u/Pristine_Club_3128

A common criticism of the show in the later seasons is that it went off the rails by trying to make itself reflect Trump and the MAGA movement.

Now, say what you want about politics in entertainment, but it's my opinion that if they had the guts to make it reflect MAGA accurately and make Homelander reflect Trump accurately, we would have gotten a far more interesting plot.

The thing about Homelander is he's not good enough a villain to carry five seasons by himself - but Vought is.

Homelander is not Superman. He has not demonstrated any real power or threat level onscreen that makes it seem like it would be impossible for a bunch of organized supes or even some well-equipped military to take him on if it comes to that.

The Vought takeover by Homelander should not have happened. Instead Vought itself deciding to steer Homelander into the take over the world path under the belief they can control him.

With Trump, everyone who pays attention to politics know that he's more the symptom than the cause. He's in power not because of any ability of his own at this point - in 2016 he had some charisma to pull people, but now the man is literally senile - but because he's being propped up by powerful people who wants to use him as a figurehead to profit.

Imagine Homelander using Compound V or Temp V or maybe an altered V1 compound to make himself stronger, but it ends up damaging his brain and body.

So we have a Homelander who is clearly deteriorating in mind and body, Vought handlers desperately trying to cover up - helped by fans who cheerfully deny the evidence of their own eyes and keep claiming he's the most powerful supe in the world even when he can barely walk on his own.

Homelander ranting nonsensically or going off on tangents that make no sense because his brain is turning to pudding while the mainstream media keeps sanewashing him partly because of Vought influence, partly because they also stand to profit by the ratings.

Instead of the billionaires going against Homelanders' plans, them openly professing great admiration while working with Vought to make their profits from the scheme.

This could also lead to the ideological split between the Boys - Butcher, in his revenge obsession, being so focused on Homelander that he can't accept Homelander is no longer the real danger, can't accept his chance for revenge was taken instead by his enemy's own idiocy and nature itself.

The rest of the Boys wanting to focus more on taking down Vought, which is being run by regular humans who create supes, while Butcher grows increasingly obsessed with eliminating supes in general and Homelander in particular even after it is clear they're the symptom and simply removing supes won't solve the actual danger.

Homelander stops being the main villain long before the end - he's being humored and handled, and he is still dangerous in a way someone with his powers, an army of obsessed fans and a deteriorating mind can be, but he's not the main villain.

It can also explain the Boys surviving this long - Vought can take them out if they can focus on them or send out competent supes or agents to handle them, but Homelander is obsessed with getting them himself. Vought hampered by having to keep their figurehead god-emperor pacified enough while stopping him from making an attempt himself that would reveal how badly off he actually is.

Vought and Homelander, along with Homelander fans who, unlike Vought handlers, really believe he's perfectly fine and playing 5D chess, getting in each others' way enough that Vought isn't able to spend as much effort as they would like on the Boys - possibly dismissing them as lower priority.

Homelander's actual death either of natural causes from the V effects or when Butcher finally gets to him he is too pathetic and addled that Butcher can't even get any satisfaction from killing him - or maybe Butcher treating it as a great triumph while the rest of the team think of it as more like putting down a rabid dog and knowing the ones who set it loose in the first place is still out there.

There's plenty of posts made on how the movie never has anyone tell Thanos his 'half the population' genocide solution won't work.

Usually the rebuttal is that the plan is supposed to be so insane that it should be obvious it won't work, that he is the Mad Titan, no one should need it spelled out, etc.

But the problem with that is... Endgame.

Every time the topic comes up, most people agree that 50% of humanity dying instantly is going to have horrible consequences. Societal collapse level consequences. Famines, cults, wars, especially since there will be a lot of people who won't believe the explanation that Thanos was responsible.

Except Endgame, set five years after in-universe, shows...a world that is pretty much okay? Tony is retired and living in a nice little billionaire play-farm with his wife and kid, Steve is running a support group, and Natasha is talking about how she saw whales returning.

Sure, people are grieving, and the deaths are treated as a tragedy, but there is absolutely no implication that the survivors are facing any kind of real threat.

When the team goes to try and recruit Tony, the arguments are all centered on how the vicitms deserved to live - no one even implies the survivors are at risk.

You would think if there was any of the danger that should logically follow the Snap, at least one of them would use it as an argument.

Tony is insistent that they don't go back in time to undo the Snap - which they can do with the Gauntlet, though not with the tech based time travel.

His argument is that doing so would risk deleting his daughter - and by extension, all the other kids who have been born since the Snap. In fact, he is so afraid of this that he initially refuses to help altogether, only changing his mind after seeing a photo of Peter.

Now, that is a fair argument in the world we are shown in Endgame - a normal world that has grieving people who have started to move on.

That very much will not have the same weight in the kind of world that should logically follow the Snap - because in a societal collapse that would follow 50% people dying instantly, most of those kids are not going to live anyway. (Though Tony's daughter probably would, being a billionaire's kid and all)

And in such a world, bringing back the Snap victims without undoing the past would only make things even worse.

MCU should just have them undo the Snap - shown the inevitable disaster Thanos' 'solution' brought, and then shown the heroes undoing it.

When viewers say MCU should have had Thanos' plan shown as insane, this is the reason.

Endgame was MCU's place to show it, and they dropped the ball so bad.

The post-Snap world shown in Endgame actually seems to imply the plan more or less worked, and simply had too much collateral damage to be acceptable.

Now, I don't know how popular Irredeemable is, but it is basically a pretty good comic featuring Plutonian - a Superman Substitute hero who goes supervillain.

Not exactly original, yes, but the comic manages to be quite creepy by showing through flashbacks how he is getting closer and closer to snapping. Basically has always had the repute of World's Greatest Hero, but the pressure, ego issues and a really fucked up childhood combines to the point he goes omnicidal after making a very bad mistake in one of his missions.

The thing is, he is shown to be pathetic and screwed up because of his childhood - but all the same have done too much horrible things to be forgiven - the same way Homelander is. But he is also legitimately terrifying, shown through multiple incidents including nuking his city from the sky and lobotomizing his kid sidekick via eye lasers.

Now, Homelander is nowhere near the same power level, but there are certainly things he could have been shown doing to demonstrate his psychotic spiral and make it clear everyone is actually in deadly danger - like a scene in Irredeemable where Plutonian casually drops in to an ordinary family's house because of an old grudge, sits down and has dinner with the terrified people and then lasers them.

It manages to come across as quite intimidatingly unhinged and pointless. Homelander snapping should have had greater effects - yes, the point is that he is a pathetic bully, but he is also supposed to be genuinely dangerous.

Some scenes like that could have been used to demonstrate the threat while also not killing off any of the heroes (though that does seem a bit annoying) or plot important characters.

In the Irredeemable comic, Plutonian doesn't kill his former teammates either even when he gets the chance, mostly because he enjoys their fear and doesn't really think of them as an actual threat. Something similar could have been done to explain why Homelander doesn't kill the Boys.