I have no idea whether or not it’s Billy Butcher who delivers the coup de grâce to Homelander (or if Homelander even ends up dying) at the end of The Boys, but if he does it may well end up looking a decent bit like this surprisingly perfect Mortal Kombat 1 mod.
Someone mapped anti superhero anti-hero Billy Butcher onto Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat 1. You might note that Butcher and Shang don’t have much in common and thus the particular pairing seems like an odd choice, and you’d be right, but it suddenly makes a lot more sense when you pair one of Shang’s Fatalities with Butcher’s arc from The Boys season 4 (spoiler warning ahead for The Boys season 4).
We need a bit of backstory to get this to all make sense. Though just about everyone in the show hates Homelander, Butcher is technically his main rival.
We’ll see how the writers handle the show in its fifth and final season (its quality has been dropping with the force of a shoddy superhero landing since season 2, in my opinion) but we’re widely set up to see these two clash in an ultimate showdown.
Butcher is a standard human where Homelander is a “supe,” and so to even the playing field Butcher has taken quite a few doses of Compound V, which seems to grant users a roll at the superpowers dice at the cost of also developing a super tumor in his brain. Butcher spent the majority of season 4 in his own head, but manifested some intense powers near the end.
Said powers are still mostly a mystery to viewers, but he seems to have some kind of giant, predatory tendrils that come out of his chest and that can rip even supes to shreds. The end of season 4 left the stage set for this enhanced version of Butcher to take on Homelander, but we’ll likely need to wait another year or two to find out how things actually go down.
How does this all connect to Shang Tsung? As a traveling snake oil salesman in the revamped story of MK1, developers decided to give him a Fatality that echoes his traditional sorcery, but is achieved through the application of a mysterious potion.
Shang throws onto a table and tears a giant gash down the center of your chest before pouring a bright green liquid into the crevice. A spike-covered snake rapidly manifests from the wound and proceeds to start chomping down on the victim’s head until it eventually devours their brain.
The snake creature looks an awful lot like the tendrils Butcher gains in the latest season of The Boys, and with Homelander as the latest guest DLC character to join MK1, the stage is perfectly set for this potential preface for the ending of the show:
The Boys Season 5 finale pic.twitter.com/sJwkFCBYE4
— Nerdy Omni-Man (@nerdyomniman) August 9, 2024
I mean, giant killer worms protruding from someone’s body and ripping people apart? It’s not exactly in line with the show but you have to admit the overlap is interesting.
Butcher has a parasite in his brain, Homelander is a parasite on the world as he only really takes and secretly doesn’t actually give back at all, and this MK1 Fatality uses a parasite that looks an awful lot like one of Butcher’s tendrils and that eats brains.
