Aphrodite: Goddess Of Love And Beauty

Analyzing The Abilities of Characters From The Boys Pt. I

⭐️Starlight⭐️

Annie’s definitely one of my favorites and I think her ability’s one of the more straight forward of the cast. She’s photokinetic, but for the brunt of the show she’s entirely dependent on synthetic/inorganic light. Without this electrical, manmade light she was “powerless”, and at the beginning of Season 4, she fully lost her ability to channel this light whatsoever. This is all symbolic of her perceived reliance on the limelight to stay relevant and important. She was raised on paparazzi shots and baptized in spotlights, so up until more recently that was the only “power source” she had. I like to imagine that now, specifically because the S4 finale didn’t show her draining the car while Hughie was driving, she’s drawing on either natural light to hint at her newfound desire for authenticity and hard truths, or internal light to draw on her own resilience and self actualization she gained through strangling a doppelgänger that taunted her lack of identity.

Analyzing The Abilities of Characters From The Boys Pt. XVI

🎙️Supersonic🎙️

Alex/Supersonic was a painfully irrelevant character who was introduced and briefly killed off all in S3. While his time on the show was short, his had his license to drive his way into all of our hearts…

Alex’s abilities are actually never shown in the show whatsoever. It is mentioned that he has the ability to generate a sonic boom by clapping his hands, but we unfortunately never get to see this before his life is cut short by Homelander.

I find Alex’s role significant, not because of his weird faux love triangle with Annie, but because of the nature of “sound” throughout the series. Alex proves himself to be an ally, and to align himself with Annie on her journey to take down Vought. He gives us valuable insight into how not every supe is brainwashed and radicalized, and yet, we watch as his advocacy goes unnoticed and still punished.

He was a child star, a musician, and a true hero, but his power wasn’t in the limelight like Annie’s. Despite the obvious fame he had, he was supposed to be an encouraging voice in Annie’s head telling her that she’s not alone, and he served that purpose exactly.

Like literally every character we see get killed in this show, I just pretend they’re not actually dead and we’re going to get a Dawn of The Seven style “Avengers Assemble” moment for the finale, but yeah no, this flop’s dead.

Synthetic biology

unknown forces compelled me to draw this

Feeling a lot of feelings about how Hadestown doesn't present the story as "Orpheus turned around and everything fell apart and there was nothing anyone could do to fix it" and instead presents a story that says "he turned around, he doubted, he failed, but if we keep telling his story maybe one day Orpheus won't" and it's not just about Orpheus as a single character, it's a bout every Orpheus, everyone who runs up against a system they can't change and fails and everyone who sees that failure and gets back up and says "maybe I can change it now" and tries again. That Orpheus failed isn't the takeaway of the story. The takeaway is that one day he might succeed.

Analyzing The Abilities of Characters From The Boys Pt. XVII

💣Soldier Boy💣

Acting as a parody of Captain America, Soldier Boy exists as a manifestation of everything America needed post-WWII. Strong, durable, and dutiful, he maintained the persona of the perfect little soldier boy, who could endure both enemy fire and the passage of time without flinching or aging respectively.

However, in true The Boys fashion, he’s a charlatan. While he did serve in WWII, Stan Edgar even claiming he “killed Germans by the dozen”, the majority of his all American backstory detailing him as a war hero, barring in mind his pompous, macho persona, sounds too good to be entirely true.

While this post isn’t supposed to debate his true involvement in WWII, I find his unique reaction to V resulting in immortality to be a cruel twist of karmic irony. He appears to have little value for human life, being quick to resort to murder to settle scores with his old teammates. He’s so ruthless that when Black Noir, a seemingly apathetic and unfeeling indestructible superhuman, gets word that Soldier Boy’s been released from Russian confinement, he practically pleads for Homelander to give him a swift death so as not to die in tortured agony by Soldier Boy’s sadistic hand.

In total, I find it ironic that the soldier forced to kill and slaughter into oblivion with nothing but his PTSD and flashbacks as a testament to his body count, is condemned to an endless immortality. You almost want to mourn the man he could have been had he never been shot up with experimental V. He was a victim of verbal abuse from his father, feeling pressured into potentially dying in WWII just to prove something to him in hopes of finally making him proud. However, he did screw a nazi for years, so, meh.

