I think the fault is in how they cut up the story. The first season is absolutely problematic because it turns Hannah in this strong symbol that is made to look so powerful that she successfully managed to impact things exactly the way she wanted it after her death.

In the later seasons though it comes out that Hannah’s view on things is all twisted and that she had a far larger hand in the things that happened to her leading up to her death, than she had made it seem on her tapes.

Basically, most of her story gets clarified to reflect reality, this is something that Clay really struggles with in season 2. The “poor little Hannah” narrative that Hannah had created for herself which painted her as a victim fell apart, and Clay learned that Hannah had so many issues and was herself the cause of things, that she completely left out of the tapes. Spoiler: he sees hallucinations of her throughout the season and even asks her at one point something along the lines of “why all the hints and the hoping and the weird games, why not just ask for help?” because he realises that she’d had plenty of opportunities to just outright ask for help, and she didn’t. In season 2 clay got really angry at Hannah for a while.

And I think that’s a part of the story that has to be included when people talk about 13 Reasons Why, because the second season shows the opposite side of the story. It shows that Hannah’s little fantasy revenge plan ultimately didn’t work and that playing those “you have to know that you should help me even though I’m not asking” games are stupid and that asking for help is the right thing to do.

I feel that if they had not split that up into 2 seasons but had included both the listening to the tapes and the falling apart of her plan by way of the actual truth coming out in the first season, that people would have reacted much differently, because in the end it showed Hannah was just a girl that had some bad luck and made some dumb decisions, and that she wasn’t alone, like she thought she was, all she had to do was genuinely reach out to someone for help only once, and things would have been a lot better.

Yes, the Bryce thing still would’ve been traumatic, but there was a lot more she talked about on her tapes and at least a fair part of that were absolutely things that she had had control over, while she chose to do nothing and wait and see if someone else did what she wanted them to do. This type of expectation of mind reading is definitely a teenage thing to do, so showing teens that life doesn’t work that way actually seems like a good message to me. People only know you need help when you tell them, not when you pretend everything is okay and continue to struggle more and more. Expecting people to know is placing impossible expectations on them. (The guilt that follows suicides was also portrayed well in my opinion, Clay really struggled with guilt through the Hannah storyline. The “could I have done something?” guilt. )