Billy Butcher vs Stain
The FORBIDDEN Death Battle Prediction Blog Episode 27
Original Fight 16
Billy Butcher vs Stain
Heh. Superheroes.
Fuck them.
They’re a bunch of holier-than-thou morons that had the good luck of getting powers no one should have. They dress up like sex weirdos and fight zero-sum battles against their own kind while the world goes to shit.
And we have to put up with like five of their movies every year.
Don’t you just hate them?
Well, you probably don’t hate them as much as these guys!
What’s The Theme Here? Who Are These Characters?
It’s the battle of the superhero killers.
Billy Butcher is the leader of a CIA black ops team called The Boys tasked with keeping the world’s population of superheroes in check through whatever means necessary–blackmail, extortion, beatings, and killing. Billy’s setting is rather grim, grimmer than even settings like Supreme Power and Aberrant, so Billy playing whack-a-supe with his crowbar lands him squarely on the “good guy” side of the story. He even stops a superhero coup of the United States taking out an evil Superman (there’s a lot of those these days, aren’t there?) and his even-more-evil clone.
…Then the final story arc of the comic happens.
You see, even among his fellow Boys, Billy had an acute hatred for “supes” stemming from a combination of personal tragedy and staring into the dark underbelly of supe culture for years. This hatred would eventually drive Billy to (spoilers for a comic that finished in 2012) hatch a plot to kill all superhumans on Earth–not just the psychopaths and airhead celebrities, but innocent people that just happened to have superpowers.
Genocidal intentions aside, Billy is not without his humanity, as deeply buried as it might be. He loved his dog Terror, and he loved his mates, even when he had to kill them because they got in the way of his genocide plot. It was his humanity that eventually led to Billy’s defeat as he was unable to kill Hughie, the newest member of the Boys who Billy saw as a little brother. The man inside Billy eventually won out against his supervillain intentions.
Butcher is currently, as Hughie states in the final issue of the comic, “In Hell, kicking the fuck out of the devil.” If the final issue of Dear Becky reveals that Butcher survived falling from the top of the Flatiron building and having Hughie shove a fence post through his gut and only pretended to be dead as part of some master plot, I don’t know about it.
Stain is a serial killer that targets heroes he deems unworthy of being called heroes. Heroes that work in a corporation or accept money for their services or do anything to show what Stain considers “a lack of conviction” are fair game.
Originally, Stain was a vigilante named Stendhal who was more of a Frank Castle type that targeted superhuman criminals, but after he was humbled by the vigilante hero Knuckle Duster, he dramatically expanded his list of acceptable targets and descended further into madness to the point of cutting off his own nose. He killed 17 heroes and permanently disabled 23 more before he was finally defeated and apprehended by three MHA kids.
He remains in prison as of the time of this battle, but given his popularity as a character and MHA’s, let’s be frank, lack of interesting baddies he’s probably going to escape prison before too long.
If he escapes prison and, I don’t know, develops the ability to absorb superpowers through the blood of his victims and becomes the MHA version of Sylar from Heroes, I don’t know about it.
Billy Butcher
“Everything he does or says serves whatever it is he got planned. He don’t waste nothin’–not time, not words, not effort. Not even a goddamn smile, Hughie.”
–Mother’s Milk
“It ain’t me son. I’m somewhere else watchin’ it happen. It ain’t me.”
–Billy Butcher
Billy Butcher was born to a Butcher that was a baker. That’s the funny part of his childhood.
That’s the only funny part.
Billy’s father was a horrible bastard. He was a neighborhood tough who liked intimidating and hurting people, especially his wife. After beating Billy’s mom so badly she had to get a glass eye, Billy planned to kill him with a kitchen knife. But he was talked out of it by his younger brother Lenny, the only person on Earth he cared for besides his mother.
At the age of 17, Billy enlisted in the Royal Marines to get away from his dad and provide his family with an alternate source of income in the hopes that they could escape his father as he had. He saw action in the Falklands war where he was the only survivor of an infantry charge. When the war ended in 1982, Butcher had trouble adjusting to civilian life. He was impulsively violent, especially after drinking, and was dangerously close to ending up exactly like his father as his life became one of pointless fighting and pointless sex.
Then he met Becky, and she was the one that saved him just as his brother Lenny saved him. She brought him back from the brink with human compassion. She got him to stop drinking and stop fighting. She helped him convince his mother to finally move away from her husband. She was with him when Lenny died in 1986. She was the light of his life.
Billy’s story would have ended there, and it would have had a happy ending, if he didn’t live in a world with supes.
Back in WW2, a Jewish scientist named Joseph Vogelbaum developed a substance that could grant superpowers for Nazi Germany, but fearing for his life, he defected in 1938 and brought his compound V and Nazi ubermensch experiment Stormfront to American weapons manufacturer Vought-American.
