Stormfront's Strongest Power On The Boys Isn't What You Think
The latest member to join the Seven on The Boys is Stormfront (Aya Cash). Stormfront can fly and shoot electricity, and it seems like she might be as powerful (if not more so) than the show's resident Evil Superman, Homelander (Antony Starr).
But superpowers are tools, not talent, and the people with powers on The Boys only got theirs from a drug called Compound V. We've already seen that powers don't always mean being truly powerful — just because you can fly doesn't mean you'll fly well. You can have super strength and still spend more time accidentally destroying property than actually helping people. A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) can run faster than almost anybody, but his health is in the toilet.
Some heroes don't even find their greatest strength through Compound V. In fact, there's an argument to be made that Stormfront's greatest strength is not a superpower at all. Stormfront is the one member of the Seven who can wield a catastrophic weapon with devastating potential: social media.
Eric Kripke on why Stormfront is a nightmare
The Boys showrunner Eric Kripke has spent some time explaining why the show's version of Stormfront is so different from the original incarnation in the pages of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's comic. For one thing, the comic's Stormfront is a man, but the differences run deeper than a gender-swap.
The original Stormfront is openly a white supremacist raised as a Hitler Youth. Kripke wanted to take that in a different direction. "[Stormfront] has some pretty hateful ideas and that character did in the comics as well, but what's different about today is that a lot of people who have really hateful notions really wrap themselves in a pretty attractive social media package," said Kripke in a Facebook interview. "They come off as disrupters who just wanna be free thinkers, but then you ask them what their free thoughts are and it's the same hateful s**t that people have been talking about for thousands of years, and so we wanted to reflect that."
Part of the reason for changing Stormfront is also about how that change impacts Homelander. "We were playing this game of making sure that every character faces their worst nightmare this season," Kripke explained. "And for Homelander, that would be a woman who is not afraid of him and who is stealing his spotlight."
What better way to repackage hateful rhetoric than with a social media movement?
Aya Cash and the power of social media
Aya Cash was onhand for that Facebook interview as well, and she echoed Kripke's sentiments. "Stormfront is really smart and really social media savvy," said Cash. "She's able to both use and manipulate those people for her own stardom and her own agenda. She's definitely not what she seems and she definitely has a dark side that rivals Homelander's. I think she's probably even scarier, simply because she has a big agenda where his agenda surrounds himself."
Basically, think of this version of Stormfront as the distillation of every hateful movement that uses social media to make dangerous ideas like white supremacy seem attractive. We already know that she has the ability to package herself in a way that forces a situation to go her way. When she meets Homelander and Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott), she uses a livestream to prevent them from being able to shoot down her introduction into the Seven. As the season progresses, we'll see all sorts of ways that Stormfront can use social media to harm (or help, in some cases) anyone as she sees fit.
The Boys season 2 is releasing weekly on Amazon Prime now.