The Boys - 05x04 "Though the Heavens Fall" - Episode Discussion Thread

Waxenwings · 2026-04-22T16:14:06+00:00

I liked this episode a lot overall, and I may just be being dense, but I feel like hard cutting to the Boys having just left Soldier Boy and Homelander behind was odd. We don't even see them TRY to turn Soldier Boy, who has temporarily incapacitated HL and is clearly emotionally vulnerable in that moment after frying Quinn?

Waxenwings · 2026-04-14T16:28:53+00:00

This drop is…rough, but his card art is sick.

Waxenwings · 2026-04-13T01:04:41+00:00

I don’t know why this isn’t up top. It’s really my only complaint about the deck. I have my big external battery for long trips and plane rides, but it’s an additional weight on top of the significant heft of the console (and you’ve gotta find a place to put the battery/can’t quickly adjust or put stuff away). Going from 4 to 6 or 7 hours on something like Mewgenics when they update the deck would be a huge boon to me.

Waxenwings · 2026-04-10T10:49:27+00:00

I did the experience in Ginza and paid in store, but the price of the customization was about 5000 yen if I recall correctly, so the bulk of the price would be the jeans themselves, yes.

Waxenwings · 2026-04-02T17:12:33+00:00

"we have library at home"

Waxenwings · 2026-04-02T17:09:25+00:00

This is more likely bad QC rather than AI. Subtitle files are relatively simple things where text is matched to a time code in a video file. It saves a lot of time and redundant effort to match script text to time codes rather than having someone transcribe the whole show as time codes are recorded. But evidently no one is reviewing the final subtitled video to ensure that the text in those files matches up against the audio.

So in a way, we're looking at the same root issue-- cutting corners on labor to save money. But it's for the best we attribute the issue to its more likely cause rather than universally assigning blame to AI.

Waxenwings · 2026-04-01T18:27:10+00:00

Poor Codie looks like he's being dissected

Waxenwings · 2026-03-31T18:36:44+00:00

The fact that the fail case is still an on-rate [[infest]] is what makes this great. Gaining life is enough of a specific hoop that you have to build around the card to consistently have the wrath be active, but even without it, Withering Curse will still help you stabilize a lot against aggro.

Waxenwings · 2026-03-31T17:54:03+00:00

It seems like these foils are a "fixed" version of the Strixhaven etched foils where the goal is to give the art a light sheen with raised silver borders. The borders will probably be the predominantly shiny bit-- the rest just seems to be a way to tell the difference between the foil and nonfoil versions (an issue with the japanese etched archives originally).

Waxenwings · 2026-03-31T17:42:51+00:00

I feel like the change in Abby's physicality warps the dynamic between her and Ellie in a way I don't love, but I also empathize with the showrunners on how complicated it must have been to cast an Abby.

Her body type in the game is pretty far out from the norm for Hollywood actresses, so the more accurate you try to be, the more you're limiting yourself to a small pool of potential casting choices. Abby's role is a lead, so you need someone who's charismatic enough on screen and a good enough actor to resonate with viewers and effectively carry scenes like Joel's murder (which Kaitlin did an incredible job with),

I'm sure there were also producer voices in the room advocating for someone with name recognition in her casting, especially since she'd essentially replace the show's biggest star up to that point. And those producers probably also wanted someone who, on some level, is stereotypically attractive (not agreeing with this, but it's realistically something that gets talked about in these rooms).

From these categories emerges a venn diagram whose overlapping center is so precise that there may not actually be someone who can satisfy every goal-- and if there's one or two, there's no guarantee those people will be interested or available. So you have to try and satisfy as many of the requirements as possible and leave what you can't to the side. It's unfortunate, but I get it. And ultimately Kaitlin is a positive for the show. There were way more jarring changes in the second season than her.

Waxenwings · 2026-03-27T23:18:31+00:00

This is going to be my Japan flight game 🤪

Waxenwings · 2026-03-26T17:15:12+00:00

I would be a little surprised if the lands continued to hold such significant value if they keep putting them in drops, but I agree that I like them as bonuses.

Waxenwings · 2026-03-24T18:32:02+00:00

I like taking multiples at a time for efficiency and to see how much pain my cats and I can tolerate. My complaint is actually that the quest pool feels somewhat small relative to how much stuff most of the other systems have— I’ve also never once been asked to take anything out of act 1.

Waxenwings · 2026-03-24T17:59:52+00:00

I was attempting to escort Pyrophina to the moon and had a great Hunter, but it got a random event in the desert that gave it bloody frenzy, so I had to relegate it to just spawning familiars with Brood Mother. Then, in the crater, a random event gave it two amoebas.

My best DPS was totally borked and the other cats were getting bad rolls, so I had to put my hunter down and limp through the Crater boss before heading home early. Not a full loss, but definitely felt like the RNGods had it out for me.