Vought-American saw dollar signs.
They created supes–colorful paramilitary superhumans to replace the rank-and-file soldier in America’s army and use it as leverage to monopolize the entire military-industrial complex (did you know that in Eisenhower’s draft it was actually military-industrial-academic complex? Most people don’t learn that in school. I wonder why…).
The average person thinks supes are heroes, but they aren’t. At best, they’re vapid, airhead celebrities interested only in drugs and sex. At worst, they’re sociopaths who don’t care who they have to hurt to get their rocks off.
While on vacation, Becky attracted the eye of Homelander, the greatest supe of all. He then broke into Becky’s hotel room and raped her, just because he could. She recorded what happened in her journal, but never told Billy out of fear that he would take action and get himself killed. Due to Homelander’s weird compound V genetics, a mutant foetus quickly formed in her womb and burst out one night while she was sleeping next to Billy.
Understandably horrified, Billy beat the superpowered foetus to death with a lamp.
That’s not something you’re going to see on Netflix!
Can you tell this was written by Garth Ennis?
I should probably mention this, because if I don’t someone will probably email me about it–it wasn’t actually Homelander that raped Becky, it was Black Noir, Homelander’s (even more) sociopathic clone, Batman stand-in, and Ben Singer look-alike.
(Hheeeeennnhh. Hheeeeennnhhh. I did things.)
Throughout most of the comic, Butcher (and Homelander himself for that matter) think it was Homelander, but the final moments of the penultimate arc reveal that it was really Black Noir dressed up as Homelander.
After beating a superpowered foetus to death (isn’t that a hell of a way to wake up?) Butcher is taken in by the authorities and pressured by a goon to sign a statement to admit to killing Becky. They try and Richard Hopkins him.
Butcher responds by digging his thumbs in the goon’s eyes.
(“You’re married…You imagine what it’d be like to know you’d never see her again?”)
This brought him to the attention of Colonel Greg Mallory of the CIA who was looking for a man to recruit that truly, personally, understood the corporatized evil the supes represented.
With Butcher, Mallory formed a CIA black-ops team to keep Vought-American and their supes in check through blackmail, extortion, intimidation, beatings, and assasination.
Mallory chose an agent well in Butcher–too well, in fact. Mallory would learn too late that Butcher’s war against the supes was not his war against the supes.
Do I recommend The Boys to read? I think it depends a lot on your headspace. It’s offensively juvenile and sophomorically provocative. If you thought the Netflix show was edgy, you know nothing. Netflix is the 80’s TMNT cartoon. The comic is the Mirage TMNT comic.
And yet, there’s a legitimate heart to The Boys. It reads like Ennis is doing a self-aware deconstruction of his Frank Castle through Butcher by contrasting him with every-man Hughie. The Boys does, once you get beyond the giggling high-school boy shenanigans, has something of merit to say about how trauma pushes men to seek easy solutions through power and violence. Trauma pushed Mallory and the United States to seek easy solutions through the CIA. Trauma pushed Americans to seek easy solutions through supes and the lies they offered. Trauma pushed Butcher to seek easy solutions through violence.
Hughie ends up the only surviving member of the Boys because he was the only one that found a way to live with his trauma peacefully.
So yeah. If you have a high tolerance for Troma levels of I CAN’T BELIEVE THEY JUST DID THAT! I’d recommend The Boys. It actually has something of substance to talk about unlike MHA.
Yeah I went there.
It’s only appropriate that I be provocative. I’m covering The Boys, after all.
Butcher’s Compound V
In the Netflix show, Butcher and the Boys don’t have superpowers and have to rely on planning and tactics to defeat supes. But in the comics, they’ve been exposed to a specialized injectable version of compound V, the substance that gives supes their powers, which gives them a degree of superhuman strength and durability. It’s not Homelander level, but it’s enough to place the Boys above your run-of-the-mill supe in a fight.
According to issue 54, this injectable version was created by Vogelbaum to follow specifications from Mallory. Mallory wanted to create something that would create superhuman operatives strong enough to thrash most supes but didn’t want to create something that the military would want to use to create a superhuman army with. Mallory believed that a superhuman army, regardless of whether Vought-American or the Feds controlled it, could only spell disaster for the world.
The injectable was designed to take a long time to manufacture and be prohibitively expensive at 19 billion USD a pop. When CIA senior official Richard Calder was told how much the injectable cost, he had his first heart attack.
To put 19 billion USD in perspective, that was the cost of the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program. 19 billion USD is the entire GDP of Laos.
