What Writers Can Learn from The Boys Finale
By: Ginger on June 12, 2026
The ending of a long-running series is often where storytelling ambitions collide with audience expectations. Readers and viewers want satisfying payoffs, beloved characters to receive meaningful conclusions, and years of investment to feel worthwhile. Achieving this with an original work is hard enough, but when adapting existing source material it becomes even more difficult, as was the case with Prime Video’s comic-book-turned-streaming-hit, The Boys. It was probably inevitable that the show’s finale would stir up controversy, but it also provides writers with a fascinating example of how theme, character arcs, and adaptation choices can shape the success or failure of an ending.
In this week’s blog, Ginger examines what The Boys got right, where it stumbled, and why some of its biggest departures from the original comic may have ultimately strengthened the story. By going through what changes were made and why, it becomes clear that strictly following an original work is not always the best creative choice in an adaptation, but there is still a delicate balance between honoring source material and serving the needs of the story. Whether you’re reworking existing material or simply trying to deliver a satisfying ending to a series of your own, the final episode of The Boys offers a valuable reminder that the most memorable endings are rarely the ones that give audiences exactly what they expect, but the ones that remain true to the story being told.
⚠️ Spoiler Warning!
This article contains major spoilers for The Boys, Seasons 1–5, and the comic book series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson.
Last week I brought up the question of self-censorship, asking whether or not authors these days felt pressured to write more prudishly. As an example, I pointed to how provocative content was handled by Prime’s streaming hit The Boys, arguing that the show seems to favor gore and visceral shock over nudity and sexuality, which perhaps indicated how we’d become more sensitive to those topics in 2026.
To further that claim, I’d also argue that when sexual content did appear in The Boys, it tended to be treated with noticeably more sensitivity toward female characters than male ones. For example, Starlight’s sexual assault at the hands of The Deep in Season 1 was treated as a defining trauma—a serious, character-shaping moment given genuine narrative weight. Compare that to the comics, where the same scene is far more cartoonishly grotesque and largely played for shock value. The show clearly made a considered choice there.
Yet when it came to Hughie’s victimization at the hands of Ashley and Tek Knight later in the show—situations that mirrored coerced sexual conduct in everything but framing—the series largely played those moments for uncomfortable comedy. The audience was invited to laugh, or at least to wince nervously rather than feel outraged. Whether that was a deliberate commentary or an unconscious double standard is a conversation worth having on its own.
But what it really illustrates, however, is something broader and more relevant for those of us who think critically about storytelling and adaptation. The Boys has always been in a complex negotiation with its source material, trying to find what works for a modern prestige television audience while retaining the anarchic, transgressive spirit of Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson’s original comics.
Most of those adaptations worked. Some worked brilliantly, although a few, as noted above, raised questions. But together, those creative choices make the series finale, which aired on May 20, 2026, an especially interesting text to examine.
The series finale of The Boys represents the ultimate test of whether the showrunners truly understood what their story was, and what it needed to be. And I think all of us who like to create characters and tell stories can learn something from the choices they made.
What the Finale Did Right
The series finale, titled Blood and Bone, delivered several of the moments that fans of both the show and the comic had been waiting years to see. Chief among them was the final showdown in the Oval Office, which had been heavily telegraphed since Homelander installed himself as America’s de facto ruler. The show had been building toward an image taken directly from the comics upon which the show was based—Homelander sitting at the Resolute Desk, master of all he surveyed—and it paid it off with full satirical force before tearing it apart.
The climactic fight brought together Butcher, Kimiko, and eventually Ryan, Homelander’s estranged son, in a confrontation that felt genuinely earned. Kimiko, supercharged with Solder Boy’s radiation-derived ability that could strip supes of their powers, faced her own internal battle before she could use it, spurred on by a vision of Frenchie, who had died making that power possible.
Once she strips all three combatants of their Compound V-provided abilities, Homelander is left mortal, and it falls to Butcher to finally deliver the highly-anticipated killing blow.
Just like in the comics, he does so with his crowbar, driving it into Homelander’s skull with the words “This is for Becca.” It’s a moment of brutal, cathartic closure for the show’s central relationship and one I found immensely satisfying as a viewer. Although not everybody who’d watched five years of this show appreciated the ending, I found the death of Homelander—begging and weeping on the floor of the Oval Office, caught on live television for the entire country to witness—was exactly the kind of public humiliation the character truly deserved.
