The Boys season 4 is airing at the moment, as time of recording, at least. It gets a lot of internet buzz every season for doing something wholly outta pocket. It’s filled with lots of inventive gore and weird sex stuff which does make it really exhilarating. In some ways, it pushes against the bounds of puritan sensibilities that drives a lot of censorship and holding back in art and in TV especially. Look, if a popular show can get away with Ant Man genital vore explosion death, then maybe people with out there imaginations can have an easier time getting the green light on their own projects.
As the season’s been airing, people have gone, “OMG it’s woke? It’s making fun of conservatives? It’s hot garbage.” And then other people go, “Haha you’re just now figuring that out? Losers.” And everyone has a lot of fun scoring internet dunk points one way or the other and the show gets a lot of free publicity. And if you’ve been watching the show since the first season you go, “Wait a second… didn’t this happen during season 3 with Homelander? And… with season 2 and Stormfront? And also… season 1 with Homelander?” One of the greatest and most annoying bits about discourse is that it is never-ending and ever-repeating.
The politics of the show can be cool to talk about. It has a sort of anti-capitalism angle. It argues that a lot if not most of the people who get famous off of riling people up on political issues are grifters. You could take that as a both sides haha everyone sucks angle, but it isn’t, really. It’s anti-populism argument that I fully agree with. Populists of all sorts thrive purely on anger and you should hold them all with extreme skepticism. It very clearly despises Trump and Stormfront, in my opinion, is mostly closely analogized with Steve Bannon.
I think it’s easy to look at the show and roll your eyes at the cynicism. The message seems to be that power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Game of Thrones did a similar thing. If your opponents hold power and will strike you low, don’t you have to get on their level to fight them? Is it possible to be a good person with power?
Well, I think that’s a little simplistic for both of those shows. But I’m actually not really interested in how The Boys examines power and politics. The Boys, is, yes, a sort of cynical political show told through superheroes and boundary-pushing weird sex things. But… isn’t it actually a hopeful show?
I ask too many questions. Sorry about that. I’m pretty long-winded. But I do actually have one main question that gets to what I think is actually at the heart of The Boys: What makes us who we are? The Ship of Theseus wonders if you slowly replace the parts of a ship with a new one, will the resulting ship be the Ship of Theseus or is it something different? At what point does it become a new ship if it does? If you replace the parts of the Ship of Theseus one by one, and you use those parts to, one by one, build an exact replica, is the replica with the original parts the actual ship of Theseus?
The Summer Hikaru died is a horror manga with gay vibes. In a rural Japanese town, Yoshiki’s best friend and likely crush Hikaru dies in the woods. His body is taken over by a god-like entity, let’s say a neo-Hikaru. Neo-Hikaru can access many of the original’s memories and often tries his best to act like Hikaru. Is he Hikaru? The manga determines that he isn’t. He something different. But he’s… still kind of Hikaru. It’s the body. It’s memories. If Hikaru is the Ship of Theseus, then the form maintains continuity through space-time. The parts, even, are not replaced. There is simply something additional inside. And something ephemeral lost.
Are we our form or bodies? Well, that can have some problematic implications. If you lose a limb, do you become less yourself? Transhumanism asks if replacing a limb with, say, automail from Full Metal Alchemist makes the metal limb part of you. Do you become the metal? Do you remain human? Obviously.
Are we our history? Neo-Hikaru’s body experienced Hikaru’s life. In this ship, the parts were never even replaced. There isn’t an argument about whether or not A equals B or C. It’s a question if A equals A. We can apply that to the mind. If you have severe amnesia, are you still you? In The Good Place, Chidi makes an argument that he doesn’t need his afterlife memories because whatever happened there happened, effectively, to a different person. It wasn’t really Chidi. We are our experiences. But he gets called out. That’s him running away into philosophy.
Chidi Anagonye is what The Boys is really interested in.
Are we our pasts? How do we manage not to be consumed by our experience? I want to talk about a few characters and their attempts to deal with their pasts versus their presents versus their futures.
One - Homelander
Homelander was systematically abused as a child at the hands of disinterested scientists threatened by the bloody hands of an uncaring, historically racist company. He was isolated, burned, attacked, and psychologically manipulated. His past haunts him. You see it pop up in his sexual hangups. Madeline Stillwell controls him through playing the part of the mother. He drinks from her breasts and like many children, when a newborn comes into the mix, he gets jealous at the lessened attention.
