The Boys creator has a snarky comeback to complaints season five sidelined the main heroes

A recurring complaint about season five of The Boys is that we’ve barely seen any of the titular boys. Many viewers have whined that the OG characters such as Hughie and Starlight don’t seem to have as much screen time as newer characters, such as Soldier Boy or Firecracker. Perhaps the show should be renamed The Vought Employees instead? Eric Kripke, the creator of The Boys, has actually responded to this complaint… and he sounded pretty salty.

According to Eric Kripke, it wasn’t a waste for The Boys season five to spend so much time away from the core Boys. He told TV Guide: “At no point during the writing of [season five] was I like, ‘Oh yeah, we’re making filler episodes. So, who cares?’ We all thought at the time, ‘We’re really getting these important character details.’

“We have something like 14 characters, maybe 15. And I owe it to all of them – in that television is the character business – I owe it to all of them to flesh them out and humanise them and their stories.”

Eric Kripke argued that all the different side characters’ plots in episodes four and five had a purpose. He continued: “It was important, for example, to really wrap out where Firecracker was. It was important to evolve Soldier Boy and Homelander’s relationship and to hear how hopeless M.M. feels in episode four. It was important to see that The Boys are fracturing between people who are gathering around Butcher, and people who are gathering around Hughie.”

He does not sound impressed with viewers who whined that not much had happened during the middle of season five. He reckons we got “giant character movement”, just “not plot”. “You’re like, ‘Nothing happened!’ And I’m like, ‘Nothing happened, what?’

“The craziest, biggest moves happened. It just wasn’t someone shooting someone else and going, pew, pew, pew. And if that’s what you want, you’re just watching the wrong show.”

I do appreciate that there is much more to The Boys than superheroes blasting each other with colourful light. But it would be nice if Hughie got something to do once in a while?

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Featured image credit: Prime Video.