Intro

When the pilot of Helluva Boss came out, it was rough around the edges but had enough charm that it had an audience curious to see where it would go next – even if most of the hype remained around its ‘parent’ show Hazbin Hotel. Helluva Boss, by comparison, had a distinctly different ‘voice’ to it – it was a fast-paced dark comedy that brought in YouTube sketch comedian and actor Brandon Rogers as the co-writer, which would hopefully give the writing team the benefits of his experience, as well as Richard Horvitz of Invader Zim fame as the voice director and voice actor for secondary character Moxxie (amongst other roles). The series itself was created by Vivienne Medrano, who was most known for Hazbin Hotel and prior webcomic Zoophobia, and animated by her animation studio SpindleHorse with occasional outside help from studios such as Chaos Emporium, Inc and ToonCity (as listed in the credits).

But even with all these advantages, Helluva Boss is one of the most disappointing and poorly written shows I’ve ever seen with its second season in particular being a masterclass in bad writing. It wasted a smart setup and interesting premise, is so incurious and inconsistent with its setting that it borders on an insult to any time and energy the viewer tries to spend on understanding the setting thus killing the stakes, and to say the way it handles its characters is flawed – especially its principal cast – would be an understatement. The worst thing it does is cast a light back on what initially felt like a strong opening seven episode run, revealing in hindsight that those episodes were themselves rife with problems the entire time, even if those episodes are the closest the show came to looking like it was going to pay off the promise of the premise.

To make matters worse, nearly all of its problems are interlinked in a way that makes it hard to talk about without going off on tangents and losing sight of what should have been the focus – much like the show itself did. But I’ve made my best effort to keep this easy to digest by splitting this up into clearly delineated sections.

I’ll also be addressing some of the common complaints levelled at the show’s writing and digging under the surface to expand on the truth that they reveal. It’s worth noting here that some of the staff on the show are very vocal on social media and have previously written offhand corrections, clarifications or even entire threads to defend the writing. I’ll be addressing these where relevant, but I don’t intend to cover every single Internet post except where the creators say something useful for the point I’m making or revealing of their perspective in a way that can inform understanding of the writing.

Also a note – we will be discussing racism, classism, abuse and sexual assault in this essay. There shouldn’t be anything too heavy in these but they will get their own separate clearly signposted section alongside discussions of plot, pacing and etc. since they are important to discuss.

A quick note

Why write this essay when the show is incomplete?

The fandom has a tendency to say “the show is only half finished!” to a lot of different kinds of criticism, so I’m going to say it simply: viewers should not need to watch an entire show for the writing to get good or even just achieve a bare minimum of competency. Also a show being incomplete does not make it immune to criticism - two seasons of wasting the premise, not following through on plot points and having an increasing mountain of plot holes so obvious that viewers have to supply headcanons to explain them away are still two bad seasons.

This is especially an issue given that these are the two opening seasons, the time when the show should be hooking people in, not turning them away. And this is increasingly what is happening - the views have cratered not just from season one to season two, but within season two itself when it returned from its summer hiatus. When talking about bad seasons of other shows, we’re usually talking about good shows that ran into issues from running too long, or one particular season in the middle of a show that attempted something different that didn’t quite work (the Initiative storyline in Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 4 being a fairly unpopular element in an unpopular season, for example). We’re not usually talking about the two seasons that should be the setup of the entire show.

But just to make it clear: if the last two seasons miraculously fixes every single problem I’m about to lay out in this essay - or even just the major issues - then honestly, good for the writers for finding a way to make it work. But Helluva is not exempt from basic storytelling rules just because it is an indie show - when we recommend shows to other people and have to caveat it by pointing out the early seasons are weak, we don’t then insist it’s a perfect show because it gets good (or has the potential to do so). We usually say ‘the first seasons are hard to sit through but I promise it gets better’, because we respect other people’s time and don’t recommend them shows expecting them to just ignore that the first two seasons are a waste of their time.

Secondly, even heavily serialized shows try to make individual episodes and seasons still worth the viewer’s time. They don’t expect the viewers to wait until the whole thing is done to judge it on quality, because network shows don’t want viewers to tune out before the end because they got tired of waiting for some hypothetical date when the show would improve.

I also want to point out that the limited scope is a personal choice. I could have frankly dropped season two right at S2E1 because it was one of the most amateurish scripts I’d ever seen put to screen, but I kept going in the hopes the show could recover. Then I kept going in the hopes the show might – just might – satisfyingly pay off at least some of their plot points.

Finally I kept going just to see if all my predictions for how badly I expected the finale to be written would come true.

All this is to say – I can’t keep going with the show any longer just to please anyone arguing that later episodes will justify how badly written many of the prior ones have been.

This essay is my own goodbye to the show and I hope to highlight why I loved the show so much to begin with, how it could have worked with a bit of better planning and why I think a lot of the show’s later inexplicable writing decisions happened. If you want to discount everything I have to say because it only focuses on the first two seasons, please do so – you do not have to read this at all if you still love the show, as I wish I still could.

Rather, if you’ve been having the niggling feeling that something is off with the show but you can’t quite articulate why, this essay will probably be most useful for you in particular.

What worked in Season One

Blitzo’s potential as a character

As a show aiming to be more adult, it makes sense the protagonist would be also. Blitzo is an adult imp and struggling business owner. Nearly all of his personal relationships are fractious: he’s overbearing with his daughter even though he loves her dearly and he invades the private lives of his two married employees. In both cases he’s trying to shortcut his way to the intimacy he desperately needs but is simultaneously terrified of: he adopts Loona as his daughter and hopes for her to immediately treat him like a father even though she’s a young adult with miles of baggage of her own and he mocks Moxxie and Millie’s monogamy as boring while continually trying to insert himself into it.

All of this is thrown into sharp relief by the most consistent throughline of the first season: Blitzo’s previous life where he burned bridges with basically everyone in his life. There is someone to represent each aspect of his old life here: his ex Verosika shows how he’s ruined romantic relationships before, his old circus partner Fizzarolli shows he’s hurt friends and mentions of his sister being in rehab (along with her appearing properly for the first time in season two) indicates that he is also estranged from his birth family. This coupled with the detail of Blitzo being covered in white patches, suggesting scars, and there is the very present suggestion of Blitzo having a tragic incident in his past that he was likely the cause of and that causes him to torpedo his personal relationships in the present day.

And all of that happens while the business Blitzo is running involves breaking the law on a day to day basis due to his use of a royal demon’s grimoire to get to earth. This puts a lot of pressure on Blitzo to keep that demon, the prince Stolas, happy to keep the arrangement going while dealing with his own discomfort any time Stolas uses the arrangement as a pretext to flirt or push his boundaries (which is often).

Putting it simply, Blitzo is an interesting character. He’s imploded his life once already and is desperately trying to start over. That’s the sort of arc adults can relate to more than teens and there’s a lot to work with. There’s the feeling of wanting to distance oneself from a prior life while continually running into reminders of that past in the form of people who he never made peace with or acknowledged how much he hurt. In addition, Blitzo is trying to take shortcuts with his personal relationships and has gotten himself trapped in a business arrangement that should be a disaster waiting to happen.

This aspect of his character is best expressed through his name. His birth name was Blitzo, pronounced phonetically. The O suffix gives him a classic clown name, but in the present day he’s trying to distance himself from the circus by changing his name so the O is silent, pronounced ‘Blitz’. Characters from his past often maliciously misname him by pronouncing the O, giving the viewer an easy way of seeing whether they are hostile to him or not (this is also one of the things the show is good at in the showing over telling department). However, Blitzo is also addressed by a third name, though only by Stolas - ‘Blitzy’. This nickname that he hates undercuts his attempts to start over as a cool assassin and reminds him his business is contingent on putting up with demeaning treatment from Stolas - something Striker also notices when he uses the nickname as a parting insult in Harvest Moon. All of this is an efficient way to express something not only about Blitzo, but the people around him.

Blitzo also has the relatable problem that starting over isn’t a get out jail free - even ignoring the issue of constantly running into people from the past, Blitzo still has all the bad coping mechanisms that he developed as a result of his tragic past and resultant self loathing, so he’s just as likely to repeat his issues with his new family.

Season one functionally ends on the story beat of exactly this happening - Blitzo’s lack of boundaries with M&M causes him to gatecrash their anniversary, which is framed as a major betrayal. He uses Stolas as a plus one to get into the club, making Stolas think their arrangement could become something more romantic but the public dressing down the two of them just received leaves Blitzo exhausted and he understandably snaps at Stolas for the way he’s used him as a sex toy all season. Finally he comes home to find Loona has gone out, leaving him feeling just as alone as ever.

All of this is elevated by Brandon Rogers’ voice acting, who has demonstrated a great ability to deliver both funny moments, dramatic moments and heartfelt ones through his performance. Even in later episodes he often delivers the funniest lines in any given episode and is certainly the most fun to watch when the show is not drowning in angst.

Specific moments

There were a couple of moments I wanted to highlight all of which are in season one where I felt the writing was really working since it got a genuine emotional reaction out of me.

The first was the moment in Harvest Moon, when Striker made his offer for Blitzo to join him in killing Stolas. When Blitzo said “I’m in” for a moment I really believed he would go through with it, which to me is a good sign – the writers had done such a good job of crafting a situation where the viewer could believe Blitzo would really feel the temptation to change everything in a drastic way due to the indignities he’s had to suffer keeping his business open.

The second was the moment right at the beginning of Ozzie’s, when Blitzo calls Stolas to go to the club with him. Watching this moment for the first time and seeing Blitzo smile when he cooks up a scheme to get into Ozzie’s, I already knew what was coming because the show had done such a good job of writing Blitzo that I could predict what he was going to do, and what a disaster he was about to create for himself.

The third was the very end of Ozzie’s, when Blitzo chews Stolas out for trying to do romance with him after spending the rest of his time in season one treating him like a sex object before coming home and breaking down in an empty apartment. At the time this confrontation felt like a game changer for the show – that both Blitzo and Stolas were going to have to confront their shortcomings and change, but in different directions.

The show tried to do this – at least it tried to do this for Blitzo – but it didn’t always succeed, as will be discussed in the character section.

The music

I’m keeping this short because it’s not my wheelhouse and I also have a distaste for having songs in cartoons because they often end up feeling shoehorned in an undercooked way, especially if they end up being nearly once an episode and not just occasional. Put it this way: who remembered that Chaz had a song before I brought it up?

However, for my money there are two songs that are genuinely good and worth watching out of context: You Will Be OK for its arrangement (you could also count its reprise) and House of Asmodeus for being a good example of musical theatre being used to further the story.

I also think the construction of Look My Way is good, but I separate it out from the others as it was originally a fanmade song and exists as a separate MV, not within an episode.

Speaking of music videos, I’m not entirely sure why the team decided “Cotton Candy” would function better as a song within an episode rather than its own music video. Putting it in its own MV would have greatly improved S1E8’s pacing since the episode essentially grinds to a halt for a music video anyway when Queen Bee appears.

The animation

It should go without saying but the animation is consistently good. Some episodes have animation bumps where the visuals are noticeably higher quality, but on the whole there are few issues with the animation outside of the occasional oversight and issues with stilted frames in some episodes, likely a result of trying to produce episodes quickly (especially in season one). It honestly feels a little sad to spend so few words on it, but let it just be said that the animators do impressive work and deserved to be using their skills on a show whose writing matches the quality they’re capable of producing.

Plot and premise

It’s become a cliche among fandom spaces to hear critiques resembling around ‘they wasted the premise’ or ‘I wish the show was still about them doing assassination jobs’, to the extent that the staff working on the show have become somewhat passive aggressive about it, occasionally complaining that they’re tried of hearing people say they wish the show was still about IMP doing assassinations.

I agree with the criticism that the assassination business has been completely wasted as a plotline, but I want to dig under the surface to talk about why it matters because getting to the heart of the issue helps shine a light on why the show has so quickly declined in quality as little as two seasons in.

Even beyond the fact that the premise ‘imps from Hell take hits from sinners to get revenge on the still living up on Earth’ is way too interesting to waste, the business as a setup is crucial to both the plot and characters in a couple of other ways.

It’s set up in both the pilot and episode 1 that the business is struggling: the pilot is framed around the team having a discussion about how to turn things around and the first episode sees Blitzo offer the client a ‘first kill free’ deal explicitly to try and keep them sweet after Moxxie accidentally sets the office on fire.

This should have given the show an easy driving question to sustain the entire run - can a group made up of Hell’s underclass successfully run a business while avoiding attracting too much attention because they’re breaking the rules to do it?

Many plots could have easily been spun out of this: the crew has to come up with inventive ideas to drum up business. The crew has to go an extra mile to secure a client. The crew has to deal with someone they killed ending up in Hell and coming back for revenge.

And while all of this is going on, it’s an easy way for the show to turn its episodic content serialized. The hit of the week format can have changes to the status quo sprinkled in as the running of IMP begins to improve.

But the show begins to drift away from the anchor of the story of a struggling business nearly immediately - as early as episode 3 there is a gag about IMP getting floods of customers straight after offering a discount just to enable the rest of the plot for that episode to happen, then by episode 5 Blitzo mentions having several clients lined up. When this happened, it was a pretty clear tell to me that the show wasn't invested in showing us the business developing organically.

This back and forth attitude to the business - what should have been the centrepiece of the entire show - continues throughout the show. How well the business is doing is decided only by what the plot requires at the time - in the second season it varies between doing well and doing poorly and there are never any consequences for the latter. Blitzo can cost the company clients or even drive them to the brink of bankruptcy and by the next episode it’s like it never happened, all but confirming to the viewer that there’s little point getting invested in IMP as a plotline. It will matter when the writers decide it matters and the rest of the time it’s just set dressing to enable other plots to happen.

There are lots of other ways IMP should have mattered, though. Not only is it satisfying for the audience to see the underdog heroes begin to succeed, but it’s an easy vehicle for character development, too.

The cast have relationships to one another – Blitzo is Loona’s adopted father, Millie and Moxxie are married – but as a four their relationship is tied together principally around IMP as a business. And the business is useful because it’s an easy metaphor for how well the crew is getting along – when they work well together, it’s a sign they’re able to set aside their differences for a common goal. When the job goes poorly, it’s a sign the fellowship might be about to fall apart.

At the beginning it felt as though the show understood this on some level. The antagonists in Murder Family work principally because they’re a contrast to IMP: they’re a family of cannibal killers who actually function well together as a team and show genuine love and affection for another. By contrast, IMP are barely getting along in Murder Family - Millie refers to Loona only as a Hellhound, Moxxie immediately messes up the job and Blitzo spends most of the episode coming down hard on him for his failures.

This should have been a good start for the team to start getting along better, right? Have episodes where we see the team learning to work better together both as a four and as separated duos so we can see the dynamics between all of the main cast. Then pay all of that off as the team achieves greater and greater victories.

This sort of happens, but it feels completely unearned. Truth Seekers is the moment where the team comes together and actually functions well as a unit for the first time, but it doesn’t happen after episodes of the main characters learning to work together and get along. The most we get is Moxxie and Blitzo resolving to try and become better friends and a very brief team up between Loona and Millie earlier in that same episode.

And that’s basically it for the entire first season. The plotlines we should have had before the DHORKS stomping team up – Moxxie learning to get along better with both Blitzo and Loona, some dynamic between Loona and Millie and Millie and Blitzo, some view of how working for such a turbulent business is affecting Millie and Moxxie’s marriage - just never materialized. The most we get before Truth Seekers is a view of Blitzo and Loona’s fractious father-daughter relationship which is left unresolved and not addressed again later (the plot point of Blitzo being overprotective is quietly dropped when Loona just goes to a party thrown by her new friend Tex and they never discuss it again) and Moxxie being reminded to have confidence and play to his strengths by Millie in Harvest Moon.

But the rest of the team dynamic is sorely lacking - Millie is more of an attachment to Moxxie than her own character, and Loona has no real fleshed out dynamic with anyone besides Blitzo. Even Blitzo and Moxxie – the two with the most consistent dynamic - never really stop and relate to one another on any human level.

