The Boys Ruins Its Best Relationship For No Reason

Because we were introduced to these two unconventional characters so many years ago, you may need a quick refresher about what they are all about.

Season 1 of The Boys introduced Frenchie as a mercenary who processed his childhood abuse at the hands of his dad by becoming a brutal mercenary; Kimiko, meanwhile, was taken from her family and forced into a life of terrorism and, after a Compound V infusion, super-terrorism.

Now, both of them have broken free from their old lives and are trying to make amends for their past by helping fight the good fight against Homelander and his goon squad.

Obviously, The Boys is based on a comic of the same name, and in that comic, the Frenchie/Kimiko dynamic is very different than what we see in the show.

Those old issues generally portray Frenchie acting more as a surrogate father to the young Kimiko. In the show, they are similarly close, but they are generally presented more as a found family pairing than a surrogate daddy/daughter.

I’ve been a fan of The Boys since reading the comic back in the day, and I’ve generally enjoyed the show for all the fun and creative departures that it made from the original source material.

Changing Frenchie and Kimiko into two lost souls who understand each other like nobody else always rang truer to me than the somewhat weirder daddy/daughter dynamic of the comics.

Moreover, I have historically applauded the writers of The Boys for keeping their relationship mostly platonic and generally ignoring the legions of fans who demanded Frenchie and Kimiko finally hook up.

Unfortunately, The Boys’ writers finally caved to this pressure, with Frenchie and Kimiko kissing and expressing their mutual love for each other in season 4. Shippers have always wanted to get these two cuties together, but I personally felt their platonic relationship was a center of calm in a show that so often revels in debauched chaos.

This is a show where the brainy sister sage lobotomizes herself to throw down with himbos like the Deep and a man uses his own clones for depraved orgies, so it was pleasant to have Frenchie and Kimo as reminders that some kinds of love transcend sex and romance.

What makes this romantic development doubly depressing is that found family has been an overriding theme of The Boys since the beginning. It’s clear that the titular crew is filled with broken people who find strength in each other, a deliberate contrast to how The Seven simply tear each other apart (sometimes literally).

In this context, Frenchie and Kimiko were once great examples that two souls can be bound by shared intimacy, history, and tragedy without inevitably falling into bed with one another. 

We only have one more season of The Boys left, and it will be interesting to see what happens to Frenchie and Kimiko—will both of them survive, and if so, will their budding romance still be intact? Without the help of Sister Sage, there’s no way of predicting that particular future.

Instead of worrying about what will happen next on this Amazon show, I’ll be joining many other fans in mourning what has already happened: the ruination of the series’ best relationship, all because the writers ran out of compelling romantic plots for Huey and Starlight.