Yes, absolutely. I’ve seen people. They would be even worse than the show.

If people had superpowers, vats of trauma and ego issues, and megacorps wanted to wrangle it for profit and control… absolutely yes.

This would totally happen in the US and other countries. 100%. No doubt.

The Boys is barely even satire, they pull so much from reality.

The only thing stopping Homelander from going on a rampage, killing tens of thousands of people and seizing control of the world is that he cares what people think about him. He wants to be loved, not feared.

He kills innocent people but he does it discreetly or when it looks like he can justify his actions.

But can you imagine an absolute piece of shit like Stephen Miller getting super powers? He’d be far, far worse.

Depends on who gets superpowers, and how such powers are acquired.

The broad strokes of The Boys makes some degree of sense if we start with the premise that some megacorporation controls the manufacture and publicity of all supers. However, if supers can come from other sources, then what limitations are we putting on the premise?

I am of the opinion that most people are inherently good. Most people are also inherently stupid and cowardly, but keep in mind that these circles on the venn diagram are independent of each other despite some overlap. However, if given an opportunity to choose between helping and hurting, without any fear of repercussions either way, most people would choose to help.

There’s a popular quote: “power corrupts”, which is a shortened version of “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. I think this quote misses something fundamental: “power attracts the corruptable”. In a world without gods, no one I’d ever trust to be one would ever actively make the choice to become one unless it was forced on them somehow.

If superpowers were distributed more randomly, then the odds of us getting a superman instead of a homelander improve greatly. Still a dice throw though.

The realistic thing about The Boys is that it isn’t a world where normal people get superpowers, it’s an evil company making superheroes into celebrities for profit.

Watchmen was a pretty good depiction of this as well.

Someone with literal godlike powers would probably lose touch with human concerns eventually. People who put on masks and start fights with criminals are deeply unwell.

They aren’t paragons of society. They’re deeply fucked up people.

It’s been proven that power corrupts humans and just recently even in a medical / biological way that empathy is lost.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-empathy/201909/power-blocks-empathy

So, absolutely.

No. I don’t think The Boys would be an accurate portrayal.

I think it would be much worse. Like apocalyptic.

One hundred percent. If you liked that show, then you might like the Wildcards series or Aberrant rpg.

Have you ever seen someone poor get a lot of money and they go from being a normal person to a psychopath? Not everyone does, but enough do that you can notice. Being rich is a super power irl. If you’re a billionaire, you can crash a 100k car and just go get another one. A middle class person cannot comprehend having a 100k car.

There’s a reason the phrase “fuck you money” exists.

I like how Vought is (among other things) so much like American professional sports organizations, the NFL in particular. I could definitely see supes being handled that way.

Nah, I think itd be 60% good people but the worst 10% would be in power pretending to be better than those good enough people

No, it’s much more interesting than that.

It’s an accurate representation of Garth Ennis being mad about having to work with superheroes despite not liking that at all and being a bit of a petty bitch with a bit of a dudebro sense of humor that, frankly, we all overrated at the time because when you were a teenager in the 90s you thought Preacher was hilarious and much smarter than it is, and it got to his head a bit.

And then it’s an accurate representation of Eric Kripke who was very much the right age to have gone through that, taking the material and going “well, that Trump guy sure was a thing, huh?” and “aren’t you kind of over all those MCU movies, also?” because superheroes in film were at the same point in 2019 than they were in comic books in 2006.

Don’t be the teenager we all were in the 90s and assume that “edgy and mean and over the top” is the same as “smart and realistic”. It’s not.

I’ll say that the show is at least less callous than the original material and it’s at least trying to be political, which makes it slightly more plausible and internally consistent than Ennis’ HR complaint of a comic book. Hollywood has a history of taking this edgelord crap (see also: every single Mark Millar adaptation) and making it palatable by applying the same mainstreaming and dumbing down that kills every Alan Moore adaptation. Turns out if the original material isn’t that smart to begin with that’s actually a good thing to do.

Are superpowers analogous to money IRL? If so, I think you have your answer.

It’s not a direct comparison, but look at what happens to people that have money and power in our society. They become evil monsters. I think superpowers could have a similar effect. Although getting money and power requires you to be a monster already on some level, I don’t think suddenly gaining superpowers would have the exact same effect.