The Boys' New Character Firecracker Was Inspired By One Of The Worst American Politicians
This post contains spoilers for "The Boys" season 4.
In news that shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's endured the past decade of increasingly ridiculous political horrors, it turns out that "The Boys" newcomer Firecracker (Valorie Curry) is inspired by a real American politician. In a recent interview with Variety, series showrunner Eric Kripke spoke about where the idea for the born-again Christian Supe formerly known as Sparkler came from, and she's based on exactly who you'd expect.
"Firecracker came from like, 'Hey, isn't Marjorie Taylor Greene scary?'" Kripke explained, noting that the character was born from a "type of personality" that's been prevalent since Donald Trump's 2016 election. Homelander (Antony Starr), the show's endlessly evil, increasingly powerful villain, famously shares plenty of qualities with the former U.S. president; last season, he even killed someone in a crowd in broad daylight and got away with it, something Trump himself hypothesized about back in 2016.
Eric Kripke based the new villain on 'Trump spawn'
"You had Trump, but now you have these Trump spawn that are trying to outdo each other for how outrageous and sexualized and gun-toting and slavishly obedient they can be," Kripke says. Although he doesn't name names aside from Greene, other post-Trump politicians in this vein include South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, who recently admitted to killing her own dog, and far-right Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert, who used to own Shooters' Grill, a restaurant that encouraged its staff to carry guns. It's easy to see why Greene would inspire Firecracker, though, as the Georgia representative's horrifying, hateful extremism remains in a league of its own.
Of course, all of these womens' policies and ideology are far scarier than any bizarre details about their history, but "The Boys" does love to dig into the peculiarities of its villains, as it did in a recent episode that saw Firecracker host a six-hour TV show called TruthBomb that was designed in part to take down her former child pageant rival, Starlight (Erin Moriarty). Over the course of the telethon, Firecracker sings a duet with The Deep (Chace Crawford), admits to sleeping with a teenager (a mistake she says inspired her return to religion), and platforms a pastor who uses numerology to theorize that her enemies are Satanic.
The Boys' political commentary is nightmarishly accurate
The sheer stupidity of the misinformation on display feels painfully accurate to today's political landscape, right down to Firecracker's gleeful, empty taunt of Starlight when she finally breaks and shows up to beat the woman to a pulp. "So you finally came to de-" the conspiracy theorist begins to say, but the word "debate" is cut off when Starlight, incensed by the show's mudslinging and abortion exposé, punches her. Elsewhere in his interview with Variety, Kripke noted that "The Boys" doesn't exactly veil its satire under layers of ambiguity. "The show's not subtle. It wears its politics on its sleeve," he told the outlet. "And it's funny to rip on the madness on the right, and we get some shots in on the left of all the performative wokeness and everything."
The official social media channels for the show are in on the overt, wince-inducingly accurate political parody too: the official video description for a clip of Firecracker and The Deep's duet takes on the voice of Vought International, the mega-corporation that's been capitalizing on Homelander's alt-right power trip and the evangelical Christian angle of Supes like Firecracker. "God Himself smiled down from heaven as they sang, and we bet He'll be streaming on Voughtify too!" the video's description jokes. Ultimately, Kripke says that the character was created from the idea that a figure like Trump often turns out to be just the tip of the political iceberg. "Just that idea — it wouldn't just start and end with Homelander, he would start to create these spores that would grow into these other characters," Kripke said, "and she's a version of that." This is why "The Boys" remains the most nightmarishly accurate depiction of superheroes on TV.