‘The Boys’ is a must-watch Satire of everything that can go wrong if superpowers existed in a capitalistic society.
The Boys is not your average superhero tv series. The caped superheroes or Supes are not the usual ‘good and kind’ people that superheroes are usually portrayed as. The series revolves around one central question: How will a company that produces Supes work in a capitalistic regime and a country like The United States of America? It does not take the usual hero-villain stance; the series takes that and reverses the roles while being a political commentary on what would happen if the Supes were real. Things go awry as the power rests in the palms of the bad guys, who are Supes.
For a long time, comics and superhero fanatics have made it the center and the epitome of popular culture. With mainstream comic books like Marvel and DC moving into the big screen, the popularity of this genre of fiction has only gotten much more enormous. The Boys is a series that hits you with a sense of familiarity in the form of discomfort. This discomfort stems from the fact that super-heroes have always been seen in a good light. But when you see them in a bad light, it shows the scary possibility of this happening if superpowers were a thing. The Boys deliver it with a pinch of humor and a dash of gruesomeness.
The Boys is a satire of this superhero trope. It shows the reality of what it would be like if the Supes were managed by a pharmaceutical company that just wants profit. The protagonist in the series is Hughie Campbell, who loses his girlfriend in a super-hero accident. The series follows a group of people who have lost things that are closed to their hearts because of the Supes. The group of people or the Boys decide to expose the chemical ‘Compound V’ which was injected into the Supes as an infant or an adult to give them powers. Vought, the company that manages the Supes, has its own PR and Legal team which ensures that the Supes are never held accountable. The Boys then decide to expose them to the public, who are the biggest funders and supporters of the Supes.
The Supes are managed by a company that is willing to make a profit out of everything. They are into merchandising and squeezing the last drop of popularity that the Supes have, to make money. It ridicules the companies that exploit people for money and the misuse of power, which are the key traits of a company in a capitalistic society.
The roles of Superheroes and villains are reversed. Here, the superheroes are the villains. Not all the Supes are terrible, some of them help the group of people expose the Vought and the Supes. This series is fun and powerful because Hughie’s group mostly consists of people with no super-powers or money. Since it is a satire, it talks about patriotism, racism, and power in the hands of the wrong people, which is completely relevant to what is going on in the United States of America recently. It talks about bigots waving the flag of patriotism to defend their inner prejudices. It is not just a satire of Superheroes; it is a satire of crucial issues like power and racism. The show takes a jab at entities that are wrong with society. It holds a mirror to the society and adds elements that we celebrate and shows us what will happen if Supes existed.