In season 4, episode 4, Homelander takes a happy little field trip to a lab where he was raised and he does a little silly revenge torture on some of the scientists who treated him like a lab rat. He’s fed up with his humanity. Or, rather, that’s the excuse his psyche uses to send him there, to confront and destroy his past. If he manages revenge, he’ll no longer be haunted. The wounds of his childhood will finally fade, and he assumes healing those wounds will make him perfect. He’ll no longer be bound by humanity. Homelander IS his past. He needs the love and approval he was never gifted. Maybe if he kills the scientists, the nightmares will stop. If he kills Madeline Stillwell, will he stop longing for a mother? If he raises Ryan as a god, will he stop being a lonely child himself?
Homelander is an on the nose stand-in for Donald Trump. The show is very much critiquing the former President and his supporters through Homelander. So obviously his supe-supremacist ideology is a stand-in for white supremacism. Why does he hold it? Well, if Homelander can convince himself that he is a god, he might be able to convince himself that all the trauma inflicted upon him was inevitable. Humanity cannot help but try to kill god out of an existential fear. If he can convince himself of that, that means it isn’t “his fault.” He wasn’t hurt because of who he is but what he is. That’s easier to handle on some level. It’s a metaphorical killing of the actual facts of his past. Yes, they were terrified of him as a child. But those humans, the people who raised him and were supposed to love him, decided to cause him harm. Continuously.
But as we see through his unending insecurity, Homelander cannot kill his past. None of us can. His attempts drive him deeper into insanity and cruelty. This, The Boys argues, is a futile endeavor that will only hurt you.
Two - Frenchie
Frenchie represents a similar way of dealing with what we have done and what has been done to us. Most obviously, he attempts to drown it in alcohol and burn it away through drugs. He’s constantly smoking, drinking, and shooting up throughout the course of the show. He’s a chemist. His concoctions harm and kill supes, but his greatest desire, it seems, is to kill himself and thereby kill his past.
Frenchie has moments of being more or less clean. But this, the show says, we all already know is a futile endeavor. The drugs eventually run out or they kill you. And when your head clears, you will still be you. Your past will still be your past. Drugs cannot explode the ship of theseus in any way that matters.
I see a lot of complaints about Frenchie each season, but I find him the second most compelling character after Kimiko. Side note: I think the least interesting character with the least interesting arc is actually Butcher.
After being abused by his father, Frenchie became a lapdog of the Russian mafia and Little Nina. She talks to him as if he’s a puppy, a submissive, a boy who must be owned, if not by her, then by Mallory or Butcher. When he is not on a leash, he is responsible. When he makes his own choices, Mallory’s grandchildren die.
Submission, like substance abuse, can be a way of “killing” the past in your brain. When you go into a submissive headspace, you don’t have to think. Anxiety disappears. Stress lessens. And the guilt, the massive, crushing guilt, fades. Submission can often be the sublimation of the lack of control being alive brings. When you’re a goon, no not that way gay twitter, you can say you aren’t responsible for your actions. There is no free will. So you can attempt to push aside what happened.
In season 3, Frenchie pushes back against his submission. He does not want to be bound by the past, right? That’s why people are rolling their eyes at his arc in season 4. He’s haunted again. Only, Frenchie is an addict, addicted to his own suffering.
When Frenchie gets too close to people, when they glimpse the ugliness he holds, he lashes out. Then he comes crawling back. He can’t stay away from the wounds he causes because living in the viscera reaffirms his view of himself. He is filthy. He is miasma. He finds a victim from his past as a hitman, and they form a relationship. Frenchie knows this is a bad idea, but he stays there. Maybe if he loves this man, then the hurt he did will go away. And if can’t be erased, then being right there lets Frenchie hate himself. Colin learns the truth and tries to kill him. That’s the good end for Frenchie. If Colin can get revenge, then maybe one of the wounds Frenchie inflicted can be erased.
