Why is every superhero now an antihero?

A user from the Amazon subreddit shared his experience with the show last October. The Boys posted a picture of their daughter dressed up like Homelander, the show’s fascist Superman parody. “No, she has not watched the show,” the caption read.

This post was shared via the subreddit, r/OkBuddyFresca. It is a subreddit that makes fun of tone deaf content frequently shared. The Boys subreddit. “Serious for a sec,” the user in r/OkBuddyFresca wrote. “This person is honestly an asshole.”

In space, no one can hear you scream — but that doesn’t stop an evil-doer from trying. Polygon will celebrate sci-fi villainy every week this week.

After backlash from the original poster, they took down their accounts and posts. However, this inadvertently sparked yet more discussion across many subreddits on the ethics of cosplaying Homelander as a racist sociopath, and, thus, as the antagonist of the show.

And every time a debate like this happens, without fail, users push back against the idea that Homelander is a true villain, instead, countering that he’s an antihero. In fact, the word “antihero” is so often, and incorrectly, deployed by The Boys fans that it’s become a meme on r/OkBuddyFresca.

But it’s also indicative of a trend across all of fandom at the moment. Science fiction, fantasy, and genre entertainment of all kinds is suffering from serious antihero drift, a general flattening of heroes and villains into morally gray but also fairly interchangeable characters that don’t have clearly defined or consistent motivations. Not only do we have three movies exploring Darth Vader’s early years as a hero and his fall to the dark, we now have an Obi-Wan Kenobi show that documents his own middle years between movies spent as a gritty wanderer trying, and often failing, to do the right thing.

This makes the characters dynamic, according to audiences. It’s a sort of postmodern reinterpretation of what a hero or a villain is, in an effort to create more complex stories. But what if we’re losing, in the process, coherent characters and storytelling with real stakes? Can you claim any story if no one follows the rules?

Worse, many entertainment properties in genres are now owned by large monopolies. They are distributed through a continuous stream of sequels and spinoffs. A traditional hero’s journey or your classic villain’s downfall requires some kind of ending to remain believable. It seems that antiheroes can flow indefinitely.

Warner Bros. Pictures

According to Erik Voss, the host of the New Rockstars YouTube channel and someone who has as close as you can get to a god’s-eye view of all of fandom, you can see the market value of an antihero acutely with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s Black Adam movie. Johnson explicitly used the ideaMarketing for the movie features an antihero.

“I think The Rock understands that him coming into Black Adam as the antihero — he’s really [tried to] put that entire title, and the whole DC Universe, on his shoulders,” Voss tells Polygon. “And I think he looked at this as well like, You know, if I’m an antihero, it gives me an option to come in as a hero and a villain — however the universe chooses to use me in the future and whoever they want to match up against or team up with.”

In other words, if you’re trying to secure a multi-picture deal to play one character within a sprawling comic book universe, you’re better off picking a character who, to borrow terms from Johnson’s previous life in pro wrestling, can be the face or the heel.

Voss calls this general phenomenon the “Loki effect,” after the character who has switched sides more often than maybe any other Marvel Cinematic Universe character at this point, most recently leading his own Disney Plus spinoff.

“My theory behind it, at least, is that it’s a product of studios wanting to build spinoffs and franchises and sequels off of every title,” Voss says. “Like every title is really a trailer for some future title. And they want the option and the opportunity to spin off a character into a sequel.”

Interestingly enough, Johnson’s turn as Black AdamHis attempts to keep his place in DC Universe’s ever-evolving maelstrom were not enough. As of November, filmmaker James Gunn is now co-lead of DC’s entire universe of movies, TV, and video games, and it seems like Johnson will not be returning any time soon to play Black Adam.

But as versatile as antiheroes are for studios to churn into endless content streams, they’ve proven somewhat confusing for fans, to put it nicely. Posts from last summer were The Boys’ subreddit went viral after users tried to argue that characters like the aforementioned Homelander and a Blue Lives Matter-supporting character named Blue Hawk weren’t actually villains. And, shortly afterward, the subreddit began arguing again about whether or not Stormfront, a character revealed to be a neo-Nazi and one literally named after the oldest neo-Nazi message board on the internet, was an “antihero” or not.

Image: Prime Video

The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke told Rolling Stone at the time that, yes, Homelander is the villain and absolutely meant to be a Trump parallel, but the fans of the show, at least the ones who spend all day talking about it on Reddit, don’t seem to understand that. Given how cruel the show is, it’s no surprise that Kripke told Rolling Stone at the time that Homelander was indeed the villain. It’s good guys are in the show, it seems it has attracted a fan base that either doesn’t care enough to think through the complex political satire of the show, or actively ignores it because it’s cool and edgy. Kripke did not agree to an interview through a representative.

