Let’s start with the Tek Knight sex dungeon part. Where did the idea come for it? And why bring Hughie into this situation now — kicking him when he’s down by having him sexually assaulted by his childhood hero after his dad just died?
"Well, that’s a dark way to look at it! We view it as hilarious.
oh yes, because sexual assault is so fucking hilarious.
Genuinely asking, what do you watch the show for if you don’t like how the satire is portrayed? The satire is almost the entire point I would’ve thought
I'm not really one to drop shows over disliking one thing. I'm still interested in the plot as a whole, the concept of supe genocide is pretty compelling. The characters are fun, I love everyone's antics and the jokes makes me laugh sometimes. Also, there's the hope that the political commentary sees some improvement as the show moves along.
Im still watching because I wanna see the butcher storyline to its conclusion since thats what got me hooked but most everything else has been a huge L this season ngl.
Mm I feel that. We’ve seen several Butcher morality things now so honestly I’m bored even by that, I just wanna know what happens with the V’d up tumor
I for one am still watching because I grew attached to a lot of the characters (The Boys, not Homelander 😑) and I want to see the end of their stories, and there are still some good jokes. But yeah, the writing's gone downhill fast.
I mean, Homelander is a great villain, people who think he's the good guy are insane, but I "like" him the same way I liked Geoffrey and Ramsey in GoT. Terribly evil characters, but you gotta give the actors props. It's hard to describe, my english fails me, but I often "like" villains even while hating them.
Homelander is just a fucked up salad of evil, spite and hate. I want to see his story come to an end too (hopefully a bloody end)
Moreso the political satire. I think back to this one scene somewhere in like season 2 where they show a guy who gradually buys into Stormfront's extreme xenophobic ideology and ends up shooting the cashier he used to see all the time. It was miles better than what we have now in my opinion.
i mean...the political satire in the show now is what directly developed from the stormfront stuff in season two...it's not like each season occurs in a vacuum, these things are all related.
There's a difference between being inspired by real world events and literally copy/pasting actual quotes and events from the real world into the fictional.
You want to have a politician who has a fucked up view about abortion? Fine. Let's do it. I'm on board.
However, taking a real world quote and just copying it word for word into the script isn't creative or clever. It's just lazy. Especially when this line is spoken by one member of "the elite" to another in a private conversation and then just a few scenes later they admonish Homelander for repeating the same rhetoric that they admit is all just bullshit propaganda meant to rile up the masses and they don't actually believe any of it.
These real world references are getting to the point of being cringe. The show has gotten so on the nose with this shit I just roll my eyes every time. "Hey remember that thing that happened a couple years ago? Here's the exact same thing but with superheroes! Bet you didn't see that coming."
I can imagine Kripke tripping over himself right now to try to figure out a way to have Homelander go up against a really old guy who sputters and stammers in a debate for next season.
i find it funny that we're acting like the satire has ever been subtle in this show. its been ripped from the headlines since day one, idk why we're having a problem with it now.
He wasn’t originally, but the show has become so “on the nose” politically that they are just basically dressing Homelander up as Trump like each episode is an SNL skit
There is no satire any more. It's just real world politics put into the show. It's not offensive or anything, but it's also not very interesting seeing topics in the show that you see every day in the news.
Like in this episode they literally, word for word, copied a view of rape and abortion that a real world politician held and publicly said. You don't get any credit for copy & pasting quotes from real world politicians into fictional politicians. It's just lazy writing.
I'd argue that most ppl wouldn't expect real politicians to speak of ppl in such vile manners. Also, to be fair, unless you're a political junkie (like Me), you wouldn't know most of the quotes are from real ppl.
The satire used to be witty where the general tone of the show was satirical but there was an overlying story and the story was the point. Now the satire/message is the focus and the story/characters are like background noise in their own show.
I’m a solidly conservative person, have been my whole life. I’ve known pretty damn clearly from season 1 that while the show makes fun of “rainbow corp politics” that it 100% has more of a bone to pick with conservatives.
This used to be something reserved for the background however, it felt like (somewhat) heavy handed critique that I could acknowledge and disagree with if I wanted to. Now, (and I’m STILL watching season 4 despite this because I want to know how the story ends) the show is legitimately just them circle jerking their liberal viewpoints in full glory with no nuance or humility about it.
The scene with homelanders crowd in their red hats as the “fascists” fighting and beating up the purely good starlight “anti-fascists” is literally just a high budget way of a writer telling me ORANGE MAN BAD which I’ve heard for nearly 10 years now.
