[Gen V’s season-long satire of college sports, superheroes, and
capitalism comes to a wicked end. Even with their amazing powers,
superhumans are still humans; corporations have the real power.]
[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

GEN V WAS ALWAYS MUCH MORE THAN A BOYS SPINOFF. ITS SEASON FINALE
PROVED THAT.  
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Alex Abad-Santos
November 3, 2023
Vox
[[link removed]]


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_ Gen V’s season-long satire of college sports, superheroes, and
capitalism comes to a wicked end. Even with their amazing powers,
superhumans are still humans; corporations have the real power. _

Jaz Sinclair as Marie Moreau, a superhero with gory powers, in Gen V.
, Amazon Studios

 

Alex Abad-Santos [[link removed]] is a
senior correspondent who explains what society obsesses over, from
Marvel and movies to fitness and skin care. He came to Vox in 2014.
Prior to that, he worked at the Atlantic.

_____

We love to send superheroes to school.

The X-Men came together at Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted
Youngsters [[link removed]].
The Fantastic Four’s Future Foundation and at least three academies
— the short-lived Teen Titans
[[link removed]],
the magically inclined Strange
[[link removed]],
and the comic book
[[link removed]] series-turned-Netflix
[[link removed]]-hit Umbrella
[[link removed]] — all
riffed on that idea and admitted protégés too. Though they aren’t
formally superheroes, Harry Potter and his friends go to Hogwarts
[[link removed]],
while _Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children_
[[link removed]] and Brakebills University
for Magic Pedagogy
[[link removed]] (featured
in _The Magicians_) function similarly. They are all part of
an extremely common trope
[[link removed]].

These stories have a lot in common, but the most important lesson is
you can’t judge a superhero by their cover. The most powerful people
can come from the humblest beginnings, and these schools are often for
people who never felt like they belonged. A place as supernatural as
the students are might be able to give these exceptional beings what
the rest of the world can’t: a home, friends, and family that
understand them and teachers to guide them.

Speaking as a person of real-life school experience, superhero school
is better.

That’s mainly because no one is ever learning trigonometry in these
stories. Nope. Super-powered kids learning “sohcahtoa
[[link removed].]”
isn’t what sells, but mixing the other parts of high school — the
anxiety of making friends, the blazing insecurity of being a teen, the
joy and embarrassment of first crushes, the universal fears about the
future — with magic and superpowers is exponentially fun. And the
massive popularity of these narratives would suggest that even the
real-life popular kids see themselves in the overlooked protagonists
in these stories.

On the surface, _Gen V_
[[link removed]],
the young-adult spinoff of Amazon’s hit _The Boys_
[[link removed]],
looks like one of these tales. Satires are supposed to. In _The
Boys_’s nihilistic cinematic universe, however, great power tilts
toward fascism, great responsibility is swapped out for unquenchable
narcissism, and truth and justice are not the American way.

Just as _The Boys _does with superhero storytelling, _Gen
V _isn’t just about clowning the genre. Though there’s more than
enough time spent watching the sleazy havoc of petty, irresponsible
college kids blessed with superpowers, the series has its sights aimed
at something bigger. It asks who’s in charge of our heroes, what
they’re being taught, and what exactly this generation did to
deserve this.

God U: A college for the future fascists of America

In this world, superheroes go to Godolkin University, a school founded
by the very powerful pharma-entertainment-defense-everything
corporation Vought International featured on _The Boys_. According to
this world’s lore, Vought International was founded by a Nazi named
Frederick Vought who created a serum that gave normal people powers.
Vought parlayed his invention into freedom, exchanging the serum for
asylum in the US.

Dubbed “God U,” Godolkin is essentially the University of Alabama
[[link removed]] for
the super-powered, allowing them to major in either crime fighting or
performing arts. These are the only two academic paths at these
schools, and they are extremely lucrative. The latter track teaches
kids how to use their powers to become entertainers and build a
celebrity following. In both the real world and _The Boys_, the line
between hero and celebrity is already thin, so supes becoming actors
and influencers [[link removed]] seems like a
natural progression.

