The last time you saw Soldier Boy, his own son had shoved him back into a freezer.
That’s how The Boys wrapped up its most chaotic villain. Homelander betrayed him, sent him into cryo sleep for the third time, and left him out of the season 5 finale entirely. Fans were understandably annoyed. A character that loud deserved a better exit than a fade-out on ice.
He gets one now, in a way. Vought Rising, the prequel set in the 1950s, puts Soldier Boy and Stormfront at the center. Its big swing is the part that should get your attention. The show plans to rebuild Soldier Boy from scratch and show you a version of him that The Boys never could, and that version may just be the most authentic take on the character yet.
Before the swagger, there was Ben
The guy you know is a fearless, charismatic brute. The guy Vought Rising has to start with is someone else entirely.
Before the shield and the ego, Ben was a regular man chasing his father’s approval. That need pushed him to volunteer for Frederick Vought’s Compound V experiments, which he was supposedly terrified of. Back then he had nowhere near the confidence or arrogance he’d later become famous for.
So if the show covers his life before he became a supe, expect a Soldier Boy who’s timid and insecure. That’s almost certainly where this is headed. And even after the powers kicked in, it likely took years, if not decades, for him to grow into the attitude everyone remembers.
That’s the appeal here. With Soldier Boy as the lead, Vought Rising gets to expose his human flaws and show you who he is without the fame, the power and the corporate machine propping him up.
The Boys already told you a lot
You don’t need a spinoff to know Soldier Boy’s backstory is ugly. The Boys gave him enough screen time to fill in plenty of it.
Ben was born into wealth, with an abusive father who made his disappointment in his son clear. Things got worse when Ben’s brother became a decorated soldier. Ben enlisted too, and that’s where he signed up for Vought’s experiments.
Here’s the dark joke of it. He avoided combat for most of WWII, and even after the serum worked, his involvement was minimal at best because Vought didn’t want to risk its prized possession. The public welcomed him home as a hero anyway.
His father didn’t. As far as Dad was concerned, Ben was still a failure, because he’d cheated by using Compound V.
How Vought built a star
When The Boys first introduced Soldier Boy, he was a forgotten hero who’d been replaced. In his heyday, though, he was as popular as Homelander. Long before Homelander showed up, Soldier Boy was Vought’s big investment: the looks, the powers and the perfectly manufactured personality.
Vought treated him accordingly. The company staged many of his saves and turned him into a public figure, complete with music videos and film appearances. Like most Vought supes, he ended up more celebrity than superhero, with an ego to match and a life full of sex and drugs.
Vought Rising is positioned to show exactly how that happened. The series is set to trace his path from ambitious hero to Vought’s corrupt poster boy, along with how the company itself turned into such a powerful force, one built on propaganda, celebrity and hidden violence. The show also wants to get into how Vought’s public image was constructed and how its corruption became tied to American culture and politics.
The Stormfront question
The biggest open thread is his relationship with Clara, the woman you know as Stormfront, who went by Liberty back then. The Boys’ final season referenced it heavily. It also left you with almost nothing on how they met or what their connection looked like.
Vought Rising will undoubtedly lean hard into that relationship, since it had such a big impact on the main show. Don’t expect anything cozy, either. The series is being described as a murder mystery, and the first-look trailer made it clear the gore and violence that defined The Boys are coming along for the ride.
Everything that came after
The prequel’s 1950s setting means it lands well before the chapters The Boys already covered. Soldier Boy eventually outgrew his original team of Bombsight, Private Angel and Torpedo, then moved on to Payback in the 1970s.
As Payback’s leader, he was abusive to members like Black Noir. He also dated another teammate, Crimson Countess. Then came a mission in the 1980s that went sideways.
During a Soviet attack in Nicaragua, his own team betrayed him and sold him out to the Russians. They experimented on him, which is how he got his radiation-based powers, and then put him into cryo sleep.
From there, the main series picks up the story. Butcher and the rest of the team freed him from a cryo chamber, and he even worked with them for several episodes, going up against Homelander despite being his father. Things fell apart near the end of season 3’s finale, and by The Boys’ final installment, he’d lined up with Homelander instead.
Across five seasons, The Boys threw plenty of threats at its heroes, from Stormfront to the Seven to an assortment of other supes, all while chasing Homelander and Vought International. Very few of them caused as much trouble as Soldier Boy. The franchise, adapted from the comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, has always been about what happens when heroes are manufactured by a corporation.
Vought Rising gets to go back to the moment before the manufacturing started: a scared rich kid lining up for an experiment, still hoping his father would finally call him a hero.
