Fandom + Art spot

Husk

Initially, Husk was not black-coded, but Keith David's delivery changes the game. Layering Black identity onto his character has the character defy stereotypes and limitations that are often placed on Black male characters, particularly in cartoons:

Husk is not toxically masculine, being overly sexual or sexually exploitative, as shown by his friction with Angel's hypersexuality in S1

Husk is not poised as being effortlessly cool; he is explicitly referred to as a "loser", and his Blackness is not made exotic/fetishised

Husk has a romance blossoming and being given a lot of narrative weight

Husk has an MLM romance blossoming

He is not portrayed as the 'muscle' or a brute. He's not initiating physical altercations flippantly, only doing so in the case of someone trying to roofie Angel. When Vox is at the door, he says Alastor will deal with him if he gets out of hand, rather than threatening Vox himself; against Velvette, he is quite soft, trying to end the fight by summoning a bouquet of flowers in her face; against Valentino, Cherri is doing the brunt of the fist-to-fist, etc.

While it's unintentional, the Blackness added to Husk's character adds a layer to the commentary on the predatory nature of casinos, in addition to his alcoholism, given the systemic marginalisation of the Black community in the USA, with the higher concentration of churches and liquor stores in low income Black communities in comparison to opportunities for empowerment and social mobility.

In the show's questioning of sins and vices, and posing the question of nature vs nurture, Husk as a Black character really adds to the idea that the Hazbin Hotel being an inclusive, productive environment is often the difference between someone turning to immoral acts due to systemised oppression.

Additionally, Keith David is African American, as Husk is, a well-known Black voice and just quite darling. Vocally, it's a glowing representation.

Onto the negatives: he's a cat. People debate whether he's meant to be Black or not... Ugh. They're just a foolish minority, but at the same time, they're not totally wrong in saying that he's not literally a Black man.

Again, this is because of colour blind casting, not because it was intentionally done, but what shakes out is that Hazbin Hotel is another example of where there are 0 dark-skinned Black male faces; meanwhile, Black women appear in main roles (coughing violently at Disney animation and live-action remakes). This trend, as I understand, happens because femininity makes Black women more non-threatening and palatable to mainstream (see: white) audiences.

The most egregious and plain examples I think of are 'The Little Mermaid' (2023) and 'Wish' (2023), in which the black female protagonists are given non-black fathers, and in TLM, bizarrely, a queen character was added and designed as black with a convoluted adoption storyline so that Prince Eric would still be played by a white man.

Anyway, in Hazbin, Velvette and quite a few of the femme background sinners are presented with dark brown skin, whereas I have not noted this being the case for male characters. So in terms of literal visual representation, it's a dud, but as I said, Husk was not designed as a black role in the first place, so I don't hold this against the show too much, it's just unfortunate.

The next major negative with Husk comes from his relationship with Alastor as depicted in S1E5.

Mimzy and Alastor call him 'Husker', which is flying too close to the shucking/husking corn association in my opinion. When you Google 'husker meaning', removing corn husks is the first thing that comes up, and we're told that Husk, for whatever reason, has a problem getting called this nickname, despite it being so close to his own, as opposed to Blitz in Helluva Boss, who states outright why he doesn't like Blitzo (and Blitzy iirc, it's been years since I watched) – a matter of respect.

We're not provided a reason as to why, hence why I looked up what it could mean. That Mimzy and Alastor are calling him a corn shucker raises my hackles as a black person. If this isn't what it's meant to be, I think the significance of the name should've been clarified in some way.

Then there's, of course, Alastor dehumanising Husk by reducing him to a 'pet', i.e. an animal, yanking the chain, violently reminding us that Husk is, for lack of a better term, his slave, and threatening Husk with violence. While soul deals and slavery in this show were already brutally touched upon with ValAngel in S1E4, A. Valentino does not have Angel get on the floor or compare him to an animal; B. ValAngel's dynamic is positioned as capitalist exploitation via sex work; C. Angel Dust is not black, let alone a black ethnicity such as African American that is descended from enslaved Africans.

They also have Husk refer to Alastor as "boss" in this scene, when he otherwise doesn't usually. Alastor does not get any capitalist benefit from Husk, their dynamic operates in a largely domestic setting – it is extremely evocative of a house slave and a master.

The problem with this is that both Husk and Alastor, as Black characters, should recognise this, and Husk should express some sort of discomfort about this particular aspect of their dynamic.

If the racist atmosphere is not intentional, it's extremely careless to depict two Black characters, especially with Alastor having explicitly lived in the Jim Crow era, and even if Husk's era hasn't been stated plainly in the show, having the voice of an older Black man, being completely blasé about the implications of their slave-master dynamic.

If it was not intentional, they should've handled that scene in a totally different way. Do not have Husk refer to Alastor as "boss"; don't have Alastor emphasise Husk's literal inferior anthropomorphism; don't have Alastor fiddling with the chain so much; take or leave this one with all the other changes, but don't have Husk pulled onto the floor, and if he is, have him show some indignation in his shock and horror about Alastor switching up, rather than immediately being submissive, as if this is a normal dynamic.

Again, comparing it to ValAngel, Angel Dust doesn't just take Val's abuse without trying to talk back, and has to be whittled down significantly into the "yes, Valentino" bit, where his line delivery is laboured, and begrudging, rather than accepting of the abusive dynamic.

Alastor

So right off the bat, Alastor is a major problem child, because not only was he initially going to be a stigmatised, demonised version of a Louisiana Voodoo practitioner, but also... he wasn't even a creole/mixed/black-ish character. Alastor was going to be white, which was changed because of criticisms. So already off to a shit start, but it was changed, so won't hold it against Prime Alastor.

I'm just going to say Alastor is Creole going forward because Vivzie has said that once, even though a lot of the fandom interprets this as meaning biracial black-white (not the same thing), but it makes little difference.

Creole Voodoo practitioner Alastor using real veves/spiritual symbols is still god-awful representation, because it continues the racist, historically precedent tradition of associating the spirituality of the African diaspora with demons and evil-doing. Diaspora spirituality is largely about connecting with our African ancestors and traditional deities, with features of syncretism, e.g. the inclusion of Catholic saints in Louisiana Voodoo. So the badness and malice Alastor does with his powers should have nothing to do with it – that's not just bad representation but it's false, pedalling stigma.

So Alastor's symbols were changed from real veves to elements from veves and sigils that resemble elements from veves. Step in the right direction, but still... associating Voodoo with bad-mindedness (sorry I keep using that word; I hope you can figure it out from context clues; a more accurate term is escaping the Jamaican in me lol).

At this point, the word "voodoo" is never uttered anywhere, and it's not technically offensive, but as I say, it's one foot over the line of offensiveness, one foot on neutral ground.

Next up is Alastor's vocal direction and casting.

Elephant in the room: Amir Talai is not Black. And unlike the VA for Clawdeen Wolf in 'Monster High' G1, or Michiko Malandro's VA in the English Dub of 'Michiko and Hatchin', and such cases, is not instructed to do any sort of Blaccent. I'm not saying this is a bad thing; we don't want non-Black people doing Blaccents, but I'm merely stating that Blackness is absent from Alastor's vocal performance. So there's no representation there.

Alastor is doing a transatlantic accent, and even in his flashback scene, as far as I hear, he's doing almost the same accent, if not the same. That is not an actual accent people had and was specifically crafted for the media to make celebrities more palatable to globalised anglophone audiences. So no representation, even beyond Blackness, on that front either.

Really and truly, they should've got a black VA to voice Alastor. I understand that the phoney accent is how the character is very married to the character's original design, but the original design was offensive and ignorant. Black characters, especially given the context Alastor is associated with, need to be researched well and handled with curiosity and education, lest we whitewash the violently racist history of the US and erase the story of the Black community in the United States and their contributions to culture as we understand it today.

The direction of Talai's Alastor is not even consistent, so I see no reason that representation was sacrificed over what we have now. The accent is not real, not directed clearly, so there's no reason why a Black voice would not suffice for the role.

Speaking of Alastor's backstory, while I now have a theory on why Rosie does not specifically call out Jim fucking Crow/racism in her dialogue... in describing the hardships Alastor faced in early 20th-century New Orleans getting a radio show, race is danced around in the most jarring way, and people have noted that the party scenes are suspect in their depiction of class and race mixing during Jim Crow. This can be addressed later if we ever get Alastor's own testimony of his life in more detail, but as of now, we are still failing to represent anything remotely black here.

Going on to his visual design, as a human, we get what is probably our one and only black win for Alastor. He has curls, he's handsome, has a realistic skin tone, brown eyes, and imo, given his being active in jazz age NOLA, freakiness (/in the most non-sexual way lol) and the shows both coming out in the 2020s, he evokes AMC's Louis de Pointe du Lac imo, which was another race-swap for sensitivity that added many layers to the character.

Human Alastor also does not summon a demon with Voodoo, but specifically with a pentagram. He's portrayed as just... generally tweaking, being a serial killer, living in conditions that are grim and unhealthily isolated. His mish-mash spirituality is presented as a frantic cry for help, throwing everything beyond major religions at the decrepit wall. He calls on "spirits of the afterlife" NOT demons, and implicitly started with Voodoo because it's what he's most familiar with, given his background. He speaks French, alluding to his Creole identity. While nothing is made explicit or commented on, there's a lot of interesting details going on here.

Kisses for human Alastor, if you take him out of the historically whitewashed context, we have a few small black wins over here. Beautifully deranged, beautifully black boy.

Had he been contextualised in a more modern era, you could imagine him as just a generally superstitious, non-traditionally spiritually wary character, which I feel like is honestly kind of a deep cut (for outsiders) culturally contextualised personality type in the black community that gives me life to see. In isolation, human Alastor has the potential to be good representation, outside of the voice issues.

...And then we come to our usual, day to day Alastor. Big sigh.

His hair is a tragedy, and without a single curl or wave. This is not implied to be a pimp perm/silk press for style. It's bright red. Not black hair. 0 points for representation. And this is obviously a matter of opinion, but his hair is just... not visually appealing enough to not have altered it somewhat.

His skin had an 'animation error' in the first season and was ghostly pale instead of the darker, sallow pallor he consistently has in S2. The fact that they just let that slide in S1 is pitiful – complexion is kind of a huge fucking deal when it comes to depicting black, melanated characters. The oversight is offensive, which is beyond what the character himself depicts, but I think it's important to mention.

Alastor is Creole, so his nose being upturned and sharp is not an issue, but when you put it all together, demon Alastor simply is not a black character design. And of course he isn't – he wasn't designed black, and he wasn't visually changed to accommodate the needed changes for sensitivity. So aesthetically, voice included, there is woefully 0 black representation in demon Alastor.

