Killer7 SINdicate

We used to have a thread about the previous season on the old forums.
I've been following along season 2 but I'm really not sure if I like it. There are aspects of it that I enjoy but overall I don't feel it's really coming together as a whole (unlike s1 which had a clear arc with a beginning, middle and end).
One thing I definetly still like is the satire on corporate culture, that's so on point it's nearly indistinguishable from reality. On the other hand I feel the main characters aren't really being proactive or doing anything at all outside of just stumbling into the ongoing plot.
Homelander started off the season by following through on his power play but he simply became submental five episodes in and that storyline was completely forgotten, he only had one interaction with Mr. Edgar (the gus fring character)
Stormfront seemed interesting because I assumed they were going to go somewhere with her pointing out how american corporate advertisement tactics are straight out of nazi germany propaganda and it seems they were going there, but she was revealed as a much flatter character that is actually just evil because she is a nazi lol
Case in point I thought her "attraction" to homelander was another ruse meant to keep him under control for Edgar, but apparently she really does just cream her panties at homelander for being a übermensch
Plot points seem to be brought up for no reason, like the supposed manhunt of the boys that doesen't actually result in anything and in the latest episode they just go to a public hospital with no issues whatsoever
I love everything to do with the corporate satire and the Deep's storyline (he falls in with scientology lol. They don't call it scientology but that's obviously what they're parodying.) but it seems like the plot is going nowhere while at the same time introducing way too many plot points at once that end up going nowhere
Is any of you still watching the show? I would like some opinions because I don't dislike watching it moment to moment, but after every episode I always leave thinking some things didn't make any sense and wondering why some plot points were introduced at all

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Well now I'm sorry I even opened the thread yesterday, because today's episode consolidated the idea that the show is just dogshit now lol.
The only funny scene in this episode was the one where Hughie is watching superhero fetish cuck porn. I thought the titles were hilarious (big black noir lmao).
Other than that, as I said in my first post, I thought they were going somewhere interesting with Stormfront but I guess the writer got a phone call reminding him that the election was coming up, so no it's just alt right neckbeard incel nazis now.

The latest episode even has a scene with a stereotypical neckbeard incel who looks like the quartering, shooting some store owner because he has been indoctrinated by the alt right propaganda lol.

It reeks of reshoots or rewrites to me because it just makes no fucking sense. Stormfront was working for Mr. Edgar since the start, hence why I believed her propaganda to be completely artificial. That is to say, a divide and conquer tactic to have Vought appeal to both edgy alt righter types, christians and hardcore liberals. That could have said something interesting about modern corporate propaganda has absorbed the DNA of national socialist propaganda but no. Stormfront just hates non-whites and suddenly becomes submental in the presence of homelander, because he is a ubermensch.

The reason why it doesen't make sense is because Mr. Edgar is played by Giancarlo Esposito, who is half italian and half-black. I guess they're gonna reveal him as a black nazi like Kaxantrom LOL!!! Then again the racist nazi woman is played by a jew, I guess they casted the parts before they even wrote the characters.
I feel there must have been rewrites or reshoots at some point because there's a stark difference with how certain subjects are handled; in the first few episodes, Edgar describes how the USA imported scientists from nazi germany after the war, much like it happened in the real world. In the latest episode, it's your typical capeshit narrative with evil nazis being evil. Homelander's ploy to take over Vought is just forgotten completely. The congressional hearing is handled by the nazi villains killing everyone lol. It was so fucking stupid I started laughing. The dialog is so fucking bad now I can't tell what anyone is trying to say anymore.

The plotting is awful as well, Starlight is kidnapped (for no reason) and released within the same episode. A new character is introduced in episode 6, only for him to kill himself randomly in episode 7 despite him having multiple chances to do so before that moment. Neither event advances the plot at all, it's just shit that happens. Butcher just leaves the scene to go have a chat with his dad at some point, which doesen't add anything to his character or to the plot at all.

