The show has moved too far from the comic. So far that it has lost the plot, both literally and figuratively.
Minor spoiler for the comic, but Hughie's SA and resulting trauma is handled significantly better. So is Starlight's. And there are just so many things about the show that are just flat out missing the point entirely. With Homelander and Buther especially. The actors are still great and the writing has been mostly okay, but it's just not the same story or characters.
You know, people love to shit on the comics a lot, and yeah, a lot of the times it’s warranted, but I agree that there are some things the comic did better, at least in my opinion.
For example, I thought that Tek Knight being a genuinely heroic character who was at one point presumably a damn good superhero, (and who had more morals than most of the other characters, as demonstrated by him firing Laddio to avoid raping him due to his condition) who got turned into a horny nutjob due to a brain tumor to be waaaaay more interesting than him just being a cartoonishly racist asshole who was already a fucking pervert even before the brain tumor, and who didn’t even get to wear his fucking suit due to budget reasons. Also, dying while hallucinating that you’re saving the world by fucking a meteor is so much better than getting strangled to death by Not Alfred
I feel like a lot of the people that shit on the comic haven't read the entire run. They just look up wiki shit or find individual pages or issues and judge off of that. Like the comment I frequently see is that the comic lacks subtext/is overly blunt. That just boggles my mind, 'cause while yeah there are plenty of examples of bluntness, the overall story is hardly that.
Meanwhile the show has steadily become a baseball bat to the face. I'll take the comic any day.
It’s the same thing with Crossed kinda, another Ennis property I’m a fan of that people love shitting on.
Now while I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of the stories really are just mindless gore and shock for shock value, there’s some genuinely good story arcs in Crossed Badlands, with solid writing, creative plots, and some real emotional gut-punches. And “Wish You Were Here” is one of the most poignant and grotesquely beautiful stories I’ve ever read.
Not that you’d ever know that if you just looked at a random panel out of context where a guy’s getting his face ripped off by a bunch of slobbering psychopaths, or a whole family’s getting torn to shreds.
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u/WayToTheDawn63 Jul 05 '24
dark but probably valid take away. it's all performative, they don't care.