Become The Most Wretched Of Women

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Great hammerhead sharks have been observed swimming on their side to save energy while swimming.

Every problem with S4 stems from the decision to make The Boys a 5 Season show, making the writers have to riff for the majority of the season. If they just stayed on schedule all the weird filler would’ve been cut and we’d be gearing up for the series finale.

René Lalique's 1936 perfume bottle design for Trésor de la Mer

Buffy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer please? Thanks <3

Sarah Michelle Geller you will always be famous

Buffy Summers

Circe: Goddess of Sorcery

Circe kids 🔮Self-presentation is important to them 🔮Entrepreneurial spirit 🔮Always root for the underdog 🔮Suspicious of others

No Cabin Assigned Yet Link in bio for more Circe info 🔮

A digital offering for Philotes, the Greek goddess of friendship! May she never stop bringing wonderful people into our lives ❤️

apollo, achilles, and the death of troilus. REACH OUT, TOUCH FAITH.

I feel like this season of the boys should’ve abbreviated a lot of its content thus far. We have two more episodes and the only important material that’s come out is a basic evil plan that’s only begun to be explained through. We better be seeing major character deaths left right and center by this last episode.

Analyzing The Abilities of Characters From The Boys Pt. VI

🐍Zoe Neuman🐍

Zoe, growing up in both a multiethnic and affluent home, is both marginalized and privileged in a myriad of ways. Her ethnicity, along with her mother’s, is never acknowledged outright on the show. For all we know, the directors could have cast white actresses for the both of them and the core of my analysis would be null and void, but I believe the fact they aren’t white provides a certain layer of tragedy to Zoe’s character in particular.

Going off of personal experience in uppity East Coast spaces, Zoe’s presumably one of few ethnic children in her social circle. While she’s debatably white passing, this would undoubtedly have led to numerous instances of her facing prejudice and most likely teasing of various kinds.

This is where her unique ability of generating snake-like tentacles from her mouth presents itself. Her being injected as a preteen means her body analyzed her current surroundings and decided what she needed most at this stage in her life was some form of aggressive defense that could come from her mouth. This most likely resulted from her being mocked, teased, harassed, or discriminated against, and wishing there was a way her “sharp tongue” could actually cut them. Now with these serpents that expel themselves from her mouth, she’s capable of holding her own against anyone who wishes to insult or berate her.

Her being subjected to Red River felt like karmic irony, Victoria injecting her in adolescence* because she decided having any ability at all would be better than being powerless. I’ve mulled over this decision from Vicky, but ultimately settled on it being near sighted and power hungry on her end. She knew full well that Compound V resulted in the death of her own parents, and could very well have given Zoe a disastrous mutation, if not killing her in a long, drawn out body horror scenario. Even Stan Edgar was repulsed and horrified at the idea that Victoria would stoop so low as to inject Zoe with V, which put the gravity of the situation into perspective.

Vicky additionally knew that, while she was getting herself tangled up in Vought and Homelander, that her life was on the chopping block, and if she died, Samir wouldn’t be able to fend off Firecracker, let alone all of Vought’s forces. This would, assuming Homelander didn’t execute her daughter, land Zoe in the same place Vicky ended up after the death of her parents, which is exactly what happened.

While this seemed unfair at first, I saw it more so as a cautionary tale of what corruption does to a person. Vicky wasn’t satisfied with what she had, and strived for absolute power at the expense of her daughter’s well being. The shift from a loving mother willing to give her child the world to a power hungry tyrant injecting her daughter with a potentially lethal drug to turn her into a #girlboss didn’t happen randomly. I can imagine every thought that went through Vicky’s head as she decided to this to Zoe, especially explaining away the consequences as trivial costs to her daughter’s safety.

My response to that, aside from it not panning out how Victoria intended, is to look no farther than Kris Jenner with Kim Kardashian. In both mother-daughter duos a power/money hungry mother mutates/exposes her child all in the name of giving her a “better life” at the cost of robbing her of her agency and ultimately her humanity. Society blames Kim for perpetuating beauty standards, all of which were thrust upon her by a mother who just wanted a bigger mansion.

