The show was heavily marketed as the first live-action superhero series with an openly gay lead, with showrunner Caroline Dries repeatedly emphasizing queer representation and drawing from personal coming-out stories to infuse authentic LGBTQ+ messaging. Diverse casting includes a black Sophie Moore and Asian-American Mary Hamilton, expanding roles with identity layers in a manner that prioritizes progressive inclusivity over strict comic fidelity. This ideological embedding provoked immediate and substantial audience backlash, including review-bombing on Rotten Tomatoes dropping the audience score to single digits, widely labeled as 'woke' for shoving queer activism into the superhero genre, compromising storytelling with preachiness and prioritizing message over coherent plots or character logic.