#tbh i do think it was doing something else. like i donβt think the point was ever to portray a completely healthy bdsm relationship yknow#like i think if thatβs the goal there are immediately points taken off for the very fact of who these characters are#kant and bison are both constantly lying each other up until ep8
@akkpipitphattana I both agree and disagree with you I think?
I agree that the point was not to portray a perfect bdsm relationship (what is a perfect bdsm relationship. what does it look like. how do you portray it.) If I am completely honest I think after what they both did to each others (the lies and breaches of trust and ya know. forcing someone to jump overboard while tied up, among other things), the actual healthy bdsm thing would be to look for other partners, and I. certainly didn't want them to do that.
At the same time they could have portrayed a not-horrible bdsm relationship slowly being build. I think that's what they did, in fact (they are certainly kinky till the end, at the very least), but a lot of people disagree and I can't really fault their reasoning? (well. i can in some cases - but those are extreme cases)
But the part of your tags I really want to chew on are those that come after: i think kink and bdsm is an aspect of their dynamic and an aspect of bisonβs character specifically#and i would have loved to see more of that dynamic in canon#but i feel like the bdsm aspect was almost more of a litmus test than an actual exploration of kink. do you know what i mean#like it was about establishing first a lack of trust (bison insists on a safe word but kant will never use it and in one of the two scenes#we get bison tells kant he hopes he doesnβt use his safe word)#and then eventually showing that trust was gained (kant safewording on the island and then using it as a nickname after in ep12 when theyre#established and settled. albeit separated by a jail cell but like yknowβ) because it's not an either or situation, to me. Like, the litmus test is the kink exploration. And the kink exploration tests the themes. Just like Kant (&Style!) having ulterior motives while Bison (&Fadel!) have secrets serves the themes of seduction and love (how honest are you, with someone you want to seduce? how honest can you let yourself be? doesn't everyone want the person they're pursuing to see the best in them and not the worst? but what if they do see the worst and love you anyway? etc), Kant & Bison's bdsm experimentations highlights questions around trust, violence, coercion and vulnerability that are pretty fundamental to the story but that are also, simply, kinky!
This is indeed best exemplified with the mutual dubcon scene (who's taking advantage of who? -well- is it possible for the person inflicting pain to be the one who's being taken advantage of? -yes- is sexual violence an appropriate punishment for someone who was attempting - coded - sexual violence? -no- who wins, here? -no one but the captain- is it still "kinky" if Kant cannot meaningfully say no and Bison cannot meaningfully say yes, and vice-versa? -the layer of fiction means it's kinky to me-) and the safewording scene. In one real life intrudes on kink, in the other kink intrudes on real life (and saves the day, we cheer) but also with it comes the implication that while Bison did not intend for the beach vacation torture session to be an unnegociated M/s scene, it wasn't not that either. You see what I mean? You can't separate the themes, the exploration of K&B's relationship outside of kink and the exploration of kink in and out of universe. They're all woven together.
And then there's the fact that the show keeps doing out-of-universe nods to kink, porn and sex even in non sexy scenes (the motel, the various meetings with an half-naked authority figure, quite a bit of the prison arc) while presenting us with characters who are kinky, sexual beings who are obviously familiar with porn/sex-work (Fadel&Style's garage roleplay, Kant's little caddy stunt, quite a bit of the prison arc) so the line is just exceedingly porous all throughout the show, tying it all together even more tightly.
Because of all of that, I ultimately think the show did explore BDSM in a mostly satisfying way and that it could have been more explicit about it after the island and that it was also doing something else - at least something else than what the people who feel it did not explore BDSM seem to mean by that.
and finally there's also the question of "did they tone down bison's sadism in the end" and the answer is yes but imo that does not negate it, in the same way that vegas saying to pete "you're not my pet" does not actually negate their dynamic in kp. if a show takes the time to establish something i tend to assume it's still there until very explicitely dismantled, and I did not think that was the case here.
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