Hilariously I used to defend this show during Season 1 when people were pissed at the fact that it was different from the comics, but the last few episodes may very well be worse than the comics. It has become so aligned with every corporate talking point (in the real world) that I honestly don't see a point in the show existing anymore, the satire on consumeristic superhero culture has become affectionate lampooning and homage and now the target is donald BLUMPF's alt right nazi incel death squads. I'm amazed they didn't retcon Mr. Edgar into being a middle man for a Trump parody yet, though I suspect that's gonna happen in Season 3 considering the Edgar storyline has been buried completely

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HOUSELANDER wrote: ↑Sat Oct 10, 2020 5:23 am

Neither event advances the plot at all, it's just shit that happens

Xed did you watched the finale? its a mess

Oh it's dogshit. I actually have a lot to say about this season because I'm amazed by the parallels with no more heroes, and to a lesser extent Twin Peaks.

It seems like it's the fate of everything that starts off as satire to eventually devolve into the very same thing it was satirizing, if it is given a sequel. Twin Peaks started off as a satire of 90s soap operas (I know david lynch hates the term but we know what we're talking about, lynch used the themes and structure of soap opera to convey his story) only to eventually turn into just another 90s soap opera in the second half of season 2.

No More Heroes, satirized bullshit 2000s videogame writing (with nonsense twist after nonsense twist existing only for the sake of shock value) and used it as a springboard to criticise extreme consummerism using a deliberately tedious gameplay loop to rapresent the tediousness of real life consummerism. (Work for money to invest money into getting slightly more money working dead end job after dead end job for a slight increase in wealth, while never actually building anything.)

The sequel, nmh2 actually requires you to take all the random twists seriously (despite them being clowned in the first game lol) and be invested in the characters' relationships and day to day lives, because the entire satyrical angle was removed.

The Boys season 2 is the exact same thing, in the sense that the first season was a satyre of capeshit movies, only because capeshit is the most profitable entertainment media property nowadays. The capeshit angle was just an excuse to discuss corporate culture and celebrity worship culture.
Season 2 is just unironic capeshit where the good guys punch evil super nazis very hard LOL!

The plot of Season 1 revolved around Vought using corruption and lobbying to get access to government funds, through the "supes in the military" initiative. Vought operates under plausible deniability, however their weak point is that their employees that are actually famous & recognized by the public (which means they can't get rid of them just yet.) are a bunch of degenerates which opens them up to blackmail, which in turn allows the boys to access Vought related information using the supes as a trojan horse.
The boys are a group of people who have a general adversity thowards Vought, but they need to be brought together by Butcher because he has a personal vendetta against Homelander, for fucking and (he presumes at the time) killing his wife.

Both groups have internal strife in that in Vought, Homelander resents the corporate suits because they want to control how he presents himself to the public, while he thinks he can steer the company's PR better than management. (Which is where his plot to distribute Compound V to create super terrorists, in order to have a reasonable menace that needs to be countered by putting superheroes in the military comes from.)
This is spurred by his own psychosis about being the most powerful man alive, yet being constrained by societal rules. (Being part of the military chain of command would allow him more freedom to express his being.)
Meanwhile The Boys are invested in undermining Vought's influence on the american state, while Butcher is only interested in taking revenge on Homelander. WHich eventually leads him to leave the boys out to die, while he goes after Homelander's mommyfu in order to enact revenge.

Season 2 actually had a very interesting set up because with Stillwell (middle management) out of the picture, Homelander starts hiring people who knows will be loyal to him, while Mr. Edgar (Stillwell's superior) gets a more hands on approach.

There's actually a very interesting interaction between them in the first few episodes where they openly explain the difference in their points of view. Homelander wants to push his brand, because he is interested in his own success with the public. Meanwhile Mr. Edgar doesen't see the supes as the endgame at all. Turns out "supes in the military" was just a talking point because he sees Vought as a pharmaceutical company, so his endgame is just selling compound V itself to military & the police and eventually phase out the flashy superhero shit when he's making five millions per doseout of taxpayer money.

After this interaction, Mr. Edgar introduces Stormfront as the new face of the team, and Stormfront is a shoeonhead type of character, in that she has a team of manservants pumping out "extreme right wing memes" to push her brand.

Now I initially thought this development was interesting, because I thought they were going to get into "alt righ" (actually socialist) grifters and how they're actually corporate/state tools. Sorry to burst anyone's bubble, Captain Jack knows what I'm talking about LOL! I'll just say that some of these personalities that constantly call out the jews, actually have at least one jewish and one muslim ghostwriter. THey do get into that a bit with her bitching about "le epic white genocide", but that's just what she actually believes. She's not pulling a publicity stunt at all lol.

