Amazon's The Boys finally debuted Love Sausage, but the superhero is very different compared to his original comic incarnation. Since the very first episode, The Boys has offered a harrowing depiction of a superhero dystopia. Racists are revered, narcissists are pampered, and ordinary, innocent people are treated as collateral damage. Eric Kripke's live-action adaptation has broadly followed the comic books by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, albeit with significant deviations, such as The Female's backstory and Stormfront. Nevertheless, the core TV narrative still follows Butcher's Boys on their crusade to take down Vought's diabolical army of supes, and doesn't pull any punches in the process.
Currently in The Boys season 2, the gang are digging deeper down Vought's rabbit hole, uncovering the truth about Stormfront in an attempt to finish the investigation Raynor started before her head spontaneously imploded. Their efforts lead to the Sage Grove mental facility, where Frenchie, M.M. and Kimiko discover a building full of adult subjects being pumped with Compound V at the behest of Stormfront. The Boys also find Lamplighter, a former member of The Seven, working at the site, and chaos ensues. Out of control test subjects are released into the wild, including a man who vomits acid, a young woman who crushes things with her mind and, best of all, Love Sausage.
A character from the original The Boys comic books, fans were eagerly anticipating their first on-screen encounter with Love Sausage. It was even speculated that this sizable role could be reserved for Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who is currently being lined up for a potential appearance in The Boys season 3. However, Love Sausage was revealed to be one of the Sage Grove inmates, and is a vastly different character to his counterpart in the source material. Here's how, and why, The Boys served up a different Sausage.
Love Sausage In The Boys Comic Books
In Garth Ennis' The Boys comic books, Love Sausage is one of the precious few superheroes Butcher and his mates actually like. Hailing from Russia, Love Sausage, amazingly, isn't the character's birth name. Born Vasilii Vorishikin (say it out loud), Love Sausage was a police officer by day and a Soviet superhero by night, but when The Boys begins, Vas is a humble bartender passing off brake fluid as alcohol. Love Sausage once represented the working class as one of the world's more honorable superheroes, leading a team known as The Glorious Five Year Plan. Following the downfall of the Soviet Union, however, Vas became disillusioned with his homeland and the changing role of superheroes, pushing him towards Billy Butcher's way of thinking. In Love Sausage's first comic scene, he greets the original Boys team as old friends, even though The Female apparently removed several of his fingers in the past, and quickly bonds with their newcomer, Hughie.
Despite being a supe, Vas shows loyalty to his friends in The Boys and Butcher returns the favor, giving Love Sausage a free pass from his usual zero-tolerance stance on super-powered folk. As Butcher explains to Hughie, "you used to wet the bed, but we still use you." When The Boys go after Stormfront (a very different version to Aya Cash's on Amazon Prime), they even take Vas with them as extra muscle, and the Russian powerhouse proves vital in the fight. In terms of superpowers, Love Sausage boasts the standard abilities of inhuman strength and durability, capable of crushing a man with his bare hands. And, finally, the name. As Hughie discovers when Vas first slips on his old superhero costume, the title "Love Sausage" comes from being unreasonably well-endowed. As the comics put it, "fifteen inches of sheer dynamite." Unfortunately, this makes it incredibly difficult for Vas to fight around naked women. He just can't run with an erection that size!
How Amazon's The Boys Changed Love Sausage
As comic fans would've noticed, Amazon's interpretation of Love Sausage is extremely different compared to Vas in the comic books, but visually at least, the two versions are nearly identical. When M.M. is viewing the Sage Grove cell video feeds and looking over the various super-powered inmates, he spies a rotund, long-haired man with a wild beard and a gut roll protruding from the bottom of his shirt. There's also the outline of a large penis visible through the prisoner's trousers, to which M.M. exclaims, "goddamn, brother's got a love sausage." The line tips viewers off that this figure is Amazon's version of Love Sausage, and the cell shot closely mirrors Vas wearing his superhero gear in the comic books. And that's more or less where the similarities end.
Live-action Love Sausage is found trapped in a facility where Vought are testing Compound V on fully grown adults, trying to perfect a formula for instantly turning people into superheroes. This suggests that Love Sausage in The Boys season 2 isn't an ex-superhero, and likely doesn't know Billy Butcher either. The episode doesn't give Love Sausage a replacement backstory, but it does make his comic history obsolete. The character is still Russian, and might've been a police officer or owned a suspicious bar, but any ties to Butcher and the superhero system have been left out.
The other major change to Love Sausage is, of course, his powers. While "The Bloody Doors Off" doesn't give a full breakdown of Love Sausage's abilities, the episode does offer a grim, detailed, close-up examination of one of them. During the melee of released test subjects at Sage Grove, a flailing tentacle can be seen whipping staff and causing havoc. At first glimpse, viewers would assume this is some kind of animal-based superpower similar to The Deep's gills or Ben in The Umbrella Academy. But this is The Boys, after all, and when the suspicious tentacle grabs M.M. by the throat, it becomes clear that the appendage is Love Sausage's penis, gradually retracting up its owner's trouser leg after being forcibly removed from M.M.'s face. Amazon's Love Sausage has an extendable, prehensile penis.
Why The Boys Changed Love Sausage's Powers & Origin
The alteration to Love Sausage's backstory fits more snugly within the world of Amazon's The Boys. In the comics, Butcher was fighting against Vought-American, and the story featured other, competing organizations across the globe also dabbling in the superhero business, which is how Love Sausage came to be fighting crime in Russia during the Soviet Union. In The Boys TV series, however, Vought is one entity who own and control Compound V. There has never been any suggestion of other international agencies putting their own superheroes into production, and Mr. Edgar has been explicit about Vought's desire to protect the Compound V formula from foreign governments. A similar change was made for Kimiko's backstory. In the comics, a young Female is immersed in Compound V at her mother's Japanese office, but in the TV series, she's one of Homelander's supe-terrorist test subjects. As such, it makes more sense for Vas to be given his superpowers by Vought as an adult in Amazon's The Boys.
The change to Love Sausage's superpowers also works better in the wider context of The Boys. While the decision to include a tentacle penis in The Boys season 2 was almost certainly made with near-the-knuckle, gross-out fun in mind, there is a deeper level to this X-rated take on Mr. Fantastic. The entire Sage Grove facility sequence highlights the depravity of Stormfront and Vought - forcibly changing the bodies of mentally ill patients and any who refuse to comply get burned alive. Sage Grove is a brutally depressing portrayal of super-powers. Cindy is feared by everyone, the young man who almost kills Hughie can't control his powers, and the acid-puker is clearly having a terrible time. This is no Justice League collection of superheroes, and that theme is continued with Love Sausage. Rather than granting the character super strength and durability, his genitals have been permanently altered into something monstrous. The Boys season 2's Love Sausage body horror rams home just how awful Vought, Stormfront and their experiments are.