But let's imagine a world where demon Alastor looked as black as the story actually calls for him to be, and we could tell by the sight and sound of him: what's the verdict on his personality and role in the story so far?

He's a cannibal, with him eating a deer as a deer demon, the food he eats having body parts, and his easygoing affiliation with Rosie. This is not great paired with the Voodoo motif, and maybe it's the Caribbean in me talking and this is less of a thought in the US (I'm not sure), but from my experience, black diaspora cultures that practice non-mainstream religions are often associated with cannibalism. I actually think most indigenous/alternative traditional religions are stigmatised and get associated with cannibalism or meat-eating practices that don't align with mainstream American ideas on what animals are permissible to eat = immoral.

So far, while we can pull some interesting interpretations from Alastor being a cannibal, it doesn't have any impact on the story, and other than the cannibal sinners, he's the only person shown to engage in this. There's no real reason, and I personally think walking it back to hints of vampirism with the blood drinking, and the venison affinity would have the same effect while flying not as close to the sun. Although, I'm obviously biased here.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't actually understand the significance of Alastor being a literal cannibal. We are explicitly told that he cannibalised his fellow overlords in terms of power, but... they told us, so no real need for him to actually be eating people, too, is there? We also don't generally see him murdering people throughout the series, so it's just a kind of weird accessory.

I think an Addams family level of macabre would work fine for the gags. The cannibalism, as of now, is just kind of there, and turning the heat up slightly on the offensiveness of his character. This is a very quiet beep on the radar that I'd usually easily overlook, given the demonic setting, but everything adds up, and there's not much in terms of black rep to offset it.

Interestingly, unlike Vox, who makes quite a pointed commentary on whiteness in pop culture, even if unintentionally, Alastor's role in the story has almost no ties to blackness. The one glimmer of hope was his talk of "freedom" in 'Finale', which is obviously an extremely topical and heralded principal for black descendants of enslaved Africans, and especially African Americans, given the clash between the country's self-proclaimed concern for freedom and the violent subjugation of Black Americans throughout history and to this day, but especially pre-Civil Rights, such as during Alastor's lifetime, which has been flagged extremely loudly from his first appearance.

This tends to be something I lean on to black him up in my personal presentations and interpretations of his character, but the show is really not interested in this at all. Alastor willingly offers himself into bondage in S2 and makes nice with Rosie after she dehumanises him and it is portrayed, I believe consciously, from Alastor's racialised perspective as degradingly anti-Black. This is not the pursuit of freedom as represented by a black character. No points for rep here, which is a damn shame because it was such an easy lay-up.

Also just touching back on the aesthetic level for a moment: Alastor's musical associations so far have been jazz and that creepy, villainous orchestral music that plays for him. This is okay, but strictly sticking to jazz feels ignorant to the history and context of Black music, especially from the Deep South. Music genres do not "fall out of coconut trees" (lol), but come through evolution and weaving in elements from different, pre-existing genres, etc. I know I'm biased here, but where are the Blues and the Country? Alastor's background is so incredibly rich and vibrant, and the portrayal is so limited to the point it almost feels like erasure to me.

Fucking VOX's white ass got a Gospel song, and Alastor is pigeonholed to jazz and spooky villain orchestral. Give me a break. But more than that too, why could his ominous music not also be Jazz. How about Ragtime...?

My point here is that limiting him in this way, I feel, diminishes the character's blackness coming across. Instead, Alastor seems more like he just really likes jazz, and there's nothing much deeper to it. Music is extremely important culturally, and especially the direct derivatives of the Blues at the time for African Americans.

But okay, "jazz is for pussies", says Adam, and we're not going to have any meaningful blowback from the early 20th century NOLA Creole guy on that. Okay. Yeah, no points for me on black representation here.

Back to his role in the story, the way he's so aggro on Lucifer with no explanation could play into the cultural context of a fight against hegemony and the oppressing classes for freedom thing... except, no. We're provided no reason so far on why Alastor is so uncharacteristically pressed about Lucifer.

If Alastor's design actually represented a black man, what we'd be seeing is a black guy bullying an adorkable white guy, emasculating him (the comment on his height), basically telling a white girl to call him daddy to emasculate a white guy (LOL), and doing all of this 100% unprovoked.

We'd then be seeing a light-skinned mixed guy playing massa to the monoracial dark-skinned Black guy.

We'd then be seeing our problematic biracial* willingly let a white woman use him like an attack dog, and suddenly finding his chill when telling her to fuck off, meanwhile not having an ounce of composure around Lucifer.

*He's not biracial, but this is a topical concept in black discourse that is just hilarious to me as a mixed person hahaha

Fortunately for episode 5, Alastor is not detectably black whatsoever, because the racial dynamics are honestly outrageous and go completely unexplained. None of it aligns with what we see of Alastor at other points in the series. I think portraying Alastor's relationship with Husk in this way also raises the question of why... why doesn't Alastor have any actual black friends?

Again, somehow Vox gets away looking much better in this regard, despite being the only character to make racist comments in Prime: he champions diversity, his bestie is a black gal that he obviously adores, takes on dinner dates, we are shown he is willing to casually die for, and calls "lovely", the first overlord he appeals to is Zeezi, who is black-coded (her VA and vocal performance), Zeezi is also the main non-Vee singer in 'Bad with Us', they practically share the song...

Meanwhile, Alastor is choosing roles of servitude for white-skinned women (Charlie, Mimzy, Rosie), obsessively bitter about white men of status (Vox, Lucifer), and has a Japanese lolita maid, and a black guy he exploits... No good at all, mate 💀.

It COULD be interesting if it were intentional, but I highly doubt it's anything more than clumsy. And most importantly, no commentary is given in the show on it so if it's intentional, it's not only executed poorly, but simply not executed.

Alastor comes off as a weirdo without racial solidarity, which again, flies in the face of any racial undertone to his pursuit of freedom. And given that he lived and died in Jim Crow, and we are explicitly shown that he was a pioneering Black voice with his radio show, and our attention is drawn to it with Rosie's "overcoming so much" comment, Alastor not having racial solidarity at all, and being so out of touch with black people is something you just have to address if you give a shit about meaningfully representing him as a black character whatsoever.

In S1E7, Alastor being weirdly touchy and inappropriate with Charlie, and then Rosie insinuating he looks like a creep, has bad manners, and having Alastor standing up behind Charlie like a butler goes back to the servitude thing, but also there's this element of Alastor giving sex pest vibes that got sown here that, when you mix it altogether with everything else I've stated, is kind of racially iffy, considering the hypersexual mandingo stereotype.

I also believe that they are subtly sowing seeds of Alastor not being intelligent, with his chicken scratch handwriting, and the repetition of "clever" and people harping on his wordplay (I find it hilarious, sorry. "I pulled a few limbs, too" is getting a Chopz giggle every time) as kind of a sore spot. It hasn't happened yet but I can see it on the horizon, and... this too is racially iffy. Of course, black men can be dumb, but to have it as a 'thing' specifically for Alastor is deeply unfortunate, and also doesn't really align with what we're shown in S1 & S2. I'll wait until the other shoe drops to dock a point for it though.

Alastor is set to become a true villain, but at a base line is generally cocky, selfish, sadistic, hypocritical, antisocial (in S2), loves to pick fights and do violence. Definitely nothing refreshing or positive going on here in terms of black male representation lol.

I love Alastor, and I add a lot of more black details in my mind (e.g. his teeth being gold 'radio' grillz... pry it from my dead hands), but he's hardly representation, and it's not good if he is. He's borderline neutral if we're being charitable... and we really are being.

Velvette

As a Black Brit, I have the most skin in the game with this one.

Visually speaking, Velvette is fine, but not beautifully black. Her complexion is pale, because of the demon thing, I suppose. Often, the brown appears more grey. I don't think it's necessary for the demons to have unnatural skin tones if I'm being honest, there's plenty of other demonic details they can be given. Just take a look at Monster High, for example: Clawdeen Wolf and her family all have brown, human skin tones and yet they're still obviously anthro wolves. Honestly, now that I say this, I wish Alastor's complexion and hair-ear situation just looked like Howleen Wolf's pretty much lol.

Anyway, Velvette is visibly black and she is sometimes given afro-textured hairstyles. So wins here.

One thing about Velvette that bothers me, and this may be problematic of me to say, but it's that she doesn't have thicker lips. This came up for me because of her being a fashion doll, and most major fashion doll lines aligning with the beauty ideal of thicker lips, or at least having enough surface area for a cute lippy, and then there's the thing of lip filler being explicitly pulled out in 'Trust Us', meanwhile Velvette sits here clearly flouting the reported beauty ideal if that's the case. Initially, I thought that the main characters simply didn't have lips as a design principle, but Rosie and recurring tertiary characters like Clara, Melissa, and so many background characters have thicker lips, that it's started to itch at me. Her top lip (I think she's biting her bottom lip???) is also thicker in the cocktail Love Potion poster.

It's not a big deal, but thicker lips are a common black feature, so on multiple levels, including black rep, I don't think it would've hurt to let Velvette have it. But this isn't a detraction, some black people don't have thick lips, it's fine. In some scenes, however, the animators seem to agree with me and give her thicker lips. Just not really getting why not here, seems like an aversion to facial diversity in the main cast, which... you know. Not good for representation.

Of course, Velvette doesn't have a black nose either. There is a serious lack of noses in this show, which I feel speaks to the priorities of Viv's art style; noses are a really big deal to depicting ethnic diversity and they are erased in most cases in the demon designs of Hazbin Hotel. And we are stuck in Hell, so although the humans all have noses, the only human characters we regularly see are the exorcist angels who are... white. Okay.

(I know Vaggi has a nose, but being Latina, the nose doesn't factor into her representation; like Alastor as a Creole character, it could be anything and have no impact on the representation).

So this is why I say she's not beautifully black, because she has (ashy) dark brown skin and sometimes has black hairstyles, but it's bare minimum in depicting a character as black, really. But it's always good to see a dark skinned black woman, in any case.

Something that is good rep about Velvette as black female character is her fashion, in my opinion. I feel she comes off as multi-faceted, dipping into more alternative styles, going to the witch thing, more 2010s social media type outfits, business style outfits, and novel outfits like the Western getup from S2E3. Literally, we get multi-facted visual representation of black women just by them letting her do this, along with the different hairstyles. So this is a positive point, albeit a very mild one.

She is voiced by a Black woman, which is good for BTS representation, although not a black British woman. Because of this, and an obvious disinterest in black British vernacular from the writers, Velvette's dialogue and vocal direction is wholly devoid of anything black British. The closest we got was her saying "it's giving", which is AAVE, since we tend to borrow from African Americans and consume Black media, absorbing these phrases through osmosis and circulating amongst ourselves, more than our non-black counterparts. That being said, white people appropriate AAVE all the time and a lot of the black roots get erased and deemed "internet slang", so regardless of whether Velvette was black or not, they probably still would've used it. Likewise, with Alastor saying "that's the tea".

