‘Gen V’ is X-Men for Gen-Z

“Gen V,’ now airing on Amazon Prime, takes the tired “young people with superpowers” genre and injects it with new life, while also being an excellent example of the form. ‘The Boys,’ in whose universe Gen V takes place, did the same thing  to a pop culture immersed in Justice League and Avengers bloat. It turned Superman into a murderous psycho with a breast-milk fetish, Wonder Woman into an angry lesbian, Batman into a brain-damaged soldier of fortune, The Flash into a preening drug addict, and Aquaman into a self-serving moron. Gen V doesn’t feature antecedents that are so obvious, at least not up to its third episode, which is all that Amazon has aired, but it’s also the X-Men parody that the superhero world needs.

The action takes place at Godolkin University, which is sort of like the Harvard of superhero education, and is The Boys’ answer to Professor Xavier’s school in X-Men. Except, of course, since this is The Boys’s universe, Godolkin’s main purpose is to corrupt its best students by selling them to corporate America, and to train the remainder of them to be shallow click-hungry Internet celebrities. Our main character is Marie Moreau, who can manipulate blood into a deadly weapon, which caused her to accidentally murder her parents on the occasion of her first period. Her roommate, Emma, otherwise known as Lil’ Cricket, can make herself tiny, a power she uses to entertain her million YouTube subscribers by doing stunts like boxing her pet gerbil. The twist is that Lil’ Cricket can only get small by purging herself like a bulimic. That’s the level of family-friendly content Gen V provides.

Gen V features all the disgusting super-gore that The Boys did. A fist goes into a security guard’s mouth and out the top of his head. People rip off arms and blow up skulls. Throats accidentally slit on a party night out on the town. Gradually, a band of attractive antiheroes begin to form, including someone with psychic powers and someone who can manipulate metal. Sound familiar, X-Men fans?

As someone who is still half trying to steer a member of Gen-Z through the rocky shoals of this messed-up world, I can find a lot to relate to in Gen V. The teen heroes are only that way because their greedy parents gave them “Compound V”, a sinister corporate-producer superhero-making substance, as babies. They didn’t ask for this legacy, and they don’t want it. Their parents are trying to make a buck off them, or, in the case of one “supe” who can change genders at will, failing to understand them. Their beloved university is a fraud that experiments on them. The media wants to exploit their identities and manipulate their stories. And all they really want to do is party and fuck. Instead, they’re the only ones with enough integrity to clean up the mess the world has handed them.

Gen V may be the most Gen Z show yet created. They retain a little bit of residual millennial earnestness and naivete, but also have inherited some Gen-X eyerolling from their exhausted parents. They have a good sense of humor but have yet to totally carve out their own identity in this stupid world. This show is a satire, but it’s also kind of an ironic rallying cry. These brooding, status-obsessed weirdoes may just be our last, best hope.