Right-Wing ‘The Boys’ Fans Grapple With Homelander Being A Villain, Confusing Everyone

A civil war broke out on the show's subreddit after this week's episode.

One of the main issues was that some fans thought that racist superhero cop Blue Hawk was making a good point when he attacked a room of black people. What's the other issue? The focus was on Homelander. As of this past week, Homelander has become a mirror image of Donald Trump, going on the equivalent of Fox News to talk about free speech, and clearing out valuable agencies.

Everyone looking at this from the outside is confused. Some people may not have understood that Homelander was a villain. Broderick said they were hoping for a redemption arcs for him.

The show isn't doing this. There are someredeemable villains on the show, but Homelander is not one of them, and the show has been political from the beginning.

• Stormfront, the secretly Nazi hero from last season, shares the name of a literal white supremacist website. Her entire storyline was about building a movement rooted in Nazism without saying that out loud. A now-famous quote from her: “People love what I have to say. They believe in it. They just don't like the word Nazi.”
• Blue Hawk is a direct allegory for police brutality in America, with this last episode parroting police talking points (“there’s more crime in black areas so more policing is needed”) and by the end he is literally shouting, “All Lives Matter! Supe Lives Matter!”
• Homelander is…a fascist sociopath, always has been. Stormfront was his one true love and now this season, he is embracing her followers as his own. He previously was given direct George W. Bush quoteson the show, and now has fallen into being a fully-fledged parody of Donald Trump, cultivating supporters that are falling for his “straight talk.” For Homelander, the racism or classism isn’t even the main point, he’s just a massive narcissist. This is…all extremely explicit. Antony Starr himself even retweeted the aforementioned Rolling Stone article, Yes, Homelander on ‘The Boys’ Is Supposed to Be Donald Trump.

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This is something that has been used in fiction before. From Tyler Durden to Tony Soprano, villains have been glamorized in the past, but Homelander seems like a new level because he is commentary on specific elements of the political right. The problem is, what he is parodying was already so close to parodying itself in the first place, that those same people are falling for it twice, once in real life, now in a fictional series, where they don't understand why he's an irredeemable

It is strange but America is at the moment. Next week, Herogasm, we will be talking about The Boys in different ways.

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