Jackson Tait / Edge columnist
The Boys was a comic series created by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson in 2006 and in 2019 it was adapted by Amazon and turned into a hit show. Since then, the show has gained a lot of popularity, but it has also ignited conversation about how superheroes would act in the real world and it’s seeming that people would act a lot like how they are in the show. Meaning that the “supe’s” would most likely act in their own interest and not necessarily in the interest of the greater good.
At first glance, The Boys would seem like an overly violent and downright disturbing take on superheroes show, but underneath all the gore it demonstrates a complex take on politics, morals, and power. In season 1 episode 4 it shows Meave and Homelander debating leaving a crashing plane with civilians on it, but Homelander didn’t care because if no one were to survive it wouldn’t tarnish his public image. In a later season he talks about a video that a victim had taken before the crash stating “go ahead. Release it. Let’s light this candle, huh? I mean, sure I’ll lose everything, but then, I’ll have nothing to lose”. Homelander says this because he knows he is so powerful it wouldn’t matter if the whole world hated him because of the absolute chaos that he would be able to cause.
One could argue that other studios like Marvel and DC have been trying to do this and show the darker side of characters like Batman but because of the reputation that the companies have they feared getting bad press even though it is what a lot of viewers are looking for. But since they don’t want to risk having such a strong take on violence, they’ve made things like the Daredevil show that isn’t totally connected to the rest of the franchise in case of backlash from fans. But in their case, most of the darker content they’ve made has gotten a lot of praise from fans because they like that its different and isn’t the same old superhero saving a cat from a burning building type of movie.
The Boys was written the way it was is because since superhero movies and shows had started coming out no one wanted to tackle the darker grittier superhero content in fear of people not liking it, even though the truth is there was and has been a large audience waiting to see superheroes do bad things for the greater good or whatever reason they might have had. The appeal in content like this is that there is a sense of realism when a superhero comes close to killing a bad guy for the sake of stopping him from causing more harm, instead of giving him a big upper cut punch and calling it a day. Much like in The Batman movie where the Batman flips a car with a in it to stop in instead of just doing something popping the tires to stop the antagonist. If you’re looking for a show with a violent and funny take on superheroes that is based in a society much like our own The Boys is for you.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/arts/television/the-boys-amazon.html https://the-boys.fandom.com/wiki/Homelander