Helluva Blorbos

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think that the characters in the Hellaverse hugely overdramatize how “bad” Blitzø is morally as a person. I fear he’s not even breaking the top 30 worst individuals they’ve encountered.

I’m sorry, but if a breakup (not including abuse or cheating survivors) is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, and you feel the need to throw an entire party dedicated to hating that person, you’ve lived a privileged life and are being incredibly petty. Verosika was acting like a 16-year-old girl experiencing heartbreak for the first time. It’s honestly pretty pathetic and childish how she handled the situation.

And honestly, what did he really fuckin’ do anyway? Exercise his right to end relationships he was a part of?

I’m not trying to excuse him stealing from Verosika and completely abandoning her in a moment of vulnerability, but I’m also sure that Blitzø leaving her wasn’t the main reason she felt so betrayed that she was enraged enough to throw a party dedicated to hating him. She has most definitely been burned before, and Blitzø was likely the first person in a long time she allowed herself to trust.

Now, moving on to the shit that happened with Stolas. Their falling out was so obviously a case where both parties were at fault. Stolas was racist; Blitzø was an inconsiderate asshole. They both hugely disregarded each other’s feelings, and they both hated themselves so much that they couldn’t imagine the other having genuine feelings for them.

So why did Blitzø get an entire episode dedicated to slandering him for what happened between the two of them, and why is he repeatedly blamed for it by the other characters—and by himself—when it was very obviously not only his fault?

Now, Blitzø definitely screamed at Stolas and told him off, but the show has made it abundantly clear that that was wrong and that we’re supposed to feel bad for Stolas. But then Stolas proceeds to do basically the same thing, except instead of doing it privately and directly to Blitzø’s face, he does it in front of a crowd.

Imagine being Blitzø, standing in that crowd, experiencing absolute whiplash and almost a kind of confirmation that you were right to believe this dude was lying to you. He had just told you how much he cared about you and how much he wanted you to stay with him, and then he had the capacity to stand alongside one of your biggest regrets—someone you already feel horrible for hurting—and listen to him sing his heart out about how much you suck.

This is also the same guy who made racist remarks to you in front of your family, who are also members of the race he was mocking, btw.

I don't think it's a case of some characters (in this case, Stolas) being favoured by the narrative, as someone in a comment stated, though I understand why it can feel that way at this point in time. The narrative has neither forgotten nor excused Stolas' shortcomings and mistakes; it is simply still setting up a scenario in which he can realise the specific ways in which he fucked up.

Stolas wasn't ready to have those realisations before: not from his mansion, where he was catered to, isolated, abused, and physically distanced from the lives of the less privileged denizens of Hell. Stolas has never had bad intentions: he's always wanted to understand Blitz and be an equal with him. What Stolas has always had—the reason for his fuck-ups—were gaps in his perception and experience the size of a fucking blue whale. Thus, in order for him to understand Blitz, his privilege had to be taken away first. Now that he's been made to become a part of Blitz's life and crew, the events of S3 can swiftly flow in a direction where he can become viscerally aware of what life in Hell is like for the lower classes, and thus self-reflect and discuss his past behaviours and hold himself accountable for them.

Which... he's dying to do! Both in Full Moon and Apology Tour, he actively asks himself: "am I still naive?" and "Is there something for Blitz to teach that I still need to learn?" Obviously, in the moment Verosika and Tex answer the latter question with "no, he's just a motherfucker" and, sure, the episode leaves it at that; but that doesn't mean the show at large has left it at that. What the narrative is doing is the opposite of leaving it at that: it's planting all of the different seeds for Stolas' growth and accountability to happen in future episodes. It's telling us: "Look! Look here! Stolas has zero understanding of what he did wrong or how to veer course!"; "but Stolas perceives he might have done something wrong and is desperately trying to untangle the mess in his mind to figure it out, he just lacks the tools to do it, and is getting nowhere on his own".

In Sinsmas, when Stolas complains about having to work on a holiday and Blitz lightly calls him out on his privilege, that's the narrative planting another seed. In this case, it's telling us: "Stolas might have lost his privilege, but that was only the first step of many that he has yet to take. He still has zero perception of what life is like for Blitz." And it's not a final statement. It's not the end of the line. It's more like a little flag on the road. A flag to help mark where he is in the progress line of his character arc at this point in time, which is further away than he was before losing his powers (because prior to losing them he wouldn't even have been physically present to gain the knowledge that there are people who have to work on their holidays), but very far away from where he has the potential to be.

You know, something that stands out to me about Helluva Boss is that, whenever there's a hiatus, you see quite a lot of people online expressing frustration with the things they feel the show has left unaddressed, or with narrative beats they felt were unsatisfying.

For anyone who wasn't around at the time, there was quite a long hiatus after Seeing Stars. At that point, Queen Bee hadn't come out, because they were working out the copyright issues with Kesha's voice. So the situation was as follows: for a long while, Ozzie's was the last episode of Helluva Boss. Obviously, people's hearts were broken, and the pressing question was, what's gonna happen next with these two? Then, after a few months, we get The Circus. A direct continuation of Ozzie's, which also provides copious amounts of additional background as flashbacks... But zero resolution for the actual Ozzie's conflict, which is still left hanging heavily in the air.