As a result of this, the show can have a second season with an even longer run of episodes that feels like it’s not going anywhere because the team dynamic is completely undercooked and the main character are barely developing or changing. The show knows how to do the appearance of development, but not how to make it stick or have it pay off in a satisfying way. As a result nearly the whole squad feels underdeveloped as characters two seasons in, both as individual characters (with the sole exception of Blitzo, as even Moxxie gets shoved to the side in season 2) and as a group dynamic.

The development issues apply to the way the crew handle jobs, too. Another way the show could have generated plots would be in the team not just getting clients, but in learning to be better at their jobs. The first episode shows they all have promise but aren’t perfect as assassins – Millie is the heavy hitter, Moxxie the sniper and Blitzo appears to be the all-around given he’s the leader who should be directing the team – but they all get separated and captured by the Murder Family quickly.

This was yet another vector the show could have used to demonstrate its main cast developing. Entire episodes could have been driven around Blitzo learning to be a more effective, kinder and less impulsive leader, Moxxie learning to master his anxieties and hone his skills as a shooter, Loona actually picking up some people skills as the receptionist and Millie learning to have more finesse instead of just relying on brute strength. But once again, this doesn’t happen – the technical side of the business, including the fun of making a plan for carrying out a hit, is completely glanced over in the show.

However, the main area where the completely lack of curiosity or care for the premise hurts the show is in its handling of its main character, Blitzo. The main issue that Blitzo has as a character that the show makes clear (and then reinforces) is that he is afraid of dying alone. As a result, he views IMP more as a second family for him than as colleagues and tries to shortcut his way into having closer relationships than he actually does without having to do the hard work of being vulnerable and honest with them about his fears and self-hatred. The first season makes it clear that Blitzo has burnt basically every bridge in his past, so his new life with IMP is his second chance to try and make a new life for himself.

All of this is to say that Blitzo’s personal stake in the success of the business is huge, the largest of anyone in the cast. Without IMP around, the crew has no reason to all be in the same place – Millie and Moxxie can find other jobs and Loona is old enough to leave Blitzo and look for another job if she really wants to. In the early episodes especially we have far less reason to believe the four of them would stay together if the business failed, especially on Moxxie’s part since he most actively pushes back against Blitzo’s overfamiliarity, so Blitzo actively needs the business to succeed to keep his new family together.

Blitzo’s other main characteristic is having a chip on his shoulder about being an imp and feeling an insatiable need to prove himself. Plot points in early episodes 2 and 3 of the first season are driven by him picking fights with other people partially to satiate his ego and episode 5 shows he has a fiercely competitive spirit when the topic of the Pain Games comes up. While he obviously needs to learn he still has worth even if he can’t conquer the inescapable class system he lives in, the success of the business underpins a lot of Blitzo’s self esteem also.

In other words, Blitzo’s new life is pretty much entirely tied up in the success of IMP. If he loses it, he might also lose his newfound family and his belief that he can prove imps can be just as successful as any other class in Hell.

Putting this as simply as possible: the most meaningful stakes in the show is whether or not IMP is successful.

It is isn’t just amateurish that the show completely shoves IMP to the wayside and is never seriously concerned with whether or not the business will succeed, it shows a fundamental lack of investment in its own main character that the show plays the Stolas/Blitzo relationship far more seriously than anything involving IMP.

And just as a reminder, Blitzo supposedly had this dream of having his own business since he was a child and yet the success of the main character’s ambitions that are literally what the show is named for (it’s called ‘Helluva Boss’ not ‘Helluva Love Interest for the Spotlight Stealing Side Character’) and forms the nexus for the other main characters to gather around is never in question or threatened.

The closest the show gets to putting IMP itself in jeopardy is the very, very brief moment where Blitzo begs Stolas with tears in his eyes to let him keep using the grimoire in S2E8, but this is a side note in an episode entirely focused on relationship issues. Similarly S2E11 that pays off the plot point of the book being stolen doesn’t even raise the question of whether or not the business will be shut down as part of IMP’s punishment – they end the episode with the business stronger than ever since the notoriety of the trial is potentially going to net them new employees and clients.

The rest of the time the business being potentially in trouble is played as a joke because Blitzo’s impulsiveness or lack of ability to be professional never has any lasting consequences.

I cannot state this in strong enough terms: the show had not only a functional but an interesting story engine with built in stakes for the main character and an opportunity to develop all the other leads alongside him, and it squandered nearly all of it. Fans – or former fans – saying they miss the assassination plotline aren’t just complaining for the sake of it or saying they wished Helluva had been a different show (or at least that it had been more like what the pilot and episode one was selling them on). They’re pointing out the fundamental issue at the heart of the show – that it’s completely disinterested in not only its interesting premise, but in using that premise to develop the characters who are supposed to be the main cast and worst of all, it discards all the progression and stakes that the writers should have used to make us care.

Lack of follow through

Outside of the wasted premise, the show can’t seem to decide whether it wants to tell self contained episodic stories or be heavily serialized. It leans towards the latter in later episodes, but this comes with one major problem: it’s often impossible to gauge when something will matter or not.

Several times plot points will be presented like they are major status quo shifting events only to be not followed up on at all or ignored for so long it would be understandable for a viewer to have forgotten all about them, or assumed the writers had forgotten about them, too.

To give a list:

- Blitzo and Loona get in a fight with her saying she doesn’t need him. They have a moment together in the season finale but they don’t address this conversation again specifically

- Blitzo and Moxxie promise to try and become better friends. This isn’t followed up on; Blitzo isn’t noticeably kinder to Moxxie in Season 2 and still snaps at him and invades his privacy in the same way as before

- Stolas calls Blitzo his “impish little plaything”, which is just a poetic way of calling him his sex toy. This is one of the most direct lines indicating how Stolas looks down on Blitzo and much like multiple things Stolas says and does in season one, it is never mentioned directly again

- Blitzo and Stolas get humiliated out at Ozzie’s club. Unlike Stolas leering over Blitzo in Harvest Moon, this is at a date venue so a prince being caught out with an imp and then both of them being dressed down by the famous, appears on magazine covers popstar Verosika should have been big news in Hell, especially with Stolas’ marriage falling apart. Nothing comes from this – no one seems to care outside the episode itself. This becomes even more inexplicable later when Verosika somehow knows that the two of them “broke up” literally the morning after the Full Moon deal ends and it’s never explained how this is possible

- Speaking of Ozzie’s, Blitzo majorly crosses the line by crashing his employees’ anniversary. This is portrayed like it should have consequences: Moxxie looks so betrayed he doesn’t talk for the rest of the House of Asmodeus number until Millie helps him finish his song. This never comes up again – Blitzo keeps invading their space and M&M don’t even appear to be angry with him next episode

- Also speaking of, Ozzie is hostile towards Stolas – using his approval of the prince’s lustful pursuit of Blitzo to basically mock him for ruining his family for no good reason. This leads Stolas to hide his face in a menu, suggesting to Blitzo he’s ashamed of him and becoming likely the straw that breaks the camel’s back and makes Blitzo declare the evening a mistake. When Stolas next sees Ozzie, Ozzie is suddenly friendly towards him and there’s no bad blood between them despite all the damage Fizz and Ozzie did through their mockery and cruelty to what was probably Stolas’ first date is not mentioned at all – Stolas isn’t angry or annoyed with him at all

- Also also speaking of, Stolas hiding his face in the menu is portrayed like a major character beat of Blitzo feeling like Stolas is ashamed of him and their “relationship”, confirming to him that he is just Stolas’ toy. This precise moment is never mentioned again

- Blitzo argues with Stolas at the end of Ozzie’s. This is addressed mainly by a blink and you miss it text message four episodes into season two. However when Blitzo and Stolas first see each other again in season two, episode two and neither of them act awkward around each other or acknowledge the argument in any way at all (and Stolas flirts with Blitzo by bringing up his prowess in bed again like Blitzo didn’t just tell him off for making everything about sex literally the last time they were onscreen together). So there is follow through here, it’s just done in the most frustrating way that a viewer could easily miss possible

- Blitzo had a thing about pirates as a kid in the flashback. This doesn’t come back outside of maybe the stylistic choice of him having a flintlock pistol

- Blitzo is bought to be Stolas’ playmate. Stolas never finds out about it and it’s never brought up again

- Blitzo and Stolas steal a lot of valuables from the Goetia household. Neither of them get caught and face any consequences for this and what Blitzo’s father Cash did with the all the money he should have gotten from selling all that stuff is never explained

- Stolas ends his arranged marriage. Stella says directly that the other Goetias will care about this, but the worldbuilding around how the nobility works is so poor it’s unclear if any of them do and so far it’s looking as though only Andrealphus and Stella care. That Stolas has effectively embarrassed his family through his affair doesn’t seem to matter at all. When the trial happens no one even mentions the divorce, giving the impression only Stella and her brother care about it despite Andrealphus saying the situation is unusual

- Blitzo tries to ask Loona to be a better receptionist. This plot point is never revisited; she’s just as bad at her job in the few episodes of season two she’s in later, even being openly rude to a client in S2E10

- Stolas is nearly killed and it’s IMP who brings him to the hospital, where a bunch of reporters knock Blitzo over. You’d think they would have noticed IMP brought him there, as well as the link between him and Blitzo, but nothing comes of this either. The near death of a Goetian prince, just like his affair, affects nothing in the next episode. This is also odd given IMP are literally accused of trying to murder Stolas in S2E11 but no one brings up the fact they were seen by reports taking him to hospital because they saved his life

- Via and Loona become friends in S2E2. This isn’t mentioned again for the rest of Season 2; we don’t even see them text

- Mammon claims there will be big consequences for Asmodeus openly admitting he loves Fizzarolli and unlike Stolas and Blitzo’s affair, this is treated as news because we get shots of demons posting about it on Hell social media. This isn’t followed up on either in season 2

- Fizzarolli looks like he feels stifled by Asmodeus being overprotective of him at the end of S2E6. This doesn’t come up again – his reason for continuing to work with Mammon is because he feels insecure about being with Ozzie, not because he wants some independence

- Moxxie’s father wants to get revenge on him in specific for the events of S2E3. This isn’t followed up on – Crimson appears in another episode but Moxxie does not. Then Crimson gets a building dropped on him so maybe that’s the end of that?

- Chaz is also Millie’s ex but we don’t get to see the backstory of their relationship. The crew said on social media they'd get to this one at some point

- The first time Stolas was nearly killed, Blitzo never told Stolas about it. This happens in episode 5 of season 1 and isn’t followed up on until episode 9 of season 2, 12 episodes later. This happens so late it comes out of nowhere so it doesn’t feel like satisfying payoff, but there’s another reason this specifically comes back up long after most viewers would have forgotten all about it which we’ll get into later

- Stolas is nearly killed by Striker in S2E4 and he knows Stella was responsible (it’s acknowledged outright in the dialogue). Everything you’d expect to happen from this doesn’t happen – Stolas does nothing to increase security at his manor, he doesn’t tell his daughter about it or try to protect her from her mother who he now knows is capable of attempted murder, he doesn’t take any more care over his own safety than usual and he doesn’t try to get Striker caught even though he attacked a prince in broad daylight and multiple people saw the would-be assassin’s face. The only continuity nod is him wearing a bandage on one arm in some shots – he isn’t even in hospital for much onscreen time – and Striker’s identity as the real assassin trying to claim Stolas’ life doesn’t even come up during the trial scene

- Stolas meets a succubus, dances and makes out with him in S2E9 with the implication he might have a rebound with him. After that one scene the succubus is never mentioned again

- Blitzo is almost executed in S2E11. Ozzie does nothing to mention evidence he has that would exonerate him – that he saw them at his club together and Stolas told him he had feelings for Blitzo, neither of which suggest Blitzo abused Stolas like Andrealphus claims. This is despite him knowing that Blitzo is Fizzarolli’s childhood friend who he recently reconnected with, so Fizz would be upset if he were to die. This doesn’t come up again in season 2

- IMP and Blitzo are treated like heroes in S2E11 after surviving the trial, with Blitzo’s phone blowing up with offers to work for IMP and positive publicity for the company. This is also not mentioned in the next episode, so it remains to be seen if season three will actually follow up on the potential storyline of the underclasses of Hell uniting behind IMP and Blitzo

Chances are this list may be non-comprehensive, since I might have missed some examples – these were just the most egregious ones I spotted. All of this put together gives the viewer the feeling that nothing really matters and that the viewer’s attempts to pay attention to smaller details of the show will be frustrated rather than rewarded.

It also makes the setting feel strangely empty – the world doesn’t feel like an organic place with the interrelated forces of a functional, living society, it feels like a set for whatever the writers want to do that episode where most of it will be discarded or forgotten about by the next. For an episodic show that doesn’t matter too much so long as the plot doesn’t change things up too drastically, but for a serialized show it’s nothing short of aggravating.

It is of course possible that the third or fourth season could follow up on some of this, but the sheer volume of setups that are just wasted discourage the viewer from feeling all that invested in characters and plot points. This is worse for plot points that happened all the way back in season one, since so much time has passed that the viewer will have either given up hope on it coming up again or more likely, they’ll have forgotten all about it if the show does choose to bring it back, leading to it feeling like it comes out of nowhere.

Bringing back other TV plot points or characters later can happen in network shows, but they show some awareness that viewers will need a reminder if it has been a season or more worth of time since something happened and usually include recaps ahead of revisiting something.

Tangent: The DHORKS thing

So DHORKS get proof that demons exist in S1E6.

This should affect the paradigm of the entire show as IMP has potentially compromised the secret information that Hell exists to people on Earth. Instead DHORKS don’t appear again until deep in Season 2 and decide not to use the proof they have to show humanity demons exist but instead create an army… of pope robots?

This for me is where the issues with the lack of follow through really became apparent.

This cliffhanger was treated like a massive hanging plot thread and it had huge stakes attached to it – IMP have done what they shouldn’t have done and there are potentially about to be huge and lasting consequences for them not being careful enough. DHORKS have enough evidence to out the existence of demons to all of Earth and not be treated like cranks anymore.

I had personally expected the show would follow up on this pretty soon – the longer it waits the more the tension dissipates like air leaking out of a balloon.

But they don’t. Not in the next episode and nor in the one after that.

By the time the show does get back to it – many, many episodes later in S2E8 – all the tension is gone and the show does yet more setup for a confrontation, this time with the pope robots and combining the plot thread with CHERUBs one (because the show has too many villains so it keeps having to make them do team ups).

And then it does it again – instead of paying off the plot thread in the season 2 finale the audience is made to wait more while the show yet again switches gears at the end of its season to focus on Goetia melodrama. Since I’m tapping out at the halfway point I have to wonder if the show will continue to tease DHORKs actually doing something in the midseason only to drop it again until the very end of the show.

DHORKS coming back and IMP having to clean up the mess of exposure they have brought to Hell would have also been a far more natural way to have them breaking the rules be exposed, instead of it happening because Stella just happened to remember Stolas was lending out the book the whole time.

The end result is a frustrating feeling of starting and stopping and like the show isn’t all that interested in the outcome of the one storyline that is the most direct result of the protagonists’ actions and rule-bending.

Continuity errors & contrivances

Just to make it clear the lack of planning in the show, here’s another list – this time of continuity errors or things that were poorly explained and had to be clarified on Twitter. Again this list is likely non-comprehensive; these are just the most obvious of them.

- Without access to his book, Stolas is able to summon himself in S1E6 to rescue IMP. When Via goes missing in S2E2 Stolas specifically mentions his powers are limited without the book so he suddenly can’t summon himself to her location.

- Without access to his book, Stolas is able to spy on Blitzo in S1E1 using magic spy bubbles in his bath. When Via goes missing in S2E2 he doesn’t do this either (or even try to text her even though she has a phone).

