The Boys: Kimiko Powers & Origins Explained | Screen Rant
Karen Fukuhara's Kimiko is The Female in The Boys, but her powers and origins are vastly different between the TV series and the original comic book.
What's Kimiko's backstory in The Boys, and how did she gain her superhuman abilities? When the debut season of Amazon's The Boys begins, Billy Butcher recruits mild-mannered music geek, Hugh Campbell, to join his violent crusade against the world's out of control superheroes. Billy soon reunites with two of his old colleagues in Frenchie and M.M., and it becomes clear that Hughie is the newest member in a disbanded, CIA-sponsored unit who used to target superheroes before a botched mission shut down the operation. This introduction more or less follows the path of Garth Ennis' original comic books, but with one glaring exception.
The final member of The Boys (the fifth Spice Girl, if you like) is The Female, otherwise known as Kimiko. Mysterious, violent and not much of a talker, Kimiko is arguably the biggest change Eric Kripke makes to the foundation of The Boys, altering the character's origin story, as well as her fighting abilities. Although Butcher was initially distrustful towards Kimiko, Frenchie persisted to champion the girl's good heart, empathizing with her desire to go home, and as The Boys moves into season 2, Kimiko can consider herself a true member of the titular group.
Played by Karen Fukuhara, Kimiko is not only markedly different to her comic book counterpart, but her origin is also more expansive in live-action, with Mesmer (Haley Joel Osment's palm-reading supe) helping to expose Kimiko's past. Here's everything The Boys has revealed about Kimiko's origins and her powers.
One of the biggest differences with Kimiko is her name, which was entirely invented for TV. In Ennis' version of The Boys, the character is simply known as The Female, or The Female of the Species. Another major alteration are Kimiko's superpowers, since the rules surrounding Compound V are somewhat different between the two mediums. The Billy Butcher of the printed world pumps himself and his fellow Boys with diluted Compound V to compete with Supes on an even level. This hasn't happened in Amazon's The Boys so far, and the series has instead focused on Compound V being the secret behind the existence of superheroes.
In the comics, The Female's backstory takes place in her native Japan. The daughter of a negligent employee at a Japanese company similar to Vought, Kimiko one day falls into a vat of Compound V. Having been completely immersed in the blue super-juice as an infant, The Female was granted enhanced strength, agility and resistance, but at the cost of an insatiable bloodlust. Following her incident, The Female was used as a guinea pig by Japanese scientists looking to recreate Vought's superhero success, until she was rescued from captivity by The Boys.
Despite these changes, Kimiko and The Female do share many traits in common. Both are mute, and share a strong, oft-misunderstood bond with Frenchie above all the other Boys. Just like Fukuhara's character, the original iteration of The Female was prone to outbursts, mercilessly violent, and to be approached with caution. Unlike the TV series, The Female is a loyal and trusted member of The Boys from her very first chapter, and was part of the initial group started by Mallory, whereas Kimiko's rescue didn't take place until after Hughie came on board in Amazon's The Boys.
Kimiko's tragic origin follows the comic story of The Boys in broad strokes, but makes a litany of changes along the way. Hailing from Japan, a young Kimiko lived happily with her brother, Kenji, and their parents in a quiet village by the sea. One fateful night, the Shining Light Liberation army attacked the village and forcibly recruited Kimiko and Kenji as child soldiers for their terrorist cause. Kimiko remained close with her brother during their Shining Light enslavement, with the pair desperately helping each other to stay alive, however, the trauma of her parents' deaths rendered Kimiko mute. Instead, she and Kenji devised their own bespoke form of sign language in order to communicate between themselves. Kimiko was eventually taken away from her beloved brother and trafficked to a nail salon owner into the United States, falling into the possession of the Triad which was involved in Homelander's conspiracy to create supervillains.
In The Boys' season 1 finale, Homelander explains how he hatched a plan to smuggle Compound V to terrorists, thereby forcing the U.S. government to accept superheroes into their armed forces. Powered-up terrorists are now littered across the globe, but Homelander reveals that experimenting with Compound V on adults was a messy endeavor, yielding only a select few success stories. Kimiko was evidently among them. Drugged full of Compound V while held captive by Chinese Triad members, Kimiko developed the abilities of a supe and was kept caged by the gang underneath a grocery store. In The Boys season 2, Kenji reveals that since Kimiko proved to be a viable recipient of Compound V, he too was experimented on and gained powers, albeit different ones to his sister.
As mentioned previously, The Female's superpowers in the comic telling of The Boys are entirely accidental - the result of poor parenting and terrible security. She's certainly not a "supe" in the traditional sense, but she does possess inhuman strength, enhanced toughness, and improved agility and speed, and these abilities are permanent, rather than when her colleagues in The Boys take a hit of Compound V for a temporary boost.
But on-screen, Kimiko is the only member of the group with Compound V coursing through her veins. The extent of Kimiko's powers haven't been explicitly defined since her explosive debut in The Boys season 1, with the character herself still going through the process of adjusting to her new abilities, but thanks to a few choice scenes, some of Kimiko's gifts can be deduced. Kimiko breaks A-Train's leg, fights competitively with Black Noir and effortlessly crushes Mesmer's hand, demonstrating her superhuman strength. The Female is also seen recovering from several grievous attacks - having her head rammed into a wall at super-speed, being viciously stabbed by Black Noir, and fighting against Stormfront in season 2. This demonstrates some level of increased resistance and regenerative ability. Furthermore, when protecting Frenchie from Black Noir, she charges the silent superhero at great speed. Kimiko never uses this power when running away from pursuers, which would suggest her speed is limited to a general quickness of movement, rather than the kind A-Train or Shockwave possess.
Most of the supes in The Boys were imbued with Compound V during their early childhood, but Kimiko was experimented on as an adult. Usually, this is a risky process that doesn't result in success, but Kimiko was a rare exception who was able to walk away with superpowers. Kimiko has been repeatedly abused in her life, firstly by the Shining Light Liberation Army who killed her parents, then indirectly by Homelander's super-terrorist plot, and then by the Triad who kept her captive to carry out potentially fatal experiments. Meeting The Boys finally breaks Kimiko away from that hardship, and gives her a semblance of something resembling friendship.