Perhaps the best example of “The Boys'” comparative restraint is the way that Homelander, while certainly a rapist, rarely actually threatens a female character with rape. His sex scenes on the show are weird and unsettling, but they’re undeniably far more creative than most of what we’ve seen on TV. It’s hard to consider his scenes with Stillwell in season 1 as strictly consensual, considering the massive power imbalance, but these scenes are laden with so much subtext about Homelander’s psyche.
Meanwhile, you can go back to most of the sexual assault scenes of “Game of Thrones” and look at what the scene is telling us about the rapist in question. Often the show would feature a minor character abusing some serving girl for seemingly no purpose except to establish that he’s a bad guy, so that a character like Arya or Jon or the Hound can murder them and the audience will feel good about it. Sansa’s rape scene is the same thing, but bigger: it exists to further establish Ramsay as an evil character so that it’ll be more satisfying later when Sansa feeds him to his dogs.
Homelander’s evil is put on display constantly throughout “The Boys,” but the way the writers go about showing his evil is far more creative than anything “GOT” showrunners Benioff and Weiss ever came up with. You can call Homelander’s many acts of sadism over the series disturbing or frustrating, but you can’t call them lazy writing. Season 3 set up a dynamic between him and Starlight that could’ve easily, in the hands of Benioff and Weiss, resulted in a rape or attempted rape scene, but the show wisely avoided going in that direction.
