Polyamorous Vulpine

This show simply cannot give up on drumming in, 'hi, we're writing a shallow, insincere, exploitative and hateful show. Our text is misogynistic. Our characters are misogynistic. Our metatext is misogynistic and moreover it is trivializing on a staggering, mind-boggling scale towards rape victims (women? allowed to be react negatively to the men who hurt them? Not on this show! Tee-hee, not as long as said men are hot and white.) and simply flat-out, bald-facedly celebrates violent rapists who take pleasure in denigrating and brutalizing young girls, who revel in it, who brag about it to the young women under threat of such actions from them, and who are not even once remorseful for their actions and are never once punished for these actions. We think they're super cool and their behaviour is desirable and 'rogueish' and 'cheeky!''

(Do not even try to argue 'desirable.' They actively reward that behaviour, they actively support that behaviour as part of the personality of a character intended to be attractive and they never, ever narratively condemn it (hey, guess what, having a young woman brutalized, raped, violated, brain-washed, tortured and abused by this man get to push him once without ever actually naming what he did to her is not narratively condemning it) beyond a few rote 'that's bad!' with no repercussions that last longer than forty minutes, it is actively portrayed as part of a 'cool' personality, the list goes on. 'That's ~edgy~ and ~bad~ but so exciting!' is not condemnation.)

Like, constantly. It will not let up. It will not allow me to compartmentalize because it can't let an episode go by without inserting a scene of violated young women, probably victims of rape, posed in sexually available ways and tight clothing, magically forced to be subservient to our pleased and gloating heroes - women who will never be saved, narratively speaking, because I will never know what happens to them, I will never know how they recover, how they or their families process the trauma of at best missing memories, I will never know how they struggle with and process the pain they feel. Their story will be tossed by the wayside with utter, excruciating indifference.

And their audience says 'who cares about harm done to those living, thinking, feeling human beings as long as they have breasts! Here, let me pay you to further celebrate rape culture, that doesn't interfere in my enjoyment at all!'

This show's approach to its women is essentially as if there was a procedural show that involved a young woman being kidnapped and raped and beaten and locked in a cellar, and we're shown this gratuitously throughout the episode - or multiple episodes of an arc - while the criminal swans about being rewarded in every possible way with wealth and pleasure (and when he is thwarted by someone more powerful, someone he can't hurt, he opens that cellar door and he goes down and he hurts her some more to make himself feel better, but the screaming is insignificant because he cries a few pretty, pretty tears while he does so) and at the end of the episode he links arms with our supposed detectives or doctors or cops and walks off into the sunset.

Leaving her locked in the basement, terrified, agonized, victimized, and voiceless. And we aren't supposed to care.

And most horrifying of all, most awful of all, most evocative of how rape culture, abuse, misogyny and the worldwide epidemic of violence against women continues to thrive, their audience fulfills that expectation in every possible way.

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