After all that, if it's just the best thing I've ever seen, it will be a letdown.
But it's free with your Prime membership, and maybe some of the Boys are hot, so...
But then we get down to the main plot, about electronics-store nebbish Hughie (Jack Quaid, left) and The Girl of His Dreams, who is killed to provide character motivation.
Yawn. Haven't I heard this a thousand times before? Action heroes ALWAYS have dead wives, or else estranged wives to reconcile with. It's disgustingly heterosexist.
Wait -- two dead Girls of Their Dreams? That's two too many. I give up and read the plot synopsis instead.
They start a vigilante band, The Boys.
1. Hughie
2. Butcher
4. Frenchie (Tomer Capon)
5. The Female (Karen Fukuhara), the only Boy who has super powers. The others get by with paralyzing gas and computer bugs.
1. Homelander (Antony Starr, left)
2. Starlight (Erin Moriarty)
3. Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott), who is a lesbian ("The first canonical gay superhero!").
Note: I am told that she's not a lesbian at all. Apparently the Wikipedia article naming another character as her ex-girlfriend was in error.
5. The Deep (Chace Crawford)
6. Black Noir (Nathan Miller)
Well, at least the show is equipped in the hunkoid department
Other superheroes of interest are:
8. Mesmer (Haley Joel Osment, who often plays gay characters).
9. The evil Ezekial (Shaun Benson), "a closeted homosexual." Is this the 1950s? When did we go back to the term "homosexual" to describe a gay person? Are we going to start using old, offensive terms for racial minorities, too?
The episode plot summaries are extremely complex, but there seems to be a lot of sex and violence. Both the Boys and the Supes are morally suspect; not a "truth and justice" type among them.
I'm not willing to find out. The origin story about the death of not one but two Girls of Their Dreams turned me off, and the homophobic "closeted homosexual" slur sealed the deal.
If only they had stuck to the gay-subtext buddy-bonding boys in the first scene.
Sorry, but Queen Maeve is aggresively straight. There's even a scene of her sparring with her harem, a group of muscular guys.
ReplyDeleteAnd yeah: Ezekiel's pretty bad. Not only is he closeted but he leads a "pray away gay" campaign and he's blackmailed by Hughie acting like he's one of Ezekiel's conquests. Although there is a fun make out scene where Ezekiel shows his stretchy powers.
Don't apologize to me, it's not my error, it's Wikipedia's. THe article on "The Boys" anmes another character as Queen Maeve's ex-girlfriend. Maybe she's bisexual.
DeleteDead love interests has a name: Women in refrigerators. Gail Simone wrote a whole thing about it. Though I question the wisdom of some examples. (Mirage being raped by a Dick Grayson impostor would bother me more if she hadn't herself raped the real McCoy shortly before that. And you'd be surprised how often this happens to him.) She called it Women in Refrigerators, referring to Kyle Rayner's girlfriend being killed, mutilated, and stuffed in the refrigerator.
ReplyDelete"The first canonically gay superhero" Now, now, including bisexuals, Marvel had Northstar, Hercules, Wolverine, and one Iceman but not the main one. (Past versions of the original X-Men were brought to the future.) Also, Ultimate Colossus, but I never followed Ultimates that closely, starting around the time the Maximoff twins were introduced as a couple. DC has Wonder Woman, Barbara Gordon (more than one Batgirl), Black Canary, Batwoman, Jericho, and a transfer from Image Comics, Apollo and the Midnighter. (Gail Simone says Lian Harper would've been a lesbian as well.) They dance around the first two Robins and Green Arrow being bi as well. Oh, and the Earth 2 Green Lantern's ring was actually the one he was going to propose to his boyfriend with now, apparently? Not sure if that retcon works in a world where it's still the 1940s. I mean, characters grow up, but in terms of technology, mores, and general aesthetic, it's the 1940s.
TBH, the series sounds dreadfully 90s. In the 90s, comics fit the Clinton-era "ends justify the means" politics. (Didn't Liefeld write a Youngblood issue where the characters, I refuse to dignify them with the title "heroes", assassinated Saddam Hussein?) So, we had a series of antiheroes replacing classic heroes over at DC. (The aforementioned Mirage is one of those antiheroes. Her arc begins around the time Superman died and ends around the time Batman was paralyzed.) Marvel had a few new additions, but mostly just mutated their characters to fit the Liefeldian norm. Nobody likes the 90s comics.
Is there an equivalent for tv? I see it all the time, usually in the first scene of a series, just before I turn it off, or in the description: "After the death of his wife, a detective." If the wife does live past the opening scene, they're divorced so they can reconcile by the end of the movie.
DeleteThe term can be used either way.
DeleteThe response from other creators was generally good. Not that it's stopped happening. It's a common crutch.
But there's another factor as well: Men in comics come back. How many other media make coming back from the dead a regular thing? Women don't.