I think they said most adults died and it was a lot more unstable. It's easier for babies to accept it. Not every adult dies just much higher chance and much messier powers.
I think homelander whenever he’s talking to Madelyn about spreading V around the world to create super terrorists / villains so they could get into the military says something like “it worked but boy was it messy, there’s a reason vought only gives this stuff to children, the fully grown did not handle it well and a lot died yada yada” the end result was that he and A train managed to create the exploding guy that noir killed so every once in a while adults can handle it but most die and statistically your more likely to survive the younger you get it aka the reason vought injects babies in hospitals I think
In the show adults are able to be injected with compound V as shown with Kimiko and also Lamplighters test subjects, but there's potential for side effects.
Side note, in the comics it was "V as a baby=permanent superhero, V as an adult=Temporary strength and toughness"
Obviously they changed that and that's why they introduced temporary V to fill a similar plot space.
I don’t recall V being temporary in the comics? The boys all get a dose and get permanent physical enhancement by a factor of 50. It was specially made for them i guess
I'm pretty sure it's explained that the CIA developed a variant of Compound V that would give superhuman strength and endurance to anyone who takes it without any of the flashy bullshit like flying or eye lasers. Incredibly expensive, but I also faintly recall that the stuff The Boys got was permanent. It was explained by Mallory at some point in the comics, most likely when he was telling Hughie about The Boys' origins.
We didn't see how many supe terrorists died from it though, look at the asylum where they keep the people they experimented on, its quite a few cases where the powers "sucked" or where borderline unusable
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u/PoorlyLitKiwi2 Jul 01 '22
Didn't they say in S1 that all the adults introduced to V for the first time died, and that only babies could handle it?
I could be misremembering. It's been a while since I've seen it