A Helluva Boss Blog

#stolitz crumbs!!

Millie Cozy Winter standee available via Shark Robot November 28, 2025. Art by Kazuki.

I've loosely been following the BFF comic an artist post, i think its also called "Season 2.5" and there is this whole concept in the most recent installment where Stolas tells Blitz he wants a "real relationship" with him.

Moment was cute, art was amazing, absolute cinema.

However, to think about canon for just a moment: Hasn't Blitz had his chance at relationships?

More specifically we have seen ALL the people he hurt in Apology Tour, his sister, Fizzarolli, Verosika, and so many others he has burned intentionally or unintentionally.

As a hardcore Stolas fan and current skeptic of Stolitz: What makes ya'll think he'll treat Stolas differently than anyone else?

But that’s just the point. Blitzo has gone through a major shift in motivation and knowledge. That has been his entire character growth through season 2.

The problem in his past relationships has been his own lack of self worth and the self destructive behavior that stemmed from those feelings of inadequacy and self hatred.

When Blitzo was a kid, he was constantly comparing himself to Fizz, who actually was genuinely more talented than him. And the thing is, that difference in talent never seemed to bother him in and of itself. What bothered him was the way he saw others heaping love and praise on him, while ignoring Blitzo. A young Blitzo mistook the adoration of fame for genuine love and as a result, internalized that feeling of not being worthy of other people’s love.

Then the fire happened and all of Blitzo’s doubts about being good enough for someone to love were intensified. He wasn’t just someone who people couldn’t love. He was someone who was undeserving of love. He killed his mother and nearly killed his best friend. Everyone he knew or loved abandoned him because they saw what he really was.

So he started to seek out physical relationships. He was terrified of true intimacy, while also craving it. Relationships like the one with Verosika were the early victims of this fear. He was willing to stay with her for long enough that she genuinely fell in love with him, but as soon as she revealed that, it freaked him the hell out. He self sabotaged because ending the relationship on his terms felt less scary than waiting for her to see him for who he really was and reject him.

Interestingly, he behaves the exact same way with Stolas when Stolas confesses his feelings in Full Moon, because he hasn’t gone through that change in knowledge or motivation yet.

It’s the episodes following Full Moon where we see that growth the most. But before we get into that, it’s important to discuss his relationships with M&M and Loona.

By season 2 in particular, Moxie and Millie have become more of a family to Blitzo than just employees. There is genuine friendship and intimacy there, but it was a rocky start. In season 1, Blitzo is crossing every conceivable boundary with them, mostly because he doesn’t understand how to behave appropriately in this scenario. His past relationships since the circus have mostly been with people he’s fucking while trying to maintain emotional distance. M&M actually understand what healthy and loving emotional relationships look like (for different reasons, which is a whole post in and of itself) and they push back on Blitzo, trying to maintain some of those boundaries.

Loona is obviously one of the few people who does not have any sexual undertones in her relationship with Blitz, because he is actually trying to replicate his relationship with his mother in the relationship he has with Loona. He sees himself in Loona — someone the world deemed unlovable and unworthy of their time, and he wants to give her the relationship he can never have. And of course, this creates a whole host of other problems. Because he projects so much of his own childhood onto her, he fails to see her as an adult and a unique separate person most of the time.

So to sum up, Blitzo is a fucking mess.

How does that change in season 2?

1. Oops - Blitzo realizes that not everyone abandoned him after the fire. Fizz would have forgiven him, even though no one else did. He starts to realize that maybe he’s not so completely unlovable.

2. Apology Tour - Blitzo takes responsibility for his behavior and stops to really think about why he sabotaged both his relationship with Stolas and Verosika. In doing so, he learns something about himself and also admits that he doesn’t want to be the person he has become. He wants to be someone that would be worthy of Stolas’s love, even if he’s not sure whether that’s even possible.

