per aspera ad inferni

The spin off, I always had mixed feelings about. To me, a Soldier Boy spin off always meant more Payback content. Noir I is right beside Soldier Boy as my favourite character, and would easily counter his awfulness in a spin off. The greater cast of Payback? They’re all delightfully zany and weird supes that could easily help carry it (Crimson Countess if you have no fans, then I am dead.)

So what compelled them to think that the co-lead of this spin off should be the Nazi character?

That was my red flag, because I had a sneaking feeling that they’ll attempt to humanise someone so morally reprehensible. The only major character, at the time of writing this, who has been shown to do hate crimes and continuously spit bile. The character who famously said “People like what I have to say, they just don’t like the word Nazi.” The at most mention of the two being together was an off hand mention Soldier Boy had where he described Liberty as the firecracker who started herogasm with him to Hughie's horror. The joke being a ‘he doesn’t know!’ in a little twist of dramatic irony.

(Side note: Soldier Boy is not a saint, and we’ve been told about his various, heinous acts. One of my many criticisms of the show is their incapability to truly commit to a character with him and often relies on telling instead of showing. The Soldier Boy that is shown is different to the Soldier Boy we are told about. It’s how we got into this mess with his characterisation in the first place.)

Whilst Kripke now has gone on the record and said that this isn’t the goal with Vought Rising (and I can’t disprove it, I haven’t seen the show yet) - Season 5 has indeed, only strengthened my suspicion with Soldier Boy’s reaction to anything relating to Stormfront. How he interacts with Stormfront is what forced Kripke to come out and say that in the first place. It’s this jarring recurring thing that turns the final act into what feels like one big ad for Vought Rising, and turning people off because it feels like Stormfront is about to be portrayed as favourable despite being… yknow… a Nazi?

Are we critiquing how the American Empire flirts with Nazism with a literal portrayal? That’s fine, Nazism is inspired by America’s own brutal genocide against Native Americans and white supremacy never left American culture and institutions. But this universe has already given physical representation of this with Stormfront/Homelander. In season 2. So what is left to explore?

Fuck all. That’s it.

Now, this isn’t to say that Soldier Boy can’t have a ‘one who got away’ kind of love. I’m actually an advocate for it, as a character who has lived as long as he is sure to have multiple loves. However, this hypothetical supe needed to be someone who is better than Ben in every conceivable way. This is the exact reason why people keep bringing up Crimson Countess (rip to my goat) in reaction to the Stormfront reveal. Countess is your slightly strange aunt, who has lived quite the wild life. She owns an animal sanctuary and sings a song against poaching chimpanzees. Who showed compassion to Kimiko when she realised Kimiko couldn’t speak. A woman who chose the wellbeing of her team over her significant other. In almost every way, she is a better person than Ben and he clung to that. That she’d be the one to save him from his imprisonment. He literally spelled it out in their confrontation scene.

It’s not that it’s inconsistent writing that he could love multiple women. He’s lived long enough. It’s just that Crimson Countess and Stormfront themselves are such wildly different women morally that Soldier Boy can’t realistically be drawn to both of them. There’s no logic in a Nazi woman and a quirky animal activist who frolicks in fields being the great loves of Soldier Boy’s life. The answer to this is that the writers just hoped you forgot about Crimson Countess at the cost of the internal logic of the narrative. This Stormfront relationship now feels incredibly forced. No more than an ad for a spin off, in the final season of the Boys, stealing much needed screen time from the titular group.

Again, I am not against the idea of Soldier Boy having a ‘one who got away’ kind of love. But it would have been more intriguing and consistent that she was someone who was just better than him. It makes him feel less like a disappointment, and that maybe he could be better. Only for him to disappoint them and the relationship to crash and burn. Then you can see how he logically went from this hypothetical supe to Crimson Countess. It’s a pattern, with a clear internal logic with what kind of supe Ben is drawn to. So it becomes less garish when we begin to unpack this part of his character. This does not mean season 5 is the place to explore this. You just give crumbs and pray the audience picks up on it.

Soldier Boy’s own shaky foundations as a character is why the writers felt like they could probably get away with just using him to set up Vought Rising. They’ve fallen into a character who shouldn’t be as well liked as he is, and did not need the nuance that he got. But somehow, along the way, he picked the nuance up. With a rift between Soldier Boy that we have been told about and the Soldier Boy we see - he was always going to crash in on himself if the writers did not adapt the character. So when attempting to strengthen the foundation to make him a strong enough character to carry his own spin off - what is it the writers do? Is it a man forced into introspection because of his awareness of his awfulness, and hates himself for it (a logical progression from his season 3 self) or is it to watch him flop around in his characterisation until they land on just using Stormfront to paste over his character. The latter being what we got, at great cost to the pacing of the season.

