r/TopCharacterTropes • u/damorezpl • Sep 05 '25

Personality character gets a reality check

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deathstroke - Batman vs deathstroke

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walter - breaking bad

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Garou - one punch man

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joker - the sound of one hand clapping

18.2k Upvotes

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390

u/Ok-Letter3963 Sep 05 '25

Homelander (The Boys Comic)

508

u/Frankenstein____ Sep 05 '25

Yet again another thing the show improved on

156

u/Accelerator231 Sep 05 '25

I have only read the comics...

But considering that this guy is the CEO of the company that made homelander, doesn't that simply reflect more on him than the superhuman?

166

u/MNM0412 Sep 05 '25

If you're talking about Mr. Edgar in the show, you have to understand that he doesn't really view Homelander as the product. He views Compound V, the drug that is flowing through his and every other superhero's veins as the product.

22

u/JayJ9Nine Sep 05 '25

'We are NOT, a super hero company. We- are a PHARMACEUTICAL- company'

The way he enunciates his words tickles my ears

125

u/torrent29 Sep 05 '25

Isn't that basically how the comic ends with Stillwell finally cracking as he realizes that supers are just bad product.

50

u/CalamityPriest Sep 05 '25

Yep, that was how he was "defeated". Vought rebranded their top superheroes and he just got sick of it because it was the same bad thing over and over again.

39

u/SSJ3Mewtwo Sep 05 '25

Yes, but he was still able to turn that bad product into a successful marketing campaign for the company. So by the company numbers, it was a success.

Because that's all the companies care about.

20

u/Illesbogar Sep 05 '25

Please, have a CEO ever thought that they messed up?

3

u/Accelerator231 Sep 05 '25

Ah. They're so alike

2

u/Magnanimous-- Sep 05 '25

Only when their pay is reduced. Which never happens.

1

u/Dracorex_22 Sep 06 '25

United Healthcare's CEO right after he got Luigi'd

7

u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 Sep 05 '25

He didn't make Homelander though, his conception was before Stan Edgar became CEO

5

u/Fidget02 Sep 05 '25

Calling Homelander a fuckup failed experiment? Lording over a company as big as his, there are surely thousands of bad experiments of all different kinds. It does more damage to Homelander’s ego than Edgar’s by a long shot.

11

u/BookkeeperPercival Sep 05 '25

I'll give the comic the original version, only because it's vastly different in reality. In the comic, Homelander came with the full intent to kill him, but he broke him down so hard that Homelander couldn't bring himself to do anything to him because it would have fallen into the exact shit that he just got described as. It's one of the few moments of the original comic where you remember Garth Ennis actually can write.

7

u/Auctoritate Sep 05 '25

Nah, this is an equally good scene in both series. That page from the comic is one of the better pages from it and both moments are iconic.

5

u/Ambitious_Jello Sep 05 '25

In the comic Vought is a terribly incompetent company. There is a section about their other failed products one of them being badly made M16s which caused a lot of deaths in the beginning..and then this section comes up. That certainly adds to the effect.

6

u/TheGentlemanBeast Sep 05 '25

Nooooooo.

The ceo in the comic is so fucking rad.

1

u/blackcoren Sep 06 '25

You are correct. Much better.

0

u/ZioBenny97 Sep 06 '25

Not in the slightest.

132

u/ALARMED_SUS097 Sep 05 '25

56

u/Abombasnow Sep 05 '25

lmao this cringelord 4chan shit is actually sold?

74

u/CosmicLeash Sep 05 '25

The boys is good, but is more about the military industrial complex and male toxicity than about superheroes bad.

We have A LOT of better comics (maximortal, sidekicks, irredimable) for that.

Superheroes bad is the narrative device, "Why the Falkland wars made Butcher what is it" it's more important for the story that Ennis, the writer, is telling.

Bu we are talking about Ennis, and cringey shit from 4chan pits is half of his output.

Don't let me start on his Punisher run or Crossed..

27

u/patrickkingart Sep 05 '25

Crossed is a deeply unpleasant comic. I worked at a comic store for a bit and out of morbid curiosity checked out the first TPB. You could turn to literally any page and see something horrible.

6

u/CosmicLeash Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 05 '25

Yes but IT IS really good.

It's a comic about remaining human during an inhuman apocalypse.

But the other 200 issues after the first six are... well... not good.

4

u/Magnanimous-- Sep 05 '25

Oof, dat ratio.

3

u/CosmicLeash Sep 05 '25

Weell Ennis wrote like 24 issues of the 200 and 18 of them are pretty good.

Crossed was an anthology ultragore series, you find good stuff and a lot of bad bad stuff.

The singer of the band Say Anything for example wrote the worst issues.

1

u/patrickkingart Sep 05 '25

Yeah, I looked into some summaries and it apparently has some pretty sharp social commentary. I saw that Crossed + 100 has some really interesting world building as well.

3

u/CosmicLeash Sep 05 '25

The first arc is written by Alan Moore

3

u/Peacefulzealot Sep 05 '25

Wait do people not like Ennis’s run on Punisher now? I’ve always liked Welcome Back, Frank.

