The ultra-violent superhero satire The Boys is known for its shocking visuals, blood-soaked violence, and a burning antipathy towards anything in a cape, but in-between the dark critiques of Marvel and DC's crime-fighters, there's a surprising emotional core that has a lot to say about love, grief, and masculinity. Each of the heroes of The Boys has suffered a terrible loss, channeling their experiences into keeping Supes under control, and foiling the ambitions of the Homelander and Vought-America. It's therefore not that surprising to learn that each member of Billy Butcher's team can be read as expressing a different aspect of the Five Stages of Grief.
The Five Stages of Grief - aka the Kübler-Ross model - is a theoretical description of distinct emotional states people experience while processing grief. Essentially an example of pop psychology without much empirical , the Five Stage of Grief have still become enmeshed in popular culture, and it's undeniable that they're the chief emotions anyone facing bereavement (including their own death) likely experiences: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. The Five Stages of Grief often appear in pop culture because of how they create a useful framework to discuss an incredibly complex and varied topic - the topic that is at the core of The Boys.
The Boys Is About Reacting to Loss
While Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson's comic series is often callous and certainly R-rated in its treatment of superhumans, it's also thoughtful about the nature of grief. Each member of The Boys is motivated to police superhumans (and often kill them) because of a moment of profound loss, though often in different ways. Hughie and Butcher both lost partners to Supe violence, Mother's Milk blames Vought-America - the company behind Supes - for the deaths of his brother and father, while the Female and the Frenchman are compelled to commit violence because of foundational trauma, and are roped into Butcher's war on Supes as useful monsters.
Throughout The Boys, Butcher and Hughie's agendas define the story. As Hughie tries to grasp the true nature of the world that killed his girlfriend Robin, Butcher prepares to burn it down in revenge for the death of his wife Becky. In the end, Butcher comes within a hair's breadth of genocide, stopped only by his love for Hughie, who he sets up to act as his conscience, deliberately replacing the deceased brother who used to keep him under control, while Hughie falls in love again and finds happiness with Annie January, aka Starlight.
Hughie and Butcher also react to death on an issue-by-issue basis, as they kill Supes as part of keeping them in line - when Hughie accidentally kills the Blarney Cock in a fight, he's horrified, and even adopts the Supe's hamster in an act of contrition. Meanwhile, after Butcher kills dozens of Supes who are working with the Russian mob, he returns to the team humming Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy.' In another mirror, Hughie and Butcher are both recruited to the Boys because of their immediate reactions to grief - Butcher attacks the corporate enforcer who threatens him, while Hughie doesn't think to ask for any money from Vought-America, catching their respective superiors' attention. But while The Boys deals with death, grief, and extreme reactions to loss, do the team really represent the Five Stages of Grief?
The Female and the Frenchman - Anger and Depression
The most obvious characters who embody specific emotions - and the least fleshed-out of Butcher's team - are the Female and the Frenchman, aka Frenchie. Frenchie is explicitly introduced as suffering severe depression, which he labels "my hateful, all-consuming ennui", and he vacillates between states of abject misery and startling violence. While his origin in issue 37 is meant to be read as a fantasy - indeed, the suggestion is that Frenchie's not actually French - it includes details of a lost love and the death of his parents, which he also references at other moments, suggesting they're partly true. Frenchie is also presented as suffering from extreme PTSD from his time in the French Foreign Legion - another theme of The Boys, and Ennis' work in general.
Meanwhile, the Female spends the series addicted to inflicting terrible violence, literally tearing the faces off her victims. When not with the Boys, the Female works as a mob assassin for anyone who will hire her, with Frenchie articulating that she has an urge to hurt people that she does her best to control. Speaking for her to Hughie, he says, "it is a savage, fierce thing. There is but one way I know to quiet it." Throughout the series, he tries to offer her other options and avenues of distraction, but their story ends with him unsure if he truly helped. At least in the case of these two characters, The Boys is explicit that their lives are defined by anger and depression.
