520 sounds like 'I love you' in Chinese, so today is a romantic day in China. And on this day, one of my ship lost his skull cap, the other lost his jaw — yet the remaining pieces can still form a full head. Tell me that's not romantic.
I’m still mad about the finale and s5 in general but I gotta say there is something really tragic and poetic about the fact that Homelander spent his entire childhood being watched and experimented on in a lab, then spent the rest of his life constantly performing in front of cameras, and in the end even his weakest moment and death happened in front of cameras too.
He never truly got to exist as an actual person. From the moment he was born, Vought turned him into a weapon and a spectacle for people to watch. Vought really did win in the end.
i'm seeing a lot of people talk about how surprisingly good and satisfying the boys finale was considering how mid this last season has been and i feel like i'm going crazy because i didn't find it good or satisfying at all, so here are some thoughts about that.
warning: it's a lot of rambling.
spoilers for the finale under the cut
my main gripes with the episode revolve around butcher's and homelander's confrontation. this may be because i am a big homelander fan, in the sense that he was my favorite character and the only reason i was still watching the show even with the drop in quality during the past few seasons. i do believe that homelander has been the main attraction of the show for a while now, which harmed the show in its own way, and that a good chunk of the audience —including many of those who would never call themselves "homelander fans" due to the stereotype of homelander fans being right-wing chuds who idolize him— were very much watching mainly for him, either for the memes, to see what crazy thing he'll do next, to see how he'll deal with the threat that the boys pose to him and viceversa or whatever else.
the show has always had a sort of hot and cold attitude towards homelander, specially post-season 1, where he was simultaneously treated with great seriousness and empathy and also as kind of a joke, a punching bag and parody of certain real life figures, attitudes, ideals and so on. this wasn't a homelander-specific thing, it makes sense given the genre/s and tone of the show and it remained reasonably balanced even up to these last few episodes despite the abysmal writing, even if the character had been flanderized and become much more of a joke by now than he used to be. this relative balance allowed the show to build homelander's character up as a three-dimensional being instead of a shallow, one-dimensional villain or parody. this balance and three-dimensionality is the reason many people found him to be a compelling character, loved to hate him, and even felt for him while also rooting for his demise since he was terrible and anyone with two working braincells understood he needed to die.
as satisfying as so many people seemed to find homelander's begging and general humilliation after his depowering, it went against any vestigious seriousness his character still possessed at the most crucial moment, dismissing all previous character building, turning him into a complete joke and retroactively destroying the character for the sake of giving the audience what they wanted —a moment of complete humilliation for homelander in which he was exposed as the fraud and the baby that he is deep down— in the cheapest way possible. i'm seeing hundreds upon hundreds of people argue that this is great writing because it goes to show how pathetic homelander really is underneath the façade that his powers granted him, and that anybody who disagrees with that is just a scorned homelander fan who stupidly thought he was supposed to be cool and who was expecting some big fight with all these sigma aura-farming moments or what have you. this is obviously not true. there's kind of two parts to this so i'll adress this first:
yes, many fans wanted a scene where homelander lost it and commited a massacre or caused some sort of big-scale destruction. this would have served as a final confirmation of homelander's status as global threat who needs to be put down stat. it could also have been cool from a technical perspective, and it's the kind of thing that people would expect from a character with his abilities when watching one of the biggest shows on earth produced by one of the biggest companies on earth. many fans also wanted a big fight between butcher and homelander that would have finally fulfilled the "scorched earth" promise for similar reasons. i have seen so many people act as if this were some kind of unreasonable expectation, claiming that anyone who wanted either of these things missed the point of the show and of homelander's character, because i guess him showing off the full extent of his powers would have been "too cool" for him and would have contradicted the fact that he is at his core a pathetic and lost child. now, i personally don't care much for action and wasn't looking forward to either of these things, but it's ridiculous to act like people who had these expectations were somehow being ridiculous or stupid when a) it would have helped raise the stakes and given momentum to the narrative that's been sorely needed all season, b) it was explicitly set-up in and outside the show, with the text itself, the showrunner and members of the cast foreshadowing and hyping up a moment like those, and c) these were literally the posters used to advertise the season and the finale itself:
the audience was essentially clickbaited by amazon and instead of people treating it as the shameless swindle that it is you have people defending jeff bezos and eric kripke like they pay their rent and somehow feeling intellectually superior for it, because what dummy would have expected butcher and/or homelander to go all out when the point of the show is that these are both clearly damaged and pathetic individuals? (how that negates the possibility of them causing great harm to the world or to each other further than "it would have been too cool", i don't know).
