For Fans of The Boys

Antony Starr's performance works because Homelander is not a villain in the traditional sense. He is a damaged person with unlimited power and no one who has ever told him no. The show understands that the real horror of someone like this is not sadism, it is neediness. He craves approval the way an addict craves a fix, and when he does not get it, the consequences are catastrophic. That combination of genuine pathos and genuine threat makes him one of the few genre characters who actually earns the label of 'terrifying.'

Before The Boys was a Prime Video phenomenon, it was a deliberately offensive, politically charged comic series that Ennis used to say things about power, celebrity, and American exceptionalism that the superhero genre usually protects. His run on Preacher operates in the same register: theology, corruption, and loyalty in the face of a universe that does not care. Reading his comics alongside watching the show reveals how much Kripke preserved in spirit even when he changed the specifics.

Both shows center on institutions so entrenched they have effectively become above the law, and both locate the drama in the gap between public image and private reality. The Roys and Vought International are different in scale and genre, but identical in structure: a founding mythology nobody believes anymore, people who benefit too much from the system to dismantle it, and outsiders too small to win but too angry to quit. Watch one and you understand the other better.

Disco Elysium is a role-playing game in which every political ideology is available to you and every one of them is shown, with real compassion and real critique, as both appealing and flawed. Like The Boys, it refuses the comfortable position. The system is broken, the institutions have failed, and the protagonist is a disaster who might still do something good. It is the only game that replicates the exact emotional experience of watching The Boys and walking away feeling both furious and strangely hopeful.