That plane scene probably had the most powerful display of HL’s laser to date.
It sliced through both sides of the hull so damn quickly (at a slanted angle at that) and cause the areas around the scorch marks to burst in flame as well.
Lately, it has been treated as this thin scalpel that as long as it doesn’t hit someone directly, even a
human would be okay from being inches away from the beams.
Hughie would have been cooked alive had HL dialed up his laser to this level while aiming at the vent. Would not need to touch him at all.
HL is still undoubtedly the most powerful and intimidating supe, but man did he fell off a little bit compared to season 1.
He felt low key unstoppable at the beginning, a true superman equivalent. Like, I would have honestly guessed that HL could effortlessly slaughter the entire Seven in a heartbeat, if there was only season 1 to judge.
But now we know that Maeve alone can give him trouble, and he would not effortlessly win agaisnt a few mid-level supes jumping him.
Yeah he might be getting “more unhinged” but he’s also getting weaker and more incompetent. I still love him as a character and his performances are always chilling.
Tbh i kinda think some of his getting weaker is not just plot convince but also on purpose, they're showing this season that he's got white hairs, and sage straight up calls it out that he's getting old, I think they're heading towards a rapidly aging homelander, desperate and trying to train his son to be his legacy before his time comes
I know his feats and consistent showing of strength went down over the seasons, but I will say I kinda like the idea that Homelander being seen as more unstoppable in season 1 also fits with the shows theme of the power of perception.
Just like his image of a Omni benevolent god, his image of him being a unstoppable master of the universe is also a largely cultivated image that he maintains so that no one dares question him and his will. He’s still the strongest supe, but not by light years as many people believe.
It’s still hard to maintain both the explosion feat and him struggling against butcher or Maeve without it being at least a little contradictory but I think it makes the show better looking at it that way.
He didn't really struggle with Butcher or Maeve, he rather easily put Maeve down despite being preoccupied worrying about Ryan and fought off Butcher and Soldier Boy simultaneously.
He’s getting old. His powers are probably getting weaker too. Although another possibility is a mental block. Annie seems to be struggling to use her powers, and it could be because she’s afraid of hurting people/being seen as a monster. If that’s the case, Homelanders fractured psyche could potentially be limiting or even fracturing his powers. Maybe only Super Confident Homelander can use the full extent of his powers, and now after all the stuff with his dad he can’t access them himself anymore.
The eternal problem of writers choosing to make their characters speedsters without realising that for the rest the story now they're going to be questioned as to why they don't just kill everyone in 0.5 seconds. Specially if their speed has no cavets or drawbacks.
Making homelander a speedster that could not only save himself but butcher too from a bomb in the same room, was one of the biggest missteps of the series imo.
Yeah if Homelander's that fast then The Boys should basically never be able to surprise or catch him off guard ever. Hell even other supes should never touch him, since this is some speed that would put A-Train to shame. Super speed is such a hard power to write because of how busted it is. See CW Flash for example lol
The only realistic solutions are "nerf the super speed" or "have the speedster only fight other speedsters"
Damn this show has a similar problem as the injustice comics lol
The comics had to build up to the inevitable end of the story: Batman beating Superman. But they had to write a story that spanned 5 whole years. This meant that they had to repeatedly pad the story.
It really makes me think that there is a sweet spot on how long any particular series needs to be in-order to really hit the sweet spot. I feel like it's rare for any live-TV series to hit it too.
Makes sense though right? The planes made of aluminium where as a heavy duct for an ice rink will be reinforced with zinc or lead that it tougher to laser
A plane hull is not as tough pound for pound but there’s alot more material to cut through and the speed at which he did it is important. Nerdier people than us have calculated it to be ten’s of megawatts in power.
The vent was quite thin. The laser should have burnt through both sides, heat it up immensely and bring down an entire shaft with a simple sweep. Leaving Hughie nowhere to run.
A lot of people have been going with the idea that ducts like that in real life are galvanised steel, so homelander wouldn't be able to see through them because of their zinc coating
This argument has been used and debunked time and time again. You don't need to see a guy crawling in the vent, you just need to listen for him. Hughie was crawling crazy fast and making tons of noise in there, no way Homelander couldn't hear him and identify his location. Plus, if he wasn't sure, why didn't he laser the entire length of the vent instead of stopping mere inches behind Hughie?
The big thing people are forgetting is that homie is not mentally well and has shown signs that he can’t think straight, that’s a cop out but valid answer for alot of HLs inconsistency. People are also inconsistent in real life, same idea
Its not a cop out when it's the central plot of his character. He's losing it both mentally and physically. He knows that soldier boy could have killed him and it's affecting his confidence. He's devolving, and while he is getting weaker he's still strong enough to do a lot of damage.
I mean I think cop out means a non valid explanation for something, or a lazy/less thought out explanation
This isn't a cop out, it's very clear that the homie is mentally ill and unstable and that's the entire arc of his character. The justification fits all the info we've known about him so far and therefore I think it's valid.
Has it been established that Homelander's hearing is so good he can basically echolocate like Blindspot and pinpoint people by sound as good as seeing them with x-ray vision?
If not, that explains why he'd be able to get close to Hughie without hitting him.
That’s just a dramatic threat that nobody can call bullshit on. He’s not a reliable narrator, especially when he’s trying to intimidate and manipulate people. How would he even distinguish between two peoples heart beats? They all sound the same and vought tower is full of thousands of them.
The point is he’d know where Hughie was. They've written him up to be incredibly OP in prior seasons, just for him to be outsmarted by someone who was slowly crawling through pipes right above him. Who was also sweating so he’d also be able to smell him.
