WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD FOR THE BOYS. INCLUDES DESCRIPTIONS OF DOMESTIC ABUSE.

I’m always fascinated by how a certain work of art can arrive at seemingly the right moment in a person’s life.

I think of how Skins was there for me in my teens and early 20s, offering a thornier, significantly more compelling portrait of adolescent and young adult growing pains than a lot of US teen dramas. I remember how the nihilistic chaos of UnREAL served as a balm right as my dreams of finding the perfect job were unravelling sooner than I could anticipate due to an unsettling shift in global politics. I look back on how Insecure gave me great comfort and wisdom in navigating evolving friendship, personal growth, and the ever-shifting idea of happiness as I left my 20s. And now I consider how the acidic satire of The Boys has helped me find closure and strength after one of my dearest friendships and partnerships flamed out in a most spectacular fashion.

Mostly, I think of the character, Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott).

For the unfamiliar, The Boys is the hit Amazon Prime series, based on a popular comic series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, that imagines a world where superheroes exist (they’re called “supes”), but the majority are vapid, egotistical psychopaths who have no qualms with the immense damage they leave in their path. An elite group of supes called the The Seven are managed by Vought, an evil NewsCorp type conglomerate that manages them as celebrities. The titular Boys are a group of mercenaries, headed by the sardonic and ruthless Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), who are out to kill supes for the harm they have wrought. The series mercilessly satirizes the superhero genre, with most characters being parodies of the beloved heroes from Marvel and DC. Superman is now Homelander (Antony Starr), a Trumpian megalomaniac. The Flash is now A-Train (Jessie T. Usher), a drug addicted narcissist. And Wonder Woman is Queen Maeve, a burned-out alcoholic who has long been disillusioned with her life as a supe.

From the start, Queen Maeve presents herself as the epitome of a Strong Female Role Model™; she can leap through the air, take a full impact van crash with nary a scratch, and stop the bad guys while maintaining a photogenic smile. Privately, she is a bitter shell of a being who hates her job, her fellow supes, and is more interested in her martial arts training or drowning her sorrows with a martini. When bright-eyed ingenue and newest member of The Seven, Starlight (Erin Moriarity), quickly learns to never meet her heroes, Maeve is a decidedly unsympathetic shoulder. Finding Starlight distraught after being sexually abused by a fellow member of The Seven named The Deep (a parody of Aquaman, played by Chace Crawford), she offers the following advice:

“For Christ’s sake, clean yourself up. Don’t ever let them see you like this!”

In that single moment, the viewer knows Maeve has become so desensitized to the cruelty and callousness of the boys-club mentality in The Seven, she can’t even fake being nice.

If that lack of sympathy where her singular trait, Maeve would be an irredeemable piece of work. But in a show filled to the brim with amoral characters, Maeve is a surprisingly neutral witness to the gory chaos that surrounds her. It’s clear she doesn’t take malicious glee in the mayhem Vought and its ilk wreak. But she has so long played the part of what Vought wants her to be, there’s a sense she herself doesn’t even know what exactly she stands for.

As the series progresses, one sees the incredible toll being a supe has taken on Maeve. She trains studiously, but despite arguably being the most powerful woman in the world, she is frequently hauled out by Vought as a walking, talking example of vapid #Girlboss “feminism.” She is deeply afraid of her coworker and former boyfriend Homelander, and after the two of them fail to stop a 9/11-style terrorist hijacking, she falls deeper into her alcoholism. She longs to be with her secret lover Elena (Nicola Correira-Damude) and live a quiet life as an openly bisexual woman, free from all the heinous bullshit that comes with being a super-powered spokesperson for Vought. Alas, life as a supe remains a gilded razor-covered cage.

Those who know me know that I’m one of the gay dudes with higher tolerance/appetite for art about queer folks fighting against seemingly impossible odds. This isn’t to say that a lot of media that purports to explore this doesn’t fail at this. There is an extensive list of queer media about tragedy that is so maudlin and ridiculous, it inspires more tears of laughter than sorrow. Similarly, media that focuses queer challenge/difficulty usually comes with a myopic portrait of “queer rage.” Namely, “rage because I, a queer/trans person, aren’t allowed to be myself.” It’s this particular aspect of The Boys that’s deceptively complex and compelling. It shows the rage of a queer character, in this case, Maeve, without ever trying to reduce it to a byproduct of her sexual orientation. Is it a dimension of her rage? Absolutely. In the second season, Maeve is cruelly outed by Homelander as gay (he fully ignores that she’s bi) and Vought quickly seizes on the opportunity to market itself as “progressive” with a “Brave Maeve” campaign. There are many hilarious scenes involving this, such as a marketing meeting with Maeve and Elena about how as a “gay couple, “only one of them can be femme” and the other has to appear butch so it doesn’t look “problematic” or “male gaze-y.” Maeve’s stony-faced contempt, brilliantly expressed by McElligott, is a moment I think every queer or trans viewer can relate to.