For the cost of 1 Boys agent, you could get 243 F-35a fighter jets. You can see why the military balked on using the injectable to create super soldiers. Butcher’s tough, but he’s not beating 243 jets shooting missiles at him.
Mallory also gave Vogelbaum two more restrictions–the injectable couldn’t make a man fly and it couldn’t make them bulletproof. It wouldn’t make anyone Homelander level.
What the injectable would be able to do would be able to do would be to increase strength and endurance by a factor of 50.
Earlier in the series, back in issue 4 when the series will still a Wildstorm book, Butcher gave Hughie the injectable and tells him that it would make him “about fifteen to twenty times stronger,” but this can be explained as Butcher wanting to lowball the effects for Hughie as he could tell he was freaking out over having his DNA modified without permission.
Side effects of compound V include a slower aging process and your shit turning blue.
Just putting that out there.
So, what does “increases strength and endurance by a factor of fifty.” mean for Butcher?
Let’s find out!
Here’s a nice summation of what the average untrained and average trained man can lift.
Now, “how much can a character life” depends on how they lift. Think about it. You can lift way more if you grab something with both hands and use your legs as opposed to just your arm. Marvel comics uses a strength scale based on how much a character can lift doing an overhead press.
This is what an overhead press is.
But people can lift far more with other kinds of presses. Take squat presses for instance where you put more of your back into it–hence the term “put your back into it.”
This is what a squat press is.
We’re going to be looking at squats to figure out Butcher’s possible strength. We could look at dead lifts to get bigger numbers, but I don’t think slightly lifting a weight off the ground is what people think of when they imagine how much a superhuman can lift.
The injectable doesn’t raise strength by a set amount or to a set amount. We know this because it’s described as increasing the strength of whoever takes it by a factor, not by an addition, and because Hughie couldn’t measure up to Butcher even after stacking buffs through his injection and Mother’s Milk’s, er, mother’s milk.
In other words, the stronger a person is before they take compound V, the stronger they end up being. The extremely young are an exception. The Seven are top-of-the-line supes created by injecting compound V into foetuses and the Female is the strongest member of the Boys and got her powers not from the injectable but from ingesting an experimental Japanese copy of compound V as a toddler.
Let’s take the average untrained man. Let’s take a Hughie, a man who has never touched a weight, a man who answers “No.” to “Do you even lift, bro?”
Our Hughie will be able to squat about 125 pounds. On compound V, that becomes 6,250 pounds or 3.125 tons.
But Butcher is obviously not a Hughie-type. Before compound V, Billy was built like a tank. He was able to beat up entire bar rooms and kill a superpowered foetus with a lamp. He should be able to do way more than 3.125 tons.
The average man, after 5-10 years of serious strength training, can squat about 475 pounds. Compound V turns this into 23,750 pounds or 11.875 tons.
Still, I think Butcher is beyond even this. The guy was a peak physical specimen and the lone survivor of an infantry charge. He got curb stomped by a group of men and laughed it off. I think we can place him beyond the average /fit/ bro. 11.875 tons would be what Butcher could squat at minimum.
But what would Butcher’s maximum be?
The world record squat set by Vlad Alhazov (it would be set by someone with a name like that, wouldn’t it?) in 2018 is 1,157 pounds.
Here’s a video of him doing it!
This is, as far as mankind knows, the human limit.
On compound V, this becomes 57,850 pounds or 28.9 tons. This is the absolute limit on what Butcher should be able to do. To put 28.9 tons in perspective, female African elephants weigh between 3 and 4 tons and bulls weigh between 3 and 7 tons.
Butcher’s strength thus lies between 11.9 tons and 28.9 tons, and it probably leans closer to 28.9 than it does 11.9. He’s crushed handguns in his fist. He’s torn apart cyborgs with his bare hands. Hughie, who is scrub-tier compared to Butcher, engraved the initials of the Boys on the metal of the Brooklyn bridge with his finger nail.
Butcher might not be Vlad Alhazov on super-steroids, but he is an exceptionally strong guy on super-steroids.
Butcher’s Scaling
Butcher might be the leader of the Boys, but he’s not the strongest member of the Boys, and that’s important to keep in mind when scaling him to his teammates. Going from what we see in the comics, the power levels for the Boys go:
The Female>Frenchie>Mother’s Milk>Butcher>Mallory>Hughie.
How do we know this? Well, when Butcher fought Mother’s Milk, he was getting tossed around the room like a ragdoll until he blew up a grenade in his hand to turn the tables. That puts him higher than Butcher.
Frenchie and the Female are specifically on the team because they’re the muscle. Butcher says as much, and that puts them at the top levels.
