The Boys - An Amazon Prime adaptation of the Ennis comic series

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Because I am a consummate weeb who plays Japanese video games and watches Japanese anime, I decided to compare The Boys finale with a scene from a throwaway non-canon Dragon Ball film called Tree of Might. In it, the villain Turles fights against Son Goku, the main hero, and the main plot revolves around the eponymous Tree of Might, which Turles uses to power himself up with, the way Homelander did with V1.


Notice the power level difference. Before eating the fruit of the tree, Turles was being driven back by Goku. After eating the fruit, he effortlessly mops the floor with Goku to the point where he can outrun and outfight him. He became stronger and faster, too strong and too fast for Goku to handle. Goku buffs himself up to be 10x stronger, but all it does is end with his face on the ground, meaning that the fruit of the Tree of Might made Turles way stronger than a 10x power-up.

One would think that Homelander would've had a similar power up. If a non-canon movie for a kids' anime show can do this, a big-time adult superhero show bankrolled by Amazon should likewise be able to do it too. @ 2:40 is how Homelander's fight with Butcher should've ended, if the V1 actually had any real effect other than visuals and stopping one's aging.
 
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LORD IMPERATOR said:
Because I am a consummate weeb who plays Japanese video games and watches Japanese anime, I decided to compare The Boys finale with a scene from a throwaway non-canon Dragon Ball film called Tree of Might. In it, the villain Turles fights against Son Goku, the main hero, and the main plot revolves around the eponymous Tree of Might, which Turles uses to power himself up with, the way Homelander did with V1.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=r3wM3BMRD_E
Notice the power level difference. Before eating the fruit of the tree, Turles was being driven back by Goku. After eating the fruit, he effortlessly mops the floor with Goku to the point where he can outrun and outfight him. He became stronger and faster, too strong and too fast for Goku to handle. Goku buffs himself up to be 10x stronger, but all it does is end with his face on the ground, meaning that the fruit of the Tree of Might made Turles way stronger than a 10x power-up.

One would think that Homelander would've had a similar power up. If a non-canon movie for a kids' anime show can do this, a big-time adult superhero show bankrolled by Amazon should likewise be able to do it too. @ 2:40 is how Homelander's fight with Butcher should've ended, if the V1 actually had any real effect other than visuals and stopping one's aging.
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For me, the most stinging issue is Homelander's under-reaction at being defeated. A narcissistic villain like this has the narrative building up to an epic downfall where they utterly climatically snap as their master plan finally unravels. Cartoons for teenagers understood the ego collapse assignment better.
Someone such as Homelander is not just gonna go "okay okay you win please stop". He lost the entire foundation of his self-importance. He would be clawing and screaming like a rabid animal upon being brought so low. Only writers blinded by an obsession with pwning their twitter block list could screw that up.
 
IMG-20260912-WA0005.jpg

Only 3 months left and no release date announced. You would have to speculate it's due to the horrible reception of the final. This pleases me.
 
The greater a'tuin said:
For me, the most stinging issue is Homelander's under-reaction at being defeated. A narcissistic villain like this has the narrative building up to an epic downfall where they utterly climatically snap as their master plan finally unravels. Cartoons for teenagers understood the ego collapse assignment better.
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Light Yagami was Death Note's main character, the man people tuned in to watch the show for. Azula was the most active villain in the Last Airbender cartoon and was a rival to both Aang and Zuko. The makers of those shows respected those villains because they were practically final boss characters.

Eric Kripke wanted his Trump analogue to suck dick and eat shit. Hence why he has Homelander offer that to Butcher.

The greater a'tuin said:
Someone such as Homelander is not just gonna go "okay okay you win please stop". He lost the entire foundation of his self-importance. He would be clawing and screaming like a rabid animal upon being brought so low. Only writers blinded by an obsession with pwning their twitter block list could screw that up.
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If I were writing it, at first, Homelander would have a realization of fear, that he might actually die. Then Starlight gets Butcher to stand down and tells him that it's better to have the legal system handle Homelander in a trial. Homelander realizes that he will be humiliated before the world, and he'd rather die than let that happen, so he starts making fun of Butcher for not having the balls to avenge his wife. Then he tells Butcher that if he could do what he did to Becky all over again, he would. That causes Butcher to snap, swatting Annie aside and killing Homelander.

