The Boys Isn't For The Girls

Last entry I talked about Amazon's new series The Boys based on a comic by Garth Ennis.  On Twitter a woman was complaining that the first episode "fridged" the main character's girlfriend and then had a rape scene so she wasn't down with it.  And, well, it's a good thing she didn't read the source material because it's like a million times more misogynist and sexually depraved.

If you're wondering, the idea of "fridging" comes from Green Lantern in the late 90s when Kyle Rayner's girlfriend was murdered and stuffed into a fridge for him to find.  Among women especially this became symbolic of comics killing or maiming or otherwise incapacitating a hero's girlfriend solely to motivate the hero.

Which if you watch all 8 episodes of the Amazon series this wasn't strictly "fridging" the girlfriend.  The main character, Hughie, and his girlfriend Robin are talking about moving in together when she suddenly explodes as the speedster A-Train literally runs right through her.  This is what leads Billy Butcher to recruit Hughie for his team and for Hughie to accept.  So in that sense it is "fridging" but later on it becomes a catalyst for finding out about this "Compound V" stuff that is like steroids for superheroes.  So in that way if it had been Hughie's dad or a male friend who had been run through the impact would have been exactly the same.  And in this context it wasn't entirely about just giving him motivation.  It was like Watchmen where it begins with a murder and that eventually leads to unraveling a whole big conspiracy.  Though admittedly Watchmen is pretty misogynist too, though less sexually depraved.

Since the show is on their network, Amazon made the first volume of the comic free on Prime Reading so I read the first six issues or so.  At least in that the girlfriend thing is a "fridging" because there really doesn't seem any reason for it except to provide motivation for Hughie to join Butcher's team.  In the comic she's not run over by A-Train; he throws or punches or whatever a villain who flies through Robin at such a high speed that she explodes--except for the arms that Hughie is still holding when paramedics arrive.

Next there's the rape.  It's not a rape in the sense of throwing a woman down and forcibly entering her.  Starlight is a young girl from Iowa with superpowers who's picked to join "The Seven," the series's version of the Justice League, though it's more like the Crime Syndicate from Earth-3 in that while they pretty much have the same powers as the Justice League they're totally evil.  Anyway, upon joining she meets her idol Homelander who then drops his pants and tells her that to become part of the team she has to give him a blow job.  And also A-Train and Black Noir, the Batman-ish character who's really more like Snake Eyes of GI JOE.  If she doesn't do it then she'll be sent back to Iowa to live out her life as a second-rate hero.  So guess what she does?  And finds no sympathy in the only other female "hero" Queen Maeve, who deals with her problems by drinking.

In the show it's mostly the same situation, except it's only the Aquaman-ish character The Deep who drops his pants.  And later gets his come-uppance when he's raped by a woman in Sandusky, Ohio, where he was sent to after Starlight inadvertently publicized what happened.  I'm not sure how much of that happens in the comics since I haven't read beyond the first volume; I think that was probably added in light of the #metoo and #timesup stuff.

So the Amazon series is actually a lot tamer than the comic book series.  If you're complaining about that, well, definitely don't read the source material because as I've laid out it's worse.  You also have a team of young heroes having sex with a bunch of prostitutes and in a park Billy Butcher has his bulldog Terror sodomize an old lady's Shih-Tzu.  For obvious reasons the bulldog is not in the TV show.  But the TV show does have The Boys shoving a bomb up an invisible "hero"'s ass and exploding him, so there's that, not that they really show much other than the exploding.

I guess if I'm a good liberal I should hate the show and the book, but I really don't.  I mean the blowjobs and dog sodomizing are a little too extreme but it's the world of the show.  Super "heroes" are assholes and the people fighting them aren't really much better.  It is what it is and you either accept it for that or don't.  But clearly if you're the type who's going to complain about "fridging" on Twitter then you aren't going to enjoy it.  Fair warning.

A couple of Fun Facts on how the show and comics are different:  first off in the comics Compound V is something The Boys use to fight superheroes.  For a short time it gives them the strength, speed, and healing ability to go toe-to-toe with most of the superheroes.  When Hughie takes some he winds up punching through a young hero and killing him.  As I said, in the show the Compound V is used like a steroid.  It's also given to babies to make them into superheroes.  There's this whole big conspiracy on distributing the drug to hospitals to create heroes, but also to terrorists to create supervillains.   

In the show Hughie is an American played by Jack Quaid, who really looks more like a Michael Shannon and Rainn Wilson hybrid than Dennis or Randy Quaid.  In the comic books he's Scottish and was actually modeled after actor/comedian Simon Pegg.  Which as an Easter egg Simon Pegg plays Hughie's father in the TV show.  In an added coincidence Karl Urban plays Billy Butcher and they were both in the reboot Star Trek movies.

Another Easter egg in the show is that two of Vought's marketing writers are named Seth and Evan, like Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, two of the producers of the series.  We find out when Billy and Hughie visit a support group that Seth's penis got broken off when a hero he was sleeping with turned to ice when she orgasmed, basically turning his dick to a Popsicle like liquid hydrogen.  So, yeah, this is definitely not a nice PG-13 show.  You've been warned!