The crime-fighting major is the elite college on campus, though. It
carves the would-be warriors into teenage titans with the ultimate
goal of being drafted into The Seven, the world’s premiere superhero
group. In _The Boys _universe, superheroism is contracted out, with
teams of heroes functioning like the Lakers or the Yankees. Graduating
at the top of your class and beating your classmates at Godolkin is a
surefire way to get into The Seven, become a celebrity superhero, and
reap all the rewards.

The parallel to college sports is purposely on the nose, given the
many instances of real-world NCAA corruption
[[link removed]] where
colleges have been caught chasing money and student-athletes
[[link removed]] and coaches
[[link removed]] have
been accused of crimes
[[link removed]],
sometimes major ones.

It’s important to note that in _The Boys_ universe, superpowers
aren’t natural. They only manifest in people injected with a drug
called Compound V, a derivative of Frederick’s Nazi serum. The
powers themselves — sometimes undesirable ones like detachable limbs
or shrinking — are random, and Compound V can have harmful side
effects that mirror steroids.

Following this logic, it’s clear that the proud parents of each
incoming class at God U were, at some point, injecting their babies
with life-altering and potentially life-threatening drugs in the hope
of hitting the genetically altered jackpot.

Despite this moral ickiness, Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) desperately
wants to be a good person. Part of her desire stems from her guilt
over accidentally killing her parents when her powers manifested;
she’s blessed/cursed with the gruesome ability to psychically
control blood (e.g., make people’s hearts stop, repair wounds, sense
if people have diseases or abnormalities in the circulatory systems,
turn a person’s blood into a weapon, etc.). Given God U’s
commitment to diversity, academics, and molding young people into the
best superheroes on Earth, it’s her dream school.

Once there, she finds an ally in her roommate Emma Meyer (Lizze
Broadway), who has the ability to change her physical size, and a good
number of grudging acquaintances. There’s Jordan Li (Derek Luh and
London Thor), an indestructible superhero with both a male and a
female form; Andre Anderson (Chance Perdomo), who can manipulate
metal; super-strong Sam Riordan (Asa Germann); and Cate Dunlap (Maddie
Phillips), a telepath with a type of mind control that allows her to
“push” people and override their free will.

As the season unfolds, it turns out Marie’s alienated origin story
isn’t unique. Emma’s powers are connected to her binge eating and
purging. Jordan’s parents aren’t accepting of their bigender
child. Andre’s powers might be giving him brain damage. Sam, the
brother of the late top-ranked super Golden Boy (Patrick
Schwarzenegger), has schizophrenia. Cate accidentally pushed her
little brother to his death.

The promising future supers at God U are not okay, and those are just
the good kids.

Other more nefarious characters on the fringes aren’t afraid to use
abilities like mind-wiping and invisibility on their classmates — a
terrifying layer to add on top of all the bullying, peer pressure,
and sexual assault
[[link removed]] that
already happens in real-life college. God U also has its own version
of legacy admits and special treatment, as Vought International is
there to make sure that its most promising students don’t get caught
up in granular things like underage drinking charges or manslaughter.

But _Gen V_ isn’t just about playing with the many sordid
scenarios that would happen if you gave teens and young adults immense
power. It’s about how they got that way in the first place.

These kids didn’t have a choice in their destiny. The people who
were supposed to take care of them did. Their parents ditched that
responsibility and gambled with their kids’ lives, thanks to the
most powerful company on Earth. The people who raised Marie and her
friends essentially fed them into a machine, a system, that’s much
more powerful than laser-beam eyes, telepathy, or even blood-bending.
The kids of _Gen V _are, to the adults around them, disposable.

It’s a damning portrait of how the competition of capitalism broke
us along with everything from college sports to law enforcement to our
families. Not only that, it has even broken the attempts to mitigate
it; _Gen V_ highlights how an evil company is adept at capitalizing
on the language of diversity and equity to achieve its goals.

That this show is airing on Amazon
[[link removed]] Prime, a branch of one of the richest
companies on Earth founded by a billionaire infatuated with muscles
[[link removed]] and space
[[link removed]],
is not lost on me. Nor is the phenomenon of right-wing fans
[[link removed]] slowly
realizing that _The Boys _superheroes they love are actually
villainous fascists (the show has arguably one of the most robust GIF
presences
[[link removed]] on Twitter
[[link removed]], now called X). Some of the show’s
larger messages might be lost on the cast, however: Perdomo, one
of _Gen V_’s leads, recently scrubbed his social media
[[link removed]] after
internet users found out his account was “liking” and promoting
far-right, sexist, anti-vax politics.

