Gen V: Superheroes Becoming Humans

To appreciate the spin-off show, Gen V, you have to watch The Boys, Amazon’s original show, which has aired three seasons since 2019 and is based on a comic book series. I only started watching The Boys last year because when my husband first told me about the show years ago, I wasn’t interested in anything called The Boys. I just didn’t think it was for me or that I would like it. I’m glad I gave it a chance, though, because I fell in love with the premise: What about the innocent casualties of the superheros’ powers? That’s when The Boys come in, a group of vigilantes who want to expose the corrupt “supes” of The Seven, an elite superhero group who are treated as gods, and Vought, the corporation that manages these superheroes. I found The Boys to be original and refreshing because it was so anti-Marvel and graphic—seriously, there’s a lot of blood and guts. I love Marvel movies, but The Boys was so different, and that’s what makes this universe so good. You won’t find any cookie-cutter superheroes here. These superheroes curse, are violent, and do some weird shit the way any human with superpowers would behave in the real world. The supes in The Boys don’t give a fuck about being real heroes. They just pretend to be. That’s what separates them from its spin-off Gen V, which starts after the events of The Boys season 3. The show follows a group of college-age supes who attend the Vought-founded Godolkin University, or, as it is ironically abbreviated, God U.  

In this world, superheroes aren’t naturally born with powers. They were normal people whose parents injected when they were babies with a drug called Compound V that gives them powers, hence the name of the spin-off. The students at God U are the first generation to have this knowledge after the information was leaked to the media in season 2 of The Boys. When we meet one of the protagonists of Gen V, Marie Moreau, her powers of controlling and sensing things in blood manifest alongside her first period. Her parents barge into the bathroom, creating a literal bloodbath when she can’t control her powers and accidentally kills them. Gen V is for a younger demographic, so it’s fitting that two of the characters’ powers are tied to self-harm, an issue prevalent in the youth, especially women. To use her power, Marie cuts herself; her roommate Emma Meyer purges to shrink. There’s a lot of self-hatred with these young supes who’ve been made to feel like monsters by their loved ones. Professor Brink tells Marie that her blood powers are a non-starter in Middle America, and there’s no four-quadrant appeal. In short, her powers are “nasty” and not marketable, which is all that matters. Neither Marie nor Emma like to talk about the disturbing ways their powers work. Common to self-harming, it’s their secret.   

With public perception paramount to a supe’s success, Gen V allows us to see how supes are molded. With classes like superhero branding and hero management, we see the origins of what we learned in The Boys: superheroes are celebrities. Every student at God U uses social media to get likes and followers, capture viral moments, and stay up to date on rankings. Numbers are everything. The students’ rankings are based on talent, skill, brand awareness, and social mentions. When the highest-ranked student kills himself, the hashtag “Why Did Golden Boy Do It” was trending number one. Golden Boy’s suicide ignites a quest for the truth in his friends, the other main supes. While the grown superheroes in The Boys help cover up the lies of the corporation that manages them, Vought, the younger supes seek to expose it. A major theme of the spin-off is the young adults grappling with being good people. Do they want to look like heroes to get in The Seven, or do they want to be heroes? Like any adolescent, they struggle with their morals and doing the right thing. When investigative journalist Tek Knight arrives on campus under the pretense of finding out why Golden Boy did it, the new number one student, Andre Anderson, says, “You get treated like a god here [at God U], but what kind of hero is too chicken shit to do anything heroic?”

One of the funniest things about The Boys is that the superheroes don’t actually do anything heroic. It’s all acting and marketing to boost their celebrity and make money for Vought. The same way it would be if superheroes were real in our world. There would be a corporation behind them caring only about the bottom dollar. Those supes don’t care about saving anyone; they’re the villains. But in Gen V, we get characters who don’t want to be monsters. They discover a secret lab underneath the school, coined “The Woods,” where they’re experimenting on young supes and infecting them with a virus that can kill supes. Andre wants to be a real hero and not a coward like his dad, who knew about The Woods and didn’t do anything. Marie wants to be a hero because she killed her parents, and the memory haunts her. She wants to be a good person and prove to her sister that she’s not a monster. This juxtaposition of two classes of superheroes is interesting, kind of like X-Men having one side of mutants thinking they’re superior to humans and the other side wanting to help humanity. We do have Starlight, who joins The Seven at the start of The Boys and is our introduction to the supes. She ends up working with The Boys to take down Vought. I can’t wait to see the new season and how it deals with the virus introduced in Gen V.   

I love that Gen V focuses more on the humanity of the supes and what they have lost by gaining superpowers, making them likable characters. Most of them have lost their families either directly with their newfound powers or their families’ fear of them. Supes like Marie and Sam, Golden Boy’s brother, hate themselves for the hurt they caused. Unlike The Boys, here are supes with feelings we can relate to. They suffer and feel alienated, all while being hormonal adolescents. In this world, with so many immoral supes running amock, especially young people still figuring themselves out, superpowers are dangerous—Rufus, a powerful telepath on campus, is named after the date-rape drug Roofies, so that should tell you something. With any drug, there are side effects to Compound V, like Andre’s dad, whose powers over the years have injured his brain. The doctor warns Andre to watch out for symptoms as well. It’s the first time superpowers are a weakness for the superhuman. And these supes are super human. In one of the opening scenes of the first episode, Marie is reading a book where she highlighted the statement: “Think about how you might make your mark on the world. Where does your story begin?” In the margin, Marie asks, “Can it start now, please?” We can all relate to that urgency of making a mark and becoming somebody in this world. Gen V just asks, What kind of human are you going to be?