If real people got powers, do you think they would all become corrupt, evil psychopaths?
Nope, cause pharmaceutical company would produce a drug that you take for a short time and never need again. Not enough profit. And they would have no actual control over the superheros. In the boys, all of the sups seemed to care what the public thought of them so much, they would do what the corp wanted. In reality, the ones who didn’t care would outnumber the ones who did. And they would just kill whoever they wanted, and threaten to kill others to get what they wanted. Kinda like the oligarchy we have today, but with far less constraint, and no need to even try to hide things like being pedos and racists and such.
Watchmen was a pretty good depiction of this as well.
Someone with literal godlike powers would probably lose touch with human concerns eventually. People who put on masks and start fights with criminals are deeply unwell.
They aren’t paragons of society. They’re deeply fucked up people.
The comic series, yes. The TV started similar, but I think it has been very gradually Marvelizing. S1of Boys was fairly loyal and realistic.
One hundred percent. If you liked that show, then you might like the Wildcards series or Aberrant rpg.
Have you ever seen someone poor get a lot of money and they go from being a normal person to a psychopath? Not everyone does, but enough do that you can notice. Being rich is a super power irl. If you’re a billionaire, you can crash a 100k car and just go get another one. A middle class person cannot comprehend having a 100k car.
There’s a reason the phrase “fuck you money” exists.
I expect a viltrimite scenario
The only thing stopping Homelander from going on a rampage, killing tens of thousands of people and seizing control of the world is that he cares what people think about him. He wants to be loved, not feared.
He kills innocent people but he does it discreetly or when it looks like he can justify his actions.
But can you imagine an absolute piece of shit like Stephen Miller getting super powers? He’d be far, far worse.
This is one of the only issues I have with the show… Homelander’s leash appears to be super hamfisted in, or in general it makes little sense why corporate has so much control with so little relative power. Lots of people in that world have powers, and it would be total anarchic chaos in reality.
Isn’t that like his entire arc? He slowly realizes his leash is only as strong as he believes it to be
In the comics Vaught does have a real fail-safe against Homelander.
deleted by creator
If people had superpowers, vats of trauma and ego issues, and megacorps wanted to wrangle it for profit and control… absolutely yes.
This would totally happen in the US and other countries. 100%. No doubt.
The Boys is barely even satire, they pull so much from reality.
I used to think it was over the top for expositional purposes. Used to.
The realistic thing about The Boys is that it isn’t a world where normal people get superpowers, it’s an evil company making superheroes into celebrities for profit.
No, it’s much more interesting than that.
It’s an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and much smarter than it is, and it got to his head a bit.
And then it’s an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going “well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?” and “aren’t you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?” because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were in comic books in 2006.
Don’t be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that “edgy and mean and over the top” is the same as “smart and realistic”. It’s not.
I’ll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it’s at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis’ HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn’t that smart to begin with that’s actually a good thing to do.
It’s an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all
I’m slightly confused… Are you suggesting that Jeff Ennis, the creator of The Boys, previously worked alongside actual superheroes?
Edit: Oops, Garth*
No, no, Jeff Ennis worked as an actual superhero briefly in the 1970s you’re thinking of John Ennis, who created The Boys as a musical in the 90s, but he was mad about his working conditions.
Lol oops
I like how Vought is (among other things) so much like American professional sports organizations, the NFL in particular. I could definitely see supes being handled that way.
No. I don’t think The Boys would be an accurate portrayal.
I think it would be much worse. Like apocalyptic.
Are superpowers analogous to money IRL? If so, I think you have your answer.
It’s not a direct comparison, but look at what happens to people that have money and power in our society. They become evil monsters. I think superpowers could have a similar effect. Although getting money and power requires you to be a monster already on some level, I don’t think suddenly gaining superpowers would have the exact same effect.
They become evil monsters.
Most, sure, but far from all. The list of historical benevolent dictators isn’t very long, but it’s not short either.
That’s true. The list of benevolent billionaires is zero as far as I’ve seen though.
I think people would still be people, but the monsters would be unstoppable. Psychopaths and corporations would be just as bad as depicted in the show.
However, normal people would still be normal. See extraordinary for more info. In this series, people have their mundane problems on top of whatever problems the powers cause.
