Homelander Mental Breakdown

About

Homelander Mental Breakdown is an exploitable image macro taken from a scene in the 2020 Amazon Prime TV series The Boys, specifically episode five of season two. The scene shows the character Homelander (played by Antony Starr) looking down at his phone while visibly shaken and distressed in a dimly lit tunnel. In memes, the scene is typically used with captions to depict a stressed reaction to a situation or memory.

Origin

On September 18th, 2020, the fifth episode of the second season of The Boys was released, with the main antagonist Homelander having some previously unthought-of challenges presented to him. The build-up of pressure finally explodes while he watches back a recent media appearance he did, causing him to finally have a breakdown while alone in a dark tunnel. This scene was uploaded to YouTube the day it came out by the channel YureZzZ,^[1] where it gained over 162,000 views in two years (shown below).

The scene in question and the clip stayed under the radar until the third season of The Boys went back to the plotline of Homelander slowly building up stress before another breakdown happened, which increased the posting of his first breakdown scene. This can be seen in the earliest known memetic use via a TikTok video relating to Homelander's breakdown being uploaded on July 5th, 2022, by TikToker chasealt69,^[2] which is right in the middle of Homelander's mental decline in season three (shown below).

Spread

The meme began to spread in the following days and weeks as a short-form video meme, with the occasional upload being a GIF, utilizing top text to add context to the meme. For example, a meme uploaded by TikToker s16ma3^[3] on July 8th, 2022, in which Homelander is having a breakdown because he sees a woman at a bus stop earned over 270 likes in one month (shown below).

On July 26th, 2022, the meme website Kapwing^[4] uploaded a video formatted template to the site that allowed users to create their own versions of Homelander Mental Breakdown, with an example being given of Homelander forgetting to put the food back in the fridge (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References