Superheroes are often as popular as celebrities, as influential as politicians, and sometimes even as revered as gods. But that's when they're using their powers for good. What happens when the heroes go rogue and start abusing their powers?
This tv show contains 151 potentially triggering events.
Season two episode 5. Billys aunties dog, Terror, is hiding with them in the house from Black Noir. The lads get into a scrap but Terror is never harmed
I don't know exactly what episode, but a character does leave his team for a period of time, without saying anything to a few of their teammates, and one of them calls this character and somewhat confronts him for leaving without a goodbye.
sexual violence is a main theme of the show. several main characters are sexual abusers and multiple characters who are victims are intimidated or stalked. the worst of the stalking happens in season 2
season 2 is really distressing because homelander spends it stalking rebecca butcher, living in her house, intimidating her, and lording it over her that she's powerless to stop him
S2E2 (28:30 - 30:20) rebecca begs for Vought to help her get away and is refused (very distressing) (35:00) homelander intimidates rebecca
(Spoilers) Homelander intimidates Becca and makes her feel unsafe in her own home; pretty much every scene in which he’s at her house is tense and upsetting. In season 3, there are flashbacks to a main character’s childhood where he and his younger brother were abused by their father.
As season 3 progresses, there is increased focus on how a main character has become verbally and physically violent like his abusive father, to the point of saying and doing things exactly the same way his father did them. Another character who speaks about how his father thought he was a disappointment goes on to call his son the same thing as they fight.
Yes-Spoilers!
Late in the season (3) we see a flashback of one of the main characters, where as a child he hid is brother and his father brutally lashed him with his belt for it.
there are scenes that include alcohol in them but one of the characters, queen maeve, is implied to be a recovering alcoholic but relapses. this happens in season 1 ep 5 if im not mistaken
As explained in the back story/behind the scenes videos, the animals are very well cared for and remain unharmed. Any work was done by special effects and editing teams.
this show is horrible about animal death. a lot of the Deep's sea creature friends die gratuitously in horrible ways just to traumatize him
season 1 episode 4 (skip from 47:00 - 48:30) a dolphin dies
in S1E5 (43:45) there's brief news footage of the dead dolphin
S1E7 (35:30 - 36:45), the Deep tries to rescue a lobster from a grocery store but the clerk stabs it before he can
S2E3 (skip from 37:00 - 40:45) a whale dies (42:00 - 44:35) the dead whale is shown again when the Seven show up and insult deep and then leave to follow the Boys
Season 3 episode 3, the deep eats a live octopus. I’m not sure how graphic it was as I forwarded it myself but judging from others comments, definitely one to skip through. When homelander brings the silver platter out skip around 1 min 30 seconds (can’t say for sure as again I didn’t watch it but that’s how much I skipped when I saw the octopus and it was fine)
Very gore scene of a whale being intentionally pierced by a boat going at full speed. It doesn't die immediatly and you can hear its cries of pain afterward.
Yes. A rabbit is shot up with Gen v and runs away. However, the development goes horribly wrong and it manifests tentacles out of its body (very graphic) which forces Butcher to euthanize it with his gun.
Webweaver is a spider-themed superhero who is a parody of Spider-Man. In his room, you can see various webs, which are directly implied to come out of his.. you know. It's kinda gross.
The Deep sends an army of sharks after The Boys while they are on a boat, and they retaliate by trying to shoot them. The sharks don’t succeed in directly attacking or eating someone though.
Homelander’s basically a giant bully that gets away with whatever he wants because he’s WAY more powerful than anyone else. If someone stands up to him or does something he doesn’t like, he viciously beats them up if not, brutally killing them
People are tied up, violently held against walls by supes, there are a LOT of scenes of people in cells, someone is stuffed into a trunk, and many more.
