There are a lot of things that tell you that The Boys has been written by a man.
For example, Kimiko’s entire arc this season and the fact that the only way they’ve given her speech and autonomy is through speech used to make jokes about watching porn and speaking like a 12-year-old. The fact that Annie is clearly the leader of a political resistance against Homelander, but they’ve completely sidelined that storyline, we’re told about it but never actually shown it. The fact that they reduced the character of Marie Moreau to a plot device, when she was supposedly meant to be key to defeating Homelander. The fact that they turned Sister Sage into a literal meme. Like, suddenly she’s the smartest woman in the world, but she can’t understand emotions… sorry, what? Intelligence isn’t just memorising facts, it has multiple forms, and emotional intelligence is one of them. So if she’s the smartest person in the world, she has to be the smartest in every sense. But then she somehow can’t even figure out something like Soldier Boy being completely in love with a Nazi. The fact that Ashley has barely served any purpose this season, when she’s been there since the very beginning of the show, and has had zero meaningful character development until the very end when it looked like she might finally get some after what happened with A-Train, but nothing ever came of it.
But above all, there’s something key: the way Soldier Boy is handled.
He’s a deeply misogynistic man, and in his first season he had more layers. But this season, his only function is basically to make jokes about fucking with women, very basic “hetero dude” humour about bragging that he’ll stick it in anything. And no one, absolutely no one, ever calls him out as the pathetic example of fragile masculinity that he is. A man who hides behind the mask of the “fuckboy alpha male” persona to compensate for emotional dysfunction and a fragile ego, constantly reinforcing his identity through sexual conquest because that’s all he has. And it’s obvious. If you actually said two sharp things to him, he’d fall apart. He’s not impressive, he’s a mess. He’s arguably even more pathetic than Homelander in a way, because Homelander is psychotic and mentally unstable, whereas Soldier Boy is just a washed-up nepo baby coping through sex, drugs, and ego inflation, because he has no real emotional regulation skills. And the moment you strip away that persona, there’s nothing there. If you told him his entire “sexual conquest identity” means nothing, he’d crumble emotionally, because that’s the only thing propping him up.
And in a show written by women, that kind of character would’ve been dismantled immediately, because he’s the textbook example of fragile masculinity. Instead, nothing happens to him. Why? Because it’s written by men.
I’m tired of shows written by men, because women are treated terribly in them, and the male characters — who feel like they’ve stepped straight out of childhood He-Man toys — get all the screen time in the world.
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