Does The Boys know what to do with Starlight anymore?

polygon.com:

Although fans of The Boys will often refer to Butcher (Karl Urban) as the main character, it was Hughie (Jack Quaid) and Annie (Erin Moriarty) who served as the early seasons’ real co-protagonists. They were the ones who changed the most, who had their worldviews shattered in the pilot episode and had to rebuild themselves from scratch. Butcher’s stayed the same cranky, morally dubious bastard, but Hughie and Annie are unrecognizable from where they began.

And though Hughie had more screen time between the two, season 1 Annie was the more compelling main character. Whereas Hughie had the comfort of at least being surrounded by people who shared his hatred of supes like A-Train, Annie was thrown right into the viper’s nest. She was forced to smile and make things work on a team filled with rapists and murderers, in a position where escape wasn’t a real option and coming forward publicly seemed pointless. Annie’s gradual self-actualization was more complicated than Hughie’s, but that only made it more interesting. Annie is always being pulled between multiple evolving teams with conflicting, dubious motives, but in season 1 the show was pulling off this delicate balancing act. Now, in season 4, almost all sense of consistency or direction with Annie has fallen apart.

Annie was well loved in season 1 among the Boys fandom, breaking the usual sexist internet trend that the most prominent female character in a franchise is the most loudly hated. As early as season 2, however, the fan sentiment started to sour, largely thanks to one giant misstep in “Nothing Like It in the World.” That’s the mid-season 2 episode where Annie kills an innocent civilian, a guy who was defending himself from what he assumed were violent carjackers. (An assumption that was basically correct.)

The story uses this as part of a bonding subplot between Annie and Butcher, two characters who’d struggled to trust each other up to this point. “You know what I was thinking when I was looking at him?”