So on the voice, it's neutral: objectively it's a black performer, but the direction and performance is not meaningfully black representation. If Velvette's VA was not black, the end product doesn't change, although Lili Cooper's performance is great, and I especially love the pitch range, particularly if Velvette is meant to be from London, since for whatever reason, it seems like we tend to have deeper voices than women from other parts of the country. I doubt it was intentional, but it's a small positive from me.

Velvette's OST is fine, but not meaningfully black, and certainly not meaningfully black British. I highly doubt they are going to use Grime, Jungle or Garage elements if she ever gets a song. Moving away from black British and more onto black genres in general, there's still a chance for something, but she doesn't have song yet so we can just move on from the aesthetic stuff for now.

Though the fandom certainly love to masculinise her, she is a feminine dark skinned black woman, and treated in such a role by Vox and Valentino as far as we've seen. This is good because black women are so often denied femininity, with blackness being viewed as inherently masculine.

That being said, as I mentioned in that post I did a while ago, positioning Velvette as the third wheel to StaticMoth, one of whom is explicitly shown to be a womanising Don Juan type (Val), the other being 2 for 2 on having a crush on his bestie/person he wants as a "partner" (Vox) positions Velvette as being undesirable, since she does not have meaningful relations with any other characters at this point, and nobody has shown any attraction to her, despite her being implied to be conventionally attractive and the commenters on her social media UI vouching for this.

Portraying black women, especially conventionally attractive black women, as undesirable plays into our other-ing and dehumanisation; it calls into question the possibility of black women as a whole to be attractive, no matter how conventional or ideal appearing, and provides the opinion of 'maybe not'. While it may seem superficial, desirability is tied to ideas of who is deserving or undeserving of love and softness, and it does matter.

The decision to make the black woman a third wheel and invest so much of herself into a relationship other than her own, when as far as we're shown she doesn't have one of her own is iffy. It puts her in service of their relationship also: Velvette is the camera woman for StaticMoth's kisses, while she herself does not receive such affection from anyone. It's something akin to the mammy archetype.

Speaking of racist archetypes, Velvette most certainly is presented as a Sapphire archetype: she is portrayed as aggressive, disrespectful, stubborn, callous, prone to quarrel and violence, irritable/frequently angry.

But as I said before, and this is also a large reason why I ship StaticDoll, is that Vox is very soft with and uplifting of her in S1E2 and S2E3, in addition to the pinups visually suggesting she is seen as desirable in the environment design, even if it's never particularly gestured toward. Vox seems to have a lot of respect for Velvette, shutting down his sexy times with Valentino flustered at her presence, for whatever reason.

In S2E6, even when he's "throwing her under the bus"... he really isn't. Getting Velvette to apologise is to her benefit, too, and it's hardly a tall order, in addition to Vox truly holding her hand through the whole thing, and trying to cover for her. My running theory is that she is purposefully meant to portray impulsivity, but just taking the show at face value, it's due to her being presented as a Sapphire that she's so bothered by Vox asking her to apologise to someone to help business run smoothly.

Other than this, it's also nice to see a feminine black female character be the villain, but also not portrayed as more villainous than the rest. The Vees being a strong friend triangle really helps make Velvette's position feel nuanced and sincere, rather than falling into another iffy trope.

Overall, I think all the issues stem from the thing that Vivzie admitted:

She did not view the characters' ethnicity and racial backgrounds as important when designing and writing them. It's simply irresponsible and tone-deaf to do that for characters so entwined with History and pop culture (the overlords). This is a show that runs a commentary on culture and hegemony, whether that's a theme it intended to focus on or not. The very least that could be done is approaching the characters' cultural backgrounds and contexts with true curiosity and care. To sincerely be acknowledged is the bulk of representation, so saying that a black character's blackness isn't important to their story is just dooming the representation to be severely limited at best, but most likely offensive.

Black people living as minorities simply cannot detangle our stories from our marginalisation. From the time that we are still in nappies, we're experiencing racism, because it's on our skin, in our hair, on our eyes, nose, lips, our voices, and this isn't even to speak of more nuanced things that crop up with age like cultural capital we do not have access to for not being raised in the mainstream (i.e. marginal), therefore often limiting us from participating in mainstream society in the way our white counterparts do. That's another reason representation matters; to bridge the gap for mainstream audiences to understand marginalised people, rather than the onus always being on us to have to translate and repackage ourself to suit their cultural sensibilities.

Saying all that to say, my opinion is that colour blind representation is never good representation. It can be neutral, and maybe I can personally like the characters and see things in them that are meaningful to me, but ultimately, if there's no intention to represent us... then it's just not possible to meaningful representation. It's like if you went to watch a performance of Romeo and Juliet and Romeo is played by a black actor... Romeo's character doesn't suddenly become black. There are things that can be done to make it so, but it would have to be intentional. No intentionality = no representation.

That's my personal take, anyway.

5th Place: Emily

She shows a lot of integrity, which is one of the most important traits to have! I think she's written very well as someone who has no experience with the kind of darkness and grit sinners have lived through, but still tries her best to take accountability and respect them. Unlike the other non-human characters, she doesn't seem to look down on sinners at all, which makes her sooo likeable.

And her design is so gorgeousss!! This was my first time drawing her and I loveddd it. And I love cyber-core, and her palette reminds me of it so much (it's probably how I'm gonna dress her in fanart)

4th Place: Valentino

He's a riot!! He makes me laugh! Sue me! I grew up seeing parody caricatures of pimps, like in Norbitt and the Boondocks, and they do just say the darndest things hahahaha, never fails to get a laugh out of me. I very much know they're evil, but I grew up on Hip Hop too, so yeah, I also think his pimp aesthetic is super cool T_T

I love that Valentino is so nuanced, though. He's not made the podium for my favourite, but he sure is the only one I've written a 10k character study for!! In everything he does, he's a man of duality, which is such an interesting social commentary, particularly on the duality of abusers, and just how different they can be to their victims vs everyone else, and on gender/sexuality, where he is both a pimp, a vicious heteropatriarch role from a largely homophobic pocket of culture, and also someone who challenges cisheteronormativity in every way. And in both of these dualisms, he acts as a beautiful thesis into how none of these things are as paradoxical or far-fetched as mainstream cultural discourse taught us to understand them.

I find him really hard to draw in my style, and conceptualise in my brain, so he sadly loses points for that (but he always ends up beautiful hahaha). And as much as I love villains, in season 1, from Angel's perspective, he was sooo unlikable. I really do love him now we've seen a bit more, but the emotional impact of that still lingers a bit.

Also, when he's not being evil, his mannerisms remind me a lot of one of my friends? So he's kind of comforting in that familiar way.

BRONZE MEDAL: Alastor

I really fucking hate drawing Alastor, because nobody else has a properly human face, but his seems like it's meant to be the same as his human face, and it really upsets me to not at least try. But I can never get it right!!! I also have no idea what's going on with his hair.

BUT. I love this boy. Season 1 was kind of disappointing for me, but I found Alastor to be an interesting mystery, and quite a delight to watch. In season 2, I love how much of an antagonistic menace he is, and I love that we got to see his human life. He looked like Louis from AMC Interview With The Vampire when he was alive aaaaa!!! I always look forward to learning more about him and his motivations. He comes from a beautiful place with a haunting history, and it's really so interesting to think about.

Also, he's adorable and he dresses fresshhh, and that matters incredibly to me. Oh and those Tumblr Sexyman bait scenes are great too hahahahha

SILVER MEDAL: Vox

I really had 0 interest in him in season 1 :0 !!! But he really sole the show in season 2, and he has such a heartfelt and human story. That scene of him and Alastor's past is soooo iconic and lowkey relatable. I love how his kind of silly obsession in season 1 got flipped into something so passionate and raw!

I find his out-of-touch CEO in a capitalist hellscape gags soooo fucking funny. And Christian Borle shut it downnnn on all of his songs/verses.

I also love the sea, so I'm deffo the target audience for his shark motif. I love his teeth???? He's just a cutie patootie and he loves his friends. And he's so easy to draw hahahaha.

He's truly a delight to watch, even just his little cameo in the Helluva on Prime ad makes me so happy. I'm always happy to see him on screen, and I hope, even if he's not centre-stage anymore, we can keep seeing this jerk!

Oh, I guess since I said everyone else is cool, I'll give him that he can have rich CEO daddy swag if he puts his mind to it. But more than anything he is really cute, right?

GOLD GOLD GOLD: VELVETTE

Velvette is probably the reason I even continued watching the show through season 2. I am the absolute target audience for her character design and she's just like meeee fr fr.

For starters, REPRESENTATION??? It's not every day I get a black British diva character in my cartoon, and your girl takes what she can get!!! As Diahann Caroll basically said about playing Dominique Devereaux on Dynasty in the 80s, good BITCH representation matters for us gals of colour. Nobody should expect us to always be the nice characters to not be the targets of racism, we are so allowed to be bitches. I love bitches, I love being a bitch hahahaha.

Also as a local, while not perfect, Lilli Cooper is doing a lovelllyyyy job with the accent and it's consistent in the songs too. I really love the voice she went with? I I really love that she has an Estuary English accent instead of RP, like she's literally just a regular London gal, it's beautiful. And I loveeee the laugh.

I love wicked women, as my bio says, I even designed a tattoo of Velvette with the word 'wicked' that I was gonna get on my hip, but then I decided I don't really want a fandom tattoo at this point in my life hahahaha. But maybe I'll get it one day??? I just think it's such an important thing in life, as a woman, to not be afraid of people thinking you're 'bad', because way too much is expected of us, especially in regard to emotional labour in the most casual conversations. I wanted it as a reminder to myself to keep my chin up and let 'em talk!!

I loved her pigtails; I had a Harley Quinn phase in 2021 and used to wear my hair in bunches to school, so it's the edgy part of me that was really fucking with her vibe, including the palette and the alt aspects of her fashion. Which is also awesome to see on a black girl character in a mainstream cartoon???

I love that she's a doll! I have a display case of dolls in my room and I try to keep up to date with fashion doll news. I stopped collecting dolls in 2023, I think. I love looking at the mini-fashions and the beautiful sculpts, but as an adult, I have no motivation to wash the box glue out of their hair, style their hair and change their clothes. They're also... WAY more expensive than when I was younger lmfao

I love that she changes outfits the most. I feel like she gets a lot of love from the creators, even if she doesn't have much screentime. Her outfits, particularly in season 2 and in more recent merch, are actually so pretty, clearly designed with care. And the black hairstyles in season 2??????? GUYSSSSS. Like omfg. Yes. Inject it into my veins.

