this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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MAGA fools needed 4 seasons to understand that The Boys is making fun of them.
Didn't a lot of republicans also get mad after season 3‽
It's very easy to read Billy Butcher as a right wing reactionary vigilante, because he's written as a caricature of an 80s/90s action hero.
It's easy to read Homelander as a Woke, Soy, Cucked establishment liberal because - early on - that's exactly the role he fills.
The show has gone downhill as the (relatively thin) subtlety in the narrative has worn away. By season 4, they were all but branding "Good Guy" and "Bad Guy" on people's heads, in a show that originally did at least pretend to struggle with morality in what amounts to a guerrilla war.
That's before you get into the compulsive need to make gross out humor the Cruz of every episode.
It kinda does start off with a member of the Seven killing the main characters girlfriend, so good/bad should be well established for anyone who's awake
Starlight's main function in season 1
This is all, oh so thinly veiled and conveyed that I am sure it went over most peoples heads.
Oh, by season 3 Homelander fucks a nazi that is a member of the 7. For people that still do not get it. If you align with a nazi state, like say russia, it makes you a nazi.
Like how the fuck do you need a talk of concentration camps to finally catch on?
This is pitched as tragic, but it isn't reactionary. A-Train is a pro-athlete-turned-media-celebrity who goes out of his way to stay out of politics and simply collect a paycheck. And the fact that he's a poc, a drug user, and a Hollyweird Celebrity all scratch certain itches in the conservative brain pan. Rush Limbaugh would have all the same vile shit to say about A-Train as he had to say about Donavan McNabb.
Jack Quaid's character arc - particularly in that first season - is in his struggle over the best response to the loss of his girlfriend. What makes him "good" is his ability to move beyond the petty impulse for immediate vengeance, stay clear of the knee-jerk anti-Super bigotry that Butcher falls into, and work towards a revolutionary struggle that challenges the underlying social system. That's what makes him "left coded" in the end, and its not quite so heavy handed inside those first two seasons. Its also easy to lose track of that arc when you're wading through fountains of blood and rivers of poop-jokes.
The show really feels itself in Season 3, as you get into a larger cast of characters with more complex relationships to the Supers and to one another. But it falls off in Season 4 and 5 as everything becomes excessively black-and-white, in an effort to discourage misreadings of the material by piling on cheap fetishistic tropes. Its not enough for Homelander to be a guy who commits massacres of civilians on a whim. He's got to be a creep and a pervert. All the bad guys have to carry out some kind of sexual fetish, while the good guys need to be in these normal-ish largely cis-het relationships.
As the showrunners increasingly lean on sexuality to code for good/evil, the moral statement of the show stops being about peaceful coexistence or egalitarian economic reform or de-militarization and ends up asserting the need for good guys to have vanilla sex lives.
It is very easy to miss that Butcher is ping-ponging between:
People might easily miss these when he says oi cunt as a distraction.
Also, it might be easily missed but all his using of establishment and grinding against it, while championing people might get lost on people. Butcher does his oi cunt I shoot ya gobba off with a shooty-shoty, it is bong o'clock way too much so the fact that he is closer to a redfash might get lost on people. Also because actual redfash historical figures are rarely portrayed as anything but a dumb baddie.
I'm not sure how anyone can read Homelander as anything but a right winger. The name pretty much gives it away, and even if it didn't the fact that he has an American Flag costume and surrounds himself in American Flag stuff should be a dead giveaway.
Its not that he's right-wing so much as his the Good Guy.
His early-show character arc is one of a feckless image-obsessed corporate prop. As the show progresses, he breaks out of the "cucked" liberal mindset and asserts himself as an ultra-nationalist for the benefit of an insecure and gullible media audience. So a right-winger can read Homelander's arc as a kind of Hero's Journey, from captive tool of the (((globalists))) into a fully realized superhero.
So, using a JBP-inspired reading of the material, he starts out as a liberal in season 1 and self-actualizes as a fascist by season 3. And this makes him the show's protagonist, as a result.
He'd hardly be the first liberal to wrap himself in an American flag.