I genuinely do not understand this obsessive need to turn Soldier Boy into some tragic little meow meow dark traumatized blorbo with a broken heart. There was literally no need for it. Homelander is the fan favorite and he is a genuinely horrifying psychotic piece of shit with basically zero redeeming qualities and people are still massively invested in him. That alone proves you do not need to woobify or justify a villain for audiences to care about them.
Which is why this entire character rewrite for Vought Rising annoys the absolute fuck out of me. Especially combined with the fact that they’ve basically turned the final season of The Boys into one giant promo campaign for the prequel while pushing the actual main cast to the side in favour of random characters nobody gives a shit about yet.
This season should have been about Butcher and Homelander. It should have given us more Starlight as an actual political and social leader. It should have treated Kimiko with basic dignity instead of giving her some of the worst dialogue imaginable. It should have properly dealt with the Butcher/Ryan conflict and the Homelander/Ryan conflict. It should have focused on the emotional and narrative threads the show has been building for years. Instead what do we get? A-Train killed off immediately so he stops taking screentime away from Soldier Boy. Half-hour-long Supernatural references that add basically nothing and could have been spent developing literally any other storyline people actually care about. Random people walking in and out of scenes because they’ll apparently matter in Vought Rising as if I’m supposed to care about this prequel. Eighty fucking mentions of Clara Vought per episode to the point it becomes genuinely unbearable. Meanwhile Ashley and Sage show up for two seconds an episode just to say some nonsense and disappear again, The Deep’s entire script consists of saying “bro” fifty times, bye bye Black Noir, and all of this for what exactly? So we can completely rewrite Soldier Boy and pretend season 3 never established him as an abusive narcissistic asshole? So we can humanize fucking Stormfront of all people even though she was insufferable from the start?
At this point it honestly feels disrespectful not just to the audience but to the actual main cast too. The final season of your flagship show should not feel like an ad break for another series.