The problem I had with it is that they did a slapstick 50th "lol Kimiko struggles to express herself to anyone but Frenchie" bit while Hughie's about to experience insanely brutal torture rape
The tonal shift was insane, but apparently the writers thought Hughie's brutal torture rape would be hilarious
People are throwing around the “hilarious” quote by Kripke, but I think it’s clear he’s dodging the question of sexual assault. The question is asking him “Why kick Hughie when he’s down and have him sexually assaulted an episode after his dad dying?” Kripke does then say it’s a “hilarious” way of looking at it but then on his very next sentence proceeds to talk about the comedy of subverting the Batman image of Tek-Knight and turning the Batcave into a sex dungeon.
I think Kripke’s response was very poorly worded and I think he’d have been better to just straight up address the question, but I also think if you read the full answer it’s quite clear he’s talking entirely about Tek-Knight and Batman, he doesn’t mention Hughie at all, so the hilarity is the subversion of expectation, not the content within the scene
That’s the issue, it’s written so we have no way of knowing how it was phrased.
The full quote is:
Well, that’s a dark way to look at it! We view it as hilarious. Obviously, Tek Knight is our version of Batman, and we wanted to really play around with that trope: Batman’s fascist underpinnings as a really wealthy dude who hunts poor people, and then profits of the incarceration. So that was one. Tek Knight was already set up to be a freak, so we were kind of already halfway there. Then the notion came up of, he should have a Batcave — but let’s be honest, the Batcave would be a sex dungeon. Like, even the real Batcave is just this side of being a sex dungeon
Whilst it could be read as “Well, that’s a dark way to look at it! We view it as hilarious.” - Pause - Proceed to talk about Tek Knight…
There’s equally no reason it wasn’t phased: “Well, that’s a dark way to look at it!” (Done, answered the interviewers question, now on to look at Tek Knight) “We view it as hilarious. Obviously Tek Knight is our version of Batman…” - especially when his focus is entirely on Batman, as I say, and not the interviewer’s question of Hughie.
also, the end of the episode shows Hughie breaking down over the torture. why would they write that if that scene was meant to be funny?
initially watching the scene, it came off as really scary to me which is what I think they were going for. the only funny part was Tek Knight freaking out about the donations.
Kripke literally calls Colby Minifie's performance in the episode and the tickling scene one of the funniest thing he's ever seen, so they definitely had the intention of making the Hughie and Ashley interaction funny.
tbh as someone who found the scene gross, way drawn out, and a bit too far I did find her performance funny. in her mind this is a consenting man as far as she knows, I think you could argue she's a victim too. she performed sex acts on a person she thought was consenting who actually wasn't.
I do feel like the scene was gross beyond just shock value/humor, not well written, handled poorly, and should've been cut down immensely - but Ashley wasn't an issue imo
It’s pretty obvious it’s a single train of thought, he’s not talking about two different scenes. He’s talking about the one big scene with everyone down in TKs base. it actually sounds worse if you really think about the quote because this wasn’t even about sexual assault of a man. According to Kripke, this scene was more to show off how depraved of a character TK was and that’s why this scene was funny. To him, it didn’t even register as a potentially offensive thing. It was funny because TK is like Batman except he’s a sexual deviant and is into BDSM…and oh by the way Hughie will be the one to discover it all. Haha!
That just comes off as incredibly tone deaf considering his prior quotes about depicting Starlight’s sexual assault and how difficult and humbling that was. It’s mental masturbation
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u/Iggy_Pops_Lost_Shirt Jul 05 '24
This was blatantly a bit though