Recap / The Boys: Diabolical S 1 E 02 An Animated Short

When the existence of Compound V is exposed to the world, the young residents of the Red River group home realize the origin of their own bizarre, unwieldy superpowers that led to their parents abandoning them. Now, led by the forever intangible Ghost, the kids seek vengeance on those who wronged them…

This short provides example of:

• Abusive Parents: The parents had their kids injected with Compound V in order to make them famous superheroes they could get rich off of. When their powers turned out to be duds, they were abandoned.
  • Ghost’s parents especially. When their daughter is stuck in an incorporeal form, their biggest concern is how it affects them. They are annoyed when Ghost tells them she’s hungry and barely hide their contempt for her when they leave her.
  • Booby-Face’s mom is perhaps the worst. She seems like a nice lady, but a quick flashback reveals her cackling while displaying a sweater made from the organs of two vivisected puppies to her crying son.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Ghost is completely naked throughout the short due to her powers, and yet her character design excludes anything explicit.
• Body Horror: Some of the powers given by Compound V can modify the body in rather horrible ways, like replacing your eyes with actual breasts, turning you into a human-sized tongue or giving you literally burning hot testicles.
• Butterface: Boombox has a well-toned muscular body...and a speaker for a head.
• Death Seeker: Ghost is so depressed over her condition that she wants to die, but can't.
• Dirty Coward: Several of the parents pathetically cower and beg for their lives when confronted by their rightfully disgruntled children, all of which falls upon deaf ears.
• Downer Ending: Most of the teens get revenge on their Abusive Parents, but they are all swiftly massacred by Homelander during their attempt on Ghost's parents, leaving her alone with her cruel mother left alive. However, the ending heavily implies that Ghost intends on getting her revenge eventually.
• Electrified Bathtub: Aqua Agua's parents are killed when their child poses as their hot tub water and Fang dumps an HDTV in it.
• Everyone Has Standards: The supes are reluctant to kill Booby-Face's mom when it seems like she changed her ways. They may want revenge, but they're not without morals.
• Evil Cripple: One of Kingdom's dads is implied to have sleep apnea, as he's seen wearing a CPAP mask in bed.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: After they find their families's locations, the protagonists work together to get their revenge for being abandoned. There's not much else one would expect from something titled "An Animated Short Where Pissed-Off Supes Kill Their Parents".
• Face Death with Dignity: Flashback and Picante Balls hug each other right before Homelander rips them apart with his eye beams.
  • When Kingdom's second dad realizes he can't get away, he braces himself for his shark mauling.
  • Mo-Slow's father is surprisingly accepting of his slow death, and even gives praise to his son for his grip getting stronger and ultimately lethal.
• Feet-First Introduction: The camera focuses on Papers' barefeet before it pans up to his face.
• Florence Nightingale Effect: Defied. The Narrator tries to his narration to get the head nurse Barb to have sexual thoughts about him. He's just met with annoyance.
  Barb: Oh come on, Paul.
• Gotta Kill Them All: The rampage is brought to a halt when Homelander arrives and promptly kills the kids, save Ghost who is intangible.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Some of the kids' bizarre powers turn out to be very useful under certain conditions.
  • Ghost is completely intangible. She is unable to eat or feel anything and she cannot interact physically with anyone. However, she is able to walk through walls and survive attacks from powerhouses like Homelander.
  • Boombox has a speaker for a head that only plays Hootie & the Blowfish. Seems useless, until it's revealed that he can amp up the volume for sonic attacks.
  • Fang has teeth that can cut through almost anything. They take up most of her face and she’s hard to understand, but they're still useful as weapons.
  • Kingdom can turn into any animal. Unfortunately, he transforms body AND mind, so he’s not going to remember things like strategies or even what he was doing a second before. But if he douses his targets with blood before turning into a great white shark…
  • Aqua Agua is stuck in the form of a liquid with the colors of the Mexican flag. He cannot turn into a tidal wave, but he CAN conduct electricity.
  • Big has his size, but that also gives him super strength enough for him to lift and throw statues, as well as crush his parents' heads with his bare hands.
  • Flashback can have... well, flashbacks of anyone's memories in his vicinity. While unorthodox, it's still useful for getting information.
  • Picante Balls can melt anything with his testicles. Emphasis on anything.
• Interactive Narrator: One resident of the Red River group home has the ability to narrate what is going on. He serves as the episode's narrator.
