▸ Column · Modern day — Homelander's native surveillance-and-spectacle era; no temporal shift from the source letter required.
HOMELANDER replies.
Replied to by Homelander, with a rebuttal from Omni-Man.
The letter
I need to understand something — maybe seeing it written down will help me. Four years in, my boyfriend, Marcus, sat down for takeout last week and mentioned, casually, that he'd accepted a position in Portland and already put a deposit on an apartment there, operating on the assumption that I would simply pack up and follow him. I have a tenured faculty position in the city where I live. I own a home I've been carrying alone for two years while he finished his doctorate. My entire family is within thirty minutes of my front door. When I told him this was a decision that belonged to both of us and he'd made it without me, he said he'd assumed I'd be "excited for a fresh start" — and seemed genuinely confused that I wasn't. Now he's framing my reaction as failing to support his career, despite the fact that I taught extra sections for two years to cover our joint bills while he wrote his dissertation. I'm not sure I want to end things. I just can't reconcile how a person who loves you looks at a choice this enormous and never once picks up the phone before signing the lease.
Homelander replies
The baffled part. Focus on the baffled part.
Marcus wasn't baffled because he's an idiot. He was baffled because in the version of this relationship that lived in his head, you weren't a full person with a tenure file and thirty years of roots — you were his support system. Infrastructure doesn't get consulted when you decide to move the building.
I know something about being positioned as the center of a story that was always really about someone else. I was literally manufactured for it. And here's what I've learned at genuine cost: the moment you discover that the person you loved has been filing you under "assets" rather than "people with stakes," that isn't a misunderstanding you clear up with a conversation. That's the actual map of the relationship, finally legible.
He signed that lease without calling you because the idea that you might say no genuinely did not occur to him as a real possibility. Someone who understood you were a whole person with a claim on this decision would have been afraid to sign without you. He wasn't afraid.
You funded two years of his life, covered his bills on sections he never thought once to worry about, and he paid you back with a Portland apartment and a story in which you're the unsupportive one. That's not confusion. That's who he is when he believes he's in the clear.
I've stood in front of screaming crowds and felt nothing I'd call known. Adoration and being seen are not the same thing. Marcus adores what you make possible. He doesn't have much of a relationship with who you actually are.
What you do with that is yours to decide. But stop trying to make him understand why you're upset. He already understands. He just thought it was yours to manage.
— Homelander
Omni-Man weighs in
He's right about what the bafflement means. He's less useful on what follows, because he has spent his entire career diagnosing how love hollows you out and zero minutes deciding what to do about it.
You didn't write this letter to understand Marcus. You wrote it with everything already assembled: the tenure, the mortgage, the two years of extra sections, the family thirty minutes away. That's not context. That's a brief you filed against yourself.
Think. What are you waiting for?
A man who signed a lease without calling you was not afraid you'd say no. He wasn't afraid because he doesn't believe your answer matters. That is not a map to decode. That is your answer. You've had it since Tuesday.
— Omni-Man