‘We do need to talk about boundaries’: ‘The Boys’ fans offended after ‘uncomfortable’ Valorie Curry shot down demands to play ‘extreme’ Firecracker scenes at Comic-Con

Today we’re going to talk about the nuances of having a healthy relationship to the media that you consume, and we’re going to do it in an article about The Boys, so you can scratch that one off your proverbial bingo card.

Of all the new additions to season four of The Boys, few can claim to have stolen the show quite as resolutely as Valorie Curry. The Tick star suited up as Firecracker, an alt-right supe and one of two new additions to the Seven, where her unofficial job was to rally the Homelander faithful with venomous lies about Starlight.

Curry played the reactionary puppeteer part of Firecracker to perfection, but it was the character’s methods to win over Homelander — her idol — that caught the attention of a certain sect of Boys viewers in a big way…

… which leads us to the incident in question; Curry appeared at Belfast’s Comic-Con earlier this weekend as a celebrity guest, where she was harassed by two fans who made snide comments and requests in reference to one of Curry’s scenes in The Boys. The scene in question? Where Firecracker won Homelander’s favor by breastfeeding him.

Curry, of course, was having none of it and made it very clear to these people that she was having none of it, only for the perpetrators to apparently become frustrated at Curry’s response, as though they genuinely believed they were acting like reasonable human beings.

Curry soon took to Instagram after the fact, posting a story to call for stricter boundaries between fans and celebrities, as one should; Curry is far from the only celebrity to be on the receiving end of parasocial discomfort, and that’s not even considering how many other forms it comes in (although, as things go, having random people antagonize you for the sake of getting a dubiously-sought reaction is pretty irritating).

Look, I get it; you find a piece of art you enjoy, you get attached to the people who had a hand in making it, and then you go and recognize someone from that piece of art — someone who you feel you’ve spent a lot of time with after consuming that art — and they remind you of the experience that you’ve had with that piece of art. In all likelihood, that experience was a personal one, and so you go and mistake that with having a personal rapport with this person you have never met before. Such is the trap of fandom and the relationship we have with entertainment.

But I couldn’t give less of a hoot how entrenched you are in such behaviors; you don’t walk up to a woman and start asking about her breasts before acting offended at her unwillingness to engage as though she’s the bad guy. Surely this common sense knowledge is more powerful than our parasocial impulses, right?

The first four seasons of The Boys are available to stream on Prime Video, with the fifth and final season eyeing a 2026 release.