spring break, i believe in you!

YAYYY YIPPEE IM SO GLAD YOU ASKED

so first i have to establish that like half of the men on the show engage with river in a psychosexual way. like spider, duffy, and hobbs all individually make comments and act in ways that’s aggressively sexual to river. i’m not even saying that in a shipping way it’s just interesting. i don’t know where im going with this but what about river makes every man who hates him in a 300 mile radius want to beat him up while also being weirdly sexual about it? those moments are often played for laughs (especially hobbs in s3) and don’t often have the same undercurrent of danger that frank’s actions do. and i think the show did a really great balance of that because they ran the risk of coming across as either making attraction between men the butt of the joke or excusing male sexual violence as a joke and they did neither (imo)!! which often in media i see both are fumbled intensely. instead they use this expectation as a way to separate frank to mark his horrific nature. his actions towards his sons aren’t humorous in the same way spider/duffy/hobbs are

ALSO i realized as i was typing; often when media does stuff like this (making sexual comments at a characters expense without intending it to have Heavy Meaning) it often mocks the person receiving the comments. i think slow horses is different because a lot of the time it’s clear that spider/duffy/hobbs are making out of pocket comments/behaviors and river isn’t the one mocked for this. we’re aligned with river in that moment of ???lmao??? instead of laughing at river. it helps that all three of these characters are antagonistic towards the characters we want to root for, but aren’t as dangerous as frank. that minimal level of power they sit at, both internal to the narrative and external, allows us to laugh AT THEM in those moments instead of at river. frank, however, has intense power internally and externally to the narrative (as he is one of the main villains of the show, and river has not been able to outsmart him). when he does psychosexual stuff towards river, instead of having that same humor we are like oh my god what the fuck. there’s a lot more worry for river and fear of what frank is capable of, and the incest adds to that level of horror. the way he acts towards his sons establishes this level of ohhh this is different and worrying. tldr narratively important incest?