u/NagitoKomaeda_987

Mine is Steven from Time Fcuk and Mewgenics.

Mine is Jaiden Animations, Shgurr, The Mysterious Mr. Enter, and Schaffrillas Productions. I don't know if there's anyone else, though.

EDIT: Don't forget about Cartoonshi and Just Stop, too.

(Note: It doesn't have to originate from Russia or the Soviet Union.)

In Garth Ennis’ original The Boys comics, the superheroes were designed as a layered satire targeting three interconnected systems: Hollywood celebrity culture, the comic book industry (superheroes as a genre), and the military-industrial complex. The whole system is surprisingly tight once you look at how the pieces fit together rather than existing as isolated ideas.

On the celebrity side, the supes are public idols with spotless branding hiding mountains of corruption beneath the surface. As a commentary on the comic industry, their history mirrors creative stagnation: things begin strong under the guidance of a visionary figure, but once that figure disappears, innovation dies with him. What remains is an endless conveyor belt of shallow, derivative knockoffs built from the same DNA. Then there’s the military-industrial angle, where superheroes are essentially defective products sold to governments by a corporation more interested in contracts and profit than quality control. Bing, bang, boom. Those are superheroes in The Boys and what they were meant to represent. Clean, simple, easy to understand. 

And you know what else? It's so thoughtfully constructed. They don't just work as separate, individual themes. What makes the allegory very effective is that they are tailor-made to support each other within the story.

The supes being out-of-touch, pampered celebrities exist because these “heroes” are essentially barely functional, low-quality WMDs behaving like overgrown, emotionally stunted children, wrapped in marketing campaigns. That way, the public adores them rather than fearing or scrutinizing them. Their sheer lack of competence and poor quality make sense since Vought prioritizes mass production and damage control over genuine improvement of the formula. And Vought continues to do this because defense contractors can often get away with delivering cheap, disposable, poorly designed, and fundamentally flawed products while still succeeding financially, so long as the products they're manufacturing are technically functional and the system continues paying for them.

Instead of asking "What if superheroes were real?", I think it's way more accurate to say that the comic's main argument is "What if a multibillion-dollar defense contractor monopolized the superhero industry and prioritized stock prices over public safety?" Every concept feeds into the next, creating a coherent satirical framework like gears in a machine or bricks in a wall rather than a pile of disconnected ideas. It’s cynical, but structurally solid in foundation.

Naturally, the showrunners looked at that allegory and asked, "Hey, why don't we do it without any gears? Or bricks?" And this is one of those things where I can't even say season 1 did it better, since from day one, most of it's NOT even there. Like, barring a few exceptions, we only follow The Seven, which eliminates much of the very concept that the supes are mass-produced corporate knockoffs. Vought’s background as a manufacturer of defective military products barely matters anymore, and the military-industrial complex critique is reduced to background noise at best. What survives is primarily the satirical commentary on modern Hollywood celebrities and the entertainment industry, especially with the latter replacing the critique of the comic book industry. Both of these aspects still work to some extent, but compared to the comics, it’s far less nuanced and cohesive.

Somehow, it only gets worse from here once they start trying to do other stuff with them. For instance, Season 2 introduces Stormfront, a character whose whole thing is to shift this allegory into a satire of Alt-Right social media influencers and far-right politicians. On paper, the idea is obvious enough: a literal Nazi manipulating fear and outrage through media spectacle. But the problem is that this clashes with the foundation that the setting originally established.

What I mean by this is that, realistically speaking, superheroes in The Boys universe are supposed to function like hyper-managed celebrities with tightly controlled public images. Especially in the show, where Vought resembles a grotesque fusion of Disney and Amazon, letting one of their flagship heroes openly flirt with hateful fascist rhetoric feels absurd. Like, can you imagine what it would be like if at Disneyland, Donald Duck started wearing an SS uniform, reading quotes from Mein Kampf, and inciting hate groups everywhere he goes? That's the equivalent here. Such a thing would absolutely never happen in the comics because, like most celebrities, supes HAVE to stay under a strict corporate leash precisely because their value depends on maintaining a carefully sanitized PR.

They’re assets, mascots, and brand icons, not loose cannons allowed to torch the company’s reputation by doing things that go completely against their brand image.

The same issue pops up when the show tries to use supes as a metaphor for the violent, racist, and otherwise corrupt law enforcement. Sure, the connection is understandable at a surface level: supes are supposed to protect people, cops are supposed to protect people, and abuse of power exists in both cases. But it doesn't work in execution because the show's allegories are too direct and obvious. Instead of using thematic parallels, the supes literally begin acting as stand-ins for crooked cops — profiling civilians, brutalizing minorities at traffic stops, and being intentionally reckless or violent in black neighborhoods, operating in ways directly modeled after real-world police misconduct. This is just dumb conceptually since supes are NOT meant to be police officers, and they shouldn't be making arrests, let alone for carjacking.

You ever notice one thing that's missing from almost any issue in the comic? Supes performing actual rescues or street-level crime fighting. That absence is intentional. Vought doesn't want these people improvising in real emergencies because they aren't meant to do any real saving that isn't heavily planned. You know, for the sake of cultivating their image. I mean, where's the sense in letting their supes do ground-level cop work? You're just asking for shit to go horribly wrong and damage your brand. It's also just a waste of money and time for the supes, which is why you never see them doing it.

What you do see, however, are the supes spending way more time on publicity events, conventions, movie premieres, etc, rather than stopping crimes. Places that celebrities go to promote something because, in essence, supes are mascots. They’re celebrities first and foremost, not actual superheroes like you see in Marvel and DC. So, they're not going to do anything actually heroic. That's what the comics are for, which Vought manufactures as real, to give off these heroic images without the risk of the real supes messing it up since they're total amateurs, not actual emergency services. It's just common sense.

Ironically, the show itself seemed to understand this early on. That's why they explain as much in Season 1, where Annie is forced to participate in a staged rescue mission. When she actually saves someone, however, she gets reprimanded because there are so many complications in a real rescue that they have to be planned for insurance reasons. They literally explained how the idea worked. So, they're just undoing that for a hamfisted metaphor they should know doesn't work. It's frustrating.

Although I guess it's kinda just part of how the show handles satire, especially when later seasons start discarding those rules to force broader political metaphors into place. Instead of building satire from the world’s foundations outward, the show often bends the setting to fit whatever commentary it wants at the moment. The result feels less like a meticulously written allegory and more like a billboard covered in disconnected slogans that are tangentially related to one another.

EDIT: And yes, before you grab your torches and pitchforks, I've taken most of this from Just Stop's "The Boys Is A TERRIBLE Adaptation (No, Seriously)" video essay. By crediting Braxton by name, I guess that clears everything up, heh…

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/64408806/

https://xcancel.com/psicoyote/status/2050397595734827494#m

https://bsky.app/profile/eikaarts.bsky.social/post/3ml426qh52k23