Stormfront is eventually revealed as an immortal 1940s OG nazi which is also fine. Knowing that the show is satyre, I assumed they were going to get into the fact that the USA has absorbed national socialist propaganda tactics through corporate advertisements, and also how american technological leaps were actually the result of hiring and pardoning national socialist scientists.

In reality, what happens is that Stormfront fucks homelander so hard that he becomes submental and completely forgets about his character arc or general objectives (LOL!!! they had a subplot in the previous episode about him deciding to be his own man, and follow his own path rather than trying to be loved by others. That's dropped immediately because Stormfront fucks him hard enough.) and in the very next episode she just acts like a comicbook villain interpretation of what a nazi is. The rest of the season is spent having random twists meant to entice base emotional responses, shitty ass romantic subplots, episodes centered around base themes such as MOTHERHOOD, FATHERHOOD, FAITH (which are not explored any deeper than me just saying those words) until the good guys just punch the nazi supervillain hard enough. Everyone teams up to defeat the bad villain person, which is defeated through brute force and the most embarassing part is how they try to frame homelander and butcher as parallels of one another, which is completely antitetical to their writing in season 1.
Obviously they did that, because The Boys just turned into a capeshit show, the exact same thing they were making fun of in Season 1. Where bad guys are unequivocably bad, and they are beaten to death by the good guys who are unequivocably good. So obviously they're just going to frame Butcher and Homelander as destined rivals, like Thor and Loki or whatever other garbage fucking retards watch nowadays.

Early in season 2 they had a plot point where Vought was pushing feminist storylines in their movies (GIRLS GET IT DONE!!!) while sweeping under the rug actual abuse against women (the deep molesting starlight, or even queen maeve getting fucked with for being a lesbian. While the company wanted to use her status as a lesbian as a talking point.)

By the end of the season, the corporate message they were making fun of, is thoroughly embraced and celebrated because, "girls really do get it done!", since all the girls gang up on the one dimensional evil nazi. Somehow punching the nazi very hard also sets back every plan that Vought had, even though it makes no sense. Their entire marketing strategy for selling Compound V to state forces was (due to homelander's meddling in season 1) based on creating superpowered menaces that law enforcement and the military would need to react to. Wouldn't Stormfront being outed as a secret nazi, lead to law enforcement demanding more compound V so that they're able to keep up with Vought's supes?

I guess it doesen't, because s2 needed a "happy ending" where punching the nazi hard enough, actually stops the propaganda machine for no reason at all. Why? Because it's dumb ass capeshit for mental midget retards, where only basic emotions are allowed. The villain gets punched, the situation is resolved, and some basic lesson is learned. (FATHERHOOD GOOD! FAITH GOOD! MOMS GOOD!)

My predictions for season 3 is that I'm not gonna watch season 3, my predictions for this post is that some gender confused american mutant person is going to copy-paste it to prove that I am a 1940s nazi, who hates the show just because nazi comedies offend me. (I'm a jew and my grandmother's family was deported during WW2 but that's apparently not a fact that is relevant.)

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& the Audience enjoyed because they like the subtle in it, a LGBTQ,People of Color & molested victim ganged up on a NAZI Villain.

I have a theory that the average audience member is actually so stupid, that their understanding of reality is abstract enough that they're simply attracted by the flashy costumes, and that's why the superhero genre is so famous despite most of the movies being on the cinematic level of those ugandan films that everyone laughs at.

Which would explain why most people can't really see the difference between season 1 and season 2 of the boys despite you delineating it in one line with no effort.

