Gen V

The Bleeding Edge of Adolescence

I had more or less made peace with being done with superheroes. The MCU had already multiversed itself into numbness, DC was still doing its usual grim march, and the whole genre was starting to feel like the party nobody remembered to end. Even *The Boys*, which built its identity on mocking superhero rot, sometimes seemed in danger of rotting the same way. So when *Gen V* was announced—a college spin-off set inside that universe—I mostly heard the gears of intellectual-property maintenance grinding away. I still think that mandate is there. What surprised me is that Michele Fazekas and Tara Butters found something raw and ugly and oddly tender inside it.



Where *The Boys* uses powers to skewer celebrity culture and capitalism at large, *Gen V* makes everything smaller and meaner. The powers here feel like bodily symptoms of trauma. They aren’t just flashy abilities; they are wounds with special effects attached. Lucy Mangan at *The Guardian* put it well: "Everywhere is metaphor. And in the world of Gen V, that is almost literally true." The premiere tells you exactly what kind of show this is. Marie Moreau (Jaz Sinclair) gets her first period, realizes she can telekinetically control blood, panics, and accidentally slices through both her parents’ throats. It’s grotesque, sure, but it also lands because it taps into something real: that teenage horror of waking up inside a body that suddenly feels alien and dangerous. Marie gets sent away carrying the guilt of her own biological arrival.



By the time she reaches Godolkin University—Vought’s polished little talent factory for young supes—Sinclair is playing Marie like a live wire wrapped too tight. Her shoulders ride high, her eyes never stop scanning, and she moves through campus like someone waiting to be punished. To use her power, she cuts her own palms with a pocket knife. The symbolism isn’t subtle. A lonely student alone in a dorm room, hurting herself so she can feel some control over what her body does, is about as blunt as television gets. But Sinclair never leans into melodrama. She keeps Marie grounded in plain old exhaustion.

Emma (Lizze Broadway), Marie’s roommate, is dealing with a different variation of the same cruelty. She can shrink to insect size by purging and grow large by binging. Broadway gives her this bright, eager-to-please surface that looks like it might split at any second. There’s a scene where Emma forces herself to vomit before a date, and the superhero premise falls away completely. It’s no longer a gimmick. It’s just a girl in a bathroom hurting herself so other people will find her manageable.



The show absolutely overreaches sometimes. There are stretches where it tries so hard to graze every imaginable Gen Z anxiety that the dialogue starts sounding less like college kids and more like a middle-aged writer’s notes app after an hour on TikTok. And "The Woods," the secret prison/conspiracy plot under the school, often feels like generic comic-book machinery intruding on more interesting character work. Still, I kept forgiving the clunkier parts because the emotional damage underneath them feels real.

By the time the season detonates into its bloody finale, *Gen V* has pulled off the trick I least expected from it. It takes a world built on invulnerability and turns it back into a story about how exposed young people really are. These characters can read minds, explode bodies, and bend the material world to their will. None of that keeps them from feeling trapped inside themselves. That, more than any splash of gore, is what sticks.