Analyzing The Abilities of Characters From The Boys Pt. V

💥Firecracker💥

Firecracker/Misty is one of my favorite additions to the show in S4, mostly because I enjoyed having a legitimate redpill influencer be depicted in the show outside of Stormfront.

Misty’s ability is a very minor form of explosion generation, taking the form of small sparks that are summoned from her snapping her fingers. This ability seems to be the result of her initially meek and insecure temperament in early adolescence that’s since mutated into an inferno of overconfidence that could very well seal her fate.

As we learn, she hates Starlight/Annie because back when they would do superhero pageants together, Annie was a pageant diva who spread a false rumor that Misty had performed lewd acts to get as far as she did in the competition. This ousted Misty from ever competing again, delegating her to a solid D-lister with a shitty power. This interaction ultimately puts both characters into perspective of one another. Both of their abilities center around light and ultimately visible perception, but while Annie relished in the limelight by shoving others out of her way, Misty was dependent on minor details to “spark” her way to glory. She relies on clipping truths and stringing together irrelevant info to create patchwork stories of misinformation she can sell to her fanbase.

As she puts it, she sells them purpose, making them believe that they’re a part of something worth fighting for instead of simple cogs in a corporate machine. Misty’s light doesn’t lead or guide like Annie’s, despite the fact it had the full potential to. Her light dissuades and confuses, flickering momentarily, just long enough to lure someone in her direction, only for it to fizzle out when they would attempt to examine it further. This is exactly how I view her conspiracy theories, giving her audience bread crumbs of truth without being able to provide ample evidence of their credibility.

Misty, like her ability, cares about details, so much so to the point where you could argue her true ability is being able to spin any situation back into a redpilled hate campaign to better suit her own agenda. She words every statement she gives the press carefully, riling up the masses while being able to turn suspicion away from herself, even when outed for sleeping with a 15 year old boy when she was 28. She took this mindset and used it to seduce Homelander, understanding that her breast milk could lure him in, but much like her sparks, it would only ever be a temporary source.

Misty is a perfect embodiment of the she-devil residing in the details, seeing as how one spark was capable of launching the entire United States into a tyrannical state of marital law.

Analyzing The Abilities of Characters From The Boys Pt. XI

🦗Emma🦗

Little Cricket, more regularly known as Emma, is a child star turned influencer who’s actress impressed me purely by taking a character I otherwise would roll my eyes at and making me adore and root for her.

Emma’s ability is size manipulation. Much like Alice in Wonderland, when she eats she grows, and when she makes herself vomit she shrinks. This is tethered to an eating disorder that’s been perfectly tailored by her mother’s obsessive hand. Her mother carries a tape measure around to make sure her daughter isn’t too small or too big, which makes for an obvious metaphor for the unloading of generational body image issues.

The most important aspect of Emma’s character is that in the Gen V S1 finale, it’s revealed that she can shrink by simply feeling small after Sam yelled at her. This proves that her ability isn’t truly dependent on food, but rather on the feeling of being too big or too small whenever she binges and purges.

-Psychology Major Moment-

“Killing Us Softly” is a series of documentaries put out by Jean Killbourne about the unsettling and frankly murderous nature of the beauty industry towards young women. Jean said in one of the documentaries something that stuck with me to this day, and reminds me deeply of Emma’s situation. She had said that while men are encouraged to be the largest of them all, the biggest man in every room they walk into, women are taught to be a perfect size 0, or in other words, “to not even exist”. Emma is repulsed by how huge she becomes after saving her friends, and ignores how in her giant form she’s stronger than Sam, capable of pressing him to the ground and holding him there with no obvious effort. She’s been indoctrinated and manipulated into truly believing that being petite is being valuable, and I’m praying that come the end of the show we get to see her become a giant woman yet again.

This whole ordeal reminded me so much of “I Like Giants” by Kimya Dawson, purely because when all is said and done, she’s a kickass hero and devoted best friend to Marie, but even then “all girls feel too big sometimes, regardless of their size”.

greek mythology: goddesses & personifications

God I love Lucy Gray.