The Boys has never been a series to shy away from controversy, but some viewers think the show went too far with its latest episode. Making matters worse was the response showrunner Eric Kripke had about the scene in question.
In the sixth episode of The Boys Season 4, Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) goes undercover as a superhero for a recon mission, winding up in a parody of the Batcave that’s much more sexualized. There’s a scene where he is sexually assaulted by Ashley (Colby Minifie) and Tek Knight (Derek Wilson), and after the experience, he shares with Annie (Erin Moriarty) how it made him feel violated. Following the episode’s premiere, some viewers took to social media to condemn the scene, uncomfortable with the idea of using sexual assault as comedy fodder.
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The episode has also been getting further criticism from the press. This includes a Forbes article by Erik Kain that addresses how sexual assault was treated much more delicately earlier in the series when it happened with Annie and The Deep (Chace Crawford). It’s argued that depictions of sexual assault where the victims are male should be treated with the same sensitivity. Additionally, Kain and others are taking exception with how Kripke called the scene “hilarious” in response to the controversy.
When asked by Jennifer Maas of Variety about why Hughie was written to be sexually assaulted by his hero after the death of his father, Kripke said, “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 off the incarceration. So that was one. Tek Knight was already set up to be a freak, so we were kind of already halfway there.”
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Kripke added, “And in the comics, there’s a great storyline where Hughie goes undercover disguised as a superhero. That was a story that Jack had always asked us to do. So part of it is, always be careful what you ask the writers for. Then we finally had this Webweaver character and the idea of Spider-Man going down to be kink tickled in the Batcave is just too good to pass up. I’m sorry, I just couldn’t leave that on the table.”
“Kink tickled? I’m sorry, this wasn’t ‘kink’ this was entirely non-consensual,” Kain’s Forbes article noted in response. “The fact that the show’s creator views it as ‘hilarious’ and waves it off as some kind of funny sex dungeon scene is more disturbing than the scene itself.”
Kain added, “Imagine if he said the Starlight scene was ‘hilarious’ and waved it off the same way as he does with Hughie’s horrific scene. There’s a lot of stigma around male victims of sexual assault, and rather than tackling that in a serious manner, The Boys just amplifies that stigma. It’s hypocritical and more than a little revolting. I’d call it a shame, but that’s not quite strong enough… Reprehensible. That’s the word I’m looking for.”
What happens next remains to be seen, but it’s all building up to one last season of The Boys. Ahead of the fourth season’s premiere, the show was renewed for a fifth and final season.
Source: X, Forbes, Variety
