RIKKI

hey guys! this was a while ago. I have a few more in my art vault lol

Analyzing The Abilities of Characters From The Boys Pt. VIII

🇬🇧S3 Billy Butcher🇬🇧

England’s debatably worst man alive, Billy Butcher experienced the loss of his wife after Homelander rapes her and Vought spirits her away to a hidden home for her to raise the bastard son of The Homelander. All the while, Butcher assumed she had taken her own life after the assault, and swore vengeance on Homelander ever since.

After shooting up with Temporary Compound V in S3, Butcher receives abilities reminiscent of Homelander’s, namely his iconic optic beams. Butcher inheriting the abilities of the man he hates most on this earth could very well stem from the fact that, at the time of injection, he believed that had he been The Homelander, had he shared a fraction of that strength, he could have protected his wife from him all those years ago.

Additionally, after being reunited with Becca in S2, she’s killed by Ryan’s optic beams in a freak accident involving an immortal nazi. Butcher is an envious, spiteful, miserable person, so him essentially duplicating the skill sets of the people who took Becca from him makes complete and utter sense, especially when him mimicking these abilities would ultimately make him even more self loathing, now that he shares something with the thing that killed the love of his life.

🦠S4 Billy Butcher🦠

After injecting himself with Compound V following his terminal illness diagnosis and being given a few months to live, Butcher develops the ability to seemingly project tendrils of cancerous material out from his body and use them as tentacles.

I believe this is indicative of him perceiving all the evil he’s done as spreading like his cancer. He’s infected and kept Hughie, MM, and Frenchie doing his dirty work despite their attempts to move on an live their lives, sure, but something the show fails to analyze is how Homelander seemingly raped Becca as a power move. Before meeting Butcher, Becca had worked with Homelander for years without any issues when she was an employee at Vought. Then a few days after he meets Butcher, he rapes her in a backroom to “assert his dominance”. Butcher may have understood this after obsessing over the tapes since 2011, and always assumed that his presence in her life ultimately led to its tragic end.

While S3 had Butcher trying to match Homelander’s might, S4 shows him embracing his own wickedness, all while viewing himself as being defined by his spreading evil he can now emanate out and “spread” to others.

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”.

Tags

the boys gen v emma meyer killing us softly Jean killbourne I like giants

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