The writers needed an ad for Vought Rising and Soldier Boy to give Homelander the V1, and Stormfront became the contrived plot point that haunts the narrative. Killing whatever interest in Vought Rising along the way and hurting the momentum of season 5 before it even got started. The problem with season 5 is structural, and Soldier Boy acting as the ad for Vought Rising is symptomatic of that. The audience is dragged along set up in a season that should’ve been about resolution. So everything just feels like we’re not in the endgame as nothing sequential is really happening. To the point when things that should make it feel like we’re in the endgame simply do not land. I won’t go into them as this is solely on Soldier Boy and his season 5 portrayal, but he’s kinda just a small example of this bigger issue. That the writers and Kripke don’t understand that season 5 IS the third act, and just rather spin their wheels until we reach the final episodes. Soldier Boy is just the tool they used to do so, and they put him back in the box when it’s time to actually act like we’re in the final.

So is there a way to fix it? Yeah, I think so.

Soldier Boy himself already laid out the groundwork, in a way that doesn’t turn whatever scene he’s in into a backdoor pilot for Vought Rising. It’s when he told Homelander that he’d gladly step aside, ‘what father wouldn’t want that for his son?’

Good, great. We have a starting point of why Soldier Boy would give Homelander the V1. We can even leave it there and have it be much more serviceable than ‘that’s what Clara would have wanted.’ It’s Soldier Boy symbolically stepping aside and retiring, as well as being consistent with his season 3 characterisation. But I think we can have something more fun than that if they’re going to end up putting Ben back on ice.

(By the way, don’t you guys find it strange that in season 3 they set up a Chekhov’s gun with the Soldier Boy chest beam? That it can be triggered independently of Soldier Boy if you play Escape by Mikhail Shufutinsky? You’d think that the line of thinking for Butcher would be ‘how do we get these cunts in a room with a Bluetooth speaker?’ before trying to give the beam to Kimiko, something that took the Russians decades to do. It'd give Soldier Boy more plot relevance than walking out, advertise Vought Rising as he gives Homie the V1 and then immediately going back into the box. The following idea is going to follow the writer's vision of putting him back on ice, but I’m so upset that this gun went unfired.)

I wrote in the past about how Episode 7 had a theme of Revolutionary Optimism. I messed up the quote (that’s what I get for writing it on a train lol), but the point still stands. How I wished Revolutionary Optimism was a consistent theme throughout the season instead of being confined to one episode. It’s part of the show's overall hesitancy with actually portraying the left in a meaningful way. I’m not suggesting that Soldier Boy suddenly became a socialist, but I did always think he would have been a good candidate for representing Niemöller’s ‘First they came’ poem physically. It was actually what I thought would have made the most sense narratively for his character.

Twice now, Soldier Boy has been betrayed and put back into the box. So his motivation should be survival. Season 5 wants to make it clear that he doesn’t agree with Homelander’s take over, making little comments of disapproval. But doesn’t blatantly speak out against it, because he doesn’t want to go back into the box. The first thing he sees in the field is alleged Starlighters getting shipped out to Freedom camps. He may make an off hand comment about it, but he never resists it. Firecracker is killed for her wavering against Homelander, despite giving him everything. Soldier Boy doesn’t speak up, because it means he goes into the box. Instead of giving Homelander the V1 because ‘that’s what Clara would have wanted’ , the V1 is his gesture to staying out of the box. He is stepping aside for Homelander, as he said he would have in season 3, but deep down he knows it’s his way out of America.

But it doesn’t matter. Because when he actually tries to leave, he slips up and tells Homelander exactly what he thinks about how weird everything is. Revealing himself as a non believer in Homelander.

He still ends up in the box. In the end, Homelander came for him too.

Since Kripke has now said that we’ve seen all of Soldier Boy now and he ain’t getting out of this one, I can’t help but feel disappointed. I did know that Soldier Boy could go either way as a character. Despite being an absolute game changer character introduced in season 3, he always had this extremely weak foundation. Something that was filled with paste that only turned his character to weak cardboard that couldn’t decide what he was going to do, so it had to be what Clara wants. It just sucks, and I will mourn the potential of Soldier Boy forever I think. My, and many others like me, interest in Vought Rising is dead in the water.