Why is every character suddenly an ‘antihero’ now?

polygon.com:

Last October, a user in the subreddit for the Amazon show 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.

The post was then shared on the subreddit r/OkBuddyFresca, a fast-growing subreddit for making fun of the wildly tone-deaf content regularly shared to The Boys subreddit. “Serious for a sec,” the user in r/OkBuddyFresca wrote. “This person is honestly an asshole.”

The original poster, who eventually took their posts and account down due to backlash, inadvertently kicked off yet another round of debate across multiple subreddits about the ethics of cosplaying as a character as despicable as Homelander, who is a violent racist sociopath and, ostensibly, the villain 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.

We, as audiences, are told that this