Reddit threads and X replies, in Instagram stories and TikTok videos, a refrain I see often is that these people, who did in fact undoubtedly cause real hurt to people in their actual lives, owe us, the audience, some performance of accountability. It is not often discussed what could be done interpersonally to remedy such a situation, but it is often noted that Amanda and West should be not posting what they’re posting on the internet, that they should seem more distraught, that going on with your life after a shitty thing happened is not, in fact, being held accountable. What do these strangers want from their parasocial relationships? How does an accountability process involve us as viewers? Do we simply want a venue in which to throw tomatoes at the sinners? (Yes.) It’s as if we, the fans, were all cheated on, we’re all waiting for a better apology, a better front-facing video, a better explanation. Is that what accountability is? A succinct narrative, a well-told story? How would we, as viewers, be able to discern what a productive “accountability process” looked like? Would we be able to tell just by the tone of the posts? By who unfollow or follows who? By what percentage of merchandise is promised to go to a Vague Humanitarian Fund?