I originally planned to run a broader The Boys finale recap on Friday, but after watching, I realized I needed to sit with the ending for a few days to sort through my feelings on it. I don’t have an issue with where the story finished off. The groundwork was there1, and I enjoyed most of this final season as a whole.

But something about the finale felt off in a way I still haven’t fully pinned down. The pacing may have played a role. So might the fact that so much of the ending’s emotional burden fell on Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara), a character who has already suffered more than enough. That’s one reason I waited until the series ended to write this piece. I wanted to see how much further the show would push her.

The Making of Kimiko

Kimiko’s dehumanization doesn’t start with Billy Butcher (Karl Urban) and the Boys. Butcher may be quick to see a weapon, but he’s definitely not the first person to look at her through the lens of utility instead of humanity.

The show – working within the framework established by the comics – gives Kimiko a backstory defined by coercion and survival rather than anything close to an ordinary childhood. She loses her parents young, is forced into combat training alongside her brother, and is ultimately folded into a terrorist organization before she has any real chance to develop an identity outside violence. By the time the show introduces her, Kimiko’s never really been given the opportunity to imagine herself not in survival mode. And with everything she’s been through, she’s lost her ability to speak.

A setup like that could easily reduce her to a tragic symbol, but to the show’s credit, it doesn’t leave her there entirely. Kimiko is given opportunities to confront the life that shaped her rather than exist as a passive product of it. She forms meaningful relationships, makes active choices about the kind of person she wants to become, and gradually begins defining herself outside the circumstances that created her. Her growth complicates the easier reading of Kimiko as little more than perpetual victimhood.

The larger question is whether The Boys allows that growth to stick when the narrative needs something else from her.

The Weapon

One of the reasons Kimiko makes for such a fascinating FUGC subject is that The Boys isn’t exactly a show known for handling its characters with kid gloves. Butcher’s driven by grief and obsession. Hughie Campbell (Jack Quaid) spends much of the series vacillating between insecurity and rage over his loss. Homelander’s (Antony Starr) entire worldview is warped by a pathological need for the love he was deliberately denied as a child. Trauma is what makes this world go round. Kimiko’s distinction isn’t that she has trauma. It’s how the show places her outside anything resembling personhood.

When we first meet her, she isn’t introduced as a woman in crisis or even as someone in need of help. Instead, she’s positioned as volatile and barely tethered to normal human interaction after years of captivity and exploitation. Butcher’s reaction says everything. He doesn’t see a traumatized survivor; he sees a tactical advantage.

That puts her in direct contrast with Annie January a.k.a Starlight. Both are products of Compound V, but Annie represents the version Vought knows how to market: polished, camera-ready, conventionally heroic. Her powers grant her entry into The Seven, where even exploitation comes dressed up as opportunity. Kimiko represents the version no one can monetize cleanly. She’s what happens when that same system produces something messy and harder to control, making her value immediately tied to what kind of havoc she can wreak.

Even as the series gives Kimiko more opportunities to make choices, that framing never really disappears. She doesn’t just endure violence on The Boys; she repeatedly hurls herself directly into it, taking on punishment that would permanently take out almost anyone else, only to heal and do it again. Her regenerative abilities make her uniquely useful in that regard, basically turning her into the team’s most disposable asset because the damage never has to stick physically.

By the final season, she willingly subjects herself to painful radiation treatments to acquire Soldier Boy’s abilities. That is agency, at least on paper, but the alternative is what exactly? Without her, there’s no viable plan to stop Homelander. The show may posit that decision as choice, but it still reinforces the same idea: Kimiko’s greatest value lies in how much suffering her body can absorb.

A Voice of Her Own?

For much of The Boys, Kimiko’s muteness becomes one of the most effective parts of her characterization. The show never treats her as voiceless in the broader sense – she communicates through expression, body language, sign, and deeply felt relationships. Her interiority comes through clearly enough that the eventual restoration of her speaking voice should feel like a meaningful step forward rather than a gimmick.

Instead, the final season introduces a version of Kimiko that often feels strangely out of sync with the woman the show spent years developing. The Boys already has another mute character in Black Noir, so we understand that silence itself is not being framed as some condition that automatically requires emotional resolution in this world. Kimiko finally speaking could have deepened her arc. Handing that long-awaited voice a steady stream of crude sexual remarks and wildly inappropriate porn jokes during strategy meetings suggests a writer’s room far more interested in easy shock humor than honoring the emotional work already invested in the character.

That likely explains why so much of the backlash centered less on Kimiko speaking and more on how she was written once she did. A character who explicitly references therapy and emotional self-work suddenly behaving like she can’t suppress every intrusive thought long enough to get through a serious conversation is jarring. It’s not revelatory, it’s regression.

Then the show doubles down and takes her voice away again after Frenchie’s (Tomer Capone) death, creating an even uglier implication. If speech was meant to reflect healing or some reclaimed sense of self, tying its disappearance to the loss of a man reduces years of emotional progress to romantic devastation. For a character whose entire arc has been about fighting to become more than the pain imposed on her, that’s a deeply frustrating place for her to end up.

After five seasons and seven years, you hope a show understands its characters well enough to land them somewhere that feels earned, even if not entirely happy. I never doubted Kimiko would take out Homelander. If anything, that inevitability is probably why the finale left me a little cold. The question mark in my mind was always what came after for her.

