[Amazon’s subversive smash hit has irked some fans with a more
overtly political season that dares to position the show’s villain
as a Donald Trump stand-in]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE
WHY SUPERHERO SATIRE THE BOYS TURNED OFF ITS RIGHTWING FANBASE
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Stuart Heritage
June 28, 2022
The Guardian
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_ Amazon’s subversive smash hit has irked some fans with a more
overtly political season that dares to position the show’s villain
as a Donald Trump stand-in _
A still from The Boys., Photograph: Amazon Prime Video
There seems to be a low-key competition within the culture at the
moment as to who can produce the worst sort of fan. For years, Star
Wars has been the far and away winner, with fans bitching and crowing
like wounded animals any time the series dares to venture out of its
very narrow parameters. And Rick and Morty had a decent shot at the
title a few years ago, when fans furious that their favourite show had
the temerity to hire a female writer published her personal details
online.
But now, thanks to a large and increasingly dunderheaded minority, it
would appear that the show with the worst fans alive is currently
Amazon’s The Boys. These fans have just twigged that the show’s
main villain is actually a villain, and they’re absolutely furious.
For those of you who haven’t watched it – and, really, you should
– The Boys is a satirical comic book adaptation about a team of
vigilantes tasked with taking down the unchecked powers of a band of
superheroes. The de facto leader of the superheroes is Homelander, a
Superman analogue dressed in a Stars and Stripes cape. Homelander
presents a smiling, all-American front to the public, but in private
uses his powers to intimidate and murder his rivals. He is, without
exaggeration, one of the most terrifying TV villains for years.
The problem is, some of Homelander’s behaviour this season has
seemed a little familiar. He’s given an open platform on a rightwing
news network. His popularity soars after he starts saying the worst
things possible. He becomes the head of an over-reaching corporation
and immediately finds himself out of his depth. He’s a
self-destructive mixture of professional ambition and personal
insecurity. In other words, as if it needed to be spelled out,
Homelander is Donald Trump.
Talking to Rolling Stone
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Homelander recently, showrunner Eric Kripke said: “All he ever wants
is to be the most powerful person he can be, even though he’s
completely inadequate in his abilities to handle it. So it’s white
male victimisation and unchecked ambition. And those issues just
happened to reflect the guy who, it’s just still surreal to say it,
was fucking president of the United States.”
This should not have come as a surprise to anyone at all. The comic
book that The Boys is based on was originally a snarling reaction to
George W Bush’s post-9/11 policies. Two years ago, when a Trump
supporter attended a rally dressed as Homelander, Kripke tweeted
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“Um … are they actually watching the show?” In its previous
season, The Boys made Homelander a rapist who fell in love with a
Nazi.
And yet, a small but vocal band of right-leaning fans have only just
realised that they’re the punchline. As well as Homelander’s
misdeeds, this season also introduced Blue Hawk, a Blue Lives Matter
superhero who kills an unarmed Black man. And last week, writer Ryan
Broderick posted
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outraged screengrabs from Reddit. One read: “Was really liking Blue
Hawk until the end of his speech’. Another read “There’s no need
to apologize for helping eliminate criminals.” These fans, Broderick
claimed, have been patiently waiting for Homelander’s redemption
arc. Now that it seems as if it won’t be coming, they’re angry
about being tricked into liking the villain.
If this is true, it’s mind-blowing. Homelander has never been
anything but the arch-villain of the entire show. The very first
episode ended with him murdering the mayor of Baltimore (by blowing up
his plane, no less) to quell a potentially negative news cycle. He is
as unequivocally, irredeemably evil as any character you will ever
encounter, and the fact that people have been missing this is truly
bewildering.
Perhaps the problem is The Boys’ insistence on having its cake and
eating it. The show tries to make a stand against issues like racism,
totalitarianism and toxic masculinity. But it does all this under the
guise of a show full of violence, cool fight scenes, exploding heads
and, as of last week’s episode, a man having sex with an octopus.
Perhaps, just perhaps, some people are so blinded by all the
whizz-bang outrageousness that they can’t see anything deeper
beneath that.
Where that leaves The Boys is anyone’s guess. This year’s season
has been much more urgently political than ever before, and this is
what you sense Kripke wants people to take from it. But with so many
people missing the point because they just want to see people get
their faces lasered off, it leaves him in a weird predicament. What
does he do? Tone down the gore and the show becomes boring. Tone down
the underlying messages and it becomes soulless. Hopefully, though,
he’ll do none of this. Hopefully he’ll just carry on as normal,
and let all the idiot fans destroy themselves in the process.
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