Amazon Prime’s The Boys surely is a violent parody of the superhero genre of the 21st Century. It has action, violence, blood, profanity, on the face humor, and the most important of all – it has Billy Butcher the fookin’ disgustin’ leader of The Boys who speaks with the thickest accent ever heard in the history of the human race. The show broke all viewing records and became a cult classic in a relatively short span of time. The comic book itself is a very huge hit and the properly executed show just helped push the mythos of The Boys even further. The Boys Season 2 is coming to Prime pretty soon this year. We have multiple questions.
The most glaring of which is – How does the Great Homelander get killed at the hands Billy Butcher?
The Boys Season 1 premiered on the 26th of July, 2019. The Boys established a world where Superheroes are nothing but corporate merchandise that are milked and their status exploited just like real world celebrities. The world of The Boys is bleak, dark, and extremely dirty. There is no such term as ‘Below the Belt’ in this universe. The Seven are a group of hand-picked superheroes that are trained and paraded by Vought International. Each member of the Seven is guilty of heinous, stomach churning crimes. The leader of the Seven and the World’s most powerful superhero is Homelander, the most twisted and most demented freak on Planet Earth.
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Homelander and Billy Butcher have a history together. Billy wants Homelander’s head for raping his wife, the resulting trauma leading to her death in the comic books. In the TV Series, it is shown that Butcher’s wife may or may not have been raped but she is not dead, having been relocated by Homelander’s creator to a secret location where she gave birth to the superhero’s son. Billy, in the series, still hates Homelander’s guts and is ready to go to extreme lengths to spill the superhero’s blood.
In the world of The Boys, every superhero is actually rife with flaws but deep down they are are genuinely good people who started out with noble intentions. It was only midway that their goals got muddied and they lost track of what they originally set out to do – make the world a better place. Homelander is the exact opposite. He is the world’s first protagonist villain. On the outside, Homelander exhumes the staunchest of righteous ideals like Captain America and Superman but inside he is the full of absolute malice, wishing the world to burr and kneel before his superiority.
The Boys Season 1 showed us that behind the curtains, when the chips are down, Homelander has incredible insecurities. He has a twisted relationship with Madelyne Stilwell, the shot caller at Vought America. He is more concerned about his public image than anything else. If any member of the Seven does something even remotely detrimental to his image, he brings down the wrath of God on them for doing so.
Homelander has all the powers of Superman. He has super human physical attributes of strength, speed, durability, endurance, stamina, and reflexes. He can fly multiple times the speed of sound, has X-Ray Vision, Heat Vision, and super human senses of sight and hearing. But unlike Superman, Homelander dos not have specific weaknesses like Kryptonite or Red Sun Radiation. Like we said, he is pretty much invincible.
But is he unbeatable? We don’t think so. There are ways via which even an ordinary person like Billy Butcher could make Homelander meet his maker.
Homelander is modeled after Superman. But in the comic it has been seen that he is not as nearly invulnerable as him. While Superman can survive a planet crashing onto him and shrug it off like a tickle, Homelander’s body does leave a mark when he encounters massive, overwhelming firepower. In one issue Homelander took a Tank Round at point blank range. The armor piercing round left a shallow dent and a scratch mark in his body. Although Homelander healed from that minor wound very fast, it proves that the stories of his nigh invulnerability are a farce that were probably propagated by Vought to make him look like a God among men.
Billy Butcher has been known to be a resourceful chap. Frenchie and Billy could muster up the necessary firepower that would take down the mighty Homelander. Powerful energy based weaponry or high caliber projectiles launched from an anti-tank rifle or a tank cannon can create a big enough wound that may prove lethal for Homelander.
But that is not the only way for Billy to pull this off. There is another way for Billy to take Homelander down. This method is more subtle and silent. It involves a fair bit of a well-known human quality – manipulation.
The Seven are a very dysfunctional group of superheroes. They work together not because they trust and believe in each other. Their primary motivations are money, fame, and most of all, fear of Homelander squishing them like a bug. If you take one or two of those motivators out of the equation, there is a high possibility that the Seven will turn against each other.
We have already seen the equations between the prominent superheroes getting jumbled up over the entire first season. The Deep was cast out to a dead-end suburban region. Queen Maeve and Homelander do not see eye to eye much. Starlight hates all the superheroes of the Seven. Fast Track is distraught and angry at Homelander for forcing him to kill his girlfriend Popclaw.
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The entire team of The Seven is at a boiling point. Tensions are running high. All Billy Butcher needs to do is get a can of gasoline and pour it all over them. He does not even need to light a match. They will catch fire on their own. Maybe one or two superheroes may be insufficient against Homelander. But if all of them joined forces to take him down, it would be a more or less even fight.
Homelander is strong enough to survive even that ordeal. But he would be significantly weakened from a fight of this caliber. That is when Billy Butcher swoops in to save the day. Using the opportunity of getting a hold of the Homelander when he is the most vulnerable Billy could take him down once and for all. An armor piercing round to the head from an anti-tank rifle should do it.