When Butcher starts killing off the Boys, Frenchie tells Hughie that he thinks he, even with one arm, has a chance against Butcher and that the Female would definitely beat Butcher in a fight provided they fought face-to-face. The Female being the strongest also matches with what we know of compound V producing better results if you’re exposed to it in extreme youth and with what we see of her feats.
The Female has by far the most impressive feat of anyone in the series not on the Seven. In issue 63, she leaps through an armored supe called Dryhump (you should see what other supes are called). She leaps through his armored front and comes out his armored back with his spine and ribcage. This didn’t hurt her at all.
We can’t say that Butcher scales to the Female, but we can say that they’re in the same ballpark. Butcher might not be able to take the spine out of an armored supe just by jumping into him, but I think he could put his fist through him.
Butcher’s Gear
Butcher’s most commonly used weapon is a crowbar, and it’s a damn good crowbar. Gordon Freeman would be proud. It may or may not be the same crowbar from story to story, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it was.
Butcher’s crowbar was durable enough for him to use it to pop evil-Superman-clone-of-an-evil-Superman Black Noir’s top and make a brain slushie. Amusingly, I think that was the only time in the comic that he used his crowbar as a crowbar is meant to be used.
Butcher also uses other weaponry as the situation calls for it. He carries a knife, because seriously, you should always carry a knife, they’re useful, and you never know when you’ll need to see a man about a dog.
(“Why’d you kill me dog, Jack…”)
He uses several kinds of firearms–rifles, pistols, and machine guns loaded with depleted uranium–the supe silver bullet in his world. All but the strongest of supes buy it against depleted uranium due to its armor-piercing properties.
Depleted uranium is a by-product of nuclear reactors and is very dense–68.4% denser than lead, in fact. This density makes it ideal for armor plating, but depleted uranium also has self-sharpening and igniting properties that makes it ideal for armor-penetration. When a depleted uranium round hits armor, it fractures in such a way so that it maintains a point. It’s energy being concentrated on this point allows it to punch through armor, and once its through armor it ignites, setting fire to ammo caches and fuel for extra damage.
This means supes hit with DU rounds burn from the inside out.
Ouch!
Butcher also uses explosives, and used explosives to kill his friends when he carried out his genocide plot. MM got a hand grenade (held in Butcher’s hand! A hand-held hand grenade!), Frenchie and the Female got a building-level bomb, and Love Sausage got a rocket launcher.
Butcher carries electronic bugs on him, as such things are extremely useful in his line of work, and he’s very skilled at stealthily placing them on people and objects.
Butcher’s coat’s primary function is to look fucking awesome and be something of a uniform for the Boys, but it also has a comm system built into the sleeve.
Butcher’s Speed and Agility
–Placed a bug on a supe named Vikor’s helmet without him noticing. (Dear Becky 4)
–Hughie, who scales way below Butcher, was able to dodge lightning from a member of Teenage Kix. (The Boys 6)
–Dodged heatvision from Black Noir. (65)
–Dodged breath lightning from Stormfront. (34)
–Dodged machine gun fire. (Herogasm 6)
Butcher’s Strength
–Smashed a glock in his hands. (“{Glock’s a wanker’s gun, son.”) (The Boys 2)
–Hughie, who scales way below Butcher, accidentally put his arm through Teenage Kix member Blarney Cock. (6)
–The Boys tear apart Paralactic, an Image comics parody team of cyborgs. (62)
–Pops Black Noir’s top. (65)
–Crams his crowbar down Stormfront’s throat and draws blood from him with a headbutt. (34)
–Drove a pickaxe through the back of a supe named Swatto’s skull and out his mouth. How very Jason! Then he decapitated another supe named Mind-Droid with a shovel and buried it in another supe named Soldier Boy’s face. Again, how very Jason! (33)
Butcher’s Durability
–Was zapped in the face by a bolt of lightning from Shout Out of the Teenage Kix. It gave him a superficial burn on his face which all but cleared up in a few hours. (The Boys 6)
–Withstood being slammed against the wall by Soldier Boy’s shield. (“Nebraska! Arkansas! Maine!”) (32)
–Endures blows from Stormfront, though he’s hurt and clearly outmatched by him. (34)
–Blew a hand grenade in his hand in order to wound Mother’s Milk enough so that he could finish him. This mangled Butcher’s hand, but he was still able to use it to grab hold of Hughie and prevent him from falling. (68)
–Survived falling off the Flatirons building, a drop of about 285 feet. He claimed that this broke his back and rendered him unable to move, and this is possible, but it is also possible that he was lying because he wanted Hughie to finish him off. (72)
Stain
“Both this sham-filled society…and the criminals who wield their power in the name of petty mischief…are targets of my purge…All for the sake of a better society.”
–Stain
“You walk the path of justice in this warped society. We share the same cause.”
