At some point in the last few weeks, Eric Kripke stopped being a showrunner and started being a reluctant prophet.
The creator of The Boys has spent five seasons building one of TV’s most biting satirical universes, a world where a fascist superhero in an American flag cape gradually convinces himself he is God, gets crowds to worship him, and, as of the sixth episode of the final season, has a gleaming golden statue unveiled in his honor.
It was always meant to be satire. It was always supposed to be the kind of cartoonish extreme that made audiences laugh nervously and then go, “Thank God that’s not real.”
But on Sunday, May 10, Eric Kripke logged onto Instagram, looked at a side-by-side comparison of Homelander’s gilded likeness from the Prime Video drama and the freshly unveiled 22-foot gold-leafed statue of Donald Trump standing at Trump National Doral Miami, and posted a meme that read: “Seriously what the fuck?”
That four-word reaction, raw, unfiltered, and completely devoid of any Hollywood spin, tells you everything you need to know about what it feels like to write a show that reality keeps plagiarizing.
When Fiction Runs Out of Road
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The episode in question, Season 5’s “Though the Heavens Fall,” started streaming on Wednesday, May 7. Just days before it dropped, Trump’s “Don Colossus,” a $450,000 bronze-and-gold-leaf monument commissioned by a group of cryptocurrency investors tied to the $PATRIOT memecoin, was ceremonially unveiled at the Doral golf course.
The statue depicts Trump raising his right fist in a pose mirroring the moment he re-emerged after surviving the assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania campaign rally on July 13, 2024.
Evangelical leaders prayed over the monument as supporters applauded around its base, and Trump himself reportedly called in by phone to thank the guests gathered there.
The presiding pastor, Mark Burns, one of Trump’s vocal religious surrogates, felt the need to draw a specific distinction at the event. “Let me be clear: this is not a golden calf,” Burns posted on Instagram. The fact that someone had to say that out loud at all should give you a moment’s pause.
Sculptor Alan Cottrill, 73, told The Daily Beast exactly how the gold leaf upgrade happened. When he pitched the idea for the gold leaf finish to Trump’s team, he said, “they loved the idea, of course. It’s like pitching ice water to a man dying of thirst.”
The finishing touch cost an extra $60,000. Reports indicate that Trump personally texted Burns, “It LOOKS FANTASTIC,” after seeing an image of the completed gilded version.
Meanwhile, on a television screen somewhere, Antony Starr’s Homelander was staring down at his own golden statue from a screen at Prime Video. The visual parallel between the two images was so striking that fans immediately flooded social media.
“You can’t make this shit up,” wrote one fan on X in reaction to a video of the statue being dedicated and blessed. Comments from one fan account, @theboysoocc, likened The Boys to The Simpsons’ legendary ability to predict real-world events before they happen.
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A Pattern That Has Kripke Exhausted
Here’s what makes this particular moment land so differently from the usual “art imitates life” chatter: this is not the first time in recent weeks that Kripke has had to sit with the rather heavy reality that his show’s wildest ideas keep materializing in the news cycle before the episodes even air.
Late last month, Trump shared an AI-generated image on Truth Social depicting himself in the visual language of Jesus Christ, complete with a glowing, beatific quality that left very little room for interpretation.
Trump later deleted the image following backlash from both sides of the aisle, telling reporters, “I thought it was me as a doctor making people better. And I do make people better.”
The problem for Kripke was that, just 48 hours before Trump posted that image, The Boys had aired an episode in which Homelander solemnly declares that he is God.
In an interview with Polygon following that incident, Kripke did not mince words about how rattled he was. “I am really tired and weary of the world reflecting the show before we get a chance to do it,” he said. “I appreciate the marketing.
I’m just like, can you just please give us a chance to put some absurd satire out there before you prove that it’s more realistic than we ever intended?” He went deeper into the specifics of just how close the timing was: “This is the episode where Homelander decides he’s going to be God, and 48 hours before it, Trump releases an image of himself as God.
A month ago, when we were talking about marketing, I was like, ‘Homelander saying he’s God is so out there. We have to be careful about how we even introduce the idea to the public because they’ll say he’s gone too far, and here we are. It’s just really hard to out-satire this world.”
The exhaustion in those words is not performative. Kripke has now watched this happen repeatedly across multiple seasons, and as the show heads into its final stretch, the frequency of the coincidences appears to be accelerating.
He has also noted that the current fifth and final season was written before the 2024 presidential election, describing it as “really fucking unsettling” that an upcoming plot point in the seventh episode has “already happened” in real life.
