Elon Musk hated The Boys finale and the cast loves that for him

Six long years of audiences misunderstanding Homelander ends with a bang

There are two types of The Boys fans: people who are in on the joke and people who aren't. Since the very beginning, the premise of Amazon's superhero satire has been to imagine what would happen if superheroes actually existed in the real world. The answer? Nothing good. As early as season 1, it was clear that Homelander (Antony Starr) and the rest of the Seven (think The Avengers if they were owned and operated by Palantir) weren't just flawed heroes or even anti-heroes; they were, to quote another classic show: the baddies.

This became even more clear in The Boys season 2 when Homelander allied himself with a literal Nazi (actor Aya Cash as Stormfront), and it's snowballed ever since. In season 4, Homelander staged a coup and took over the U.S. government. In season 5, he jailed his critics in work camps and then decided he was God, reshaping Christianity itself around him. Despite all this, there's always been a small, stupid, vocal contingent of The Boys fans who weren't in on the joke. Worse, this fraction of the audience not only thought Homelander was the hero of the show, they also thought he was redeemable.

To be honest, I'm not sure if that's because they were too busy looking at their phones to pay attention to anything but Homelander's red-white-and-blue cape and assumed he was the good guy, or because a sizable contingent of Americans are no longer bothered by "edgy" concepts like fascism and religious supremacy anymore (although I hope it's the latter). Either way, these fans managed to make it all the way to the end of The Boys without realizing Homelander was the villain. And, of course, Elon Musk was among them.

In response to a screenshot from The Boys series finale where Homelander, after losing his powers, tries to weasel his way out of getting murdered by the show's actual anti-hero, Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), by offering to suck Butcher's dick, the richest man in the world (who runs Tesla, SpaceX, and X) posted a single word on his social media platform: "Pathetic."

The cast, in response to Kripke's same post on Instagram, lost it. In a good way.

While this might seem like a critique of Homelander (which, accurate) it was actually an endorsement of another X user, far-right personality and Korean actor Lee Kang-min, who had posted:

To be clear, this is a total misread of The Boys, which never once attempted to sexualize or fetishize Homelander throughout all five seasons (it's actually been all-but established that the character is asexual). That final offer of oral sex is less about actual sexuality and more about just how pathetic (to borrow Musk's word of choice) Homelander has always been when his superpowers are stripped away.

As for the claim that The Boys injected "twisted fetishes into every script," well, in that instance, Lee isn't wrong. But again, the point of The Boys has always been to depict superheroes as depraved monsters with no sense of right or wrong.

For both Musk and Lee, it seems clear that neither of them ever paid much attention to The Boys until the finale and then pounced on a single line of dialogue for culture war points. Thankfully, the rest of us know how wrong they are.

Best of all, The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke is getting the last laugh. In response to Musk, he wrote simply: "OMG this is his review of what @TheBoysTV did to Homelander, I’ll never get a better review ever. #TheBoys."

As a professional TV critic, that stings. But as a fan of The Boys, I'd have to agree.