And I loved the use of the crowbar, and how it was a conscious nod to the comics. The Oval Office setting likewise mirrored the source material’s climactic location. These were gifts to readers of the comics, fan service in the best possible sense, acknowledgments of the original text without being enslaved to it.
The Road Not Taken: The Black Noir Twist
But even as the show delivered on so much from its source material, the finale was also where the show made one of its most consequential and defensible departures from the comics, and it’s worth examining in detail. Not only because it’s fascinating on a craft-of-writing level, but also because it speaks directly to questions that matter most to writers: When should you deviate from your source material? And why?
In Ennis and Robertson’s original comic series, one of the most audacious late-game revelations is that Black Noir is not merely a silent, masked member of the Seven. He is, in fact, a clone of Homelander, created by Vought as a failsafe in the event that Homelander ever went rogue.
What makes this twist so provocative is its implication: Nearly every atrocity the audience believed Homelander to have committed—including the rape of Becca Butcher—was actually revealed to have been committed by Black Noir, who then ensured Homelander would see the evidence and be psychologically destroyed by the belief that he was responsible.
In the comics, it’s possible to argue that Homelander’s entire reign of terror was built on this misbelief. He was a monster, yes, but not quite the monster we thought, and many of the monstrous things he’d done later were only because he’d been tricked into thinking he was capable of them.
It’s a genuinely shocking twist. It’s also, as showrunner Eric Kripke has explained, one he never had any intention of adapting.
In an interview with Collider, Kripke was direct about his reasoning: After spending multiple seasons asking audiences to follow a villain and invest in his psychology, he felt it would be a deeply unsatisfying narrative choice to reveal to the audience at the last moment that Homelander didn’t actually do all the things we thought he had.
Instead, the show committed to Homelander being a fully realized, unambiguous monster. A man guilty of every crime attributed to him, including the assault of Becca. I feel that commitment made his eventual defeat mean something much more powerful than a straight-up adaptation of the comic book twist would have done.
But it’s also worth noting the structural impossibility of adapting that twist in the television version. The show’s Black Noir had been an entirely different character right from the beginning, telling a very different (and arguably much more interesting) story.
In the TV show, Black Noir was a Black man named Earving with a specific backstory tied right back to the era of Soldier Boy, Homelander’s unknowing father (or, ahem, sperm donor.) He’d fought alongside the original corporate supes, but had been treated like a second-class member of the team back then because of his race.
Noir was forced to wear a black suit to hide his appearance, and even his name was a dismissive slight; the only Black member of the original team of superheroes having a moniker which is simply the color of his skin repeated in both English and French.
After Homelander killed the original Black Noir in Season 3, a second character took the mask. That meant there was never a viable pathway to make either of these men a Homelander clone without it feeling absurd. The comics’ twist required a specific architecture the show simply hadn’t built, and wisely chose not to.
And the result is that the television finale’s version of Homelander’s death hits much harder. In the comics, Butcher ultimately finishes off the clone, not the real Homelander—a distinction that, whatever its thematic intentions, dilutes the personal revenge arc at the story’s heart. In the TV show, Butcher kills the man who actually ruined his life, in the very room that represents the culmination of the power Homelander had spent five seasons obsessively chasing.
As finales go, it was cleaner, more emotionally resonant, and much more honest to what the show had always been about.
What the Finale Got Wrong (Or At Least Fumbled)
That said, the reception to the finale was genuinely mixed, and the criticisms aren’t without merit. While I really enjoyed the final episode, apparently many viewers felt that Season 5 as a whole had been paced unevenly. For example, too much of it was spent in cramped interior scenes, without enough of the grand-scale action and chaos that had defined earlier seasons.
Additional criticism pointed out that several prominent character arcs felt either truncated or unresolved in the finale, and the decision to exit Jensen Ackles’ Soldier Boy before the final episode struck many as a significant missed opportunity to resolve the father/son relationship dynamic.
The finale itself was criticized in some quarters for feeling rushed, as though it had too much ground to cover in a single episode and couldn’t give every thread the space it deserved. Others felt like too much of the season had been hijacked as a stealth commercial for the upcoming prequel series, Vought Rising.
