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Television shows getting terrible reviews isn’t anything new. But there’s something fascinating happening with the fourth season of The Boys. It’s not just that people have suddenly turned on Amazon’s hit superhero satire, it’s who those people are and why they’ve changed their tune that’s so interesting.
Since premiering to critical praise on June 13, alleged fans have been review-bombing the show’s latest season on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB. The most vocal and eye-catching of these takedowns pronounce that the show has gone “woke” or is so obviously “anti-Donald Trump.”
They’re not wrong, but they’re excruciatingly late to this observation.
Since the show’s inception in 2019, The Boys has been a superhero allegory about Trump, dangerous authoritarianism, political fanaticism, Nazis, and America’s sway toward fascism. Its showrunner, Eric Kripke, has said as much interview after interview: This is a show explicitly about the allure of Trump and a critique of corporate America. The only thing that’s seemingly different in this fourth season is that it skates so close to what’s happening in the US now: Homelander (Antony Starr), a Superman-like sociopath who functions as the Trump stand-in, is facing a criminal trial and is fanning the flames of a January 6-like insurrection.
These angry public admissions from conservatives that they’ve spent the previous seasons cheering on this horrible character — only to now realize they’re the butt of the joke — have become bigger than the show itself. It’s a testament to our culture’s ever-diminishing media literacy.
This isn’t the first time in pop culture that a superhero satire has served as a warning about fascism, and its biggest fans have whiffed on the point. That it keeps happening is a testament to how difficult it may be for all of us to not be lost in the allure of powerful people.
What’s happening on this season of The Boys
At the heart of The Boys is a brash deconstruction of the superhero fantasy, taking apart the traditional comic book superhero arc where super-powered beings save the day and defend those who can’t defend themselves.
In The Boys, however, every character, every line, every shot, and every scene paints a larger portrait of how extremely screwed we would all be if superheroes existed in real life. The Boys’scynical counter to the fantasy is a worldview that humans — even super ones — are morally flawed beings and that power always compromises morality. No matter how good we could be or think we could be, our selfishness, biases, envy, and everything in between will always get the better of us.
People aren’t meant to be superheroes.
These human failings take the form of heroes like the terminally narcissistic Homelander or any of his coworkers, known as The Seven (a parallel to DC Comics’s Justice League or Marvel’s Avengers). Homelander and his pals rape and kill and lie, but their powers and, more importantly, their celebrity status keep them from facing any semblance of justice. The Seven are all propped up by Vought International, an ultra-powerful pharma-entertainment-military defense corporation originated by a Nazi who invented a serum that gave normal people superpowers.
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