sexual violence is a main theme of the show. several main characters are sexual abusers and characters who are victims are intimidated and stalked
i might have missed some but these are the big ones + the borderline cases
season 1 episode 1 22:00 - 24:30 Deep coerces Starlight into sex 32:00 Translucent is invisible in the women's restroom and spying on them while naked
s1e2 37:00 - 38:00 Starlight stops an attempted rape and kicks the shit out of the guys 41:00, a shapeshifter tricks someone into sex blindfolded in order to blackmail him 42:00 homelander watches someone breastfeed through a wall 48:30 the boys put a bomb in transluscent's rectum
s1e3 Popclaw has consensual sex with her landlord but then crushes his head and his distress is very visible
s1e4 Frenchie is talking to a girl in a cafe and she grabs him by the crotch threateningly and painfully, but it's played for laughs
episode 5 Maeve gets drunk and kisses her ex girlfriend against her will but stops immediately
episode 5, 45 minutes in when starlight goes onstage she describes her sexual assault
S1E6, 30 minutes in, Butcher talks about homelander assaulting his wife
S1E7 - the Deep is assaulted by a fangirl graphically onscreen (25 minutes in) - homelander accuses starlight of faking her rape accusation - we see survaillance footage of Butcher's wife before and after her assault in a flashback. she gets pregnant and "dies" in childbirth 40 minutes in (the scene is very graphic)
season 2 is really distressing because homelander spends it stalking rebecca butcher, living in her house, intimidating her, and lording it over her that she's powerless to stop him
S2E2 (28:30 - 30:20) rebecca begs for Vought to help her get away and is refused (very distressing) (35:00) homelander intimidates rebecca (42:30) Stormfront makes a victim-blaming joke about Starlight's rape
S2E3 (7:15) homelander intimidates rebecca (16:30) butcher makes a joke about assaulting hughie
Spoilers: Hughie goes undercovered as a supe which turns had a BDSM date with Tek Knight, and so he is forced to part take into sexual acts against his will and at the moment it's treated a bit like a joke (this is later rectified as we see the real mental turmoil He's going thru tho it's mostly out of grief)
To my knowledge there are two explicit rape scenes. One involving the Deep being assaulted by a fan and one involving Doppelganger tricking a man into sex under false pretences for blackmailing purposes while the man is wearing a blindfold
There are many more examples of sexual assault in the show although it's not always as explicitly shown.
At the beginning of episode one a woman is brutality murdered. She is crushed and completely dissolved on screen as a result of being hit by a speeding superhero.
No achilles tendon injuries are shown during this episode, however it's important to mention that there are still distressing injuries and body parts being torn off like nearly every episode of the series.
S3 spoiler:
In the first episode of Season 3, a shrinked character enters the urethra of another male character. When still inside he pops back to normal size, blowing up most of the other character.
To elaborate on the other two comments, it is mentioned in Episode 1 that after A-Train ran through a girl, he accidentally swallowed one of her molars.
season 1 episode 2 hughie punches a wall repeatedly and draws blood (18:00)
episode 6 the super-strength woman breaks Mesmer's wrist when he tries to read her mind (there are visions of her snapping people's necks)
episode 7 (this one is extremely bad), when Hugie goes to confront A-Train he distracts him while Kimiko sneaks up on him and breaks his leg (about 20 minutes in
episode 8, 15 minutes in, Kimiko flees the SWAT guys and breaks several of their bones before she's caught
season 2 episode 1 at 30:00 we see someone's mutilated arm
S2 E3 (51:00 - 53:00) Stormfront crushes Kenji's hands and then snaps his neck while calling him slurs (this one is extremely bad)
In S2 E5 (17:30 - 18:30) Kimiko walks into the shop and then rips someone's face off, stabs, breaks bones, it was bad enough that I couldn't watch it
In season 3 a character is stripped naked, humiliated and bike locked to a pillar, then forced to choose who to kill between 2 people he cares about. Arguably psychological torture. A supe introduced in season 3 is also tested on by scientists to test his limits including being shot down the throat, burned and gassed.
Yes, enough that I would not be able to name all of the instances if I tried. Do not watch the show if you aren’t prepared for creative, gratuitous, frequently surprise violence.
Queen Maeve survives a brutal battle with Homelander and sacrifices herself to save others from Soldier Boy's nuclear explosion by jumping out the side of the building with soldier boy. She ends up surviving though
A few minutes from the end the last episode of season 3, when homelander is in a crowd of his supporters, a protestor is called a variation of the r slur. mute & turn off captions from 57:22-57:24 and you won't see/hear it. the dialogue isn't important so you won't miss anything. (SPOILERS)
if you wanna be extra safe and skip it, a protestor calls homelander a fascist and throws a can at his kid, so homelander lasers the guy's head off and everyone cheers.
A-Train murders his girlfriend by using his super speed to inject her with numerous heroin needles at once. A-Train also abuses compound V (a fictional drug that boosts super powers) throughout the show and ends up giving himself severe heart problems and almost dies of a heart attack because of this at one point.