3. Ghostfuckers - He proves that he is capable of growth by changing his relationship with Millie. He is forced to confront everything he hates about himself and sees someone who is still willing to stand by him because she genuinely loves him for nothing but who he is as a person. He doesn’t have to prove himself or trade pieces of himself in exchange for that love. It is simply given freely because she sees who he really is and what a light he can be to others. He finally allows himself to open up and be vulnerable with her in the final moments of the episode, showing he has the ability to change.

4. Mastermind and Sinsmas - Blitzo gets a second chance and this time he has the motivation and the understanding of how to be open and vulnerable and present so that he can build a real relationship with Stolas. His skills are… patchy. We see him excel at offering quiet comfort and romance, but he’s not perfect. He doesn’t always know the right words to say and has to rely on touch and physical comfort when words fail him, but he has enough skill to be a pretty decent boyfriend in most things. I assume we’ll see where those skills fall short in future episodes, but at least he know has the motivation to work through any potential shortcomings.

We also see his relationship with Loona quietly start to improve in the background. The more Blitzo’s relationship with others shifts, the more he seems to let go of his disordered view of their relationship. We never get an episode focused on it, but we see how the relationship has shifted by the time we reach Sinsmas. After confronting this fear of rejection, he no longer has to cling to a father/daughter relationship as an avatar of his own self worth. Blitzo is giving Loona more agency and she is thriving. She’s making new friends and actually seems to enjoy being around Blitzo more.

Werewolf Blitz shirt available via Shark Robot September 30, 2024. Art by Identity Pollution.

Backseat:

*note: Octavia is in the van too but she has normal legs and her profile is mostly hidden, the people line is definitely all him

Front seat:

Then i got curious and looked at other times we see him sitting. Don't want to comb the show for every time, but here's an example of a chair that's too short for him but accommodates let space under the table for him and a seat that seems to be properly tall enough for his legs to go down proper:

Bird knees are super high up and they have really long feet. If you look at the diagram above and analogous structures, a is the thigh bone, 1 is the knee, 2 is the ankle, b is the heel, and 3 is the ball of the foot and the toes.

“How dare Stolas try to take the book back.” It’s his fucking book! Blitzo stole his book. The book belongs to Stolas. It is his and Blitzo stole the book from him. Blitzo has zero claim to keep the book just because.

“But Blitzo needs the book for his job.” Stolas needs the book for his job! He tells us he needs it and we see him use it for that job. Also, it’s Stolas’s fucking book!

“Stolas probably doesn’t even need the book. We know he can make portals without it.” That is one spell. Blitzo uses the book for one spell. There is absolutely no reason to believe Stolas was given that whole ass book for only one spell. Blitzo on the other hand COULD find another way to access the mortal realm. There are at least 2 different types of crystals that other demons use to access the mortal world, so it’s not like Blitzo has to steal this book and has no other options. It’s just the option he had the best lead on.

“He could still let Blitzo have the book part time without making a deal.” I mean, sure. He could. But lending out the book is incredibly dangerous for both Blitzo and Stolas if the wrong people catch wind of it. Blitzo almost died when someone found out and Stolas was banished. It’s a dumb risk for Stolas to take and the only reason that horny owl takes it is because he’s too busy thinking with his downstairs brain. If you remove the only reason for him making a dumb decision, why else would he make it?

Yes Octavia is used to being her father's entire world and her 'norm' is an unrealistic standard Stolas set up for himself in the way that he raised her, because he was trying to compensate for the shortcomings of his own upbringing and he did amazing with the resources and knowledge he had at his disposal.

Yes Octavia is bitter about the changes in her life that put distance between her father and herself, which is a relatively new development and has in turn exposed her more to the unrest in her parents' marriage and the objectively unsavory personality of her mother alone.

