Homelander is a Smug SnakeVillain with Good Publicity. He was also raised in a locked cell inside a lab by loveless scientists and now spends his life trying to connive and extort love and loyalty from others, since he has no idea how else to get it.
It gets worse in his canoncial Origins Episode in The Boys: Diabolical. Not only was Homelander repeatedly tortured as a child in Vought's lab tests, but he also genuinely wanted to help the innocent as a real hero. Unfortunately, his disastrous first mission, in which Black Noir absolved him of all responsibility, and the toxic influence of Madelyn Stillwell twisted him into becoming a megalomaniacal monster.
Queen Maeve, albeit a far more sympathetic example; she used to be a Wide-Eyed Idealist who genuinely wanted to be a hero, but lost it one compromise at a time, and is now an alcoholic, self-hating wreck who's cruel to anyone who tries to get close to her. She had a girlfriend she really loved, but they didn't work out as Maeve feared Homelander could kill her and are now bitterly estranged. When she finally gets a chance to do something great and save a hundred innocent people, it all goes wrong and she has to watch them all die, leading her to break down even further. In Season 2, she gets back together with her girlfriend Elena before being outed as gay (she's actually bi, but the marketing department believes gay sells better) and Homelander uses his power overproduction to continue screwing her life. Ultimately she loses Elena after she learns the truth about what happened on Flight 37, and starts backsliding hard into all her worst habits, mindlessly and hedonistically doing hard drugs and having sex with anonymous strangers in an effort to dull her pain. In the finale, she does get out of her funk, but only after some sacrifices.
The Deep thinks nothing of extorting Starlight into having sex with him and has done the same to plenty of other women. He's also got an Inferiority Superiority Complex from being seen as a one-trick pony and a "diversity hire" among the Seven, and whenever he tries to express his only redeeming trait - his genuine love of and concern for marine animals - he's met with obstacles and catastrophic failures at every turn (he wants to "shine a light" on Oceanworld's animal handling practices, Vought wants him to shut up and do the pre-negotiated Oceanworld ad campaign). And then he gets Reassigned to Antarctica and is raped by a loony fan which drove him to a complete mental breakdown (which consisted of him shaving his head in front of a mirror while crying and calling himself stupid). Things only get worse for him when he ends up getting involved in a cult and suffering multiple public humiliations, and later getting to rejoin the Seven, only to be forced to eat one of his animal friends alive. Even considering his previous heinous actions, it's pretty hard to not start feeling sorry for the bastard.
A-Train's reaction to accidentally killing a woman is mild discomfort at best and he's just generally oblivious and self-satisfied. At the same time, his corporate masters won't let him be with the woman he loves because it doesn't fit his persona as a Lovable Sex Maniac (and eventually he is forced to kill her - though there's a good bit of Jerkass in that too, since he could have refused) and won't let him share any genuine details of his background since they're too grim and won't play well with the audience. He's also painfully aware that he's not getting any younger and once he's no longer the world's fastest man no one's going to care about him anymore, and his use of Compound V to prolong his career eventually pushes away his brother, who seems to be the only person left that he had an actual good relationship with. He is later kicked off the team and replaced by his rival Shockwave, after his Compound V use affects his performance. The fact Homelander admits it's less about concern over A-Train's wellbeing and more about preserving The Seven's image only makes it worse.
Mesmer is an unscrupulous liar who only seems to look out for number one, but is also a pathetic has-been who has to watch his once-peers accomplish things far beyond him, and whose daughter barely knows (or cares) who he is, even when he tries to reconnect to her. It's hard to not pity him to a certain extent when Butcher kills him.
Ashley Barrett, who was just a Jerkass in Season 1, becomes this in Season 2 after being rehired and promoted to Stillwell's job. She now lives in almost constant mortal terror of Homelander and her bosses, knowing full well she's disposable and it would take very little for her to be replaced, if not outright killed on a whim of Homelander. She’s also shown to not be so unfettered as most Supes or other Vought members as covering for them out of fear has caused immense guilt manifesting in her hair falling out leaving her almost completely bald. Homelander even uses this to humiliate her in front to A-Train and The Deep.