• It's All About Me: The parents of the abandoned supe teens inject their kids with Compound V, hoping to get rich off them when they become superheroes, but when their children turn into failures with crappy powers, the parents blame Vought even though they're the ones who gave them their consent. Instead of sucking it up and trying to make the best of what they've got, the parents decide to forget about their mistake entirely by sending their kids away; the worst part is they have zero remorse for what they did, making their deaths at the hands of their vengeful children very satisfying.
• Karma Houdini:
  • Ghost’s mother survives, though it’s negated by the fact Ghost is still active and promises to come back for her.
  • Homelander, as usual. He butchers all the Superkids (minus Ghost) at the end and gets away with it.
• Knight of Cerebus: Homelander when he appears and lasers the super teens.
• Man Bites Man: Fang kills her father by biting his throat out.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: The reason why Kingdom's power kind of sucks, he turns into animals in both body and mind, making him just as intelligent as the animal he turned into until he changes back.
• Never My Fault: Ghost's parents abandon her at the group home on the grounds that it isn’t their job to clean up Vought’s mistakes, conveniently ignoring the fact that THEY had her injected with Compound V to begin with so they could get rich off a famous superhero child.
  • Again at the ending. The mom says she called Vought for help just as she walks in on a massacre courtesy of Homelander and Vought receiving the call. She promptly blames the surviving Ghost.
• Oh, Crap!: Every parent gets this when they see their children have returned because they know what's coming.
• Parental Abandonment: The plot of the short is that the kids were injected with Compound V by their parents in the hopes of creating famous superhero children, and then were abandoned when their powers turned out to be too strange and unwieldy.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: The Vought employee that Ghost’s parents leave her with at least makes the argument that the couple ARE capable of raising her. Too bad they were so dead set on abandoning their child.
• Required Secondary Powers: Averted with three of the Supe teens, whose power would be extremely useful otherwise.
  • Ghost has Intangibility, which gives her the ability to pass through walls and Nigh-Invulnerability to the point that even Homelander can't do anything against her. However, the fact that she's always intangible doesn't only means that her powers are useless in combat, but she also can't even live a normal life because of it.
  • Kingdom can transform into any animal he wants, but his mind also transforms into that of the animal he choose, which means he can't control his animal forms, thus making his power only marginally useful in situations in which he can count on his animal form instincts.
  • Picante Balls can melt anything with his testicles. The problem is the same with Ghost, his power is always on and the fact that the rest of him isn't immune to his own powers, judging by the burn scars around his thighs and hands.
• Self-Made Orphan: It's right in the title that the supes murder their own parents.
• Signature Style: Justin Roiland co-wrote the episode and the character designs are identical to his shows Rick and Morty and Solar Opposites.
• Silent Antagonist: Homelander.
• Shout-Out: In the comic, Red River is a PMC owned by Vought, that is often used as their private army.
• Skewed Priorities: Kingdom's fathers abandoned him because he crapped all over the carpet. When he takes his revenge by devouring them as a shark, the father who said that still worries about blood on the carpet even as his severed head flies off.
• Slasher Smile: Homelander right before he blasts the Supe-Teens is shown to have one.
• Sole Survivor:
  • After Homelander wipes the Supe teens out, Ghost manages to survive due to her intangibility.
  • Ghost's mother is only parent left alive. She managed to survive because she wasn't with her husband when the Supe teens killed him.
• Soundtrack Dissonance: "Only Wanna Be With You" by Hootie & the Blowfish plays over the montage of the Supes getting their bloody revenge on their parents.
• Superpower Lottery: The focus of this episode are a couple of low rollers, and their retribution for the people who entered them into it.
• Super-Strength: Mo Slow has enough strength to crush his father's neck, including breaking his spinal cord.
• Tragic Intangibility: Ghost. Her intangibility makes her unable to eat, wear clothes or to do anything remotely related to living a normal life.
• This Is Gonna Suck: The moment the Supe teens saw Homelander, they realized they were going to die in that garage.
• Uncertain Doom: Aqua Agua is never seen again after electrocuting his parents, seemingly giving the implication that he died along with them.
• Undignified Death: Picante Balls' father essentially dies from his own son tea-bagging him.
• The Unintelligible: Due to her huge teeth, Fang can be rather difficult to understand.
• Useless Superpowers: Half the kids powers can count as this:
  • Mo Slo can move extra slowly… and that’s about it.
  • Booby-Face has a pair of women’s breasts where his eyes should be… and that’s it
  • Ranch Dressing Cum Squirter… Needless to say, useless in a fight.
• We Will Meet Again: Ghost's parting words to her mother after killing her father is that she'll be back.
• You Monster!: Ghost's mother calls her this after seeing her dead husband and all the other slaughter superhumans.