THE LIVE ACTION CASTING OF THE BOYS SUCKS.
Okay I know this is is out of the blue and more then likely none of you guys give a shit about he boys but I really wanna talk about this so please shut up and listen for a minute.
This is the comic book version of the boys aka notice the fact that a lot of these people look like, well, people! Frenchie, female, and ESPECIALLY Hughie look like regular people! And you can kinda get their whole shtick with how they look, notice how their hair all kinda looks off, female is unkempt, hughie is bald, frenchy has goggles on, Y’know, standard character design. Contrast that with Butcher (the guy in the bottom left), who is very clean shaven, tight 2000s guy hair cut. It almost looks like he’s the most well put together member of the boys (don’t mind the guy in the top right he’s got a good design). That’s deliberate! Butchers whole deal is that he’s willing to do anything to kill superheros, and he’s been doing it for so long he’s basically a professional. But ALSO he’s meant to be a foil for hughie, they have very similar trauma (lost a loved one to a “hero”), except hughie tries to move on and stay pure, while butcher tries to lead him down this path of revenge and bloody death and torturing super heros to help themselves feel better. So basically, butcher was the devil on Hughies shoulder. And this is shown through the character design, because (by 2000s standards) hughie was considered ugly, and butcher was the attractive one (don’t shoot the messenger, if you wanna fuck comic hughie that’s all you man), so it’s also a partial play on that one trope of “the demon makes itself attractive to call you in, while the angel makes itself self ugly to ward off evil”, I don’t know what it’s called but you are going to the bad place when you die if you think I’m doing research on that. Either way, it all makes sense from a character design perspective, from the facial hair, to the hair cuts, to that dumb sweet idiot look hughie has in a majority do the panels.
And now I’m angry because I have to talk about the show.
Now to start positive, female isn’t terrible, and mother’s milk still looks good. But oh my GOD THEY FUCKED UP HUGHIE AND BUTCHERS WHOLE THING. First off the fucking beards got swapped, which is alright at a surface glance because “hey at least one of them has a beard!” But problem arise when you realize the whole reason hughie had a beard ONLY was to paint a deliberate contrast between him and butcher. So giving butcher the beard, and hughie hair is the equivalent of giving will powers at the end of stranger things…
It’s the equivalent of getting rid of Dustin’s CCD in a stranger things reboot.
It’s the equivalent of giving will a female love interest in a stranger things reboot.
Okay you get it, it’s a poor choice.
This is for several reasons, on top of what I said before, this also doesn’t make hughie nearly as endearing in my personal opinion, but then again everyone and their mom probably has a tumblr post about how “we should cast actors that look like people and not photo shopped goddesses” with every angle of that problem being tackled and cancelled or whatever so I’ll just spare you from that. But genuinely, making hughie look like a conventionally attractive scrawny white man, instead of the chad, bald goatee having idiot we had in the comics just makes him less identifiable as a character. And this goes along well with butcher who went from this undeniably charming “Devil on your shoulder” type to the type of guy who would tell you about how he hadn’t gotten laid in a year at the Christmas dinner table (I know from experience what that type of person is like.)
The only actor I feel like they got down was home lander. I mean yeah they couldn’t make him as cartoonishly big as they did in the comic, but the way they designed his costume was shockingly accurate. I’m not saying I like how they did his character/how they write him so cartoonishly evil and dastardly even though his WHOLE thing in the comic was beyond all the red lasers, blood shed, and everything, he was just a normal box standard bully, one who wasn’t creative enough to come up with anything beyond just torturing people lesser then him. And how the fact he was so boring that it ended up being his greatest insecurity and in the end, his downfall. But it’s hard to put bad writing into a costume! So I’ll save that for another day!