The Boys is a hilariously fun and twisted masterpiece of modern TV. In a world that is mostly dominated by superhero movies where it’s the same thing over and over again – the hero has a problem, hero beats problem, hero saves the world, the Amazon Prime original series is a refreshing yet bizarre look at what could happen when superheroes aren't exactly what people might think they are, which is what makes the TV show so good. The ability to reach into the minds of these folks that seem almost godly and notice that some of them are just like civilians – regular people who want to do good. And some of the others are just plain evil.
In this world, we have almost an Avengers-like team called “The Seven,” a group of superheroes employed by Vought to “fight crime” when in reality, it’s all just one big business-model, and over the last three seasons, this team has changed a lot. From truly dastardly villains posing as heroes to genuine heroes, we have seen the best and worst in supes, and today, we’re going to rank them from good to evil - and everything else in-between.
And obviously, big spoilers for Season 3 and all other seasons of The Boys.
Starlight - Good - Quit The Seven
My personal favorite has always been Starlight, otherwise known as Annie. Does that make me basic? Probably. But I can’t help that she’s a genuinely good person that still has moral lines when it comes to being a superhero. Starlight comes to The Seven wanting to make a difference. Her goal in life was to be a superhero. The one that goes out and fights crime and does good, and doesn’t just do it for their own personal gain.
And when she sees how the inside of Vought works and how twisted it is, she’s understandably heartbroken and wants it to change, so much so that she teams up with The Boys to take Vought down from the inside out and expose their Compound-V situation, putting her own job and life in jeopardy.
This is extended even further into Season 3, when she straight-up quits The Seven because she’s so sick the lies, and even called out Homelander, and told the truth about Soldier Boy to the public - which could have ended with her losing her life, all because she cares about the greater good.
There’s no question about Starlight. She’s a good person. She does have her moments of violence, but any time that’s happened it’s always been to protect people, not for harm or for worse. She tries her hardest to portray herself as sort of the opposite of what Vought is - which is confirmed even more when she quits The Seven and joins The Boys for real during the Season 3 ending so it’s safe to say that Starlight is the hero the public deserves.
Queen Maeve - Good - Believed To Have Died But Is Actually Retired
There is probably not a single person in the world who doesn’t feel bad for Queen Maeve. At first, in Season 1, we as viewers can connect with her over her shared burnout of working at a company for so long, where all she wants is to save people and yet it feels like Vought is quite literally sucking the life out of her. In Season 2 and Season 3, this love for her only continues to grow, as she starts to rebel against Vought and Homelander, making us love her even more.
Is Queen Maeve a bit twisted sometimes, too? Yes. She did leave with Homelander when he sent that plane down (which we will talk about later) but at least she tried to save some of the people on it. She wanted to see what they could do but it was too late at that point. Both Season 2 and Season 3 sees her actively going against Vought and Homelander - going so far as to team up with Starlight, Supersonic and The Boys to see if they could take out Homelander. While it ended up with her having to sacrifice her powers in order to stop Soldier Boy, at least now, at the end of Season 3, she finally gets the break that she deserved.
Supersonic - Good - Deceased
Poor Supersonic, man. He really could have been such a great addition to The Seven, but Homelander got to him first.
In Season 3 of The Boys, Supersonic was picked as a replacement for Stormfront in The Seven, and honestly, he was a good guy. A former childhood love interest with Starlight, he was kind and handsome and cared about her cause in trying to stop Homelander, but when he revealed their plans to A-Train, he ended up getting killed by Homelander when A-Train snitched to the leader in order to get in his good graces again. Homelander uses it as a warning to Starlight about her plan to take him out, saying it would be Hughie next.
It’s such a shame, because I really did like Supersonic, but it just goes to show what happens when you trust the wrong people.
The Deep – It’s Complicated - Active
The Deep isn’t a great person, from the start. He sexually abused Starlight on her first day in The Seven, and has continuously displayed throughout the three seasons of the show that he’s a pushover when it comes to staying on the Seven and will do anything to kiss ass to Homelander. However, I do think there’s room for redemption, which is why I think he’s way more complicated than we give him credit for.
By the end of Season 2, he seems like a different man. Viewers get to see inside of his head a little bit, that he doesn’t love himself because of the gills on his body, so how can he learn to love someone else if he can’t love himself? He tries to clean up his act and his image so he can get back to The Seven. And by the time Season 3 comes around, he’s married, and it looks like his world is finally starting to turn around.
But, once he’s back in the Seven, he is a kiss-up to Homelander and will do his bidding no matter what - including killing a potential Vice President elect. That, paired with that, ah, his interest in beastiality in Season 3, makes it hard to see him as completely good - although he’s nowhere near as bad as he was in Season 1. There’s plenty of room to improve who he is but I don’t think we’ll get there for some time.
A-Train – It’s Complicated - Active
A-Train is one of those superheroes where you want them to be good so bad but they still end up making poor decisions one way or another. Not only was he basically running an underground Compound-V operation – which in itself is a bad thing – he’s not afraid to kill the people that he cares about to make sure it still works, such as Pop Claw, one of the biggest deaths so far of the show. He straight-up murdered his girlfriend because she told someone by sticking four needles filled with the substance into her arms, causing her to have an overdose. He’s also willing to cheat to win so he can continue to be the “fastest man alive” and puts Compound-V into his body so he can win a race between him and Shockwave.
