The Boys and One Piece

**SPOILERS AHEAD FOR:** * **Season 5 Episode 1** * **One Piece (up to Drum Island)** **~~(out of context Wano too)~~** Hey everyone! So I was watching the first two episodes of the 5th season of The Boys, and after finishing them there was a moment in the first episode that I just couldn’t stop thinking about. A-Train, a man who has spent his whole life running away from his problems, has nowhere to run anymore. He’s lying on the ground, his mouth filled with his own blood after accidentally running through multiple trees trying to escape Homelander. At this point his fate is sealed. As Homelander starts to walk towards him, he seemingly expects a plea. This man, having immense power both physically politically, expects everyone that he’s about to kill (if they haven’t died already) to beg and argue for their lives. However, as he walks towards A-Train, he doesn’t even see fear. Instead, he hears something. A laugh. Not a nervous one, nor one of fear or anxiety, but a genuine laugh. As Homelander picks him up by the neck, A-Train calmly tells Homelander that he is an empty suit, a man who has nothing but the powers bestowed upon him from birth. Homelander looks at him for a second, then snaps his neck. It doesn’t matter. A-Train dies laughing. Let’s back up a moment. Earlier in the episode, immediately after a scene of a conversation between A-Train and his brother Nathan in France, the The Boys’ three supe members argue about the logistics of Butcher’s plan to jailbreak Hughie, MM, and Frenchie from a Vought “Freedom Camp”. Annie had been told by A-Train that he didn’t want to get involved, and Butcher consequently scolds her about A-Train being her phone-a-friend. The two eventually agree that the goal of killing Homelander is most important, and thus Annie being their new escape vehicle means that she’ll prioritize saving Frenchie first. When Kimiko asks about Hughie and MM, Annie responds by saying she’ll go for them after. The scene then cuts to a closeup of Butcher’s face. At this moment, he realizes that Annie is starting to do the math the same way he does, and he approves. Of course, people are worth more than others, when the mission is on the line. There’s another small but key detail worth mentioning, however. In the background of this scene is a quaint little symbol, easily missed. (S5E1, 0:41:25) A skull and crossbones wearing a straw hat. In the One Piece series, Gol D. Roger earned the title King of the Pirates by being the only pirate to circumnavigate the entire planet, becoming the freest man in the world. Captured and brought to his hometown of Loguetown for public execution, he kneels on the platform as someone calls out asking where his treasure lies. His fortune is theirs for the taking, he says, he left it at the end of the world in One Piece. The crowd scatters. And with the swords at his neck being the only sure thing left in his life, he laughs. The moment that his death is inevitable, he laughs. Years later, our protagonist Monkey D. Luffy is captured by an enemy at Loguetown and is dragged to that same execution platform. Knowing there's nothing he can do to escape, he exclaims "I'm going to be the King of the Pirates". His captor freezes. He was there the day Roger died, on this very platform. The laugh is identical. Luffy escapes. But this laugh doesn't go unnoticed, lest of all by us. One Piece is telling us something deliberate here. The laugh is not just a quirk of Roger's personality. It's a philosophy. It belongs to a person who knows they're so free that no external circumstances can take their freedom away from them. Not chains, nor blades at the neck, nor certain death, can reach the part of him that matters. The laugh is only half of the picture, though. As the series goes on, Luffy and his crew sail from island to island, and keep running into the same picture: people living under the boot of leadership that has decided that power has dictated their right to deprive their citizens of their freedom. And Luffy, every single time, does something about it. Not because it was his plan, not because he carefully weighed the pros and cons of intervention, but because his friends are in danger. Because people are suffering, and the idea of not helping is something that his mind is incapable of entertaining. He does it out of the love he has, both for people and for the freedom they so deserve. And with each new island they sail away from, the people he's liberated get to watch the symbol of their newfound freedom, the Straw Hat Pirates' Jolly Roger. A skull and crossbones wearing a straw hat. Which brings us back to that wall. The Butcher/Annie/Kimiko scene where Annie basically agrees to leave Hughie and MM behind. I don’t think the writers put the symbol there by coincidence. To put the flag of the most freedom-obsessed story in manga in the background of a scene about deciding who’s expendable or not. To me, it’s the scene holding up a mirror and asking whether or not the people trying to save the world have what it takes. Look at Butcher and Annie in this scene. Butcher has spent the last two seasons trying to out-monster the monster, doing the best he can to build himself into something just as hard and ruthless to do what he thinks is needed to kill Homelander. Annie, as of this episode, is slowly following him down that path. The guilt of all of the Starlighter camps being raided, the people within only doing so because of the things she’s said, has lead her to believing that her life is nothing more than something that can be used to take down Homelander. In this way, the look Butcher gives is one of someone passing along a disease.  The issue is that we’re fighting out of hatred. Hatred makes you dependent on the enemy. The impetus to fight comes externally. Butcher, while hating Homelander, has devoted his entire life towards him. Homelander is the center of everything in his world, his focus so narrow that he can think of nothing else but his defeat. And that’s what Homelander needs. Devotion. Homelander’s entire existence is the people around him being afraid of him. The heartbeats of everyone getting faster and faster the closer he is. It’s humiliating. He yearns for everyone’s adoration of him, but is starved of it. But despite it all, he has one devotee that he knows will do anything. Butcher. No one else is as devoted to Homelander as Butcher is. To Homelander, Butcher is like if you gave a steak dinner to Tantalus. A-Train showed us an alternative vision. He didn’t decide to go in and save The Boys because he hates Homelander. He saved them because they were people, and people are worth saving. He swerved around the woman costing him speed, and ultimately his life, because it was a life that deserved living. And thus in his last moments, he became genuinely free. Free enough that doing the right thing was no longer a decision he needed to make. It was just something he did. And when Homelander stood over him, he found a man who was in a place he could never think of reaching. A man who doesn’t care about the things you take away from him, because there is something within him that he knows can never be taken away. A-Train laughed because Homelander is a husk within a supersuit. A vessel that yearns for adoration, for love from the people beneath him, from external validation. To me this is the yin and yang of this season. This philosophy is what I think is necessary for the victory of The Boys in this upcoming season. To fight fire with fire is an impossible task, no matter how much hatred is within our hearts for Homelander. Instead, we must quell the hatred, and instead turn it into love for the people around us. For the people of whom we are liberating. It’s for our hearts to beat with the drums of liberation, and fight not for ourselves but for others. And thus we need to become like Luffy, or Roger, or A-Train. The Jolly Roger is on the wall because the show knows exactly what it wants to say. The Boys will only be able to strip Homelander of everything he is once they understand what they are actually fighting for. Not the destruction of one man. But rather to free the world.