Same lab roots, opposite paths: Why Homelander became a monster and Eleven a hero

The Boys and Stranger Things both build terrifying laboratories where scientists play god, injecting power into fragile bodies, testing them and watching what happens. They give us two figures who share an almost identical beginning but could not be more different.

Homelander grows into a narcissistic tyrant who thrives on fear and adoration. Eleven becomes a reluctant but determined hero fighting to save the people she loves. Their stories challenge the idea that an origin can seal a destiny.

The Boys and the making of a weapon

Homelander’s first memories belong to sterile rooms where he was observed like an animal. He was never held by a mother or comforted by a father. His caretakers were scientists who measured strength and aggression as if he were a weapon in development.

In The Boys, power is corporate. Vought creates “supes” through calculated dosing of Compound V, treating extraordinary abilities as a product to be packaged, monetized, and sold to the public. Homelander is the ultimate advertisement, the perfect smile and unstoppable force presented as the dream soldier on billboards and TV spots. His strength isn’t a wonder to explore but a brand to weaponize.

This corporate lens teaches him that love is performance and that worth is tied to power. Without real affection, he grows up feeding on applause and fear, desperate to be seen but unable to connect.

Stranger Things and the fight to reclaim humanity

Eleven’s early years at Hawkins Lab also meant isolation and cold experimentation. She was tested, punished, and used to explore the limits of psychic ability. But even inside those walls, small signs of humanity slipped through. Whispers from her mother, fleeting kindness from nurses, and later the desperate pull toward the outside world gave her a sense that something better might exist.

Stranger Things frames her powers as partly scientific and partly uncanny, a strange blend of human experimentation and a force that feels bigger than the lab itself. Her telekinesis and psychic reach are terrifying but also wild, something she learns to understand rather than something marketed to the masses.

Unlike Homelander, Eleven is eventually met with love and friendship. Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will offer her trust and warmth. Joyce’s fierce protection shows her that adults can love without exploitation. Even Hopper, with all his flaws, becomes a father figure willing to fight for her safety.

Affection against the void

The most defining split between the two lies in human connection. Homelander never receives authentic affection. He grows up craving approval but learns that adoration can be faked and manipulated.

Vought gives him fame instead of love, teaching him to mistake applause for care. His adult life becomes a hollow quest to be worshipped, a constant search for validation that turns into cruelty whenever his image is threatened.

Eleven, in contrast, is saved by connection. These relationships don’t erase trauma, but they give her a reason to resist becoming what the lab tried to create.

The gaze of society shaping monsters and heroes

Neither character exists in a vacuum. Homelander’s world rewards domination and control. Media turns him into a symbol of national pride, politics weaponizes his image, and fans cheer his every violent triumph.

With no one to hold him accountable and every incentive to maintain power, he grows more dangerous as the public hands him permission to do anything.

Eleven faces the opposite. She’s feared, hunted, and forced to hide, but this adversity creates space for real loyalty to form. Her battles aren’t publicized for profit; they’re fought to protect friends and her town.

Society doesn’t hand her a throne. It forces her to earn belonging, and in doing so, she learns empathy that Homelander never had a chance to develop.

Choice within the scars

Trauma explains much but doesn’t remove agency. Homelander chooses to dominate and destroy. He could have sought truth or connection, but he builds his life on fear.

Eleven chooses to protect, even when she’s scared and wounded. She runs, fights, and returns because she wants the people around her to live free.

The shows avoid simple redemption or condemnation. Homelander isn’t purely a victim of his upbringing, and Eleven isn’t a saint untouched by pain. Both carry scars, but each acts on them differently.

Beyond The Boys and Stranger Things: other lab-made lives that defy prediction

Stories about children built or altered in laboratories reach far beyond Homelander and Eleven. Each new version challenges the idea that origin alone shapes destiny.

X-23, also known as Laura Kinney in Marvel comics and films, is cloned from Wolverine and raised to be nothing but a weapon. Her escape and slow fight to claim identity show how conditioning can be broken, even after years of violence.

Tetsuo in Akira follows a darker road. Exposed to experiments that awaken devastating psychic power, he becomes consumed by rage and instability. His arc mirrors Homelander’s tragedy more than Eleven’s hope and proves how isolation and unchecked strength can collapse into destruction.

River Tam in Firefly is another stolen childhood turned into an experiment. She is trained, manipulated and nearly broken, yet fights to regain selfhood and connection with her crew. Ava in Ex Machina emerges from a controlled environment as well but uses cunning and intelligence to escape her creator’s plans and carve her own path.

Even within Stranger Things, Two, another test subject from Hawkins Lab, illustrates how shared trauma can lead somewhere entirely different. Where Eleven seeks connection, Two turns to anger and revenge and shows that survival does not guarantee empathy.

These characters widen the conversation started by The Boys and Stranger Things. Laboratory origins can produce monsters, rebels, protectors or visionaries. What is imposed at birth may shape someone, but it never fixes who they have to be.

Homelander and Eleven: A legacy that defies the lab

These stories speak to a larger cultural fascination with engineered children and artificial origins. From comics to science fiction, the trope of the lab-made human often suggests that suffering breeds villainy or that unnatural creation taints the soul.

The Boys and Stranger Things break that pattern. They show that while control and cruelty can shape a person, they don’t define the final outcome. Power and pain may narrow the road, but they don’t lock it.

Homelander’s rise is a tragedy built on abandonment and exploitation. Eleven’s fight is a fragile triumph born from the same soil. Together they remind us that even the most controlled beginnings can’t fully script who someone becomes, and that destiny is never entirely written in a lab.

Furthermore, their journeys prove that creation is only a starting point. What follows, the love found or denied, the choices embraced or feared, decides everything. In the end, being made in a lab doesn’t write the story. The people who reach for connection and the ones who surrender to power show that destiny bends to what we choose to become.