- Stolas has the ability to turn people to stone and create portals to anywhere. He uses neither when Striker attempts to kill him at close range in S2E4 and only bothers trying to turn him to stone long after Striker has him bound with blessed rope and taken to an isolated location.

- DHORKs have footage of IMP and want to capture them in S1E6. Moxxie and Blitzo just happen to be making noise right outside their window (though the script at least makes fun of this one)

- A weird timeline thing happens due to retcons in S2E1. S1E2 opens with Stella yelling at Stolas due to the cheating. This happens after S1E1 chronologically, an episode where Stolas said Blitzo had had the book ‘for some time now’. The flashback in S2E1 however implies the argument the morning of Loo Loo Land happened literally right after the initial cheating happened, which makes the whole thing a continuity snarl. It also has Stolas go from crowing about a divorce to making excuses and trying to placate her, which the creators had to explain on Twitter as the euphoria of his cheating wearing off (even though Stolas is far more apologetic in S1E2 than he is in S2E1)

- Moxxie says he’s from the Wrath ring in S1E5 (and so does Blitzo) but it’s later revealed in S2E3 he’s from Greed. This was clarified on Twitter that he was born in Wrath but raised in Greed.

- Crimson hires Striker to capture Fizzarolli in S2E6. Striker captures Blitzo and Fizz with a lasso, both of whom just happened to be right outside the building he was talking to Crimson in.

- In the Antarctica short Blitzo can’t get the Asmodean Crystal to work. Because it’s from Lust Millie suggests kissing it, which Moxxie has to do for him to get it to work. This short airs after Blitzo used the crystal in S2E9 when he had no issue using it at all, and sure enough the Crystal having an extra step to make it work is never mentioned again.

- In S2E9 Verosika somehow knows Blitzo and Stolas “broke up”. It’s shown that S2E9 happens literally the night right after the argument in S2E8, yet there’s no explanation for how Verosika would even be able to know about the “breakup”.

- In S2E11 Satan acts like he’s in charge of Hell, causing Bee and Asmodeus look unamused. Viv had to clarify on Twitter that this was supposed to read like Satan was lying and Bee and Asmodeus know Lucifer is actually in charge, he’s just missing currently (likely due to legal reasons because of Lucifer being a character in Hazbin Hotel).

Settings

Knowing the rules of the world can become a problem in a fantasy setting, because in the real world the viewer already has a basic understanding of what the laws are, when the protagonists are breaking them and what the general penalty of that will be. If there are exceptions or loopholes that the characters are relying on, one would expect them to be explicitly mentioned. But with a non-Earth setting the amount of setup needed for that element is higher to ensure the viewer knows what is happening.

However in Helluva Boss the setting is very vaguely sketched out, which affects the viewers abilities to gauge the stakes in the story and feel invested whenever new plot points come along.

This overlaps with the lack of follow through, but it’s bigger than that. First, the lack of a sense of what the normative values are in Hell make it hard to tell when a character is doing something uniquely bad for the setting or when the show is just making a joke (which we’ll cover more later) or why they believe things they believe if those values don’t make much sense since the viewer has not been shown why a Hellborn demon would believe something like that.

But for now, my concern is with the way in which the lack of worldbuilding in the setting makes consequences for any action less a case of ‘thing that would happen because we know how the world works’ and more ‘whatever the writers wanted at any given time’.

For example, in S2E3 a flashback shows that Hell not only has prisons but that Moxxie gets thrown in one for getting caught stealing. This along with the comments around the lending of the grimoire suggests Hell definitely has laws, but it’s hard to intuit what they actually are. For example, S1E2 and S2E7 has Blitzo casually killing people (the former in broad daylight with witnesses) and not being all that worried about any consequences for doing this. As per usual, it’s possible to headcanon explanations for this - Hell is corrupt and cares about property over the lives of any small-fry Hellborns - but this isn’t really an acceptable substitution for being able to know what’s going on and what the stakes are behind any given situation.

In addition to this, the idea that killing is ignored in Hell in certain situations makes it even stranger when S2E3 also establishes that the mafia - or mafia-like organizations - exist in Hell. This raises the question - why would any organization need to go to all the trouble of carrying out killing in secret (dumping bodies in lakes and etc.) when Blitzo is able to openly shoot people at a public theme park, no questions asked? Since the group are only in Moxxie’s home for one episode there’s no real explanation of what exactly Crimson does that brings money in, or why he’d need to do it as part of an organized crime gang.

This lack of clarity and stakes applies to part of the original setup: the grimoire.

Stolas mentions in the first episode that lending it out is breaking demon law, but the punishment for this is never clarified. It comes up again in S1E6 when Stolas says the group getting him trouble will get him in trouble, but once again he never mentions how specifically they’ll get in trouble.

In addition to the way the book is never put in jeopardy despite being massively important for enabling IMP to do their jobs, this lack of clarity over what the consequences are make the whole situation feel weightless and without real stakes. We find out what the consequences are basically as they happen - in S2E11 and after the book has stopped being used by IMP, the gang are arrested and put on trial. As lower class Hellborns they’re summarily sentenced to death, but it would have been nice to know the crew were risking their lives to do their jobs before now in order to build stakes. Having this detail would reinforce Blitzo’s character also, because it would tell the viewer that Blitzo is so determined to prove himself and rise above his station that he is willing to risk his life to do it - and the others were so pulled by his conviction that they followed his lead.

The consequences for Stolas having broken the law are basically also made up on the spot - Andrealphus steps in and suggests a punishment that Satan just agrees to so he doesn’t have to think about it. Given the court is clearly corrupt, it’s fine if what the punishments would be are nebulous, but the characters not knowing would also help with the stakes - even knowing there’s a chance that they could be killed if found out would increase the tension, and it helps to keep Stolas sympathetic if he was unsure if he was breaking his promise to his daughter when the consequences for lending out the book to get sex were unclear.

It’s of course possible to infer this would happen given the worldbuilding around the class difference, but it’s still a missed opportunity when it could have been used to build stakes and add character to the main cast.

This again overlaps with the lack of follow through, especially where the setting implies something matters only to have nothing materially change. It’s implied that the class difference between Stolas and Blitzo is a big deal - in S1E2 Stella is specifically horrified that Stolas cheated with an imp in particular, then in S1E7 the idea of Stolas going on a date with Blitzo is a cause of mockery for everyone in the club. However, as mentioned before nothing comes of this - no public scandal, nothing. The resultant lack of anything happening doesn’t just encourage viewers not to invest in plot points being followed up on, it gives the impression that nothing really matters in this world: that Hell is simultaneously filled with cruel assholes, including the lower classes who hate royal demons like in S1E5, but that they don’t care enough to bother gossiping about the reputation of royal.

This happens again when it’s revealed both Ozzie and Bee are going out with lower class demons - something implied to be a big deal in S1E7 is suddenly not when no one acts like it’s odd Bee is dating Tex in S1E8, contradicting what the viewer was previously shown. Then when Ozzie declares in public that he loves Fizz, the news prompts other demons to post on social media about it, suggesting that it is a big deal once again. But how this affects their lives or their relationship isn’t shown after S2E7 - as per usual, it’s like it never happened at all.

Mammon openly says Asmodeus will regret revealing the relationship, implying something will happen as a result of him spilling the beans, but - and you know what I’m going to say already - nothing ever comes of it.

By the time the trial happens in S2E11 Mammon openly references Bee and Ozzie dating lower class demons in front of Satan, and the literal leader of Hell (in Lucifer’s absence, that is) gives no reaction at all. Besides lending to the feeling that the show is going back and forth with how much of a big deal Deadly Sins or Goetic demons dating lower classes really is, this raises further questions about the setting.

If imps are an underclass meant to serve the royalty of Hell, then why is dating across classes allowed at all, especially with a huge difference like there is between royalty and imps? An imp dating someone higher class means they have the benefit of their partners’ wealth and power and if they were to have or adopt children together, that child would have the benefit of the royal’s wealth also. All of that provides class mobility, which would be the exact thing Satan and other royals should not want if they’re trying to keep imps under their control at the bottom of the totem pole.

A royal being in a relationship with an imp/Hellhound also undermines class stratification in other ways, too. Hell’s hierarchy relies on the notion that imps and Hellhounds are inherently inferior to them. But a royal or Deadly Sin openly loving them like equals cuts against this, as it shows they think the lower classes are just as worthy of love as someone of their own class. And given that some of the royals and Deadly Sins are immortal, making a family with a lower class demon could have very long lasting consequences.

But none of this is mentioned, giving the impression the implications of how classism should function in a larger way in the setting has not been thought through. In fact there is a mirrored pattern between Stella and Mammon - both of them threaten consequences to a royal character engaging in an inter-class relationship, that being Stolas and Asmodeus, and both of them imply a wider number of people will want to weigh in (Mammon goes for the broad ‘you’ll regret it’ whereas Stella specifically asks what the rest of the Goetia family will think, implying they will think the divorce is a problem)… and then nothing happens.

The result is that there’s no sense of a noble society that enforces the class system, no sense of harsh punishments for breaking the expected social mores of Hell - the only real problem is a few bad apples. All of the mechanisms you’d expect the higher and lower classes to use to punish social transgressions of inter class dating are non-existent; there’s no ostracism, no gossip, no other nobles jockeying for power using whatever weaknesses they can find outside of designated bad guys like Stella and Andrealphus, who are the exception to the rule.

Stolas losing his powers isn’t the result of a series of dominoes falling that led to his downfall where his peers enforced the rules of a strict hierarchy - his affair and divorce doesn’t attract meaningful recrimination from anyone outside of Stella and Andrealphus and he probably would have gotten away with lending out his book completely if his in-law hadn’t been plotting to steal his power and money, despite what he’d been doing being incredibly easy to figure out.

The end result of all of this is a setting where things are constantly shifting - the plot will imply something that should have larger ramifications in the setting, but then nothing will come of it. When this isn’t the case, later episodes will introduce contradictory information. Besides all the issues with the stakes, the result is a setting that feels only fractionally more detailed than the painted backdrop of a school play instead of a living world. Its a world that thwarts any attempts to make sense of it and rewards any viewer trying to pay attention with frustration, unless they’re willing to provide endless excuses and explanations of their own or are just happy to assume that an answer will be forthcoming even if continuing to watch only adds to the pile of things that doesn’t make sense rather than subtract from it.

Characters

Everyone talks the same

The show has a bad habit of failing to really distinguish its characters’ voices, as basically all of them swear constantly, often handled like the swear itself is enough to be funny on its own.

This happens so often that it loses all impact as the show goes on – the worst offender by far is Blitzo for the sheer volume of it but even supposedly more formal, buttoned up characters like Moxxie and Stolas begin increasingly peppering their dialogue with swear words.

This point gets brought up a lot already so I don’t want to linger on it, but I will say that outside of jokes needing more than just a swear or a sex joke to make them funny it lends to a feeling of the characters blending together that weakens already thin characterization. With dialogue ideally everyone should have their own voice – it should not be possible to just transplant one character’s lines to another and have no one notice the difference, but that’s increasingly the feeling with Helluva’s dialogue.

Even characters like Stolas, who in S1E1 did have a noticeably different vocabulary and speech pattern and reserved swears mostly just for when he was doing dirty talk down the phone, begin to increasingly swear in casual conversation as the show goes on.

Character design

Another commonly raised issue are the character designs. Again I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this, simply to say that some of them are fine enough while others lean into being overdesigned and messy.

One thing I will lament is that the main cast have different outfits in a flashback that far better communicates all of their respective personalities than just putting the entire crew in black in the present day. The in-universe explanation is likely that they’re assassins so they need to wear black but as a group they take so few precautions around being caught or spotted that I honestly think the flashback designs would have been a few better choice and visually distinguish the cast from one another a lot more.

Main (and male) characters

Blitzo

Blitzo is the closest thing the show has to a successfully written character. As I mentioned in the section about what worked in season one, Blitzo was one of those things.

He’s very strongly characterized and plays well off the other main characters, even if his relationships with some rather than others are better developed.

But as the show goes on, the handling of his character gets worse and worse.

To start with, the handling of Blitzo’s past is… disappointing to say the least. It was possible to infer that Blitzo was somehow responsible for what happened to Fizzarolli and his mother in the past and that the marks on his body and face were likely scars.

Then in S2E6 it turns out his mother died and Fizz lost his limbs in a circus fire.

This episode and reveal is disappointing for a number of reasons. Firstly, Fizz and Blitzo make up far too quickly for the sheer amount of damage that was done to Fizzarolli as a result of the fire - the episode basically has Fizz take an ‘it turned out all right in the end’ sort of attitude to the fire because it gave him the chance to meet Ozzie. This feels like a way for the writers to avoid doing any work to make Blitzo and Fizz’s reconciliation take more time - Fizz never seems to grieve the person he could’ve been if only the circus fire hadn’t happened as soon as Blitzo apologizes for it. After S2E6 there’s no lingering resentment or sense that the characters need to rebuild their relationship - they’re buddies again and even the slight tension in their conversation surrounding whether it’s possible for imps to date demon royalty is never revisited. In fact the opposite happens - Blitzo goes to Fizz for advice on sex toys in S2E8 and they don’t have any kind of meaningful conversation about it, which would have been nice to have in that episode to gauge how Blitzo is feeling about the upcoming full moon meeting when a friend he trusts asks him what’s going on.

Secondly, even though the storyline is written so that Blitzo feels like he is responsible for the fire, the writers avoid making the accident happen as a result of any of Blitzo’s flaws. All that happens is that he’s upset by his father giving Fizz a ‘Wish you were my son’ card and bumps into someone carrying a cake with lit candles.

This is as much the fault of the person carrying the cake as it is Blitzo’s and as a result of it being just a random accident, there isn’t really much for Blitzo to learn from any of this outside of ‘watch what you’re doing even when you’re upset’, which isn’t really a lesson unique for him as a character. But it’s hard to feel Blitzo is all that responsible for what happened given how the fire occurred; instead there’s a sense the writers were just reluctant to have him do anything that the audience would judge him for.

The same thing happens in the aftermath of the fire - Blitzo and Fizz don’t talk again, but it isn’t because Blitzo was too ashamed to face him or Fizz didn’t want to see him. Instead it was just a misunderstanding where other people (probably Blitzo’s father) conspired to keep them apart. Neither of them made an active choice that affected the relationship, it was all forced on them by other people.

Imagine if instead of it being a case of bumping someone at the wrong time, Blitzo caused the fire by attempting to win his father’s love by competing with Fizz. It would still be an accident, but the cause of it would have linked back to something Blitzo chose to do. And it would give him something to learn from that links in to his need to prove himself in the present day - would he be willing to go that far again to preserve his dream business, IMP, if it meant potentially hurting someone he cares about and ending up alone again?

As a side note, the foreshadowing for this moment is deeply odd too. Even though Blitzo is scarred all over his body because of the fire, including a mark on his face that he has to look at every day, this wasn’t accounted for in the plot at all. In both S1E1 and S1E2 Blitzo is around both regular and Hellfire and shows no PTSD reaction to either. Even if it wasn’t as extreme as a panic attack, his lack of uneasiness suggests that either this too was a story element that was decided after production began or no one thought to incorporate it into the plot earlier despite opportunities to do so. Curiouser still is that Hell is a setting where the average character has the rudeness of a stereotypical New Yorker and yet no one, not even other imps, comments on Blitzo’s very visible scar tissue on both his face and arms.

The reluctance to hold Blitzo repsonsible for other ways he has hurt his newfound family is also present throughout the rest of the show. Despite it being a potential source of plots and character development, the show shortchanges most of the development Blitzo could have had.

The show correctly notes he treats Moxxie the worst, but when confronted in S1E6 Blitzo claims he treats Moxxie harshly because he knows he has potential. We don’t really get to see this - he meets Moxxie in prison in a flashback in S1E3 but whatever it was that made him think he had potential is kept offscreen. And most crucially, their song in S1E6 where Blitzo and Moxxie promise to try and be better friends never comes to anything - Blitzo still snaps at Moxxie in episodes like S2E3 and S2E5, so their dynamic doesn’t feel markedly different than it does at the start of the show.

