The Boys was always anti-authoritarian and anti-Trump, but some conservative fans are only now seeing it

A couple weeks ago, Amazon Prime Video dropped three new episodes of The Boys, kicking off the show's fourth season. So far, it's pretty much business as usual: the Superman-esque Homelander continues to spiral into madness, our heroes are trying to prevent him from taking over the government, and there's a scene where a self-replicating superhero eats out his own butt, continuing the show's tradition of trying to top itself with spectacular acts of grossness.

I've been watching The Boys since the beginning, and while the show can repeat itself from time to time, it remains an entertaining satire of superhero movies and a jackhammer commentary on our current political moment. The Boys has always worn its progressive politics on its sleeve. The narcissistic Homelander tries to project an image of patriotic strength — he literally wears an American flag for a cape — but is really a needy man-child who thinks he can do "whatever I want" with impunity. The difference between Homelander and your average petulant 8-year-old is that no one is willing to stand up to Homelander because he has superpowers and could kill them.

In season 2, Homelander gets involved with a Nazi superhero named Stormfront (her name is borrowed from a white supremacist hate forum) who educates him on the "white genocide" conspiracy theory. "People love what I have to say. They believe in it," goes one of her famous lines. "They just don't like the word Nazi, that's all." This storyline is inspired by the 2017 white supremacist hate rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as the rise of far-right rhetoric in political discourse in general.

That's one of many times The Boys has taken inspiration directly from the headlines. In the third season, a superhero named Blue Hawk is criticized for over-policing Black neighborhoods; he freaks out at a Black community center meeting and shouts, “All supes matter!” And then there are the parallels between Homelander and Donald Trump, which were obvious from the start and ramped up as the show went on. At the end of season 3, Homelander uses his laser eyes to blow the head off a protester, only to be cheered on by a throng of fans. That's a direct reference to what Trump said while running for president in 2016: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”

The Boys has also skewered progressive ideas and public figures; superhero and politician Victoria Neuman, who can explode people's heads with her mind, draws comparisons to Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And in season 3, the show poked fun at how the entertainment industry makes empty overtures towards queer people in an attempt to fleece them for as much money and positive PR as possible. But most of the satire has always been reserved for the right, Trump and Trumpism. That's continued in season 4; the opening episodes feature Homelander sitting in court on murder charges, recalling images of Trump in court for falsifying business records.

And yet, the discourse around The Boys has changed with season 4. Audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes have dropped from 75% positive for season 3 to 50% positive in season 4. One-star user reviews bemoan the show's "in-your-face idealogical lecturing" or its "obsessive need to preach THE MESSAGE." One simply reads, "Don't let them capture your mind. This is evil."

There's a right-wing tone to a lot of these reviews, even though The Boys has always been open about its progressive, anti-fascist politics. "If the show had a message, it’s that anyone who stands in front of you and says they can save the world is lying," showrunner Eric Kripke recently told The Hollywood Reporter. That message is especially pertinent as we approach another presidential election where Donald Trump — who is known for claiming that he "alone" can fix the country's problems — is one of the candidates. According to a report from the conservative Heritage Foundation, if Trump is elected, he intends to remake the federal bureaucracy so as to concentrate unprecedented levels of power in his person, indulging in the sort of authoritarianism about which The Boys is deeply skeptical. He's the villain of the show in abstentia, and he always has been.

What's different now is that this message seems harder to ignore. Take the clip below, where the superhero Firecracker rattles off a bunch of deranged conspiracy theories to a receptive audience. Everything she says is drawn directly from actual conservative conspiracy theories from the past few years: the stuff about different foods corresponding to different acts of child molestation is lifted from Pizzagate; adrenochrome is taken from QAnon; and Tom Hanks really was cast as a pedophilic monster in the eyes of right-wing conspiracy nuts.

To anybody who's brain hasn't been warped to the point where this stuff seems reasonable, everything Firecracker says sounds absurd and therefore hilarious. It's exactly the kind of wingnut rhetoric that The Boys has always loved to skewer. And yet the incensed fan who posted this clip seems shocked: "What the fuck happened to this show lmao," they ask. Over on Rotten Tomatoes, one fan seems to tip their hand: "A good story has been replaced with uninteresting pandering and a desperate effort to mock everything they want people to believe are 'conspiracy theories.'"

This person seems genuinely offended that The Boys would dare suggest that Tom Hanks isn't running a child sex trafficking ring, much less treat it as the silly nonsense it is. "The Boys is a good show but watching people on here figure out The Boys was making fun of them the whole time is an even better show," reads a tweet from Washington Post Universe Guy. Reading some of these pearl-clutching responses to the new season, I think there's some truth in that.

Why do some fans idolize Homelander?

