This is going to be terribly structured and rambling. Apologies in advance. I also wanna preface this by saying I did enjoy watching S5, but this was a particular thing I noticed at some point and then couldn't really un-notice.
I've mentioned this to various people, but something I think is notable (and sad, in my view) about S5 is how we get no more Homelander POV after episode 3 - ostensibly, after his psychotic break. I feel slightly bad highlighting this at all - it must suck a lot if you watch this show primarily for the boys and then you get to S5E5 and don't even get me started on Annie - but, nonetheless, we are never again in Homelander's POV after the third episode. Emotionally, whenever we're in a scene with him, we're meant to be sitting with someone else. Sometimes the script even tells us so (not that it should be doing that), such as detailing that viewers feel Butcher's satisfaction when he's punching him in the finale.
After episode 3, we do not witness any more of Homelander's hallucinations alongside him; we get no more tinnitus noises until very briefly in the finale (arguably, the closest we get to his POV again is during his Easter address when he snaps, but the way it's presented with cuts to other scenes dilutes his POV considerably); and we are never again left alone with him for any meaningful amount of time to see him behave in ways he only does when he's alone (talking to the mirror, obsessing over his perceived imperfections, getting upset with himself, etc.). In short: Homelander no longer exists when other people aren't watching him. And while this sounds like good meta commentary on his own relationship to his sense of selfhood, I don't think that was the objective of this choice nor the result of carrying it out in practice.
None of this means it's impossible to know what Homelander is feeling in any given scene after episode 3 - especially if you're watching for him and are well versed in reading him - since we still get to witness him going through various experiences from an outside perspective and Antony Starr is a phenomenal actor, but it's very obvious, despite Jensen Ackles' belief that he was there in S5 to support Homelander's arc, that actually Homelander was there to support Soldier Boy's. If this lack of Homelander POV was indeed an intentional decision from the show, I assume it was done to create emotional distance between Homelander and the viewer, since he was their Big Bad who was going to die at the end of the season. They were effectively winding him down. Soldier Boy, on the other hand, they actively wanted us to be interested in because he will be starring in an up-coming spin-off.
Besides this lack of POV focus, one of the notable ways the show seeks to distance us from Homelander is by refusing point blank to engage with his traumatic origins, knowing they're surely the biggest trigger for viewer sympathy for him. You could argue they'd covered Homelander and the lab extensively in S4E4, but they chose to manoeuvre him and his father into situations where his lab trauma is staring us right in the face (hello, episode 4). I've seen people discuss elsewhere how letting Soldier Boy find out his son suffered like him (much worse than him) in a lab would've circumnavigated the need for retconning that he was in love with Stormfront to create something for them to bond over. After all, bringing back Stormfront's ghost for S5 did nothing for Homelander's arc - we learnt nothing new about him by it, nor did it push him to new places. He didn't hallucinate her (or, if he did, we never saw it). He didn't ever come to realise/admit that it wasn't him as a person she loved but the ideal of an Aryan superman - and that she killed herself as soon as she knew he wasn't going to do what she wanted him to so, actually, Homelander getting the V1 was not necessarily what she would have wanted. These things could've pushed him to new heights of madness, since obviously any character growth the show wanted to give Homelander by this point would've been negative growth, but the show wasn't interested in this. Instead, the Stormfront references were all for Soldier Boy's sake - and for Vought Rising's.
Secondly, of course, there's also the strange exclusion of Ryan for most of the season - the apparent decision to pull back on how important he was ever going to be as the first natural born supe, despite how crucial his burgeoning sense of morality was made out to be from S2-4. Homelander's character arc has always been strongly tied up in learning he has a son and his internal struggles over how to actually parent and bond with that son, while misunderstanding what he can do to make himself feel happier and more secure in his relationship with him (taking over the country as opposed to spending Christmas day with him, for example). I don't object to Homelander's ability to later rationalise and justify beating up Ryan in episode 3 - although, again, without any Homelander POV, it takes a level of analysis that the show doesn't want viewers to expend on Homelander anymore to understand why he beat Ryan and how he feels about it afterwards. What I do object to are the final beats of Homelander and Ryan's tragic relationship being crammed into only three shared scenes. It feels like a more complex dynamic was reduced to just the blunt shape of where they wanted the story to go.