And then we get Seeing Stars. And then nothing after that for like eight months.

People gave up on the show. People left the fandom. Seeing Stars was hated by many. Because people felt the show had simply decided to "ignore" Ozzie's and pretend like nothing had happened; because seeing Stolitz interact again in an episode that's kind of a silly Earth adventure, without addressing Ozzie's at all, was jarring. Like... "That's it? We're just moving past it? Like nothing happened? What a waste. That's so unsatisfying. I'm out. I don't care anymore."

Obviously, anyone who's still around knows the show did in fact address Ozzie's, partly at least (I don't doubt we're still coming back to that disastrous evening). We saw in Western Energy how their deal was put on hold as Stolas tried to navigate Blitz's feelings while Blitz seemingly gave him nothing to work with over text. We saw Stolas sit in Asmodeus' waiting room and ask for a crystal for Blitz because he wasn't sure if his feelings were mutual. We saw Full Moon, where Stolas ended the deal as a direct consequence of Ozzie's, and everything that happened afterwards. More subtly, we also saw how Blitz stopped trying to insert himself in M&M's marriage after Ozzie's. We also then got Queen Bee (which iirc aired around the same time as Western Energy), which gave some more insight into Blitz's side of things after Ozzie's.

What I'm trying to say is this show loves to plant seeds and not immediately address them. Just because Stolas and Blitz pretended nothing happened on their first encounter after Ozzie's, it doesn't mean they weren't both thinking about it, haunted by it, changing their behaviour behind the scenes because of it, and slowly letting it simmer until it inevitably boiled over and burned them.

This isn't different! The show hasn't forgotten any of the mistakes Stolas has made, and all of the seeds I mentioned above are just some of the signs the narrative has given us in late season 2 that Stolas' realisation of the exact ways in which his privilege made him fuck up is something we're slowly building up towards. They're taking their time so they can introduce all the puzzle pieces in a way that makes it inevitable for them to come together at a later time.

Even Verosika, to a lesser extent, has had this happen! Her behaviour in Apology Tour is not going to go unaddressed. Proof of this is the fact we were shown her shock and distress when she saw Blitz about to be executed, and when Stolas saved him. This is a wake-up call for her that the narrative will return to at a later date.

I think the reason Apology Tour was written to make the viewer feel so viscerally like "Verosika and Stolas are correct and justified, and Blitz does actually suck and deserve to be hated to this extent" is because the party is meant to be seen through Blitz's eyes, and at that moment, that's how he sees himself. That's how he perceives the entire thing. As fair. As understandable. He sees himself as someone who entirely ruins people's lives. It's setting up for Ghostfuckers, in a way: for him to learn that no matter how self-destructive he gets, his crew will be there for him, and that no matter how much he thinks he ruins everyone's lives, he can't change the fact there are people (eg. Millie) who he's saved, and whose lives he's changed for the better.

Ghostfuckers was just the first piece of the Apology Tour resolution: an introduction for Blitz to the idea that his self perception is not an objective truth, no matter how much he felt like Verosika's party confirmed his worst fears about himself. There will be more pieces. Both Stolas and Verosika will likely confront and take accountability for the hurt they caused Blitz. They just haven't yet because getting there is a process that we're currently in the early stages of.

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TL;DR: Apology Tour is the new Ozzie's, in that it is an episode that set certain intense emotional beats into motion that—in many ways—weren't immediately addressed. That doesn't mean they'll never be. More seeds need to be planted first so the resolution feels narratively organic and satisfying.

On a side note, because we now have the release date for Part 1 of Season 3 of Helluva Boss, I’ve already got started on the script for the Stolas video I mentioned some time ago. Currently rewatching Loo Loo Land, and very quickly, I remember that this was the episode that made me fall in love with Helluva Boss in the first place.

So. About that Helluva Boss season 3 clip.

There is so much to unpack for a clip that's less than 2 minutes long, which is not surprising for Helluva Boss. But today, I want to delve into this particular line from Stolas' imaginary version of Blitz, which gave me a lot to think about:

On a surface level, this is your typical, trope-y smut scene: the romantic interest meets the main character and is so allured by them he cannot control himself. As he throws himself onto the MC, he teases the MC about how obvious it is that they want this. In smut, this teasing can take many forms: think "I can smell your arousal" in omegaverse or the more generic (and physiologically realistic) "you're blushing so hard, you're breathing so fast, you're not resisting me at all, you're so wet/hard for me already".

Stolas' fantasy plays with their power imbalance: despite having visible pupils and a hair streak, this is still a royal self-insert; one with magical power. Indeed, if he didn't want Blitz to be touching him, Stolas could easily overpower him and get Blitz off of him. But he doesn't, because he does want Blitz, because that's the whole point of this kind of smutty fantasy. So Blitz teases him about it.

Without the context of the rest of the show, Stolas' fantasy is... actually pretty generic, with the exception of the details that signify their particular likes (ie. horses, plants, and blonde wigs).

But with two seasons worth of context, I find Stolas' sexual fantasy tells us quite a bit about the emotions Stolas is currently struggling with, both in his past and present relationship with Blitz and in his life at large.

So let's dive in.