The Boys Has One Parody Amazon Doesn’t Want You To Notice
One of the things that has made The Boys so popular is that it uses sharp satire to skewer so many things in our current culture, including everything from political culture wars to superhero cinema. Certainly, this keen satire has helped the show stay relatively fresh even when its nonstop parade of degradation and ultraviolence starts feeling stale. However, there is an irony about The Boys’ satire that Amazon hopes you don’t notice: most of the satire directed at fictional companies like Vought International could just as easily apply to Amazon itself.
Firecracker & Co.
For an example of the show’s satire, one need look no further than Season 4. The show frequently mocks rightwing politics, presenting the new character Firecracker as an Alex Jones-style conspiracy nut whose talking points are largely ripped from the headlines of conservative media.
One of her fans ends up threatening Starlight’s supporters while spouting Pizzagate-style nonsense, and the show unironically uses the term “critical supe theory” as a way to mock conservative voices freaked out about critical race theory.
Culture Wars
Some fans of The Boys have complained that some of this satire (especially the critical supe theory bit) is too on the nose, and it’s true that this Amazon Prime show has gotten far less subtle over the years (though it wasn’t that subtle to begin with).
In a fun bit of irony, the show making fun of culture war content has become a part of those same online skirmishes as an increasing number of conservative fans realize the show constantly makes them the butt of the joke.
That online outrage about The Boys often manages to overlook the show’s biggest satirical target: Amazon itself.
Vought
Beyond supervillains like Homelander, the true villain in The Boys has always been Vought International, the company that creates, licenses, and markets superheroes around the world.
Throughout the show, we discover this company has its evil hand in many different pies and makes most of its money by selling movies, TV shows, music, clothing, video games, and so on.
We also learn very that the company is run by amoral leadership who treats underlings like crap, like when The Deep fires everyone in the Crime Analytics Department who had ever tweeted anything critical about Homelander.
Amazon’s Labor
It’s easy to see that this fictional company in The Boys is satirizing Amazon, a company that is also trying to take over the world by making consumers reliant on them for just about anything.
Amazon sells almost every kind of product that Vought sells, and the only reason this show even exists is because the giant corporation branched into entertainment, just like Vought.
This real-life company also allegedly mistreats workers, with OSHA frequently citing Amazon for unsafe working conditions and warehouse workers sharing stories about how they have to pee into bottles to meet productivity demands.
Missing The Point
The fact that The Boys is making fun of corporations like Amazon isn’t exactly a new theory–nearly half a decade ago, fans were swapping memes discussing the irony that this giant corporation could create a show about corporate evil and not lose any business despite their highly public scandals.
But in a grim twist, the show has used such a broad brush to satirize so many things that angry fans often miss how the show frequently (and rather boldly) bites the hand that feeds.
Fans of The Boys missing the parody of Amazon because they are too busy engaging in the same culture war garbage the show frequently mocks? It doesn’t get more diabolically depressing than that.
