After an impressive first-season that saw Amazon’s hit-series became one of their frontrunner shows, The Boys returned for a second-season that; against all odds, managed to hugely impress. Raising the stakes, putting the characters through more challenges than ever before and deepening the story further with some incredible plots, this show has quickly become a standout of the sub-genre.
So what made this follow-up work so well?
In my opinion, the majority of things that make this season so well-crafted can be seen through its best new character: Stormfront.
Introduced as the spunky, sarcastic, 21st century tech-savvy hero, Aya Rachel Cash plays this character with all the smug; yet down-to-earth relatability, that such a character needs to ride that thin line between fun and insufferable. Her performance as the new girl who runs rings around Vought’s tightly controlled PR; inspiring a fanatical wave of fans through her livestreaming and anti-corporate attitudes, plays out well across the first two episodes. However, in S2, E3: ‘Over the Hill With the Swords of a Thousand Men’, she reveals her true maliciousness.
Pursuing Kimiko and her brother; a telekinetic ‘super-terrorist’; super-villain if you agree with Homelander, she murders several Black bystanders for no apparent reason, she then racially taunts Kenji by breaking his hands, insulting his ethnicity with the infamous racial slur: ‘Yellow bastard’ and saying that she: ‘Likes to see the light go out’; before snapping his neck.
It was at this moment, the show’s genius with her writing is revealed: A popular cultural stereotype is that racist and xenophobic attitudes are an ‘old’ person’s mindset and while this later turns out to be accurate for Stormfront, by showing this character as a tech-savvy millennial, the audience is lulled into a false-sense of security around her moral ethics; only to be rudely awakened through this brutal display of cruelty.
This serves to highlight the duplicity in modern discrimination: Few parts of the world can openly engage in the prior horrors of racism openly: Slavery, lynching, etc. Where such attitudes exist now, they are disguised and transformed into new forms of oppression: The manipulation of wealth, barriers to voting, the systemic violence of authority towards minorities. Stormfront is the embodiment of this idea, revealed to be a literal Nazi; formerly married to the creator of Compound V, yet her methods of manipulation are disturbingly intelligent.
As she herself says to Homelander: ‘You don’t need 50 million people to love you, you need 5 million f***ing pissed. Anger sells. You have fans, I have soldiers”. By utilising the speed and simplicity of modern communication formats: Livestreaming, public protests; even memes, she has radicalised many to her viewpoints without them even realising just how far she’s taken them. One of the season’s most depressing, yet accurate lines is: “People love what I have to say. They believe in it. They just don’t like the word Nazi. That’s all”.
In an era of political radicalisation to quasi-authoritians, extreme populists and many who seek to de-legitimise the modern systems of checks-and-balances, this line is an uncomfortably real moment that highlights just how problematic these mindsets are. One of the greatest issues in combating this is that attempts to do so hit the snag that Stromfront herself exploits brilliantly: When the system tries to combat you, communication centred around spreading misinformation and distrust is wildly effective at turning this counter-criticism, into ‘fake news’.
This is brilliantly shown when Homelander; suffering immense public backlash for the death of a young teenage boy while killing a super-terrorist, is able to regain much of his lost-love via Stormfront’s use of ‘memes’ to reshape the narrative. Over the course of an episode, Homelander goes from being called out by politicians and crowds for a war-crime; thousands chanting: ‘You don’t speak for us’, to a renewed figure for American exceptionalism. The memes propose the teenager’s death as photo-shopped, Homelander as a badass who won’t show pity to terrorist’s and his opposition as ‘SJW”s; cowards who would defend vicious killers over patriotic heroes.
Stormfront is a mirror to the modern-world and this storyline pulls zero-punches in what it is trying to say: Compound V was a drug created by a Nazi-scientist, granted asylum in America; similar to the real-life history of Operation Paperclip. This then led to America having one of defining scientific breakthroughs of the 20th Century: In our world this was the Moon Landing, yet for The Boys Universe; it was the mass-creation of superheroes.
This drug was then taken by Homelander; an ‘All-American’ hero, to create super-terrorists for his own and Vought’s exploitation as a weapon of fear; to radicalise the population into supporting them against an enemy they created. Comparisons to American foreign policy funding the Taliban hardly need to be pointed out and the exploitation of said conflicts to destabilise authority and promote the very-same toxic ideals that lead to such violence… well, I’m sure the comparisons to our own world speak for themselves.
While Eric Kripke; The Boys showrunner, has some frankly bizarre views that the movies of the MCU are partially to blame for the rise of populism and Donald Trump’s 2016 election success, he has ironically explored this exact idea with much more intelligence right here. It is not pop-culture or any single entity within it that has fet the rise of extreme ideals across the Western world, merely the understanding that many organisations from Breitbart to Proud Boys have gained: In a world of instant communication, lies and mistrust can spread far faster than the truth.
Stormfront’s rise in The Seven is a brutal exploration of modern politics, as it reflects just how easily a lone individual; empowered by modern communication, can spread hate and toxic mindsets across a nation. While The Boys naturally adds an action-dynamic to this; giving her the ability to shoot lightning alongside several other powers, if you took that away from her: She would still be a dangerous adversary. Though eventually brought down by Homelander’s son Ryan, Stormfront is the embodiment of the worst mindsets and ideas in the modern political landscape and unfortunately, no amount of laser-vision can destroy that.
Marley Eleven Bury is a twenty-one year old Film & TV writer who loves takeaway and the superhero genre far too much. His claims to fame are having listened to the entire 26-hour+ Fire and Blood audiobook multiple times and being able to sing the Periodic Table song from memory.
