Homelander & Yulia "Empress" Bellam. art for my planned homelander x oc fic, The Hand You Wanna Hold is a Weapon. 🖤 ( art by Toyryla )

So, I'm here again. I hope I'm not pestering you or anything, but I'm really glad you didn't mind my rambling about Layla in my last message! I'll definitely be doing more of that, lol.

Anyway, I'm just super excited for the upcoming fanfiction you're working on, and I was wondering if you could share some general head-canons about the original character featured in the artwork you posted—Yulia. Unless, of course, you want to keep it mostly secret for now, at least until the fanfiction is released. Then that's fine too! You could also write about other original characters that you have plans for in future projects—I'd love to hear about them! Just share whatever you're comfortable with about your characters.

- 💌

aahhh 💌 anon, my beloved! i'm sorry i'm so late getting to this, but i've been thinking about it a ton. i can't tell you how happy it makes me when people are curious about my oc's!!!!

Yulia was the first oc i made for the boys! specifically for shipping with Homelander. she's changed a looooot since her initial conception in 2022. she started off as a supe, then i rewrote her to be a human working for Vought, and now i've swung back around to a revamped supe origin. i don't wanna spoil too much of the fic i have planned for her, but i do intend to do a full rewrite from the start of s2 forward. Yulia is going to be planted in the seven (instead of SF) as one step of a much larger scheme developed by the same russian team that took soldier boy (another plot i'm completely rewriting lol) where her job is to feed back information and ascertain Homelander's weaknesses, but in doing so she comes across his abusive origins and uh oh! things get complicated.

some facts about her are:

her powers are based on my own experience with phantom pain! she has the ability to manipulate the electrical signals that the brain uses to transmit information to the body. she can cause pain, pleasure, hallucinations, release hormones, all kinds of zany shit. she does run the risk of frying her own brain or causing it to send the same signals through her own body, though. manipulating someone else's nerve cells can confuse her own system into thinking there's a missing input somewhere, which can trigger debilitating migraines and other phantom pains.

her supe name, "Empress," is a play on the word Empathy, since her powers can be used to detect and influence someone's emotional state. it's also an inside joke about how desperate she is to impress her higher-ups and live up to expectation.

her upbringing has made a chronic people-pleaser out of her. she sincerely believes her powers are not her own, and that she owes it to the people who raised/made her to use them for others.

she has a big heart and is a bit of a crybaby. the character arc i have planned for her is overcoming that aspect of herself without losing the gentleness she's managed to hold onto.

she loves cheesecake so much. just so, so much.