Warning: The following contains SPOILERS for The Boys Season 2 finale.
While Hughie and Starlight on The Boys are meant to be kindred spirits due to their lost innocence, the truth is that Starlight is far more like Butcher than her boyfriend. This was shown throughout Season 2 of The Boys, as Starlight underwent a journey that saw her becoming as jaded as Butcher as her world fell apart.
At the start of The Boys, both Hughie Campbell and Annie January were entering into a new life, with Hughie falling into Butcher's team of anti-Supe vigilantes and Annie, as Starlight, becoming an A-List superhero as the newest member of The Seven. The reality of their new positions soon set in, as Hughie found himself killing a man in cold blood and Starlight found herself being forced into a more revealing variant of her superhero costume after being sexually assaulted by The Deep. In the midst of all this, the two met by chance in a park and slowly began to bond.
The Boys Season 2: Every Confirmed Super & Their Powers Explained
While Annie and Hughie were seemingly a good pairing because of their shared pain, Season 2 of The Boys saw them develop in radically different ways. Hughie was able to maintain his innocence, while Annie became more cynical about the world of superheroes. While Hughie was still working to expose the corruption of Vought-American from a position of righteousness, Starlight was forced to compromise her ethics while working as Hughie's double-agent within the company, like when she blackmailed her friend Gecko into stealing a sample of Compound V. By the end of the season, Annie, once a devout Christian, had begun questioning not only the idea of a loving deity, but the value of doing good.
In this, Starlight's journey closely resembles that of Billy Butcher, who underwent a similar fall from grace after the disappearance of his wife, Becca. While The Boys said little about the details of Butcher's past, it had been suggested that he lost the best parts of himself during the years he spent working under Grace Mallory, thinking that his wife had been raped by Homelander and that Vought-American had killed her to save the public image of their most popular Supe. The revelation that his wife had willingly gone into hiding after discovering she was pregnant shattered Butcher and his world view once again and Season 2 of The Boys saw him struggling to find some new reason to fight when the woman he loved more than anything didn't want to be rescued.
Unsurprisingly, Annie and Butcher butted heads when they were forced to interact over the course of Season 2, as Butcher felt the only good Supe was a dead Supe and Annie had serious moral objections to most of Butcher's actions. Despite the abyss between them, the two proved to be an effective team in the episode "The Bloody Doors Off," when they were forced to work together to save a critically wounded Hughie. The incident seemed to give Starlight and Butcher some degree of mutual respect for one another, as they discovered that while they may not like each other, they were in agreement when it came to their belief that Hughie was too good for this world and more than either of them deserved.
The similarities between Butcher and Starlight were cemented by The Boys Season 2 finale, which revealed that both of them had a necklace that served as a reminder of what they had lost. In Butcher's case, he had an amulet of St. Christopher, which had been given to him by his wife, which he gave to her son as he was taken into protective custody. Starlight had a golden cross that had been given to her by her mother before they parted ways earlier in the episode, which she wore for the first time as she met Hughie in the park where they first met. When Hughie asked her about the cross, Starlight remarked in a snarky way that the fact that she had seen Billy Butcher do something good and noble confirmed that "there's got to be some kind of higher power." In truth, the necklace seemed to be, like Butcher's St. Christopher, a reminder of what she had lost and the ideal she was fighting for.