Mother's Milk - Bargaining
Mother's Milk is the true intelligence agent of the Boys, gathering vast amounts of secret info on Vought-America and various Supes. In The Boys #35-36, Hughie learns that MM gets his fastidious nature from his father - after MM's family were mutated by Compound V, his father studied law in order to take Vought-America to court. After years of legal battling, he won, only for MM to overhear two executives shrugging off the loss. Shortly after, MM's brother's powers killed him, and his father ed away during an exhausting second legal attempt against Vought. MM therefore tries to hit the company where it actually hurts, while also raising his daughter Janine, who ages at an accelerated rate because of the Compound V in her system. So where does bargaining come in?
In the Kübler-Ross model, 'bargaining' is the most versatile stage, and describes any behavior which a person unreasonably believes they can 'trade' for a better outcome. In MM's case, constant, exhaustive research can be read as his bargaining behavior. MM's life is essentially in stasis - he wants to be a present father, but is unable to connect with his daughter, who ends the comic traumatized and robbed of her family because of Butcher's plans. In a telling detail, MM is killed by Butcher in The Boys #68 because he unexpectedly returns to the group's base to do further research rather than going to reconnect with his daughter. MM appears to believe that he can recontextualize his father's death by continuing the fight against Vought, but ultimately he doesn't live to see them brought low, and his obsession with finding out more about his enemies takes him away from his family.
Hughie and Butcher - Denial and Acceptance
Butcher's acceptance of death is a constant throughout The Boys. After he manages to kill Black Noir and oversee the death of Homelander, he its he never expected to survive getting his revenge. Left with no single target left to chase, Butcher plans to set off a chemical weapon that will kill everyone with any trace of Compound V in their system - every Supe in the world, the Boys, an unknown number of civilians, and of course himself. Indeed, Butcher is so accepting of death, Hughie hypothesizes he can will it into existence - after Butcher kills the evil Supe Malchemical in The Boys #43, Hughie says, "It was like he made up his mind in that one second: this guy's gettin' it. An' after that it was a foregone conclusion. Like killin' him was an act of will." Even when Butcher is paralyzed in his final confrontation with Hughie, it's his decision to push Hughie into killing him, dying with the final words, "Nice one, mate."
Meanwhile, Hughie is characterized by his complete unwillingness to accept the world of The Boys - something Butcher tries to move him past by forcing him through the other stages of grief, for example revealing his girlfriend's hip of the Seven to induce depression, and capturing A-Train to push Hughie into a rage-fueled act of murder. In The Boys #71, Butcher its that Hughie's denial of the cutthroat world of killing Supes is unassailable, saying, "none of it made a blind bit o' difference. You stayed yourself no matter what I done." However, in the final issue, Hughie does overcome his denial of the darker aspects of life, even threatening CIA Kessler and Vought-America's James Stillwell - wheeling and dealing to curtail the excesses of the corrupt without fully embracing Butcher's evil. As the story's main character, Hughie actually gets to progress through the stages, achieving acceptance by overcoming his naïveté and finding new love.
The Boys Has One Clear Message About Grief
Fans will never know if the Five Stages of Grief directly inspired Ennis and Robertson's depictions of the Boys, and ultimately it doesn't matter - The Boys is about people dealing with grief in wildly unhealthy ways, and so reflects the same truths about how people try to process these emotions, coming to many of the same conclusions as the Kübler-Ross model. In particular, The Boys is about the relationship between masculinity and healthy grief - in issue 71, Butcher lays out the philosophy from which the series takes its name - "[Becky] said men without women, it wasn't a good idea. An' she was right. 'Cos all that macho **** - that gunfighter, Dirty Harry ********, it looks tasty, but in the end it's ******* self-defeatin'. ... Men are only so much use, Hughie. Men are boys."
While presented in a sexist way, Butcher lays out the problem with the Boys as a group: none of them have the emotional skills to work through what they're feeling, leaving them trapped in behavior patterns that are both harmful and unsustainable. Denial, anger, bargaining, and depression characterize the group because they're unwilling or unable to progress past them to acceptance - characterized by Ennis as a feminine influence - to move onto a more sustainable frame of mind. Ultimately, because The Boys is Hughie's story, he's the one who actually manages to grow, while the rest of the team act as dark examples of the alternative.