Dog Rough said:
View attachment 9555916

Only 3 months left and no release date announced. You would have to speculate it's due to the horrible reception of the final. This pleases me.
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It's like what happened to Dave Benioff and Daniel Weiss' Star Wars project after Game of Thrones bombed. No one wants to talk about it.

wtfNeedSignUp said:
I wonder if the "Suck your cock" line was done purely due to Watchmen's Rorschach "No Compromise" line, that breaks leftists minds to this day.
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More like they wanted their Trump anaologue to actually suck cocks and eat shit, so Kripke had Homelander say it.
 
Holy fucking necro. I'm on season 1 Episode 5 of this show and I don't know which character I'm beginning to hate more. My two least favorite characters have been the Deep, who really feels like an author's barely disguised fetish and probably written by a woman who really likes the idea of men getting fucked by marine animals, and Starlight because every time she faces injustices in her position, characters have to practically break themselves in half or the environment has to basically contrive itself into goofy unrealistic satire. The show also has way too much fucking vulgarity. I swear to god if Vivienne Medrano admitted that The Boys was her central source of inspiration for the over sexualized writing and overly vulgar writing, I'd ask no fucking questions.
 
An Ordinary Ordinator said:
Holy fucking necro. I'm on season 1 Episode 5 of this show and I don't know which character I'm beginning to hate more. My two least favorite characters have been the Deep, who really feels like an author's barely disguised fetish and probably written by a woman who really likes the idea of men getting fucked by marine animals, and Starlight because every time she faces injustices in her position, characters have to practically break themselves in half or the environment has to basically contrive itself into goofy unrealistic satire. The show also has way too much fucking vulgarity. I swear to god if Vivienne Medrano admitted that The Boys was her central source of inspiration for the over sexualized writing and overly vulgar writing, I'd ask no fucking questions.
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And the show only gets WORSE once it gets political!

Bail out now.

Seriously.
 
Samuel Fuller said:
And the show only gets WORSE once tiit gets political!

Bail out now.

Seriously.
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It already has some of the laziest societal critiques and satire I've ever seen in a "mature" dark comedy. Every "superhero" is just an asshole who generally has a sneering, apathetic outlook of everyone beneath him... because we can't have a character who maybe views the idea of an omnipotent power who's driving motivation of keeping the peace through money as a lesser evil. The Deep has to whip his dick out when Starlight mentions she had a crush on him as a teen... because we have to make a commentary on Weinstein even though whatever development is inevitably going to be knee capped because, as a man, I hate rapists and perverts and that's how I view him now. Starlight has to be a walking commentary on how comic book nerds view women in comic books and Marvel movies which, look, I get the fact that DeviantArt is a thing, but if you ask the grand majority of comic book fans outside of that niche circle what they think about Rogue or Mystique, they'd probably have radically different opinions than just... whatever they think comic book fans think after parsing through Rule 34 sites.
 
An Ordinary Ordinator said:
It already has some of the laziest societal critiques and satire I've ever seen in a "mature" dark comedy. Every "superhero" is just an asshole who generally has a sneering, apathetic outlook of everyone beneath him... because we can't have a character who maybe views the idea of an omnipotent power who's driving motivation of keeping the peace through money as a lesser evil. The Deep has to whip his dick out when Starlight mentions she had a crush on him as a teen... because we have to make a commentary on Weinstein even though whatever development is inevitably going to be knee capped because, as a man, I hate rapists and perverts and that's how I view him now. Starlight has to be a walking commentary on how comic book nerds view women in comic books and Marvel movies which, look, I get the fact that DeviantArt is a thing, but if you ask the grand majority of comic book fans outside of that niche circle what they think about Rogue or Mystique, they'd probably have radically different opinions than just... whatever they think comic book fans think after parsing through Rule 34 sites.
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That's NOTHING compared to season 3 onward, where it just becomes TDS: The Series.

The writers were too stupid to do good social critique, so just imagine how tedious their political "satire" is.

