WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for the first four episodes of The Boys Season 2, available now on Amazon Prime Video.
Even for how much competition there is out there, The Boys manages to carve a niche for itself in the superhero genre by being weirder and more gruesome than most other caped series. Leading that charge and embodying the best (and worst) of everything the show has to offer is Homelander. He’s one of the most interesting characters psychologically, and much of the fun comes in getting inside his scary head to see what makes him tick. However, what’s going on with the rest of Homelander’s body is just as interesting, as there’s a whole lot more to him than meets the eye.
When Did Homelander Develop His Powers?
The dark secret behind superpowers in The Boys is that they’re artificially produced, manufactured by Vought International utilizing a substance known as Compound V. Whereas much of the public is led to believe powers are naturally bestowed, many of the Seven and other supes were injected with Compound V when they were children. Homelander is no exception, and his childhood growing up in a laboratory proved so traumatic that many of his psychological problems seem to harken back to the unhealthy setting.
While Homelander’s age of exposure to Compound V has yet to be revealed in the TV series, in the comics he was injected as far back as the embryonic stage of life. His powers manifested as early as possible, and when he was born his heat vision activated from the stress before killing his mother and all of the nursing staff present. Amazon’s Homelander developed powers quickly as well, and he mentions in Season 2 that he was hitting Mach speeds when he was just a child.
How Strong Is Homelander?
What stands out to make Homelander most threatening is his extreme power level. It’s implied multiple times that Homelander is the strongest of the supes. There has yet to be an individual that can fully go toe to toe with him. People crumble under his touch, and he can knock a plane door off with a simple bat of his arm. In the comics, he even throws a jet plane in a brief flash of rage.
Perhaps even more impressive is Homelander’s durability, something that makes him almost impossible to kill. The Boys had a hard enough time figuring out how to break past Translucent impervious skin, but if they ever hope to turn their wrath on Homelander, there will be an even greater challenge ahead. He survives point-blank explosions and vehicles crashing into him, with Madelyn Stillwell stating that “there isn’t a weapon on Earth they haven’t thrown against him.”
What Is Homelander’s Weakness?
This isn’t to say that Homelander is without his limitations. He mentions that he’s unable to carry the crashing passenger plane from Season 1 to safety, hinting at some upper limit on just how much weight he can carry. He has also been taken off guard, hit by crashing vehicles and momentarily kept out of a fight even when he did not suffer any visible harm.
In the comics, the U.S. government managed to keep Homelander in check for some time with the threat of atomic weapons, literally strapping him to a hydrogen bomb for his first 18 years of life in order to keep him in line. Throughout the comic, it seems that a nuclear explosion may be the only thing that could stop him, but given Madelyn Stillwell’s line, this may not be a limitation that transfers to the live-action adaptation.
What Are Homelander’s Super Senses?
Pure brawn isn’t what makes Homelander such a chilling threat. What truly gives him presence is the possibility that he is always watching and always listening. He has X-ray vision capable of piercing any material other than zinc, which the Boys used to line a box holding Translucent’s remains, and super hearing that can pick up explosions from miles away and pinpoint a man’s blood pressure.
Homelander’s powers get even creepier in the comics. The illustrated Homelander takes pinpoint blood pressure a step further, using super smell to detect sweat, differentiating emotions by the sound of heartbeats and allegedly hearing the “firing of neurons” in a person’s brain. On top of that, he uses his X-Ray vision to spy on the people around him.
How Fast Can Homelander Fly?
From floating above an adoring crowd to chasing down airliners, Homelander’s ability to fly is one of his most useful powers. While scanning the country for Translucent, he clocked nearly 1872 kilometers per hour, and he frequently catches up to and outpaces jets. This even combines with his extraordinary reaction times to such a degree that Homelander saved Billy Butcher from a point-blank explosion before it did any harm to him.
What’s even more chilling is Homelander’s requirements in order to fly at the heights and speeds that he does. Breathing would be immensely difficult at such speeds in a thin atmosphere, so it’s very likely that Homelander is not very easily suffocated. The extreme temperatures and frictions of such environments would speak further to his impressive immunity.
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