Unknown Forces Compelled Me To Draw This

HOT BOY LEO AND FLAREON !!!!!!!! he’s baby

Asclepius: God of Healing and Medicine

Asclepius kids 🩺Sleep-deprived 🩺Log major volunteer hours 🩺Trustworthy 🩺Tend to hyperfixate on their current interest

No Cabin Assigned Yet Roman Aspect: Aesculapius Link in bio for more Asclepius info 🩺

Love how random these are

I want this summer to be different, but I can’t change if I’m doing the same thing on repeat. I need change, but familiarity is comforting

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).*

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. II (Indestructiblity)

⚔️Maeve⚔️

I like to view Queen Maeve as a litmus test for The Boys fans. It’s either you’re a straight man (the target audience) and you kind of hate her, or you’re gay (the unintended yet equally sizable audience) and you adore the mommydom roleplay Dominque was doing with Jack onscreen for the world to see.

Either way, Queen Maeve is indestructible, the opening sequence (as shown above) showing that not even an armored trucked can phase her as her body is used as a shield, cutting through the vehicle without a scratch. All of this is to say that while she’s physically unable to be harmed or bested, even standing up against Homelander in S3, she’s vulnerable in her own ways. For the majority of the show, she was the only member of the Seven who experienced remorse for the things they’d done (outside of Annie of course), which frames her as being more humane than her comrades.

Her fling with Homelander’s equally interesting, implying that while her ability matched him to some degree, it’s that Teflon mentality that drew them together, before she probably understood that he hasn’t caught on that Supes are still people in the end. Ironically, she’s one of the few Supes we meet who doesn’t have a god complex, despite her referencing DC’s resident goddess, Wonder Woman

♟️Black Noir♟️

Black Noir/Erving’s a super soldier. Obedient, silent, lethal, and according to Homelander, one of the captain’s best friends. This all comes at the obvious cost of Noir being an aspiring superhero back in the 1980s who had a fateful mission down in Nicaragua. One thing led to the next and he was severely injured, left with little cognitive functioning. As “The Boys:Diabolical” revealed, it was Noir who taught Homelander the first rule of being a Supe in this world; it doesn’t matter what happened, what matters is what you tell the press.

The characters with indestructibility are jaded, being forced to view the world’s greatest hardships and atrocities only to come out unscathed and progressively unfazed. We never see them get nearly as afraid or uncomfortable as the others, mostly due to this ability. However, we do have evidence that Noir mourned the boy he was with Replacement McDreamy Noir assessing that not only did OG Noir keep files of Buster Beaver (knockoff Chucky Cheese) in his closet, but despite the vague ninja motifs in his branding, he never learned martial arts at all.

With both Maeve and Noir, the issues were seldom physical and always tied back to identity. Maeve’s sexuality being used as a bargaining chip and Noir face/ethnicity not being deemed worthy of confirmation despite Erving’s early wishes. He was trained to view his identity as a burden so that the only person who could truly hurt him outside of Homelander/Soldier Boy would be himself imagining the star he could have been if things turned out slightly differently.

ganymede and the erotes (eros, himeros)

more ganymede 🍎

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”.

rikki!!