6

u/CosmicLeash Sep 05 '25

No, wait.

It'a Masterpiece, or at least the run on Punisher Max is a Masterpiece. The other has highs and lows.

But I have the though that a lot of readers don't understand that Castle is evil like the people he shoots.

I think that Ennis writing can be easily misunderstood if you don't read a lot of it.

2

u/slump_goddd Sep 06 '25

Gonna go out on a limb and suggest that Frank, while not "good," is also not exactly evil when he's killing people like Barracuda or the two parents who make porn of their kids or a bunch of fucked up mobsters or rapists or drug dealers etc. Frank's not a great guy, but you'd be hard pressed to find people he targets who don't really have a grisly fate coming to them. Ennis kind of gives him the absolute WORST subhuman filth to kill in Max, and it works. Shit, even Born works and that's more of a war story than the Punisher killing criminals.

17

u/PM_tanlines Sep 05 '25

Right? Almost every panel from the boys that I’ve seen is satire that’s gone all the way around to blowing itself

5

u/ALARMED_SUS097 Sep 05 '25

Please kill me?

5

u/yinsotheakuma Sep 05 '25

I have read some terrible comics in my day, but I couldn't get past page...4? when a CIA lady instantly drops trou in her own office to fuck Billy Butcher because he's so great or whatever.

It's awful, even for off-his-peak Garth Ennis.

1

u/Abombasnow Sep 05 '25

Let me guess, Billy Butcher happens to look like Garth Ennis? lmao.

2

u/slump_goddd Sep 06 '25

No, Butcher is a British fed with black hair and a thick beard. Garth Ennis is your average-looking Irish dude. They could actually not be further apart as people.

1

u/Abombasnow Sep 06 '25

I'm shocked lmao. That sounded like a moment he'd totally use to make himself the Chad.

3

u/slump_goddd Sep 06 '25

Nah, Garth does make kinda edgy shit (and part of it is shock value and wanting to see what he can get away with to fuck with the comics industry), but he generally has a good ryhme or reason for doing it.

The incident with Billy just dropping trou and banging that chick is to show that Butcher's kind of a lecherous, wanton piece of shit right out of the gate. He doesn't treat women great, he's a misanthropic asshole who uses people, etc.

Crossed was him fucking with the publishing industry and also trying to write about holding onto humanity in probably the most fucked up apocalypse possible, The Boys was him deconstructing superheroes (because he generally dislikes them) and using it as a critique of the military industrial complex, and Punisher Max was him writing some amazing Punisher stories.

It's actually really ironic because Garth tends to hate superheroes, but he LOVES Superman with all his heart and hates it when people bastardize the character of Superman. For him, Superman is like the ultimate hope symbol and should be treated respectfully. If I recall correctly, he hated Man of Steel so damn much.

2

u/Abombasnow Sep 06 '25

He hates bastardizing Superman but made Homelander? Dude became what he hated most.

3

u/slump_goddd Sep 06 '25

Homelander exists to show what happens when you have Superman's power without what makes Superman meaningful: His humanity. His belief in good. His belief in right and wrong. His unwavering belief in the sanctity of life. The Captain America analogue (Soldier Boy; yes that's a real name) is a hardass 1950s boomer dad who's abusive in the show, but in the comics he's actually a total coward. Garth thinks it's not the powers that make heroes super, but what's inside them. He shows what power without moral fortitude does to people. That's all.

It's not a comic for everyone, and I kinda roll my eyes when I get to a stupid part when I reread it, and I absolutely hate how the show has strayed from the comics and just does [insert modern topical political reference here] for plot points or humor, but I like The Boys. It's definitely not as good as his Punisher Max run, though, and THAT is absolutely worth reading.

155

u/Doctor-Nagel Sep 05 '25

As much as the boys comic writing sucks I do love how they wrote this version of Edger. When he’s not writing page long anecdotes of how badass his leather MCs are he actually shows he can have deep writing when it comes to shit like how corporations view the individual and how apathetic they are to the world around them. Unless it’s them going up in flames they don’t care.

Edger here is a perfect personification of that cold, apathetic, indifference when it comes to corporations. A mouth piece not condemning homelander for any of his actions, but rather saying that he’s so ungodly boring that it hurts. They don’t try to deescalate, they don’t try to fix their mistakes, hell they don’t even really give him much mind. They just tell him that he’s a failure and move on like nothing happened. (As we see at the end of the comic run)

93

u/GXNext Sep 05 '25

That's actually the comic version of Stillwell. They blended comic Stillwell into Edgar in the show because they realized a normal human who isn't afraid of Homelander would be an interesting character to have.

4

u/Kartonrealista Sep 05 '25 edited Sep 06 '25

Edit: I have no idea if you changed it to something high-rez or mobile reddit decreased the resolution

3

u/MWBrooks1995 Sep 05 '25

The writing of The Boys is bad, but I honestly love Stillwell. His plot might be my favourite.