In the earlier half of the season, they used the line, "GIRLS GET IT DONE!" in the context of a fake vought movie, to poke fun at the fact that hollywood will parade "feminist" messages on screen while harrassing their actresses behind the scenes. (Just think of all the weinstein shit. Starlight & Queen Maeve are both getting harrassed behind the scenes, yet they are "empowered" on screen.)
Season 2 ends, with the show embracing that corporate talking point. Turns out "GIRLS REALLY DO GET IT DONE", because they're empowered enough to PUNCH the NAZIS! LOL! Commentary on real issues is abandoned entirely to focus on a comicbook villain (an immortal supernazi from the 1920s) to the point where punching said villain, somehow solves every outstanding issue in the plot.
Stormfront was brought on by Vought to stir the pot for reasons that escape me (considering the treath of super terrorism was already introduced in season 1 and she barely talks about them, she spends most of her time shitting on the same company that employs her lol. Which made me think they were going somewhere interesting with a divide and conquer marketing strategy but no. SHe actually believes everything she says, coz she's an evil nazi whose only objective is to do evil nazi things), but having her outed as a nazi, would actually make Vought look untrustworthy. So if anything, law enforcement would want to employ Compound V even more, because "supervillains" can even infiltrate the Seven now.
We abandoned the world of logic though; the show is just marvel capeshit at this point, so punching the nazi real hard somehow also solves corruption, lobbying, manipulation of voting blocks through propaganda, blackmail, appropriation of state funds, etc. etc.
Any criticism of the show is now dismissed as WELL, UHMMM, MAYBE YOU ROOTED FOR THE NAZI MUCH??? YOU THINK THE NAZIS ARE THE GOOD GUYS???? Which is the same corporate message the show was making fun of initially, LOL!
EPIC plot twist with the EPIC ocasio-cortez parody being revealed as an evil supe. OH NO! She is also evil. WHat will her evil entail??? I bet we're gonna get an EPIC fight with her at the end, where the boys have to team up again to take her down... it's gonna be such a HYPE moment!

What a piece of dogshit. My friends make fun of me, because I still fume when they bring up the boys s2. I tell them maybe amazon should have produced a show that wasn't fucking trash if they wanted me to shut the fuck up about it, lol. (S2 is legitimately worse than the comics, because the comics never tried to elevate themselves beyond being funny edgy trash.)

This tells me that satyre really only works as a one and off thing. If you're trying to build an audience for a satyrical piece of media, you'll eventually have to dumb down every message you were ever considering passing on to the masses, because every aspect of your property is dumbed down into a byte sized meme by the dumb ass audience members.

You can see that with twin peaks, where the understanding of the show by fans is "epic funnee show with the coffee man. Dass a nice cuppa coffee! Cherry pie!" and the aspects of brutal rape are glossed over like they don't exist. Most fans of Twin Peaks S3 only like it because it pissed some people off and they think being contrarian makes them intelligent, LOL! They outright refuse to discuss direction, acting or themes because that's somehow antithetic to the point, that s3 was meant to be bad to piss people off. (I actually like TP3, I wrote novel lenght posts defending it on the previous forum but its fanbase is made up of fucking unbearable hipsters, who got so insecure about the fact they disliked it they had to rationalize it as the intended meaning.)

In the case of Suda51, making a satyrical parody of videogame conventions actually tanked his career (on an artistic level at least) because GHM spent the next 10 years just playing the same notes but without any irony.

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well that & super powers,when i watch some the boys clips on youtube the comment section usually filled with discussion about "who will win? superman or Homelander?" "Homelander probably stronger if only the characters push his limits so we can see how strong he is" or "this is why Batman have contegency plan for Justice League" i have no problem what Audience wants but that is the least thing that makes The Boys interesting.

Yeah as I said audiences are fucking idiotic, hence why trying to pander to an audience is always a bad idea if you're trying to make something good or even decent.
Occasionally you get something with universal appeal that connects with billions of people like star wars but that was also the brain child of an auteur. It just so happened that the language he conveyed his themes with, was universal enough to connect with illiterate people as well. (The craftmanship involved in making the original movies is unparalleled by pseudo-art movies of today, that pretentious critics call "art" lol.)
Same with the hobbit and lord of the rings. Those also have a universal appeal, but that's a result of the author's language of choice. (By language I don't just mean english. I mean the specific lexicon he adopted.) Toklien just wrote all his original stories as tales for his kids, he did not concieve them with an audience of millions in mind.

