this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2024
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This is pitched as tragic, but it isn't reactionary. A-Train is a pro-athlete-turned-media-celebrity who goes out of his way to stay out of politics and simply collect a paycheck. And the fact that he's a poc, a drug user, and a Hollyweird Celebrity all scratch certain itches in the conservative brain pan. Rush Limbaugh would have all the same vile shit to say about A-Train as he had to say about Donavan McNabb.
Jack Quaid's character arc - particularly in that first season - is in his struggle over the best response to the loss of his girlfriend. What makes him "good" is his ability to move beyond the petty impulse for immediate vengeance, stay clear of the knee-jerk anti-Super bigotry that Butcher falls into, and work towards a revolutionary struggle that challenges the underlying social system. That's what makes him "left coded" in the end, and its not quite so heavy handed inside those first two seasons. Its also easy to lose track of that arc when you're wading through fountains of blood and rivers of poop-jokes.
The show really feels itself in Season 3, as you get into a larger cast of characters with more complex relationships to the Supers and to one another. But it falls off in Season 4 and 5 as everything becomes excessively black-and-white, in an effort to discourage misreadings of the material by piling on cheap fetishistic tropes. Its not enough for Homelander to be a guy who commits massacres of civilians on a whim. He's got to be a creep and a pervert. All the bad guys have to carry out some kind of sexual fetish, while the good guys need to be in these normal-ish largely cis-het relationships.
As the showrunners increasingly lean on sexuality to code for good/evil, the moral statement of the show stops being about peaceful coexistence or egalitarian economic reform or de-militarization and ends up asserting the need for good guys to have vanilla sex lives.