On Hulu’s Not Okay, Danni Sanders is not acceptable. The millennial has a huge crush on her coworker Colin but an empty life—no friends, no community, no boyfriend.
She is successful in getting Colin’s attention by pretending to be traveling to Paris for a writing retreat.
She wakes up the morning after an Instagram post to discover a terrorist bombing in Paris.
Most individuals would stop lying after such a disaster, though. However, Sanders presents herself as a survivor of the attack now that she has tasted the attention she had long sought.
Sanders immediately discovers that simulating trauma is trickier than simulating an international vacation.
She thus makes friends with Rowan, a victim of a school shooting, in order to benefit from her knowledge.
In influencer culture, the fictional character Danni Sanders is relatable
The majority of the characters in Not Okay, including Danni Sanders, are made up. However, Danni was designed by director and creator Quinn Shephard to be a personable character in the influencer industry.
According to Shepard, she wanted readers in the internet age to be able to identify with Sanders’ obsession with social media attention—views, likes, clicks, follows, engagements, and the like—and the extraordinary lengths people would go to in order to obtain it. quoting Quinn
“Danni is intentionally both terrible and very relatable. I think especially for young white women on the internet.
I want it to be a character that people see themselves in so that they can kind of question how they can be less of a Danni in their daily lives.”
Although Sanders’ activities may appear extreme, there are influences in the real world who have created tragedies to gain attention.
For instance, a Frenchwoman named Alexandra Damien falsely claimed to have been a victim of the 130-person-death Paris attacks in November 2015.
Damien received 20,000 euros from the funds generated for the assault victims. The French Association of Terror Victims paid for her counseling sessions as well. She was given a six-month prison term for lying and fraud by a judge.
People like Damien always draw universal condemnation, as is only fitting. However, the condemnation frequently degenerates into ugly behavior as some online users harass and abuse the offender.
Sanders experienced the same outcome after a coworker exposed her lies.
“Tearing women down on the internet is not always the answer, even though they should be held accountable for their wrongs,” Quinn said.
Despite having its fair share of sarcasm and humor, Not Okay handles topics like gun violence and terrorist attacks with care and sensitivity.
Quinn didn’t use the November 2015 Paris incident or actual school shootings as inspiration.
But since terrorist attacks and school shootings really occur, she wanted the movie to portray the trauma of the victims as authentically as possible. quoting Quinn
“I really hoped that I would navigate them all right, but to make sure that I was doing so I did vet the script with a number of people, including a trauma consultant, to make sure that I was navigating all of those scenes in an authentic way and I guess that’s the best you can do when you’re going to try to talk about topics like these.”