I knew better than to expect some neat domestic fantasy where she and Frenchie disappear into a life of three kids and a Bernedoodle like she once fantasized. The Boys was never going to hand Kimiko the kind of clean, conventional happy ending reserved for someone like Annie. At the same time, watching her simply say goodbye and head off on her own didn’t fully work for me either.

But maybe that discomfort and ambiguity is the point. Kimiko survives. She chooses herself, at least in theory. Still, after years of watching the show define her through suffering, violence, sacrifice, and emotional loss, it’s hard to know whether that final image reads as liberation or just one last version of abandonment.

Been a busy week at Riot Wrrrd!, so a little scheduling note before we get into the nitty gritty: The Boys will return this Friday for a bonus post, and unless Kripke and company completely fumble the ending in spectacular fashion, it’ll likely be a two-parter with the second half dropping Sunday.

In the meantime, I’ve been deep down the horror rabbit hole, which isn’t much different than usual if I’m being honest. But May has some heavy hitters on deck and I’ve been first in line to be emotionally walloped. Obsession is the latest low-budget horror entry making big waves with folks fawning over it left and right, but I had a slightly more unexpected reaction given all the hype I’d heard going into it.

The thing is that I get exactly why the film is landing for people. It really commits to its premise and hits on something culturally recognizable. That said, it brought up a much messier question about my own evolving relationship with horror as a genre.

TL;DR Plot: After breaking the mysterious “One Wish Willow” to win his crush’s heart, a hopeless romantic finds himself getting exactly what he asked for but soon discovers that some desires come at a dark, sinister price.

Starring: Inde Navarrette, Michael Johnston, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, and Andy Richter

Director: Curry Barker

Writer: Curry Barker

How to Watch It: Currently in theaters

Trailer:

Obsession is built around a clever little horror setup. A lonely “nice guy” named Bear1 (Michael Johnston), makes a supernatural wish for the woman he wants to love him more than anyone else in the world. It all goes to shit when he finds himself trapped inside the most grotesque possible version of that fantasy as Nikki (Inde Navarrette2) becomes unrecognizable in more ways than one. There’s obvious cultural currency there since we live in an era where male entitlement has been dissected, meme’d, exposed, and turned into its own recognizable archetype. A horror film taking that impulse and mutating it into a nightmare makes perfect sense.

And to be clear, I’m not arguing the film fails at communicating that idea. What I’ve been stuck on since seeing it is how it treats Nikki.

Bear may be the one who makes the wish, but Nikki is the one forced to endure its the harshest of its consequences. By the end of the film, I wasn’t thinking about the setup so much as the sheer amount of suffering the film had put this unsuspecting girl through.

Obsession occasionally acknowledges Nikki’s humanity in ways that suggest a much more interesting and disturbing film, then refuses to follow that thread.

There are flashes where Nikki seems aware of what is happening to her, frightened by her own behavior, even desperate for release from whatever Bear’s wish has turned her into. Writer and director, Curry Barker, has no problem establishing that there’s a woman trapped inside this prison of a body, but then makes the decision to keep her at arm’s length while subjecting her to increasingly brutal humiliation.

Nikki defecates on herself. She takes a broken bottle to her own face. Bear sexually assaults her early on, in a moment the film moves through with a startling lack of interest. Barker is interested in the monstrous escalation of Bear’s supernatural punishment, but Nikki’s interior experience remains frustratingly out of reach. If her suffering is central to the horror, why is the audience denied meaningful access to her perspective? Why does the emotional point of identification remain with the man who caused this in the first place? Who is Nikki outside of being the person in Bear’s crosshairs?

That’s where the male gaze question started knocking on the inside of my skull during my viewing. Horror has always asked audiences to sit through ugly things and more often than not, the person on the receiving end of the most heinous behavior is a woman. But since the director or writer is almost always male, are we ever able to connect with a final girl without a decidedly male filter skewing our view of the character?

That simple truth and how persistently Obsession keeps Nikki’s humanity visible enough to register while refusing to let her personhood fully take shape unsettled me in a way I still can’t fully articulate.

Part of me has to ask if Obsession is benefiting from a larger audience need for punishment. Crappy men rarely face consequences on screen – or in life, if we’re being real here – that actually reflect their actions, so I completely get why this film is resonating with people. Watching a terrible person engineer their own destruction is pretty damn cathartic.

But what gets normalized in the process of our collective catharsis? At one point, Nikki breaks through and begs Bear to kill her and end this nightmare. Instead of recognizing how far he’s gone, he’s stung that she doesn’t want to be with him and leaves her to suffer. The scene is meant to show us how self-absorbed and depraved Bear has become, with Nikki’s desperation almost being a secondary factor in the moment. Her plea for death made me wonder whether we’ve entered a strange cultural feedback loop where recognizable politics can make familiar forms of female suffering feel easier to accept.

We’ve become very good at identifying stories about toxic masculinity, coercion, and male entitlement, and that language is undeniably useful if we’re actually going to be better as a society. But I do question whether there are moments where quickly recognizing the message short-circuits a deeper interrogation of the method. If a film is perceived as being on the right side of the argument, how much scrutiny do we still give the collateral damage used to make its point?

I’m open to the possibility that some of this is personal for me. Horror has been my favorite genre for years, and grief has changed plenty about how I move through the world. It could be that my tolerance for certain kinds of suffering has evolved and that’s all there is to it. But I can’t get past the feeling that Obsession is revealing something deeper and more alarming about spectatorship, particularly when it comes to the suffering women are expected to take on.