If you go out of your way to pander to audience members you can only ever produce garbage, because the greatest part of the public will always exclusively latch on to the most superficial aspects of a property. Namely things that can be written down in a wiki as factual information, quotes, or even basic colors and geometrical shapes. Which is exactly what you see in those comments you mentioned. WHO'S GONNA PUNCH THE HARDEST IN THIS CORPORATE SATIRE??? SUPERHEROES ARE FUCKING COOL! I CLAPPED WHEN THEY PUNCHED THE NAZI WOMAN!!! Damn, she really liked like anakin skywalker there... EASTER EGG! I KNOW THE THING!!! AHAH CORPORATIONS ARE TAKING OVER THE GOVERNMENT AND LAWMAKERS ARE IN BED WITH THEM TO DEREGULATE THEIR ENDLESS PURCHASING POWER THAT ALLOWS THEM TO SWAY VOTING BLOCKS IN FAVOUR OF MALLEABLE TALKING HEAD POLITICIANS, SUPERHEROES YAY

Unfortunately, modern audiences only really understand pandering and they will go out of their way to bitch about not being serviced enough on social media.
Just see how the biggest criticism to the last of us 2 is that it didn't pander to joel fans. Not a peep about the fact that Naughty Dog has been producing some of the worst games ever made since the PS3 era, and how this garbage game is just one in a long line of linear story-driven slow-ass "shooter" where 70% of the "gameplay" consists in walking slowly from one cutscene to the next, while characters chat endlessly about garbage LOL!
The same thing is happening with star wars ironically. People bitch about how it didn't pander to the fanbase enough, when in my opinion, the problems with the new movies are mostly related to how they fucking suck ass as movies. JJ Abrams is one of many hollywood high budget directors that can't actually frame a shot to save his life, and whoever his editor is must have parkinsons disease so every single movie he made looks and flows like dogshit, but that's somehow unimportant and not even part of the conversation. The movies themselves are an attempt at pandering to everyone, that doesen't actually appeal to anyone because there's no unifying vision, outside of wanting to make audiences happy and get their pocket cash.

The boys was successful enough in season 1 to warrant it being rewritten to suit the tastes of its audience, and it turns out its audience was a bunch of morons who just wanted epic twists, epic fights and epic toilet humor

i'm only started reading now, around volume 20.the way The Boys in Handle teens Supe in the comics is much better than the S2 finale. The Boys Exposed what teens supe truly is to the public & the fight between The Boys & the teens supe in CHerry CHapter is also part of Butcher's plan to exposed them as the Supe never train even if they didn't train they should fight better because they fight crime everyday but The Boys easily whooped them it shows The Teens Supe didn't actually fight crime at all but Hughie Accidentaly killed one of them .or at least thats how i see it.i like the comics,while Butcher have a personal vendetta with Supe & gather someone like Hughie to form The Boys,Butcher doing the Wetworks very well.

I do think season 1 of the show is much better than the comics specifically because the comics are just an ultraviolent parody of superhero comics (I basically see it as itchy and scratchy with human characters lol) while the show actually had very interesting thematic implications back during its first year. However the one thing I would say was better in the comics since day one, is that they actually did focus on more supergroups than just the seven and they were kind of working their way up the ladder. Season 1 at least had minor celebs like popclaw or mesmer (it was fucking hilarious having him be played by haley joel osment). S2 has nothing.

The show blew its load immediately with the boys killing one of the seven during the first two episodes, and then never again lol. It didn't bother me in S1 because I assumed they would up the ante in S2, but it never happens. The idea that they have to find creative solutions to killing supes is completely absent in s2 because it turns out they just need to have starlight, the female and queen maeve punching people in the face with hollywood music blasting in the background.
They're obviously trying to make the show more like the comics, which doesen't interest me at all.

(Keep in mind the comic takes a nosedive in the second half where nothing happens because you slowly go through the backstory of every single main character. I have no idea why it's paced the way it is, because immediately afterwards the final arc starts.)

also Xed do you know any other show or comic that similar to this? where The protagonist doing the wetworks or something similar.

100 bullets is about an internal conflict between an illuminati style secret society and their agents. Jack raccomended it to me I think a decade ago lol. I re-read it a couple of years ago and I had a lot of fun, it might be up your alley, I don't read any modern comics so I have no clue if anything similar exists at all in the current zeitgeist

I called this from the beginning. They basically turned The Boys into what it was ridiculing. People were praising the changes and saying it more relatable, but one of the main points of the comic was to show how not relatable super heroes would be if they lived in the real world. Then on top of that, they injected so much feminism into. I'm not surprised that the second season intensified all this.

There was a point to the characterizations in the comic.