*The horror of Vicky’s decision stems mostly from the fact that the older you are, the worse the mortality rates/negative mutations are with V injections. Stan and Vicky already knew this, and it’s why people were contemplating whether Ashley would die at the end of S4 or not. Babies appear to be more malleable, and while some gain adverse mutations, they’re hardly ever lethal, and may even be tailored to Vought’s liking (so it seems).*

Analyzing The Abilities of Characters From The Boys

-Le Finale-

🇺🇸Homelander🇺🇸

Thank you to everyone who sat by and waited for this grand finale, it truly means a lot to me! You’re the heroes, truly! I added Superman by Ivory Layne because I associate it with America’s #1 Supe, plus I wanted to plug one of my all time favorite 2010s throwbacks.

I think Homelander’s “Evil Superman” pitch is definitely the main draw of the franchise, but I wish he wasn’t always shackled to that identity. He acts as an introspective analysis of the true evil of corruption on a radical/political level. I mean, the man was birthed in a lab and raised on straight looping American nationalist propaganda. He was essentially being hypnotized by Vought to be an All-American boy, and yet he turned out exactly like America itself; overpowered, inescapable, and caked in far too much makeup.

Homelander/John’s wide range of abilities stems directly from the versatile torture methods Vought used on him in infancy in order to rig the results of the V and produce the most amount of abilities. For example, my assumption is they would drop him, along with other flying Supes, from high places, and if they managed to float for survival they would grow up to be able to fly at dazzling speeds. This is based on the number of trials he endured, such as the oven he would be placed in for hours on end. He’s now invulnerable, but he had to quite literally be forged through flame to be so.

In addition to his range of abilities, the episode of Diabolical that depicts Black Noir feeding him his lesson on optics makes his inability to swiftly dispose of those who show no fear all the more reasonable. When he’s viewed as the monster he’s always been seen as (the whole “you ripped out of your mother and beamed through the bodies of the doctors in the room while flying like a scene from the exorcist” thing) he’s incentivized to be what they expect of him, almost like how he was taught to be what the masses wanted from him. The careful crafting and hardwiring of a monster stays, even though he’s subverting Vought’s benevolent persona.

When a character shows indifference or truly just a lack of terror, he spares them, deeply yearning for genuine human connection with an individual who doesn’t recoil from his advance. Whether it was Madeline, Stormfront, or Maeve, they all proved themselves to be fierce women who he had difficulty letting go of. Madeline in particular managed to survive up until the exact moment she admitted her fear of him, to which he incinerated through her skull with his laser vision.

Even when analyzing how he spares Hughie, Butcher, Annie, or the rest of The Boys, Homelander has ample opportunities to fly over and murder them all. He could kill them all in broad daylight and get away with it, but whether he’s consciously aware of it or not, he fully needs humans on this planet who know the truth about him and refuse to be afraid. The alternative would be too boring, and as I could imagine, horrifying. He doesn’t want to be a king, we see into his psyche too frequently to know he hates himself. He truly hates what he sees in the mirror, and masks it with a veneer of egotism until he eventually breaks down again. He wants people unafraid to challenge him, otherwise he would have used one of his several powers to slaughter The Boys ages ago. You may call it plot armor, but I think John needs someone to go blow for blow with. Butcherlander

John never had the chance to be human. He was directed how to be a god, and given the power to match. While every part of me sees him as the monster he is, rape and murder included, I almost feel like killing him wouldn’t be the karmic serve fans think it would be. I agree with the sentiment that he should be stripped of his power and condemned to live an average human life without access to Compound V (I like to imagine they’ll just blow up Vought tower in the finale, but we’ll see). His scenes with Ryan almost make me believe that he wants to be human, but he can never do that as the supervillain he is today. Maybe if he could try out being a human, he wouldn’t have to try and escape his humanity.