Goddd I love her relationship with the Vees in season 2. Her and Vox in S2E3 just like... tattoo it on my brain pls. DO IT NOW. DO IT NOW. And I love how she's a team player from her very first appearance but has no qualms laying 'em out. And it's nice to see rep of a girl in a group of boys that isn't, like, girlbossing them around or there to be a love interest? Obviously, Velvette's a girlboss, but I mean the Vees really are her friends and vice versa.

I love that she's a witch! I know I already said I love wicked women but I also love WICKED women hahahaha. Nina Simone and Eartha Kitt sang about this way back in the day, like there's truly something about having supernatural abilities, being this ostracised class for having something so powerful inside you... like, yes, that's us, ladies!!!! And I love when those powers are used for selfish reasons, just to spite the world that would condemn that inner power. Fuck 'em!!!!

I love that she's the social media overlord. Isn't it so relatable how she's doomscrolling in half her scenes? Like, she is representing us, guys! And I really love that they're not portraying her as vapid and thoughtless because of it, and her interest in fashion. In fact, it seems like they're going to go with the mastermind angle next season? Which, again, it's so rare outside of like... media very much targeted at young girls to get a character like this. Even in those, the 'bully' archetypes tend to not be very capable.

I love so much about her, and I can't wait to see more.

+ Honourable Mention: Angel Dust

Angel Dust was my first favourite character back in 2019. I really loved his design, I thought he was so funny and cute. And my brain latched onto him strangely, whenever I thought about him I could smell plain instant ramen??? I have an 'Addict' tank top, so been there, done that and literally got the shirt!!!!

To start with, I want to analyse the scenes we're shown in 'Poison' and how they contrast with scenes we're shown of Alastor, especially in his backstory, since I think it's easier to understand when you can visually see it.

'Poison' and Alastor's backstory start the same way, with RadioDust's attractiveness being called attention to: Angel poses, Rosie tells us Alastor was a "handsome young man, quite the charmer".

We then see them both performing: Angel is doing a porn scene, and Alastor at the radio station. They are surrounded by three imposing male figures, who are looking at them with violence in their gazes. The difference between Angel and Alastor is the order of the shots (though I put them side by side just so you can see it): Alastor's story starts with the men, and moves to him behind the glass as two leer over him and nod; Angel has two of the men close in on him first, then we see the three.

We then see both of them performing at a club, and Alastor's left eye is emphasised as being red to us, matching Angel's. Noteworthy here is that the glass illuminating this is Mimzy's, and we were shown Alastor has a codependent relationship with her in S1E5. Likewise, Angel performing is framed by Valentino, and Angel also has a codependent relationship with Val, highlighted especially by his "I'll do my best, daddy" in S2E6.

No longer going chronological with the comparisons, because what I'm saying is that they are on the same line going in different directions.

Valentino takes the cigarette away from Angel and blows secondhand smoke into his face. At this point, the violent bondage scene has Angel ready to call it quits, whereas Alastor is not smoking, gets 'swept up' by the producers' smoke, and this kicks off the chain of events that lead to the circumstances of his death.

We see by the end of 'Poison' that Valentino is dragging Angel back in, but Angel is trying to break away. We see his face illuminating the LED screen behind them, and the shot rounds off with Angel on his own, shining.

Alastor, on the other hand, reaches out to Rosie, and his shadow flares up behind him as she starts to wrap around him, and he willingly accepts her bondage. We then see his shadow on the floor, tied up.

And throughout this scene, Alastor smiles in the face of demon hands caressing his face, meanwhile Angel is struggling to keep up the act for Valentino as he is made to dance on the chain, and ends up desperately trying to break away.

Then, we see Angel, panicked, searching for some kind of escape, although he won't find it in Val's halls. He goes to the balcony. Doing the complete opposite, we see Alastor in 'Finale' running to the rubble of the radio tower. Angel's move is to escape; Alastor's is to go back in.

We see this again with how they find themselves in the Vees' clutches. My last big point on 'Poison' here is that the final scene that Val forces Angel into is hardcore bondage, where his mouth is forced open and three people brutally have their way with him.

On the other hand, when Alastor is initially captured by the Vees, his mouth is covered. When Vox takes the mask off his face and Alastor starts talking, he eventually tries to silence him, but Alastor bypasses it by using his radio grill to 'force his mouth open' himself.

This brings me back to RadioDust going in opposite directions. As I said before, at the start of this bondage scene, Valentino takes the cigarette away from Angel, and we see that after Valentino blows the smoke in his face, Angel has reached his limit with all that's happening to him.

Alastor, on the other hand, has Vox blow smoke in his face in S2E4, saying, "It's nice, isn't it?" and then trying to get him to drink, then trying to get him to spill his secrets. In response to the call to overshare, Alastor budges to bully Vox (see: be antisocial) and starts talking, getting more enthusiastic than even Vox bargained for.

'Poison' is showing us Angel at his limit, and his declaration that "his story is gonna end with [him] dead from [the] poison" is not so; his last verse outright tells us he's "sick" of the cycle. Angel wants to be at the hotel; he wants to get better. Meanwhile, Alastor declares to Vox he "ain't won... yet."

Likewise, in S1E2, Angel and Alastor have totally different reactions to Vox's camera. Angel detects the camera getting installed and is immediately, literally guns blazing, ready to kill Vox-via-Pentious and get rid of Vox's attempt to breach the "boundaries". Meanwhile, Alastor enters after the fact and challenges Vox to try again.

Viewing these characters through the lens of coping mechanisms and trauma, I think the Vox and Angel scene makes more sense.

What Angel thinks is happening is that he is going to do sex work, i.e. engage in hypersexuality. I think this also speaks to why he says, "I'll do my best, daddy". He's very self-aware of his hypersexuality, as he mentions in 'Loser, Baby'.

Instead of hypersexuality, Vox suddenly pops out of the darkness, and Angel realises he has been oversharing – the vice that Vox represents, i.e. he was unknowingly telling the hotel's secrets. Angel did not consider himself to be an oversharer, but Vox, someone who indulges in oversharing, starts blathering on about his schemes and forces Angel to look into a mirror and recognise that he's still prone to the bad habit himself.

If you think about it in real life, it's really easy for emotional oversharing/trauma-dumping to encourage someone else to dangerously overshare, and it turns into things like blackmail, image-based sexual abuse (revenge porn), etc.

I think it would also explain why Angel seems to be wholly convinced he can defy overlord Vox, spitting on his face and walking toward the door without much panic or rush. This would also explain why, despite the Vees being thick as thieves, Angel doesn't seem anywhere near as wary of Velvette and Vox: he has not reflected on his impulsivity or oversharing, just his hypersexuality.

It also makes Vox calling Angel a murderer make a lot of sense: Vox is oversharing Angel's secrets and trying to coax Angel to overshare about his family trauma. Velvette explicitly calls this out as a trauma dump and praises Vox for it, because she is an enabler. We know she is not talking about Angel here because Angel tried to shut it down and did not give any info about his past. She encourages Vox to overshare by putting the finger on Angel's mouth, to stop him from enforcing healthy boundaries.

I think the fact that Vox knows that Angel killed his father, and explicitly tells us that Valentino told him, is also a hint that, indeed, Angel does have an unaddressed tendency to overshare. We know that by the time Angel has checked into rehab the hotel in S1, he does not seem to have any affection for Valentino whatsoever, and would never tell him such a personal secret.

To hammer home that Vox represents oversharing, I think this is why they make sure Vox says "that's a feeling I'd love to share with the both of you" specifically in S2E1. It sums up his whole M.O. and I believe that this is the friction between him and Alastor in the flashback.

Alastor has an opposing unhealthy coping mechanism to Vox, due to the events of his life: self-isolation. This causes secrecy that clashes entirely with oversharing and that perfectly encapsulates the interaction they had, with Alastor being brutally closed off and claiming that friends don't even exist, meanwhile Vox is blushing, starts crying and then has "a tantrum".

But self-isolation cannot sustain itself, especially not when you are still part of a community and value your social connections. Inevitably, Alastor's self-centred and antisocial behaviour will cause a blow-up in social relations that becomes a new trauma, requiring a new coping mechanism.

His backstory demonstrates this by him moving into the woods – it seems like a choice, but after murdering the rich white man, he has put himself in a precarious situation, and so has to isolate in order to not face the legal consequences, which may include death, or getting lynched.

His impulsivity flipped the switch on his trauma response, which makes him hanging out with Velvette, the enabler, a red flag. Angel is showing us that the rock bottom for RadioDust is hypersexuality. Angel is starting at the end, and working his way backwards by developing healthy coping mechanisms; explicitly, he has learned about enforcing boundaries to counteract anxious attachment, and we have already seen him defy Valentino in S1E6.

So, although he's back at V Tower, he has a productive mechanism to deal with Valentino this time. Next on his docket is Velvette and impulsivity, which I believe is going to be his drug addiction and walking his hypersexuality/danger-seeking back to plainer anxious attachment (which he knows how to deal with), as we see in S2E8 he has a ridiculous amount of drugs on the table.

I also think the fact that Vox tells him Velvette specifically is going to make him "look great for his presentation", though it's happening in Val's penthouse, he is present, and shown in 'Trust Us' to be part of the makeover process, clues us into the fact that impulsivity is the next vice for him to swap out for something healthy.

I'm don't know how to put it into one word, but Lucifer is the healthy version of Velvette, and where she is for coercion, he is for informed consent and agency, so Angel will be taking a page out of Lucifer's book. Restraint and self control are the best words I can think of.

The fact that Lucifer doesn't lash out at Alastor when he spills coffee on him and disengages once Vox starts 'spilling' his business during Vox Populi are examples of him modelling the kind of restraint that Angel is going to be using. The fact that Angel, in particular, complimented him for not reacting to Alastor really flares in my mind. This also plays into Lucifer actively working on his unintended innuendos – he's demonstrating self control.

The last for him to combat will be to exchange oversharing (Vox) for healthy vulnerability (Niffty, Charlie). We saw in S1E7 that Angel prevented Niffty from turning into "a mess" = from healthy vulnerable to an oversharer, and he tells us he's been going to therapy with Charlie in S2E1. So Angel already has it in him to negate Vox.

To sum up: Husk helped him exchange anxious attachment for healthy boundaries, Lucifer has helped him trade impulsivity for self-restraint, and Niffty & Charlie have helped him trade oversharing for healthy vulnerability. By staying at the hotel, Angel has learned healthy coping mechanisms and has the tools to break out from the Vees.

