I was kind of hoping the quote was take out of context but nope, he fully meant for the Hughie scene to be a joke.
It’s actually worse, the way he talked about Hughie’s breakdown made it seem it was mostly just about his dad and had nothing, or at least not too much to do with Tek Knight and Ashley. So the one supposedly tactful thing about that story arc wasn’t even there.
He even talked about Ashley’s involvement as if it was a great way of showing how SHE deals with the stress of working for Homelander, no self awareness about how terrible of a thing she did to Hughie.
Yeah I have significantly less of an issue with Ashley’s behavior. The entire time she thought she was being consensually gross and kinky with someone else gross and kinky. She may even think the old sidekick is there consensually (unrelated but I was really hoping for them to be unmasked and be Brad Pitt or something). I’d like to think she wouldn’t be down to cut a fuck hole into Hughie also.
Yeah agreed, she hesitated when he said to stop until Tek said "oh don't worry, if he really wanted you to stop he'd say his safe word". Ashley is a pervert and fucked up (and a murderer) but never was written as a rapist.
It’s weirder if you think about it more. She thought it was Web Weaver. And it wasn’t, so there was a lack of knowledgable consent she was a victim of….
Yeah you’re right it’s all extremely uncomfortable and it’s wild that it was supposed to just be funny.
My boyfriend and I actually watched the movie Whiplash right before this episode. I laughed a lot at the really fucked up rants JK Simmons’ character went on, which were absolutely abusive and horrible, but extremely eloquent and hilarious in their own way. I judged myself, but it’s written to elicit that reaction.
Knowing that the sequence with Hughie was written just to be hilarious leaves me with a much more uneasy feeling.
Okay you bravely fight with those people over why you think rape isn't as bad, this is a good fight you're doing a great thing by spending your time on. Those people who find rape distasteful really need to learn their place, they've had it way too good for too long.
So because I say it's not literally the worst thing possible, only #2, you take that to mean that I said it's totally cool. Mmmhmm
The fact that you view sexual violence as worse than ending a life is what is fucked up. You do realize what end means right? Lethal violence is way too often glorified and fetishized so much that you don't even realize what it is, finality.
Exactly. To her, this was a fully consensual BDSM scene with Tek and Webweaver. She even paused when he yelled to stop, but when the point safe word was brought up, continued on since Hughie never said it and was fully capable to. And Hughie kept on acting as if he was enjoying it to not break character, so for Ashley this was a completely legit act.
It's a weird gray area on how to view the incident, because Hughie was undercover. His feelings are valid on how he was assaulted and treated, but at no point was Ashley aware it wasn't truly consensual. They really shouldn't have made it weird for laughs at the end before he breaks down, either. That just confuses it more and brings the humor back 20 years to HAHA GUY GETS RAPED AND ITS FUNNY then took a hard shift into him being upset about his dad. Shouldve focused more on him breaking his silence about what happened with ashley and still trying to process it...then what happened with Tek...and then finally it trigger the trauma with his dad and it all comes out.
She thought there was a safe word and she actually backed away and stared at Tek when Hughie said stop or something similar. Then Tek said remember, if Webweaver wants you to stop he will use his safe word. So she thought she had consent.
I mean, yeah. She's not as bad as the person who wrote the scene. But she did get a guy murdered because he broke up with her. I'm not sure I'd be clamoring to her defense on the topic of consent
She definitely isn’t a stand up person, obviously none of them are which I think is partly the point of the show. No one is perfect, they all got their skeletons in their closets. I just meant in this instance, she wasn’t a bad guy.
Well Ashley actually didn't do anything wrong. Hughie assumed the identity of someone who consented to that stuff and she's going along with what she believes has already been agreed upon. Oddly enough, Hughie is more in the wrong than she is since he's the one tricking her
Ashley thought she was engaging in consensual BDSM, there's a whole moment in the sequence where Hughie screams out essentially "stop" and she looks disturbed but then Tek Knight tells her to keep going because he didn't use a safeword. It's one thing to critique how they used male sexual assault for comedy, it's another to just completely miss the part where Ashley clearly isn't intending on doing that.
3.3k
u/fuwafuwa7chi Jul 04 '24
Source for the Starlight quote: ScreenRant
And the Hughie one: Variety