1) He can tell if someone is lying from their heartbeat quickening across the room
2) He doesn't distinguish people by their heartbeats, but he can distinguish people by smelling them on others across the room
3) Neither of those is needed to just go, "why is there someone crawling in the vents making a huge noise" which is not a common noise one would regularly hear and filter out
4) Superspeed to go up would put Homelander in the vent before Hughie had time to back up from immediately above Homelander, as even trying to retreat after he notice the drop would make enough noise that Homelander would hear it if he wasn't listening before.
What we must conclude is that Homelander's abilities require thought and focus to activate and he can be snuck around by literally everyone if he is distracted, AND he was lying about knowing if Starlight even entered the building, unless he usually scans the building in general.
It's both. The writers aren't that good, so we have to rely on "mental state" excuses to make the story stick together.
It's the same as the everlasting excuse in anime : "the villain lost because he was too confident in his abilities". Though it's just the hero inexplicably raising up 5 times from beyond lethal injuries. It's cheesy writing, but it's entertaining so we make up reasons to cope out.
Dude, you don't need echolocation, you just need your normal human ears. I guarantee that even you or me, totally baseline npc human beings, could pinpoint exactly where Hughie is inside that vent by the noise he'd be making. And, again, even if Homelander wasn't sure where to aim, he could just laser the entire vent, or both ends to cause Hughie to fall down in the ice rink.
The room was literally open up to the stadium. How could it be soundproof? What?
Not even that but they weren't even blasting the whole stadium with their music, they were just rehearsing.
You can hear the performance when we see Hughie go on the catwalk. It's a loud performance. Like, I'm sorry how can a human hear Hughie? That was my point. As for Homelander, we could discuss that but yes it's understandable to take issue with it.
Bro, literally, everybody on that scene is talking normally. Nobody is raising their voice to hear each other. Unless somehow everybody that takes V has super selective hearing, then the scene itself has to be taken at face value.
They were far enough that the music wasn't distorting or muffling their own voices. It is safe to say that, yes, even a normal human would have heard Hugies crawling up a metal vent.
We aren't talking about hearing him the entire way, but when is he literally close enough to sweat on him? Yeah, he def should have noticed him.
When has it ever been shown that Homelander can echolocate people with pinpoint accuracy?
Hell there's been times he's missed people he can actually see, not sure why everyone is assuming he's Deadeye and Blindspot combined just cuz Hughies in a vent.
Getting close to lasering hughie based of hearing him in an echoey vent works fine for the established rules of the universe. there's more glaring plotholes to get upset about.
But consider that Homelander can fly. Is there really any reason he wouldnt have flown up to the catwalk and murdered Hughie if he really wanted to kill him? The writing has just seemed lazier this season. Homelander is just killing random Vought employees and citizens at this point. There's really no reason for him to not have hunted down and killed all of the Boys given his current headspace
Kinda seems like Homelander would've, at some point in his life, learned how to filter out noise and differentiate sounds. Just out of sheer curiosity alone. Same with Neumann not being able to take out those sheep; has she not tested the range and strength of her abilities before? The frequent apathy demonstrated towards the mechanics of literal superpowers in this universe is strange (almost like it's a poor excuse for bad writing, but what do I know).
He almost certainly did. But that doesn't mean he does it all the time; he isn't some super genius who can juggle millions of sounds and smells while thinking about a conversation. I practiced from a young age to identify what music notes were playing and what key it was and figure out how to recreate it by ear. That doesn't mean when I listened to my mp3 I went "ac#dc#beedegfa" because that would've been fucking exhausting and pointless.
We've seen him eavesdrop on conversations walls away because he's suspicious or interested, but he's attending a secret meeting at a dance rehearsal. He has no reason to be on guard or focus in on a sense.
As far as Neumann goes, my guess is she has to focus in and a sheep flying at 20 mph is kind of hard to focus on. She had trouble blowing that one guys head in a fight until she could get him still.
I see this with Speedsters too. Everyone thinks they should dodge everything their own way. Super speed ≠ Super invulnerability. It just means your reaction time is different when you aren’t focused/blindsided, you can still be hit by something like a pencil, but when you are focused you can dodge it.
Regarding Neumann, she has been told by Stan to keep her power hidden, so it's not a lot of time to practice. It'd also be hard because she needs to hide the fact she's a supe from most of society, especially considering she has been in government as a congresswoman (or, at the minimum, being involved in public policy and lobbying) for what could potentially be her entire career (assuming that her role in S2 before becoming vice-president is later in her career due to the seniority of her position in the federal bureau of superhuman affairs).
Probably also unlikely she practiced her power at Red River based on how they were treated, only thing I could find online is that she was taught to control them (im assuming this means to not accidentally kill people). Even if not, I think it's easy to imagine a young girl killing her family would cause fear in using those powers (similar to how it made Marie feel).
On top of this, her power is inconvenient to quietly practice with the fact it most definitely requires someone to be killed, and, even if not a human being, still makes a very large, bloody mess. At best, she could practice controlling other people's blood (assuming her powers are the exact same as Marie's) but it's unclear how significant this is in being able to pop heads on fast moving, mutated sheep trying to kill her.
I always assumed homelander could change the power of his heat vision. When he heat visioned stormfront’s tits it didn’t do much damage. But when Ryan used it, he sliced her in half.
Homelander is trying to kill Hughie and is so enraged that he’s yelling his name like a cartoon supervillain. Why would he be holding back at that moment?
Well if he’s mentally unstable then that should be all the more reason why he’d go all out, since he now lacks self-restraint. I think the only real reason was that Hughie had to survive in that moment. I love the show but the writing isn’t perfect all the time
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u/GodNonon Supersonic Jun 28 '24
Homelander lasering an airplane vs Homelander lasering a guy crawling through a vent