The reason Vox snatches him up is because he hasn't been using self-restraint or healthy vulnerability (as opposed to oversharing), because he doesn't realise he needs to. Vox is a rude awakening, because Angel not recognising this in himself has unexpectedly hurt his friends. By making him look in a mirror, Vox is forcing to confront this unhealthy coping mechanisms, but as they say, "the first step is to admit you have a problem". Now that he sees it, Angel has everything he needs to combat the influence of the Vees/the vices, though he doesn't realise it yet.

Valentino forced Angel to reflect on his anxious attachment in S1E4, which is what he sings about in 'Loser, Baby' – his hypersexuality. Angel is self-aware of it, which is why he is open to accepting Husk's lesson about boundaries, and stops sexually harassing him after this. We then see Angel also reflecting on this before Lucifer arrives, which I'm going to reference again later, since S1E5 is all about Alastor's anxious attachment.

In S2E6, we see Angel reflecting when talking to Husk about his impulsive jump in front of the train (the impulsiveness led to him slipping to anxious attachment, recklessly putting himself in danger for Husk's benefit), saying that redemption isn't for him. Angel is wrong, and it's precisely his willingness to reflect on his unhealthy coping mechanisms + his active engagement with the hotel that is going to prove that when he deals with the Vees in S3.

In total contrast, the one time we see Alastor in a mirror, he is desperately avoiding his own gaze, and fixated on the wound – i.e. his trauma. Alastor is in denial, which is why he is not open to embracing healthy mechanisms. I think it's possible that his jamming of cameras also plays into this; whenever we are shown Alastor getting a chance to look at himself, what we see is that he refuses to. In the case of the wound, we see this is really a moment where he has the opportunity to "look inside", as the Speaker says to Sera, to recognise that he is dangerously self-isolating, backsliding to the circumstances of his fatal trauma – the forest. But Alastor winces when momentarily catching his own gaze, and only looks at the wound.

And I think this is why his room is so much more forest than in S1: the trauma from Adam triggered him, but his coping mechanism is counterproductive to healing. He is denial about it. What he sees when he glances in the mirror is a deer in the woods – wounded vulnerable prey, which is why he rejects vulnerability: he thinks that's the problem.

So back to comparing how Angel and Alastor end up at V Tower in the first place in S2: Angel is suddenly dragged back to the vices because he didn't realise he still had unhealthy coping mechanisms; Alastor goes back of his own volition, thinking a bender will heal him because he is in denial about the self-destructive nature of his isolation.

Alastor quits the hotel, and sticks it out through a 1v3, instead of calling for help or disengaging, because that would require him to acknowledge that self-isolating isn't going to save him.

This is also why it's specifically Niffty that causes him to wave the white flag; Alastor's relationship with her is his crutch in lieu of developing healthy vulnerability for himself, so her being in danger pushes him to open up and admit to Vox that he's not coping well.

But Niffty is a crutch – he still lacks healthy vulnerability, and doesn't think he needs to develop it. This is why he makes a deal with Vox to let Husk and Niffty go, rather than actually pleading for mercy.

The offer Alastor then makes to Vox is that he will allow himself to be dragged on an oversharing bender. This is what the montage afterwards represents, with Vox parading him around, even oversharing about Alastor's situation below the belt (lol).

Viewing it this way, the random emphasis on the line where Vox tells Charlie to "come up here, where everyone can see you!" makes more sense: he is an oversharer. You see it in almost all of his dialogue that he's oversharing or trying to get others to do the same. It also explains his appropriation of the other overlords in 'Bad With Us' – he can't hide how cool he thinks their things are, or how disinterested he is in Zestial's thing, and it spins out to him being offensive to Carmilla.

His disinterest in Zestial, particularly, is of note to me because Maestro's opera, for example, is also a lot more old-school than the music overlords' things. It's "old, boring shit". I also don't think it's because Zestial and Carmilla are Velvette's opps, because he is extremely excited by what he perceives to be Carmilla's culture, and he clearly is doing it more for his own enjoyment than hers, as we see with him shaking the maracas at the end. His unenthused pitch to Zestial is simply because plays and poetry do not interest Vox, and he struggles to hide his feelings because... he's an oversharer.

So, Alastor thinks that his self-isolating will negate Vox's extreme vulnerability, but what he doesn't realise is that he and Vox are pushing each other to self-destruct, which is what the S2 finale fight is all about.

What ends up happening, from Alastor's perspective, is that Emily gets hurt trying to save him due to her self-destructive lack of boundaries/willingness to make herself vulnerable. Vox's extremely toxic trauma-dumping would have actually deeply affected Alastor, but her getting hurt was enough to further reinforce his belief in isolating/not reaching out for help; we see this in how he crawls away from Emily after the blast, rather than going through it together/having solidarity. Because solidarity requires vulnerability.

The difference between Emily and Alastor though, is that her wing healed, and his wound from Adam didn't. But that's not to say Emily's vulnerability/openness to accepting help on HMH will always work out for her; we just saw with Vox how far it can be taken, and she lost the wing being vulnerable in the first place. She's in the middle of the vulnerability spectrum, and I have a feeling that because she was rewarded for it that time, and did not face backlash for taking the shot for Alastor, she's going to swing Vox's way...

Vox's trauma-dumping does not coax Alastor into oversharing, but rather Alastor closes up and is on the road to isolating completely. He holds back on helping in 'Hear My Hope' even though he could die, which is a blatant red flag for self-destructing. It's no different from what Vox did.

Alastor explicitly tells us he is willing to hurt all the people he cares about and, though he doesn't see it, that is the self-destruction. It's a forecast that he is going to damage his relationships to the point that the isolation causes him a new traumatic low, which will spur him to develop another coping mechanism. And it's Alastor so, it'll be unhealthy. The fact that he's not actually looking at his friends burning, I think is significant, like with the mirror. He is in denial.

Anytime there is a chance for Alastor to see the damage he's doing, we are shown that he LITERALLY looks away. That also plays into him crawling away from Emily, instead of asking her if she's okay or telling her she didn't need to stick her neck out, since it was his choice to engage the fight: he categorically rejects confronting that his vices are not helping, but harming himself and others.

Earlier, when I was comparing 'Poison' to Alastor's backstory, this is what I was getting at with Angel's illuminated face vs Alastor's shadow. Angel is constantly looking at himself and seeing himself: he has pictures of himself in his bedroom, his phone case is a spiderweb, the reflections, etc.

A shadow is cast where YOU block the light. You're not going to find the light/the answer by looking at your shadow; you have to genuinely look inside yourself and confront that you are causing the darkness/the problem to make a productive change. And that's the difference between Angel and Alastor.

We also see RadioDust are going opposite ways in their relationships with Husk.

Both Angel and Alastor exhibit their anxious attachment in S1E4 and E5: Angel is hypersexual, Alastor is not there... for the time being.

When Husk scolds Angel for this behaviour, Angel disengages and goes to self-destruct at a bar (self-isolation), where Husk comes to stop him from putting himself in a dangerous sexual situation (hypersexuality). Angel isn't happy with him, but eventually does take Husk's advice, and it helps him to make better choices.

The impact of HuskerDust's relationship gets highlighted in S1E6, when he is at Club Consent and prevents Niffty from getting dragged into hypersexuality by Valentino. He too swats off Valentino's flirting, and it's not easy – Angel puts up a fight. He does not try to people-please Val, because Husk, who encourages healthy boundaries, has rubbed off on him. And this is also why Angel reminds Charlie of "boundaries" specifically in S2E3, too. He's making real progress from being the guy who sexually harasses the bartender.

Notably for this analysis, the first instance of Angel's hypersexuality actually involves him... trying to drag Alastor into it. To which Alastor enforces the boundary with a plain rejection – healthy enforcement of his boundaries.

Which is why Mimzy's arrival is such a big deal for Husk: Alastor has an anxious attachment to her and does not enforce boundaries with her, even when it is to his detriment. Alastor's coping mechanisms are still iffy, but the hotel is a productive space where he can work on it; Husk recognises that Mimzy is going to influence him to backslide. We see Alastor give Husk the complete opposite reaction to Angel Dust.

Angel takes his advice and agrees that if they "eat shit together, things will end up differently", i.e. embraces solidarity to help them on their healing journeys.

Alastor, on the other hand, crashes all the way out when Husk attempts to remind him that they're in similar situations. It's actually exactly the same line he uses on Angel: talking about how they both owe their souls to someone. Alastor is in denial about his anxious attachment.

And actually, you see him exhibiting anxious attachment to Husk in this scene, where he's trying not to burden him (i.e. he could say, if you don't want Mimzy here, you deal with it) by saying there's nothing to worry about, putting on a baby voice, calling him "fuzzy", calling him his pet, trying to be cute and playful.

And I'm pretty sure that the only other instances of flirty baby voice are Val trying to get Vox to come back to bed before the Alastor v Vees fight, and... Alastor when he's adding conditions to the deal with Vox. Sound the alarms, babe. It's NOT looking good.

When Husk tries to get Alastor to admit he has a problem, unlike Angel who embraces the solidarity, Alastor literally drags Husk down and forces him to behave outside of healthy boundaries, making him get on the floor, feel tiny (by going kaiju), and forcing him to people please by using threats of violence.

This is exactly how Mimzy makes Alastor feel, and I think that's why the specifically had her call Alastor a 'kitten' – because Husk is a cat. While Alastor is anxiously attached to Mimzy, Husk isn't actually anxiously attached, but Alastor literally drags him down to his level. That's the abusive element to RadioHusk's dynamic, and what the soul chain represents.

Where Angel takes Husk's advice, comes back to the hotel and improves, Alastor truly does backslide in S1E5, and while it seems kind of random, I'm thinking that it's significant for the RadioHusk dynamic.

It gets framed with Husk turning away from Alastor. He's done all he can do, he's not going to hurt himself trying to help someone who won't help themselves, precisely because his coping mechanism is healthy boundaries. What we're literally shown is Alastor's anxious attachment putting distance between him and Husk, making Husk turn his back on him. Even once Alastor has addressed it, the damage has been done, as we see with Vox getting kicked off the M.O.L in S2.

We also see Angel and Alastor going in totally different directions based on how they participate in the hotel in S2.

In season 1, Alastor was doing a lot of heavy lifting, making the commercial, dealing with Pentious' attack, agreeing to deal with the eggs, getting the cannibal army for Charlie, putting up the barrier in the vs exorcists battle, and finally going to fight Adam. We also saw him hanging out in the background during Charlie's exercises. He was very present, whereas Angel was throwing the towel in and getting exasperated.

