There are a lot of things that tell you that The Boys has been written by a man.
For example, Kimikoâs entire arc this season and the fact that the only way theyâve given her speech and autonomy is through speech used to make jokes about watching porn and speaking like a 12-year-old. The fact that Annie is clearly the leader of a political resistance against Homelander, but theyâve completely sidelined that storyline, weâre told about it but never actually shown it. The fact that they reduced the character of Marie Moreau to a plot device, when she was supposedly meant to be key to defeating Homelander. The fact that they turned Sister Sage into a literal meme. Like, suddenly sheâs the smartest woman in the world, but she canât understand emotions⌠sorry, what? Intelligence isnât just memorising facts, it has multiple forms, and emotional intelligence is one of them. So if sheâs the smartest person in the world, she has to be the smartest in every sense. But then she somehow canât even figure out something like Soldier Boy being completely in love with a Nazi. The fact that Ashley has barely served any purpose this season, when sheâs been there since the very beginning of the show, and has had zero meaningful character development until the very end when it looked like she might finally get some after what happened with A-Train, but nothing ever came of it.
But above all, thereâs something key: the way Soldier Boy is handled.
Heâs a deeply misogynistic man, and in his first season he had more layers. But this season, his only function is basically to make jokes about fucking with women, very basic âhetero dudeâ humour about bragging that heâll stick it in anything. And no one, absolutely no one, ever calls him out as the pathetic example of fragile masculinity that he is. A man who hides behind the mask of the âfuckboy alpha maleâ persona to compensate for emotional dysfunction and a fragile ego, constantly reinforcing his identity through sexual conquest because thatâs all he has. And itâs obvious. If you actually said two sharp things to him, heâd fall apart. Heâs not impressive, heâs a mess. Heâs arguably even more pathetic than Homelander in a way, because Homelander is psychotic and mentally unstable, whereas Soldier Boy is just a washed-up nepo baby coping through sex, drugs, and ego inflation, because he has no real emotional regulation skills. And the moment you strip away that persona, thereâs nothing there. If you told him his entire âsexual conquest identityâ means nothing, heâd crumble emotionally, because thatâs the only thing propping him up.
And in a show written by women, that kind of character wouldâve been dismantled immediately, because heâs the textbook example of fragile masculinity. Instead, nothing happens to him. Why? Because itâs written by men.
Iâm tired of shows written by men, because women are treated terribly in them, and the male characters â who feel like theyâve stepped straight out of childhood He-Man toys â get all the screen time in the world.