The show’s attitude towards Blitzo stalking M&M because he clearly wants to be in a threesome towards them gradually shifts. It’s most pronounced in the pilot but carries over into the show proper as a running gag before taking a turn for the dramatic in S1E7 when it appears like Blitzo has gone too far when he crashes their anniversary. This goes nowhere and the show shifts right back to treating this element like a joke, when it remembers it existed at all. Frustratingly this goes unresolved until S2E10 when the viewer is reminded this story element exists just in time for Blitzo to resolve to stop doing it. And it’s not because the show thinks him doing it in the first place was wrong or because Millie told him to stop, it’s because he’s pining over Stolas (we’ll get to that later).

This lack of progression happens in his relationship with Loona, too. Their dynamic in the piot and especially in S1E3 is one of Blitzo being loving but overprotective to the point of smothering, so Loona can’t make any friends. It’s never resolved in that episode, but it’s never revisited either - Loona just goes to a party in S1E7 and Blitzo comes to pick her up when she asks in S1E8. Blitzo’s loving support of Loona is one of his best traits and he’s at his most likeable when he’s just giving her the family she needs without being too overprotective or clingy, but how he got to the point of being all right with her hanging out with Tex after spending all of S1E3 trying to keep them apart is never explained onscreen.

It’s just glanced over, so their relationship often feels like it just develops in fits and starts: Loona calls him Dad occasionally, Blitzo supports her when the opportunity comes up in the show, that’s about it. We get to see Loona realize she maybe took him for granted when he almost dies and she tells him ‘I love you’ for the first time, but it remains to be seen if their dynamic develops from here or resets to how it was before. This isn’t helped by how little Loona is even given a speaking role in season two.

Finally, Millie is forced to deal with Blitzo while he is in a depressive state in S2E10. Blitzo has been blowing through the company’s money by buying collectible plates and taxidermy owls, refusing to take jobs and locking himself in his office for days on end. If allowed to continue this behavior could have bankrupted IMP, but ultimately Millie ends up being the one apologizing to Blitzo. We again miss an opportunity for someone to point out to Blitzo that his habit of prioritizing personal issues above the company like he did previously in S1E5 is harmful and for him to change as a result – while he does get his act together we don’t see him learn anything other than Millie considers him her best friend and he just didn’t know it before.

The only character Blitzo noticeably treats differently is Stolas: after saving his life Blitzo goes from furiously yelling at him in S2E8 to being unreservedly sweet and affectionate for all of S2E12.

Putting it simply, there is a pattern in the show of Blitzo doing things that hurt other members of IMP - his overprotectiveness with Loona, his stalking of M&M, his abrasive nature towards Moxxie in particular - and in every case the show never does anything satisfying with it. It’s either quietly dropped, framed like it wasn’t that bad before it’s also dropped for other reasons or Blitzo carries on doing exactly what he was doing before.

This is something of a problem because again, Blitzo’s relationship with IMP is supposed to be the heart of the show. But every character arc involving Blitzo learning to become a better person for them is completely undercooked or overlooked. It makes the moment when Blitzo is about to be executed in S2E11 where he tells someone he loves them for the first time (in this case, everyone in IMP) kind of sad because it didn’t hit anywhere near as hard as it should have.

And speaking of, Blitzo effectively completes part of his character arc in S2E11 by conquering his fear of loving people.

I’m giving that its own paragraph, which is more emphasis than the show places on it. The moment where Blitzo conquers part of his fears and is vulnerable with his family is immediately overshadowed by Stolas singing yet another musical number. It’s hard to say where Blitzo will go from here in the third season, but I suspect he’ll be more relegated to playing support for Stolas.

The last wasted opportunity with Blitzo is the show squandering his chemistry with various characters. Blitzo has a history with Fizz: they were childhood friends and he felt upstaged by him in the circus, as well as Fizz being his first crush and first love. They also have a lot of chemistry in the present day, with Blitzo clearly still having a crush on him. But so far the show has done nothing to resolve that, either.

The same is true with Blitzo’s relationship with Striker. Striker’s introductory episode sets him up as a neat contrast to Blitzo: they’re both assassins, but Striker is solitary where Blitzo can’t stand to be alone. Striker is suave and smooth where Blitzo is loud and blunt. And most noticeably, Striker is critical of royalty and how imps are treated, forcing Blitzo to confront his mixed feelings about his transactional arrangement with Stolas. In S1E5 Blitzo had a lot of chemistry with Striker - especially in the scene when Striker essentially tries to seduce Blitzo to join his side - and the two were explicitly set up as rivals during the Pain Games. After this though the rivalry is all but forgotten about - the viewer doesn’t get to see Blitzo and Striker try and one-up each other anymore and Striker’s ability to get under Blitzo’s skin so effectively in S1E5 never makes a return; Blitzo just has contempt for him and that’s basically it, but we’ll get into that more in the section on classism.

It’s tough to include Blitzo here since he does feel like the closest thing the show has to a successfully written character. For as poorly executed as it is, he does have some progression in the show in terms of trying to make amends with people he’s hurt in the past.

But none of it feels as earned or as centred as it should be - despite being the protagonist the one moment that actually felt like watching him progress as the central character done right was when he refuses to leave Fizz behind a second time. Because while the fire was an accident, leaving Fizz at that moment was his choice and something he could grow and change from the second time around. It’s basically the only meaningful choice he made in the defining event of his life - he didn’t choose to do anything that started the fire, just bumped into someone too hard and he didn’t choose not to speak to Fizz again. But he did choose to run, and later chose not to in order to try and make it up to him. While the moment where Fizz hugs him feels rushed on Fizz’s end for him to forgive so easily, this one moment was the closest the show got to a resolution that felt earned for its protagonist.

And yet this is the only moment like this for Blitzo in the show - a similar plot beat with Verosika instead gets weighed down with all the Stolas/Blitzo melodrama. The show doing nearly competent character development for him is the exception instead of the rule. And given he’s the main character, this should not have been the case.

Moxxie

In season one Moxxie is the secondary lead character next to Blitzo. While Blitzo’s burnt bridges is the main throughline for the first season, Moxxie is the character with the most focus episodes. S1E1 focuses on resolving the moral qualms Moxxie has about making a hit on a family, S1E5 is concerned with his feelings of inadequacy compared to Striker and in S1E6 his quiet conversation with Blitzo is the emotional high point of the season.

Next to Blitzo he is arguably the most successfully written character. He has strongly defined interests and qualities and a very well established dynamic with Blitzo, where the two of them tend to change places back and forth as to being the one whose neuroses and impulses is harming the business and being the one trying to keep things on track.

His relationship with Blitzo is one of the more subtle details of the show - it’s established from the pilot and then carried into the show proper that while the other members of IMP either refer to Blitzo by name or by a nickname (Millie calls him ‘B’ or ‘boss’ occasionally), Moxxie consistently refers to him as ‘sir’ instead. This bolsters the impression of Moxxie as the straight laced one who is trying to maintain boundaries as IMP as a business instead of Blitzo’s new family, but it also suggests a level of respect to Blitzo that appears initially at odds with Moxxie’s usual and understandable attitude towards him. S2E3 does a neat job of recontextualizing this when Moxxie addresses his own father also as ‘sir’. This suggests Moxxie perhaps views Blitzo as a father figure, one who is far from perfect but did give Moxxie a job straight out of prison where he could escape from his family’s influence and ended up meeting his future wife. However, the show doesn’t do much in the second season with Moxxie’s begrudging gratitude and respect towards Blitzo; it’s never commented on again.

The show also suggests Moxxie and Blitzo will develop a more equal relationship when Blitzo tells him to use his real name instead of ‘sir’ in S1E6 and while Moxxie does do that occasionally, he still regresses to using ‘sir’ in episodes like S2E3 which makes it feel like the relationship has not progressed in a meaningful way.

Moxxie also fares better than some of the other characters in terms of the variety of his character based plots, though they all tend to revolve around Moxxie’s struggles to make a place for himself in IMP: to preserve something of his own moral code within the jobs, to be respected, to improve his adversarial relationship with his boss.

The only arc that really continues into the second season is his need to be respected and prove himself - that’s why S2E5 is really more of a Moxxie episode because the plot is driven by his need to complete a job as the leader, and has to learn to support Millie in return when he resents the admiration and respect she gets from the kids at camp. This doesn’t feel like it goes anywhere - he messes up the job in S2E5 and is criticized by Blitzo for this, but there’s no defineable arc of him improving his skills.

Worse than this, his characterization becomes increasingly weak as the show goes on: Moxxie was originally the team sniper while Millie was the heavy close range combatant, but S2E4 sees him easily beat up several men much heavier than him easily using melee attacks (shout out to We Are Not Alive for pointing this out) while Millie is off being the one talking to people. Moxxie’s trait as the one person less likely to make dirty jokes or swear excessively due to being the straight man of the group also begins to erode so in some scenes he begins to resemble a mini-Blitzo: when he is being attacked by Striker he makes a dirty joke very reminiscent to one made in the pilot of Hazbin Hotel by Angel Dust in order to get the upper hand.

While Moxxie’s characterization is stronger than the female members of IMP and he gets his insecurities explored from a couple of different angles, he suffers from the same problem that most of the characters do: a lack of planning to his backstory and a lack of direction to his character arc.

Striker

This section needs another caveat before we get into it. When fans have previously criticized how the writing of Striker changed, there has sometimes been a misconception that the issue is that fans wanted Striker to be a ten steps ahead style mastermind. Personally, that’s not my complaint.

My issue with how Striker changes from S1E5 to every appearance he has afterwards is that he’s established as a legitimate threat, a cool and suave assassin who makes Moxxie feel insecure and can go toe to toe with Blitzo. He gets the crowd to love him, along with Millie’s parents.

And crucially, he’s pragmatic and smart: when Moxxie stumbles on to Striker’s plot to kill Stolas, Striker immediately tries to kill him quietly to get him out of the picture. Then when Millie shows up to save him, Striker is momentarily surprised but manages to overcome them and instead shoves them both down into the basement to avoid missing his window of opportunity to kill Stolas when he’s onstage at the ceremony. Finally Blitzo shows up to attempt to stop him and since Striker knows Blitzo is the one person who is physically a threat to him, he avoids fighting him to begin with and instead capitalizes on his knowledge of how Blitzo feels degraded by his treatment of Stolas just from watching them interact a few times. Unused beatboards suggest that he might have attempted to goad Blitzo himself into doing the assassination himself directly by handing him his weapons (Striker has the dual pistols here, suggesting the blessed rifle showed up in later drafts).

The point I’m making here is that while I wouldn’t expect Striker to be a mastermind type of character, he is a very competent rival who is both skilful and seductive. Everything he does in Harvest Moon is evident of someone who plans meticulously and even when unexpected events crop up, he adapts in a smart way that makes sense - he's capable of thinking on his feet.

This aspect of his character never comes back again and goes completely wasted in future episodes. When he returns in S2E4 he’s suddenly far less smart - firstly, he attacks Stolas head-on despite knowing he’s demon royalty and (should be) pretty tough to kill and secondly he does this in broad daylight in a cafe that primarily rich people attend who could be relied on to help catch him later. He also takes Stolas to what is presumably his home/base, so when IMP follow him there he’s basically ensured he has to give up his own hiding spot in Wrath to find another one where he can go to ground for awhile. The only pragmatic thing he does is attempt to blind Stolas before IMP arrive to rescue him so Stolas can’t see him again (not that this matters, because the writers don’t have Stolas even bother to try and have him caught or arrested). This stupidity carries over into future episodes - he takes a job to kidnap Fizz in order to try and blackmail Asmodeus, which is a stupid plan for numerous reasons, and he even just stands there staring and doing nothing while Fizz does a musical number solely for the purposes of distracting them long enough for Blitzo to set up explosives to collapse the entire building. There’s never a time in future episodes where Striker uses his brain the same way he did in S1E5 to carry a nearly perfect plan to completion - he can still provide a threat in physical fights, but that’s primarily it.

He also becomes flanderized in other ways in this episode. Striker always had an ego - singing a song called ‘Sweet Victory’ for example - but here it’s dialled up to comical levels where he has a statue of himself that is massively well-endowed. Striker’s suave, self-possessed and seductive traits fall away too - he develops much more of a hair-trigger temper even when just talking to other imps and his hygiene is mocked by Fizz in S2E6.

Worse still is the handling of his attitude towards royalty. He goes from someone who can very effectively disarm Blitzo’s armor around the transactional deal to someone who is just dismissed by everyone else when he brings up the fact that the class system of Hell is blatantly unfair.

The nadir of the writing comes in S2E11, when Striker is called as a witness when IMP is on trial. He is used by Andrealphus to claim Blitzo hired him to kill Stolas, who he describes as “the precious Goetia”.

This is blatantly out of character.

The one consistent trait Striker has even as he became dumber and more of a joke in the narrative was his hatred of royalty. And yet he is willing to essentially defend Stolas by painting Blitzo and IMP as the villains trying to kill him? The episode never bothers to show Andrealphus and Stella blackmailing him into giving this testimony, or that he knew Andrealphus actually intended to target Stolas from the beginning. He certainly has no reason to assume that is the plan given Andrealphus’ stupid nonsense strategy revolves entirely around painting Blitzo as the one preying on Stolas.

To make matters worse, Striker not only knows this isn’t true but is the only character who has ever criticized Stolas for how he treated Blitzo in the story. He knows the arrangement is transactional and he knows Stolas treated Blitzo like a plaything because he directly saw it in S1E5. He has a grudge against IMP for beating him so often (now that he’s an incompetent joke), sure, but he still hates royals and yet shows no discomfort at all in being part of a plan to - as far as he is written to know in the episode - punish IMP for something he knows Stolas was not only onboard with, but leveraged in order to get sex.

As a rival and an antagonist, Striker peaked in S1E5 and it was all downhill from there. He’s not only one of the most wasted characters in terms of potential, but he gets more disappointing every time he turns up onscreen to the point that he is basically just an annoying obstacle to IMP in recent episodes; there is now no tension over whether he can ever be a genuine threat to the team at all.

Fizz and Ozzie

I’ll keep this section short: Fizz and Ozzie are both reflective of another strange trend the show has - defanging previously interesting characters.

Ozzie goes from a Deadly Sin happy to assert his authority over Stolas by using his approval of Stolas’ lustful ways to mock him for ruining his family just to sleep with Blitzo, to someone who is inexplicably friendly towards him and there’s no sign of any bad blood between them. As mentioned previously, Ozzie effectively helping to ruin Stolas’ first ever date doesn’t affect their new friendly dynamic in the slightest.

Fizz goes from a cocky performer and right hand man to Ozzie to another nervous woobie being abused by Mammon. He escapes from this in the course of a single episode and no real lingering effects of this are mentioned and we are presumably left to assume he just went back to working at Ozzie’s. There’s a subtext of him feeling smothered by Ozzie and potentially insecure when people needle him about being a ‘purse dog’ to Asmodeus - an unequal partner, maybe even a category traitor for reaping the benefits of fraternizing with royalty while other imps still suffer under their heel. So far this has gone nowhere.

The two of them form the second stable couple in the series along with M&M. At first this is kind of fun - the two of them trying to hide their actually affectionate relationship in order to uphold Asmodeus’ reputation as the Deadly Sin of Lust, being essentially hypocrites when they shame Stolas and Blitzo at Ozzie’s club.

Where this gets frustrating is the vagueness around the worldbuilding, yet again. Like Tex and Loona, everyone occasionally acts like it’s a big deal for a Deadly Sin to date a lower class demon, but what the consequences for this will or should be are never made clear. Mammon threatens Ozzie he will regret openly telling everyone he loves Fizz, but as per usual this is never followed up on.

Ozzie also suffers from a writing problem - he has to stop being a consistent character when the writers want something in particular to happen in the plot. His main trait is his love for Fizz, to the extent that he calls Blitzo to help him deal with Mammon because he knows Blitzo is friend.