In S2E1, the first thing we see is Alastor bothered by his broken staff, and when Vaggi asks for help, he refuses – a complete 180º from the guy who offered to make her the commercial when she was struggling (that's so sad, ugh). He dips on her, a mild self-isolating behaviour, and goes to tease Lucifer, but gets agitated when Lucifer throws the ducky at him.

It feels like another red flag for his self-destructive tendencies to me. Lucifer was obviously going to respond negatively to the provocation... What did Alastor think was going to happen? If he was genuinely just playing, he wouldn't have been so pissed when Lucifer hit back, and would've gone tit for tat, because it was just banter. I don't think it's that meaningful in-verse, but I think you know... they're constantly showing us that this is just Alastor's casual behaviour.

We then see Angel sitting on Husk's bar, and he orders the 'Harder, Daddy', which I think shows he's still working on the hypersexuality, because when Husk starts talking about Fat Nuggets "gobbling [his] nuts" (lmao), Angel bristles and asks him not to do that – setting a boundary, but also he does pick up the pig, which shows him respecting Husk's. He still goes hypersexual after that by "celebrity endorsing". We then hear him talking about going to therapy for "talking about feelings and junk", i.e. developing healthy vulnerability.

What we see is that Angel still has a way to go, but he's putting the work in. He's engaged with the hotel.

The next time we come back, Angel notices Charlie needs help, and Husk tells Alastor he should help her.

"Should I? Perhaps. Will I? No. Do I enjoy being difficult? Most definitely."

Again, this is not the guy from S1. Because of the trauma from Adam, he's being antisocial, i.e. isolating.

In S2E3, Angel Dust reins Cherri Bomb in when she accuses Charlie of lying about redemption. Angel is the one to say he believes; Husk concurs and flatters Angel, to which Angel responds by flirting, and Husk flirts back. This is different to S1, where Angel got sexual when Husk was upset with him – intimacy and sexuality are healthy, as long as it is not impulsive and not based on anxious attachment, i.e. hypersexuality. Because of that, this is a bonding moment for HuskerDust, rather than a point of friction like in S1. That's growth from Angel.

The next scene we get is of Alastor bristling when Charlie calls for him. He looks agitated; we hear radio static, and he doesn't respond to Charlie at all. He doesn't give her a heads-up about Vox, as opposed to his subtle warning about 'picturebox technology' in S1E1, and unlike when Lucifer came to the hotel, and he had his reservations, this time Alastor selfishly peaces out. It's giving, "double it and give it to the next person", and the person is someone that he cares about, and really should be helping.

On the other hand, Angel encourages Charlie to set boundaries with the Vees, explicitly calls out how she should respect his boundaries later, and is ultimately willing to help Charlie, being pro-social, whereas Alastor self-isolates. They both have some skin in the game with the Vees, but their different reactions say it all.

I also want to say here that Husk is "letting walls down", as the boundaries guy. He and Alastor both have self-isolating tendencies, but 'Loser, Baby' is where Husk swapped self-isolating for healthy boundaries. You can see that in S1, during the roleplay, he's rolling his eyes and is the first to leave after Angel, while Alastor is still sitting there, engaging. In S2E3, Husk participates in the roleplay. He, like Angel, is encouraged by his solidarity with Angel, as we see in S2E6 where he returns to the hotel after a convo with him and is also making progress.

Unfortunately, Vox's oversharing and Velvette's enabling presence are a setback for Angel in S2E3. I believe this is why we get that Husk vs Vox moment, because Husk is repping healthy boundaries, and since he and Angel have been bonding, he's adamant that Angel has the tools to negate Vox's oversharing.

I think the issue everyone is having is that Velvette's toxicity goes understated, both by the audience and also by the characters. Angel mentions that Vox is sadistic, but he makes no comment about Velvette, because the impact of enabling is not as easy to recognise.

Her dialogue reveals that she is 100% that her role is to be the stirrer:

"Are we interrupting something? We don't really have all day"

She is encouraging the gang to make an impulsive decision. And they do. Velvette also stops Vox from opening up about his legitimate grievances with Angel Dust, which could lead to them hashing things out, and instead encourages him not to get reasonably vulnerable with his feelings and talk it out, but to overshare by recording and publicising his issues with Angel.

"Hang on, V; the star power is always good for viewership."

If Velvette hadn't been there, Angel would've had time to make a measured decision, and almost certainly, the gang would be able to rein Charlie in and tell Vox to fuck off. But let's say they couldn't; the moment Vox started mouthing off about his issues with Angel, then Angel and the gang would've responded to him, and they'd end up having an illuminating talk about their feelings... Velvette enabled the disaster, straight up. And of course she did: her vice is impulsivity and resignation.

Although StaticDoll take Angel one step back, my point here is that he is truly giving healthy coping his best shot and is starting to trust himself to utilise healthy coping mechanisms. In S1E2, when Charlie dragged him into the exercises, he didn't try to explain how he felt and why he didn't want to do it (healthy vulnerability), and he doesn't express how Charlie hurt his feelings, but he does both in S2E3. As he explicitly states about going to therapy, Angel has done away with self-isolation, period. He has healthy vulnerability, and he uses it whenever presented with the choice between that and self-isolating.

Even when he turns himself in to V Tower in S2E8, unlike Alastor who quits without saying anything, Angel is open about why he's going back with Cherri and Husk. He admits that it upsets him, that he's vulnerable, which is going to help him in the long run, because while they respect his agency, if shit really gets too real with the Vees, the gang all know that he would want them to pull him out.

When the gang infiltrate V Tower in S2E8, Alastor isn't even mentioned in the plan, and they certainly aren't thinking about saving him. Charlie notices him when he's right in front of her face, but they can't help Alastor if he won't help himself. We also see that with Lucifer in S1E7, where he doesn't really question what the deal is with him and Vox. So, if ever Alastor gets into some real shit, he has denied his friends the chance to help him.

More on Lucifer, because this is another way Angel and Alastor are portrayed as headed in opposite directions. Most obviously, in the scene where Alastor quits, Alastor is exasperated by Lucifer trying to advise him to stop isolating, whereas Angel ends up telling Lucifer that he wishes he (Lucifer) had moved in sooner.

Angel really didn't need to be in that scene at all, but if the point is to show us that RadioDust are progressing vs regressing, it makes perfect sense why he kind of had to be in the scene where Alastor self-isolates, with Angel encouraging someone else to lean in and participate in the productive environment.

In S1, RadioDust also have opposite reactions to Lucifer. But before I get into that, what I want to say is that Alastor's only contribution to the prep montage is him being agitated by the (misspelt) "welcome, Daddy" banner, and he is immediately aggro with Lucifer, and then challenges his position as a father on 'Hell's Greatest Dad', and literally says:

"Sadly, there are times a birth parent is a dud."

He also mentions Charlie's "daddy issues" in S1E1, and if I'm not mistaken, he is the only character to use this phrase at all? If not the only one, he's one of the only. And then in S2E3, Vox reveals to us that Angel killed his father, i.e. Angel has daddy issues. So what I'm thinking here is that RadioDust both have daddy issues.

In light of that, it makes Alastor's saying Charlie is trying to solve her daddy issues by fixing other people come off as projection, given how he self-reports that he has been fixing things at the hotel and helping out make more sense if we think of Alastor having an inherent friction with father figures because of a fraught or traumatic relationship with his own.

Moving on, Alastor and Angel are the only two characters to mention Lucifer's height, and while Alastor mocks him for being short, Angel is encouraging about it.

Alastor doesn't really talk about people's physical attributes ever, if I'm not mistaken, so this was a big 'ole blip on the radar for me. And in realising Angel made a comment on Lucifer's height also, this is actually what got me to make this post, and brings me back to Alastor's backstory and 'Poison'.

Vox says to Alastor in 'Don't You Forget':

"I'd laugh at how you look so small."

Really esoteric line, because... does Alastor really look so small? And then I was thinking about how small he made himself in the Propaganda Parade shadows, and a comment on Velvette's stream that repeated the "so small" phrasing, then I thought about the comment he makes to Lucifer... And then I thought about his kaiju form in S1E5, which he does not use at any other point.

The first instance is him threatening Husk because he called him out on his anxious attachment. The second time, he stops Vaggi from dealing with the sharks, and says

"It's time I remind everyone why I'm here."

This has always been such an odd line to me. Why is he there? We don't know the full lore, but what we do know is that he's the facilities manager and self-proclaimed host. Vaggi does the protecting, as Angel says in S1E2 when Pentious comes back. This certainly is not why Alastor is here.

This also ties into Vaggi's very abrupt and bizarre line in S1E3:

"If I can't help you, what's the point of me?"

By staying at the hotel and recognising that her contributions were appreciated, Vaggi swapped her anxious attachment for secure attachment. I now realise that was the point of her arc in this episode.

So what Alastor's line is conveying is his anxious attachment popping back out. He puts himself into a dangerous situation alone for their benefit.

And when viewing it through this lens, Mimzy's response really seems like they're trying to get across that it's an abusive codependent dynamic.

"Fine! Who needs ya? Have fun with your li'l princess and your li'l hotel. See if I care."

This is the kind of thing someone says to provoke a people-pleasing response. The "who needs you?" is particularly egregious, especially in the context of Mimzy saying "ugh, finally" when Alastor got going. And as I said in my last analysis, Alastor's anxious attachment gets teased again in the Valentine's postcard list, where he specifically writes "I need you" to Husk. This is a thing for him.

And Alastor watches her walk away, rather than turning around and coming back inside. He only reappears when Charlie starts talking about how the hotel is her dream, and she believes in the gang, Alastor included, as we just saw her defend him to Lucifer. So to me, what it looks like they're trying to convey is that Alastor let go of his anxious attachment for secure attachment thanks to Charlie's healthy vulnerability, which causes her to naturally affirm that he is valued. That would be the third time it happens, with the commercial being one and the eggs being two. Like I said before when I was talking about this, the hotel is working on him.

But my point here is really that we only see Alastor drastically get bigger when the anxious attachment is triggered. So I do think we will see it again after his antisocial behaviour blows up his relationships.

Using this form, Alastor drags Husk down to make him feel small, a kitten, as he does. On Husk's neons in 'Loser, Baby', there's a sign that says "manlet", which felt very out of place to me. But I think it's all related.

I also think the comment after "so small" saying to bin Alastor could be a sneak hint at what his deal is. The reason this comment has always stuck in my mind is that it's just such an oddly specific comment. He's at a distance; why would he look... big? And why small instead of weak, pathetic, etc.

And actually, now that I say this, in S1E2, the conversation Vox and Velvette have about Pentious, without naming him is starting to sound my alarms about Velvette enabling Alastor's anxious attachment:

"We need someone who little Miss Bleeding Heart would take in." "Someone pathetic, desperate... with no direct ties to us."