Maybe I’m overthinking things3. It could be that I caught Obsession on the wrong day or in the wrong headspace, with less patience for this particular brand of horror than I used to have.

Still, I can’t imagine leaving that theater thinking what happened to Nikki was simply the price of admission.

Overall Rating: I typically link my Letterboxd rating here but I’ll keep it a buck with you guys, I don’t know how to rate this. I can appreciate that it’s well made and it’s a solid story. Hell, there are some things about it I really loved (the scenes where Nikki is shrouded in darkness except for the possessed glint in her eyes are straight up baller), but I think this is one of those instances where this movie just wasn’t for me so I’m having a hard time judging it fairly.

I’m not even going to pretend to be chill about this – Sarah Michelle Gellar is stepping back into a villain role and it has my full attention.

Look, I’m always going to show up for SMG. That part is non-negotiable. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is my forever number one. But there’s a different kind of fun in watching her play someone controlled, calculated, and fully aware of the damage she’s inflicting.

With Ready or Not 2: Here I Come hitting theaters today, I decided to return to one of my favorite characters for this Friday bonus post: Kathryn Merteuil from 1999’s Cruel Intentions. She doesn’t slip into cruelty casually. She builds her entire inner life around it. Everything she does is intentional, practiced, and just detached enough to keep her from ever being the one who looks out of control.

Which makes her an interesting fit for the Fcked Up Girls Club.

Marcia Fucking Brady of the Upper East Side

Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar) enters Cruel Intentions as the perfect young woman. In front of Cecile (Selma Blair) and Mrs. Caldwell (Christine Baranski), she’s composed, polished, and almost aggressively respectable. A scene later, once Cecile and her mother have left and she’s alone with Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe), the other Kathryn steps forward – the one who’s biting, calculating, and fully privy to how the game’s played.

That contrast does a lot of work pretty quickly. It gives Kathryn an outer shell and an inner life without confusing the two for the audience. The proper girl is the version her world wants. The one underneath is the version that learned what the cost of being that person. By the time the bet with Sebastian starts driving the plot, the film has already shown us that Kathryn’s real talent is not manipulation on its own. It’s presentation; knowing when to appear harmless, when to bare her teeth, and when to let someone else take the fall.

Rules for Me, but Not for Thee

The film draws its lines early and lets a useless guy like Court Reynolds (Charlie O’Connell) enforce them without question. Kathryn is written off as too sexually experienced, while Cecile is valued for the exact opposite. That makes her safe and worth choosing. Annette (Reese Witherspoon) sits even higher in that hierarchy, her restraint reading as virtue instead of limitation.

What Kathryn understands better than anyone in the mix is that once a girl is seen a certain way, it tends to stick. There’s no reset, no second chance. Cecile’s innocence protects her for now, Annette’s abstinence elevates her, and Kathryn’s experience defines her before she even opens her mouth1. The film never gives Kathryn an authority figure who interrupts that logic or offers her another framework to work from, so she builds her own out of what’s already there.

That’s why her dynamic with Cecile feels so deliberate. Kathryn doesn’t treat innocence as something to preserve because she doesn’t believe it will hold. She treats it as temporary and starts preparing Cecile for what comes after, reframing desire as something that needs to be managed and experience as something that can be used. When Sebastian coerces Cecile into a sexual encounter, Kathryn reads it through that same lens and calls it progress. It’s a brutal response, but it follows the rules Kathryn has learned: once a girl is seen sexually, the question is no longer whether she’ll be judged, but how she’ll survive being judged.

Kathryn applies that same logic to herself with far more control. She withholds sex from Sebastian, turns it into incentive, and keeps it conditional because she knows exactly what happens when that control slips. Cecile is pushed into experience and left to deal with it. Annette is protected by a narrative that reframes her choices as meaningful. Kathryn gets neither option, which is why she stays one step removed, managing perception before it can settle into something permanent.

Her manipulation doesn’t come out of nowhere. It grows out of a world that has already decided who she is and offers her no real way to be anything else.

Terms and Conditions

The bet with Sebastian lays out how Kathryn operates with total clarity. If he can seduce Annette – the one girl who has made a point of waiting – Kathryn will reward him by sleeping with him. If he can’t, she gets his beloved vintage car. She defines the stakes, decides what counts as success, and removes any ambiguity about what this is all supposed to be.

That kind of structure is the point. Kathryn doesn’t leave space for things to unfold on their own because that would require her to react instead of dictate. By setting the terms up front, she controls the outcome before anything actually happens.

Sebastian fits into neatly because he understands how to perform within it. He knows how to pursue, how to adjust, how to push past resistance when he’s given a target. Annette’s positioned as a challenge, but also as proof of concept. If someone like her can be persuaded, then her boundaries don’t hold much weight to begin with.

What she manages much more carefully is Sebastian. The reward is always conditional, always tied to whether he follows through, which keeps him moving in the direction she’s set. Even when his behavior starts to shift, she pulls him back by reframing the situation in terms he recognizes, reminding him who he is supposed to be within this dynamic and what he stands to lose if he steps outside of it.

The problem is that the structure only works if everyone plays their predetermined part. Once Sebastian starts treating Annette as something other than a goal, the logic Kathryn is relying on begins to break down. His hesitation introduces something she hasn’t accounted for, not because it’s complicated, but because there’s no transaction to be had to fix things to her liking.

