I'm reading the comics out of morbid curiosity at the moment and feel compelled to speak in their defense on this point. First of all, the comics' supes are more morally "grey", or neutral, than their TV show counterparts; in the former, superheroes are essentially young, sex-addled adults in their teens-early thirties, living out the vapid, hedonistic fantasies of your typical frat bro with parties, drugs, and boatloads of money from their cynical corporate overlords. They're egotistical and neurotic, but you never get the sense that they're "bad", let alone evil enough to deserve death. Even in the few instances where they do something that truly marks them out as terrible people - sexual assault, unintentional murder - they're portrayed more as the dopey instruments of a power-grubbing defense contractor than villain Numero uno. Some factions are even portrayed as being sweet, innocent, or blissfully naive. It's only at the end, when they join Homelander in his coup, that they're villainized. Overall they're far more one-dimensional because the comics' focus is on the boys.
Vought was always the main villain, not the superheroes, whose actions are just a symptom, not the main problem itself.
From what I gathered, the heroes coup only happened because Homelander knew they were getting replaced, so it was him and his mates going down in a blaze of glory. He even says as much to James Stillwell, with him musing that Jimmy already has a new Homelander being grown, some tactical camo dude who does what it's told. Ironically enough, one such person already exists, and it was Black Noir, who pushed Homelander into madness so he can fulfill his primary programming of killing Homelander when he does go nuts. So it was less like fully evil and more like Homelander being gaslit into becoming evil by Black Noir so the latter has the all-clear to kill him.
The main difference between the comic and the show is that James Stillwell is reduced to a kooky fruit merchant, whereas Stan Edgar retook control of Vought and is more powerful than ever. So while the main villain in the comics was defanged, the same cannot be said for the show, especially since in the latter, Noir's flashbacks depict Stan Edgar as the one who approved of the operation to replace Soldier Boy with Homelander, replacing a dude who was at worst, an abusive jackass man-whore, with a ticking time bomb that went bananas.
That's why even though @LORD IMPERATOR 's alternate endings are better, they would never do them. Because he is consciously or unconsciously trying to find ways to add back strength and dignity to Homelander. This is antithetical to what Kripke wants.
It was conscious. I wanted Homelander to go out with at least some dignity that should be afforded to a story's main villain. You didn't see General Zod from Man of Steel or Megatron from Transformers Prime begging like a little pussy when they went down. They went down fighting, and in the case of the latter, he died holding a literal sword in his hand when the Autobots skewered him with a giant saber.
Hell, at least the comics had that; Homelander went down fighting Black Noir when it was revealed that the latter did all the nasty things that everyone thought Homelander did. And he did enough damage so that Butcher could finish Noir off.
I've mentioned it before but the actually subversive show would be The Tick, because it has all the commercialisation and deconstruction of heroes that The Boys has but without the shit and penis jokes.
Those jokes just serve to tear down anything substantial. Kind of like how the gross sex jokes in the Bayformers movies were completely pointless.
Here I respectfully disagree because I don't think it's about them having a different view on Good, but disliking the notion of Good all together. For someone to be good, someone must have agency, must have will and that opposes their blank slate philosophy, opposes their war on people you can look up to. Everything must be about the group and the system.
I wouldn't go that far; to me, it seems that they view themselves as the only good and see everyone else as a lesser, misguided good or outright evil.
Starr also seemed to possess better writing instincts than Kripke. He'd at numerous points pushed back on the showrunner's attempts to make Homelander a caricatured stand-in for Donald Trump, with his input being responsible for the sliver of tragic nuance that made the villain so captivating when the show was at its best. When Homelander revisited his childhood "home" in season 4, Kripke wanted to portray him as an unhesitating sadist who took revenge without even a shade of sentimentalism, guilt, or despondence. It was Starr that prevented Homelander from becoming a cardboard cutout. I imagine it drove Kripke insane that Starr's edits are what garnered the show such acclaim.
