The Boys season 3 makes the case against fandom

polygon.com:

It’s hard to imagine that, decades down the line, all of the superhero franchise fiction dominating our pop cultural consumption will look good. This is coming from someone who likes this stuff: It’s cool when metaphors are given human form to fight or find clever solutions to larger-than-life problems, and it’s even cooler when they’re given the space to be weird cosmic tapestries striving to be both interdependent and yet unique. Yet these stories haven’t come to dominate our streaming services and cinema out of artistic goodwill — they are an act of corporate dominance, a consolidated effort to make sure that, no matter who you are, you will have a corporation’s mascot to identify with, to spend time and money on.

The Boys, Amazon’s adaptation of the comic of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, does its best to piss in the superhero Kool-Aid we’re all chugging, all while cashing a big corporate check of its own. It’s a compromised work, but that doesn’t mean its creators aren’t interested in swinging for the fences. After all, the series, which kicks off its third season with three episodes this Friday, isn’t best read as a takedown of superheroes — or as a violent satire on current events, even as the show lambasts celebrity culture, right-wing media, and yes, the Trump presidency. The Boys is about the rot that took place before all that clogged our newsfeed, from a time before there were even newsfeeds. It’s about how many things can go wrong when we let ourselves get swept up into the idea that a hero will save us — and so the main thrust of The Boys’ third season has its sprawling cast circling around the past.

The season begins with a new status quo that follows season 2’s bloody finale, with