Stormfront (Klara Risinger): The superheroine who turned fear into a trend

In the third episode of the second season of The Boys (Prime Video, 2020), Stormfront, the Seven’s new star, chases Kimiko and her brother Kenji into an apartment building. As she blasts her way through it, she kills every Black resident she sees, whether or not they are in her way. On the roof she catches the two siblings, breaks Kenji’s wrists, calls him a racial slur and kills him in front of Kimiko. Soon afterwards, at a televised press conference, Stan Edgar, Vought’s boss, praises her for saving the day; she blames Kenji for the massacre, offers her condolences to the families and the crowd cheers her. In front of the cameras, the slaughter becomes a story about a threat from outside. Behind the fashionable heroine is Klara Risinger, a Nazi born in Germany in the early twentieth century, and what she does at that press conference is what criminology studies as the social contagion of fear.

// The theoryFear that spreads

Criminology distinguishes between crime and fear of crime, and has found they do not always go together: fear can rise while crime falls. The sociologist Barry Glassner, in The Culture of Fear (1999), described how media, politicians and companies exaggerate threats because fear draws attention, votes and money. Studies of social contagion explain that collective emotions, fear in particular, pass from person to person and are amplified on social networks. And the geography of fear shows how that fear is projected onto specific places and groups, often minorities or foreigners.

// The subjectThe Nazi with an influencer’s style

What is disturbing about Stormfront is the gap between form and substance. She presents herself as irreverent, modern and approachable; her ideology is that of 1939. The Boys uses her to show how hate speech renews its appearance without changing its essence. She is charismatic, knows how to read her audience and manipulates Homelander by feeding his narcissism. When her past is revealed, part of the public does not abandon her, and the series makes clear this is not a flaw in the plan but part of it.

Her arc in the season follows the cycle of panic step by step. In the first episode she joins the Seven without Homelander’s approval, placed there by Stan Edgar, and wins over social media by mocking the company’s scripts. After the massacre in the apartment building, she turns Kenji’s death into proof of the threat she keeps announcing. In the fourth, Hughie, Annie and Mother’s Milk discover that she is Liberty, the heroine who committed a racially motivated murder in the 1970s; in the fifth, when Homelander’s popularity drops after he kills two civilians, she is the one who restores it. In the sixth she confesses to him that she was the first successful Compound V subject and that she is Frederick Vought’s widow, and urges him to lead the superhumans to rule the world. When her Nazi past leaks in the eighth, Edgar halts his plan to sell Compound V: fear was profitable as long as no one could see where it came from. In the finale, Ryan cripples her with his eye lasers.

// The crackFear is not invented from nothing

The culture-of-fear thesis can fall into the opposite error to the one it criticizes: treating all social fears as manufactured. In The Boys, the supervillains exist; what Stormfront manipulates is their origin and their meaning. The same happens in reality: fear discourses work best when they start from a real problem and exaggerate it or attribute it to a group.

The series also attributes the fear to a single charismatic figure, whereas research shows fear is built by many actors: media, algorithms, companies and audiences. Stormfront could do nothing without Vought, which chooses to spread her videos because they make it money.