The Boys/YMMV


 * Anvilicious: The whole "superpowers are bad" premise. This is Garth Ennis we're talking about.
 * Broken Aesop: The premise of the story is people with superpowers abusing them and criticizing superpowered beings, 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 predates this comic by deacades. 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.
 * Superheroes letting their power go to their heads, violently abusing it and needing to be reined in predates The Boys by at least a decade, a prime example being DC Comics Kingdom Come series (which is the Spiritual Antithesis of this series in several ways), to the point that the story also has a.
 * 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).
 * The concept of Homelander is very similar to the "evil Superman" idea, which is far from unique to The Boys, and even DC themselves have done numerous story arcs where Superman turns evil before and after The Boys was released (such as Superman: Red Son and the Injustice series).
 * 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.