#* headcanon

because it's fucking funny, right, imagining this guy doing crazy meta recursive metonymy, becoming the hegemonic system and town religion, and then at least partly using his ambiguous god powers to write modern domestic au unproblematic conflictless fan fiction of a deer girl and a goat boy. pulling strings, making them (wedding bells) ring, etc, with the aim of getting a real messy motherfucker to be in a cute fluff dynamic. and yes, maybe she does feel genuine love resulting from that (where's the line between a genuine feeling and one engendered by circumstance? is it even possible to tell? does it matter?). but she also senses that something is very wrong. she is trapped in a gilded glass cage and wants to be let out. she needs to be challenged (but only in the ways she likes) and feel like she's achieving something on her own merits, and this whole relationship is kind of the antithesis of that. so, her only recourse is to, like, run as fast and far as she can into the dark and twisted woods on the edge of the quaint suburban town to see how far she can go before she hits a wall, and then turn right back around to dive into the lake and swim towards the song of the thing awaiting below. just bullshit like that.

like. corypheus is the first person of status to treat her like a person, in her eyes. he teaches her how to use magic beyond the bare necessities to not become an abomination. he puts trust and faith in her, lets her lead things without constantly checking up on her, believes in her. but he's using her and the fact he can dangle a future that will never happen like a carrot in order to get her to do his bidding. there is also imo canon evidence that wide swaths of what the venatori do aren't actually under calpernia's command/are happening without her knowledge - there is no way she would be okay with or even able to look the other way with the use of slaves in lyrium mining that you find, not to mention the red lyrium smuggling into tevinter with the plan of using it on slaves there to use as an army against the qunari in seheron. like it's just so blatantly against everything she stands for/the driving force of her character that i have to assume these things were hidden from her and she has less general control over the venatori than she/the inquisition is led to believe.

My theory/headcanon is that Homelander is Teddy Stillwell's biological father. We know from season 3 that Homelander is biologically Soldier Boy's son, yet he has entirely different powers from him. The way Compound V and superpowers work seems to be pretty wishy washy. Blue juice = powers, but also some supes can be natural born and the supe gene(s) can be passed down from just 1 supe parent to a child.

After killing Madelyn Stillwell, Teddy is found miles away. Only one person could have managed to do that in time, unless Teddy's powers of teleportation kicked in right at that moment (which is possible). For the sake of argument, let's say his powers hadn't developed yet or weren't responsible for that outcome. I do think it would be possible that Homelander spared Teddy Stillwell out of the nagging thought that he could be his son. Considering the resentment he had towards her baby for taking attention away from him, he should have let him just die but he didn't. At this point, he knows he has a child and is capable of fathering children. I think he might have suspected based on the nature of his relationship with Stillwell that there was a possibility the kid was his, but wasn't certain enough to do more than transport him to safety. In season 3, Teddy is at the Red River Institute, confirming he does indeed have superpowers. Unless Stillwell dosed him with V, which I'm not sure she did, then she was exposed while pregnant or breastfeeding which is possible but doesn't seem likely since she wouldn't be in Vought's Labs all that much. This leaves one remaining possibility: Teddy's father is a supe. The supe that Stillwell had a known sexual relationship with was Homelander, the same person who ended up keeping Teddy alive when there was no incentive to do so. Teddy could have a different father, but the available evidence could suggest that Homelander has 2 children.

EDIT/PS: also, even if Teddy teleported himself, the question of where he got his powers from would remain. I doubt Stillwell would dose her kid with V knowing it doesn't always work. She's not exactly in a position where she needs the money for experimenting with Vought either. I think Teddy is most likely a natural born supe, and I would think Homelander is likely one of the few if only supes on her personal roster at Vought that she would have this kind of relationship with. It seems to me that her motivation was mostly to keep Homelander pacified and malleable. If Teddy has a supe father, that person is still most likely Homelander.

one day i may take this and run with it as a whole fic, but —

peter finds this absolutely delightful. from then on, he never lets rich hear the end of it; there's probably some moment when they're, like, in the middle of a battle, and he's like, "hey, watch your hair, big ponytail!" or something like that, and rich about falls out of the sky in embarrassment. also, peter probably keeps one of those old photos for himself just so he can look at it whenever he wants. maybe for potential blackmail purposes, too.

gamora just gives rich a deadpan stare because she's never seen anything so hideous in her life and she has no words fhdhdhd