Season 2 continues this path of bad decisions that A-Train has made, but in Season 3, we do start to see some semblance of good in him. After it’s revealed he can’t run any more due to the heart condition he has thanks to his usage with Compound-V, he starts to change direction with his superhero abilities, instead focusing in on the Black community and attempting to aid people against a supe that was overtly targeting Black Americans.
However, even when he shows signs of doing good, he backtracks with other dastardly deeds, like revealing Supersonic’s plan to Homelander in order to get in his good graces again, or killing Blue Hawk instead of letting the justice system take care of him. There’s potential for A-Train to be a good superhero, but so far, he's still sort of in the meh zone. We’ll see in Season 4.
Translucent – Meh (Good/Evil) - Deceased
Again, the viewers don’t know much about this man so it’s hard to put him in a category, but I’d say he’s just meh.
Lamplighter - Meh (Good/Evil) - Deceased
This was another case of “I’m not entirely sure” because we really don’t know that much about Lamplighter either. Before Season 1 even started, he wasn’t on The Seven because he was apparently demoted, but we find out more about his backstory in Season 2 when it is revealed he was instead employed as an orderly at Sage Grove Center in order to keep patients there in line.
But with Lamplighter, he was such an interesting character. He did a lot of horrible things - such as burning houses down, torturing patients, and even killed Grace Mallory’s grandchildren in a housefire. But more is revealed to his story later on through flashbacks and we see that he has a very compelling reason to be the way he is.
Even in Season 2, at first, it seems like he’s willing to go against Vought at the hearing, after we learn that he was blackmailed by the organization. It looks like he wants to make amends for the horrors he has caused. But instead, when he is in Vought tower, he kills himself by igniting his skin as he burns alive, revealing that all he wanted was to make sure that he ended his life in front of his statue there - which they removed.
Black Noir – Evil-Ish - Deceased
This was another one I had trouble with but after some thinking, Black Noir is certainly evil-ish.
Black Noir is one of those supes that, at first, seems to blindly follow orders, and viewers see that in a couple of spots. When the Female is on the loose, Black Noir is sent out to try and find her and kill her, and with how he does it so viciously, he does not waste any time in making sure his victims feel pain. When he was sent off to kill The Boys after Vought found out what they were doing, he was pretty much ready to end their lives in the most painful way possible. It if wasn’t for Queen Maeve sticking an Almond Joy in his face (because he has a nut allergy), they would all be dead.
But in Season 3 of The Boys, we get a little more backstory on who Black Noir is as a character, showing what happened to his face and why we never see it, his time with Soldier Boy, and how he actually sees animated creatures in his mind that are almost there as a comfort after the trauma he has been through. That doesn’t make what he has done right, whatsoever, but he’s certainly a more complex character than we thought before. It’s a shame what happens to him with Homelander after it’s revealed that Noir knew Soldier Boy was Homelander’s biological father, but at least we got to know a little bit more before his demise.
Stormfront – Evil - Deceased
I really don't need to explain why she’s evil. Stormfront is a literal Nazi who wants to take over the world and eliminate anyone who’s not a supe, and basically have a race of superheroes because she feels that they are better than anyone. She is willing to kill whoever she must to get that goal and will risk everything to achieve what she wants. She showed that when she practically tore an apartment building down and killed multiple people inside just to murder the Female’s brother.
Stormfront was actually the first recipient of Compound-V back in the 1940s from her husband (who was the creator of Vought). Not only that, but I’m quite positive she was okay with killing children as well, despite her attempting to be like a ‘mother’ to Homelander’s son. She’s pure evil incarnate. And to be honest, I am perfectly okay with the fact that she was burnt to a crisp at the end of Season 2 and bit the dust in Season 3 after literally biting down on her own tongue to bleed out. She was horrible.
Homelander - Evil - Active
Is Homelander eviler than Stormfront? Yes. So much yes. And for one reason only - he’s had more time to show just how evil he is, and has done so many more horrible things. He is compliant in a relationship with a Nazi because he agrees with her. He wants a race of supers as well. He hates the public. He only wants to use Vought for his own gain. He has serious issues (we’re not going to talk about that relationship with the former VP of Vought) and is a dangerous man where if someone steps in his way, he will not hesitate to kill you within seconds with his eyes, or his hands, or any part of his body.
Not only that but again – the plane, literally one of the worst things he has ever done. He willingly let all those innocent passengers die because he knew it would be pointless but didn’t even try to save them as Queen Maeve did. He flew up into the air and killed a mayor and his son because they didn’t agree with the VP of Vought. He regularly threatens his own teammates that if they undermined him, they’d be dead next - just like Supersonic in Season 3. I mean, he literally blew up the head of someone who heckled his son at a rally at the end of Season 3, and the people around him cheered. Who is going to stop his man?
It’s a shame, but I don’t think Homelander is going to die for some time, and now with his strange relationship with his son, Ryan, who knows what he’s going to do next. Butcher better get on that.
While there are surely other superheroes out there that are just as twisted, these are the ones that matter the most – and will continue to make these same (or maybe different) decisions in The Boys Season 4 whenever it comes out. Who do you think is the most evil?