Episode 4 of the first season features a plane crash with children on board. A little girl holds a Disney-looking plastic baby doll in her arms, and you just keep seeing this girl clutching her doll while the passengers beg for their lives. The child ultimately dies, and you can tell because there’s a heartbreaking closeup of the now ruined doll among the debris from the crash.
Yes, Hughie unintentionally cheats with the shapeshifter, who is impersonating Annie. After the shapeshifter is killed, The real Annie confronts Hughie about this.
Ghosts don't exist within The Boys universe, however it's important to mention that "Joe Kessler", is a ghost is that he can only appear to Butcher and that the other characters cannot interact with him.
Robin suddenly dies after A-Train accidentally collides with her, leaving blood and gore in his wake. The scene is incredibly sudden and comes straight after a sweet moment between Robin and Hughie.
Season 1 Episode 1: In the opening scene when an armoured truck is being destroyed, a man gets out of the truck and v*s onto the ground. It is not graphic but still visible.
A young woman suddenly and audibly v*s into a toilet roughly 20 minutes in, however v* is not shown, you only see her knees under a toilet stall.
Season 1 episode 7: A man v*s into a trash can somewhere between 9 and 9:30 mins after running on a track. V* is visible for about a second and very audible.
Season 1 episode 8: A young woman is seen flirting drunkenly with a man at an event. She excuses herself and there is a sudden cut to her audibly V* into a toilet, however v* not shown.
Season 2 episode 6: During CCTV footage, a man is shown v* acid onto a bed. This is sudden and visible through grainy CCTV footage.
Characters are shown being trapped in a room in a hospital and one character decides to open the door. The acid v* man enters the room and v*s towards a man and then on himself. Look away for about 45 seconds to be safe. Graphic and unpleasant to watch.
A man sells his body parts to be eaten but it’s not shown on screen.
Not human, but sea creatures the Deep knows on a personal, human-like level are eaten.
As part of the torture, Elijah is forced to bring a chocolate cake and i'm not kidding, Hughie has to do various awful things to it. I'd skip that scene if I were you. You'll never look at cake the same way again.
It’s very blink and you miss it— in season 2, while Homelander is being shown memes about himself, a picture showing the Twin Towers on fire can be seen.
It's not stated if the character is trans but a shapeshifter character with a female appearance seduces and convinces a man to have sex, only to turn into a male presenting appearance midway in order to blackmail him, playing on the "trap" trope.
no autistic character are abused however a variation of the r slur is used at the end of the last episode of season 3. there's nothing visible on screen so if you turn off captions and mute it from 57:22-57:24 you'll be safe and still know what happens. (SPOILERS)
if you wanna be extra safe and skip it, a protestor calls homelander a fascist and throws a can at his kid, so homelander lasers the guy's head off and everyone cheers.
A girl stands on a roof about to commit suicide by jumping off but ends up changing her mind. She is forced off the roof anyway by Homelander after in the same scene, it’s revealed in a news broadcast that Stormfront committed suicide by biting off her own tongue.
During most silent discussion scenes audio is alot more sensitive and picks up breathing / mouth opening noises
Season 2 Episode 7 has an eating scene with lots of slurping
Gore sounds including head crushing and squelching throughout the entire show.
Subtitles also say things like "Sigh (Lip smack)" and such.
hughie dealing with his grief over robin's death is a big part of the show and he has PTSD episodes in almost every episode in season 1 (hyperventilating, ringing in ears)
Becca says to Homelander that if he kills Butcher, She will kill herself in front of Homelander’s son and say it’s his fault. This is never followed through with.
Body Dysmorphia Disorder is a body-image disorder characterized by persistant and intrusive preoccupations with an imagined or slight defect in one's appearance. This means that the afflicted person cannot stop thinking negatively about their appearance, or aspects of it. It has nothing to do with shapeshifting.
The Deep has serious body dysmorphia and depression because of his gills, and being assaulted in season 1 episode 7 makes it worse. In season 2 episode 2 he's given a drug that makes him hallucinate that his gills are talking to him, and they give him a long talk about how he has to learn to accept his body the way it is. His distress is very intense.
In S2E3 (44:00) Homelander calls him disgusting and tells him to cover up
I'd argue yes in season 4. SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS Homelander goes back to where he was raised and talks about "the bad room" which is a smaller concrete room that he was frequently kept in alone with a large metal door. Later someone is sealed shut inside of it with no way out
Starlight is recovering from bulimia. it's rarely mentioned but she relapses briefly in season 1 episode 1, 30 minutes in, immediately after the lines "they're fucking laughing" "so what are you going to do about it?"