“The same? Like hell we do! I’m a badass ally of justice! You’re just some mad slasher!”
–Stain vs Knuckle Duster
Videos Of Ice Destruction To Help Contextualize Stain’s Ice Cutting Feat:
Chizome Akaguro, aka Stendhal, aka Hero-Killer Stain, is more or less a serial killer that targets superheroes he feels don’t live up to being superheroes.
The superhero community of MHA hides a lot of skeletons in its closet. It’s not as bad as Marvel’s superhero community (after everything the mutants have gotten away with in Hickman’s run, humanity is totally justified issuing shoot-on-sight orders for the gene jokes) and they’re NOWHERE near as bad as the superhero community in The Boys, but they’ve got a dark underbelly beneath that glowing All-Might smile.
According to chapter 3 of Vigilantes, superhumans cannot use their quirks, or powers, in public without a license. Even a boy whose power amounts to sliding as fast as a bicycle when he has three limbs touching the ground and a girl whose power amounts to jumping high break the law by not being licensed.
And how do you get a license so that the government will let you use your natural gifts? You become a hero!
“Hero” is a nice way of saying “paramilitary enforcer” filtered through Japanese pop idol aesthetics to make you palatable to the proles.
It’s essentially the Camp Hammond bullshit from Marvel. Anyone remember that shit? “Flying girl! Do you want to fly without going to jail? Well, first you got to learn how to hurt people! We can’t think of a use for you outside killing people!”
(“Service guarantees citizenship! Would you like to know more?”)
And this paramilitary community? It’s far from perfect. High school kids participate in “athletics festival” bloodsports as their future corporate masters watch on and judge. Kids like Bakugo top draft pick lists made by adults even though he’s got the emotional stability of a toddler. It’s a skeevy open secret that something is very wrong with Endeavor and his son. They might not know the exact details (he abused his wife so hard she suffered a mental breakdown and permanently disfigured their son), but they know enough to call child services. Yet Endeavor remains not only within the superhero community but at a highly respected position–he’s the #2 hero only surpassed by All-Might, the setting’s Superman stand-in.
So yeah.
It’s not surprising some crazy eventually came along to try and clean up the superhero community.
Don’t you just hate it when the writer defuses salient criticism of the setting’s status quo by placing it within the mouths of psychopaths? I know I sure do.
Oh wait a second.
What’s this here? Right here? Is this a setting with a school for superhumans that isn’t depressingly authoritarian?
Why yes! Yes it is!
Stain first appeared in chapter 41 of MHA, but his first in-universe appearance came in the spin-off series Vigilantes where he hunts down and kills superpowered criminals, sort of like a weeaboo punisher. At this point in his career, he’s not called Stain but Stendhal, and he dresses like William Gibson does Phantom of the Opera.
Why he decided to name himself out of an early pioneer of the realism genre from the 19th century, I have no idea. He does monolog in one scene about him being “the red and the black” and that was the title of one of Stendhal’s books, but that book was a social satire of the Bourbon Restoration (the red and the black refer to the tensions between secular and clerical forces).
Who can fathom the whims of a crazy person? Maybe when he read the book, he read masked vigilante swordsmen prowling around 19th century France.
As Stendhal, Stain ruthlessly targeted not only adult members of the Yakuza, but teenage criminals on superpower drugs as well. This put him against the heroes of Vigilantes who aren’t okay with other vigilantes Frank Castleing people in Tokyo. Stendhal was defeated by Knuckle Duster, sort of like a hobo Wildcat, and his defeat plunged Stendhal further into his psychosis. He removed his mask, cut off his nose, and expanded his list of targets to include “heroes without conviction.” He ditches his mask, cuts off his nose, and ends up looking like a 90 Image character. He’s got sort of a Mirage TMNT look going with the red bandana mask and lack of nose and a little bit of a Spawn influence with how his bandana flutters around and violates gravity.
When Stain shows up in MHA, he’s already killed 17 superheroes and permanently disabled another 23. And his 24th ended up being Tenya Ida’s brother Tensei, and this leads the young hero to hunt the hero-hunter, get in over his head, and get bailed out by his friends who take down and arrest Stain.
Stain’s been sitting in Tartarus, the MHA equivalent of Marvel’s Vault or DC’s Slab, ever since.
You’d think the writer would have brought him back by now since all the other MHA baddies are as dull as dishwater, but no.
Stain’s not the most interesting baddie in the wide-world of fiction, but compared to everyone else in the series he’s nuanced.
Stain’s Quirk
In MHA, 80% of people are born with a superpower called a quirk. For most people, their quirks are innocuous. We’re talking “able to grow an extra finger” kinds of “superpowers.”