Overall, though, I think the decision to make Homelander grovel was just Kripke living out his darkest fantasies about Trump. He likely resents Starr but he hates Orange Man even more.
It would've been better off if Starr had full control of his character. Then you can make it about transhumanism and Supe Supremacy as opposed to whatever stupid Trump parody Kripke was going for.
Like I said before, if they wanted a Teump parody, they should've done what they did with Elon Musk. Have it so that Vought supports the Trump expy as a way to gain conservative support, but the guy becomes a pain in Vought's ass because he starts tariff wars and deportations which hurt Vought's bottom line. Then the Vought shareholders give Soldier Boy and Homelander the green light to tear him to shreds, that way the conservatives grow to hate the villains, while the liberals get their scene of Trump getting torn to shreds, and Homelander remains a separate villain with his own motivations and desires.
Can I just say that was one of the things about Man of Steel that worked for me, it sold me on Zod and Superman being able to kill everyone on earth and thus I understood why Batman wanted to do something about it.
People rag on the Snyderverse, but they at least got that right. People in-universe like Batman rightfully feared superhumans after Zod and Clark tore Metropolis to shreds.
It would've been funny if there were two doses of V1, and you had Butcher and Homelander take them and go Super Saiyan, decimating all of DC in their little fight the way Superman and Zod did in Man of Steel.
You just nailed why MHA is my favorite superhero story of all time and why it is better written(IMO) than Watchmen, it understands heroes and people better that any commie deconstructionist garbage ever could.
This, you know it when you see it, "Heroism" isn't just being good, its ideals and actions, sacrifice.
In My Hero Academia, an anime that "gets" super heros better than Marvel/Disney does today (not that it doesn't have story telling or writing flaws) there are numerous moments that get it.
That's because anime heroes still treat heroism with respect, as opposed to the west where it's all deconstructions and wise guy quips.
From my count Robert Singer, Stan Edgar, and Sister Sage all did evil shit and just kind of got away with it for no reason. A look into the shitlib mindset where you can be forgiven for anything so long as you also hate the bad guy. Stan Edgar ran a company that tortured children with experimental drugs and now that I have typed that out I realize that of course liberals wouldn't hold that against him.
Stan Edgar should've been the final boss of the series. Have Homelander be a mid-tier boss, but when they get him, Homelander regrets everything, and with his last words, he remarks on his tortured existence, how he never felt like he belonged, and he tells his son never to let the world define him, that he is his own man.
Butcher and the gang then realize that Homelander was just another tragedy spawned by Vought under Stan Edgar, and they then gear up to fight Stan who has since retaken control of Vought after Homelander's death. Have a new final boss supe, maybe a third version of Black Noir who is a clone of Homelander but completely obedient, and he has Soldier Boy's chest beam attack. They can have him be Stan Edgar's ace in the hole, the final boss fight for Butcher, Starlight, and the Boys.
I've found the same problems with a lot of properties over the years: the fans simply care more about what fans want.
Writers don't care about what fans want. We can go back to Joss Whedon saying that he didn't write what the fans want, he wrote what they "needed". Which is stupid. It basically says that, in essence, the end justifies the means, no matter how much of an ass pull the writer has to do to get there.
Maybe it's because I've never been rich and famous, and therefore in a place of "knowing better" what the filthy casuals that merely consume a property should get, but I've always thought that I'd take the "therefore/but" philosophy to writing. It doesn't matter what I as the writer, or what the fans are emotionally attached to. What matters is whether or not the story at the end of the day makes sense from beginning to end, not just from a logical standpoint, but also based on who the characters are written to be. Sometimes writers are on too high a horse to remember that.
It's the same problem with capeshit comics, magnified. You have new authors who take over and don't care about what was built, or what fans want, but they want a soapbox to preach from and to put their own imprint on things. That is why many modern creatives have far less respect for the IPs entrusted to them than the fans who actually like those IPs. To the fans, these properties are an escape from the toil and drudgery of modern life, whereas to these writers, they're a paycheck and a soapbox, nothing more.
