Cannibalism as a metaphor for love is already a worn-out theme, but what if cannibalism is a metaphor for the highest degree of power? Naturally, this shouldn't be examined only through Hannibal, but also through the example of Homelander from The Boys. He is a victim of the capitalist order in society, essentially a product of consumerism and a lab mouse, out of which eventually grew a wounded god with a human's complex — one who, throughout the entire series, reached the peak of narcissism, completely denying love and attachment to people. His consumption of other people is cannibalism in its purest form.
Vought creates him, sells his image, turning his body, personality, and trauma into a commercial product. But as his own power grows, Homelander begins to reproduce that same behavioral model. He doesn't just start controlling people — he consumes them.
This isn't, of course, about literally eating flesh — Homelander feeds on people in a different sense. He feeds on their attention, admiration, fear, love, and loyalty, turning people into a resource. This is why cannibalism becomes the logical conclusion of this process. Cannibalism becomes sovereignty over another's body, where love and power cease to exist separately. Power normally presupposes that the subordinate continues to exist. Kings don't eat their subjects, and a dictator always needs living citizens. But cannibalism destroys the very possibility of resistance, because the object of power ceases to exist as a separate being.
This is where his image as a "god" fits in beautifully.
In religion, sacrifice is usually performed by a human for the sake of a deity. With Homelander, the reverse process occurs: the god himself begins to consume people. So his cannibalism can be read as a marker of the transition from a human with power to a being that no longer recognizes human boundaries or the value of humanity at all.
It turns out that the cannibalism reading works far more powerfully than the capitalism reading. Capitalism explains Homelander's origin here, while cannibalism shows the endpoint of his development: not love, not intimacy, not hunger, but the conviction that the people around him exist solely for his consumption. That's why the act becomes not physiological but almost theological — a demonstration of the divine right to dispose of others' bodies and lives.
The milk scenes with Homelander are also very important and strange at the same time. If we look at them not through the "milk fetish" memes but through the symbolism of power and dependency, milk becomes here an almost sacred substance. After all, in the ordinary sense, breast milk is a primordial gift that a person receives from another person. It's always tied to care, warmth, safety, attachment, and unconditional love. The child literally lives off its mother's body.
Homelander's relationship with milk is more perverse. He doesn't receive it naturally. He has no mother, no normal attachment, no experience of unconditional love. So milk becomes for him an object of obsession — a symbol of what he never had.
Homelander constantly demands emotional "feeding" from others: admiration, recognition, love, and reverence. He literally cannot exist without a constant confirmation of his own significance. In this sense, milk becomes for him a resource that others are obligated to give him. But then a paradox arises: a character who considers himself a god turns out, in the end, to be a being dependent on being fed by others. He wants to be omnipotent, but he constantly demands sacrifices. Milk here becomes a form of offering — not in the religious sense, but in the anthropological one.
For Homelander, love doesn't exist as a mutual feeling. It exists only as a form of feeding. That's why milk becomes the symbol of love, and its ultimate expression is cannibalism. In both cases, the other person is valuable not in themselves, but as a source of something that can be consumed. For Homelander, consumption isn't tied to preserving the other, but to endlessly filling his own inner void. So his milk and his cannibalism aren't metaphors for love, but metaphors for dependency, power, and the need to be constantly "fed" by someone else's existence.
