✨Venus Exaltation✨

this scene altered 12 year old me’s brain chemistry

greek mythology: goddesses & personifications

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. IV

🫀A-Train🫀

From the fastest man alive to one of America’s most wanted, A-Train/Reggie has known nothing but stress and urgency his entire life. Despite his relatively laid back demeanor he leads with most of the time, under the surface of his douchey jock persona is a vulnerable and terrified individual. Him being a speedster seems to be the result of the Compound V (acting as a form of instant evolution for most patients) giving him the ability to escape gunfire by outrunning the bullets when he was younger. This story foreshadows his future, with the issues he’s constantly outrunning increasing in severity until the shift from internal struggles of addiction and balancing his public persona with his personal love of Popclaw, to external survival issues like Homelander and the rest of Vought.

His redemption arc plays itself out to juxtapose The Deep. While both characters harmed Hughie/Annie deeply in the first episode alone, A-Train goes on to feel remorse and even tries to make up for it. He risks his life by being the leak in order to make amends for everything he’s done. The fact that he saw Ashley as someone worth saving meant something remarkably significant to me about how their characters both feel trapped at Vought despite the tremendous power they both wield. Ashley’s quite literally the CEO of one of the most influential corporations on the planet, and yet she behaves like a cockroach, even at times being reduced to crawling on the floor to appease Homelander when attempting to leave the room. A-Train is the fastest man alive, and yet he feels powerless to put an end to Vought’s tyranny up until the end of S4. When he finally strikes The Deep and makes it evident that they are two opposite sides of what once was the same coin, he revealed to the audience that regardless of having Blue Hawk’s heart beating in his chest, his heart’s still in the right place. Ultimately, it’s this desperation to right his wrongs and “escape” his still potentially deadly fate that make me view his speed as being a fitting ability for his character to inherit.

No no no NO! “The Idol” could’ve been directed by a WOMAN until The Weekend got his grubby little man hands on it and disliked its “female perspective”? Gold to lead, I guess :/

This is what the Sun looks like

'H2O: JUST ADD WATER'

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.*

aphrodite & venus + art

maevelight 💥💫🩷 annie is just her little light yeah exactlyyy