secondly, nobody is complaining about homelander's end being him getting depowered, being pathetic and dying to butcher's hands. i'm pretty sure this is exactly what most people expected (the theories about homelander getting depowered in the end have been going around from before the season even started airing) and wanted, and given the direction the show was going it would have made little sense for homelander to go out any other way that wasn't getting his claims to godhood destroyed by exposing his real weakness to himself and to the rest of the world before butcher finished him off. the problem isn't that homelander, as the person inside the world of the boys, was exposed to the public of his world as the joke that he has always been, but rather that the narrative itself treated his last moments —and by extension, him as a character— as a joke for us.
the scene would have been so much more powerful, homelander's death more impactful and in line with the character the rest of the show had been building up to this point, if we had gotten a scene of him begging for his life normally, maybe breaking into tears and age-regressing the way he tends to do when under serious duress, trying to bargain for his life with butcher, maybe by trying to present himself as a potential ally or by trying to appeal to his and butcher's unique connection or even asking to be jailed instead of killed, there were so many possibilities. instead, the show had to go the "i'll suck your dick i'll eat your shit on camera" route because that is, at least in theory, funnier and so much more humilliating, which is what the audience wanted to see for homelander's end. and yet it isn't that humilliating, because it would have been so much more pathetic and humilliating to see him terrified and begging for his life like a person in his situation actually would instead of turning it into yet another dick joke, if he had been more in character rather than acting like a charicature of the "sniveling pussy" (to quote his dad) that he already was.
the forceful inclusion of the dick and shit jokes is even more baffling when you consider that the scene has incredible comedic potential in and of itself if played straight, which we see in the moment where homelander tries to use his powers and fails. playing the scene straight would have made it not only funnier (seeing genuine terror and confusion in homelander's eyes as he tried to fight and/or flee butcher and failed and got increasingly more desperate could have been hilarious and satisfying on its own) but also far more meaningful (by treating the characters and what they signified, and by extension the story itself and its message, with care and respect). instead, we got some —i believe, intentionally— goofy acting, a looney tunes ass punch from homelander, and more adolescent jokes, and we were supposed to sit there and clap at homelander's humilliation via emasculation, because what could be more humilliating for a man, and therefore better poetic justice and more satisfying for an audience, than to see the bad guy debase himself by offering to blow another dude off? i mean, that's like, so gay, it really goes to show how lame homelander REALLY is. and don't think about how he's canonically been sexually abused his entire life and about how much worse that makes the situation, because we already know how the boys feels about male victims of sexual violence. and since homelander has also sexually abused others himself, who cares anyway? the answer is that a better show would have cared and would have approached the subject with more nuance, if not done away with the dick joke overall.
(i've seen people claim that the sucking dick and eating shit comments weren't jokes, that they weren't supposed to be funny — obviously they were, in the sense that they were trying to get the audience to go "oh my goddd, look at how pathetic this guy is as soon as you take away his powers omggg 😭")
and i'm going to stop here because this is way too long and i could probably go on forever, but there's so much more to criticize from this episode it's kind of crazy. from how rushed everything was, to the assassination of butcher's character whose potential they completely squashed throughout the show and who also had a terribly unsatisfying ending, the deep's and sage's endings, the fact that kimiko was able to blast homelander thanks to the power of heterosexual love, and so on.
TL;DR this finale was a catastrophe that tricked its fans into wasting so much of their time for things that never came, disrespected its most important characters to death (both character assassionation and literal death), and retroactively made the show into a joke where nothing and no one ever really mattered. it is only enjoyable if you don't give a damn about the world or its characters, and/or you don't think about anything too hard, and/or you were only there to see certain tropes be executed poorly and/or see all the bad guys get their comeuppance and all the good guys have their fairytale endings.
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