Relevant to the RadioDust comparison I want to make here, Angel Dust is also brought up in this scene. And specifically, Valentino calls him "lanky prick", i.e. he is small (but tall). Valentino also specifically uses the word "loser" in this scene, which, if you read my last analysis, is specifically used in Hazbin to reference those who indulge in vices/are dysfunctional ('Loser, Baby', 'Hell's Greatest Dad', 'Don't You Forget (Reprise)').

What Velvette says here is not the case, obviously, because the single non-staff resident at the hotel is literally Angel Dust, who has a direct tie to the Vees. There is also only one other person at the hotel who was taken in – Alastor. Remember that Husk and Niffty are only there because he summoned them, and Vaggi is there because she's Charlie's girlfriend...

Putting a pin in that for now, what I also noticed about the Propaganda Parade shadows is how, even once Alastor's diminutive shadow slinks away, real Alastor is being towered over by the Valentino shadow.

If there is some relationship to feeling small and anxious attachment, what is it?

I think this is it. Taking me back to what I said at the start, we see in both 'Poison' and Alastor's backstory that they are surrounded by three men with violent intentions that are much bigger than them. After this comes the club scenes with the object of their anxious attachment; then next is Angel Dust at his limit, being overwhelmed, then they both self-isolate; next is Angel trying to break away, and Alastor giving himself in.

When Rosie says "overcoming so much", it feels like an extremely heavy-handed way of dodging racism. But on this track, what I'm suggesting is that we see Alastor is retreading his steps in his demon life post-Adam, but backwards, so we start at self-isolation, we're moving to anxious attachment, and are going to end with hypersexuality... where Alastor began. That would mean the reason Rosie is saying "so much" is because they're suggesting there's more to it than just racism. Why do the producers look so menacing? Why are they nodding at each other like that while watching him? I think Angel's scene in 'Poison' is telling us why. They both experienced sexual trauma, which made them feel "small".

I think this would be why being "so small" is getting hinted at as a thing: it's triggering for Alastor. We also see that in his vs Valentino, Alastor conjures a giant palm to fall into, i.e. he feels small.

Valentino represents anxious attachment, which can ramp up to hypersexuality. Which brings me back to Velvette being the one to talk about "pathetic, desperate, no direct ties to us"... She is the enabler that would push Alastor's anxious attachment into hypersexuality, and I don't know what the circumstances would be, but what I do know for sure is that when Alastor reaches that stage... that same description will apply.

Furthermore, as I've noted before but not made the essay about yet, Valentino and Vaggi are foils in that they both represent intimacy – unhealthy vs healthy, anxious attachment vs secure. But while Vaggi is the healthy version, she triggers Alastor because she is amatonormative ('Easy', her jealousy toward Emily touching Charlie), and he is asexual.

Whenever we see her approach him, he's framed like a cute little deer in headlights. This blipped on my radar in my rewatch because Alastor truly looks so goddamn adorable, but I couldn't exactly thread the eye on why; I think the anxious attachment is it. In S1E1, we also see that after he made the commercial for Chaggi, he's hypersensitive to Charlie's criticism, and Vaggi is framed from a low shot as she chews him out and threatens his place/purpose at the hotel; meanwhile, she's Charlie's girlfriend, and so will always be welcome, i.e. she makes Alastor feel small.

That would also explain why he slides into bed with Charlie in S1E7 when he notices that Chaggi are having relationship issues, and is so smug about pulling Charlie away from Vaggi. It also explains his calling Vaggi 'Vagin' in S2E1, when she is trying to choose a new name to get away from Adam, degradingly reducing her to the female sex organ. Alastor does the exact same, just in French, because he's bitter about the sexual aspect of Chaggi's relationship.

Coming back to RadioDust sharing this trauma, I think this may also play into why Valentino's preferred nickname for Angel is "amorcito" rather than just 'amor'; it's a diminutive, and it's triggering to Angel. But Angel is healing from anxious attachment, and the Vees' Valentine's postcard gives us a teaser of that, with Valentino addressing him as "amor", rather than "amorcito".

Meanwhile, we very clearly see Alastor tipping toward anxious attachment by wanting to write "I need you" to Husk, which is a pretty extreme and toxic thing to say to a friend, especially with Husk atm being emotionally distressed by something that, when you really think about it, Alastor was 100% complicit in.

(Idk if I linked it already, but if you're iffy on the card being from Alastor instead of Husk, here's the link to my reasoning in the comments of my last post on this topic.)

It makes me think of how, in S2E3, Husk is confident that if the Vees did anything bad to Angel, Alastor would be "ready to throw down", and he absolutely did not do that, and did nothing in his time at the Tower to help Angel either. If Husk isn't disappointed and somewhat resentful toward Alastor for his selfishness in that regard already, Alastor acting weird and clingy due to his anxious attachment is definitely going to rile him up, as we saw with HuskerDust in S1, prior to 'Loser, Baby'. And Alastor's hypersensitivity, as we saw in S1E5, is 100x as horrific as Angel's because of the extreme power imbalance between Alastor and Husk.

What truly convinced me I’m not just tripping about all this (although, I admit that I very much could be) is that the first line of ‘Poison’ is:

I’m not above a love to cash in

But then by the end of the song, Angel says he’s done with all this. He's ready to let go of the "poison" = toxic coping mechanisms.

The whole song is about him recognising that the way he's living is going to lead to him self-destructing. This is why he says, "I can only blame myself" – the creators aren't trying to victim-blame, as much as it realllllyy sounds like it, because this isn't actually about Angel's Watsonian soul deal with Valentino – it's about him choosing vices over healthy coping mechanisms.

Another lover underneath those flashin' lights Another one of those ruthless nights

Angel swaps from glamourising his hypersexuality to recognising the danger – from flashing lights to RUTHLESS.

Every night I'm livin' like there's no tomorrow

This is the impulsivity.

I got so good at bein' untrue I got so good at tellin' you what you wanna hear I disassociate, disappear

This is the anxious attachment.

Any way you want me, baby That's the way you got me, I'll be yours My story's gonna end with me dead from your poison

At first, Angel romanticises the control his vices have over him, saying "baby [...] I'll be yours"; it is LITERAL romanticising, but the last line of the chorus says it all; Angel has woken up and realises that relying on vices is not sustainable.

As I said earlier, you'll notice that he makes no mention of secrets or spilling his guts or anything of the sort, which is what Vox popping up on him represents. Angel is presented as having no signs of awareness that he overshares. I'll need to go back through S1 to see if there are any instances of him actually doing this at the hotel, but it's besides the point, because S2 tells us he does.

I'm thinking it's possible that selling your soul is meant to represent oversharing, like blackmail, as I was saying earlier, and this may be what triggered Alastor's self-isolation and Husk's boundary setting: they were overly vulnerable and trusting, which resulted in them losing their souls. The oversharing then literally being 'oversharing'... your soul, and would match up with what we see of Alastor letting Vox goad him into the oversharing bender in S1E4 via the immortal deal. I think that's probably also why Vox thinks Alastor will be happy about it, because as extreme vulnerability is his vice, he anticipates Alastor will get catharsis from showing his ass (literally lmfao) to the public, having people see him, getting intimate secrets off his chest, etc.

Anyway, what's totally certain, and made crystal clear by the last verse and the sob-like delivery they had Blake Roman give, is that Angel Dust is DONE. He had "a love to cash in", but now he's looking for an out.

I analysed ‘Hazbin Guarantee (Trust Us)’ being about Angel and Alastor in my last analysis, but critically, here, the Vees sing:

Sign and cash in

And in ‘Don’t You Forget (Reprise)’, Vox says to Alastor:

At last, your check is cashed

The repetition of "cashing in" is literally telling us that Angel realises he needs to get out and is now looking for it (i.e. reflected and is making positive change), while Alastor has just made his way in and is truly about to get taken for a ride if he cannot accept that the vices are going to cause him to crash, and recognise he needs to get the fuck out of there and try it again with healthy coping mechanisms.

And in me using this car metaphor, that is literally what the visual on 'sign and cash in' is: Vox and Velvette presenting a Lamborghini with Valentino lying atop it naked, i.e. Alastor fucking around with Vox's oversharing in S2, and then Velvette's impulsivity next, is going to accelerate his anxious attachment into Valentino's hypersexuality, and the car is fast (and furious, heh), so fast he's not going to be able to hop out once he gets going. Alastor is going to crash = self-destruct, and hurt others in the process.

Before, when I analysed this in my RadioVees endgame theory, I thought it was noteworthy that the background was GREEN. It's green because that's Alastor's colour. Back then, I had 0 idea how dark the implications actually were; I thought RadioVees were going to be pals. No. No, no, no. Fuck no.

And what I compared this to in that analysis was that there is a shot with the exact same composition in 'Hell's Greatest Dad', where instead of car, it's an open door, and instead of Vox and Velvette, we see Charlie and Alastor.

Now, I get it: Alastor is turning Charlie away from the exit and leading her down a staircase. He spends the song trying to convince Charlie that his vices – "the path of least resistance" – are more cathartic and more productive than Lucifer's healthy healing. Remember that Alastor's main vice is self-isolation in S1 & S2; meanwhile, Lucifer has just learnt the hard way through a longgggg period of depression-induced reclusion that self-isolation is not the way. That's what their beef and the song is all about.

At the bottom of the staircase, we see Lucifer. Because he's already experienced the self-destruction of isolation – the rock bottom.

And I haven't talked about Emily here, but I also noted that in 'Like You', she's also in a car.

I understand now why Pentious is so averse to everything Emily is trying to get him into: she is suggesting that he sweeps his feelings under the rug and distracts himself with bullshit (as Mr Peanutbutter from Bojack states), instead of addressing his trauma and finding a productive coping mechanism. This will also lead to a crash.

Bringing in word of god here: when Viv said she was inspired by Bojack, by viewing it through this lens, it absolutely makes sense. Alastor is Bojack, Emily is Mr Peanutbutter, and the show is about trauma. I think maybe Charlie is similar to Diane, who initially begins having a close relationship with Bojack, the unhealthy-coping-and-vices guy, and they remain friends but drift and have friction, as she deepens her relationship with Mr Peanutbutter, which implodes because he refuses to cope with anything. I think this would also explain why Charlie causes such a negative reaction in people – she's like if Diane was adorkable, and Diane was also quite disliked during the Bojack years.

With that in mind, I think that HuskerDust and RadioJoy are going to be presented to us as a dynamic that balances each other out, promoting healing, vs a dynamic that balances each other out and makes each other so much worse. RadioJoy are the two sports cars headed toward each other... jfc.