But despite this, when Blitzo and IMP are put on trial Ozzie does nothing despite knowing that he is Fizz’s friend and despite Fizz texting him to do something. This is especially egregious because Ozzie has information that could help exonerate Blitzo and make it obvious Andrealphus is definitely lying about some of it, none of which he mentions when it would have been appropriate to do so. Even Beelzebub gets to reference more past events than he does.

Repeated arcs, wheel spinning

Because the show completely wasted its story engine and premise, it lacks ways to meaningfully develop its cast.

As a result the show has a tendency to repeat its plot points, to the extent that some episodes feel like near 1:1 re-runs of episodes that already happened in season one, or else they repeat character arcs already seen in prior episodes.

For example, both S1E2 and S2E2 focus on Stolas’ strained relationship with Via as a result of the infidelity and divorce. His habit of neglecting her and being bad at noticing obvious signs she’s unhappy comes up in both episodes, leading to the feeling that he’s learned nothing. Worse still, Via gets less screentime in S2E2 and Stolas and Via are separated for most of it, so the repeated arc becomes less impactful the second time.

Both S2E5 and S2E10 are focused on Millie doing a job with one other of the male characters, but her partner in crime with an enthusiasm for dressing up in a disguise messes up the job due to prioritizing the wrong thing. Millie tries to be patient with them until she ultimately tells them straight what damage they’re doing and they have a heartwarming reconciliation later.

Other character beats just get repeated ad nauseam. After S1E6 and S1E7 it is very clear what Blitzo’s deepest issue is: he hates himself and pushes people away before they can leave and prove what he suspects – that he doesn’t deserve to be loved. But the show reinforces this again anyway, most heavily in S2E10. Which we didn’t really need – we already understand he has this issue. If we got to see Blitzo attempt to change, only to relapse that would be something different – but this isn’t what we get in S2E10. Instead the villain forces Blitzo to view a cinema reel of his own worst memories, but Blitzo doesn’t break free from the possession by overcoming anything or making any kind of incremental progress: instead Millie just punches the demon out of him and that’s that.

Some episodes are even worse than this as it doesn’t feel like they needed to exist at all. S2E4 is the worst offender – Stella realizing she needs Stolas alive should have been a single conversation at the start of the episode, where she and Andrealphus discuss her failed attempt using Striker last season. As a result the entire plotline of the episode is rendered pointless and what little tension there is drains away. If anything it feels more like a justification to use the blessed rope as a convenient plot device to depower Stolas and torture him for a while.

The nadir of repetition in the show happens in a series of episodes that feel like a three-part trilogy, because they’re all based around the same night. These three are S1E7, S1E8 and S2E1.

Both S1E7 and S1E8 end with Blitzo curled up heartbroken and crying on the couch.

Both S1E7 and S2E1 end with Stolas in his cloak, alone in his palace and looking sadly out at the camera.

The plot point that Blitzo is scared of dying alone is raised implicitly through him alone on his couch and looking through photos of people he’s lost touch with in S1E7, then said outright in S1E8 when tells Loona he’ll die alone. We didn’t need the explicit confirmation – the first scene was far more powerful.

Similarly, S1E7 establishes Stella has already moved out offscreen, but S2E1 has them repeat a conversation that was implied to have already happened when he tells Stella they’re getting the divorce, but for sure this time.

This wasn’t helped by airing the episodes out of order, but even with the Loona content in the middle of the sandwich the three episodes together result in a feeling like the show is going nowhere slowly because no progression is happening. One episode doing the same night from different perspectives could be a neat idea in theory, but in practice the amount of repeating plot points here makes the whole experience a slog.

Tangent: The Stolas Cycle

This will be covered more later, but the same wheel spinning issue applies to Stolas. The writers have Stolas consistently go around a simple loop, especially where Blitzo is concerned:

Stolas messes up, he gets called out on it.

Stolas either doesn’t understand what the very obvious problem is or denies he did anything wrong.

Stolas makes a big gesture to fix it that doesn’t fix the problem but gives him a reason to think the other party is being insufficiently grateful.

Stolas has a single moment of introspection where he considers he could be the issue.

The writers don’t have him build on this or fix what the original problem was.

Stolas messes up in either the exact same or a very similar way to what he did the first time, the cycle begins all over again.

This pattern of the show simultaneously having him repeat the same mistakes over and over again, while also including dramatic moments that suggest he’s about to self-reflect and learn and grow leads to a character that is very frustrating to watch and consistently more dislikeable than the show wants him to be. I’ll cover this more later, but for now I’ll just point out that while having a character struggle to change and fall back into old habits is understandable and can make for good drama, it’s frustrating to watch a character act as though they aren’t even aware of what their issues are when they’ve seen the detrimental effects their behavior has multiple times over.

This same cycle applies to the Stolas/Blitzo relationship, where they will cycle through having fights with one another before having a peaceful period, then flare up into another fight. Just as with Stolas the fundamental issues between them aren’t addressed in a way that feels meaningful, with the relationship progressing in unnatural jumps forward. As with the issues around Stolas himself, this constant fight - makeup cycle makes the relationship feel far more toxic than what the show is going for.

Female characters

As a show, Helluva Boss has a disregard for its female characters that goes beyond plausible deniability when looking at the pattern in its totality. Usually when this is brought up the response will either to be to find some in universe excuse for why this is the case, or else it will be defensive responses that these critiques are automatically accusing the creators of misogyny.

For the first defence I will gesture towards the Thermian argument: everything in a show is there because the creators made a decision to put it there. And at every turn the creators made the decision to prioritize the male characters over the female ones. Saying ‘the reason this character is underdeveloped is because the creators are going to get to them later’ or ‘the creators did this to save money’ is not an excuse when the creators are making the decision to shove the female character’s development into some hypothetical future time when they are happy to waste money on extravagant music videos that tell us things we already know i.e. that Stolas is sad, wants Blitzo romantically and is (supposed to be) committed to making amends for the transactional deal.

For the second I will say only this: I don’t know what’s in the creators’ hearts. What I do know is that both Hellaverse shows have an issue with its female characters being underwritten compared to the spotlight stealing males, who simply need to show up in a nice outfit with an angsty backstory to immediately be given speaking roles and prominence amongst both the show and the fandom. I’m not interested in accusing anyone of bigotry or internalized sexism; but I will say that statements like this:

“Hazbin has always had a heavier emphasis on women led stories, so Helluva has steered more towards male-led stories” – tweet from VivziePop on March 12^th 2023

Are not a defense. Besides the fact that it’s generous to call Hazbin having more female-led stories - the women do fare a little better but the male characters aren’t anywhere near as neglected in Hazbin as the women are in Helluva and previously prominent characters in the Hazbin pilot like Cherri Bomb get little screentime in the show proper - there is no excuse to purposefully write one demographic worse then respond to criticism by saying anyone wanting to see well developed female characters needs to watch a different show. This would be the case if Hazbin really was female-led, too - there would be no excuse for writing male characters in that show with no interiority or focus.

With that groundwork established, let’s move on.

Millie

The problem with underwritten female characters is most obvious with the two members of IMP, Loona and Millie. Both are supposed to be main characters but the two of them are vastly underdeveloped compared to Blitzo and Moxxie.

Millie is the worst offender by far as she’s very undercooked as a character - her principal traits are being Moxxie’s wife and being violent. Her most developed relationship is to Moxxie, but she largely exists to reassure him and the relationship isn’t particularly fleshed out - their dynamic is mostly generically sweet and occasionally horny with Moxxie being the one with insecurities that the couple face together. We see in flashback that Moxxie was smitten with Millie the moment they met, but not how they fell in love or what it is that Millie finds attractive about Moxxie, who is a kind person but also from a very different background than hers with different interests and a tendency towards neuroticism.

Her dynamic with the team is also barebones - she’s far more laid back about Blitzo stalking her and Moxxie outside of work even though he’s violating her privacy as well, and gets along with him generally a lot better than Moxxie despite his eccentricities and impulsiveness potentially hurting the business that provides her and Moxxie’s living wage. She’s largely passive about the way he constantly butts heads and mocks her husband.

And we don’t see why this is the case - why she’s not worried at all about the potential failure of the company she’s working for.

This is especially strange given that the one character trait she potentially has outside of ‘violent’ and ‘Moxxie’s wife’ before S2E10 is a feeling that her family don’t approve of her new life - neither her parents nor her sister Sallie Mae respect her choice of husband and her mother misunderstands how Millie’s new job works to the point she thinks Millie is not earning any money. If the company failed and she had to go home to the farm, wouldn’t that be the collapse of the new life she’s built in IMP City and a vindication of all the people who doubted or judged her? And if so, shouldn’t she have shown some sign of worrying about the success of IMP before now?

Millie also barely has a dynamic with Loona at all, the other female supposedly main character at the company. There’s a reoccurring pattern of her referring to Loona as ‘Hellhound’ rather than by her name, which suggests some prejudice on her part, but nothing comes of this. By S2E10 she just calls Loona by her name but the viewer never got to see a moment where she and Loona became friends or Loona told her not to do that; it just happens. It’s also the first time they’ve even had a conversation since S1E6 - if the change was due to that episode it’s too long afterwards to feel relevant and it’s not remotely earned.

The pattern of writing throughout the show makes this disinterest in Millie more and more clear. Harvest Moon is about the group staying over at Millie’s home farm to attend the ceremony and Pain Games beforehand, but it’s not a Millie episode that really explores her feelings about coming home and her family being lukewarm about the new life she’s built. This gets even stranger when looking at S2E10, which does try to flesh out Millie by suggesting she was actually an assassin at some point trying to work solo and she had internalized the classism imps face to such an extent that she refused to believe Blitzo could own his own business at first, then she felt doubtful again when Blitzo rented an office that any of them really deserved to have that level of success. You’d expect her to be more passionate about defending her new life when coming home, or more insecure that people keep questioning it. But it just doesn’t come up - likely because the writers just didn’t dig that deeply into Millie’s character before they started writing season one.

The only other notable thing in this episode is a rivalry between her and Sallie Mae, since her sister is allowed to compete in the Pain Games while Millie isn’t. But this doesn’t come up again in the episode or drive any conflict for Millie; it’s much more transparently an excuse to keep Millie out of the Games so the rivalry between Blitzo and Striker can be better established. The shorts make this clear - one focuses on Millie and Sallie Mae spending the day together and Sallie Mae reveals that she not only missed Millie but felt like she can’t fit into Millie’s new life in the city.

None of this was communicated in the way Sallie Mae and Millie spoke to one another back in Harvest Moon. While it’s nice for both of them to get more screentime, the entire plotline again speaks to the lack of planning and thought put into the lives of the show’s female characters.

In reality, Harvest Moon is another Moxxie episode - the second that season. Where S1E1 focused around Moxxie’s moral quandry with the assassination business breaking up families, S1E5 is about his confidence in himself. It’s Moxxie who feels most undermined by Millie’s parents’ disapproval in him and Moxxie who has a character arc that episode of learning to rely on his strengths, culminating in him being the one to stand up to Millie’s parents at the end of the episode, noting her father giving him a single nod of acknowledgement is progress compared to how things were before. Even the design of new character Striker appears tailor-made to be a contrast to Moxxie and throw his insecurities into sharp relief - Striker is more stereotypically masculine and rocks a Wrath-style Western aesthetic compared to Moxxie’s theatre kid energy (and worse, he can sing!).

This pattern of Millie being put in situations where she should have character development but gets crumbs or nothing continues throughout the show. For the rest of season one she gets little: Loona and Millie team up in S1E6, but they don’t have a heart to heart similar to the one Blitzo and Moxxie do. Then she supports Moxxie in S1E7, ending the first season with no focus episode of her own - the only one of the principal cast to do so.

Season two continues the pattern, sometimes to the point of farce. S2E3 opens as though it should be a Millie episode - she walks into the office furious because she ran into an ex and it aggravated her. Then the episode pivots to be about a trip to Moxxie’s childhood home - and unlike the trip to Millie’s home becoming a Moxxie episode and a vehicle to explore his insecurities, S2E3 is a Moxxie episode. The plot point with Millie’s ex comes back up when that ex is revealed to be Chaz - who Moxxie also dated.

It honestly starts to feel like the writers are being as blatant as possible about sidelining Millie when this episode has an entire flashback about Moxxie’s relationship with Chaz, but not Millie’s. To make matters worse, all of Millie’s dislike of Chaz for their own history is immediately consumed by her hating him for Moxxie’s sake - she’s understandably angry that Chaz betrayed Moxxie and gets violent over it, but this once again reduces her character to “violent but supportive wife”. She’s aggressive towards him but we don’t see her speak about her own history with Chaz all that much so it’s hard to gauge what kind of relationship they had.

Much like Millie’s overzealousness and rivalry with Sallie Mae being more of an excuse to keep her out of the Pain Games, the inclusion of her relationship with Chaz given how little it impacts her character comes across as far more of an excuse to enable the plot: the only thing it really affects in the episode is Blitzo sleeping with Chaz to find out what M&M like in bed, which leads to him getting suspicious of him and moves the plot forwards when he discovers Chaz is not rich.

The elephant in the room here is that the writers addressed this topic on social media, hinting that Chaz will return and Millie’s backstory with him will be expanded upon in the future.

As I highlighted above, female characters backstories and motivations being shunted into some hypothetical future date is a pattern with this show and does not fix them being vastly underdeveloped in the present time. Besides carrying the usual issue that when we finally do see Millie’s history with Chaz it could be so far in the future that the viewers have forgotten all about him, Chaz is one of the few characters that was killed off in the episode he was introduced. Seeing his history with Millie after he’s already dead and can no longer affect the story is just far less engaging than what Moxxie got - we saw his history with Chaz in the context of a storyline where his father intends to force Moxxie to marry him, making the stakes much higher.

The writers first likely attempt to make an actual Millie episode is in S2E5, and the result is a mixed bag. To get the obvious out of the way, this once again feels far more like a Moxxie episode than a Millie one (though likely by accident rather than design this time). Moxxie is the one with the conflict - he’s feeling insecure (again) because the kids at camp don’t like his popular girl disguised self ‘Moxxine’ and prefer ‘Millerd’. And he’s the one who learns a lesson in the episode - that when it comes to his insecurities, Millie is a nonstop fountain of support who could really use her husband being happy for her when she gets recognition for her talents.

What Millie does get is a storyline that feels like the writers just trying to find something for her to do. At the start of the episode she notices the culprit they’re looking for straight away, but puts it to one side to humor Moxxie’s fantasies of playing investigator. But when the human campers begin hero worshipping her, she expresses that it’s nice to have positive attention for once since her job involves killing people all the time.

This isn’t a terrible plotline but there’s no setup for it, so it comes out of nowhere. Before now Millie seemed to enjoy her job; it’s her one characteristic that she’s kind of bloodthirsty about it.

The other element of the storyline makes a little more sense i.e. that Millie resents Moxxie for not supporting her. This is the kind of storyline that doesn’t seem set up intentionally - there’s no moment where we see Millie looking sad or feeling neglected by Moxxie before; the most we get is that she’s sad he didn’t tell her about Crimson and asks her to communicate more in future about any family issues - but at least takes advantage of the pattern of Moxxie having problems and Millie being there to bolster his confidence. This too is resolved by the end of the episode and hasn’t come up again since.

It takes until five episodes later for Millie to truly have an episode from her perspective that actually expands on her backstory and how she came to join IMP. It’s the best of the bunch for Millie, but it’s not perfect. Once again Millie’s role is largely playing emotional support for a male character - she tries to keep IMP running by getting through to Blitzo, then plays along with Blitzo’s Ghostfuckers cosplay, then chews him out when it gets too much. This at least works with the backstory introduced specifically in this episode that Millie feels imps can’t run a business because of the class system, though it would have been nice to see it come up earlier. Interestingly enough her personality seems a lot different in her backstory - much angrier and harder-edged, which is something to explore in the future.