It’s sort of like Earth X, but instead of upending the status quo of human society it does nothing interesting.
MHA is great at introducing interesting ideas but then watering them down so that they don’t matter. It’s like how Deku in the beginning looked like he was going to do the PS 238/Sky High thing as a non-powered kid in a superpowered school, but then got the setting’s greatest power anyway.
“Here child, the greatest burden I could bestow upon a man. Now lie to your mother about you developing this power naturally.”
Did I mention the setting’s got serious skeletons in its closet?
For a rare few, their quirks are actually substantial. Stain’s in particular is very powerful, albeit circumstantial. It’s called blood curdle, and what it means is that if Stain licks your blood with his long grody mutant tongue, you’re paralyzed for a time depending on your blood type.
Here enters a couple of unknowns that complicate our analysis.
We know that from longest paralysis time to shortest, the blood types go B, AB, A, then O. And we know that B paralyzes for 8 minutes. But we don’t have official times for the other three blood types.
We also don’t know Butcher’s blood type. Going by Japanese blood type personality stereotypes, Butcher would be O. It’s like a horoscope thing, so definitions of what personality goes with O vary, but typically the O personality is described as being “outgoing, social, a natural leader, arrogant, and insensitive.” That does describe Butcher quite well. He’s a fun, social guy when he’s not beating supes heads in who likes to kick back with a pint with the Boys and a natural leader. He’s also insensitive (“Hey Hughie I’m going to stick this needle of black ops goo into your neck don’t worry it’s all good okay I just did it.”) and arrogant. He walks into the headquarters of the CIA and screws the director as a regular booty call.
Is it a stretch turning to Japanese blood type personality stereotypes to determine Butcher’s blood type? Yes. But what else can we do? Do you want to be the one to ask Garth Ennis what Butcher’s blood type is? “Hey Garth, what’s Butcher’s blood type? I need to know what would happen if he fought this anime ninja named Stain.”
I couldn’t do it. I like him too much for Enemy Ace: War in Heaven. I’m like Mike Stoklasa with William Shatner. I just couldn’t take Garth Ennis roasting me.
Look at it this way. There’s more evidence for Butcher being type O than there’s evidence for him not being type O.
Stain doesn’t need to taste a lot of blood for his quirk to work. A single drop from a scratch will do. It doesn’t even have to be fresh blood. During his days as Stendhal, Stain cut a deal with an evil high school girl to get old band-aids used by superhuman Yakuza so he could paralyze them all at once when he fought them.
The exact range of blood curdle is unknown. Stain doesn’t have to be within striking distance for it to work, but he’s also never used it on someone outside his visual range. Could Stain lick a person’s blood and paralyze them when they’re on the other side of the planet? We don’t know. Could Stain use blood curdle on a person hiding from his sight? We don’t know. We also don’t know if the paralysis can be overpowered. It does work on opponents with superhuman muscles. It worked on Deku and it worked on a superhuman Yakuza that used manholes as melee weapons. Would it work on someone as powerful as All-Might? We don’t know. But for the purpose of this fight, I’m going to say it would work on Butcher.
Stain doesn’t have any superpowers outside blood curdle…but of course, people with “no powers” in comics still have superpowers by real world standards, as Stain’s feats will attest.
Stain’s Gear
Stain keeps things pretty simple as a hobo ninja. He’s got bladed boots to add damage to his kicks and increase his edginess (in more ways than one), several throwing knives, and a well-worn katana which, though it looks like it’ll fall to pieces if it tries to cut anything stronger than paper, is capable of slicing not only through people but ice.
Where’s the mystical junkyard they keep getting these weapons from?
Stain’s Strength
–As Stendhal, blocked the punch of a big crystal dude named Akira Iwako capable of making holes in the ground and knocking down walls with his katana.
–Hacked apart Todoroki’s ice walls as his greatest strength feat.
As you can see from the many videos on ice destruction, it is possible for a person to hack through blocks of ice in real life, but it takes a degree of superhuman strength to slice through that much ice as quickly as Stain. Is it Butcher level? No. But it is slightly superhuman.
What’s more interesting is that Stain’s ice wall feats make no physical sense, and I don’t just mean in the “it makes no sense a normal human could do this” way. Ice isn’t clay. You don’t cut it and split it apart. Ice crumbles. It compresses when you hit it. In real life, if you attached a blade to an industrial machine to replicate Stain’s ice wall feats, the ice wouldn’t be cut clean. A chunk of it would explode as the blade hit.
–As a limit on his strength, Stain was unable to draw blood from Akira Iwako. He was only able to make white marks on his skin which might either be streaks from his katana or extremely shallow cuts. To hurt Akira, Stain had to throw a knife into his eye to break his concentration which softened his body.