But I don't think it's as new as the 'Still Not Divorced' party and resulting scene of Stolas's infidelity quite literally falling on the cake during morning tea time in front of Stella and her friends. When Stolas was Octavia's age in the show, he was about to get married and had spent the last decade of his life studying his grimoire and learning how to be the perfect little prince Paimon wanted him to be. Octavia has a completely different life than Stolas did, and Stolas - especially with his autism - cannot connect to that. The older Octavia got, the more used to his magics, and the deeper into a harrowing and draining marriage, it got harder and harder to connect with his beloved Starfire.

Octavia and Stolas just drifted apart in the way teenagers with depressed parents do. He still smiled for her, they still did things together and talked and they still loved each other quite a lot, but Stolas didn't know what the hell he was doing and Octavia could sense it. Not in a 'my dad is an idiot and is actively making my life horrible' kind of way but in a 'Dad doesn't understand me, he's still my favorite person here but something is wrong and it's probably his fault' sort of way.

Blitz getting thrown into the mix just gave that tension a real target, gave a name to the stress Octavia is feeling in the household, and it's given Stolas some pep to his life that gives him the energy and motivation to try and reconnect with Octavia again, like they used to, but because it's been so long he's doing it Wrong.

I don't even want to talk about 'good dads' and 'bad dads' because that's such a stupid fucking dichotomy to sort cartoon characters into. 'Good' and 'bad' are opinions that are relevant to individuals by perspective, not immovable truths. My dad was a good dad to me when I was little, but not to my brother. I was pushier for attention than my brother was, I was his second attempt at being a dad, there are a lot of factors that go into it, and it doesn't fucking matter.

I don't give a shit if Stolas was a 'good' dad or a 'bad' dad by whatever arbitrary threshold the anti, critic, or fan is measuring by. Stolas is a better father than Paimon was, and he's trying to be a better father than he was yesterday, all the time. And it isn't so simple of an issue as 'Stolas abandoned Via for Blitz', because I think Stolas drifted away from his daughter slowly over a much larger time than what we see in the show.

Stolas doesn’t know what Via likes. He makes a lot of incorrect assumptions and when Via tells him what she likes at the end of the episode, he’s a bit confused, though certainly willing to learn.

It’s also notable that all of Via’s good memories of their relationship are shown as flashbacks from when she was much younger.

It seems clear that there is a distance between them that pre-dates Blitz showing up or the divorce, but the cause of that distance hasn’t really been specified.

A lot of parent/child relationships shift as the child grows up. Teenagers are trying to figure out who they are and form their own identity separate from their parents, which shifts relationship dynamics no matter what. Some parents can roll with that change to find a new equilibrium, while others really struggle. Stolas definitely seems like someone who would struggle with that change, and this may be why we see him still trying to relate to Via like she’s a kid.

Or it could actually be the stress of the marriage has gotten worse over time. Just because we know Stella was mean as a child and is mean in present day, doesn’t mean that their relationship was always the same level of stressful/abusive/unbearable. It’s possible that relationship has gotten worse. And even if it hasn’t gotten worse, it’s possible that the constant negativity has built up to something that feels worse and worse every day. It would make sense if Stolas pulled away from Via as a response to that stress or his worsening depression.

It’s also possible that Via pulled away because of her uncomfortableness with her parents’ relationship and hostility towards each other. Whether it got worse over time, or they didn’t try as hard to hide it, or she just noticed it more as she got older, it would make sense for Via to pull away from both her parents with that much toxicity between them.

No matter the reason(s), it’s clear that they have drifted away from each other, but not because of any specific incident. And when Stolas makes a genuine effort to connect, Via welcomes it.

This is what sets Mastermind and Sinsmas apart. Everything before this has been part of a slow and steady drift apart. Stolas taking the blame and punishment for Blitz, in Via’s mind, feels like a deliberate step away from her. Then she finds his pills in Sinsmas and questions whether her memories of their happiness were even real. Was he faking that the entire time and is that why it was so easy for him to walk away? It breaks her trust in Stolas in a way that nothing before this has.

Loona announcement

Blitzø announcement

Stolas announcement

Millie announcement

Moxxi announcement