THE IRONIC THINGS

The first ironic thing is that Hoyt actually has been raped by a woman, recently, and doesn't remember it, so the whole comparing-scars thing they do is not actually funny at all, beyond Jason's funny voices. The second ironic thing is that Jason is processing his ambivalence about this trauma in precisely the way he's processed every bad thing that's ever happened to them: Trying to locate in the shifting puritanism of his cultural values the thing he did that meant he was asking for it. (And as usual, he can only conclude that his healthy sexual appetite is to blame, just like every other time he's had this conversation with himself.)

The most ironic thing to me, though, is that by shifting to this silly, lazy conversation about what kind of imaginary fiction rape is worse than the other kinds takes the spotlight off the story itself, which is about Hotshot and about weres. About an entire kind of supernatural character on this show that is part man and part animal. Just as Sookie is half-faerie, and Eric is half-monster, and Sam has a shadow shifter that fires the gun, weres have a duality in them just like you and I do, and it would be bad genre to leave that unexplored.

Specifically, you have the werewolves, for example, who roam in role-oriented pyramidal "packs" and adhere to a strictly two-partner mating scheme. (Which is in itself interesting because our conception of the wolfpack is actually a cultural misunderstanding born of forced captivity conditions, and the actual natural form of the wolfpack is much closer to the nuclear family, with an Alpha Pair attended by their children, who enforce non-incestuous behavior in the younger ones and eventually leave the pack to form a new family in undefended territory that's just far enough away from the parent pack that they won't accidentally interbreed, and all of this space and territory is described and defended by wolfsong. Isn't that cool?)