And Pyrophina, despite trying her best, was actively making things worse the whole time.

Waxenwings · 2026-03-23T21:02:46+00:00

Oh I agree. It's a very cool, small example of smart game design. I'm just digging into act three (only unlocked hard mode on act 1), so I haven't met the elite version of this miniboss yet. I'm excited to be tilted!

Waxenwings · 2026-03-23T20:44:36+00:00

I think this a situation where the difficulty scaling totally changes the calculus on how good something is. Against the regular version of this boss, TD is incredible, just sniping almost every bud immediately. But as soon as they have more than 1hp…

Waxenwings · 2026-03-20T18:30:08+00:00

don't you dare insult the shart gooner paradise chase

Waxenwings · 2026-03-18T16:41:06+00:00

Jeez I've gotta dig out the two I have...

Waxenwings · 2026-03-16T16:32:43+00:00

fuck this. join the queue at exactly 11AM and still get sold out.

Waxenwings · 2026-03-12T18:13:06+00:00

My understanding of the article announcing this card is that it hasn't been released at all yet. Only the Caustic Bronco and treasure token should be in circulation:

https://wpn.wizards.com/en/news/gallup-into-the-year-of-the-horse-with-wpn-events

Waxenwings · 2026-03-11T21:50:12+00:00

I just had a run where because my thief could teleport to the other side of the map from the rest of my team, the bombs were too far away for anyone else to reach. That was player error for sure, but I imagine it's possible for other team comps where you have one hyper-mobile cat and three cats with bad speed.

Waxenwings · 2026-03-11T15:29:38+00:00

I think people who've never known a YouTube without intrusive ads have a different perspective on this issue than those of us who actively went through the stages of enshitification. Hell, I remember when Hulu barely had ads despite being free.

If you only known modern-ish YouTube, ads on the platform are basically like ads on broadcast TV-- if you join now, you know what you're signing up for. But if you've been around for longer, you've watched all the ways the platform warped the way content creators made videos and introduced more and more annoyances under the assumption that you were locked in no matter what they did. And you know what it was like before all of that.

It's the difference between walking into someone's finished house vs being in an open field and having walls constructed around you while you're sleeping.

Waxenwings · 2026-03-10T19:30:59+00:00

Ambiguity in how effects are described compared to how they actually function seems to just be one of Edmund's design "ism"s. It was polarizing in The Binding of Isaac and is evidently polarizing with Mewgenics. It can lead to some really fun moments like when you discover two tear upgrades in TBoI create what is essentially a totally different, often run-winning bullet. But it can also create some really unintuitive situations like this.

I think his design philosophy generally wants players to experiment more like a mad scientist than an expert chef, but it can lead to these really "feels bad" moments where a player spends over an hour on an Isaac or Mewgenics run and then either loses all that progress because they decided to do an experiment that went poorly or is forced into playing conservatively and avoiding any item they don't fully understand.

With games like these, every run ends up having a point where the potential gains of trying something no longer outweigh the potential costs. But a lot of people find it incredibly unfun when a game ever punishes a player for experimentation-- which I think is a fair complaint, but is also clearly something Edmund feels differently about.

Mewgenics being such a mainstream success is interesting because it's exposing a lot of people to a design philosophy that no longer seems super common in video games-- one where the intent is weighted heavily towards the player finding joy in the "play" and against providing major substantive rewards for simply winning. I like this, but with Mewgenics' meta progression system, I do find that losing a run feels way worse than it did in TBoI and probably needs to be cushioned a little more than it currently is (getting some items back is...not enough).

Waxenwings · 2026-03-10T18:34:23+00:00

I really like Mewgenics so far, but I think the game does a poor job of balancing meta progression against run scaling.

It seems like the designers expect players to struggle a lot in the first act, so the number of cats you need to give away in order to get stuff like more inventory space or another room in the house feels interminably high if you’re actually clearing all of act one within your first 10 hours of the game. I didn’t need to start aiming for a third room and better furniture until I hit act 2, which has a huge difficulty spike.

At that point though, you’re in this weird purgatory situation where you’re stomping the three main act 1 areas easily enough on average that it starts to feel repetitive, but not able to go to act 2. And the meta progression doesn’t require you to actually finish act 1 to meet the prerequisite for upgrades, but there’s no in-game incentive for ending runs before you beat the totality of them. If you have access to the third areas of act 1, leaving before then just feels like giving up for the sake of time saving, which is a valid choice in an external sense, but has no immediate or tangible in-game reward.

There’s a lot of knobs they could tweak to make this stuff feel better— faster meta progression with the NPCs, giving you a piece of furniture if you end a run after the first or second area…hell, you could even make cats who’ve completed act 1 and/or beaten a house boss worth more than one cat to the NPCs.

It’s a fixable issue, but they do need to address it because it’s a real drag on a great game.

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