#also i want season 2 end on a positive note of Frenchie SOME FUCKING HOW stealing a ship for them

[varyathevillain]

one thing I definitely don't want out of the rest of S2 episodes, and afraid that will come to happen nonetheless due to the "love triangle" interview, or due to stereotypic expectations of "softer love saving from past abuse and toxicity", and also, like, LOTS OF SPOILERY STILLS for the episodes premiering tomorrow... is for Izzy Hands to come out of his fucked up dependent toxic love for Ed into another romantic relationship, especially if it includes Edward.

I want Izzy Hands to be developed as a character, to finally untangle his love towards Ed/Blackbeard, not through falling in love again... but through the love towards the crew, and of them towards him. I want for the trauma pack of attempted Ed Teach murderers to bond, not so hard it's impossible to untangle them from one another, but enough to see "yeah, all these people are together, and they're gonna stay shoulder to shoulder to protect one another".

I want a friend group that did bond through a traumatic experience, but came out trusting one another because of care, not trauma. I want that to be the crux of Israel Hands' development, to be someone who can finally see himself apart from Edward Teach, and apart from "this love he has", like a disease... I want him to embrace what he has yet refused to admit. that he wants to care for his people, his crew, and to be cared for back equally, without any dynamics of power in the way.

#brought to you by aromantic person who thinks coming out of a romantic attraction into another one would just switch gears for Izzy #and not actually like. have him understand that he doesn't have to nurse that shit in his chest and needs to move on #also i want season 2 end on a positive note of Frenchie SOME FUCKING HOW stealing a ship for them #where everyone goes 'yup! Izzy deserves to be captain and have fun' and the lot of them sail off on an adventure... on The Adventure :P #OFMD spoilers #OFMD S2 spoilers #Izzy Hands #Varya rambles #OFMD #Our Flag Means Death #no offense to Steddyhands shippers I just think 'the healing power of romantic love' even if poly SUCKS after a recent toxic relationship #ending after physical and mental abuse for TWO PEOPLE of that pairing. yeah it would be fantastically fucked up #and go ahead if you want that in fic or show like FULL SPEED AHEAD. great dynamic. not for me and not now #text post

[abigailnussbaum]

The Boys - Good & Bad

Being an itemized list of the strengths and weaknesses of the first season Amazon’s superhero show The Boys, based on the comic run of the same name by Garth Ennis, which I haven’t read.

GOOD:

The show looks good.  It’s not tremendously visually inventive on the level of, say, Legion or Doom Patrol, but it’s got a definite style, and not just in the action scenes.  The stagings pop, the street scenes look crisp and interesting, the boardroom scenes take advantage of the set designers’ inventiveness.  There’s the requisite loss of saturation once our two main characters lose their respective love interests, but it’s not color-graded out of existence, the way a lot of other shows trying to evoke masculine despondency do.  A “gritty”, laddish superhero show conjures up certain expectations where visuals are concerned, and The Boys exceeds them at almost every turn.

There are actual episodes!  With beginnings and endings and common themes!  I had no idea streaming shows could still do that, but The Boys is really good at finding mini-stories within its overarching plot and structuring its episodes around them (which should be a basic implement in a TV writer’s toolkit and instead has all-but disappeared).  Episode 2 is about the Boys realizing how screwed they are by having captured a nearly-unkillable superhero who has seen their faces, and trying to figure out a way to kill him.  Episode 5 is structured around Annie and Hughie’s visit to a superhero-themed Christian revivalist festival.  It gives the entire season a more engaging structure, and pulls you along with the story in a way that most streaming shows don’t even attempt.

There are some genuinely clever worldbuilding choices that emerge from the “what if superheroes, but awful” premise.  The fact that superheroes star in their own movies, for example, or that their power competitions become major sporting events, is hilarious, and perfectly conveys the sense of moral bankruptcy that I think the show is going for.  And the crossover the show posits between superhero worship and white Evangelicalism is an obvious and perfect fit, tying into the latter’s barely-concealed love of power and authoritarianism.  Also, there are some inventive demonstrations of how combining superpowers, limited intelligence, and corporate greed can lead to horrifying results, some funny - The Deep trying to rescue a dolphin from captivity - and some genuinely gutting - the plane crash scene in episode 4 is the queasy highlight of the season, as the viewer realizes just a few seconds before the characters do just how badly they’ve screwed up, and how horrible their future choices are going to have to be.