Her response is to force the situation back into something controllable. She reframes this newfound love as weakness and pushes him toward breaking it off. It works briefly, but it makes it clear she can’t control what he actually feels.

A Public Image Execution

After Sebastian dies, his journal makes rounds at the funeral. And it lays out everything: the bet, Annette, and Kathryn’s manipulation of damn near everyone. She never gets a chance to get in front of it. Within minutes, the version of her that she’s been presenting all film – composed, respectable, always in control – is wiped out.

What’s always bugged me is that no one challenges it. No one asks whether the journal complete or if it’s been altered. The journal lands, and that’s enough because it lines up cleanly with what people already believed about her.

Sebastian leaves behind something far more forgiving. The same journal that exposes him also lets him speak for himself, to frame what he did in his own words and show some awareness of it. His death closes that loop before anyone can question it, leaving behind a version of him that feels more layered than the one we started with.

Kathryn doesn’t get that kind of grace. Everything is out in the open, stripped of context, and no one is interested in filling in the gaps or even asking her side of things. She’s a girl the film never allows to be anything else, and by the end, yes she’s still alive – she’s just not the one who gets to survive.

1

***Spoilers for AMC’s Interview with the Vampire ahead***

Interview with the Vampire unfolds as a story of memory. Some memories are more slippery than others as the vampire Louis (Jacob Anderson) sits down to recount his life, the people he loved, and the choices that continue to haunt him. The version of events we see is shaped by that act of remembering which is understandably clouded by grief, by guilt, and by the need to explain how everything went so wrong.

Claudia (Bailey Bass in season one, Delainey Hayles in season two) sits at the center of this fragile recounting. She’s Louis’ daughter in all but name, the third pillar in a volatile relationship with the vampire Lestat (Sam Reid), and one of the deepest wounds Louis carries through the rest of his existence. For much of the series, the audience encounters her through his retelling: a girl he loved, a life he helped create, and a tragedy he still struggles to understand himself.

Scattered throughout that story, another voice cuts through the haze. Claudia’s diaries appear in fragments, brief glimpses of the person she understood herself to be. In those pages, the portrait shifts into something darker, angrier, and more fucked up than Louis ever seems willing to allow.

In the Beginning...

The show itself is rooted in a rich literary history. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, first published in 1976, is structured around a vampire recounting his life story to a journalist and is the first installment of The Vampire Chronicles – a 13-book series that also happens to be one of my favorite things ever. The AMC adaptation keeps that core conceit while moving the timeline forward a little. Louis now sits across from journalist Daniel Molloy (Eric Bogosian) decades after their first meeting, revisiting his past and revising the version of events he once told.

The character of Claudia also has a deeply personal origin for Rice. She was inspired by the author’s young daughter, Michele, who died of leukemia in 1972 at the age of five, so that grief is deeply embedded in the character from the beginning. The AMC series rearranges some details – most notably Claudia’s age, moving her from five years old in the novel to fourteen on screen. What remains intact is the core emotional engine of the character: a child forced into a permanent state of being, grappling with a life she never chose and a rage she has no real outlet for.

A Tale of Two Claudias

Claudia enters Louis’ life as an act of desperation. In the show’s early episodes, he pulls a dying girl from a fire during a race riot he inadvertently started in the New Orleans French Quarter and begs Lestat to turn her into a vampire. Lestat obliges to keep Louis from leaving him, hoping a child will buoy a drowning relationship. From that point forward, Claudia becomes the frail center of their makeshift family – sometimes a daughter, mostly a hostage, and in the end a failed attempt at domestic stability.

For a little while, though, it does work. Louis falls completely into the role of doting father. His account preserves Claudia largely as the daughter he loved and the proof that something tender once existed between the violence and betrayal that defined his and Lestat’s lives together. Her diaries tell a far harsher story. Instead of the musings of a lonely child, Claudia’s journals read like the record of someone slowly losing their tether to reality.

The entries reveal a transformation Louis’ memory rarely confronts directly as Claudia evolves into an unrepentant killer. She documents her hunts, noting the instant a victim understands what she is. Some entries are written in blood, preserving their final words like trophies. The journals become a reflection of a fractured psyche, proof of how quickly a young, impressionable mind adapts to a life built around killing.

Her anger circles back to the same target again and again. Lestat is the one who trapped her in this body, the one who ultimately decided a dying girl would remain a girl forever. The diaries trace how that resentment turns from fury into intent. Long before the household collapses both literally and figuratively, Claudia’s writing makes clear that she’s already imagining a future that doesn’t include him.

While Louis can’t help but reflect on the daughter he loved so dearly, the diaries offer an unfiltered glimpse at how trauma can warp the conscience. Each word reveals a mind being remolded behind the innocence of a child’s face, cataloging every grievance and every wrong. He can’t let go of the perfect image he’s created while the diaries reveal Claudia as something far more frightening: an equal who has already decided she’s done waiting for him to figure that out.

Eternity, The Echo Chamber

What’s it like to be trapped in the body of a child when you’re twenty-five? What about forty? Eighty?

Each year stretches the distance between the person Claudia is and the child the world sees standing in front of them. Strangers dismiss her. Adults patronize her. Any attempt at independence reads as misbehavior because the voice delivering it comes from the body of a fourteen-year-old girl.

