The Boys/YMMV


 * Anvilicious: Superpowers = bad. This is Garth Ennis we're talking about.
 * Broken Aesop: The premise of the story is people with superpowers abusing them, yet several members of the titular Cape Busters squad have superpowers themselves such as Mother's Milk.
 * Complete Monster: Homelander.  Candidates for either time where when he   And that's before it's revealed he was a ruthless rapist, baby & heart eater and more.  The man is basically Captain Hero Played for Drama..
 * Malchemical runs off this slippery slope at full speed, with absolutely zero remorse, and is stopped just before he gets to rape little girls. It's a running theme that people with sufficient superpowers to get away with it will end up becoming as close to this trope as makes no difference.
 * Base Breaking Character: Billy Butcher is either a Deconstructed Trope of the vigilante man character, or the same kind of Escapist Character the comic rails against (with a side of Author Avatar and Creator's Pet to boot).
 * Crossing the Line Twice: Almost every issue.
 * Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy: One of Garth's darkest works, and that's saying something. It becomes hard to care for the characters when every character who's not Hughie or Annie is a jerk at best (and even they have their moments) or a homocidal sociopath at worst.  And then several characters  Jump off the Slippery Slope.
 * Fridge Horror: When Tek-Knight sent Laddio away to visit all the other superteams in a effort to keep himself from involuntarily raping the boy, he explicitly said to even visit the G-Men and all their spin-off teams. We never see Laddio again after that.
 * High Octane Nightmare Fuel: Issue 63: Homelander's face after he
 * Moral Event Horizon:
 * crossed this in the Believe arc, issue 46, The Muller family had just won the BELIEVE meeting prizes, a new shining car and a dinner with, the hero was kind enough to take the car and family flying to their reserved tables; that was what the family thought. What ended up happening was the "Superhero" took the Mullers for their
 * Everything Black Noir did that.
 * Billy himself when he.
 * Narm: Frequently played straight in-universe.
 * Older Than They Think
 * The idea of people with superpowers being Villains with good publicity has been done for decades before this comic. Prime examples from popular works include Doctor Doom and Magneto.
 * The idea of Cape Busters sanctioned by the authorities fighting supers who abuse their powers has been done numerous times before, such as Stormwatch and Marshal Law.
 * An amusing example involving a super whose a combination of Superman and Captain America, has a cape based on the US flag, golden eagle-themed armor and a patriotism-themed name. But it's not Homelander of the 2000's.  It's Major Glory of the 1990's (though Major Glory's clearly heroic while Homelander's a villain).
 * Squick
 * Wangst: Played with; many's the time that Wee Hughie's basically been told to shut the fuck up, stop moaning about things and just get over it by the other characters, and he does display a tendency to mope about and wallow in self-pity over the problems in his life. Then again, a lot of the people who are telling him this are themselves homicidal borderline-sociopaths who find it unsettlingly easy to shrug off various atrocities, so they probably aren't the best examples to follow in terms of getting in touch with your emotions.
 * Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: In Butcher's case, Played With. He wasn't exactly a nice guy early in his life. But he gradually became a better person when he met his wife, Becky. Then she got raped by Homelander . And then she died when the child crawled out of her womb. He's implied to have Death Seeker tendencies, and in issue 65
 * Ironically enough, as of issue 65,  Throughout the series, we see him cross the Moral Event Horizon multiple times.
 * Ironically enough, as of issue 65,  Throughout the series, we see him cross the Moral Event Horizon multiple times.