▸ Column · Modern corporate-superhero America — contemporary United States, Vought-adjacent world
HOMELANDER replies.
Replied to by Homelander, with a rebuttal from Omni-Man.
The letter
I've been with my boyfriend Hunter for almost four years, and for the past month or so I've had this low-level dread I can't shake — like something between us quietly changed, but I can't point to anything real. He still texts me every morning. Still books our weekends. Nothing's cold or weird in any way I could write down and show someone. That's honestly the part that's making me crazy. There's no secret phone, no name that keeps coming up, no receipt from somewhere he wasn't supposed to be. Just a feeling. Like the room tilted two degrees and only I noticed. I keep asking myself if maybe I'm the problem — like maybe I'm projecting some old stuff onto a guy who hasn't actually done anything wrong. I'd really hate to blow up four years over nothing but a hunch. But I also don't want to talk myself out of something real. How do you even tell the difference when there's nothing to go on?
— Uneasy in Nashville
Homelander replies
Let me tell you what I actually hear in this letter, because the question you're asking isn't the real one. You want to know if the signal is real. The real question is why you're already sitting with exit signs lit in the back of your mind — scanning everything for confirmation that the floor is moving.
Here's the thing about that dread. It's not nothing. The people who invented "you're probably just paranoid" were always people who needed you to doubt yourself more than they needed to be honest. But here's what it also isn't — it isn't a signal to go confront him, hat in hand, with "I have a feeling." The moment you hand him that? You've told him exactly how much power he has. And if you're already scared, you cannot afford to do that.
What you can do: stop fishing. Stop checking whether the morning texts still feel warm. Stop tallying reassurances. Get so locked into what you actually care about — separately from him — that the shift, real or imagined, can't hollow you out. Then you'll know which it is. If it was your fear, it'll quiet down. If it was real, you'll see it clearly, instead of through the fog of needing him to make it not true.
I've stood in front of an entire country telling me I was beloved, and felt nothing. Adoration is not the same as being known. You shouldn't have to count his texts to feel safe.
— Homelander
Omni-Man weighs in
Think. You're asking how to stay armored long enough to know if the threat is real. He'd have you counting your own tells and locking them away like a security system. I walked that road for five hundred years — composure is power, sentiment is weakness, never show the crack. You know what it built? A man who nearly destroyed his own son proving the theory.
Face Hunter. Say "something feels different and I don't know why" — out loud, to his face, willing to be wrong. That's the hard thing. The audit — intuition versus paranoia — is the weak thing dressed as the hard one.
Don't mistake a fortress for a home.
— Omni-Man
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