Defining The Boys is pretty easy. It is a series based on a comic book of the same name written by Garth Ennis and drawn by Dick Robertson that only interested those who knew how to search between the hundreds of Marvel and DC volumes on the shelves of the companies. Like The Umbrella Academy, the series takes the comic as a reference point for then developing a story at ease and pleasure. Of course, the series can’t afford the same visual power as the comic book, but it can orbit around the original idea to say something else. Now, unlike The Umbrella Academy, The Boys takes the opportunity to lift the middle finger to comic book cinema that takes all the blockbusters (or did so before COVID-19 got in the way) and show business making supers a much more extreme and obvious Watchmenian critique. That’s what the first season is all about: a representation of the world of superstars. Only, instead of actors, influencers and some other mortal with a VIP seal, there are superheroes. Interviews, fake smiles, secrets, underground hatreds, confidentiality contracts, consumption models to satisfy the appetite of the public, posters, action figures. All compressed in a series of one season and one in progress. At the moment, the second season wants to show two things. The first is hunting for alleged terrorists and false threats to make people forget that supers are not gifted, but manufactured and, on the other hand, the second is… Stormfront, let’s see, what happened?
Well, in the comic book, Stormfront is the guy in the picture above. Very different from the version of the series. The Stormfront of Ennis is a Nazi made and right (neither is the name any coincidence) product of Adolf Hitler’s experiments with Compound V, that kind of supersolden serum from the The Boys universe, and who now works for americans, though without losing a shred of his ideology. But the Stormfront of comics would have no effect to this day. It would serve (or serve) to shade much more subtle and imperceptible phenomena at first sight. The comique Stormfront would probably have done something other than anything else in the series, but it would have been taken off the reality it poses. That’s why the character was cleverly remodeled, going from being him to being her.” I find Homelander’s counterpoint much more interesting if you have it with a mine,” explains Lucas Baini, a film journalist and founder of the Camera in Hand channel. “It is interesting to bring, in a different way, the world agenda and this whole feminist revolution. There are series that try to incorporate it and in many it remains as forced. The Boys puts on other nuances: the one that brings the feminist agenda is the villain.” The Stormfront that Aya Cash brings to life is shown as Vought’s empathetic face, which comes to break with the chains of the past and expose the seams of the establishment. A communicative establishment that, according to Juan Ruocco, a philosophy student and writer who researched in the jaws of 4Chan, has been cracking since Donald Trump, in his campaign for president of the United States, uploaded a cartoonish image like Pepe The Frog, a meme idol of the site that Ruocco investigated and that is filled by “wrong” politicians.
But he wasn’t just the first and nothing else. It was a successful first use of meme. “What Trump does is take a meme that was already created by a group that, on the Internet, banked his candidacy. It’s not a meme your campaign team generates: it’s something they take out of an online community. It’s a bottom-up meme, from the ground up to the candidate,” Ruocco.Stormfront explains, for his part, comfortably uses modern media like The Live Instagram, has his own verified Twitter account, gives interviews in his own style and without following a previously articulated script and speaks to ordinary people in the language of ordinary people. She even points to that sorority stay woke among the super feminine. Stormfront is chosen by the company without having consulted others, it is an imposition from above designed to balance the team. Not so much from the point of view of its efficiency, but because of its commercial and communicative power. Vought most likely knows the consequences of having hired her, but, for now, it’s not a problem: she’s the piece the brand needs right now.” Stormfront changes the focus of information,” Baini now explains of this Vought signing. “He throws shit at the company from how unsever operational or useless it can be, something they can resum with: ‘Well, we simulated a terrorist attack and, rightly, it’s the Seven who solve it.'”
The enemy of my enemiGo is my friend? Talking bad about Homelander, that powerful old man who needs to be removed to make room for the new, is the formula Stormfront uses to put the audience right in his pocket. The idea is that a new objectively powerful (albeit evil) character will face the one who, for an entire season, we’ve been hating… It is ok. It’s a pretty cool idea that makes us, at some point, sympathetic to her. And that’s the plan.” He’s a character who has a lot of energy. Whether you’re appealing or not. Even now, with all the things he did, he positions himself as the second most disruptive character in the series after Homelander, which is a re-achievement,” Baini confesses.
In the fourth episode we learned that Stormfront has been a super a long time ago and that she spent her time murdering young Afro for crimes they had never committed before. But now he changed his name, changed the way he communicated, and became politically aggiorn. Equal… some other resabio remains, will A-Train’s dismissal have incentivized him? All this metaphor peaks when Stormfront massacres a large number of people in their quest to eliminate a threat and make-up what happened as “collateral damage.” Of course, the propaganda attributes the massacre to the “terrorists” and makes her look like a heroine. The besieged, hegemonic, egolatra and childish Homelander sees the ugly, normal memes against him and touches a fiber. The self-esteem of a demigod immediately pierced. And that’s really basic images, made nothing but to go viral. But he gets angry. The biggest “Ok, boomer” of the century. We understand this: it’s not easy to stop being the best-selling Funko Pop by laughing at social media.
“I’ve already had 5 thousand, five won’t be a problem” Or yes…”On the Internet, if you have an organic community, that is, people who share memes because yes, you can make a million creative zero people end up creating a meme more creative than a campaign spot,” Ruocco says of professional advertising versus handmade memes. At a verbal crossing, Stormfront leaves him in an unsurpassed technical knockout: “You spent $273 million on that ‘Saving America’ crap and I’m taking you the lead with five guys creating memes on their computers. I practically paid them with Arby’s gift cards.” Arby’s is an American fast food chain. Yes. Auch.Si, for Ruocco, the television presence still plays a very important role in the campaign of political candidates (the full case is Donald Trump again), gradually examples are emerging that turn the tortilla around.
“Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez did a great campaign on the Internet and door-to-door. That’s where he made a huge difference and won his district,” Ruocco explains. Peeero, it’s not the same running for New York as it is for president of the United States. Television is still an important crowd, but it’s only a matter of time. The British Embassy selling its scholarships with memes, the Front of All promoting the fight against the coronavirus using the dynamics of Among Us, Joe Biden campaigning with phrases by Donald Trump… It was only a matter of time before the arrival of a villain whose superpower was to know perfectly the technological codes to amplify her rotten message in the best Trojan horse style.Now all that remains is to wait for the end of this second electrifying season and see how Stormfront continues to develop its technological skills to use in its favor. It wouldn’t be crazy to watch her streaming on Twitch to watch her playing Fortnite with three subscribers. Or going out to fight, alongside Homelander, for the supremacy of the supers worldwide.