The reason I say this, on top of the RadioDust connection, is that we already have a direct parallel in the show. In S2E3, Vox cuts the brakes on Charlie's train, and Husk is on the track that he allowed himself to be tied to. In S2E8, Vox goes ham blasting beams from the M.O.L., trying to kill Alastor because Alastor has chosen to engage in a fight instead of peacing out, and Alastor ends up being unable to get out of Shok.Wav's jaws. We then see Charlie reaching out in concern, but not jumping in herself (not a bad thing).

Then we see Angel and Emily swoop in recklessly to save RadioHusk. This isn't actually a healthy response, because in both scenarios, if the blast or train hit, Alastor and Husk would have died anyway. Emily is lucky that she dropped Alastor, otherwise, she would not only have a broken wing, but a dead deer in her hands. It was more obviously a bad idea in Angel's case, because he certainly would die from the spear, too.

What this has just made me realise is that both Alastor and Emily are the ones to rally the troops for Charlie in the episode before the final showdown. They really are the same, but unhealthy vs no-cope.

Anyway, in both of the reckless save situations, Husk and Alastor actively chose to engage with Vox, taking the risk of putting everyone around them in danger, and actively choosing to be in the direct line of fire, knowing that perma-death is potential.

So, I know what you're thinking: but aren't Angel and Alastor meant to be foils, not Alastor and Husk? Yes. Because what I think we're going to see happen is that Angel is exiting the cycle of toxicity at the point where he is a victim, and we're going to see Alastor's spiral into becoming a no-frills abuser (à la Bojack).

A very key difference between HuskerDust and RadioJoy is what happens after the save.

I finally get what Husk is saying when he says he's "not worth it" – Husk chose to put himself in the precarious situation, and he is telling Angel it wasn't his responsibility to rescue him, that he needed to respect Husk's agency, and also set healthy boundaries to keep himself safe.

The next time we see them in S2E6, Husk takes accountability for pushing Angel into that. Angel forgives him. This is a healthy and productive response to the situation, because the two of them have been putting in the work at the hotel.

What's especially notable here is that Husk stopped holding himself accountable, let go of his restraint and healthy boundaries and went running to his vices (gambling and alcohol) because Alastor was not around. This brings us back to the abusive dynamic from earlier, where Alastor drags Husk down with him: if Alastor is indulging in his vices (self-isolation), then Husk follows suit, because Alastor has made him dependent on him. Husk, prior to the hotel, needed Alastor to keep him busy working behind a bar to stop himself from idly sitting in front of it, as I mentioned in my last analysis.

So the difference between Alastor and Angel here is that Angel, who has been working really fucking hard on exchanging his vices for healthy coping mechanisms, encourages Husk to keep at it, to do the same, to come back to the hotel. Angel himself is a healthy influence, building on what we saw of him in S1E7.

The reason he's not redeemed yet, however, I believe, goes back to what I was saying before about him needing to dig just a bit deeper to make a change. Vox forcing him to reflect was the last push he needed to turn it around for good.

Angel goes back to the Vees, not self-isolating, as I said about him being open about why, and even crying – but as a healthy boundary between him and his friends to keep them safe. It wasn't impulsive, either. So, while it may seem like he's going backwards, he's already showing the signs of rising to the occasion.

Being with the Vees will be exam time for him, and Angel will pass because he has developed all the healthy coping mechanisms required to get past them. I'm not sure how exactly they'll handle his redemption, but what's for sure is that settling on healthy instead of dysfunction for good is a hurdle he has to jump over before he can "get up there".

After a talk with Angel, Husk reflects on himself in the drink, literally puts it down and goes straight back to the hotel. This is obviously the opposite of Alastor's influence on him, which sent him straight to the casino, launching into 'Love In A Bottle'. We literally see a shot of him 'drowning' in a glass before it gets going.

Big sigh, because now it's time to talk about Alastor and Emily's version.

Viv said that Alastor is not going to "super care" that Emily saved him. This checks out with his vice of antisocial behaviour and what we see in S2E8 itself. As I said, Alastor doesn't ask if Emily is okay; he doesn't tell her she shouldn't have done it, he doesn't thank her – his first acknowledgement of Emily is threatening her life to Rosie. He feels entitled to her saving him.

What makes it worse is that Emily, unlike Husk, does not hold Alastor to task about engaging Vox and putting himself in harm's way. She is very happy to self-sacrifice, and selflessness can be a good thing, but there is a limit. You HAVE to have boundaries, or else you will lose yourself looking for someone else, as Husk told us.

And as I talked about in depth in my other posts, Emily has already been signalled to have problems with this and a poor judge of character, with diction choices that suggest she will be making herself vulnerable to Alastor while flying in the face of Peter's standards, which will cause a rift between them. (Discussed in parts 1 & 2)

In that post, I also talked about how Lute and Alastor have the exact same self-isolating trauma response, and I think we already see the signs of Lute being abusive toward Abel. Not saying that they will parallel HuskerDust and RadioJoy necessarily; they may very well, but what I'm saying here is that if Lute is an abuser... as above, so below.

She's a fast-tracked example of where Alastor's headed, I think, because Lute has nothing to lose, and Heaven does not encourage any sort of coping mechanisms. The Vees and the hotel represent dysfunction and function, so it's at least addressing the trauma, which slows the road to self-destruction.

I recently made a post about how Lute's hallucination of Adam would make sense as the show representing a physical trauma response, due to Heaven's sweep it under the rug approach – the body will respond if you don't. Going back to 'Gravity', I actually think her having a genuine full psychological breakdown is hinted at with her referring to her rage as "terminal". She's talking about burning but also rain at the same time, and I'm thinking that this is a red flag that she is going to self-destruct by suffering a full mental break with whatever drastic action she ends up taking.

And as I was saying, I think Heaven's solution will be a 'higher power', i.e. external therapeutic techniques, such as medication. I believe with Sera, we've already seen anxiety and panic attacks be addressed with 'counselling' as therapy, which I discuss in this post here.

Anyway, whereas Lute is going to break herself, I believe what's going to happen with RadioDust is that Angel fixes himself, and Alastor is going to break... someone else: Emily.

Which, now that I've arrived here, makes the hypersexuality element EXTREMELY concerning. My RadioJoy heart is breaking right now; I swear this is not the conclusion I ever wanted to come to. Anyway, for now this is merely speculation, and Alastor and Emily haven't sung enough for me to pick up any more red flags about the specifics of that in lyrics... I hope it isn't as horrific as the pieces are slotting together to suggest, but I'll leave that there for now. I feel sick...

Coming back to the title of this essay, I talked about at the end of this analysis (link) how 'Losin' Streak' seems like it will apply to Alastor when he's just blown up his relationships. I won't rehash everything, but the lines that really blipped on my radar were:

You're livin' for the rush, for that royal flush But you take what you can get You play your final ace for a pretty face Tastes like Scotch and cigarettes

As I said in that post:

Alastor calls making connections at the hotel a "thrill" in S1E7, thrill = rush

Husk's melee deck of cards shows RadioTrio as the king (Alastor), queen (Niffty) and jack (Husk) in a royal flush

Rosie has explicitly referred to Alastor as an "ace in the hole"... when he self-destructs like this, he would most definitely be a fucking ace IN THE HOLE – a final ace to be played.

Niffty explicitly calls Velvette "pretty", and Katie and Tom do a coquettish eyelash gesture to represent Emily. I'm also thinking that, with Lute's hate-boner for Vaggi in the mix, this could also relate to her in some way, as Lucifer calls her "pretty" in S1E5, and Alastor is very bitter about her amatonormative relationship with Charlie

As I used for the banner of this analysis, we are very deliberately shown Alastor drinking brown liquor and smoking in S2E4, when we have never seen him touch a cigarette, and it was the first time we had ever seen him drink. It's scotch and cigarettes.

We don't even see Husk smoking, if I'm not mistaken – the only other person drinking brown liquor and smoking a cigarette is Valentino in S2E4 when he's in bed beside Vox. And I think, honestly, what we're going to see is Alastor become extremely kindred with Valentino in the nature of their abuse.

Tying it back into the thing I said about Vaggi, this might explain why, where Velvette is shown watching the news about Lucifer, and Vox watching Niffty in the S1E8 epilogue before 'Finale', Valentino is specifically shown looking at Adam...

Returning to RadioDust to round us off, the difference we see between them is that Alastor is indulging in "scotch and cigarettes" for the first time in the audience's eyes, whereas Angel literally takes it away from the guy in front of him and spills the drink over his head. It's a hyena demon, who honestly resembles Alastor with the red ears and black tips. You could also say that hyenas being associated with their laughter is meant to be evocative of Alastor's smile.

Previously, I was thinking that maybe RadioJoy would be the QPR that comes together to save the day, but now I'm thinking they have to separate in order to not accelerate each other's opposite toxicity; they are yin and yang, i.e. they keep the dysfunction perfectly balanced when together, not dissimilar to the Vees.

That's a real fucking shame, because as I mentioned in a previous analysis, unwittingly, their combined coping mechanisms had a beautiful outcome of helping Charlie and Pentious grieve the distance with how they handled the eggs.

Now, my thought is that RadioDust could be the dynamic where Angel is a positive influence on Alastor and breaks the cycle. Maybe that's what will get him into Heaven? But anyway, it would bring us right back where we started in S1E1, where Angel was encouraging Alastor to be hypersexual with him and to abuse his power (enabling impulsivity) to force people to stay with them at the hotel. I think he's going to do the opposite.

And as I went back to rewatch that intro scene, what I noticed is that Vaggi is triggering Alastor's anxious attachment, which comes back to the 'Vagin' thing. Charlie sugarcoats and thanks him for making the commercial, but when she critiques him, he bristles and cracks his neck – he's hypersensitive because of his anxious attachment.

When Vaggi chews him out, the shot is from below, i.e. suggesting Alastor feels small. Then he awkwardly mentions how "everyone remembers me from my radio show", which soothes his anxiously attached tendency.

He then rebuffs with self-isolation, blaming them for his weirdo commercial, saying he "had a little fun with it" – and in my last analysis, I noted how "fun" is always used to refer to vices, as "boring" is to healthy coping mechanisms, and "loser" to dysfunctional individuals.

To reiterate, in the introduction scene, we get Angel and Vaggi poking the bear on Alastor's hypersexuality, impulsivity, and anxious attachment. So my thought now is we're due a rerun where we reverse all that.

Now that I say that, though, I still think RadioJoy as yin and yang could represent the need for continuous change (i.e. not falling, not getting redeemed, just taking it day by day and trying to grow). I think Angel, Vaggi... and Lucifer? Will have influence on both of them, because even if Alastor gets reined in as an abuser, there's still Emily's self-destruction to contend with to break the cycle.