I understand that refusing to get close to Homelander perhaps functions on a symbolic level as another way he is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of humanity - now, even we the viewers are locked out of his head - but it just feels a shame to me. The tormented manner Homelander reacts to everything that happens to him, and our ability to view these reactions the way none of the other characters can, is part of the juiciness of his character. Hardly anyone in the world of The Boys actually views Homelander as a person with an internal life; he is either a perfect saviour they idolise, or a dangerous obstacle for them to navigate around and try to eliminate. The narrative itself is supposed to understand differently: that, no matter what any of these characters do, none of them are simply heroes or villains, gods or monsters, but flawed people who mean different things to different people and have the capacity to get better and/or worse. The dehumanisation of Homelander from both those who revere and those who despise him is one of the overarching themes of the show, is why his face and name haunts the world even when he isn't onscreen, so cutting off viewers' ability to perceive him when he isn't playing a role for another character or being coloured by their judgement feels like an attempt to encourage that same subconscious dehumanisation in viewers too. And, to be fair, it's not like they needed to push many viewers very hard in that direction when it comes to Homelander - he's by far the most likely of my favourite fictional characters to get me crucified online for liking beyond his meme value.
The wider issue with his lack of POV in the final season is that Homelander was The Boys' principal antagonist and frankly the cash cow of the show - Antony Starr had third billing throughout, and by the last season the protagonists had all but abandoned the notion of holding Vought to account for anything that could be "solved" by simply killing Homelander instead - so it was a disservice to him to wrap up his character arc before we even reached the midpoint of S5 (for the record, I don't think Homelander having a psychotic break had to be the last beat in his character arc before his death, but if the show itself couldn't think of anywhere new to push him after that, despite the increased whump it put him through that could've inspired additional beats, then he should've had his breakdown in a later episode). It's true that in S1, the season he appears onscreen the least, we aren't especially close to Homelander either - but this is because in the first season there is still the mystique of what exactly his deal is to tease out. Cutting down on his POV for S5 doesn't work as a neat mirror image of that; you can't take us to the third act and just pull the plug. I hope we weren't distanced from him as some kind of comment on his psychosis meaning he simply became beyond human comprehension, or suddenly lacked an inner life like a "normal" person. It was very obvious even watching from an outside perspective that neither of those things were true. He was never "nothing", despite the finale's verdict on him.
There was the interesting scene with the Legend, showcasing Homelander's latent humanity, in episode 6. This was honestly not a flavour of Homelander I ever expected them to give us in the last season, especially not that late into it, which just makes me wonder why they even gave him this merciful moment at all, seeing as they weren't especially interested in digging deeper into his character by that point. Homelander could've been so much worse in S5 than he ever actually became, and I'm glad we have moments that do still deliberately highlight his complexity. I still wouldn't say this scene is from Homelander's POV - it feels more like we're with the Legend in witnessing him crash out and try to talk to Madelyn, and though in the end we are left with Homelander after the Legend wisely exits, it's just for a short plot beat so we can understand how Homelander finds Soldier Boy later. Still, it was a scene that allowed some of Homelander's layers to be peeled back.
Anyway, all of this is to say, despite the fact the show made the utterly baffling decision to have the V1 they'd talked up all season affect Homelander in absolutely no discernable way whatsoever (Butcher and Ryan being able to overpower him so easily would've made sense if they'd taken the staggeringly obvious route of having the V1 fuck him up in some way for his hubris), we were still cheated of a scene with Homelander alone in his penthouse after his lasgergasm, examining himself and feeling what the V1 had done to him while Mirrorlander purred smugly about how he'd finally become the marble god he was always meant to be... with maybe a slight hint that, hm, despite the exhilaration and the intoxication of being on a new drug, there's still that niggling chasm of emptiness inside him. Pesky thing. Cue the photo of him and Ryan coming into focus for us before the scene ends.
But I guess when you are supposed to be nothing, you get no perspective.
my cuteness aggression with homelander’s nose grows every day. i have always had a weird thing about finding noses cute (NOT sexual surprisingly) and his nose is sooooo puppy ouppy dogggyyy
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