She also explicitly makes text something that was mostly just implied by now - that she enjoys playing along with Blitzo’s sometimes eccentric behavior, though there is a point for her where it gets too far.

The episode also establishes that Blitzo considers her his best friend, though this too feels pretty unearned since they never spent much one on one time with each other onscreen before now. S2E10 also resolves the plotline of Blitzo spying on M&M, though Millie’s incredible casualness towards it isn’t given much explanation.

On the whole, Ghostfuckers isn’t the worst exploration of Millie as a character but it needed to happen far, far sooner than S2E10 and episodes like this should have been the rule and not the exception for fleshing the IMP crew out as a group. It’s honestly a little heartbreaking that the episode that establishes Blitzo thinks of Millie as his best friend happens only one episode before a climatic payoff where Blitzo is almost put to death and the rest of IMP have to watch.

We can’t really wrap up on Millie as a character without discussing the other social media elephant in the room - Vivziepop’s thread about her character.

I’m just going to focus in on the parts I think are relevant - there’s some other useful stuff in here but I want to discuss that elsewhere.

In it VivziePop lists Millie’s qualities: resourceful, strong family ties and memories, past of violence, sibling rivalry, excitable and hyper focused.

Some of these are shown throughout the show, while some are fairly surface level. Millie not having personality traits isn’t really the problem though, no one is critiquing her for being boring that I’ve seen. The real issue is that she has little purpose in the show outside of being Moxxie’s wife. All the traits listed for Millie are fine in isolation but the show rarely does anything with them, leading to her feeling like a void with no interior life.

VivziePop goes on to say that because Millie is upbeat she reads as lacking depth. Again, that is not the issue - plenty of characters have depth that are upbeat. I personally don’t want or expect her to have a tragic past and I don’t think she needs a backstory like that to be compelling; I don’t think I’ve seen many arguing for that, either.

What she needs is to feel like a person with some reaction to events around her broader than ‘worried about Moxxie/Blitzo’ or ‘kill something now’. For example, does she have interests of her own? We know Moxxie is a somewhat pretentious theatre kid who likes musicals and doesn’t like pop music. We know Blitzo has an obsession with horses and likes loud rock music. We know Loona is a fan of Verosika and is phone obsessed. But what does Millie like? Discounting her penchant for violence, she doesn’t get much outside of a running gag where she’s enthusiastic about going on trips, but that isn’t particularly unique to her - most people get excited about having something new to do.

The final point in the thread I want to discuss is the priorities of the writers. VivziePop states that the first season was focused around Blitzo, with Moxxie offering the most play off him and Stolas getting focus too due to him changing directions from the pilot. This again falls apart under the Thermian argument - it was a decision to give Moxxie the personality that conflicted with Blitzo the most and for Stolas to get increasingly more screentime. It was a decision to prioritize the male characters in this way, so talking about it as though it was just something that just kind of happened doesn’t make the criticism of how Millie was handled any less valid.

In the interests of not just doing an unproductive dunking for a whole section, I want to switch gears for a second to talk about why I think Millie ended up being written this way since I think it goes beyond just prioritizing Blitzo, Moxxie and Stolas.

Millie is, fundamentally, someone who is basically content with her life. Not only does she not really want anything, she’s not particularly insecure about anything, either - not compared to Blitzo and Moxxie, at least.

It doesn’t bother her that much that she’s working for a highly risky startup where - for the first season and most of the second - her and her husband could be discovered for breaking demon law any day, even though her boss is impulsive and the noble they rely on for use of the book is completely indiscreet about his affair, so it would be very easy for someone to put the pieces together. It doesn’t bother her that much that her parents and sister disapprove of her new job and choice of husband. Until S2E10, it didn’t seem bother her that much that imps were the bottom of the pecking order in Hell - the effects of classism that obviously have a big impact on Blitzo didn’t linger with her as soon as she had a job and husband she was happy with.

So given Millie is generally content and happy, how do you write plotlines for her?

This is where I again have to point out that having an angsty backstory is not the only way to create plotlines for a character. Besides the suggestions I outlined earlier where all of IMP could have developed together to become better at their jobs, there are several ways to create situations for Millie to respond to.

For examples of happy and confident characters who are still compelling, we could consider My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. None of them have terribly tragic childhoods but the showrunners pretty successfully got seven seasons worth of plot out of MLP: FiM. And this was because most of them want something: Twilight wants to learn about magic, Rainbow Dash to become a Wonderbolt, Fluttershy to care for animals but also to be more confident, Rarity to run a successful boutique, Applejack to run the family farm and Pinkie Pie to throw fun parties and run a cake shop.

We can take the last two as examples since they’re probably the most similar to Millie - already in a job they like with friends around them. Some of Pinkie Pie’s most memorable plots come from turning her identity against her - for example, when she thinks her friends don’t like her parties (and her by extension) and she has an episode long breakdown over it, or when her usually good traits result in chaos because her vices get the better of her, like when her desire to hang out with her friends results in her making clones of herself who cause chaos all over town.

It’s something of a meme that Applejack is the neglected character of the Mane Six, having less focus episodes of her own. Like Millie she’s mostly content with life so long as her farm is running OK, but she’s also more of a subdued personality compared to the rest of the main cast - she’s level-headed and sensible, her worst vice being that she’s stubborn sometimes. And that can be the case sometimes - characters may work better as supporting cast than as a main leading character. However, the writers still came up with creative ways to give her focus episodes. In some cases they use the same trick with Pinkie Pie where her usually positive traits become weaknesses in certain situations - for example her self-reliance becomes self-destructive stubbornness, her desire to avoid letting anyone down leads to an escalating pattern of her acting irrationally and even her unwavering honesty can become a weakness when she fears telling the truth if she knows it will hurt someone. In others they put her in a situation with external stressors; usually something threatens her farm or her family, the two things she cares about above all else.

Either of these could have worked for coming up with plots to give Millie something to do. Maybe her love of violence causes the gang to flub a job because she got carried away. Maybe tensions with her family boil over when she gets tired of them judging her and they feel she looks down on them for breaking the mould of farming and menial labor that imps are ‘supposed’ to do. Maybe an external threat to the business causes Millie to realize her new life is more precarious than she thought and she panics. Maybe she develops past her prejudice against Hellhounds and gets along better with Loona. Maybe the writers use the criticism that Millie is just Moxxie’s wife as a metatextual plot point to put their marriage in danger, making her rediscover who she is outside of him.

The point being, I don’t entirely believe that non-angsty non-tragic-backstory characters are just inherently harder to write or that it’s impossible to make them fleshed out characters. It speaks to a general lack of experience in writing characters and – as is the case throughout the entirety of Helluva Boss – a lack of planning.

Tangent: That ending in Season 2

So season 2 ends with the reveal that Millie is pregnant and unsure what to do about it.

It is pretty sad that the only storyline the writers could think to give the flattest female character in the show was a soap opera surprise pregnancy, but since season 3 will largely deal with whatever the fallout is I can’t comment on it except to say that I hope the writers don’t handle it as poorly as they’ve handled other heavy topics like abuse, classism and domestic violence. It is at least an external stressor but it will remain to be seen how well the writers can utilize it to develop Millie as a character.

Loona

Loona is the closest thing the show has to a well written female character - or at least she was, in the first season. She has interests of her own and is very flawed with a soft side buried deep down. Loona also does something rare successfully for the show: we get to see how she’s a vastly different person depending who she’s around.

With the members of IMP, she behaves like a grumpy teen. In front of Verosika she’s a shrinking violet and in front of Tex she’s a nervous awkward mess. S1E3, her first and best focus episode, made me like her for the first time because it recontextualized her grouchy attitude: she’s a young adult with no friends who does have a home provided by her adoptive father but also can’t have much of a life outside of him due to his overprotectiveness.

The issues raised by that episode go unresolved and are not revisited - Blitzo never learns to stop being overprotective, Loona just goes to Tex’s party and they don’t have much of a discussion about anything that happened in S1E3. Meanwhile Loona’s assertion that she doesn’t need Blitzo has so far gone forgotten about - she does occasionally call him ‘Dad’ and seemed to regret her attitude when he was nearly executed, but like a lot of the character development in Helluva it just happens in fits and starts so nothing feels intentional.

Her worst moment as a character is in S2E2, one of the most unpleasant episodes of the entire show, but we’ll cover that later on. For now we’ll just focus on the plot of the episode - it opens with Loona angry at Blitzo for asking her to improve her people skills as the businesses receptionist (a pretty reasonable request given she’s the first impression people will have of IMP), her suggesting he replace her if she’s that bad and Blitzo trying to tough love his way through it by saying maybe he might. This hurts Loona even if she doesn’t let on, but then the group is distracted by trying to find Via.

The group ends up splitting up and Loona is left to go find Via and at first she doesn’t bother. Meanwhile Blitzo is mistaken for a human and has to act in a sitcom, but the plot reminds him of the moment he adopted Loona and he has a flashback about it.

Just to clarify that point: Loona’s backstory is used to provide angst for Blitzo. Loona’s awful time being raised in care - only to be adopted by Blitzo right before she was about to age out - is used for a PTSD flashback for the main male lead, who is having trauma over someone else’s past. This happens in an episode where Loona and Via were on the thumbnail and are supposed to be the focus, but they’re less present than they were in S1E2 and S1E3 respectively.

And speaking of which – Loona’s backstory is completely wasted. It’s implied she was treated very badly while she was in the foster system in S2E3 but this isn’t followed up on and it’s unclear if Loona’s struggles to socialize and make friends are partly a result of this trauma or not. I’d honestly forgotten it was even part of her character until I came to write this part because it’s referenced so little in the show.

When the plot cuts back to Loona, she decides to go look for Via after all but we never get to see the moment where she decides that she should do the right thing. Similarly, the speech she gives to Via is supposed to be heartwarming but we never see how she comes to conclusion that people should cut their fathers some slack when they mess up because she spends the entire episode being angry at Blitzo, then kicks him in the groin and slams his face with a book as a means of getting even. It’s clear Loona is an intensely prickly and defensive character, but the viewer still needs some indication that she remembered something Blitzo did that she appreciated for this speech to make any sense. Especially given that Loona is talking to Via about Stolas here and not Blitzo, who she has even less reason to like (but we’ll get into the rest of that later).

As for the rest of season two, Loona’s development outside of S2E2 is… basically nothing. She calls Blitzo Dad and tells him she loves him in S2E11 and keeps being nice to him in S2E12, but that’s the most we get.

That’s not hyperbole, she quite literally doesn’t appear or doesn’t speak starting from S2E3 and lasting nearly half the season - all the way until S2E8, when she has a role in the fight scene between IMP and CHERUB.

Where Millie gets two focus episodes in season two (one more an attempt than a success, but let’s count it to be fair), Loona gets only one and even then she shares it with Via and it’s more focused on Stolas and Blitzo, anyway, so calling it a Loona episode is kind of generous.

This was reportedly done to save money (the thread has since been deleted but since I couldn’t find readable screenshots, it’s discussed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbWobv3jwXk), at which point I gesture to the Look My Way MV and the Thermian argument and remind the reader that the writers could have made the choice to use other voice actors less and save money that way.

While it is nice to see Loona call Blitzo “Dad” and treating him with more kindness in S2E12 (and hopefully this sticks going into season 3), but it would be nice if Loona actually had more focus and felt like a main character, especially with her being the only Hellhound.

Either way, next to Millie Looa is easily the flattest character. It’s honestly impressive to call someone a main character when they aren’t even a character for half of the second season. Of course, it is possible that she’ll get some more screentime in season three since Stolas is now living with Blitzo so Blitzo’s home (where Loona lives) might get more screentime.

Via

When Octavia first appeared she had some promise as a character. S1E2 is essentially from her perspective, beginning with her childhood and showing the audience her relationship with Stolas along with her fears and hard cutting to the present day when her home life has crumbled so badly that she’s basically listening to music all the time just to cope with her parents screaming at one another.

The conversation she has with Stolas at the end of S1E2 is one of the most nuanced in the whole show, where Stolas actually listens to her feelings but doesn’t have the perfect words to make things better because it’s a complicated situation with no easy answers. This in turn prompts Via to open up and get some cathartic relief for what she’s actually worried about - that Stolas is going to run off and leave her for Blitzo.

From there the show can’t find much to do with Via - despite being Stolas’ daughter who he loves she tends to stop existing outside of episodes either explicitly about her. There’s no sense of what Stolas does to look after her on a day to day basis, or whether she’s learning to become his heir or integrate into noble society when she’s older. She basically stops existing except as a prop used to remind Stolas he has responsibilities to someone else every once in a while.

This emptiness in defining what she does and how Stolas interacts with her leads to the feeling that much like her father, she’s friendless and does nothing except listen to music around the house all day. Even after meeting Loona and seemingly connecting with her over having hot messes for fathers, there’s no sense of how their friendship is or isn’t progressing anywhere onscreen (which could have been another easy way to develop both Via and Loona since their different backgrounds would give them some great play off each other as friends).

Via is essentially just a prop who exists to make conflict around the divorce, then when the show decided it didn’t really care about that she stopped being even that. Her role for season 3 onwards will likely be the show trying to make the viewer feel bad for her estranging herself from Stolas, something which is completely understandable given the circumstances (but more on that later).

And that’s a shame because not only is Via the one of the few genuinely likeable characters in the show, she’s also voiced by Barret Wilbert Weed who is best known for the off Broadway adaptation of Heathers and yet she doesn’t even get a song of her own until very late in the show.

Barbie Wire

Barbie Wire is Blitzo’s sister - his twin in the pilot going by the ‘Amazing Imp Twins’ poster. After the death of his mother and presumably also his father, she’s also the only remaining blood relative that Blitzo has.

Barbie Wire is mentioned in S1E3 by Verosika, though it’s hard to say if they actually know each other or if Verosika is just being a jerk for the sake of it. Then she shows up in S2E5, again making the female characters share space as she appears in what was ostensibly supposed to be the first actual Millie episode, and is introduced as being yet another person who is angry at Blitzo.

The reason she is angry at Blitzo is the vaguest of everyone in Blitzo’s past, though it can be inferred it’s likely to do with the accident at the circus.

This is the entirety of the screentime she gets in the show’s two seasons.

There are two flashbacks to Blitzo’s childhood but despite Barbie being his sister, she appears in neither of them - Blitzo claims they were close in S2E12 but the viewer is never shown this. Worse still, she was supposed to be in the circus fire flashback according to the beatboards but was removed in the final cut.

Much like Blitzo’s mother, the show has little interest in Blitzo’s female family members - at least not compared to Fizzarolli, Stolas and both Stolas and Blitzo’s fathers who appear prominently in the flashbacks (while both of their mothers don’t).

Stella

The writing of Stella, even compared to the other female characters, is uniquely ghoulish and uniquely amateurish. Stella will get her own focus in the section about the handling of the depictions of abuse, but for this section I will focus solely on her wasted potential and the sheer lack of empathy demonstrated by the writers towards the setup they wrote for Stella.

Stella’s backstory on paper is this: she was put into an arranged marriage as a child to someone she didn’t want to marry, then expected to have a child with him that she didn’t want to have. She has no power and seemingly no wealth or assets of her own outside of the property owned by Stolas and her brother. She has no purpose or place in the world outside of being Stolas’ wife, who she may or may not have been more civil with at a point in time. Then Stolas not only cheats on her but does so with an imp, compromising the family’s reputation. She somehow discovers that the family grimoire, its most powerful artefact and her daughter’s inheritance, is being loaned out by her husband to the imp he cheated on her with. At some point she moves out of the house (Stolas telling the movers to break what worldly possessions she has when she sends for them because he wants to get one over on her) and begins a co-parenting arrangement to raise Via.

Simply put, Stella was just as much a victim of the arranged marriage as Stolas. And unlike Stolas, who at least has vast amounts of wealth and power, Stella has nothing outside of her marriage to him. She is completely dependent on her husband and then her brother for a place to stay because the nobility of Hell decided before she was even a teenager that her only worth was as an incubator for a precautionary heir.

