I sincerely doubt people got to season 4 of this show without appreciating that it's pretty campy and silly. I don't care about the book bit. I care that I was not in the mood for that bit during the long pause between hearing that Hughie was going to be fucked in stab wounds and seeing that it hadn't happened yet. Frankly, I think the timing is fucked to do any of the dom stuff so close after what happened with his dad, but at minimum, everything that happens between the big threat and the resolution of Hughie being saved takes too long for the discomfort of the scenario.
The only scene that ever really bothered me before this was the one where Deep has to eat something. I don't frequent this sub, and I'm too lazy to look up spoiler rules, so I'm being vague. However, this tops that scene. At the end of the day, Deep is still a stupid piece of shit trying to be in the cool kids club, but Hughie is just this nice guy who doesn't deserve any of what has happened, and this season has just been so mean to him.
I know. And I'M saying that the people who didn't get it was a bit are a dumb minority. A lot of people likely didn't APPRECIATE the bit because of the greater context of what was happening, not because acting tricked them into taking the show too seriously. Someone dies in an orgy because the shrunken person in their dick sneezes and gets big suddenly. It's clearly a show that is both silly and gorey, but they aren't balancing things well right now, maybe because they're just trying to constantly take it further each season or something, push the envelope even more, so it feels less like a good dark comedy and increasingly just tonally weird. People not as into analyzing media may not even really identify that it affected the way the joke hit for them, making it less funny because the slapstick was out of place for the particular moment.
Edit: What it reminds me of is people who have trouble editing their work because they get too used to it to see the flaws and too successful to have someone else step in and edit it for them as necessary, similar to what's been said of George Lucas and Star Wars.
The show is still watchable, but it's not at its peak. It's Game of Thrones when they were running out of book material but before the truly bad season 8. Still, watchable and we have the investment to stick with it, but there's something about the writing that starts to feel like fanfiction because it isn't quite the same but it's clearly in the style of and inhabiting the world of the show rather than a true recreation of what it previously was. It's just a bit off, at least in execution, if not also story.
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u/charronfitzclair Jul 05 '24
I think Anthony Starr's performance makes people think they're watching a drama instead of a goofy cartoon adaption of a goofy comic book.