But we also might be feeling the effects of antihero overload more acutely right now because there’s an entire generation of fans coming of age at the moment who have never known a world without mainstream antihero leads like Tony Soprano, Walter White, Tony Stark, Deadpool, John Wick, Wolverine, Rick Sanchez, the Joker — the list goes on and on. And it’s absolutely not an accident that all of these characters tend to be both white and male, though even Taylor Swift has recently declared herself an “Anti-Hero.”

Ian Carlos Crawford hosts the popular podcast. Slayerfest 98This is a primarily focused on Buffy the Vampire Slayer but has, more recently, expanded out to cover more fandom properties, tells Polygon that the antihero trope has been around for a long time, of course, but the drama it’s causing online definitely feels new.

Carlos says he’s had issues recently with fans of the Buffy Spike is the character. “Those fans will attack, attack, attack,” he says. “They are the most toxic fans in the fandom.”

According to him, he had recently a guest who was uncomfortable with Spike’s character arc. He first appeared in the series as a villain who attempts sexual assault on Buffy Summers. He eventually transforms the character into an antihero who is a favorite among fans over the years. These fans will shout down anyone that disagrees.

“They’re the worst people in all the Buffy groups. They attack everyone,” he says. “And these are mostly younger fans, and most of the accounts that are attacking or getting mad about that stuff are like, in their bio, it says they’re 20 or 21.”

Image: 20th Century Fox Television

If you’re curious who the very first antihero character was, there’s not a super clear consensus. Some argue it’s Kaoru Genji, a character from an 11th-century Japanese story called Genji: The Tale of Genji. Other believe that it can be traced back to Thersites who is featured in several Greek epics. But broadly, an antihero is a protagonist that lacks the qualities of a typical hero — courage, moral fortitude, clear motivations. Captain America can be considered a hero while Iron Man could be called an antihero.

With the advent of entertainment companies and the inescapable creation of genre movies, the antihero has evolved from a subversion of tropes to be a part of the story. Because of big group-up movies such as The Avengers, we know that the heroes won’t get along at first. They’ll argue. You will make some mistakes. And, ultimately, in the third act, where the CGI budget allows it, they’ll put aside their differences and rise to the occasion. They will have to do all the teambuilding again, and all the cooperation is going out of the window. They can fight a “civil war,” but the “endgame” is clear.

As entertainment universes continue, more characters have a chance to be redeemed and/or turn evil. Case in point: Even Thanos, the inevitable snapper of half the universe’s population, gets to be a good guy in an alternate reality episode from Disney Plus’ What if …?Wanda Maximoff, a poor villain who started out as one, became a hero in three movies, then was swept away in spinoff TV shows and returned to the main bad. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.

Others see it as a good thing.

“If you’re trying to do something really interesting in an oversaturated space, one of the ways to do that is to kind of lean into this antihero effect that creates more conversation,” writes Julia Alexander, director of strategy for the audience-demand tracker group Parrot Analytics, over email. “Versus trying to do the black-and-white good person/bad person storyline, which is kind of almost overdone in the genre space.”

An excellent example is House of the Dragon, HBO’s recent Game of ThronesPrequel was the streaming sensation last autumn and is being praised for its diverse and flawed cast, which includes characters that could not be described as classically good or evil. After a disappointing mainline series that turned into an epic battle between the genocidal Daenerys Tarrayen and Jon Snow, this show is a welcome surprise. House of the DragonThis is where Cersei Lannister is the main character. It makes for unquestionably great television.

“We saw this in the early-to-late 2010s, when all of a sudden every TV show was based on an antihero,” Alexander says. “You had Breaking BadYou were a good person. Mad Men — starting with The Sopranos. And we’ve kind of moved away from that a little bit on the TV front. On the film side, what you’re getting, what you’re seeing happening is, a genre once considered juvenile is entering this moment of adulthood.”

As cyclical these trends may seem, one has to wonder how long fandom entertainment can rely on antiheroes as their chosen protagonist. When Henry Cavill was asked his thoughts on the now-defunct Superman character, Cavill said that he didn’t think it would be possible to continue to play the role of the villainous Zack Snyder-designed Superman.Man of Steel, Batman v Superman – Dawn of Justice(2). Justice League, the next time around his Superman would be “enormously joyful.”

“I think what he’s saying is that he wants to be able to play a superhero that’s, at its core, a fundamentally human figure,” Alexander says. “And he has not been able to do that. That would be my bet on what he’s saying with that.”

Of course, we now know that movie won’t ever see the light of day, now that Gunn is in charge. It is telling, however that Gunn now holds the reins. Gunn has been able to direct two of the most popular superhero films, the Guardians of the Galaxy as well as the Suicide Squad. And, wouldn’t you know it, both feature morally gray antiheroes who bicker their way through their respective films only to come together just in time to take down the bad guy. They can only do it again the next time.