Her attempt to find a love of her own ends in heartache when she accidentally kills her first love, Charlie, during a moment of passion before she even realizes what she’s done. She brings his body to Lestat, begging him to turn Charlie the way he once turned her. Lestat’s response is to mock her. Then he makes her watch as he burns what’s left. Louis tries to reach for her afterward, but there’s nothing to hold onto. The girl who wanted love badly enough to risk everything for it closes off something that never fully reopens.

It’s not the first time the world has taught her that softness is a liability. Her mother died giving birth to her. The relatives who took her in offered little protection. The show hints at physical abuse from the aunt who raised her and suggests other men in the family may have viewed her as something to exploit. Immortality gives her strength and power no human could imagine. It doesn’t give her authority.

That history unfolds in Jim Crow–era New Orleans, where being a young Black girl already carries its own set of dangers. Becoming a vampire doesn’t remove those conditions so much as freeze them in place. The vulnerability she learned as a child becomes the foundation of an existence that can never progress beyond girlhood.

The show never lets that truth fade into the background. The future most people assume they will grow into – adulthood, independence, the freedom to build a life on their own terms – has already been sealed off. The only thing allowed to evolve is Claudia’s awareness of what’s happening around her.

Once that understanding settles in, another realization follows close behind: she may not be able to change the circumstances of her existence, but she can remove the man who created them.

The Cardinal Sin

Before Claudia concocts a plan to take out her maker, she boards a train out of New Orleans determined to find other vampires and some version of a life that doesn’t revolve around the volatile orbit that is Louis and Lestat. The attempt ends almost immediately when Lestat intercepts the train and slaughters every single passenger to bring her back.

This need to control isn’t even about Claudia, but she remains the one thing capable of keeping Louis tied to him. If she disappears, Lestat knows it’s only a matter of time until Louis follows.

Claudia returns to the life that’s suffocating her, but with no illusion of trying to hold it together anymore. She’s outgrown being their makeshift patch job. Whatever hope once existed that the three of them might continue living inside that delicate arrangement disappears and is replaced by cold calculation.

What she cannot know yet is that this act carries consequences far beyond their home in New Orleans. In the vampire world, killing one’s maker is considered an unforgivable sin by some. Her move towards freedom is a crime that will eventually follow her across the Atlantic.

Lestat is poisoned, his throat cut, and his body dumped in a city landfill while Louis and Claudia flee New Orleans in search of other vampires. Their journey eventually leads them to Paris and the Théâtre des Vampires, a coven that initially appears to offer the community Claudia had been longing for.

Instead, the coven treats Lestat’s murder as an indefensible violation of vampire law. Claudia is condemned to die by the sun and destroyed by the same family she crossed an ocean hoping to find.

The Page Is the Witness

Claudia’s diaries do more than fill in character detail. They function as a parallel record inside a story otherwise controlled by Louis. Where he hesitates, rationalizes, or retreats into guilt, Claudia rarely affords herself that distance. Her entries are blunt about the life she’s been given and the very people responsible for it.

Louis is remembering events decades later, trying to repackage them into something he can stomach enough to live with. The diaries exist much closer to the authentic moment. They follow the progression from confusion to anger to calculation. They document the killings Louis struggles to justify. They record the resentment that eventually builds into a tide of all-consuming rage toward Lestat and sets the rest of the story in motion.

Seen through that lens, Claudia may be the most fully realized of the Fucked Up Girls so far – a character whose damage isn’t hinted at or explained away, but documented in her own words, by her own hand.

It still isn’t enough to save her.

Welcome to F*cked Up February!

Okay, that’s not a thing. I just really like alliteration and it feels more fitting than all of the Valentine’s Day stuff we’re about to get inundated with. But speaking of things I am making official: The F*cked Up1 Girls Club has had this name for years. I just never knew what to do with it, so I’ve decided to let it live here as an open-ended series.

FUGC was always meant to begin with Faith Lehane. The Eleven piece came first purely because of timing thanks to Netflix announcing their documentary. But Faith’s been waiting. One of my favorite characters2 from my favorite show, and the exact blueprint for what this series exists to explore.

Fair warning: these pieces are beefier gals than my usual stuff, so FUGC isn’t sticking to a monthly schedule. They’ll arrive when they’re ready, which means this series is living beyond February.

Alright, let’s talk about Faith.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is built on a very specific premise: one teenage girl is chosen to fight vampires and demons so everyone else can live in denial. She’s called the Slayer. The burden is meant to be singular – one girl, one body, absorbing the danger so the rest of the world doesn’t have to.

That singularity is what justifies everything the show puts Buffy Summers (Sarah Michelle Gellar) through. The isolation. The violence. The expectation that she will endure whatever the job requires and still show up the next day. And when she inevitably loses and dies, even briefly, another slayer is activated.

Early in the series, Buffy drowns and is revived minutes later. That moment triggers the calling of Kendra, who is later killed in battle. That’s how Faith Lehane (Eliza Dushku) enters the story – not as a twist or mythic exception, but as a simple mechanical consequence. The system doesn’t pause to mourn or reflect. It just calls the next one up.

Faith arrives with the same strength and calling as Buffy, but without any of the protections Buffy has built in. No Watcher who sees her as a daughter. No mother anchoring her to a life outside the fight. No friends invested in keeping her alive and accountable. Buffy has been slowly surrounded by a structure designed to keep her functional. Faith… Not so much. And yet, she’s still expected to do the job. Kill what needs killing. Take the hits. Keep it moving.