But more than skewering cynical corporate greed regarding how queerness is commodified and sold by big business, the series goes one step further. The best art knows that any emotion will be layered. With Maeve, The Boys depicts a tremendously smart, tremendously powerful woman who has seen so much awfulness in her life that she toes the line Vought has created for her. For as angry as she is with her lot in life, Maeve’s rage is imbued with deep anxiety. She knows Homelander is a dangerous psychopath and that Vought can’t protect her. She knows that anyone who is close to her has a high likelihood of ending up like a splattered bug on a windshield. And she knows, gradually throughout the course of the series, that all this suffering and internalized pain has caused her to doubt her own strength and resilience. Watching her gain that back is one of the most thrilling parts of her character’s arc.

For a series that was based on a comic that can generously be described as edgelord, The Boys has a special contempt for bullies. Some characters embody their cruelty fully, like Homelander of Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles), while others try to stop the bullies while still attempting to take the moral high ground, like Starlight or Boys member Mother’s Milk (Laz Alonso). Maeve splits the difference and knows sometimes a bone-crunching punch is what’s needed most. This is demonstrated in one of the most purely satisfying scenes I’ve ever seen in a TV series, where the Nazi supervillain Stormfront (Aya Cash) gets exactly what she deserves from Maeve, Starlight, and Kimiko (a super-powered member of The Boys, played by Karen Fukuhara)

I mentioned earlier that sometimes a work of art can enter a person’s life at exactly the right moment. I was late to the party with The Boys, and yet I’m weirdly grateful for this.

I started watching the series after a particularly nasty divorce. I lost one of my dearest friends in the process and while our friendship had been on life support for a while, I couldn’t have imagined how spectacularly it would all blow up. Let me just say when a tactical unit from the São Paulo Civil Police, along with the São Paulo Military Police, and the US Consulate all have to get involved, something has gone very wrong. The aftermath was ugly, to put it mildly, and I felt as if I had lost my centre of gravity. So many formerly happy memories were irreversibly colored, so many quiet doubts have become unanswerable riddles. In the year since, with the help of my wonderful family and incredible friends, I feel like I have found a certain peace and acceptance with all that has happened. One part of this was accepting the deep, deep volcanic fury that came with it all.

In the third season, Maeve is fully entrenched on her quest to destroy Homelander. In the finale, as they finally face off, she punches him hard enough to draw blood. It’s the first time the audience has ever seen Homelander bleed. And Maeve smiles. She looks confident and positively gleeful that she has set aside her doubt and anxiety and has made the worst bully in her life properly feel her wrath.

While the fight that follows is spectacularly brutal, the strength she has regained by unleashing her rage burns brighter than ever. It builds to a moment of incredible sacrifice on her part, one that aligns with her character’s integrity, skewers the “bury your gays” trope, and in my opinion, shows how queer rage can indeed be liberating. I will tread carefully to avoid too many spoilers, but in this scene Maeve gets to inflict her much desired revenge on Homelander and show that she was indeed a hero at the end of the day. It would have been easier and more trite to the frame the moment as “Maeve’s rage consumed her and her sacrifice saved everyone, blah blah.” Instead, her rage propels Maeve to be brave (heh) enough to strike back, but it never clouds her intelligence to the point where she loses sight of what is the morally right thing to do when imminent disaster looms. I think of this often on the increasingly rare occasions when I remember the last time I saw my ex-husband.

I was at the door of our apartment, escorted by two men from a São Paulo Civil Police tactical unit. After all the happened the night before, and the weeks leading up to this moment, I felt so anxious. Even though I was with two members of law enforcement, both incredibly strong in their own right, armed with machine guns, I still felt unsettled. When my husband opened the door, he looked genuinely scared. And much like Maeve, I smiled.

I got what I needed and left and I have never seen my ex-husband since. The last thing he said to me was “I’ll ruin your life,” but to this day, it’s been an empty threat. I think of that final fight scene with Maeve and Homelander in the third season finale. I think of how she stood up for herself, reclaimed her inner strength, and unleashed her rage but still managed to do the right thing. Like her, I didn’t need to sink any lower with my ex.

A year later, I met one of the officers who helped me on that fateful day. I joked that meeting under those circumstances was probably the weirdest way to start a friendship, but I’m eternally grateful something great came from one of the worst days of my life. My friend said “in my line of work, it’s so rare to see people who get happy endings, and I’m very glad you got your happy ending.” Watching The Boys several months later, his words echo in my head when I think of Maeve’s storyline and how it has ended (as of the fourth season). A happy ending may never static like it is in a film or series or book, but the road ahead looks brighter than ever and for that alone, I’m grateful.

In the penultimate episode of the third season, Maeve sees Homelander and even after he threatens her she says, “this is still a ‘top three day’ in my life.”

When he asks why, she drolly replies: “Because I got to see you genuinely scared.”

Watching that moment, all I could do was laugh and say:

“A-fucking-men, Queen.”