I want to preface this article by saying I do not hate superhero media, rather there’s just so much of it that I’m just getting fatigued. 

How many times this year have you been asked if you’ve seen one of the Disney Plus Marvel tv shows this year? How many did you watch? The answers going to depend on the reader of course but say you watched all 4 of the currently available Disney Plus series you would have effectively watched 19 hours and 40 minutes of just the television series. 

Wandavision runs a total of five hours and 50 minutes, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier runs 4 hours and 25 minutes, Loki runs 4 hours and 53 minutes, What If…?  approximately 4 hours and 30 minutes

I get that we’ve had a lot of free time over the course of the pandemic but at a certain point, I hit a wall with how much Marvel I could handle because I’ll be honest with you I couldn’t finish all of it. Even Loki, which I would have ordinarily loved a couple of years back just kind of fell through my interest and I hate that because I’ve loved Tom Hiddleston’s version of Loki since Thor came out in 2011. As much I wanted to cheer for my favorite reformed villain, my interest just kept dipping, and eventually, I just forgot to finish the series.

I used to eat up everything Marvel put out in the earlier days of the MCU, I was REALLY into it actually, one of the pieces I used in my first ever university art portfolio was an Iron Man Mark 7 Suit that I painstakingly made from EVA floormats and wore to a comic convention in 2012. I made a couple more marvel cosplays included Deadpool and the Winter Soldier and up until the pandemic made FanExpo a distant memory I was planning more Marvel cosplays, I really just loved everything they made. 

Like I said earlier though, I’m getting tired and I was only watching the Marvel television series. I still want to see Shang Chi when I get the chance but it kills me a little bit every time I see a joke on social media about how “nobody knows” or cares about The Eternals because I actually did read the Neil Gaiman version of the series during my highest interest point in the early 2010s and when I heard that it was going to be a movie I was genuinely excited to see it, and even though I love the director, Chloe Zhao as well as cast it’s probably going to join the other Marvel movies I get to when I get to.

I think part of what’s been tiring me with the MCU is the focus on “family-friendly” which I understand the reasons for keeping a superhero franchise child-friendly but I think it limits the scope of what the characters can talk about to a degree. 

Amazon’s The Boys has really stood out as a non-Marvel superhero tv series. The Boys is the furthest thing from the family-friendly superheroes we find in Marvel, and as dysfunctional as the team of Avengers could be in the MCU, they don’t even come close to the levels of workplace toxicity that we find in The Boys’ respective top superhero team “The Seven”.

In the world of The Boys, heroes are little more than a product for a corporation that is elevated to superstar status, and while they dazzle the public on billboards and films of their own, the luster is lost when your loved one is accidentally killed as part of the “collateral damage” part of superhero movies we don’t always get to see. 

I’ve also been really impressed by is the writing and themes of the show, I love the way the series is able to critique the entire superhero film genre so cleanly and thoroughly and the casting is really excellent. I personally love Anthony Starr as Homelander, he’s the leader of “the Seven”, he gets to do hero jobs while getting to live the lifestyle of the rich and famous and while he has a carefully crafted public image of being a very good, moral superhero, his off-camera behavior is appallingly cruel and often extremely violent for no other reason other than he seems to enjoy inflicting pain on people. The real heroes in The Boys are the gang trying to bring down Homelander and the corporation he works for, Vaught. 

The show in the second season also deals with subjects like White Nationalism, and identity politics that in the years since 2016 have often found themselves coming to the forefront of news and politics. It’s very timely, thought-provoking, but also has superheroes. 

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Another superhero film I liked from 2021 was James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad. Gunn famously directed the first two Guardian of the Galaxy movies for the MCU and is returning to direct the third and final installment this year. The Suicide Squad is part of the DC’s Extended Universe and focuses on a group of incarcerated villains (they’re really more anti-heroes) as they try to take down a rogue scientist in an enemy country at the behest of the US Government. Part of what makes this movie work so well in my opinion is that James Gunn has a great sense of style for action, gore, and body horror and that marries really well with the nature of the characters we see in The Suicide Squad. Gunn also has a really good way of working emotion and humor into his stories, and I love that he’s able to show the human side of the super-powered characters and I really appreciate that.

As I said earlier, I don’t hate superhero media, I just am tired of so much of it happening every single year, I think there will continue to be productions that I will watch but there are also going to be many that I don’t end up seeing, and maybe that’s for the best.