WARNING: This piece contains a lot of spoilers for the ending of The Boys. Like, in the very first sentence. So you’ve been warned.

In the final episode of the satirical superhero series The Boys, anti-hero Billy Butcher drives a crowbar through the skull of his nemesis Homelander, a psychotic supervillain who wears the American flag as a cape. Before that, Homelander had been delivering a speech in the Oval Office, demanding the American people worship him as their god. But after being rendered powerless with radiation, Homelander begged Butcher for mercy on his knees. He even offered Butcher oral sex and to eat his feces on live television.

This was the inevitable outcome of The Boys, which chronicled Butcher’s plot to kill Homelander over five seasons. I watched it all, mainly because I was a superfan of showrunner Eric Kripke’s previous creation Supernatural (more on that later). I could appreciate the ending. But what made it truly satisfying was watching conservatives melt down over it ever since.

Homelander is an obvious analogue for Donald Trump, and that became truer in the later seasons. Some of it was unintentional; Kripke and the other writers couldn’t have predicted that Trump would post an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus a month before the finale aired. But the references to Trump and his true believers were thinly veiled, especially in seasons 3-5.

It’s equally obvious why Trump supporters are upset about this scene. But their sustained spiral of rage is about way more than just that.