'The Boys' & 'Daredevil' Didn't Want To Mimic Reality, It Just Happened

If you’ve been watching Daredevil: Born Again Season 2, it’s been very hard to ignore the real world parallel of Mayor Fisk’s Anti-Vigilante Task Force. This paramilitary offshoot of the NYPD essentially operates as Kingpin’s personal goon squad with zero oversight and the freedom to round up citizens at will — in the latest episodes, often immigrants — and imprison them in a black site without legal representation. Sound way too freaking familiar?

Well, that parallel was not lost on Daredevil showrunner Dario Scardapane, who wrote the new season before the 2024 election. All he did was use history to envision how a supervillain would act if they gained political power, and surprise, the show was right on the money.

Via The Wrap:

“The thing that’s crazy about that is that, you know, those [AVTF] costumes were designed 10 years ago in the comics, the costumes that we did last season, the raids that we wrote a year and a half ago,” he said. “And then it’s like, you go from editing and look at the news, and the imagery was almost exact. We couldn’t have planned it. So, it was chilling.”

“And I think it’s a testimony how — we wrote, what I would say, is the historical kind of rise of an autocrat,” he continued. “The playbook is always the same, you know? Form a militia, target a marginalized community, take over the means of media, shake down the rich to fund your plots. And that’s a history that’s gone on with, whether it’s Franco, or Pinochet, or Nero. And we told that story, and then now, you know, history is doomed to repeat itself. Our text string is pretty, Yikes!”

As its fifth and final season premieres this week, The Boys finds itself running headfirst into the same exact wall. Like Daredevil, this current season was written before the election, which left the creative team watching in horror as real life mimicked Homelander. In this case, to the letter.

Via Deadline:

The Prime Video series creator and showrunner revealed that the supervillain has “the craziest line” the writers could imagine in episode 7, which has “already happened” in real life, despite Season 5 being written before the 2024 presidential election.

“I’m totally bummed out to say we wrote it before the election,” he told TV Guide. “It sounds super naive now, but I swear the plan was, ‘Let’s write a 1984 version of what creeping authoritarianism looks like in America,’ and maybe everyone will be like, ‘Whew, we really dodged a bullet.’ But instead, we got hit with the bullet.”

I know what you’re thinking: Mike, isn’t it cringe to compare Donald Trump to comic book villains? Maybe watch something else besides cape sh*t.

If I may: This morning, Trump literally said these words in an official capacity: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”

I do not enjoy the president of the United States writing posts that would make even Sephiroth go "Whoa buddy, don't you think this is a bit much."

— Achilles (@achilleslaststand.bsky.social) April 7, 2026 at 9:04 AM