The Truth About Homelander And Stormfront's Relationship In The Boys
Amazon's "The Boys" thrives thanks to its impossibly dangerous and unsettlingly charismatic villains. Every scene with Homelander (Antony Starr) is filled with tension because it truly feels like he could snap at any moment and commit an atrocity. However, Stormfront (Aya Cash) lures audiences in with her refreshing no-filter feminism before revealing her true nature as a literal Nazi. As a duo? They're formidable and horrifying.
The pair of them meet for the first time in Season 2, with a rocky beginning: Homelander is clearly threatened by the attention lavished on new girl Stormfront. However, as his public image wavers, she steps in to help him build a better online presence and then they get straight to the laser-beam foreplay.
Villain duos are few and far between on-screen, despite making for excellent stories. It may be easy to label Homelander and Stormfront as pure evil — because, let's face it, they are — but there is more to them than a simple caricature of super-villainy. Together, they make for a pretty twisted couple.
Stormfront was genderbent to be the most effective foil for Homelander
While Amazon's "The Boys" draws much of its inspiration from its source material, the comic of the same name, the writers change characters and events as needed to fit their version of the story. One of the most obvious cases of this is with Stormfront's character — she's a man in the comics. But while the story certainly benefits from having more female characters, that isn't the only reason the writers changed up Stormfront.
Show creator Eric Kripke told Den of Geek, "We wanted to give Homelander his worst nightmare, which would be a strong woman who isn't afraid of him and steals his spotlight. That would be way more offensive to him than if a man did it because he's a gaping hole of insecurity." Of course, Homelander would end up having sex with his worst nightmare.
The thing is, while Stormfront's character was created to perfectly push Homelander's buttons, he is everything she wants: He's the blue-eyed, blond, white man that she, a Nazi, thinks of as perfection. Plus, he's wicked strong and super-powered to boot; the rival thing wasn't going to last forever.
Homelander and Stormfront started as rivals and ended as lovers
Homelander and Stormfront are a twisted version of the enemies-to-lovers trope — they definitely skipped over the "friends" step. The pair of them revel in each other's wickedness and they're fully happy to murder together, which is definitely something Homelander didn't have in his past relationships with Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue) and Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott). In Stormfront, Homelander has finally found someone to rival his own evilness, and he loves it.
Despite their sometimes violent relationship, it really did develop into something that had emotional stakes on both sides. Even though they're both terrible people, they also both desire family: Stormfront's loved ones have all died by this point, because she's been alive since World War I, while Homelander never truly had a family. When they kidnap his son, they find that family — a distorted, messed up version of family, sure, but a family nonetheless.
When Homelander finds her burnt to a bloody crisp and begins to cry, it's obvious how much he cares for her. Unfortunately for him, their relationship ended as it started: with laser beams.
There are some weird parent-child undertones to their relationship
Now, Homelander clearly has some mommy issues. It's hard not to feel a little bad for the guy — he grew up alone in a lab, with no mother to speak of. This is held up as the dividing factor between him and his good-natured son, Ryan (Cameron Crovetti), who has grown up with a mother. However, murderous tendencies from a lack of affection aside, Homelander's mommy issues manifest in his uncomfortable relationship with his boss, Madelyn Stillwell, that teeters between sexual and motherly as he gets a taste for her breast milk.
Homelander's relationship with Stormfront is less overtly motherly than with Madelyn, but it definitely still has those undertones. Of course, comic fans know that comic-Stormfront is genetically related to Homelander, in that the latter was made from the former's genes. That hasn't been confirmed nor denied in the TV series, but the theme of Stormfront creating Homelander is still there. She and her husband, Frederick Vought, created Compound V together and so she sees Homelander as a continuation of their legacy ... in a pseudo-parent way.
That's a little weird by itself, but add it to Homelander's established mom-kink and it becomes clear what the writers are doing here. In fact, some fans theorize that Stormfront is literally his mother.
Stormfront sees Homelander as her greatest achievement
The basis for Stormfront and Homelander's relationship is rooted deep in Stormfront's origins. She was an active member of the Nazi party and married to Frederick Vought, who created Compound V to make a superpowered army. She got the first successful dose and became the very first of what they envisioned together. However, the Nazis lost the war, and Compound V went to the U.S., so they didn't get to fulfill their wish.
In Homelander, she sees hope for Aryan dominance — he's incredibly strong, nigh indestructible, and of course, blond-haired and blue-eyed. In a way, she and her husband created him and so he inspires feelings of pride in her. This is why she loves him so deeply, and all Homelander wants is to be loved, so it works out quite nicely for them. However, they do differ in motivations: Homelander cares about the fans' attention far more than she does and has less passion for her Nazi agenda. Maybe this would have become an issue between them, but now, Stormfront's fate is uncertain as she resembles Darth Vader on Mustafar.