To put it simply, Stella’s life is the horror story of the modern day tradwife turned up to eleven: told that her only worth is in having children from a very young age, forced into a situation where she’s miserable and has nothing to do outside of throwing parties (which the audience is presumably supposed to judge her as being vapid for wanting to socialize) and then her more powerful and richer husband cheats on her and tells her to her face that he isn’t sorry for it, because he’s decided the cheating never hurt her in the first place (and also is it really cheating when you think aout it?).

It’s honestly disgusting to see a storyline like this where the writers frame only Stolas as the victim in the arranged marriage, but if I can be brutally honest for a moment I don’t think anyone bothered to sit down and think through what the world would look like from Stella’s eyes - and how horrific her life frankly is - or the deeply unpleasant implications of her backstory, because just like characters like Blitzo’s and Moxxie’s mothers or even Via, Stella is not a character first and foremost. She had potential in season one when the writers were less afraid of making Stolas’ broken marriage seem like an actual drawback and consequence of his cheating that he should feel responsible for, but in season two she is the most blatant prop character of all the female characters: she is a one dimensional shrew whose sole purpose is to make the audience feel sorry for Stolas.

This is also true of the worldbuilding around her character, which is poor as per usual. We have no idea what family Stella came from, why she was picked to marry Stolas, if she has extended family beyond Andrealphus who should care quite a lot if her husband openly divorces her after cheating with an imp and leaves her with no option but to move back in with Andrealphus. Her attitude towards having to hire an imp to do her dirty work of killing Stolas is also left unexplored – she has no dynamic with Striker whatsoever, and doesn’t so much as have a conversation with him after S1E5 where it’s first revealed that he’s working for her.

Speaking of which, there’s this peculiar running ‘gag’ where her own brother keeps making incestuous remarks towards her that make her uncomfortable. Once again going by social media posts and likes from the creators, he does this to make people think he’s straight. This explanation makes little sense given the Goetia don’t seem homophobic – Stella is more concerned Stolas cheated with an imp than with a man, after all – and there’s nothing stopping Andrealphus hitting on someone who isn’t his sister, like most people would do. But I digress.

By the time Stolas lending out the book is exposed in S2E11 her relevance even as a villain has also been usurped by Andrealphus, her brother, resulting in a trial scene where Stolas finally faces punishment for breaking demon law - and Stella is not even present for it. Once again a female character was present on the beatboards but is unceremoniously cut.

She’s such a bit part that even as an evil harpy she doesn’t get to be present for the culmination of her own revenge storyline - when Via cuts Stolas off after an argument after Andrealphus tries to kill Stolas outright, she's similarly not present for that either.

In the first season of the show she had enough initiative to hire Striker to kill Stolas and was potentially the one to give him the perfect window of opportunity to act at the Harvest Moon festival. By the second she’s all but shoved to the side as Andrealphus takes charge and the writers never miss an opportunity to remind the audience that she’s dumb as a post and couldn’t possibly manage to do anything on her own.

The usual response to pointing out Stella was turned into a plot device in season two to enable sympathy for Stolas is fans insisting that Stella was always a villain from the moment the show began. There’s a couple of problems with this though. First, there is a difference between a character who is a classist jerk who has become estranged from her husband and is rightfully angry at being cheated on and a character who was just born evil and does nothing but insult Stolas or cackle 24/7 so anything awful that happens to her should be celebrated (including being cheated on).

In her first ever scene she rips Stolas a new one for his cheating, characterizing her as classist but also seemingly feeling some level of genuine betrayal. By S2E12, her character has degraded so much that the one scene she’s in has her repeat over and over how “hilaaaarious” it is that Stolas is trying to call Via.

Secondly, the first episode she appears in (discounting the pilot) did suggest that Stolas and Stella were at least civil at a point in time. Despite living in a massive palace they shared the same bed and Via explicitly mentions that when she was little her parents didn’t hate each other and as far as she remembers, the fights began as a result of the cheating and were not a regular feature of her childhood.

The other response is that there were context clues that Stella was always meant to be evil, because she doesn’t get up to help Via after the nightmare and is hogging the blankets. Neither of these are great signifiers of evil - most married couples argue over whose turn it is to get up to attend to a restless child or argue that the other partner hogs the covers. At worst Stella’s behavior here and Stolas’ subsequent sigh suggest this has become a regular occurrence with her, suggesting selfishness on her part. Which again is different than her being a verbally abusive nightmare from the minute she was born.

I want to pause for a moment and point out that I am not saying that Stella has to be a good person or even particularly likeable. What I am pointing out is that the scenario as written in season one had the potential to have more nuance to it. Both Stella and Stolas have suffered as a result of the arranged marriage and could have come to the realizaion that taking it out on each other is a waste of time - not only are they fundamentally incompatible, but their fighting hurts Via and neither of them are ultimately the problem. The issue is the system that forced them to get married in the first place and arranged marriages have presumably been inflicted on other Goetias given that Andrealphus specifically mentions that divorce is rare for their kind.

Or if they don’t come to any realization and just pointlessly mudsling at each other, that too could have been an interesting storyline about people who get trapped in cycles of pettily hurting one another just to prove a point while the thing they should be focusing on (caring for Via through a very tumultous time) goes neglected. There’s a bit of that in S2E2 when Stolas is sniping at Stella down the phone and forgets his promise to Via, but Stella is a footnote in that episode as well so it never really goes anywhere. We don’t even see Stolas, the one who is supposed to be the more morally virtuous party here, really internalize any lessons about not sinking to Stella’s level since the next time they see each other in S2E4 they’re both trading petty insults again.

The storyline went from the implication they were friendly and trying to make it work once upon a time to just a flat plane where Stella was always awful and the only change was that Stolas went from apologetic about the cheating to being awful right back, but it’s presented as positive that he does this. And that storyline is frankly a boring and unengaging one to sit through.

Summing up, by making Stella so boring and two dimensional, all her scenes are as well. There’s no point expecting anything from her but excessive smirking, cackling and tea drinking while she and Andrealphus plot together in the most over the top way possible like a couple of Saturday morning cartoon villains. For a show trying to present itself as saying something more deep and meaningful than that, its a waste and a misstep. Though that’s not the worst of the problems with Stella, but that’s a story for another section.

How mothers are written (or not)

Speaking of which, the mothers in the series rarely fare better. Of the main cast, only Millie’s mother, Lin, is a character in her own right - she’s given a name, speaking lines and has a relationship with Millie that is loving but not perfect (she doesn’t understand that ‘freelance’ work doesn’t mean working for free).

In other cases, they get the short end of the stick every time. In each flashback to the main character’s childhoods - Blitzo’s, Stolas’ and Moxxie’s, that is - their fathers are present while their mothers are largely absent, either completely missing or never given a speaking line.

The Goetia plotline increasingly steals time from IMP as the show goes on, but if the writers are determined to crowbar it in then it should’ve been fleshed out. Having Stolas’ mother present, however briefly, could have helped contextualize story elements in the present day - was her marriage to Paimon also arranged? Are arranged marriages common? Why was Stolas, who is demon royalty, raised with no friends to help him learn the social skills a royal should need if some of their duties include interfacing with the public (i.e. the Harvest Moon ritual)? And if she died when he was young, did he have any feelings about it at all? Was it a reason for staying with Stella so Via could have a mother despite all the obvious drawbacks of that decision?

The mothers who are present fare little better - they’re one dimensional, just perfect and loving women who exist to be tragically fridged in order to further the male leads’ pain. This happens with both Blitzo and Moxxie - trauma over the death of Blitzo’s mother in the circus fire appears to be a major source of his issues in the present day (he wears her pendant somewhere on his outfit in virtually everything he wears), but she appears onscreen only once and never speaks a line.

Blitzo’s father gets substantial air time in S2E1 and while that’s fine as a means of establishing what a tool his father is, if the series is going to lazily fridge his mother it would help to at least see her relationship with Blitzo before it happens but we are simply told and not shown that Blitzo wants to help his mother when his father guilt trips him. I should note that I keep saying ‘Blitzo’s mother’ because she’s never named in the show, even if she is in the wiki.

Speaking of names, another mother who goes unnamed is Moxxie’s. Just like Blitzo’s mother she appears only in flashbacks, doesn’t speak a single line and is seemingly the perfect parent to once again contrast the abusive father figure.

She is then unceremoniously fridged (it appears Crimson had killed her earlier, though some confusion in how the scene was blocked led some of the fandom to assume Crimson forced Moxxie to be the one to kill her) as a means of demonstrating how evil Crimson is, then never mentioned again. Her murder doesn’t even seem to motivate Moxxie to rebel against his father; he’s far more invested in refusing to betray Millie by marrying someone else.

This trend of perfect mothers going unnamed wouldn’t be as annoying as it is if it wasn’t for the fact that other characters who are less important than them do get names - when the fandom started shipping Crimson with one of his shark bodyguards, the creators made a point of giving him a name. And yet it isn’t considered important for either of the main leads’ mothers to be named despite the fact that their horrific deaths form part of their tragic backstories?

By S2E11 Blitzo is still wearing his mother’s memento but she still isn’t a character of her own. She’s just a plot device, the same as Moxxie’s mother.

Bonus: Glitz and Glam

This is a small section since I realized I’d forgotten all about Glitz and Glam.

Glitz and Glam are boring.

They’re just written to be two dimensional jerks, so anything bad that happens to them is funny. The viewer is presumably not supposed to think about the fact that they might become Fizz’s replacement for the entertainers Mammon is going to exploit and abuse.

Voice acting

The voice acting on the whole is strong, often proving a vehicle for actors primarily associated with comedy like Brandon Rogers to flex their chops on some more dramatic material.

I add this as a section principally to highlight the issues that can arise with sourcing celebrity voice talent.

The show has brought in a number of big names over the years, most recently Broadway star Patrick Page (perhaps ebst known for Hadestown) and John Waters.

However, this creates a problem. For characters designed to appear for only one episode, either because they’re in one specific setting or plot beat or will be killed off shortly, it doesn’t matter if their VA is a celebrity.

But several characters are written so that they would be a good choice to reappear in future. For instance seeing Stolas’ father Paimon return would have been an easy way of reinforcing the strict system of rules Goetia are supposed to live under if he had berated his son for his failing marriage or the rumors of his affair with an imp, then tried to force him to comply to his values of what royals are supposed to be.

But because he has a celebrity VA, bringing him back would mean either working to that celebrity’s schedule, which limits control over which episode he could reappear in unless planned very far in advance, or recasting the character entirely, which the audience will notice.

And when an arrangement can be made, it neccessitates that a minimum amount of changes can be done. All their lines likely need to be recorded in a single session in the studio, which means their part of the script can’t be adjusted if tweaks are needed (and if the cost of getting them in the studio is a lot higher than it might be for other VAs, that incentivizes keeping it as nailed down as possible.)

This issue was most obvious in the character of Striker, who in his first appearance was voiced by Norman Reedus. Since he was part of a lingering plot thread involving the potential assassination of the (at the time) B plot character who represented the protagonists’ main means of getting to the human realm and he was built up to be a rival to IMP and Blitzo in particular, the show kind of had to bring him back.

But they had a problem. Norman Reedus was likely too busy to commit to the number of lines needed, so they recast the part to Ed Bosco (who was the voice of Alastor in the pilot of Hazbin Hotel, though he was unfortunately recast in the series proper). I like Ed as a VA and he clearly has range, but his voice is too different than Reedus’ to not notice the difference. Often a striking voice can go a long way in helping define a character, so it’s definitely unfortunate when this happens.

To the show’s credit they appear to have generally learnt how to handle their casting better - as mentioned before, both John Waters and Patrick Page appear in this season, but their characters are one-offs: Rolando is killed off in the same episode he’s introduced and Satan is used for a court scene alongside the other Deadly Sins and given he’s the (acting) head of Hell he’s not likely to need to reappear often in future, if at all.

Abuse

Beginning with the second season, the show changes from just being a world populated by assholes to being a world populated by abusers. However, the show’s depiction of abuse is incredibly amateurish and cartoonish. I want to pause to acknowledge that I’m not here to tell anyone who saw themselves in these stories or found them cathartic that they’re wrong for feeling that way; I just want to point out that I think you deserve better than Helluva Boss.

I also don’t want to avoid this topic because I believe depictions of abuse are important, and when it’s done poorly shows can contribute to misconceptions about abuse that don’t help anyone in navigating situations like this in real life.

Helluva Boss is one of the most amateurish, embarassing depictions of abuse that I’ve ever seen.

Fathers

One of the most frequent repeated plot points is the appearance of abusive fathers. All three of the main characters the show actually cares about - Blitzo, Stolas and Moxxie - have abusive fathers.

And because the show doesn’t understand an abuser as anything other than ‘two dimensional monster with no interiority’, both Blitzo’s father Cash and Moxxie’s father Crimson act in inconsistent ways.

Appropriately enough for his name, Cash is generally obsessed by money. When Stolas’ father Paimon wants to buy his son a playmate for the day (more on this later), Cash immediately implies buying Fizzarolli for a playmate will be expensive. However, as soon as Paimon says he wants Blitzo instead, Cash abandons his money hungry nature and accepts a comically low price for Blitzo.

He does this because the only consistent motivation he has is to do whatever will hurt Blitzo the most so the viewer can feel sorry for him. Right after this happens he snaps back to being money hungry, nonsensically telling Blitzo to steal from the Goetias - literal royalty who could have them killed - when he could have just charged a higher price for Blitzo in the first place.

Crimson behaves in a similar manner. The mafia family Moxxie is from is apparently struggling financially, so he wants Moxxie to marry someone rich so they can have the resources once they’re married in to the family.

The problem is that Crimson chooses Chaz, who previously betrayed Moxxie and got him landed in prison. There’s little reason for Crimson to trust Chaz. Worse still, Chaz’s claim to be rich is pretty suspect on its face - we don’t see him give any evidence of the money he supposedly has and he doesn’t exactly dress like he’s flush with cash. It reads as though the only thing he did to convince Crimson he had money was to rent a suit.

Given that Crimson isn’t particularly characterized as being gullible or dumb (at least not as heavy-handedly as they do with Stella), it once again gives the impression that his motivation - much like Cash - is whatever will upset one of the main characters the most.

To make matters worse, the episode is tonally all over the place - a scene of Moxxie being intimidated and physically struck by Crimson has to share space with a joke about Crimson having dildos come out of the walls because he assumes this will make Moxxie more amenable to his whole marrying Chaz idea.

Speaking of which - Crimson is written to be both homophobic and biphobic. He doesn’t like that Moxxie likes men but can’t wrap his head around the idea that Moxxie is genuinely in love with Millie, because he doesn’t understand bisexuality.

Once again the viewer is given the impression that this is only the case to make Moxxie upset and give a quick tell to the viewer that Crimson is a bad guy. But the worldbuilding around Hell is so poor that it’s impossible to tell where he would have gotten this homophobic attitude from - it doesn’t appear to be a common attitude throughout the rest of Hell, there’s no reason for demons literally born in Hell to subscribe to the Christian fundamentalist idea that marriage or sex is acceptable only between a man and a woman and there’s also apparently no law in Hell that people can only share wealth and property in a female/male marriage since Crimson is having Moxxie marry Chaz for specifically that reason. Hazbin Hotel also has homophobes but they’ve most prominently been in the form of sinners i.e. people from Earth who could have been raised in an environment where homophobic attitudes are common, but Crimson is a Hellborn living in a ring of Hell where there aren’t any sinners residing.

Simply put, Crimson has this attitude for only one reason - to make Moxxie upset and to communicate in shorthand that he’s the bad guy; giving him a perspective the audience will naturally disagree with and dislike but not giving him any reason to have that attitude in the first place.

