Homelander, I am so fucking sorry that the soulless blood-soaked nazi-built mega-corporation that dehumanized you and tortured you physically and psychologically from the moment you took your first breath, in ways that are almost incomprehensible to the human mind, all for capitalistic greed… got to walk away from this series completely unscathed and intact and ready to make more hopeless monsters exactly like you.
You had to go, that’s true. You were a monster that could not be rehabilitated. But you were a monster that Vought made. You should have at least gotten to take Vought down with you. But that wasn’t in the cards I guess. Supes still exist and Vought still exists, and because of that, somewhere in the world in a laboratory deep underground another little child just might exist with a future as hopeless as your own.
I just finished the series. Binged it in like 3 weeks, absolutely LOVED the start, had some minor grievances during s3, fell off hard during seasons 4-5... and my god, it really pisses me off how the finale treats the death of Homelander as: "and all was well".
Bruh!
The cruelty, the haughtiness, the indifference towards human life was never exclusive to Homelander. It’s something we very clearly see in other supes as well and it’s VOUGHT that created and enabled this culture. Vought doesn’t care about human lives, they only care about profits.
Homelander is a symptom of that culture, a severe one since he’s a labrat who was never even considered human, just a product. He never had a chance at normalcy, never had anyone to love him or guide him to be anything else. And none of that would have been an issue to Vought at all BUT since Homelander is far more powerful than other supes and mentally unstable (again thanks to Vought), he becomes hard to control and thus a “bad product”. Never mistake that “bad product” statement to mean Vought wants to actually honestly be better. “Better” for them means supes that are easier to capitalize on. It doesn’t mean better, as in, morally right. They would still have called Homelander a bad product if he was a goodie two shoes constantly putting his sense of justice before capital interest.
I'd have loved Homelander to be the one to actually destroy Vought. (He kinda started it already by slaughtering the Vought scientists who liked to toss him in ovens and fuck with his head.) Pretty cathartic to have their oh so lovingly manufactured product which they unleashed upon the world, who's both a victim and a monster, to be their doom. Then the Boys would kill Homelander and then Butcher would still want to kill all supes which would have made his "villain arc" far more villainous. Now they pretty much just had me agreeing with him instead of buying into the "you have gone too far" narrative. Like, sure, I don't agree with killing all the supes but when he correctly highlighted the fact that Vought is still standing ready to continue their work, that it's just a matter of time someone becomes the next Homelander, yeah, I fully agree on that.
There's so many things wrong in the last season (inconsistencies, obvious filler, juvenile jokes, false marketing, sheer wasted potential, etc) but somehow the whole "the ultimate villain behind everything, behind creating Homelander, gets to continue their business as usual and we frame it like it's a happy ending" grinds my gears like arghwkjbalkhtrw.
And btw, this is not me absolving Homelander. He might be my favorite character but I'm fully aware he's an irredeemable pos. He absolutely had to be taken down. I can think that while also thinking he's 100% the most tragic character in the show. He's a victim AND a monster. Unlike other evil supes he never really even had a chance to be anything else. The corpo a-holes who enabled all the shit happening in the show, who manufactured Homelander to be their perfect product -a reflection of their values- and only went "oops" when that product still had a (messed up) mind of its' own... that makes them the ultimate villain to me. And it grates on me when the symptom of a bigger problem gets to be the scapegoat for ALL the problems. Yeah, it happen irl all the time, just throw the most obvious bad fruits under the bus while doing nothing about the polluted garden, but that doesn't mean I have to accept it.
