#there’s also the fact that hughie was smart and good enough at his job that he was basically newman’s second in command at the beginning of

[hermywolf]

i think one of my favorite things about the boys is how out of all of them hughie, the one considered to be the useless civilian one, is ultimately the one who did the most against vought, and most of it was by mistake or an accident.

like. hughie electrocuted and then murdered a member of the seven, was responsible for another’s death, and had an occasion to let another die and only didnt because he’s a good person. he infiltrated vought tower twice, going as far as the seven’s main room. he bugged said room and one of the seven’s phone. he successfully broke five prisoners out of vought facilities. he hacked into a supe’s computer to spy on her which allowed them to blackmail her. he encouraged annie to fight back against the deep which led to him being fired from the seven. he also showed up to a-train’s hostage situation, blackmailed him into letting his dad go, then had his leg broken which also led to him being fired. plus all the information and help they get from annie they get only because hughie knows her. he gave butcher the solution to make sure vought wouldn’t find them when they had transluscent. he lied to homelander’s face and is the only human except edgar and butcher who stood up to him. the information which allowed to take down stormfront was given to him and annie, not any of the boys. he successfully blackmailed ezekiel without even having any evidence, purely through improvisation, and is the one who found out where the compound v was which directly led to discovering how supes are made. he helped obtain and leak the compound v information to the public.

like the boys would be NOWHERE at this point if butcher hadn’t recruited him and its hilarious because since he doesn’t look intimidating nobody focuses on him. homelander saw the boys and immediately decided butcher was his sworn enemy he was gonna have a rivalry with and completely overlooked the awkward twink. when in reality the boys aint shit without him and said awkward twink is objectively the biggest threat against vought so far, and he directly or indirectly got FOUR of the seven either killed or fired. literally every single one of the boys, annie included, would be dead without him and he’s not even trying half of the time or he does it on accident. and yet everyone just goes ‘oh yeah thats hughie he doesnt really do anything’. idk why this is so funny to me

#the boys #show:theboys #hughie campbell #sorry this makes no sense im tryna get my thoughts in words but its messy #annie january #billy butcher #the homelander #marvin milk #a-train #lamplighter #there’s also the fact that hughie was smart and good enough at his job that he was basically newman’s second in command at the beginning of #s3 and literally all the other boys’ boss. #hermy posts

[abigailnussbaum]

The Boys 2x01 - 2x03

I’m going to try to write weekly reviews of the second season of The Boys, though judging by my reaction to the first three episodes, I may quickly lose steam.

When I wrote about the show’s first season last year, it was with mingled surprise and skepticism. Surprise, because although the core concept of “they’re superheroes, but bad!” sounded trite and juvenile (and the original comics are apparently even worse than that), The Boys ended up being smart and even thoughtful, using its violent, selfish, sociopathic superheroes as a metaphor for everything from Hollywood’s diseased star culture, to the way corporations mask their anti-social behavior with empty gestures towards diversity and social justice, to how the evangelical subculture feeds into and promotes America’s militarism. Skepticism, because as much as I enjoyed the season, it had some obvious pitfalls, and I wasn’t certain that the show’s team knew how to avoid them.

The first three episodes of the second season are, on the one hand, a thorough rebuke to those concerns. I worried that the show, having been praised for its outrageousness, would forget how to balance extreme violence with a recognition of how real and damaging that violence is. And I worried that Butcher, by far the show’s least versatile, least interesting character, would be allowed to take over its story and made uncomplicatedly heroic. On both of those counts, these episodes have allayed my fears. When Butcher shows up, it’s to a resounding chorus of basically everyone else on the show having had enough of his bullshit, and though by the end of the third episode he has clawed back some ground with the rest of the team (and especially Hughie) it’s only to the point of being tolerated, not of having his self-absorption and arrogance validated. And while there’s no shortage of violence, it still feels grounded - even a motorboat ramming into a beached whale is horrible and tragic as well as darkly funny.