Billy Butcher is an Anti-Hero example. He's tetchy, hot-headed, toxic, oftentimes self-centered, and has a tendency to be an absolute jerk to even his friends. But he's also deeply broken by the fact that his wife Becca is being held captive and doesn't even want to be rescued because she doesn't want to risk the life of her son who she still loves in spite of his origins. Butcher's aunt also mentions his beloved younger brother died in a situation that Butcher feels regret for and Becca hints that he's got anger problems which he's too macho to address. He was likely abused by his father in his youth and has nothing but contempt for the man now, with their reunion being hard to watch.
Kimiko. Witnessing her brother get broken and murdered by Stormfront, who is then praised for it while she can't even get revenge visibly cuts her up.
Lamplighter got entrapped into being the Boys' inside man on the Seven, and tried to get out of it by burning down Mallory's house. Except her two grandchildren were actually inside at the time, leaving him with horrible guilt that actually causes Mallory to agree to leave him alive, rather than ending it by killing him.
Even Black Noir, the team's silent Jerkass, gets a Not So Stoic moment in Season 2 when he's seen and heard crying upon learning that he got his powers from Compound V rather than being born with something that made him different. It's not every day when you see that a superhero in tears because he just wanted to be special. A flashback in Season 3 reveals that he suffered horrific injuries to his face and brain from an ill-advised attempt to join the Cold War, so it's possible he's not even in his right mind. Indeed, our first glimpse into his psyche shows that Noir's practically a child in a grown superhero's body, so traumatized by his past with Soldier Boy that he needs to imagine his animated comfort characters acting it out because the memories hurt him that much. As for their history, we see that Soldier Boy was an all around tyrant to him, sabotaging his advancing career out of jealousy, viciously beating him when steps out of line, and it was him who permanently scarred Noir.
Soldier Boy's base attitude is very much shown to be a product of his time, being foul-mouthed, misogynistic and overly macho, this on top of having been extremely abusive to his team in multiple ways (beating up Gunpowder and Noir, derailing Noir's film career) and at best dangerously uncaring about collateral damage (causing the death of MM's family by accident and being shown not to care or even remember). But he is discovered to be alive after having been tortured and experimented on for nearly forty years which he spent hoping to get rescued by his girlfriend, only to learn she was the one who sold him out, and that she and the rest of his team had hated him all along. Soldier Boy then revealed that after flunking out of boarding school, he was disowned by his father and even becoming a superhero didn't change things with his father still dismissing him as a cheater for using Compound V.
Hughie witnessed his girlfriend die before his eyes and suffers through post-traumatic stress disorder for the rest of the season. And just when he finds someone who can help him move on, Butcher tells him she's the enemy purely because she's a Supe.
Starlight is objectified by pretty much every character except Hughie, to the point where even her own mother doesn't treat her like an actual person. She also suffers a horrible Madonna-Whore Complex forced on her by Vought, first making heavy focus on her (supposed) virginity and purity, then deciding to sex her up and play off her good looks. This is after she came out about being coerced into sex by the Deep, but despite this and her voiced discomfort with it, she's still shown being presented as a sex icon by Vought.
Popclaw. She's going steady with A-Train, but in order to keep up his profile, he tells everyone that he's single. When he says this on television, knowing full well Popclaw would be watching, she just crumbles. She then accidentally kills her landlord while they were having sex, gets blackmailed by the Boys, and then gets tragically killed by her former lover as part of a Sadistic Choice from his corporate overlords.
Becca. She was raped by Homelander and struck a deal with Vought when it turned out that she was pregnant since she feared what Billy would've done in the name of vengeance had he found out about it. Now living in a compound dedicating much of her life into preventing another psychotic superman with a son that she loves very much, she's faced with a possessive Homelander that constantly mentally tortures her with his very presence and intends to break Ryan into being like him. When Billy manages to track her down, their reunion is bittersweet, as her and his interests clash when Billy is only determined to live his life with her again and abandon her son for being a "Supe freak", which would also place them both under Vought's pressure. She realized that the man that she loved was always filled to the brim with rage and would inevitably rampage when brought past a breaking point, long before she came into his life, and she breaks things off with him despite her love because she cannot stand to see where his anger is taking him.