The cast is uniformly excellent, and pretty much everyone gets a lot of different layers to play.  The highlights are Elisabeth Shue, Erin Moriarty, Jessie T. Usher, and Tomer Capon (bit of hometown pride here, but it’s easy to see why he’s such a well-regarded young actor in Israel), but pretty much everyone is good and interesting to watch.  Even Karl Urban, who gets the show’s most thankless task - he has to carry most of the story while playing its least nuanced character - manages to infuse some humor and complexity into Billy.

There are a lot of interesting, complex relationships, the top one being Homelander and Madeline Stillwell.  As a character says near the end of the season, it’s a relationship that is “hard to quantify” - does he want to fuck her, or kill her, or be her child?  Does she want to control him or does she genuinely get off on his desire for her?  Other relationships are less fraught - Frenchie and Kimiko are incredibly sweet together - but still a lot of fun to watch.

The show seems to understand that at the root of almost every villain, and certainly privileged ones, is childishness.  You see this in the way The Deep sinks into self-pity after experiencing the consequences of his sexual assault on Annie, or the way A-Train becomes obsessed with blaming Hughie for his girlfriend’s death, even though he’s the one who killed her.  You see it most of all in Homelander’s resentment of Madeline’s baby and the attention she lavishes on it.  It’s simply stunning how openly envious this grown man is of a months-old infant, and it makes every scene the two share almost unbearably tense, because you’re just waiting for Homelander to snap and kill the baby.  Which ends up much more effectively conveying the point the show is trying to make than the sudden shock of him actually doing it would have - the fact that this character would clearly feel themselves justified in killing an infant, and is only holding back because he knows there’ll be a fuss, is the sum total of the show’s criticism of absolute power.

(This emphasis also justifies the show’s insistence that Hughie is redeemable, because though he starts out quite immature, he does grow, unlike the superpowered villains.  He starts the season killing a super who hasn’t really done anything to him, just for the rush of it, and ends it saving the life of the super whose selfishness destroyed his world, because he’s actually realized that his are not the only problems that matter.)

Someone seems to have realized that having a female (Asian) character whose name is simply The Female is an absolutely terrible idea, and the show gives her a name as soon as possible.  There’s also hints that she may be regaining the power of speech.

BAD:

The use of violence - and particularly sexual violence - against women ends up privileging men, even when those men are the perpetrators.  Both Hughie and Billy are motivated by the loss of the women they loved, and in both cases the show plumps for the classic approach of single scene featuring the love interest being angelic, and doesn’t bother to shade either of them in or give them a personality or a chance to speak on their own behalf.  And even when the victim is a main character, as when The Deep assaults Annie, the focus is much more on him than on her.  Annie processes her trauma in a scene and a half, and it ends up being folded into her overall dilemma over how to be a superhero.  Whereas the Deep spends the rest of the season coping with the consequences of his actions and folding them into his general lack of self-esteem.  While there’s the germ of an important point there - just because this guy has problems of his own doesn’t justify his assault on another person or make him particularly tragic or compelling - the show’s insistence on going back to that well, even as the season approaches its climax, is simply baffling.

This feels, in fact, like a smaller component of the show’s broader problem with sexual ethics, the fact that it seems to have no way of distinguishing between sexual behavior is depraved, and sexual behavior that is just weird or maybe a bit kinky.  Like, the fact that the Deep has consensual sex with dolphins is not worse than, or even equivalent to, the fact that he assaulted Annie.  The fact that Homelander prematurely ejaculates when he and Madeline have sex isn’t a worse reflection on his character than the fact that he may have raped Billy’s wife.  And yet those cases are treated as equivalent by the narrative.  It ends up feeling profoundly anti-sex, rather than anti-sexual-violence, an impression that is only intensified when Annie and Hughie - the show’s sole “good”, loving couple - have sex that is completely vanilla (and despite Hughie’s earlier assurances that he isn’t intimidated by Annie’s strength, he still ends up being the dominant one in bed, and she even lets him be on top).  It also prevents the show from any serious discussion of the one aspect of sexuality that is unique to its setting, the possibility of supers inadvertently hurting their human partners.  The scene in which Popclaw crushes a man’s head between her thighs is the nadir of the season precisely because it’s played for laughs, for that “aren’t we outrageous” vibe that everyone told me the comic was suffused with.  When actually you could do something interesting and character-based with it, if the show actually cared to.

