ik you said in your tags “don’t get me started on homelander” this season but 😭 def do get started. i’m honestly not sure how i feel about his development this season lmao, like he’s still my fave character, but some of these writing choices had me hm. also think ryan should’ve had way more scene time this season if this was the direction they were heading…

i feel you bestie!! i was thinking about writing a very lengthy post on why i didn't like season 3 sometime soon to get it out of my system once and for all (so that i don't keep annoying my followers and mutuals who liked this season.. sorry lol) but i actually have so many issues with homelander this season that it warrants its own post. so thank you for giving me the opportunity!!

anyway, most of my problems with s3 homelander can really be traced back to one thing

like... it's giving nothing

it doesn't make much sense considering their prior worldbuilding — just in terms of how homelander and supes at large have always been perceived by the public. homelander has been wholly unmarred by scandal up until very recently in the world of the boys (butcher says as much in the first episode). yes, some fringe groups idolize him, but homelander has been carefully crafted to be popular across both sides of the political aisle. and he was literally endorsing a democrat this season! he's never been a trump-like figure, but since the writers were hellbent on him becoming more like trump as the mask slips, let’s consider it for a moment.

the problem is you have to make vought profoundly inept to do it. i don't believe that vought wouldn't utilize every resource and PR trick in the book to restore his reputation. they're extremely image-conscious. so for them to not only reluctantly approve but actually encourage inevitable PR disasters such as homelight stretches the limits of the imagination. and they really didn't have a better CEO backup in place than ashley?? seriously? there were so many obvious plot contrivances that had to first occur in order for the trump-homelander comparisons to fully manifest and that just. irks me deeply. and it's not like they did it for groundbreaking commentary either — while this show has featured meaningful satire in the past, the trumpian homelander stuff offers nothing fresh or insightful and is really boring #tome.

i also feel like, in the last two seasons, they've been able to distinguish homelander as a symbol of american nationalism from homelander the person — so there's the obvious political commentary but running parallel to that is homelander himself with completely separate motivations. homelander as a symbol distributing a weapon of mass destruction (compound v) to terrorist cells around the globe checks the political commentary box. whereas homelander himself just wants to fix a bad situation for madelyn (and it's a similar scenario with stormfront in season 2). this season, those two things merged in a forced and unnatural way and it was extremely damaging to the character. (like, why did he offer supersonic mexican food?? there are exactly two scenarios where he’d care about race — if it could negatively impact vought’s ratings, or to make the distinction between regular humans and supes. we’ve been over this!)

one thing that made homelander feel like a fundamentally different person was how openly aggressive he was all of a sudden? he's always threatened people behind closed doors or operated with just enough subtlety that he has plausible deniability in case he's questioned about it later (unless, of course, he plans to kill the other person). think of the scene with the deep in the seven's conference room in 1.02, or him and stormfront on the film set in 2.06. well that went out the window this season! now he's making vulgar comments totally out of line with his wholesome christian image to a prospective member of the seven, or openly threatening milkshake-drinking a-train in plain view of vought employees, or having a meltdown and considering lasering someone when innocently questioned about EBITDA margins. (edit: this all would have been fine if only they'd built up to it, but we saw this behaviour right away! more on that in the next paragraph)

and you may say, "well that's to show he's losing his grip!" but the reason i didn't like it was because it's not really the direction his character was poised to take at the end of season 2. we saw him in an increasingly tightening leash while his ratings were slipping, which i'd say actually makes it much more likely for him to consistently be on his best behaviour. however, we don't get nearly enough of homelander being forced to cooperate except for one scene with stan where he’s already being pissy, or homelander going out of his way to boost his ratings, perhaps by saving people. (and you know, he does do that. that's why he was so popular once upon a time.) i think kripke said something about how each season, he wants to take something away from homelander until he snaps — this season, it seems like one of the things homelander lost was widespread public support, echoing stormfront's "you can't win the whole country anymore" from the last season. but he hated that idea, remember? he's always chased broad appeal, which is why i was a little confused when ashley expressed that he dropped in ratings in so many demographics and he.... brushed it off ?? i think this whole plot falls flat for me since we don't really get to see homelander trying to win the public back (and fail). we can't feel the extent of his loss (and seemingly, neither does he) or the full force of his relief when some nutjobs cheer him on anyway. it should have been a very straightforward arc but they skipped some key steps (it wouldn’t even have taken much time! all they really needed to do was indicate that there had been prior PR efforts) and it made the whole thing incoherent.

instead of seeing this process, we get #homelight, which we're told is a great PR strategy. i'm not so sure that the optics are favourable here — he's been said to be a mentor figure to her, there's a significant age gap, she visibly cringes when they're standing in close proximity of each other, and worst of all, dating a blonde white girl after his last scandal was due to his involvement with a nazi is..... a choice. i already have a lot of trouble buying it — i think vought would put forth a much safer option for a PR relationship. nevertheless, i suppose this sets up a potentially interesting dynamic... only for it to remain completely unexplored throughout the season.

think about it! the antithesis of a superhero interacting, non-contentiously, with the true superhero of the series!! both raised as products, but ending up wildly different. there's a lot to unpack there from a storytelling pov. i've also always thought that thematically, it would fit best for either hughie or annie (the most likely option based on this season) to take homelander down, so establishing a relationship (i don't mean a romantic one) between them now would have made that future so much more compelling. idk if there's an opportunity anymore given that annie has left the seven. it's incredibly clear that the purpose of that little plot thread was pure shock value to get more conversation going after the first three eps.