S1E2 40 minutes starlight's manager yells at her because people are mocking her eating disorder on social media
episode 4 in the mall scene butcher makes a passing joke about clothes for anorexics
Homelander talks to a girl on the roof of a tall building about to kill herself (and while she ultimately decides she doesn’t want to, Homelander forces her off the building and to her death anyway).
During the same scene, it’s revealed that Stormfront committed suicide by biting off her own tongue and choking on it
A baby cries throughout the final scene of Season 1. The mother (who is tied up in the midst of a tense stand-off between two violent and unpredictable people) begs for the baby to be moved to another room but she is ignored.
S02E05 - very intense, direct, sudden strobe after hard cut, around 6min mark, right after Homelander shuts trailer door, for about two minutes. There is no epilepsy warning before the show or any ease-in before scene, if not for a friend who saw it earlier and warned me it would give me seizure as there is no time for reaction and closing one/both eyes is not enough to block it - it is INTENSE.
The boys plant audio and/or video bugs multiple times to spy on people. Also Homelander can see through walls and has superhearing so he can watch or listen in on people without them knowing from several buildings away, which he does multiple times.
This is kind of hard to answer. The showrunners make use of lots of real life social media to help sell the message of the show, for example much of the in-universe entertainment produced by Vought can be seen in real life on their Youtube channel.
Becca is shown in a graphic scene in labour, and blood spills all over the floor. It is explained that the fetus developed unusually fast due to it being homelanders child.
To clarify, the death mentioned in the previous comment is a lie told by a character and the woman didn’t die, however you are still visually shown this death in a fake flashback as if it’s real and it’s not confirmed to be a lie until several episodes later.
“Poof.” S4E7 has a scene where puppets sing a homophobic, transphobic song. The portrayal of pinkwashing/performative activism has been mistaken for homophobia, mostly by projecting homophobes, but this is a misinterpretation.
A shapeshifter is sometimes unable to maintain their form and reverts to their base, masculine presenting form while still in feminine clothes. This is treated as a joke in some scenes.
Some of the characters have had their races swapped from the source material (Deep is now white instead of black like in the comics, A-Train is now black instead of white like in the comics), but aside from that I can’t really think of an example of minority misrepresentation that wasn’t an intentional plot point regarding racism, bigotry etc.
It’s mentioned that several of the supes have had sexual activities with underaged people or people much younger than them such as lamplighter and allegedly with soldier boy and gunpowder
Starlight is made to wear a much more revealing outfit by Vought for marketing purposes. This is clearly done as a commentary on the sexual objectification of women in superhero media.
Gonna say no but Homelander seems to have an Oedipus complex thing happening with Stillwell in season one where he sees her as a mother figure and a romantic/sexual partner. In season 2 he finds a bottle of her breast milk and drinks it which is continuing to be a weird obsession with milk throughout the show. He is also jealous of her baby for a time, like an older sibling would be.
(SPOILERS)
He had Doppelganger morph into her after her death to enact fantasies with. Just definitely some weird pseudo-incest stuff happening that is worth a warning.
Several mentions of BDSM relationships, including one onscreen BDSM sex scene. A major female character is also shown to perform dominatrix BDSM acts on multiple male coworkers as a coping mechanism for her stressful job.
Yes- SPOILER!
On the last episode of season 3, near the end, one of the main characters wakes up in a hospital, where he asks a doctor "how long have I got?", and the doctor replies "12 month, 18 if you are lucky"
On another episode, we see a child with cancer, where he gets a visit from a super hero, at the make-a-wish program. There is a "joke" about the child wanting to meet a different hero, and was told that he will come to visit the child in a few days, to which the doctor shake is head "no".
The series isn’t over yet but most of the seasons end off on a sad note and with the direction the series is going, it’s hard to see it having a happy ending
Yes, during the final scene as the boys go their separate ways and flee the country, each one of them get kidnapped by vought agents with the exception of Annie who flies away. Annie and Hughie drive to escape the country, and a telepathic supe throws a car at them, causing the tires to screech and them to crash.
SPOILERS-
The show starts with the graphic blowing apart of Hughie’s girlfriend, The Female kills her victims by beating them to a pulp, Popclaw crushes her landlord, One character is blown up via plastic explosives inside him, Supers maim alotof people, etc...