This, The Boys argues, is also not the correct way to deal with your past. Torturing yourself does not make you a good person. It does not ease the suffering of any survivors. All it will do is…
Three - Lamplighter
Lamplighter is Frenchie’s parallel. He spends his past high, not on Frenchie’s drug cocktails, but on power. Power, superiority, and domination, that performance allows you to imagine yourself in control. Non-intuitively, it can almost be the same sublimation as submission. If you have such strong control, you have the power to erase the hurt in your past. If you are superior, you can pretend the hurt you have caused is insignificant.
After torching Mallory’s grandchildren, Lamplighter retires. He takes care of imprisoned superheroes and often burns them, over and over. He’s a good soldier. He can turn his brain off. He can inflict the same death he gave those children in his nightmares over and over and drown in the pains of his memory. This torture is how he handles his past. As with Frenchie, it doesn’t help anyone, least of all himself.
Like Frenchie, he wants one of his victims to kill him. Frenchie killed Colin’s family. Lamplighter killed Mallory’s. In both instances, their would-be killed desires their death but doesn’t follow through. I wrote this after episode 4 of season 4 so as of now, we don’t know how Frenchie will truly handle this. Lamplighter committed suicide. Drowning in your past will kill you.
Four - Butcher
Butcher deals with his past through anger. He desires revenge. At first his violence is driven by his hatred for his father. He and his brother Lenny were abused by a drunk. Lenny went and killed himself. He lets his past fester because anger feels like a holy emotion. You can sustain off anger, and if it leads you to a vendetta, it can make you feel like your past had a reason. Becca died, horrible as it was, to send Butcher down the path to toppling Vaught. He doesn’t want to defeat Homelander because it’s the right thing to do. Butcher wants to kill Homelander because Butcher wanted to kill his father and never did. This isn’t simply his revenge for Becca. It’s his revenge for Lenny. If Butcher doesn’t live for the fight, he’ll have to truly sit with all of his pain. He’ll have to think on every life he’s taken and ruined, including Hughie’s. Hughie reminds Butcher of Lenny. By keeping Hughie around and toughening him up, Butcher can live in the fantasy of having saved his brother. He can push away his pain. He can further fuel himself off of Hughie’s anger. Hughie’s anger is Lenny’s anger, after all.
And Butcher path of revenge… is both failing and killing him. He’s ruined every relationship he’s ever had. There is no path to happiness for him. He has not saved the world. He’s as genocidal as Homelander.
This, too, The Boys argues, is a bad path.
Five - Starlight
When Starlight is introduced, she warns everyone that her powers can blind people. In season 4 we discover that on her first rescue, she blinded people and it was covered up. She went on to smile like she hadn’t done something horrific. Firecracker reveals that Starlight basically ruined her life by spreading rumors of sexual impropriety when they were children. Starlight fat-shamed Firecracker. It’s a bit of a shock when those revelations come out. We know Starlight is capable of being vindictive, manipulative, and cruel. She can kill someone in cold blood if it furthers her goals. The groundwork is all there for this glimpse into her past. But it still feels out of character… because Starlight has reinvented herself. It’s how she handles her past. Coming out of her childhood, Starlight reinvented from the mean pageant girl to a bubbly, wholesome hero. After joining the Seven and be traumatized over and over, she reinvents herself again when she escapes. She no longer wants to be Starlight. She fully becomes Annie January. This is how she runs away.
Now Starlight is really interesting because she’s one of the few characters in the show that is mostly portrayed as “good” on the moral scale. Her efforts to outrun her past have led her primarily down the road of morality. Whether this is atonement, a way of survival, or who she is and chooses to be, this is undoubtedly a good road to walk. One way to deal with the harms we have caused is to simply be better today. You heal more than you hurt. You endeavor to be better.
But, the show says, replacing your parts, becoming new, does not remove your history as the ship of Theseus. The wounds you’ve been dealt and the ones you’ve given still exist. You will still have to choose how to handle them. When injuries she’s dealt are pointed out, Annie runs away. She makes a new her. When her scars are poked, when she is bleeding, she tries to cauterize the wound. She gives into her anger.
Reinvention to the good, according to the show, is a better path. But it is still running away. It will not remove you from who you are, what you’ve done, and what’s been done to you. This, too, The Boys says, will not free you.