Stain’s Durability
–As Stendhal, was tricked into running into a punch by Knuckle Duster which knocked him out for a moment.
–Took a 5% Detroit Smash from Deku to the face and was still on his feet.
–Was dragged across the side of a building by Deku and was still able to fight.
–Was knocked out for a moment by taking a punch from Deku and Ida’s recipro burst to the head at the same time, but quickly got up like Jason and was able to continue fighting. He was then knocked out cold by a final kick from Ida.
Stain’s Speed
–Detected and reacted to Ida’s approach and knocked his helmet off with a swing of his sword.
–Was able to block Ida’s recipro burst with his sword, though it broke.
So Who Wins?
Butcher turns Stain into a stain.
It all comes down to Stain’s blood curdle power. Without it, he’s pretty much a punching bag for Butcher. Butcher is just way too strong for him. Yeah yeah, Stain took a 5% one-for-all Detroit Smash from Deku to the face, and I’m sure someone somewhere out there on the internet, probably close to vsbattlewiki, takes 5% of the pity wank DB gave All-Might in All-Might vs Might Guy to make Deku’s fist equal to five hundred times the power of the US nuclear arsenal or whatever, but let’s get real. Deku at 20% struggled to hold up an I beam. A fourth of that isn’t a patch on what Butcher can lift.
You have to do a lot of guessing to figure out how much Deku was squatting to hold up the I beam since the weight of I beams vary by the materials used to construct them. You might recall my King Kong vs Rhedosaurus where I went into how saying something is “made of steel” leaves a lot for guesswork as there’s many different types of steel each with their own physical properties. But going by continental steel.com, a 40 foot steel beam would weigh about a ton. So a 5% Deku could squat about 500 pounds. Let’s go ahead and double it to 1,000 pounds. Hell, let’s triple it to 1,500 pounds. No, let’s go even further and say 5% Deku can squat a ton and triple it, so 3 tons.
It’s still not a patch on Butcher’s strength.
For the sake of argument, let’s go full fanboy and say Deku can punch with the force of a nuke. He wasn’t using all that force on Stain. Killing is a big no-no for MHA kids. Ida, Todoroki, and Deku wanted to capture Stain. They didn’t want to kill him. If they had wanted to kill Stain they would have curbstomped him after he was knocked out.
But Butcher doesn’t have that problem.
If Butcher gets his hands on Stain, it’s over. One good punch is going to turn Stain into red mist.
But with blood curdle, things get much more complicated.
The best argument for Stain beating Butcher goes like this:
- Stain can draw blood from Butcher because he can cut ice walls.
- Stain is faster than Butcher.
- Stain will draw blood, paralyze Butcher, and spend a minute or two hacking away at Butcher until he dies.
To people in the “who would win” community, this argument is known as speed blitzing. It doesn’t matter if a character’s opponent is stronger and tougher so long as the character can take them down before they get going.
The counter to this argument depends on the rules we’re using.
As crazy as it sounds, by Death Battle rules, Butcher is faster.
If you remember my prediction for Zuko vs Todoroki, you’ll know that Death Battle has very weird rules for calculating the speed of characters.
They have most MHA characters as being able to move faster than lightning because one time a kid with a bird head blocked the totally-just-like-real-lighting-down-to-the-speed of his fighting tournament opponent with his living shadow.
Did Death Battle realize that this made the MHA kids much faster than the top speed they calculated for All-Might in All-Might vs Might Guy?
Did Death Battle realize that the school’s speedster character’s top speed over short distances is 36.8 miles per hour?
Probably not.
But if you apply the same sketchy scaling rules to Butcher, he leaves Stain in the dust.
Huey is the newb scrub on the Boys and even he was able to dodge lightning blasts from Shout-Out of the Teenage Kix. Butcher later dodged lightning from Stormfront, who as the name might suggest, is both a Nazi and a lighting-user.
But wait, there’s more!
Do you remember how in Danny Phantom vs Jake Long Death Battle gave both characters faster-than-light because they dodged “lasers” that travel in pulses and make noise and yet are still somehow honest-to-god-we’re-internet-scientists as fast as real-life lasers?
Butcher dodged Homelander’s heat vision.
Say hello to FTL Butcher.
Now that’s game right there, but this is my blog, and I run fights with slightly different rules. Characters fight in-character and moving faster than a “laser beam” does not mean you can move as fast as a starship. That means Stain is faster than Butcher. Just look at how he moves. The dude pinballs between buildings as a form of travel. He also perceived and reacted to a kid that can go 36.8 miles per hour trying to kick him from behind. That’s a better objective speed feat than anything Butcher has.
So does that mean Stain “blitzs” Butcher, as the term goes?