That imbalance is the condition Faith enters under, and it’s the pressure that defines everything that follows.

The Anti-Buffy Takes Shape

The show doesn’t wait long to start positioning Faith as Buffy’s opposite, and it does it visually before it ever does it morally. Faith isn’t introduced as another Slayer so much as a darker draft of one; Buffy is blonde, increasingly polished, her look softening as her authority settles in. Faith shows up dark-haired, leather-clad, rough around the edges. These aren’t neutral choices. They’re cues for the viewer.

Where Buffy is learning how to balance responsibility with the possibility of a future, Faith is framed as what happens when that balance is never offered. She’s the version of the role stripped of approval, stability, and long-term imagination.

That framing becomes obvious when the adults around Buffy begin to entertain the idea that Faith could take over full Slayer duties. Her mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland), and Watcher, Giles (Anthony Stewart Head), float the possibility that Buffy might step back, go to college, and live something resembling a normal life. What’s striking is how casually this substitution is discussed – and how Faith herself is completely excluded from it. No one asks her if she wants that responsibility, if she’s ready for it, or what it would cost her. She’s treated less like a person than a solution.

It all comes crashing down once Faith accidentally kills the Deputy Mayor after mistaking him for a vampire during battle. That’s the moment the show reveals what it’s really doing. Faith stops being a potential replacement and becomes a containment strategy. All the impulses the series is unwilling to assign to Buffy – rage, recklessness, moral drift – get handed to Faith instead.

Buffy stabbing Faith and leaving her in a coma is the most extreme expression of that strategy. Faith is the only human Buffy ever seriously considers killing, not because Faith is beyond saving, but because she represents a version of Buffy the show isn’t prepared to explore directly.

From here on out, Faith isn’t just contrasted with Buffy. She’s used to shield her. The show gets to explore what a Slayer going dark might look like without ever letting its hero cross that line. Faith’s trauma isn’t incidental to that function; it’s the backbone. It’s piled on, intensified, and then presented as evidence.

The Infamous Body Swap

Faith’s history reaches the audience in pieces, and the show never seems interested in assembling them into anything whole. We are given fragments instead of scenes, implications instead of texture. Her past exists to explain her behavior, not to be explored on its own terms.

We know Faith has no parents in the picture, but the details stop there. There is no sense of where she lived, what her life looked like, or what she lost before arriving in Sunnydale. The show provides absence without curiosity.

The same approach shapes how her Watchers are handled. Faith witnesses the violent death of the first one assigned to her, an event that should register as shattering. Instead, it is introduced quickly and folded into her characterization without aftermath. The loss explains her volatility and then disappears. The next Watcher turns out to be a fraud who pretends to offer guidance and then tries to kill her. It is a profound betrayal, but again, the show doesn’t linger. These moments function as plot accelerants, not as experiences Faith is allowed to inhabit.

In Season 4, Faith wakes up from her coma for a 2-episode arc in “This Year’s Girl” and “Who Are You?”, where she uses a supernatural gadget to swap bodies with Buffy. She takes over her life, moving through her home, her relationships, and the authority that comes with being recognized as the Slayer everyone already trusts. Buffy wakes up in Faith’s body and immediately encounters the suspicion and containment that have come to define Faith’s place in the story.

The episodes spend most of their time inside Faith’s experience of Buffy’s world. We see how easily Faith adapts to being believed. How natural it feels for her to move through spaces where concern is automatic and her strength is read as something admirable rather than dangerous. The desire underneath it is not subtle. Faith wants to be a hero. She wants to be loved. She wants the kind of recognition Buffy receives without having to ask for it.

What we do not get is a deeper look at Faith’s own life. Buffy’s time in Faith’s body is confined to institutional spaces and moments of control. A hospital room. Custody. Interrogation. These scenes reinforce how Faith is perceived, but they do not open up her inner world or fill in the gaps the show has already left blank. Even in a storyline built around literal embodiment, Faith’s interior life remains inaccessible.

When the swap ends, Faith leaves Buffy’s orbit entirely. Whatever the experience changed for her unfolds far from the Sunnydale city limits. The body swap teased insight into Faith’s inner world. What it delivers is a clearer picture of Buffy’s.

The Limits of Redemption

Faith returns in the final season having already made choices the show once insisted she was incapable of making. She has taken responsibility for what she did and accepted punishment. She has lived with consequence. Her reentry into Buffy’s world comes after accountability, not in place of it.

More importantly, her help is needed. It’s the ultimate battle between good and evil with Buffy gearing up to take on The First. The problem is the only real help Buffy has in the final season are a bunch of slayers-in-waiting. Faith isn’t exactly welcomed with open arms, but she’s not turned away. Another experienced Slayer is useful. Another body on the line is necessary. The show presents her as someone who has already survived the worst version of herself and learned how to live with what remains.

The tension surfaces anyway, because Faith’s presence reopens wounds the show never tended to. Faith’s growth does not erase history, and it doesn’t dissolve the pressure Buffy has been carrying. When the Potential Slayers turn on Buffy and choose Faith to lead them instead, the rupture feels less like a referendum on strength than an expression of exhaustion. Buffy has been exacting and unyielding in her leadership. Faith feels easier in the moment. Less punishing to follow.

She accepts the role, and the experiment collapses quickly. She leads a mission that leaves several of the Potentials gravely injured. The fallout is immediate. The show doesn’t slow down to explore the decision as a difficult call made under pressure. At the same time, Buffy’s instincts about a secret weapon being hidden from her are proven correct, restoring her authority without ambiguity.

