Eric Kripke Says ‘Vought Rising’ Will Not “Sympathize with Stormfront”

With The Boys teasing a return for Aya Cash‘s Stormfront in the upcoming prequel series, Eric Kripke has no plans to retcon her motivations.

The creator of the Prime Video series assured that he will never expect viewers “to sympathize with Stormfront” in the 1950s-set Vought Rising, despite recently teasing Soldier Boy’s (Jensen Ackles) affections for the white supremacist Supe formerly known as Clara Vought/Liberty.

“In no way will I ever ask the audience to sympathize with Stormfront. She’s a Nazi, and she sucks,” he explained to ScreenRant. “Soldier Boy? I think, if it’s teasing anything, it’s teasing that he really had feelings for Clara more than he had originally let on, and that you’ll see a lot of that play out in Vought Rising. You’ll understand a little bit more of what Soldier Boy and Bombsight’s relationship is, and why they resent each other, in Vought Rising.”

Kripke added, “But we always try to hit the right balance, where it provides a little bit of context and some good Easter eggs. But by no means do you have to watch The Boys to enjoy Vought Rising. In fact, we just had some audience testing with some people who had never seen The Boys, and they liked Vought Rising on its own. So, that is for sure the goal.”

Debuting in Season 2 of The Boys, Stormfront is a Supe with electrokinesis and the ability to create lightning, who joins The Seven with a secret white supremacist agenda. After beginning an affair with Homelander (Antony Starr), she’s revealed as Frederick Vought’s wife Clara, who has rebranded herself decades after operating as Liberty.

With Vought Rising exploring her and Soldier Boy’s origins, Ackles previously spoke to Deadline about working on the prequel series.

“It was exciting, and it was a little bit more challenging because I felt like I’d gotten to know modern day Soldier Boy pretty well and had him kind of dialed in,” he explained. “And then it kind of stripped a lot of that away to tell the story of how he was back then, before a lot of the shit had happened. But also, while that stuff is happening when we see him in The Boys, this is the past of all of that stuff, and it’s how that kind of shaped his life and shaped who he was and his ideology of himself and of the world.”

Ackles continued, “But you kind of have to strip all that away because he’s now going through it, so it’s the heartache and the breakup and the experience that he’s having in V Rising that we then understand why he became who he became. So, it was a little bit different. It was a little trickier to get some footing in that character but Paul Grellong, who ran the show, did an incredible job of writing these characters out, these storylines, and you’ll definitely see the modern day Soldier Boy, he’s in there. But you kind of get the sense of seeing why certain elements of his personality took over more.”

Following next Wednesday’s penultimate episode of The Boys, the series finale premieres May 19 in 4DX theaters, followed by its Prime Video debut the next day.