The show’s complicated real-world baggage aside, _Gen V_ is a
riotous indictment of fascists both big (like corporations and
universities) and small (like parents and teachers). With legal
guardians like these, the massive psychological damage these young
people carry isn’t that surprising.

What happens in _Gen V_’s cynical and twisted season finale

[Image reads “spoilers below,” with a triangular sign bearing an
exclamation point.]

In the final episode of the first season, Marie and her friends find
out that Indira Shetty (Shelley Conn), the dean of God U, has been
using the college as a front. Viewers have seen Shetty do some
nefarious things over the season, but most of the kids haven’t been
privy to her dastardly deeds.

Beneath the campus is an underground lab called the “Woods” where
Shetty has been creating a contagious virus that kills supes. She’s
been testing her biological weapon on wayward students and wants to
unleash it on the superhero population en masse. Shetty wants revenge.

Her daughter and husband were on Flight 37
[[link removed]], a
bungled rescue mission and significant event in _The Boys _universe.
Homelander (Antony Starr), and Queen Maeve (Dominique
McElligott), _The Boys_’s analogs to Superman and Wonder Woman,
tried to save the flight from terrorists but ended up damaging the
plane’s control panels. Instead of rescuing as many people as
possible, Homelander — a fascist, megalomaniac sociopath —
believed that any survivors would rat out their fault and damage
superhumans’ reputation. He lets everyone aboard die. Homelander has
also since used the crash to ask for more power and less regulation
from authorities.

The discovery of Shetty’s plan splits the team.

Cate, who had the closest relationship with Shetty and was thereby
manipulated the most, is out for blood; she pushes Shetty to kill
herself. Cate, with Sam, releases the students trapped in the Woods
and turns them on the non-super faculty and staff at God U. In a
crossover role slightly larger than a cameo, Victoria Neuman (Claudia
Doumit), a shady, anti-supe lawmaker, gets her hands on the virus.

Marie, Jordan, Emma, and Andre decide that even though Shetty was
planning genocide of their kind, they need to take a stand and protect
the humans. Said humans are only out for themselves and try to cut
deals — even promising a spot on The Seven — with the supers,
promising anyone anything if they can kill Cate and the freed kids.

Cate’s revolt is a bloodbath. She pushes Sam and the Woods prisoners
to homicide. But she’s finally cornered by Marie. Out of the blue,
Homelander, the world’s most powerful super-fascist, tells everyone
to stand down. Vought execs call him in to save their lives. Just when
he looks like he’s going to incapacitate Cate and her carnage, he
blasts Marie with his laser eyes and calls her pathetic for turning on
her own kind.

In the aftermath, the show skips forward. It’s sometime later, and
God U and Vought have covered up the rampage, anointing Cate and Sam
as heroes. They’ve pinned the massacre on Marie, Emma, Jordan, and
Andrew. Marie, it turns out, has survived Homelander’s eye blast.
She and her friends are being held in what seems like a high-security
mental institution. They’re trapped and have no idea what has
happened in the outside world.

The people in charge have made the decision that blaming these kids
— three of whom happen to be people of color — is more beneficial
to Vought and, by extension, God U. Vought has also made Marie and her
friends into notorious criminals, ruining their lives, their
families’ lives, and putting the ire of a country on them. If they
do find a way out, probably with a hand from The Boys (the
anti-superhero group the original series is named after), they’ll
never be able to live normal lives again.

On the other hand, if Cate and Sam are still alive and haven’t
already been martyred by Vought, they don’t have it any easier. Just
because they’re poster children doesn’t mean they’re being
treated as such. Vought has kept them around because they have some
kind of value. Cate’s power to mind control people is extremely
handy for a company that has its fingers in seemingly every industry
in the world. Sam is immensely powerful, maybe one of the strongest
supes ever. Vought has probably figured out how to bribe, manipulate,
threaten, or blackmail the two of them into complete compliance.

Given the outcome, it becomes clear that the students were in a no-win
situation. Protecting the lives of the people who want to kill you or
killing them before they kill you — none of it matters. They never
had a chance or a choice. Even with their amazing powers, superhumans
are still humans; corporations have the real power.

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