But how could these conservative fans really have taken this long to figure out that The Boys has a progressive political agenda? "The show’s many things. Subtle isn’t one of them," Eric Kripke has said of his creation. He seems particularly baffled by people who see Homelander as aspirational or heroic. "Some people who watch it think Homelander is the hero. What do you say to that?"

Antony Starr, the actor who plays Homelander, is on the same page. “A lot of people have glommed onto him," he said in 2023. "There’s a weird element out there that actually kind of idolize him. I’ve seen some shit on Twitter and I’m like, ‘Wait, What? You are missing the point entirely!’”

There do seem to be a strangely large number of people who have missed the point, especially early on in the show's run. Homelander is a reflection of Donald Trump and The Boys is deeply skeptical of Trump and everything he represents, so why did this Trump fan dress up as Homelander in the Million MAGA March in November 2020?

There are actually a lot of people out there who have identified with Homelander. "Been rewatching The Boys before I watch season 3, and Homelander is literally me," wrote Movie Cucks on Twitter in 2022, alongside an image of Homelander overlaid with text that reads, "Just be yourself and force others to do whatever the fvck you want." In 2021, one fan on Reddit admitted to being "a little jealous" of Homelander's "total disregard for others and the jacked up ego."

I'm hesitant to put too much weight on testimonials like that, since a lot of appreciation for Homelander is draped in layers of irony. But clearly something about him appeals to some fans. I agree with Rebecca Onion of Slate that "Homelander’s appeal is about power and domination." Unsurprisingly, that's also part of Trump's appeal; many people find something likable and admirable about a person who does whatever they want, whenever they want, and damn the consequences. The followers of a dictator either aspirationally identify with that kind of brutal power, or else find relief in submitting to it. That's the appeal of all strongmen politicians, who try to project strength first, foremost and to the exclusion of all else.

In real life, this desire for people to see their leaders as unfailingly strong can become cringey and excessive. Think of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin posing shirtless, or of Trump's fans feeling the need to give him ripped, bulging muscles on posters. The Boys knows that the myth of the strongman politician is dangerous and absurd, so the show mercilessly mocked Homelander from the beginning. "I don’t know how you root for Homelander," Kripke recently told Variety. "When the guy is slurping up breast milk, and being the weakest character in the show over and over and over again and being like — he’s not even particularly macho. He’s weird. He’s weird and thin-skinned, and I don’t know how you look at that guy and you’re like, 'That’s my guy.'"

And yet, many never seemed to have gotten the memo. One fan on Rotten Tomatoes complains that, in season 4 of The Boys, Homelander acts like "an insecure teenager." If fans like this didn't see that Homelander was a cripplingly insecure little boy before this, maybe the show was being too subtle despite itself.

The Boys was progressive then and is progressive now

I think there are other, related reasons why the show's conservative fanbase is flipping on it. Many negative reviews mourn that the character of Frenchie (Tomer Capone), previously in a relationship with Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), is now sleeping with a new character named Colin (Elliot Knight). I have some problems with this storyline myself, namely that it ramps up so quickly I wondered if I'd missed an episode or two. But I can roll with it. I imagine that if Frenchie were suddenly sleeping with an out-of-nowhere female character, rather than an out-of-nowhere male one, there wouldn't be an outcry. As it stands, there are a lot of complaints about the show "pandering" by "making Frenchie gay."

Basically, I think some conservative fans were grossed out that two men kissed on TV. Homophobia is generally associated more with the right than the left, so I suspect these fans are mixed in with the ones offended that The Boys would mock anything as serious and important as QAnon.

I think there's a lot of value in a show that can appeal to people on both sides of the political aisle. But The Boys has always had a clear political message, so I don't know if it could keep walking that line. If a large chunk of the audience didn't realize that the show is anti-fascist, anti-authoritarian, and anti-Trump, then it wasn't doing its job properly.

Honestly, I've always been amazed that The Boys has managed to be so boldly progressive and anti-Trump while also becoming a big hit. Maybe the majority of the viewing public doesn't care as much about politics as you'd guess from scrolling Twitter, and will tune into a TV series so long as it's funny, exciting, and features the occasional action scene where a man is accidentally thrown against the side of a building and flattens to it like a gooey red pancake. That's actually a comforting thought.

The audience for The Boys is bigger than ever, which means there are more people to tick off

Another explanation is that as The Boys is becoming more popular; the first three episodes of season 4 brought in 21% more viewers than the first three episodes of season 3, a healthy jump. As the number of viewers grows, so do the number of people who might take offense and whine on the internet.

After season 4, The Boys has one more season to go before it wraps up. At the rate it's going, the fifth and final season could become a pop cultural event. I expect that to be anything but boring, onscreen and online. In the meantime, new episodes drop on Amazon Prime Video on Thursdays.

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