[that also highlights larger problems with the season imo. 1. a refusal to give us new, interesting character dynamics (though expanding on the MM/annie dynamic was delightful) 2. a lot of evolution randomly occurring during the time jump so that some characters start s3 super different from how they ended s2 — which is so jarring! 3. annie can have no flaws even though she was learning to embrace the "whatever it takes mentality" during all of s2 and 4. a bunch of scenes existing solely for shock value and nothing more]

in general, s3 homelander was super dumbed down (i wrote a bit more about it here) and imo, lacked the emotional depth of the prior two seasons. apparently antony starr himself asked kripke to tone it down and not write homelander as a bumbling fool, which is when you know the situation is dire😭😭

link to interview

even the one scene i've seen garner a lot of praise (and i liked it a lot too!) — the mirror scene — contributed nothing new to his character (which i really think it should have done if you're going to write something so direct, but that's just me). it only reiterated what we already know: he wants love, is sorely lacking parental figures, can rely on himself and nobody else, and so on. i'll retract this if they plan to do something interesting with mirror!homelander à la black noir in the comics, but that feels too creative for the writers who came up with this season and patted themselves on the back for it. a homelander alter-ego has also not been hinted at prior to that scene, nor after it, so i'm not sure i'd even want them to go there. the point is, if that's the highlight of the character's emotional arc all season then idk... that's not great

there were other opportunities to add some emotional weight, particularly with maeve or noir or soldier boy, but the way those scenes were framed didn't really give the audience any opportunity to feel for him.

when it came to black noir, everyone was obviously far more emotional about his death, and rightfully so. meanwhile there were no allusions to homelander's complicated history with noir, which is a baffling choice considering this is the last we'll see of their onscreen dynamic. based on the last episode of the boys: diabolical (said by show creators to be canon and even dubbed "required viewing" for s3 by kripke), noir was instrumental in turning homelander into one of vought's puppets who kills out of convenience. emphasizing this would have added more depth to their final scene (from homelander's pov) but instead it comes off as him throwing a hissy fit because he was lied to... which we've already seen! at this point it's just played out.

found a screencap of the ep! it was only 20 mins iirc but it was a neat bit of background

then we have homelander's confrontation with soldier boy. one of the core themes of the season has been the downfalls of toxic masculinity, yet we're supposed to cheer for soldier boy calling his son weak and emotional and a pussy (as highlighted by butcher and maeve's satisfied, triumphant smirks in the seconds following). it just made a lot of their prior commentary ring hollow, because there's no reproof of this attitude — it's fine if it's directed towards homelander, apparently. (tw sa i'm not sure this was their intention, but they've been having tonal issues of this nature since season 1. for instance, the creators have expressed amusement at the scene where the deep was sexually assaulted and that episode did not come with appropriate content warnings like 1.01 did — again reinforcing the idea that "this fucked up thing is actually okay if it happens to a fucked up person. you can cheer." and the audience did!)

the one that hurts me the most personally is maeve and homelander, because all of the complexity that made their scenes some of my favourites of the series was sucked away. i talked about it earlier here and here (linking because i don’t want to repeat things). it was most evident during their final fight scene, though, because it was literally just a brawl devoid of feelings on either end. it was supposed to be a moment of epic catharsis for maeve, but she didn't say anything impactful or even express emotions that i could latch on to beyond a couple of smirks. and i didn't get a sense of what homelander felt beyond mild annoyance at the start. the emotional emptiness of their fight sequence is especially glaring when contrasted with their showdown in the season 2 finale, which was so much shorter and yet was packed with soooo many more emotions. 

the only other place they could have added some emotional beats is with ryan. unfortunately their reconciliation felt entirely unearned. ryan in the finale had me scratching my head. i agree with you — we should have had 2 full eps of homelander trying to win ryan back at minimum if that's where they were planning on taking him.

i guess my final complaint is a larger problem with the season, which is that the power-scaling has gone to shit. it was implied in s1 that homelander could take nukes, but maeve punched with enough power to halfway crack the floor or dent a cabinet and that was able to make him bleed. maeve's attacks should have been shown to be a lot more forceful if they were going to write the scene that way. the other problem is that maeve plus one more powerful supe (temp-v butcher, for instance) seems like enough to take homelander on, based on the way that fight was progressing. this destroys the notion they've been parroting all season of homelander being on an entirely different level than everyone else. (further, i feel like it negates the need for soldier boy and paints the main gang’s drastic actions as idiotic and callous.) most importantly, it takes away from the terror of homelander quite significantly, which was such a rich source of tension earlier on in the show.

all in all, i think homelander in s3 was pretty bad, and not in an entertaining way. a lot of people seem to like that he's becoming more batshit, which is cool and all, but that's never been the most captivating part of the character. the largest source of praise i saw for this show going into it was how they managed to revamp comic!homelander into a character that was terrifying in his competence and felt distressingly human despite being the most powerful man alive. at this point, i'm annoyed merely seeing him do progressively crazier things all while most of the elements of the character that drew fans to him in the first place are discarded for the sake of lazy political commentary.