By the time the final battle arrives, Faith and Buffy are fighting side by side again. The reconciliation is real, but so is the restraint around it. Faith is changed when she comes back. There’s no doubt that she’s steadier, and more capable of standing in the fight without burning everything down. That growth is allowed to register, but only in ways that stabilize what already exists. Faith’s healing strengthens the story at the moment it is most needed, then narrows back into support as the shape of the world reasserts itself.

So welcome to FUGC, Faith Lehane.

Membership isn’t about being misunderstood or left behind. It’s about being built to carry what the story isn’t ready to put on its hero. You absorb the fallout. You take the risks. You test the darker possibilities so the moral center can stay intact.

And once that work is done, the story moves forward. With or without you.

You guys know I like to be honest with you since we’re all friends here. I planned to take a break from Stranger Things 5 coverage and shelf this piece until next month as the launch of a new series called The Fucked Up Girls Club. But Netflix announced a documentary on the final season due out tomorrow and they’ve already teased that a debate over Eleven’s fate will be featured, so it made sense to drop this now.

The Fucked Up Girls Club always felt like it would evolve similarly to how Black Horror History Corner did – meaning, it was always likely to stick around well beyond its intended timeline. The series will revolve around a simple question: when a story centers a traumatized woman, does it actually center her – or does it just orbit her pain? This theme isn’t about demanding healing arcs, redemption, or tidy “growth.” It’s about agency. About whether these characters are allowed interiority, choice, contradiction, and consequence – or whether their suffering is simply a tool the story uses to motivate everyone else.

The fucked up girl isn’t a side character. She’s the axis. What I’d like to get to the bottom of is whether the narrative treats her like a person or a device. Who better to kick it off this series than the hero and primary female protagonist of Stranger Things, Jane “Eleven” Hopper.

A Love Letter to Misfits?

***Spoiler Alerts for the series finales of Stranger Things, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Supernatural***

From its earliest episodes, Stranger Things has framed itself as a story for people who don’t quite fit. Not aspirational heroes or chosen prodigies, but kids marked as strange, awkward, excessive, or wrong. The language around the show has always emphasized outsiders – freaks, misfits, the ones who exist just outside the boundaries of what’s considered normal or safe.

What makes the series work isn’t just its genre trappings or its affection for the past, but its insistence that belonging can be built. Found family is not a secondary theme; it’s the emotional logic of the show. The kids survive because they find one another, because difference becomes a shared language instead of a liability. The monsters may be supernatural, but the fear they tap into is deeply human: the fear of being seen as disposable.

Trauma runs through the series, but it is never supposed to be the final word. Pain is something these characters carry, not something that disqualifies them from love, stability, or a future. The show’s promise is that being othered does not mean you are meant to disappear. It means you deserve a place where you are known and chosen anyway.

Stories like this are important because they give shape to belonging before it feels attainable. For young people – especially girls – who grow up feeling out of place in their bodies, their families, or their classrooms, a show that centers misfits does more than mirror discomfort. It offers a working example of finding your people anyway. It suggests that being strange isn’t something to correct or outgrow, but a way of moving through the world that can still lead to connection, care, and safety. When you’re young and isolated, that promise isn’t just an idea. It’s grounding – the idea that even if you don’t fit now, there might still be a place where you will.

Eleven, Misfit-in-Chief

Eleven’s (Millie Bobby Brown) otherness isn’t metaphorical. It’s literal, systemic, and violent. From the moment she is born, she is denied the most basic markers of childhood. She’s taken from her mother’s arms and led to believe she died during childbirth and what follows isn’t just neglect, but containment – a childhood spent in a lab, reduced to a test subject, valued only for what her body can produce.

By the time she escapes the lab, the damage to her psyche is already done. Eleven enters the world without language for what’s been taken from her, without any sense of safety that doesn’t have to be earned through pain. And before she’s even old enough to think about high school, she’s asked to do the impossible: to confront evils that adults can barely comprehend, let alone survive. The show treats this as destiny, but it’s also exploitation. She’s repeatedly placed in harm’s way because she can be, because no one else can do what she does.

When Eleven finally reaches something resembling a normal adolescence, that promise falls apart just as quickly. High school doesn’t offer reprieve; it delivers a new kind of cruelty. She’s bullied relentlessly for her clothes, her speech, her otherness – for every visible reminder that she doesn’t fit. Her trauma doesn’t make her exceptional here. It makes her a target.

What makes this especially painful is that the show knows how much she wants to belong. With Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and the rest of the group, Eleven finds something close to home – chosen family, protection, love that isn’t conditional on usefulness. For brief stretches, she’s allowed to just be a kid among other kids, not a weapon or a solution.

But the question the series never fully answers is whether that version of Eleven is allowed to last. Again and again, her belonging is interrupted by necessity. She’s pulled back into service, back into sacrifice, back into being the one who has to end the endless threats. Even when she is loved, she’s still a tool.

That’s the heartbreak at the center of her story. Not just that she is different, but that her difference is never allowed to stop being useful. The show insists she matters, that she is cherished, that she deserves happiness – and then repeatedly structures the narrative so that her pain is what makes everything else possible.

Eleven is the ultimate misfit not because she doesn’t belong, but because the story never quite lets her be anything other than a means to an end.