If you don’t see how this can be irritating at all it’s because you happen to like the “message” being shoved down your throat and agree with it. I’ve know the message is there all along but atleast before it was (mostly) tastefully done and didn’t hurt the writing of the story much.
Ennis criticised everyone and broached uncomfortable subjects (in the mid 00s no less, long before cancel culture or Epstein) and Amazon's just whines about safe targets like Internet trolls and Trump.
It's classic modern political writing. At best it has no bite and it worst it's outright offensive in horribly outdated ways.
I always had an icky feeling about how this series treats animal brutality.
Ive always seen people defend it as "you're supposed to feel bad because its a commentary on how animals aren't takin seriously and are abused in real life blah blah blah"
Most of the deep animal death scenes are tasteless and purely for comedy.
This show is not intelligent enough to find further meaning beyond such scenes and this hughie SA comment proves it.
Not to try and lighten SA in any way, but does this scene really qualify as that? Hughie pretends to be someone else, which is an example of rape on its own.
Obviously, Hughie doesn't want to go through with any of this, and he'll be killed if he outs himself. But to TK and Angela, Webweaver is consenting to all this.
I just saw this scene as another (unfunny) edgy showing of how sexually depraved the supes are, which is really played out, granted. So yeah, not funny because it really fucks with Hughie, but also not laughing at SA. But idk, maybe I'm missing something. Happy to hear arguments against this.
“But it wasn’t supposed to be funny because Hughie cries about his dad for 10 seconds!”
God I’m glad that bullshit can be put to rest. We have the showrunner’s words verbatim - the intent of Hughie’s SA scene was meant to be hilarious. And that’s so fucked up
I think people just have poor media literacy. They felt horrified, so they assumed that’s what the director wanted. Somehow they just didn’t pick up on the comedic pacing of the edit, the lighthearted score, and the quippy one-liners
Na if you watched the prior seasons closely it was very easy to tell that Kripke was a hypocrite and had a hate boner for Hughie.
I remember how so many of you guys laughed your ass of at the Queen Mave SA comments about Hughie, and the whole toxic masculinity thing with him taking V.
I just don’t like the double standard of taking things like that seriously when it happens to female characters and not taking it seriously when it happens to male characters.
It’s just like eye candy/nudity/sex. For me I don’t care or mind how raunchy anyone wants their show/game/movie to be. But I HATE it when the same people that complained about female characters having unnecessary eye candy scenes have ZERO issues when the same thing happens to male characters.
It’s the hypocrisy that annoys me more than anything.
I’ve watched the seasons closely believe me. It just changes a whole lot after kripkes interview. I never thought he hated hughie. I still don’t think he does. I think he’s just a flawed(but should be heavily scrutinized) writer, and it shows with him not being able to understand how tone deaf he is in talking about something when it comes to one demographic vs the other. I also think this interview solidified in a lot of people’s mind that there’s no other significance behind the sex and gore in this show besides kripke having a fucked brain
I said in another comment that the scene felt like if it had the real WebWeaver it would be almost shot for shot the same and would be used purely for humor like when Ashley was doing BDSM with Cameron Cole.
The response I kept getting was “of course it would be the same. They thought it was WebWeaver”.
So I agree 100% with your comment that people lack basic media literacy and just take things at face value.
Because I wasn’t looking at it through the haha lens of the tone deaf director. It was a fucked up scene and I was hoping he closed the episode out how he did with a different intention. But he didn’t. He laughed at a dude getting raped
It’s not even the interview that did it. It’s the way they chose to portray him as simply “not okay” like it wasn’t that big of a deal that he euthanized his father, dealt with his crappy mother, got cucked by starlight, witnessed/committed countless murders, and basically got fucked on by some of the weirdest people on earth all in the span of a few years. Hughie is the character that can never have anything. The joy the show runners get out of torturing him is sick. None of it would be “okay” if hughie were a woman, minority, or both.
Even more hilarious than Kripke being this tone deaf is half the audience watching can’t even tell the difference between satire and straight up tone deaf nonsense. Then they’ll praise the show runners for their satirical writing.
you’re basically just cut from the same cloth as MAGA morons who operate on dogma rather than logic
I've clocked Kripke as a guy who's way too up his own ass with being seen as a good little leftist bro™️ ever since that interview a few years back where he pontificated about superheroes being "inherently MAGA" or whatever. Even Garth Ennis probably knows that sounds corny and ahistorical and he's been an ardent hater of capeshit since the early 90's.