Best advice I can give is just to stop watching now.
 
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An Ordinary Ordinator said:
Holy fucking necro. I'm on season 1 Episode 5 of this show and I don't know which character I'm beginning to hate more. My two least favorite characters have been the Deep, who really feels like an author's barely disguised fetish and probably written by a woman who really likes the idea of men getting fucked by marine animals, and Starlight because every time she faces injustices in her position, characters have to practically break themselves in half or the environment has to basically contrive itself into goofy unrealistic satire. The show also has way too much fucking vulgarity. I swear to god if Vivienne Medrano admitted that The Boys was her central source of inspiration for the over sexualized writing and overly vulgar writing, I'd ask no fucking questions.
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As said, it got worse, so my recommendation is to just watch some clips and summaries of the ending. Trust me, season four is not worth it, especially because they make so many references to Gen Vee season 1 that you have to watch it to know what the fuck they're talking about and somehow that show is worse than The Boys.

The show has some good moments here and there that can give you hope but if you're already sick of it? Don't bother. Time is valuable, use it on a show you actually like.
 
sixuglymidgets said:
I think it could be interesting to look at how paranoid the government would become if superheroes were real and genuinely doing good things. Because knowing the shady shit our cia gets up to I could realistically see it turning into conflict
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So I'm not a fan of Warren Ellis, I think his comics are edgetacular crap, but in an interview about his comic Black Summer which was his take on Marvel's Civil War, I think he was correct in how the situation would go in reality.

"Masked adventurers on the run are not going to be pursued, tricked and trapped by their estranged colleagues. Every last one of them is going to be hunted by the combined forces of the US military structure. It is, to my mind, what would always happen — the streets of America would be secured by soldiers and gun emplacements and helicopters against the threat of the flying superhuman. And for those who think I’m being anti-American, consider this: in Britain, we’d just have the SAS kill them in their beds. "​
 
A Very Big Fish said:
"Masked adventurers on the run are not going to be pursued, tricked and trapped by their estranged colleagues. Every last one of them is going to be hunted by the combined forces of the US military structure. It is, to my mind, what would always happen — the streets of America would be secured by soldiers and gun emplacements and helicopters against the threat of the flying superhuman. And for those who think I’m being anti-American, consider this: in Britain, we’d just have the SAS kill them in their beds. "
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After having played Modern Warfare 2 again, I can safely say that yes, that is what the SAS would do.

The Task Force 141 SAS guys would respond to the threat of Vought superheroes by holding a knife to Stan Edgar's throat and forcing him to cooperate. They'd also happily kill any supe with a criminal record if the supe is weak enough.

They had zero problems adjusting and slaughtering Yankee troops after General Herschel Shepherd betrayed them. How do you think they'd react to an American company developing unstable supes that can bring about the end of the world? They'd do whatever they can to defeat them. Hell, they might even take a page from Makarov's book and detonate a nuke on Homelander's face, just to save the world from him.

sixuglymidgets said:
I think it could be interesting to look at how paranoid the government would become if superheroes were real and genuinely doing good things. Because knowing the shady shit our cia gets up to I could realistically see it turning into conflict
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The very idea that the Feds would just let Vought control superheroes like this is so unrealistic, even in the first season. Either A) the Feds would have a duopoly with Vought and would give them some leeway in exchange for them giving V to people that the Feds need it for, or B) the Feds would not allow Vought to have a monopoly on V and would allow other Big Pharma companies to have a crack at it.

Also, any superhero that can be trouble will suspiciously end up poisoned or dead. Or they'd disappear and wind up in Gitmo getting waterboarded if they do too much damage against the locals. Vought would not be allowed to make someone as powerful as Homelander without the Feds having the kill switch or a weakness they can program into his biology. They will not let Vought create their own Superman without first having their version of Kryptonite.
 
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Only semi related but this thread is a lot of ennis discussion.
some fucking how we're getting a crossed movie

It's being directed by Rob Jabbaz director of The Sadness, which is apperatetly just crossed but Chinese, and is actually being written by ennis. It looks like it's really going for it. I wonder what's more responsible for getting this green lit, The Boys or Terrifier?
 
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