In a separate interview, he put it even more starkly: “It sounds super naive now, but I swear the plan was, ‘Let’s write a 1984 version of what creeping authoritarianism looks like in America,’ and maybe everyone will be like, ‘Whew, we really dodged a bullet.’ But instead, we got hit with the bullet.”
THE BOYS LITERALLY DID THE SAME BIT FOR HOMELANDER THIS WEEK
You can’t make this shit up https://t.co/AGLU39yWVS pic.twitter.com/rswrSS4uYg
— Mike Nellis (@MikeNellis) May 9, 2026
The Making of an Accidental Oracle
What people tend to forget in all of this is that Kripke did not set out to build a show about Donald Trump. He set out to adapt Garth Ennis’ notoriously brutal comic book series, and the political dimensions evolved organically from the cultural moment.
He crafted a scathing satire of 21st-century America where Homelander, the chiseled superhero in the American flag cape, became an authoritarian proxy for Donald Trump, and critics and audiences immediately took notice.
But the show’s political teeth were always rooted in something broader than any single figure. When critics asked him in 2024 how the show seemed so prescient about racial violence and policing, his answer was almost wearily logical.
“It’s been a problem for over 100 years. It was a problem five years ago, and unfortunately, it’s going to be a problem five years from now. It’s always the same shit.”
That perspective reframes everything. Kripke is not a prophet. He is a writer who pays close attention to the long, ugly patterns of human behavior, which is perhaps more unsettling because it means the parallels are not coincidences at all.
They are the same show, running on two different screens. And the cast of The Boys clearly feels it too. Actor Laz Alonso, who plays Mother’s Milk, commented on Kripke’s Instagram post saying, “Someone had to have leaked our scripts to them.” It was a joke. Mostly.
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The Uncomfortable Take Nobody Wants To Hear
Here is the part of this story that cuts against the comfortable narrative, the angle that most outlets will skip right past in favor of the easier, funnier version.
There is a real argument to be made that The Boys and the cultural conversation surrounding it have, however unintentionally, contributed to the normalization of the very things it satirizes.
Every viral comparison between Homelander and Trump, every meme, every “can you believe this?” moment, every breathless article about the show predicting real life, including this one, is also a piece of content that keeps the spectacle churning.
Satire works when it makes people feel the absurdity of a thing so sharply that they reject it. But when the satire becomes indistinguishable from the thing it is mocking, when the golden statue of the fictional fascist and the golden statue of the real president are visually interchangeable, you have to at least ask whether the joke is still doing the work it set out to do.
Kripke himself seems to sense this uncomfortable tension. The weariness he has expressed is not just the fatigue of a showrunner on a grueling final season.
It sounds more like the specific exhaustion of someone who built a funhouse mirror to expose the grotesque and then watched the grotesque start using it as a vanity mirror. He has been emphatic that he will not pull his punches in the final season, that the show’s sharp political edge is, in his view, vital.
But for the audience watching both screens at once, the more pressing question is not whether The Boys is brave enough to satirize the moment. It is whether the moment has grown too comfortable being satirized.
The Final Season Runs Out the Clock
All of this unfolds as The Boys charges toward its end. The finale is set for a theatrical 4DX screening on May 19, followed by its Prime Video debut the following day.
Kripke has already signaled that more unsettling parallels may be coming before the credits roll. “There’s a line in Episode 7 that Homelander says that was the craziest line we could think of, and it’s already happened,” he noted ominously, without giving the specifics away.
What Kripke has built over five seasons is, whatever else you want to say about it, genuinely remarkable television. The show has won Emmy Awards for Best Stunt Coordination, Best Stunt Performance, and Best Music and Lyrics, and Kripke has been openly vocal about wanting recognition for his cast, particularly Antony Starr.
“To me, it’s criminal that Antony Starr has not gotten recognition for the job he’s doing as Homelander,” Kripke told Gold Derby. And he is not wrong. Starr’s performance has been one of the most consistently precise portraits of charismatic authoritarian menace in recent television history, which is precisely why the real-world echoes land with such force.
But the moment that will likely define the final chapter of The Boys in the cultural memory is not a plot twist or an Emmy win. It is a showrunner sitting in front of his phone on a Sunday, looking at a 22-foot golden statue of the American president and a fictional fascist superhero standing side by side in almost identical poses, and finding that the most articulate thing he could muster was: “Seriously, what the fuck?” Sometimes that is the only honest response left.