Butcher’s final arc, in particular, divided audiences. After killing Homelander, he steals the supe-targeting virus and makes one last bid to wipe out all superhumans, only to be stopped and killed by Hughie, the young man he’d mentored and antagonized in equal measure across five seasons. It’s a bleak ending that mirrors the comics (where Hughie also delivers that eulogy about Butcher being in hell, kicking the devil) but left some viewers feeling more deflated than moved.
But I found it exactly right: a recognition that Butcher was never truly a hero, that his war had always been as much about self-destruction as justice, and that Hughie killing him was the logical conclusion of everything the show had said about cycles of violence and toxic masculinity. After everything Butcher had done, he couldn’t be allowed to have a happily-ever-after ending (in keeping with the “redeemable” and “irredeemable” rules I outlined in .)
The Verdict
As with most ambitious serialized television, whether The Boys finale “worked” depends significantly on what you were watching it for. If you wanted spectacle, catharsis, and the symbolic annihilation of a fascist in the room where American power most likes to imagine itself orderly, you got it (and given what’s going on in America right now, it truly was cathartic.)
But if you wanted a tidier resolution for every character, a more triumphant ending, or retaining the audacious plot gymnastics of the comic’s “clone” twist, you were likely disappointed.
But hopefully you’ll agree that what the finale truly did achieve, arguably more than most superhero finales ever do, was thematic coherence.
The show had always argued that power corrupts, that institutions protect the powerful, and that the men who style themselves as saviors are often the most dangerous people in the room. Homelander died a coward on live television. Butcher died having never truly escaped himself. Hughie, who began the series as a witness to helpless horror, ended it by making the hardest choice available to him. None of these arcs had a happy ending, but they felt like true endings.
For self-published writers and storytellers, I think there’s a great deal to learn from the choices The Boys made across its run, and particularly from the ones it made at the end.
For me, the most instructive lesson isn’t about shock value or subverting genre expectations, though both have their place. It’s about the relationship between theme and plot, and how ruthlessly you need to protect that relationship when the pressure to please your audience mounts.
Kripke’s decision to abandon the Black Noir clone twist wasn’t just a structural call, it was a thematic one. He understood that asking readers or viewers to invest in a villain’s acts of evil, and then yank the rug out from under us by revealing that the villain was largely a victim of manipulation all along, retroactively undermines every scene we were invested in together.
As a self-published author, you don’t have a network or a studio to absorb reader backlash on your behalf. Your relationship with your audience is direct and personal, and that means betraying the implicit contract of your story (the promise you make in your opening chapters about what kind of story this is) lands harder.
So before you plant a late-game twist, ask yourself Kripke’s question honestly: Does this revelation honor everything that came before it, or does it quietly invalidate it?
On a similar note, the show’s handling of “fan service” offers a useful model. There’s a version of fan service that’s pure pandering, giving audiences what they think they want regardless of whether or not it serves the story.
Instead, The Boys largely earned the moments fans most anticipated by making the characters journeys actually lead there. Butcher killing Homelander with a crowbar in the Oval Office works not because it’s spectacular, or matches what happens in the comic, but because the show spent five seasons making you feel the weight of what that crowbar represented (Butcher even wielded in in the first episode, arguably making it !)
When you’re writing a series, a saga, or even a standalone novel with a large and invested readership, the question to ask isn’t “what do my readers want to see?” but “what have I been building toward, and how do I arrive there in a way that feels inevitable rather than convenient?” The difference between those two questions is the difference between a finale that resonates and one that simply closes the book.
Now I want to hear from you. Did the finale of The Boys satisfy you? Were you glad the show abandoned the Black Noir clone twist, or do you think it would have elevated the ending?
And for those of you following these articles as writers, what do you think the show’s choices say about the art of adaptation? When should you honor your source material, and when should you be willing to burn it down? I’d love to know your opinion in the comments!
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Ginger is also known as Roland Hulme - a digital Don Draper with a Hemingway complex. Under a penname, he's sold 65,000+ copies of his romance novels, and reached more than 320,000 readers through Kindle Unlimited - using his background in marketing, advertising, and social media to reach an ever-expanding audience.
I loved The Boys and thought the ending was just right. Though I did enjoy Butcher, I think what you said is correct, he was never an actual hero. Thanks for this interesting look at the show and the characters as a lesson for storytelling.