The Ending That Wasn’t

By the time the series reaches its end, Eleven is no longer being asked how to win. She’s being asked how much she’s willing to give up.

The choice placed in front of her is framed as necessary, even noble. Stay behind and stop evil for good. End the cycle. Protect everyone else. It’s presented as agency, but it’s a version of agency shaped entirely by constraint. Eleven isn’t choosing between two futures she wants. She’s choosing between outcomes she’s been told are inevitable.

That framing here is critical, because both versions of the ending demand sacrifice at the expense of her happiness. In one, she dies and her life ends where it began – defined by violence, imprisonment, and utility. In the other, she survives, but only by leaving everything behind. Her family. Her community. The people who taught her how to exist outside a lab.

The show treats these outcomes as meaningfully different, but emotionally they converge. Death is final, but exile is a slower erasure and raises a quieter, crueler question: what is a life worth if it has to be lived without the people who made it possible?

This is where the ambiguity starts feeling punitive. The finale refuses to confirm whether Eleven lives or dies, but either answer comes with the same underlying logic. There is no version of the ending where she gets to stay and be whole. There is no future imagined for her that includes both survival and belonging.

By refusing to choose, the show makes Eleven choose everything. It hands her the burden of the ending and calls it grace.

When There’s No More Story To Tell

Some stories do need to end with a main character’s death. Finality can be honest. It can feel earned. It can bring resolution to a character whose arc has already given them everything the story has to offer. The problem isn’t death itself. It’s whether that death serves the broader story and makes sense for the life that came before it.

That distinction stands out when thinking about how different genre shows handle their finales. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example, effectively has two endings. Buffy dies at the end of the fifth season – a series finale of sorts as the show was set to change networks – sacrificing herself to save the world. On paper, it’s a classic heroic conclusion. In practice, it feels horribly cruel. That death would have folded Buffy back into a long lineage of slayers who lived short, violent lives and left little behind besides the fact that they kept the world turning for a bit longer. The cycle would have continued. Another slayer would rise. Buffy would have been remembered as just another slayer, but not one who really changed anything.

The show decided to walk it back the following season because while that moment resolves the plot cleanly enough, it undercuts the story’s deeper work. Buffy’s survival through season seven allows something bigger and more meaningful to happen. She doesn’t just stop another apocalypse; she breaks the cycle that defined her life by learning to truly share her power. She’s able to figure out that survival doesn’t require endless sacrifice from her alone. The world is still saved, but Buffy gets to grow, to choose, and to live with what she’s learned. It’s an ending that gave me hope when I first watched it as a teenager.

At the other end of the spectrum is Supernatural. At the end of that series, Dean and eventually Sam’s deaths feel less like punishment than release. After years of loss, repetition, and deferred peace, the idea that they finally get to rest makes complete sense. Their deaths don’t erase their lives or cut their arcs short. They close them. Eternity in Paradise isn’t a consolation prize; it’s the only ending that honors what they’ve already endured.

What these endings have in common is commitment. Whether the character lives or dies, the story follows through on what that choice means. Death isn’t used to avoid imagining the future, and survival isn’t treated as something that has to be hidden away. Those endings commit to answering the question the series’ had been asking all along: what was all of this for?

The Choice That Wasn’t

What’s frustrating about El’s ending isn’t just that it’s devastating and tragic. It’s that it feels smaller than the story Stranger Things spent years telling. After all this time, after all this emphasis on found family and staying together through the worst of it, the show can’t quite imagine what comes next for the person who needed that promise the most.

By treating her removal as a natural consequence of who she is – too powerful, too hunted, too dangerous to remain – the finale quietly reinforces the idea the show once pushed back against. In this scenario the misfit can belong as long as they’re useful, but it was never meant to be forever. Eventually, they have to go for the benefit of everyone else.

This is where the language of choice does its cleanest and most vicious work. If Eleven chooses anything other than leaving, it’s fundamentally selfish. But leaving means the creators don’t have to reckon with building a world that actually holds her. They can gesture at love without ever testing it. The show preserves the comfort of its message while sidestepping the harder question it raised: what responsibility do we have to the people we save once the crisis is over?

Where Do the Outcasts Go?

There’s a moment in the finale where Hopper (David Harbour), finally understanding what Eleven plans to do, begs her to keep fighting. Not to save the world again, but to stay. To live. To have a future. He names what’s been done to her – the experiments, the manipulation, the way adults have treated her body and her pain as a means to an end. He tells her she deserves a life beyond all of it. Not as a weapon. Not as a sacrifice. As a person.

The Duffer Brothers have said this scene was inspired by real debates in the writers’ room about what to do with Eleven. That admission lands like a slap to the face because it confirms that the show understands the cost of asking this of her. It knows the history it’s invoking. It knows what kind of ending this threatens to become.

That’s why Eleven’s fate doesn’t just feel like a betrayal to the character. It feels like a failure of responsibility to the audience she represents. For young women who see themselves in Eleven – in her anger, her awkwardness, her longing to belong – the message lands hard. You can survive unimaginable harm. You can save everyone else. You can do everything right. And still, the story may not make room for you to stay.

Shows built around misfits offer something powerful when they work. They give young people a way to imagine themselves not just surviving the world, but finding their place inside it. When that promise collapses at the finish line, the loss isn’t theoretical. It’s personal. It teaches a quieter lesson: that for girls like Eleven, survival may be possible, but acceptance is far from it.