I don’t think so.
Stain is going to have trouble drawing blood against Butcher. I think that with enough strikes he would be able to draw blood, but with just one swing? I doubt it.
Look at when Stain fought random thug superhuman Akira Iwako, a dude so low-level he doesn’t even have a supername. Akira and Butcher are comparable in that Akira is like a weaker version of Butcher. They’re both capable of punching holes in the ground and knocking down walls. Akira hauled ass when he heard that the cops were coming, which implies that he, like Butcher, isn’t bulletproof.
Stain wasn’t able to draw blood from Akira. He had to throw a knife into Akira’s eye which broke his concentration and reversed the hardening of his skin.
Stain also runs the risk of his katana breaking on Butcher. His katana was broken by Ida kicking it. Butcher has torn apart metal with his bare hands, so it’s conceivable he could tear apart Stain’s sword. It’s a sturdy sword, but its not made out of adamantium.
Say for the sake of argument that Stain could draw blood on Butcher in one strike. He would then have to lick the blood leaving him open to a counterattack. He cuts Butcher, Butcher splatters him. It ends with Butcher having a cut and Stain being in pieces. As seen in his fight with Mother’s Milk, Butcher going all-out is willing to blow a grenade in his hand to take down his opponent. So a fight with them both going for the alpha strike goes like this: Stain closes the gap, Butcher takes the pin out of the grenade, Stain cuts Butcher, Butcher holds out his hand, and boom goes the dynamite and boom goes Stain.
Butcher also has several factors that swing the fight in his favor. For one, he’s got more experience than Stain. He fought in the Falklands war in 1982 and was recruited by Mallory to start body bagging Supes sometime after his brother died in 1986. He spent 15 years on the job until the Boys disbanded in 2001, but it’s implied that he was far from inactive before reforming the Boys a few years later. He spent his time forming connections, collecting information, and removing those that stood in his way.
Butcher has 15+ years of wetworks experience and supes busting to his name–and then the comic starts.
Stain is 35, and has 17 hero kills to his name with 24 other heros disabled. As Stendhal, he killed an indeterminate number of superhuman criminals. Now, it is true that the average MHA superhuman is a lot more dangerous than the average The Boys superhuman. The average MHA hero has combat training while the average The Boys supe pretends to have combat training. Mother’s Milk once described fighting supes as fighting crackheads armed with shotguns. They’re powerful, but unfocused and unskilled. By the time they figure out how to get the safety off, you’re beating them over the head with their own weapon.
But it’s not as if Stain made his 17 kills through fair 1-on-1 combat. He’s as much of an ambush predator as Butcher. He corners his prey in dark alleys, cuts them, licks the blood, then cuts, cuts, cuts. In terms of combat experience against foes that fight back, Butcher actually has him beat. Take Stain’s fight against a room full of four Yakuza superhumans from Vigilantes back when he was Stendhal. He licked some old band-aids he got from their medical check-ups. Then it was EZ PZ. It’s a piece of cake to kill people when they don’t move.
Note that the one time Stain fought an adult with years of combat experience face-to-face, he lost. Knuckle Duster knocked him on his ass. That doesn’t say good things about his skills against Butcher.
Butcher wins if he and Stain ever separate following the initial engagement. Despite looking like a ninja, Stain’s not very stealthy. He likes the thrill of combat and the thrill of monologuing too much. Just look at his track record–he hunts to kill, but 24 heroes managed to escape him crippled but still alive, though it is conceivable that he left a few of them alive as warnings to others. But when Butcher wants to assassinate someone, that person dies and there’s no witnesses. The number of targets that survived Butcher is 0. If the fight comes down to who can find the other first without being found, Butcher wins.
Butcher has the better gear and it gives him several advantages. Never bring a knife to a gunfight, especially when the guns are filled with depleted uranium. With only throwing knives as an answer to long-ranged combat, Butcher controls the fight beyond striking distance. And just as one good blow from Butcher will drop Stain, one good shot will drop him as well. Butcher’s gear also gives him a key advantage in melee that sounds weird to say but is true–
His crowbar beats Stain’s katana.
No, I’m serious.
Stain’s katana shattered when a kid going probably, and we’re being extremely generous here multiplying his short distance speed by two for his recipro burst special move, 73.6 mph, kicked it. Butcher’s crowbar was able to pry Black Noir’s skull open without even warping. Keep in mind Black Noir is a superhuman who even after being reduced to a skinless zombie by a fight with Homelander was able to survive the US military lighting him up with DU rounds. His skull is very strong.
Music Track Name Ideas:
C-Rank: Superhero Slayers
B-Rank: No Heros
A-Rank: Hero Killers
S-Rank: Blood-Stained Butchers
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