Gen-V’s cancellation leaves more than a cliffhanger

This article contains spoilers for the plot of Gen-V, and the last season of The Boys.

Last month, Amazon producers confirmed in an interview with Variety that their show “Gen V” would not be renewed for a 3rd season. This left many fans, including myself, baffled and distraught, especially because a 3rd season was so highly anticipated and almost expected with the successful run the show was having.

In the dead-internet media hell that is streaming nowadays, it’s not exactly surprising that shows are gonna be cancelled and discontinued out of nowhere. But what struck me as odd with Gen V’s cancellation was the absolute outrage that ensued afterwards. 

Videos and posts with hundreds of likes on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, etc, popped up on my feed only hours after the announcement, with numerous fans distraught over the show being discontinued. Some even created petitions for Amazon to reconsider its decision. One petition garnered over 5,000 signatures to renew the show and is still gaining signatures as of now.

This announcement obviously left many fans not only upset, but wildly confused, as head director, Eric Kripke, teased the plot for a supposed 3rd season just 2 weeks before the cancellation announcement. Some argued that the show was always only going to be 2 seasons, but there is no credible announcement or information that I can find that indicates that Gen V was supposed to end here. 

Especially with producers using the words “cancelled” and “discontinued” in favor of simply stating that this is where the plot ends and where it was always supposed to end. If Gen V was always meant to be just 2, 8-episode long seasons, why did they not advertise the second season as the show’s finale? The claim that this was always the show’s intended ending is simply misinformation that has gained a peculiar amount of traction online.

For those who don’t know, Gen V is a spin-off of Amazon’s wildly popular superhero series, The Boys. Apart from sharing a universe and some side characters, Gen V tells its own story with its characters mostly unrelated to The Boys. Though it relies on the The Boys already established world, of there being people with supernatural abilities and superpowers, who are called “supes”, many fans agree that you can watch Gen V and completely understand the plot without having to watch the main series.

Gen V mainly follows our protagonist, Marie Moreau, and the group of not-quite-friends she makes at Godolkin University, a college for the supernatural. Marie is a young black girl who has the supernatural ability to manipulate blood. To access this power in the show, Marie cuts herself. While Marie, and even the audience to an extent, excuses this self-harm at first as simply being how Marie uses her powers, Marie later learns how to use her abilities without having to, yet continues to harm herself. 

The harm Marie does to herself is as much an obstacle to her character as the main antagonists are, and throughout the series,we see that, with the support of her kind of friend group, she can get support for it and start recovering from these mental health issues.

Marie’s battle with mental health and self-harm throughout the show highlights a unique perspective not often shown in the media. It’s not often we see black characters struggle with mental health, and even more rare that the characters themselves acknowledge these issues and begin to heal from them, as Marie implies in the season 2 finale.

 “We don’t get a lot of non-white, especially black, self-harm representation.” one commenter, @veilsfairy said. “I feel like this leads to people thinking self-harm is a ‘white people thing.’  I’ve never seen a person of color in media self-harm until (Marie). She means a lot to me, and I see myself in her struggles.”

Though self-harm is a topic hardly talked about in most shows, when it is thrown, it can feel like the writers truly don’t understand why people who self-harm do it. An example of self-harm in popular media that struck me as odd was Ginny’s in “Ginny and Georgia”. In the show, Ginny is almost exclusively shown self-harming in an attempt to end her life and end it once and for all.

Though such scenario obviously isn’t impossible, and I’m in no way implying that Ginny’s self harm is “wrong” or “invalid” in any way, this shows wide mainstream fanbase, and it being one of the only popular shows at the time that had a character who self harmed, made many believe that people who self injure only do it because they’re trying to kill themselves. Many studies have shown that, though there are certainly people who inflict self-injury in an attempt to end their life, most, and I myself, do not view it as a means to an end. 

In comparison, Gen V shows us that Marie is a troubled girl who harms herself not because she intends to end her life, but because the incredible stress and pressure she is put through every day is too much for her. Marie’s self-harm is shown to be an outlet for her pent-up rage, frustration, and sadness that boils over and becomes too much to the point it feels like there is nothing she can do but redirect that mental pain in a physically violent way back at herself.

Marie’s character was not only an optimistic one, but a relatable one for many viewers. As someone who has also struggled with cutting and self-harm in the past, Marie’s character really hit home for me. I could see my hurt in hers and empathize with her pain as someone who has struggled similarly. 

With season 2 ending, I was optimistic that a 3rd season would show Marie more in tune with her abilities and going through an intense, emotional arc as she starts to recover from her self-harm, but I now know there will be no such thing. It really hurt to see a character whose story resonated so deeply with me get abandoned. It’s so rare we see a character identify their self-harm for what it is and move on from it, and though that seemed to have been the intended route for her character, we’ll truly never know.

Marie’s character isn’t the only one that deals with themes of self-harm, though. Through the character of Marie’s roommate, Emma, the show explores the negative effects of eating disorders. Emma grew up in a home where eating disorders were normalized due to her mother struggling with one and not acknowledging it.

Emma retains the same mindset as her mother, thinking her disorder is just a necessary part of maintaining beauty, until the second season. Near the end of season 2, Emma and Marie bond over their shared harmful coping methods, grow closer, and promise to help support each other and possibly heal from them. 

In a time where eating disorders and weight loss campaigns have a chokehold on the media, having a character openly admit that these habits are not okay and have support from their friends to stop them is incredibly important, and resonates with a lot of people, especially teens and young adults.

But Emma Meyer will remain without growth without a 3rd season. Emma’s super abilities directly correlate to her mental state, and her getting better signified that her powers would grow a lot stronger, but seeing as Emma is supposedly not going to appear in the boys’ season 5, and her own show isn’t being continued, her arc has led nowhere. 

There’s no resolution to Emma’s story or big prize for finally overcoming the problem that has haunted her all her life, other than a hundred what-ifs. What could she have been capable of without her mental health issues prohibiting her? We’ll unfortunately never know.

Now, shortly before the second season of Gen V was supposed to start filming, actor Chance Perdomo, who played the character Andre, one of Marie’s friends, was killed in a car accident. The entire script for season 2 had to be rewritten in one month. This heavily impacted the quality of season 2’s plot and characters. Entire scenes and storylines had to be reworked, as among the main cast, Andre was arguably the second most important to the main story aside from Marie.

Even as a fan of the show, I can admit that while the overall story of the second season was entertaining, many side plots fell flat. It is revealed that Marie’s power is potentially strong enough to rival that of, and possibly defeat, Homelander, the main villain of The Boys. 

This is a stupid decision. I would use a less harsh word if I could, but I could think of nothing else to describe it. Why would anyone who has only watched The Boys want to watch an ending where a character they’ve never seen before defeats the big bad guy? This plot would have only worked if Gen V characters were integrated into The Boys much earlier, giving fans of The Boys a reason to care about them.

Now that we’re five seasons and 5 episodes into The Boys, fans of the show aren’t looking forward to the Gen V cast supposedly “stealing the spotlight” of the main cast in their own finale, and as much as I’m looking forward to their cameos, I understand where other fans are coming from.