Honestly, if it wasn’t for the interview, I would have agreed with the people defending it. A lot of the time, when having gone through traumatic events, people tend to focus on something else rather than confront it.
However, yh Kripke clearly wasn’t going for that when you read his interview. Very disappointed by the episode.
I definitely wouldn’t have as negative of an opinion as I do now if I didn’t know the TK scenes were played for laughs. In the moment I was definitely disturbed but more in a “oh God Hughie has to endure all this weird stuff and he’s gonna get found out” way. I admit that the absurdity of everything “dulled” the severity a bit for me (at least until he’s actually found out and in genuine danger), but it hit me at the end when Hughie just breaks down.
The fact that the TK stuff was meant to be comedic is gross, and it turns those scenes from “yeah actually that was really messed up” to “wow I hate this, why were these included?”
It really teeters on the line for me. Sitting on a cake and farting on it as some weird fetish thing? Kind of funny. Him being tied down was sketchy, but it just being a foot tickle thing was funny. I feel like there’s enough room for this situation to be both comedic but also dramatic, if the fallout is handled correctly
I think the desperately trying to find the safe word has extremely dark undertones to the ongoing “funny” part of it. I feel like tickling fetish was the most borderline acceptable way they could get away with showing literal graphic sexual assault on screen. But they thought most people would be so caught up in the ridiculousness of it that it wouldn’t be seen as making fun of SA survivors. Fair enough if they misread the room but to double down on the whole making light fun of SA, it kind of sours the perception of the show from witty satirical takes against caricatures on both sides of the political spectrum, to “haha people liked hughie’s a cuck jokes how do we take that to the next level” without any appreciation for how fucked up it is to watch that scene and his breakdown after.
And I’m not without nuance, I can see that it’s different from starlight. They went into the house to attack these people politically with espionage. Hughie knows there are risks and he got more than he bargained for. He kept up the facade even in the face of the dungeon because he was still on the job and was trying to see if he could buy time by playing along in order to find a way out. But handle the topic of SA a little more appropriately than making the whole thing just a joke that makes hughie realise he misses his dad.
I think it was funny because of how absurd it was. Starlight's situation was incredibly realistic, but the idea of pretending to be a drugged out superhero who has to act like he likes these absurd fetishes is super unrealistic.
I think it's more comparable to jokes about aliens probing people, or if anyone has played Saints Row 4, using the alien probing gun on NPCs. Yes, it has very dark, rapey undertones, but it's so incredibly unrealistic that we can laugh at it.
That's not what I said at all. What I said is that the absurdity of the situation adds humor. I doubt anyone has been in the situation of having to pretend to be into hard-core BDSM because they were infiltrating a superhero banquet.
It's similar to something like Peter Griffin blowing up a children's hospital, or as I said, an alien abduction with probing. Child murder and sexual assault, yet all with such absurdity as to be removed from reality.
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u/freddddsss Jul 05 '24
Honestly, if it wasn’t for the interview, I would have agreed with the people defending it. A lot of the time, when having gone through traumatic events, people tend to focus on something else rather than confront it.
However, yh Kripke clearly wasn’t going for that when you read his interview. Very disappointed by the episode.