How A Horny Uni Rom‑Com Handles Sexual Assault And Consent

CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses sexual assault.

There are spoilers on spoilers on spoilers in this piece. You’ve been warned!

Off Campus is being sold as the horniest show on TV right now. It’s got fake dating, hot hockey boys and sex on the kitchen bench. What more could you want?? But under all the smutty TikTok edits sits a bigger question: can a rom‑com actually hold sexual assault responsibly, or should it stay in its lane?

You see, Off Campus isn’t just a dreamy uni romance. Hannah’s (Ella Bright) whole relationship to sex, music and her own body has been warped by a high‑school assault, and Garrett (Belmont Cameli) is still unpacking childhood domestic violence. It’s horny, sure, but it’s also asking what responsible representation of sexual violence looks like when your show is literally marketed as a comfort watch.

What “responsible” actually looks like

When I spoke to Full Stop Australia’s director of clinical and client services, Tara Hunter, her checklist wasn’t about how graphic a scene is. It was about where the story puts its weight.

“I think the [important] stuff is around a realistic depiction of what the impacts are — they are vast and varied for people that have experienced something like sexual violence, or in the context of DV or coercive controlling environments,” she told PEDESTRIAN.TV.

The red flags, for her, are when narratives lean into victim‑blaming instead of “holding that level of responsibility with the perpetrator or the person causing the harm”.

She also pushed back on the stock “hysterical victim” image.

“Not everyone turns up and collapses and is in hysterical tears,” she said. “Often people are quite composed or they might actually be quite distant… and yes, people can also be really distressed.”

Off Campus sits in that quieter space. We see Hannah blocked creatively, avoiding intimacy, talking about how much work she’s done in therapy before she even thinks about trying to orgasm again.

Showrunner Louisa Levy told PEDESTRIAN.TV they built her arc around that tension.

“Hannah herself kind of defines the line, which is she doesn’t want to be defined by [the assault], so she doesn’t live her life in that way,” she said.

“But by kind of repressing it and not sharing it, she’s inadvertently allowing it to define her life.”

Eventually, Levy said, “she can share it with her best friend, but also can release it and not let it define her. And that enables her to find her voice again.”

Trauma porn vs aftermath

One of the boldest choices in Off Campus is what it doesn’t show. We never see Hannah’s assault. No party flashback, no grainy replay — we just see the fallout.

Hunter is firmly in favour of that. She talked about what she bluntly calls “trauma porn” –— “the sensationalising, really quite confronting, traumatic material”, and how unnecessary it is.

You can tell a story about sexual violence, she argued, “without having to go into the very, very depths of that very graphic material”.

She pointed to Heartbreak High showing the impacts of Harper’s (Asher Yasbincek) attempted assault without forcing audiences through a brutal scene. Off Campus takes a similar tack.

Levy put it simply: “We never actually show any of the trauma, because it’s not about the trauma. It’s about surviving.”

The show wants to stay “positive, optimistic, joyful… in the way that the books are”, while still allowing the “depth and nuance and emotion” of Hannah’s trauma to sit underneath.

That’s a very different vibe to something like I May Destroy You. Michaela Coel’s series is rightly praised as genius for centring a survivor and showing the “ongoing, uneven” process of healing, but watching it destroyed me and a lot of women I know. We felt seen, but at a cost.

Not every depiction needs to make you relive the worst night of your life to be meaningful.

Horny healing and romance as “fix”

Then there’s that scene: Hannah and Garrett naked, sitting opposite each other, not touching, maintaining eye contact while they masturbate. It’s one of the horniest things on TV, but it’s also the first time I’ve seen a survivor’s pleasure treated as the main event rather than a bonus prize for the boyfriend.

Hunter thinks scenes like that can quietly help people watching “see themselves in that, and think, ‘Gee, actually what’s happened to me is normalised,’” instead of just feeling broken.

She’s seen how media can tip people into seeking help. Although not a fictional TV show, after Concetta Caristo spoke about her own childhood traumas on I’m A Celebrity and donated her winnings to Full Stop, the organisation saw an uptick in people ringing their services. “Some people were ringing [our services] and saying, ‘I haven’t told anyone this for 20 years’,” said Hunter.

Flinders University Associate Professor Claire Henry, who literally wrote the book on rape‑revenge, sees the upside and the risk.

She told me “mainstream romance is trying to integrate trauma‑informed storytelling”, where reclaiming intimacy after assault lives inside a love story rather than in a separate “serious” drama. But as she pointed out, if the story is still built around a romance arc, the recovery narrative “is still going to be shaped towards the heterosexual coupling and that intimacy as a resolution”.

That can “re‑centre the romance rather than the survivor’s autonomy” and feed into a familiar trope: romance as healing, the idea that the right partner is the cure.

You can feel that tension in Off Campus — and in something like It Ends With Us, which is marketed as a love story (remember when we were told to “grab your girls, wear your florals, and go see it”?) while wading deep into intimate partner violence. Both want to say “this is what abuse looks like”, but both flirt with the fantasy that love and sex are where the healing lives.

When rom-coms are the problem

Part of why all this matters is that rom‑coms have historically been… cooked. Bridget Jones’s Diary treats Daniel Cleaver’s (Hugh Grant) sleazy emails and groping as cheeky office banter. Love Actually gives us a Prime Minister fixating on a junior staffer and that cue‑card “romantic” stalking. As Henry put it, “rom‑coms have a bad reputation for like these classic tropes that blur consent… [they] trained audiences to kind of misrecognise coercion as romance”, to read pressure as passion.

Off Campus is clearly trying to push back on that. It makes consent explicit. It centres Hannah’s “yes” and “no”. It lets her want sex again without pretending that wanting sex means she’s “over it”.

Where it falls into old patterns is the on‑ice revenge fight, where Garrett beats up Hannah’s alleged rapist while she’s nowhere in sight. Henry pointed out this “proxy avenger” trope is straight out of rape‑revenge: a boyfriend “takes revenge on a rapist”, and the story becomes about his rage and honour instead of her agency. Hunter sees similar dynamics in real life when friends or family respond to disclosures by taking over, instead of giving survivors choices.

To its credit, the show does at least have Hannah call him out afterwards and restate that she never asked for that. But his punch‑up still gets the big, cinematic payoff. Her messy, boring, very real healing mostly plays out in smaller moments.

The thing that keeps me soft on Off Campus is the duality. Survivors don’t get to put life on pause while they process what happened. We still go to class, crush on stupidly charming hockey boys, obsess over BookTok. We still want our rom‑com lives, even when we’re carrying something huge.

Levy gets that. Hannah “doesn’t want to be defined” by her assault, but pretending it never happened means “she’s inadvertently allowing it to define her life”. The show lets her be both: a girl in a horny campus rom‑com, and a survivor whose trauma is real, ongoing and not neatly solved by a boyfriend.

Off Campus certainly doesn’t nail every beat, but it does more than most. It avoids trauma porn, centres aftermath, lets a survivor claim her own pleasure, and at least interrogates the fantasy of the avenging boyfriend. For a show marketed as the horniest rom‑com on streaming, that’s a surprisingly responsible place to land — and maybe the closest thing we’ve got to a rom‑com world where women like Hannah can be traumatised and still be allowed to want to thrive.

Lead image: Prime Video