Secret Hedgehog

Left Alive

Chapter 6: The Price of Attention

Behold the pocket-sized western pygmy possum! (Cercartetus concinnus). One of the world’s smallest possums, this species typically weighs just 0.5 oz (14 g)—the size of an AA battery. This dainty marsupial is a nectarivore, meaning that its diet consists primarily of plant nectar. It inhabits treetops in forests throughout parts of Australia, using its long prehensile tail like a fifth limb as it moves from branch to branch.

That is exactly how prejudice evolves itself into something systemic. By changing the rules of who is allowed to be seen clearly. And this is where it becomes personal.

Most people reading this do not think of themselves as antisemitic. They would never use a slur. They would never straight out and openly deny someone’s humanity. But that is not how this shows up anymore. It shows up in smaller decisions we make as progressive and left leaders these days. In what we excuse. In what we scroll past. In which deaths feel complicated instead of tragic and unacceptable. In whether we instinctively see a person or a position when we hear the word “Zionist” or “anti-Zionist.”

You can oppose Israeli policy. You can reject Zionism. You can defend it. None of those positions require you to sort Jews, Israelis, Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims into categories that determine whether they deserve empathy. If your framework depends on deciding which Jews are acceptable and which are not, or which civilians matter and which do not, then the issue is not that your politics are controversial. It is that your reasoning has already crossed a line that civil rights traditions were meant to prevent. The civil rights standard was never agreement. It was consistency. No collective guilt. No dehumanization. No conditional empathy.

We already know how to apply these principles. We are watching what happens when we fail to. The only question is whether we are willing to apply them when it challenges our own assumptions. Because if we cannot, then all we have really done is learn how to recognize injustice selectively.

And selective justice is not justice for all."

My thesis is that Cringe is a spectrum and any character that is too Cringe and is classified as cringy becomes Irredeemable.

Of course, this phenomenon only caught my eye because of Homelander but The Boys gives me more material. Including the Deep and A-Train, but I will focus on the two biggest examples for brevity.

Homelander is a villain and, despite how he was treated in season 5, he was the villain that was framed throughout the series as being the most physically threatening. Though the role of ultimate villain was rightly Stan Edgar's, Homelander got saddled with it due to the showrunner's and writers' political fixation and skewed view of what the narrative of the series conveyed.

Homelander though powerful, threatening, and cunning is cringy. He drinks fresh cow's milk from a bucket. It has not been cleaned or pasteurized, so the audience can know that there is fur in it. He breastfeeds from a woman that he is not sleeping with or even romantically interested in. He bathes in stolen breastmilk from the NICU. Though there are deep psychological reasons behind why he does this and why he loves milk so much in general, the visuals make the audience cringe. Homelander is also often childishly petulant and insecure in a distinctly "unmanly" way compared to other characters. He behaves submissively toward some women, who were mostly villainous themselves, but was the rapist of a Good Woman. He flees from fights that he feels he stands a chance of losing, despite the advantage his superpowers give him. Which, as it is done by Homelander who is clearly defined as pathetic, is a sign of cowardice rather than intelligence or good sense. This is a villain that is plainly Cringe to most people, and in a way that makes him Irredeemable.

Now let's consider Soldier Boy. Soldier Boy was said to take advantage of some faceless women that were far too young for him. He is guilty of stolen valor; he is racist; he is in love with the same Nazi Homelander loved. But Ben gets to be charismatic and very cool too. His appreciation for older women is not some hunt for a mother figure as Homelander's tendency to fall for slightly older or only physically young women is, but simply is Ben's preference. Soldier Boy just still goes for ladies closer to his age even though he can pull young bombshells just as easily. He is mostly effortlessly charming to any woman he desires and his lovers are satisfied in bed by him (despite what lousy editing would imply). He gets to say cool lines. He gets to be clever in fights and never runs even when he should, which is brave and not ever lampshaded as stupid. When he is outsmarted, he still looks cool and always comes out the other side all right in the end anyway. He doesn't fret and cry after losing like Homelander does, he gets mad and he gets even. He has some cringe aspects but he does not slide toward the level where he becomes Irredeemable. It doesn't matter that Ben is as much an unrepentant monster as his son or that he is nihilistic and cruel. Soldier Boy is Redeemable because he is more Cool than he is Cringe.

To further illustrate my point, I only need look at fan and fan-to-fan responses now and how they compare across media.

There is a trend of thought, mostly among the male audience, that it is silly to expect every villain to be redeemed. I agree with this. It is perfectly acceptable for there to be stories that are good versus evil and for the evil to be uncomplicatedly vanquished in those stories. It is also more than acceptable for a villain's life and death to be framed as tragic but for their fall to need to happen anyway to resolve the story. That's all well and good. However, sometimes this cry for simplicity is misdirected. As it is when it comes to Homelander.

Homelander was not pure evil or really intentionally evil at all as he was never given anyone good to model morality from. He did what he was created to do and then he acted out in the destructive manners he knew. Still, he was not a born evil creature the way a Tolkien Orc is. Some fans treat him as if he was though. Granted, that is how the show tries to treat him via not letting anyone that might care learn anything solid about his past and by neglecting to explore it further in season 5. Even though the writers claimed to be tying up loose ends they failed to reveal Barbara Findley's fate (something even Antony Starr was uncertain of), because they wanted Homelander's past out of the audience's mind so they could kill their Trump parody.

It is a bit ironic how Homelander and other Cringe villains are treated in comparison to, say, Darth Vader or Roy Batty. Even though those men's plights and sins are really not so different from Homelander's. They both killed and tortured many people. Darth Vader also killed children and stood by while an entire populated planet was obliterated. Yet no fan will argue that Darth Vader should have died evil rather than return to the Light right at the end. No fan will argue that Roy Batty's final lines were unnecessary and took away from the narrative weight of Blade Runner. Because Darth Vader and Roy Batty, despite their struggles, flaws, and pain, were Cool Characters. They got that redemption because they were awesome, strong, brave, and powerful. They did not cross the Irredeemably Cringe line.

John and Homelander are not different people, they are not different characters. There is no innocent child John trapped inside a Homelander shaped shell. Homelander is not some foreign spirit possessing the body of innocent lab-rat John. Homelander is John. period. In just the same fucking way that ‘effect’ cannot exist in isolation from ‘cause,’ Homelander cannot exist in isolation from John, because every awful thing that Homelander is, is the direct causal result of every awful thing that happened to John.

Because Homelander literally could not be Homelander if he was not John.

Saying “feel for John, not for Homelander” cowardly and strategically avoids confronting the scary fact that even ‘bad’ people, people who you hate, might actually deserve empathy and equitable justice when they have been unjustifiably wronged. And it does so by taking ONE person and dividing them into two separate individuals: The Innocent (who you can advocate for without guilt) and The Guilty (who you can hurt without thought).

It’s so much easier to hate something when you purposefully strip it of its humanity and pretend it’s another character. This is the death of nuance btw.