How the Women of ‘The Boys’ Struggled To Be Heard in Season 3

Amazon’s The Boys is complicated to talk about because we don’t really know who we can actually trust and support, mainly because even if they’re not on Homelander’s side, they helped to enable him enough that he’s now the monster we all knew him to be. Season 3 was a quest to find a way to kill Homelander (played brilliantly by Antony Starr), but in that journey, we watched as all the men of the series felt as if they knew what to do and who to align with and, in doing so, sidelined all the women (which is hilarious, given that the women are the only Supes that the team has against the Seven).

In the first two seasons, we watched as Kimiko started to open up to the other members of the Boys as she learned more about her powers. We saw how much Maeve has struggled as a member of the Seven, and we saw as Annie wanted to break Vought from the inside since joining the Seven as Starlight. But all of that came to a head this season, and while Starlight was far from perfect in her move to play along with Vought as co-captain of the Seven, all three of these characters experienced a world of people not listening to them when they definitely should have.

Queen Maeve

Maeve is complicated. In season 1, she was basically the woman of the Seven, who didn’t exactly feel bad for Annie when she was sexually assaulted by the Deep. But as we learned in season 3, for Maeve, that was the moment when she felt like she was saved from being brainwashed into whatever the Seven wanted her to be. Annie coming into her life made her a better person, and it’s why, for most of the season, she’s working with Butcher and bringing him the temporary Compound V so he can be a Supe for 24 hours to get answers about Soldier Boy.

But Maeve, to her credit, warns Butcher about it and warns him that he shouldn’t keep using it. And as the season goes on, we learn that it’s killing him and results in him having less than two years to live, in the end. So Maeve kept telling him, and it wasn’t until Annie had concrete evidence that he finally realized two people were telling him to stop. On top of that, Maeve and Starlight were both warning the Boys that taking on Soldier Boy could be a suicide mission, and yet, the one who has to sacrifice herself (granted, she survived, but she didn’t know that) was Maeve. She jumps out the window to save everyone else from Soldier Boy and presumes that she’s going to die as she does it, and none of that would have happened had the Boys listened to Starlight and Maeve from the start.

Starlight

Annie, this season, was the one who made it very clear to me that no one was listening to her. She kept warning Hughie about using the temporary V. She kept trying to say that Homelander was going too far and wasn’t going to be stopped, and she kept warning them about teaming up with Soldier Boy. When no one listened, she took matters into her own hands and kept pushing the truth out into the world all on her own. It took Butcher abandoning Hughie, so that he wouldn’t take the temp V, for even Hughie to see reason with Annie, and it was, again, frustrating because a lot of the issues that came up in the series wouldn’t have been a problem if Butcher and Hughie had just listened to Annie.

While I loved Herogasm and watching a bunch of Supes just get destroyed by Homelander and Soldier Boy (and sorry to Frenchie, who missed it), it wouldn’t have been a blood bath had Hughie and Butcher listened to her and not teamed up with Soldier Boy in the first place. To look back and see all the destruction caused by Hughie’s insecurities is … a lot.

Kimiko

With Kimiko’s journey throughout the season, we watch as she struggles to come to terms with the powers she didn’t ask for, and yet, when she loses them, it is her choice to ask Annie to go back to Vought Tower and get her some compound V so she can once again heal herself. When Frenchie continues to question why she’s doing this, she finally reveals to him that this is her choice in a way the first round of her powers wasn’t. But throughout the season, she’s also continually told to not do things because Frenchie is too afraid to lose her.

She keeps being sidelined, and while it’s coming from Frenchie’s own fear of losing her, it’s still hard to watch because Kimiko can make her own decisions, and she does when it comes to her powers.

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Now, the women are not innocent. They’ve made mistakes and will continue to do so, but this season was just frustrating because when they realized what was going on and how to fix it, no one would listen to them because they had their own agendas, and it would have all been sorted without a blood bath had any of the men of The Boys just stopped and listened to reason.

The men of The Boys may not have done this intentionally, or they might have just been making decisions and not thinking about what they were doing to the women in their lives, but it was rough to see some of these guys we’ve come to love completely ignoring the women of the show, as they talked about what they needed or had answers that the guys just didn’t want to hear. I’m glad that Maeve, Annie, and Kimiko ended up being right in the end and got their moments to have an “I told you so” reaction (which, for Annie, was literally telling Hughie she told him so), but maybe season 4 will actually have men just sitting back because clearly these women knew how to take on Soldier Boy and Homelander without their butting in.

(featured image: Prime Video)