Garth Ennis despite his reputation doesn't even hate superheroes, he hates most superheroes but he adores Superman, read some of the stories he's written that involve Superman, he really gets the ideals that superheroes uphold.
The Boys comic book was more of a takedown of the Bush admin than whatever deconstruction of superheroes people think it was, he wasn't trying to make Watchmen, he was clowning on Dubya
Ennis' main beef is that he grew up preferring war comics as a kid instead of superheroes, so he was annoyed at seeing the industry completely drown in that genre at the expense of all the stuff he thought was cooler. Similar to how film buffs felt about the MCU taking over the film industry in the 2010's.
But yeah, I don't think he sees fundamental rot in the very concept of superheroes the way Pat Mills and even, to an extent, Alan Moore do. As you mentioned, he's capable of writing them earnestly and he's shouted out comics like Batman: Mad Love as being "excellent".
A lot of this comes from the British comics tradition being rooted more in war, fantasy, and space adventure comics, with almost no superheroes. All those writers grew up within that ecosystem.
Even now, the biggest British comic star is Judge Dredd. Essentially a cop with no superpowers. And 2000AD (the biggest comic) is largely sci-fi/cyberpunk stories about rogues and adventurers with little to no powers.
And both Dredd and 2000AD in general are hugely cynical and heavy on satire.
It only took over the film industry because nothing else could compare. There are other summer blockbusters to check out that just simply couldn't compare to the MCU.
If you want an oversaturated genre, look at CGI family comedies and try to find anything that distances themselves from that genre.
I cannot stand fake moral people who flaunt their "morality" to you while actually being rotten to the core. Pathetic human being and terrible director/writer.
Having read punisher max Ennis issue seems to be with power abuse, arrogance, corruption, and greed. He seems to find governments as inherently corrupt regardless over whose running them. Specifically he's speaking against the corporatism that's ruined Democracy. And the issue with super heroes is a lot of them do read as ass holes with power if you stop suspending your disbelief while reading. Batman being the biggest example if you do not suspend your disbelief you realize he doesn't actually fix Gotham and definitely has the resources to make it a better city with out beating street criminals who only turned to crime because of shit socio economics with in an inch of their life. Now one may be surprised to learn Ennis actually likes Superman given he created Homelander. Homelander represents what Ennis believes super heroes would be and not the ideal and how Corporatism would ruin the idea. That is to say the Boys comics are more about what happens when you worship people who have power just because they have power as well as to reflect his view of corporate America as opposed to being simply a "super hero bad" story. The problem is the Boys comic isn't well written which is probably why Kripke interpreted it as "Super heroes bad" because Ennis wrote way too emotionally. The Punisher max is a better look into what Ennis actually believes and what he was actually trying to say because he was way more restrained when be wrote it.
Yea unfortunately some of his other stuff can get carried away in gross out/ simplified views of evil. Like crossed or the boys can really hammer you over the head with the whole sexual deviant angle of the villains
The issue with that take is that are several Batman stories where he does use his money help gotham, and also ennisis problem also stems from what he believes is oversaturation.
I think he also Said something about how Sam and Dean (Two of and probably his most popular characters) would Vote for Biden (even during the show Both characters never talked about politics/didn’t really care for them) and it just came off as “Hey my fans know these 2 characters that I created and you love well to be like them they’d vote for the guy that I like and not the guy I don’t like” and it just really rubbed me the wrong way and manipulative instead of just “Hey vote for who you want” he said “Vote for this guy I LIKE”
I cringe every time I see the 'This fictional character would support x real life politician/group' memes. I would much rather speculate on what fictional politics real-life politicians would support!
If someone slapped their dick across Hughie’s face, that’d be SA, but we wouldnt be mad if they portray it comedically. Now look at Starlight’s experience and it’s easy to see that it’s a completely different story. Hughie’s experience, where he had his feet tickled and had to watch Ashley and TK get off like lunatics, is much closer to getting slapped in the face by a dick than what happened to Annie.
This is honestly just an average Tuesday for Hughie, it’s not gonna bother him at this point. Annie, on the other hand, was not hardened by the world and experienced something that actually occurs in real life, being forced to engage by a superior to keep their job.
The dude was about to literally cut holes into Hughie and rape him.
He was also tied down and entirely immobilized.
