#she would definitely not have jumped off with soldier boy if annie hadn't been there

[hermywolf]

knowing her plan i loved rewatching all the scenes with maeve in 3x08, especially with butchie in mind. like this is her first time seeing the dynamics within the boys: she thinks she knows butcher pretty well by now, and so her plan is clearly to find butcher and trust that his hatred of homelander will ensure killing him to be his absolute priority, so they’ll always be on the same page

but when hughie starts arguing in butcher’s defense you can see that she’s a bit surprised, and filing that away. and then later, when hughie’s trying to convince butcher to step down, after once again defending him several times, she realized she’d been wrong: there WAS one thing that could be more important to butcher than his revenge, and that’s hughie. she saw that hughie was getting to butcher, maybe even managing to convince him. and that’s why it’s the exact moment she chose to toss their only weapon against soldier boy out of the window, to take away that option and snap butcher out of it. even she could tell within like a minute of seeing them interract that hughie is butcher’s canary, the same way annie is hers