There is a line in Man of Steel that has haunted the film’s reputation for over a decade. A young Clark Kent has just pulled a school bus full of children from a river, saving their lives, saving his classmates, done the objectively heroic thing. And his father’s response is to suggest, carefully and with evident pain, that maybe he shouldn’t have.
“What was I supposed to do, just let them die?”
“Maybe.”
The internet never forgave it. Zack Snyder’s Jonathan Kent was branded a coward, a bad father, a symbol of everything wrong with a superhero film accused of misunderstanding its own hero. The “maybe” became shorthand for a grim, broken take on Superman — a Pa Kent who valued secrecy over lives, fear over love.
That reading is wrong, and Homelander is why.
The Boys did not set out to rehabilitate Jonathan Kent. It set out to satirize corporate power, American exceptionalism, and the mythology of the superhero. But in constructing its central villain a god-tier superhuman raised not by a Kansas farming family but by a government contractor called Vought International, the show accidentally built the most persuasive defense of Pa Kent’s philosophy ever put to screen.
Homelander is what Clark Kent would have been.
Remove the Kents in Man of Steel, replace them with a laboratory, a corporation, and handlers who see a child as an asset to be optimized. What you get is a man of limitless power and zero ethical foundation charming on the surface, catastrophically hollow underneath. Homelander is clinically incapable of empathy. He requires adoration the way most people require oxygen. He kills not from pure sadism but from a complete absence of the moral architecture that turns power into responsibility. He was never taught that other lives have weight. He was only taught that his does.
This is the outcome Jonathan Kent saw coming.
The great misreading of that bus scene in Man of Steel is that Pa Kent’s fear is about Clark. It isn’t. It is about what the world would do to Clark the moment it knew what he was.
When Jonathan raises the possibility that saving the bus may have been a mistake, he is not being monstrous. He is being honest about a calculation with no clean answer. The instant Clark’s existence is public knowledge, he ceases to be a boy. He becomes a weapon, a threat, a resource, a symbol, whatever the institutions that reach him first decide to make him. The Kents understood, on a gut level, what The Boys demonstrates in exhaustive, horrifying detail across five seasons: that governments and corporations do not raise children. They manufacture assets.
Vought didn’t give Homelander a family. They gave him a lab, a costume, and metrics. They didn’t ask him what he believed or who he wanted to be. They told him what he was for. And he became exactly that — an instrument of power with the emotional development of an abandoned child and the capability of a nuclear warhead.
Jonathan Kent looked at his son and saw that future waiting. The “maybe” wasn’t callousness; it was terror on behalf of the world.
And it is worth saying clearly: Jonathan Kent did not just preach this philosophy, he paid for it with his life.
Knowing what Clark was, knowing what exposure would cost both his son and the world, Jonathan Kent made the decision to take that secret with him rather than let it be pulled loose in a moment of crisis. He gave everything to protect what he had spent years building: not just Clark’s anonymity, but Clark’s humanity. That is not the act of a coward. That is the act of a man who understood the stakes with complete clarity and chose accordingly.
What the film does quietly, and what rarely gets credited, is show us that the Kent approach worked, there is a brief shot of Clark reading philosophy, it is easy to miss, but it is doing enormous thematic work.
This is a teenager actively wrestling with questions of ethics, duty, and what it means to live well not because it was assigned, but because he has been raised in a home that treats those questions as worth asking. Jonathan and Martha Kent did not merely hide their son. They formed him. They gave him the interior life that Homelander was never allowed to develop, because Homelander’s handlers had no use for a superhuman who asked hard questions about himself.
Homelander was never asked to consider whether anyone else’s inner life was as real as his own.
The contrast Snyder builds, between a Clark shaped by moral philosophy and a loving, if frightened, domestic community, and the Clark that Vought or the Department of Defense would have produced, is exactly the contrast The Boys dramatizes across years of television. We simply didn’t have the second half of the argument when Man of Steel was released.
None of this makes the “maybe” an easy line to hear. It isn’t meant to be, but discomfort is not the same as wrongness, Jonathan Kent was not telling his son that those children’s lives didn’t matter. He was telling him that all lives including the ones Clark would one day be responsible for at scale, depended on Clark becoming the right kind of person before the world found out he existed.
Homelander is what happens when that formation never takes place. He is the proof of concept Pa Kent died to prevent.
The “maybe” was always the most important word in Man of Steel. It just took Vought International to make us understand it.