On the other hand, no amount of impaled whales can obscure the fact that these episodes are, well, kind of a slog. Not because nothing happens in them, but because the position the show left itself in at the end of the first season doesn’t lend itself to particularly propulsive storytelling. S1 spent most of its time establishing its world and setting up the show’s central metaphor. But having done so, there’s really no place for the story to go. The new episodes embroider a bit around the ideas we’ve already taken in - Madeline Stilwell’s replacement Ashley cooing about getting a “differently abled” superhero into The Seven, then taking it (mostly) in stride when Homelander mutilates and possibly kills that hero. Ashley’s boss, Stan Edgar, calmly explaining to Homelander that Vought isn’t a superhero company, but a pharmaceutical company that’s using superheroes to sell the things that make real money. A former colleague of Starlight’s who has, like a failed child star, taken to turning tricks to make ends meet.

The problem is, all of these elements add up to the same conclusion they did last season - the real enemy isn’t superheroes, but capitalism. And capitalism isn’t going to be brought down by a bunch of guys hiding out in the utility closet of a drug den and their megalomaniacal boss with an increasingly implausible accent. Nothing that happens in these three episodes makes the Boys - or even characters who are closer to the action, like Starlight - seem like anything more than a sideshow to the very story they introduced us to in the first season. Vought is too powerful, too embedded at all levels of government, and too rooted in the foundations of American culture (as seen, for example, in the 9/11-ification of Transluscent’s death, and how it, in turn, is used to sell memorabilia) for any one person or group to dismantle it.

To be fair, the show itself seems to realize this at least a little, because the prevailing theme of these episodes is being stuck and feeling powerless. Hughie is stuck with the consequences of his impulsive decision to involve himself with Butcher and participate in his crimes, forced to rely on criminals for the little bit of safety and freedom he still has, and tied (probably for life) to people he doesn’t trust, or even like that much. Annie is stuck in her position with the Seven, unable to leave, constantly in danger of being exposed and killed, and forced to play a role the she finds increasingly distasteful. Rebecca Butcher is literally stuck, in an enclosure that no longer offers the safety that was its one saving grace, and even the people who put her there can only shrug when she points out how much danger she and her son are in. Maeve is still stuck in her position as Homelander’s fallback girl, unable to be with anyone she actually cares about for fear that he’ll kill them in a jealous rage. Even The Deep is stuck in a dead-end job and a downward spiral, and it seems unlikely that his new cult-y friends are going to make things better for him.

There is some small amount of forward motion in these episodes (though the fact that so much of it happens to the Deep is rather disturbing; I thought the character was well done last season but that doesn’t mean I’m particularly interested in his emotional journey, much less in such trite revelations as “he abuses women because he hates himself”). One promising sign is that Kimiko is being positioned as the Boys’ driving force for the rest of the season, though that idea is hobbled by the fact that we don’t really know her as a person. Why, for example, does she refuse to let Mouse go, even though she clearly agrees with him that America and its superheroes have become a menace to the world? It’s never made clear, and with Mouse’s death, probably won’t be. Still, it’s good to have a protagonist with a clear goal, and the fact that this is the character who in the comics was just “The Female” is especially encouraging.

And then there’s Stormfront. The publicity materials for the second season have been talking up “the Nazi superhero” for weeks, which is a bit of a shame given that the episodes themselves are clearly setting up Stormfront’s politics as a big shock at their end. It also means that I was paying more attention to the character than I otherwise might have, which has left me more than a little uncertain about the show’s ability to handle such a concept. It’s not surprising that Stormfront isn’t spewing white supremacist buzzwords in interviews - people like her know how to maintain plausible deniability. But she should be throwing out dog whistles, seeking out fellow travelers and people she can convert to her worldview. Maybe that’s still to come, but the fact remains that until she utters a racial slur at the end of the episode, there’s no real indication of what Stormfront is. Which makes the whole exercise feel cheap, not at all unlike the empty diversity drives and social justice buzzwords that the show decries with its other storytelling. The fact that she does it for racist reasons doesn’t, after all, make Stormfront killing all the inhabitants of an apartment building in her pursuit of Mouse significantly worse than Homelander downing an airliner last season. 

Like the other superheroes, what makes Stormfront truly terrifying is what she symbolizes - Vought’s openness to (thinly-veiled) white supremacist ideology if it gets them a previously under-utilized market share; the normalization of racist rhetoric under the guise of patriotism and fighting terrorism; the ties between corporate America, evangelicalism, and white supremacy. There’s very little of this in these episodes, and while there’s obviously room for the show to get there, that feels like a retread of what it did in the first season. We already know where we stand with this world and these characters. It’s time for this story to move forward, and judging by these three episodes, I’m not convinced the show knows how.

#the boys