I heart loser bisexuals

Absolutely no one:

butcher's main issue in his and becca's relationship, prior to homelander, was that he didn't see her for who she really was, and instead saw her for what he wanted to see. i forget which episode, but somewhere in season 2 when butcher is trying to get becca out of the fake neighborhood and she refuses to go with him because she knows butcher would just find a way to get rid of ryan (which is also on its own so telling about butcher lmao), she brings up how he's always been so self loathing and angry at the world that hes only ever seen her as this idealized 'savior' that he put on a pedestal to avoid reflecting on his own actions. and that claim is consistently proven to be true about butcher throughout the entire show. earlier in season 2, butcher also even says "what was i before you? nothing. you saved me. and i've been out hunting homelander and you've been trapped in this shithole and i didn't save you and ill make it up to you until the day i die." so point is, in short, this tells us that butcher views relationships as acts of saving.

butcher grew up seeing violence in the place of love, and he never stopped resenting his dad for it. then there was lenny's suicide, which he felt he was at fault for. so of course after growing up around constant anger and violence, instead of learning to cope with that grief in healthy ways, it turned into more anger and violence. anger towards his dad, towards the world, towards himself; and hes carried that anger with him his whole life. butcher hates himself so much for hurting the people he loves, but instead of ever learning how to take accountability or ownership for the mistakes he's made in life, he learned from his dad to take it out on other people and himself.

there's a difference between guilt and shame. guilt motivates change, it makes you go "oh god i really messed up there, i shouldn't do that again because i don't want to hurt that person again." but shame is less about your actions leading up to the mistake/going forward and making amends with the person you hurt, and more about how the mistake will impact *you* and what you think the mistake says about you and the fear that you'll be abandoned or hurt because of it. shame makes you spiral into self hatred and gets you stuck in these mental holes/pits where you feel so bad about whatever you did that you can't bring yourself to focus on improvement going forward because all that matters in that moment is that you think you deserve to suffer for your mistake. shame is "oh god i really messed up there, im worthless now and im horrible and everyone else deserves better than me and i hate myself etc etc." you end up more focused on the fact that you feel terrible about yourself because of whatever you did, and you end up more worried about the other person's reaction, than on the fact that you hurt someone you love and you need to change going forward so it doesn't happen again. butcher feels shame much more than he feels guilt. he gets so stuck in these spirals of self loathing, and subsequently self sabotage, that he never actually tries to improve as a person, and then he repeats the same cycles of hurting his loved ones over and over again. he loves hating himself more than he loves loving any other person.

when you have a mindset like that, it is so much easier to find self worth in a perfect, idealized version of someone else that you can tell yourself is saving you and fixing you and loving you into loving yourself, than it is to learn how to actually take accountability and build internal self worth. butcher views himself as less than, and therefore, becca as above him. he relies on her validation and reassurance to determine his self worth because without the love of the person he considers perfect and above everyone else, he hates himself. without her love, he sees himself as nothing. so in turn, he worships her and obsesses over her and devotes himself to her.

bringing it back to the quote i mentioned earlier, "you've been trapped in this shithole and i didn't save you and ill make it up to you until the day i die." butcher says he's gonna make it up to becca for not saving her and he acknowledges that she's been thru some shit, and yet he doesn't acknowledge that he is part of the reason she went thru the shit to begin with. his mistake wasn't not saving her, his mistake was creating a relationship that made her feel like she couldn't go to him when she got raped because SHE KNEW he would focus more on getting revenge than caring for her (and that wouldn't help anyone), because butcher is an angry person who doesn't understand grief without violence. but butcher doesn't even consider that aspect of it because he thinks his role in their relationship was to save her in the way that he feels like she's saved him. to butcher, EVERYTHING in a romantic relationship is about saving and being saved.

i mention all of this because his and becca's relationship is the main and pretty much only point of reference we get for how butcher acts in long term, committed, romantic relationships. or stated differently, butcher didn't act the way he did with becca about the savior stuff because becca was special in some way, he acted that way because that's how someone with as unstable of a self image as he has acts in a relationship with anyone.

now finally onto homelander. it's pretty clearly established that homelander wants to be a savior. even putting aside the whole religious psychosis god stuff in season 5, homelander was raised his whole life to become a superhero, to save and protect people. i think this is shown particularly interestingly in Diabolical, because seeing him that young shows us that for a really long time (and probably still currently), he genuinely did think he was saving people even when he was hurting them. it's the role both vought has placed upon him, and he has placed upon himself his entire life. and homelander wants devotion and loyalty and praise and worship and love from the people he saves, and he wants to be wanted as a savior.

and guess who seeks out a savior in his lover and then gives devotion and loyalty and praise and worship and love to whoever he has decided is his savior? butcher!

and i know butcher and homelander's relationship is nothing like butcher and becca's, there are a loooottt of extra layers with them (which is what make them so fascinating), but still, it really makes me think about this aspect of butcher in relationships that i think often goes unnoticed but would make for an even MORE interesting dynamic for butchlander if it were to be further explored in things like AUs where they're actually together or something. plus i mean butcher is ALREADY outrageously obsessed with homelander and devoted to him in canon when they're not dating so thinking about that being like amped up by 100 is entertaining.

and it'd make their relationship somehow even more messy and dysfunctional and toxic and codependent than it already would've been without this aspect,, like imagine an au where they're dating (and for simplicity for a second, pretend becca doesn't exist in this au) and butcher goes and gets drunk and flirts with someone else or god forbid cheats on homelander (in canon he cheated on becca, so i wouldn't put it past him) so homelander gets jealous and loses his shit and burns the whole place down and kills people, so then butcher feels awful and ashamed for fucking up and hurting homelander so he starts spiraling into his shame pit while getting in his head even more about how homelander is his savior and how DARE he hurt someone so perfect and he deserves to hate himself and suffer now, all while homelander is either giving him the silent treatment for making him jealous or taking it out on someone else somewhere through even more violence, which just makes butcher feel worse, which turns into violence and anger as well, and neither of them can take accountability so they inevitably just end up fighting eachother and then probably rough fucking it out. and then all goes back to normal for a day until one of them finds something new to be pissy about. but they wouldn't break up because they'd both end up dependent on eachother's validation and reassurance to fuel their own egos. and homelander would so get off on the idea that butcher 100% seriously views him as his savior, and butcher would love that homelander is feeding into his fantasy of having someone to save him from himself.

that said, i don't tend to love aus that completely discard their canon background and conflicts and dynamic because i think all of the complexity of that is the best part of them (and it makes the smut way better), but i imagine it's kinda hard to write a relationship where the characters actually love eachother and are still mortal enemies, so i feel like adding the extra layer of butcher's savior thing might be hard to pull off while keeping their canon backstory. idk im not a fanfic writer. but regardless, i think a fic that talks about butcher's need to be saved and homelander's need to save while still keeping their canon backstory would be amazinggg. ive seen some really good writers manage to keep butcher and homelander's real story and dynamic and all of the hatred and obsession and pain and intrigue and anger and curiosity and hurt and allll of that, while still working a romantic relationship into the story, so i know it must be possible. like for example one fic i really like takes place around season 3 ish i think and something prompts them to hate fuck and then they keep fucking more and more and over time they start actually kinda liking eachother but they still act like themselves and they're not mischaracterized and idk id be curious to see if someone could write something like that while thinking about the savior stuff.

They all to condemn me

Homelander, sure you are pathetic. Very cute without your powers huh!

Guess who’s on top, well… maybe it’s up to your imagination.