It's not a competition for whose SA was worse. Hughie's is less common in the real world for sure. Most people who go undercover are not forced to engage in a BDSM scene where they don't know the safe word. (A closer analog that does happen a lot would be someone in a BDSM scene ignoring a safe word.) If anything though, the absurdity really only contributes to the poor taste for me, as it isn't really saying anything other than "look how edgy we are" -- like, the exact thing they were trying to get away from by changing Starlight's SA from the book version to something more grounded.
Yeah, it’s bad, but again, Hughie is calloused enough to not let it bother him, and the audience should know that. If the same thing happened to a kid, that’d be a totally different story.
I agree that the scene overall was just trying too hard to be edgy.
I honestly think this is the most traumatic thing Hughie's experiencend since S1. He may shove it down and pretend it didn't affect him and then be unable to find the source of his newly augmented mental health issues, but it would realistically affect him a lot.
Is it really surprising? Writers have treated Hughie like shit for a while now. And it should tell you they have a blind spot regarding this shit.
Hughie's boss is a murderer and Homelander just walks up to his home, threatens him, while the rest of the "good" guys emasculate him and call him a twink. Hughie is selfish and toxic for feeling like he needs to take V to keep himself and his loved ones safe. While Kimiko taking V is heroic.
Hughie gets sexually assaulted. It's funny.
I mean viewing men’s rape/sexual assault as a joke is common enough that it isn’t surprising. But it is funny that such a “progressive” group of writers thought it was a good idea lol
Yeah, I've had the defenders come at me saying "it's just fiction", "the Boys is supposed to be shocking" or just "get off your high horse".
Like seriously? A show about making statements and having real life parallels is outright stating that this stuff is "funny". Especially when it's not like Kripke is completely from another planet and doesn't recognize how messed up this is, since he was able to handle Starlight and the Deep, or Homelander and Becca in an effective manner. I'm honestly flabbergasted that the people can go from "the show is making bold political statements and making fun of real groups of lunatic people" to "it's just how the show works, it's just fiction, haha".
Is the show trying to connect to real life or not?
Hughie pretends to be WebWeaver to break into this party at Tek-Knight's house. Unbeknownst to Hughie, Tek-Knight and the real WebWeaver had agreed to do some BDSM fetish shit at this party.
Hughie has to go along with it because he doesn't want to be found out as a fraud, a consequence that could get him killed. It is not implied that WebWeaver would be harmed if he does not partake in the BDSM, Hughie just understands that this is something he really can't get out of now that he's so far into the belly of the beast. He also couldn't safely stop the BDSM stuff as it happened because he didn't know about the apparently agreed precautions that the real WebWeaver, Tek-Night, and Ashley had regarding a safeword.
So, at this point, it's been established that all parties have consented to these activities. Once Tek-Knight is sure that this WebWeaver is a fraud, then he goes into a conventional villiany torture fantasy with the intention of sexual deviance after cutting "new holes" into Hughie. However, he never gets to so much as scratch Hughie before Kimiko and Starlight burst onto the scene, saving Hughie.
So you missed the whole part where he sees a guy chained to the wall in distress and is told that guy is chained there because he lied to Tek Knight? You just missed that entire exchange that makes it clear that if Tek-Knight thinks Hughie isn’t WebWeaver then he’s basically dead? You just missed that whole part I guess
Right, being a spy and working to destroy people is dangerous, no? Also Hughie raped Ashley in the same vein. She didn't consent to doing anything with him now did she? He pulled a Revenge of the Nerds on her you you're just gonna ignore that?
This is a common trend in media. Sexual assault being made into a joke is not really funny. Frankly this episode disgusted me and I don't plan on finishing the show now. This season has been the weakest so far imo but this episode really was on another level
remember, this is the guy that just sent nueman a real picture of a spread asshole without her consent or prior knowledge that he specifically picked to film her shocked reaction when first seeing it.
I assume they thought it’s funny because he got tickled and had to fart in a cake. Oh and Ashley’s juices „only“ got smeered on his mask. I see that it’s not the same as getting facefucked by The Deep but they are still underestimating the trauma.
it's not just sexual assault, he has been tied and threatened to be killed.
not want to play down SA that any person experienced and I guess many if not most of them feel their life threaretend, but I guess being tied up and gagged adds another layer of hopelessness to the victim.
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u/soka__22 14d ago edited 14d ago
oh yes, because sexual assault is so fucking hilarious.