By Alison Lanier | TV | October 30, 2023 |
By Alison Lanier | TV | October 30, 2023 |
Warning: This article discusses self-harm and disordered eating.
Spoilers for Gen V and The Boys ahead!
Gen V is a spinoff that works; with its finale episode of season one incoming this coming Friday, I’ve been thinking more about what the show is actually doing differently than its flagship, The Boys. Gen V is about a generation of young “supes” who know that their powers are the result of a drug that their parents injected into them as babies. It’s a different starting point story-wise, but it’s also a chance for the world of The Boys to explore some more nuances and implications outside of its central super-cast.
And Gen V is also doing something new with its younger generation of supes: it’s looking at the gendered implication of powers. Two of the female leads, Emma (Lizzie Broadway) and Marie (Jaz Sinclair), have powers that specifically rely on what to all appearances read as an eating disorder and self-harm respectively. Emma can change her size Ant-Man style, shrinking by vomiting and growing by overeating. The more she purges, the smaller she gets, and vice versa. Marie can control blood, in the manner of Avatar blood bending, using blood as whips or as projectile weapons. And for the bulk of the season, it’s her own blood she uses, which necessitates her slicing her palms over and over again with a pocketknife.
There’s some clear gendered commentary, as the powers that make these women remarkable in the context of their superhero careers are also powers that demand repeated, ritualized harm to their bodies.
Now, it does tend to touch a nerve with me when shows try to frame things like eating disorders as some kind of abstracted symbol of social oppression. As someone in recovery from an eating disorder that affected me severely from adolescence through college, I get my hackles up around storytelling that relies on the dramatic portrayal of young girls’ painful relationship to food and their bodies. Because so often, it’s so vastly oversimplified for “gritty social issue” points. That’s just me and my kneejerk reaction. Depictions of mental illness are different for everybody, like mental illness itself.
That said, Gen V’s explicit satire of that “gritty social issue” trope felt right to me. Early in the season, Emma opens up to an inexplicably friendly popular girl, in confidence, about how her powers work, which was nobody knew except Emma and her mother. The next day, popular girl has broadcast that secret on her vlog, with the faux rah-rah feminist message of Isn’t it just awful how the patriarchy forces control and compliance over women’s bodies? It’s blatantly cringy and performative virtue signaling, packaged for views, and the harm it does is immediate.
With that trope out of the way, the show does what it actually means to do. Marie confronts Emma, after Emma’s “outed” as having an eating disorder. Marie insists that Emma has a problem; Emma goes through defensive semi-truths (I have it under control), but then asks how what she does is any different than Marie, who has never been questioned about the psychology of her abilities. Marie says, That’s different, it’s my powers. And Emma says, Thank you. Tension hangs in the air between them. There seems to be nothing else to say. Both are trapped inside a role—and what that role expects of them—that they’ve adapted to from necessity.
And both tip toward serious self-destruction in private moments, also through that ritualized harm. Emma shrinks down so small she can barely move, and Marie draws more and more blood from her body with no target in sight. Emma refuses to allow people to refer to her powers as an eating disorder. When her mother is trying to sell a reality TV show about Emma “overcoming” her disorder, Emma insists that it isn’t a disorder, and that there are other stories about her to be told. She wants to be like Queen Maeve, she says; but it’s immediately, painfully apparent how hopeless it is to expect anyone to listen. Marie is nearly discarded from the university out of the gate, in part because her powers are too creepy and unsettling to market.
This is a show about superheroes. It’s set at a university for training superheroes to be profitable professionals, inside the corporate PR machine investing in them. And what makes these women supes? Their willingness to do themselves harm. Both women rely on ritualized harm to their bodies for their potential careers, for their social standing, for their general precarious usefulness to the dangerous people around them. It makes them who they are; it’s demanded of them. Both internally and externally, all this pain feels too inherent to fight.
It’s very messy. It’s difficult, and it’s unresolved, and it feels hard to talk about even within the show. And that’s what makes what Gen V does so interesting and more successful than most for me. These issues are the lives of the young women in a sense, not something to be excised by therapy. That pernicious hold on a deep and intensive level feels more real to me somehow in terms of storytelling than a literal portrayal. It feels like a moment where science fiction comes into its element—to show an experience in a way that feels truer than true.
There’s a lot more Gen V is trying to do in terms of thinking about the intersection of powers and gender, most explicitly through the character of Jordan Li (London Thor/Derek Luh), a bigender student who can physically, instantaneously switch from a feminine to a masculine body. But that’s another story, and also not my experience to speak about.
Gen V surprised me for being willing to go where it goes, and not only in terms of gore (The Boys set a high bar to meet on the volume of blood and guts on screen). There’s a genuinely effective and interesting edge to how the show approaches its most difficult themes, and I have to say I’m pleasantly surprised.
Gen V is streaming on Prime.