Available yesterday on Prime Video, the sixth episode of the third season of The Boys brought to the scene the awaited transposition of Herogasm.
Anyone who has read The Boys comics was looking forward to this episode, because he knew how over the top it would be, even by The Boys standards. Everyone else… well, the same, because it was advertised by Prime Video as crazy stuff. How else do you want to define an orgy for super heroes, after all? But the comic book Hererogasm is different, especially for an element that was deliberately left out in the TV series.
THE FAKE PLANETARY CRISIS
Herogasm is a spin-off miniseries of The Boys, released in 2009, also written by Garth Ennis (co-creator of The Boys with Darick Robertson) and drawn by John McCrea and Keith Burns . Here, too, everything revolves around an annual orgy of super-heroes, the Hererogasm, in fact, but with several differences. To begin with, the comic book Eroegasm’s sex and drug orgy takes place on an island off Costa Rica, and in order to participate, Patriot / Homelander announces every time there is a major crisis – like a alien invasion – which needs all the super heroes to be solved.
A discreet outlet for the mega-events that involve the super-heroes Marvel and DC every year or every six months.
HOMELANDER AND SOLDIER BOY
Just in the miniseries Herogasm makes his first appearance on paper Soldier Boy / Soldatino, when his particular agreement with Homelander / Patriot is shown. In fact, the guy with the shield wants to join the Seven, and Patriot subjects him to a test every year: a sexual relationship between the two of them, which will determine whether or not Soldatino can have a place in the team.
And, year after year, the answer is always the same: try again. At the beginning of the miniseries, after yet another failure, Soldatino asks Patriot if there is something gay in their relationship. The other replies that obviously this is not the case, because he is a Patriot and he can do whatever he wants.
BUT THIS IS NOT IN THE SERIES
The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke has been talking for years about how much he wanted Herogasm to be on his show. And last month, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, he explained that if the Homelander and Soldier Boy scene in bed isn’t there, it’s not because they couldn’t use it, but just because it didn’t quite fit the characterization given to this Soldier Boy. Their Toy Soldier is indeed very far from his vile comic counterpart: he is an incarnation of toxic masculinity, of senseless machismo, and above all he is a feared and respected hero. As it is said in the series, he was Homelander before Homelander.
What was certainly to be expected from this sixth episode, as any fan of Supernatural (another Kripke series) is ready to swear, is that after the orgy there would be a punch in the stomach. Hitting the viewer after having entertained him with something exaggerated seems to be a classic in the way of doing TV of this showrunner. And in fact, right after the Eroegasm, comes that scene with A-Train collapsing and Annie’s urbi et orbi revelation.
Devil of a Kripke.