Six - Kimiko
Kimiko is filled with rage. Of course she is. She’s Wolverine unleashed. She went mute as a child and has been ever since due to the psychological trauma she’s had to endure as a child soldier and experiment. She wants revenge on all those who have harmed her. She rips people’s faces off. She longs to destroy Stormfront. This, we see, doesn’t help her. Here, she is Butcher. She turns to contract killing. An assassin is sent to kill. And that allows her to express her rage and turn off the need to think. The loss of control brings back control. She drinks a lot. She makes dirty jokes. Levity and rage mix. When she meets a young woman she brought into and scarred from Shining Light Liberation Army, she wants to save her. Through saving her, maybe that will make up for her past. Here, she is Frenchie.
After losing her powers to Soldier Boy, Kimiko experiences once again what it’s like to be helpless. She couldn’t save her brother. She almost loses Frenchie. While she struggles with the immense carnage that lays behind her, Kimiko cannot accept powerlessness. She takes V and becomes, once more, a “monster.” In way, here, she is Hughie. But this moment from Kimiko shows a sort of acceptance of her past. Yes, she has caused harm. That doesn’t mean she is only capable of harm. Her “form” does not determine her “function.” Kimiko had a plank removed from her ship and then it was returned. And yet she was no longer the same ship of Theseus.
Sort of. Some people’s frustration with Kimiko so far in season 4 is that she’s somewhat regressed, like Frenchie, into some old habits. But, again, like Frenchie, I think that’s what makes her so interesting. The two of them are so tightly bound in the narrative for the previous seasons, you don’t expect them to suddenly become each other’s foils. Kimiko is looking into getting help. She wants to move forward. She considers speech therapy. She had a dream once of singing and being free and happy. Despite her past, despite her present, Kimiko has moments where she genuinely lives for the future. She has hope.
This, The Boys says, has potential. You can never undo the past. But that does not mean you can’t endeavor to joy.
Seven - Queen Maeve
Until her exit in Season 3, I think Maeve was actually the most interesting character on the show. She had such a defeated charisma. She’s every depressed alcoholic detective in a noir who’s given up. She’s Disco Elysium, jaded, drunk, and vaguely doing her job of violence. She’s scared, sure. But mostly she regrets her roles in massive harm. She didn’t save anyone on that plane. She let Homelander get away with it. She let him ruin her love life. She lives in terror of her wounds and the guilt of the harm she’s done has rendered her impotent.
To drown it out, Maeve lives in sex and alcohol. She’s a dismissive avoidant because she views herself as a cancer. She attracts danger. Homelander will kill anyone she loves. She cannot give them happiness. So she might as well throw them away first. Maeve deals with her past by isolating.
But then she meets Starlight. She sees someone powerful and aimed at the good who doesn’t follow her path of misery. Slowly, slowly, it inspires her. She stands up for herself. She threatens Homelander. It’s here, with a taste of power again, she becomes obsessed with revenge. For a moment, she’s Butcher. She wants to kill all supes. But then she meets Annie again, and again she has hope for the future.
Maeve gives up on her revenge against Homelander almost immediately after heavily injuring him. She sacrifices herself to save Starlight. But she manages to survive, depowered. She’s human. Her old life is dead. Though she must live injured and in hiding, though she cannot give herself a new form, she is no longer the same ship.
Here The Boys reveals its hand a little. You cannot run from your past. You cannot drink it away or drown it in sex. To become jaded is a defense mechanism that will not save you. Revenge will not save you. You must work for a better future. You have hope. You accept that you are worthy of love and a normal, quiet life. You will still be wounded. You will forever be changed by your past. There is nothing you can do to destroy it. But you can outlive it. You can, like Starlight, endeavor for the good. The difference between Starlight and Maeve is that Starlight reinvented herself without accepting her past. She reinvented, at least partially, to avoid it.
To free yourself, you have to accept that you can’t. Your past happened. It hurt you. It will continue to hurt you at moments. You will have nightmares. You will be angry and scared and sad. But it can only destroy you if you run. Let it catch you. Accept the emotions. Accept the shitty things you’ve done. Work to make up for them. Accept the shitty things that have been done to you. Hold the sadness and fear and anger. Then let them go.
This, The Boys says, so far at least, is the only way you get to live. And maybe that’s a bit cynical, but I think it holds a tremendous amount of hope.
You are haunted. That does not mean you are dead.
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