What do you think Homelander and Maeve’s ‘romantic’ relationship was like?
I think Homelander, because—well—Soldier Boy says he’s asexual and his sexuality is generally all over the place. And we know he’s a pretty wild guy and, honestly, kind of a jerk, basically very messed up overall. But I also think that the Homelander we see later on is someone who has completely lost his grip, who’s reached his most extreme psychotic state. Whatever was already going on in his head at the beginning just keeps getting worse and worse once he realizes his façade is collapsing, people are turning against him, and there are others actively working to bring him down. All of that just makes his already fragile mental state deteriorate even more.
So, with that in mind, what I see in Homelander is that the people he seems to “respect”—within the very limited capacity he has for respect, because really he doesn’t respect anyone but himself, and not even properly—are those who actively confront him. The ones he actually registers as people, not just ants he can crush, are the ones who impact him because they don’t fear him and are willing to stand up to him, even if it means dying.
This is very clear with Butcher, who is the ultimate example. basically a kamikaze. Others might confront Homelander, but Butcher is willing to die while taking him down. That’s what sets him apart. The same thing happens with Annie, he only starts taking her seriously when she stands up to him and shows she’s no longer afraid. With A-Train, the betrayal hurts him personally, but what really gets to him is that, at the end, A-Train doesn’t just stop fearing him, he laughs in his face. And that completely short-circuits Homelander. Not because he cares about him, but because the idea of not being seen as a god, of not being feared, of being mocked even in the face of death, destabilizes him completely. In a twisted way, that kind of person ends up ranking higher for him than someone who just worships him. It also happens with Stormfront, who doesn’t fear him at all and even manipulates him. And Maeve doesn’t fear him either, at least initially, she confronts him directly, just like Stormfront does.
So for me, Homelander is drawn to women who don’t fear him. Because at the core of his chaotic, psychotic mind, there’s a constant: he feels deeply alone. And someone like Firecracker—who worships him, obeys him, treats him like a god—doesn’t bring him closer; it pushes her further away. He’s placed himself at the top of Mount Olympus, and she’s just one of the people making sacrifices to the gods. What he actually needs is someone closer to him on that “summit,” because he’s lonely. And the only people who can exist there are those who don’t fear him, who know he’s dangerous, who know he’s unstable, but still don’t respond to him with fear.
That’s why I think what might have attracted him to Maeve was precisely that, she made him feel less alone in that sense. There’s even a moment—I might be misremembering a bit—where he says they could have had a child together, that their child would have been incredible. And that ties into it: what Homelander really wants, and always has wanted, is a “perfect family”like a 1950s advertisement version of it. So I think at some point he might have thought: this woman doesn’t fear me, she’s a supe—someone he considers superior—and she could be a way to fulfill that fantasy of building a family and having what he never had. But that’s a version of Homelander who hasn’t completely spiraled yet. He’s still deeply dysfunctional, of course, but not at the extreme level we see later in the series.
As for Maeve, I think it’s simpler: Homelander was a very powerful, magnetic figure, and she probably got involved with him, then realized he was unbearable and left. But the key thing is that, despite everything, she never stops treating him like a human being. And that’s where the “respect” comes from. Ironically, the only people Homelander really sees are those who treat him like a human, and do so honestly. Not like Grace Mallory, who was actually afraid of him and just performing control. The moment he realizes she fears him, she’s done.
It’s the same with Sage, she treats him like what he is: a deeply unstable man. And he values her not just because she’s brilliant, but because she tells him, repeatedly, that he’s completely unhinged. And I think part of his attachment to Soldier Boy is that, beyond the fact that he’s his father and he craves that parental validation, Soldier Boy also doesn’t fear him. He treats him like what he is, a dysfunctional, abusive father figure dynamic. Same with Victoria Neuman, she doesn’t fear him as a person. She fears what he can do to the world, the consequences, but not him on a personal level.
I’ve gone on a bit of a tangent, but I think to understand any relationship involving Homelander, you have to look at all of them comparatively. He’s a character you only really grasp when you see how he behaves across different interactions.
That said, going back to your point: I don’t think his relationship with Maeve was easy at all. It was probably partly built on image and marketing, because it suited them both, but also on that strange dynamic where she didn’t fear him, and that, for him, is everything. But at the same time, I think he genuinely saw himself building a family with Maeve. Because Maeve was strong-willed, she didn’t fear him, she could stand up to him and in the end, she probably made him feel human. And that’s incredibly important for him.
Even if he doesn’t want to be human and actively rejects humanity, because it was denied to him. As a child, he wasn’t raised to be a human being; he was raised to be a weapon. So as a defense mechanism, he rejects humans and, in his internal narrative, reduces them to something worthless. But deep down, what he actually wants is to be treated like a human. Because when someone treats you like that, you feel less alone, you feel like you’re part of something collective.
So I think that’s what worked for him with Maeve. That, and the fact that she was a powerful supe with abilities, which also fit into his fantasy of eventually building the “perfect” super-powered family. As for Maeve, I think it’s pretty much what the show suggests: things were probably fine at the beginning, but the moment she realized that Homelander was a deeply unstable, psychotic man with serious mental health issues—and the emotional maturity of a five-year-old she was like, “yeah… no.”
And it’s interesting, because the fact that Maeve left him clearly bothered him a lot—but even so, he never killed her.