(Having said all this, I do think that the show is a lot better on the subject of sexual violence than it could have been, and a lot better than the source material might have dictated.  It feels significant that - with the exception of the aforementioned Popclaw scene - we never see any act of sexual assault on screen.  We see Homelander and the Deep scoping out their victims, Rebecca Butcher and Annie, and maneuvering them into a position of vulnerability.  And we see the aftermath of the assault for both victims.  But we don’t see the act itself, in a series that is otherwise perfectly happy to depict consensual sex, even if it judges anything resembling kink.  I also thought the handling of Queen Maeve, as a woman who has lived for years under a sustained campaign of sexual harassment, was extremely powerful - again, the focus is on how the abuse twists the victim up and makes them feel powerless and alone, not on any overt act of violence.)

I really don’t get why I’m meant to care about Billy Butcher.  It’s not even that I don’t like him - I just find him completely uninteresting.  He works as an engine of plot and a way to inject chaos into the other characters’ lives (the repeated device in which he authoritatively promises to solve the team’s problems, only for the show to cut away to him alone, wearing an expression that makes it clear that he has no idea what to do and is about to make everything worse, is pretty funny and effective).  But as a character in his own right and with his own story, he just feels too one-note and monomaniacal for me to care about.  I care what happens to MM and Frenchie and Kimiku and Annie and Maeve.  I even care a little what happens to Hughie.  I simply can’t bring myself to give a fuck about Billy.

I don’t see why I should be rooting for Hughie and Annie to make it work.  It’s great that he feels she helped him rediscover his moral compass, but in the meantime he lied to her, used her, and concealed the fact that he had murdered one of her teammates from her.  Annie has the right of it when she hears his confession and replies “the thing is, I don’t care”.  It would be one thing if their reconciliation at the end of the season was more of an ethical one, a case of Annie choosing to rescue Hughie and the Boys because she knows they don’t deserve to die, not because she forgives him.  But I got the impression that we were meant to read it as a romantic reconciliation too, which Hughie hasn’t even come close to earning.

If you must have interchangeable Middle Eastern terrorists as your go-to, killable background villains, doesn’t it seem obvious that there should be at least a few positive, named Middle Eastern characters in the foreground?  (I suppose Frenchie might count?  But given Capon’s heritage, he could just as easily be a Sepharadic Jew, which doesn’t really avoid the problem of Islamophobia that the show cheerfully blunders into.)

The plot kind of loses the thread towards the end of the season, partly, I suspect, because of the need to set up characters and plot points for season 2.  It’s a particular shame because the plotting had been so strong in the first half of the season.

The sound mix is terrible.  It should tell you something that I even noticed this and worked out the right term to use for it, because I’m usually completely illiterate on these matters.  But after the millionth time you’ve had to raise the volume during a dialogue scene, then immediately lower it during an action scene, you start to wonder if there isn’t something wrong.

Overall, this is a much smarter, more interesting, and more entertaining show than discussions of the comic had led me to expect, but I can’t help but wonder if it isn’t benefitting from the fact that we’re so saturated with superhero stories right now.  There’s less pressure to be the one subversive superhero story, which leaves The Boys room to be more character-focused, and to use superheroes as more of a metaphor for the corrupting influence of power and the evil of corporate overreach.  Its supers feel a lot more like generic celebrities - A-Train is an anxiety-ridden athlete; Annie is a pageant kid; Maeve is an aging movie star whose career and soul have been blighted by ubiquitous sexual harassment.  Characters who are genuinely set apart by their superpowers, like Homelander, are in the minority (and even in Homelander’s case it turns out his psychopathy has more to do with having been raised in a lab).  

Basically it feels like the people who adapted the comic saved it by telling a story that is much more generic than the original, which may be entirely to the good.  But I do wonder whether the second season won’t veer further into exactly those parts of the show that I find least interesting.  The final scene seems to suggest much more of an emphasis on Billy’s manpain and his conflict with Homelander, and the introduction of superpowered terrorists threatens to move the show away from the criticism of power that made the first season work.

#the boys #this was a lot better than i was expecting #while still having enough flaws #that i can easily see it falling apart in season 2 #still #if you were holding off because of the comic's reputation #the show is a lot smarter and more nuanced