Analyzing The Abilities Of Characters From The Boys Pt. XVI

“Let us give masculinity back its flowering wand of reciprocal relationship with the natural world. Let us call Dionysus to the gates of our cities and homes. A man who can dance with plants and honor beasts, a man who can be a woman and an androgen and an animal, is more than a gender. He is a celebration. A hive of humming bees. A secret network of fungus ready to erupt as the air moistens. A murmuration of birds. A cluster of grapes. A throng of singing women. A magician.”

— Sophie Strand, The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine

The sun-eyed witch☀️

every time i remember that photo of the little inuk girl with her puppy i engage in inconsolable hysterics

God I love Lucy Gray.

All the  Seven ( + Will Solace) from “Heroes of Olympus” saga! 

I kind of want to do a series going through the different abilities of The Boys/Gen V characters and analyzing how/why they have what they have…

Analyzing The Abilities of Characters From The Boys Pt. XVIII

🧨 Ryan Butcher🧨

An under-analyzed character from The Boys cast, Ryan is the son of The Homelander. Being the first official natural-born superhuman, I find it curious that Ryan was never injected with compound V. Even though none of the babies could have consented to being shot up with a potentially lethal drug, Ryan having a genomic affinity for world shattering power forms the basis of any Evil Superman story you can think of.

Ryan being the first, and really the only one of his kind, creates this distance between him and the other Supes. None of them chose this life, but Ryan was raised with powers he never got to explore nor understand, while he was sequestered away under the protection of Becca. Homelander’s reaction to this lack of self realization is heartbreaking to me, specifically because, unlike Homelander, Ryan was raised a human instead of an experiment. I find it almost insulting that Vought essentially propped Ryan up to have the exact backstory they fabricated for “John”: a quiet life in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, à la Clark Kent’s origin story.

Ryan being this cookie cutter doppelgänger of his father creates this dynamic of showing the audience the hero Homelander could have been had he been raised by people instead of maniacal scientists in a lab. Additionally, it provides a bitter form of clarity on the nature of corruption. Given the circumstances that John went through, wouldn’t any and every baby grow up to be exactly like him? You can try to explain that you’re special or you’re different, but without any form of support system or human socialization, and between being baked alive and probed beginning at infancy, I doubt most people would be capable of maintaining their humanity.

I pray that Ryan is able to truly internalize that the deaths of Becca, the stunt actor, and even Grace weren’t truly his fault. I mean, if someone gave you superhuman strength as a preteen wouldn’t you have an alarmingly high body count by now? If you ask me, the kid’s doing good, all things considered…

I think the most valuable lesson you should take away from his character is the concept of chance. Anyone, given the circumstance, could have been either John or Ryan. Ryan has the *chance* his father didn’t to be a real hero, but whether he chooses power or mercy, is entirely up to chance.

*Butcher’s influence on Ryan is fascinating to me because, he’s a horrible role model. Butcher has just as horrible tendencies and selfish whims as Homelander, and yet, in Ryan’s eyes, is the more humane of the two purely because he’s just some guy. Now that Butcher can rival the strength of Homelander, and Ryan knows everything his father’s done, only time will tell how Ryan will begin to unpack his new perspective on Billy.*

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.

Selene, the moon herself 🌕

✨Venus Exaltation✨