Crimson is also an example of another strange writing choice the show makes often: refusing to kill its abusive characters. At the end of S2E3 Millie has discovered her husband’s father intended to marry him off to their mutual ex and he attempted to kill her using his hired goons to get the job done. Millie makes sushi out of all of them, but even though they are the originators of the problem she doesn’t kill either Chaz or Crimson. She doesn’t even appear to consider it, simply taking Moxxie and leaving Crimson alive to cause problems for them another day. If she was happy to kill dozens and dozens of his goons, why leave the ringleader alive? It’s possible she thought Moxxie would be upset if she did so, but it isn’t a conversation they even have.

In terms of character consistency, Paimon is the best of a bad bunch - his motivation boils down to introducing Stolas to the arranged marriage then trying to distract him from it with a trip to the circus Stolas clearly has no interest in (at least until Blitzo shows up). His lines lean more comedic in tone and the only time he lays a hand on Stolas is to tell him not to bow to Blitzo (put a pin in it, we’ll get back to that). After that he basically vanishes from the episode and from the show.

All of the worldbuilding around how the Goetia nobility structure actually works is also left vague - Paimon implies there are a lot of Goetian children, which would suggest Stolas has siblings, yet no explanation is given as to why Stolas is apparently being raised mostly by an imp butler all by himself in a massive palace.

This is a massively wasted opportunity - Stolas later sings about how he felt like Blitzo made him see he could choose a life for himself, but there’s so little time spent on how Stolas’ life was dictated for him: he’s told he will marry Stella as a child and harshly corrected by his father only once (when he shows respect to Blitzo), but the rest of his youth where he was groomed to be a prince and marry Stella is largely glanced over as the show skips to him being the age he is in present day.

Paimon being such a small presence is a curious choice given that he could have been used to represent the repressive environment Stolas was raised in, but instead he’s only fractionally more interesting than Stella in the way he’s used (as much as I enjoy the voice actor’s performance).

Male characters who aren’t fathers

I put this heading in because I realized I’d forgotten all about Mammon. He’s an improvement over Cash and Crimson in that he behaves more or less consistently and has a motivation for what he’s doing (a business he wants to make money for as the Sin of Greed), though he’s no more subtle than they are.

His design is at least a little different than the others in the show and his voice performance is fun, but I have pretty little to say about him to be honest.

Stella (again)

When the topic of abusive relationships and its hamfisted handling of them usually comes up in the context of Helluva Boss, people tend to be talking about Stella.

I want to lay some additional groundwork here before I get started.

First, there’s a kneejerk tendency to insist anyone criticizing the way she’s written is solely because people don’t like that an abusive character is female. This is not the issue I have with how Stella is written, so to draw a point of comparison I will be looking at other female abusive characters. The second defense is usually that she was always written to be bad, but rather than rehashing everything said above I will simply reiterate that there is a difference between a classist jerk Stolas grew alienated from and the fundamentally evil monster Stella was written to be in season two.

The usual critique drawn is that Stella’s worst traits are exaggerated massively in S2E1 for one reason only: to effectively let Stolas off the hook for his cheating. This was very likely the intent - Stolas not only says he doesn’t consider it cheating and isn’t sorry in later episodes, two claims which go uncontested, but his attitude to the cheating is a complete about face from season one where he was alternatively apologetic in S1E2 and ashamed of what he’d done in S1E7. Put another way, Stolas begins as a deconstruction of the sympathetic adulterer by focusing on the damage his cheating does to his family and especially his daughter, but by season two the viewer is encouraged to think that not only was the cheating understandable but it morally wasn’t that bad because how Stella behaves is far worse.

The appearance of a minor character at the end of season two who is also angry at her husband for cheating on her with a man makes the show’s implicit thesis pretty explicit: cheating isn’t a big deal and it’s definitely not a big deal when the victim is a woman who is a 2D jerk. The show never stops to consider how grim it is to treat mothers as once again disposable – the children of the Earth family aren’t missing their dead mother particularly much, they’re just picture perfect happy; the exact same as Via presumably will one day be without Stella around.

The experience of S2E1 is essentially just a parade of how Stella is the most awful character in the show. Every single line she says is either an insult or a threat directed at Stolas, and that’s it. She stops being a character and just becomes a flat abuse dispensing machine.

The previous problem of a lack of interiority and consistency that the other male abusers like Crimson and Cash have is dialled all the way up with Stella, to the extent that nothing she does in the episode makes any kind of sense.

Let’s deal with the lack of interiority first. The uncomfortable truth is that abusers are human beings who find ways to rationalize what they do to others as either not being wrong or not being their responsibility - the stereotypical phrase ‘look what you made me do’ is a stereotype for a reason because it neatly demonstrates the way a lot of abusers think: they are never to blame for the hurt they cause because they’re doing it for what they believe are rational reasons.

To their victim or to the outside world, what they’re doing can often seem inexplicable or even random - anyone who has been on the receiving end of someone turning from friendly to frosty over the smallest of perceived slights can attest to how confusing this can be to deal with, usually resulting in the victim ending up in a state of hyperviligance where they begin to police their own behavior to avoid punishment.

All this is to say that while nothing abusers do is right or fair, it is at least motivated and consistent. There should be a reason for an abusive character to behave like they do - the reason doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but them, but they should have one.

Helluva Boss gives some of its male abusers a barebones motivation and has them act inconsistently if it will make the main characters more upset, but Stella doesn’t have even the shadow of a consistent motivation for behaving the way she does.

Any attempt to assign a motivation to her based on her actions quickly falls apart when examining S2E1 in any detail.

Is she angry because Stolas cheated with an imp in particular and her classism leads her to hate the damage that does to the family reputation? That doesn’t make sense, considering she throws ‘Still Not Divorced’ parties and announces them in the literal newspaper - if she’s happy to basically announce to all of Hell that her marriage is failing then why would she care what damage Stolas does to their name by sleeping with Blitzo?

Is she angry because she genuinely loved Stolas and was hurt by his cheating? That’s a definite no; she never expresses any affection for him at any time and he says outright she never cared for him at all.

Is it about the money and prestige she’ll lose if they divorce? It doesn’t seem so, since S2E4 establishes she’s so dumb it never even occurred to her that she would lose out of the inheritance if Stolas died since everything would pass to Via.

Is she angry at being used as an incubator and being forced to marry Stolas? If she is she mentions it precious little - just one stray comment in S2E1 about how ‘it’s not picnic being married to a boring stiff like Stolas’ and that’s it.

The simple truth is that Stella has no motivation beyond being abusive and later dumber than a pile of rocks. The tell here is the photograph Paimon shows Stolas of her as a child where she’s strangling a dog - as far as the story is concerned she was born evil, and this is why the audience should view the arranged marriage as a wrong that was done to Stolas only: because Stella is not a deeply flawed and awful person with motivations or a perspective the audience can understand, she’s just a grenade with a British accent tossed into Stolas’ life.

Stella is simply written so that she is angry all the time and losing her freedom by marrying Stolas and being forced to have a child to her matters only insofar as it gave her a target for her purposeless ire. This is why she will do contradictory things like say she hates being around Stolas and then hang around the house after the separation begins to verbally abuse him whenever she gets the chance.

The line that communicates this best is the worst of the whole episode: Stella saying ‘I like tormenting you!’ Because that’s all she exists to do; just be mean to Stolas and enjoy it so the audience can all get on the same page that Stolas is the only victim here regardless of his infidelity.

Tangent: Mother Gothel

For a point of comparison let’s consider another female abusive mother: Mother Gothel from Tangled. Mother Gothel’s motivation is pretty simple - she’s vain and wants to use the magic flower to remain young (and maybe also stay alive forever?). Everything she does flows from that motivation - she goes so far as to kidnap Rapunzel and raise her as her own, trapping her in the tower to use her power indefinitely.

We also see other, more subtle abusive traits come into play due to this motivation. Gothel needs Rapunzel to be afraid of the outside world and stay in the tower, so she lies to her about what the outside world is like. She undermines her confidence with a steady stream of innocuous insults disguised as motherly advice. She even threatens Rapunzel not to ask to leave again.

Gothel also demonstrates a trait common to abusers: dehuamnization. To her Rapunzel is less an autonomous person and more the golden flower now in inconvenient human form. The two of them are getting on most smoothly when Rapunzel is going along with her wishes and not pushing at the boundaries Gothel wants to imprison her in forever. She doesn’t really care for Rapunzel, she approaches her as a series of inputs where she just needs to choose the right option to elicit the response she wants. Even seemingly kind gestures like agreeing to get Rapunzel new paint even though it’s a long trip aren’t really about making Rapunzel happy, they’re compromises to keep her from going outside or finding out what the floating lights really are.

And crucially, she isn’t mean 100% of the time. Sometimes she’s flamboyant and fun and she does things to make Rapunzel believe she loves her, like bringing her birthday presents in the past and telling her how she’s trying to protect her. The viewer understands why she does what she does through the whole movie, as well as why Rapunzel has mixed feelings when she feels she’s betraying Gothel by leaving the tower. Most effective and scary of all, sometimes the viewer themselves might question whether Gothel actually loves Rapunzel.

Worldbuilding and the Goetia family dynamic

The world surrounding Stella’s antagonism makes just as little sense. Stolas is a Goetic prince, not well liked by imps in season one episodes like Harvest Moon but given deference and respect due to being royalty. Stella, meanwhile, is just his wife with no power or wealth of her own. And yet she can get away with insulting Stolas openly in front of everyone, with multiple nobles happy to attend a party that is fundamentally devoted to mocking him. And again, the worldbuilding is so poor around how the noble classes function that there’s no explanation for how Stella gets away with this and why everyone implicitly sides with her. How Stolas’ place among the Goetia is affected by Stella is equally never explained - why is it no one is afraid of making the royal who can turn other demons into stone with just a look angry?

Switching gears to focus on Stolas and Via’s end of the equation reveals the same lack of planning felt everywhere else in the story.

On Via’s end, the sheer cartoonish levels of evil Stella reaches in S2E1 creates a level of dissonance in understanding what the situation in the Goetia household even is. Via's dialogue in S1E2 suggests her parents got along once, at least well enough that they weren’t screaming at one another and would take her to Loo Loo Land together. But the decision to make Stella an out and out monster makes this situation impossible to understand.

There’s no way to make sense of Via’s belief in season one that her parents didn’t hate each other once when looking at how Stella is written in season two. Stella is so openly verbally abusive and so comically over the top that it is impossible to believe Via would have failed to notice how she treated Stolas all this time. It’s especially impossible to believe given that Stella throws a Still Not Divorced party (and is implied to have done this before) in Via’s own home and Via somehow didn’t notice this, even though Stella announced it in the newspaper and social media exists in Hell, so it strains belief to assume she managed not to notice at all. The notion that her parents put on an act just in front of her falls apart when looking at episodes like S2E1, because Stella is doing nothing to hide her hatred of Stolas at all.

The show also very noticeably sidesteps having Via and Stella speak to one another. This is possibly because the writers put themselves in a double bind by choosing to take the route they did with Stella: if Stella is cruel to Via this raises more questions how Via could have not known what her parents’ marriage was really like. If she isn’t, that might give people the idea she’s at least a good mother and not one hundred percent evil. So to avoid that question they have the two of them speak as little as possible, serving as yet another example of two female characters’ bond to one another going underdeveloped and unexplored.

This leads into another question: Stolas’ reason for remaining in the marriage. In season one there was just enough there to think they might have gotten along once even if they never loved one another, but season two flushes that down the toilet once it’s established Stella was a piece of work ever since she was a child. The pressures from the Goetia family could account for some of it, but we never see anyone care about the divorce except Andrealphus and Stella: there are no wider consequences to Stolas going through with it, so that can’t be it.

So what is the reason? In S2E1, Stolas claims that he tolerated Stella’s insults so that Via could have a normal life. But it doesn’t make a great deal of sense for him to believe this, since the lack of worldbuilding around normative values in Hell give no reason to think that Stolas would believe Via being part of a nuclear family is so important or better for her than him being a single parent - Stolas has legions and imp servants to raise Via if he couldn’t manage by himself. And again, Stella is so cartoonishly awful it’s hard to buy that anyone would think she’d be a good parent: we see so little of her relationship with Via (and Via behaves like she obviously prefers Stolas and barely cares about Stella every episode she’s in) that there’s little reason to think ending the marriage early would have cost Via anything. But Stolas' need to play house despite it serving no one in the family is never relly questioned.

In choosing to change Stella from a little cold and callous to an abusive monster, the writers have trapped themselves in a corner. They need Stella to be awful to make Stolas sympathetic, but they can’t have her be too openly awful to Via because it would raise questions of why Stolas would keep his child in an abusive household for 17 years when he has no good reason to otherwise - he isn’t economically dependent on Stella to raise Via as he is the prince with all the power and wealth already. But if the writers lean too hard into making it clear Stella can behave herself enough to give Via a happy home life then that would give her a redeeming feature, which the writers categorically do not want to do since Stella needs to be bad and Stolas needs to be good.

So instead she has to be written as unnaturally as possible even when it hurts the story by keeping whatever Via and Stella’s actual relationship to each other is nearly entirely offscreen. Just like the questions around what it is Via does most days when she isn’t being forgotten by the show for several episodes at a time, we have no idea what would pass for a typical interaction between her and Stella. The end impression of all this is that there is no understandable dynamic in the Goetia household – the abuse needs to exist enough to make Stolas look like a saint for putting up with Stella for Via’s sake, but not be focused on too much lest the audience ask why Stolas is keeping his daughter around an obviously cruel and dangerous person.

Another issue outside of everyone’s perspectives in the situation not standing up to the slightest bit of scrutiny is a tone problem.

In S2E1 Stella goes to slap Stolas and it is played very dramatically - it is unambiguously an example of domestic violence and given how Stella is written in that episode to be just Stolas’ tormentor, it’s unlikely it’s the first time she’s done this as far as her season two self goes.

But here’s the problem: Stella had already escalated far past physical abuse all the way to trying to get Stolas killed. It happened way back in the middle of season one.

And here’s the other, much bigger problem: Stella trying to kill Stolas back in season one was played as a joke.

At the end of S1E5, the viewer discovers the person who hired Striker is Stella, because she’s yelling about how much she wants him dead at the dinner table… while he’s sitting across from her, ignoring every single word she says. There’s a very obvious setup and punchline here - and the writers are treating what Stella is doing as a joke.

And personally I think you can’t have a storyline where one character slapping another is played for drama and the viewers are supposed to take it seriously when you already played the idea of that same character murdering the other as a dark comedy joke.

I want to be clear again that plenty of shows that lean darkly comedic have jokes about the characters killing one another. But those shows by and large maintain that darkly comedic tone. They don’t attempt to reverse gears in the second season and insist that no, they’re taking domestic violence seriously actually and expect the audience to forget they previously didn’t do that.

The denouement of S1E5 is a dark comedy joke as written for a show that doesn’t take domestic violence - or the idea of Stella as an abuser - particularly seriously, possibly because it’s Hell and we’re supposed to assume this sort of thing is more commonplace.

The ending of S2E1 is trying to present itself as a serious depiction of domestic violence, using the exact same characters it did before and instead stating that no, this violence isn’t normalized in the setting but is a huge red flag.

It’s honestly hard to sum all this up because the show is so back and forth that just trying to explain it is an exercise in getting tied in knots, so there’s no easy conclusion to this section either. But before turning to talk about how all this does nothing to further the audience’s understanding of abuse, I’ll sum up simply with this: the sheer snarl of problems around how the Goetia family are written have the same causes that many of the other writing issues do. There was a lack of planning of which way to go, then when a new direction was picked the fact that it didn’t gel well with the previous story beats was not only ignored, but the new story was so exaggerated that the inconsistencies were impossible to ignore.

There is after all a reason why so many fans dropped off the show starting with season two.

The other reason for the dropoff is obvious: the change was done to favor Stolas and damn the consequences.

However, Stella isn’t the only abusive female character in the show we should talk about.

Loona

Let’s get this out of the way up front: Loona is not Stella. She’s often abrasive and mean but she usually doesn’t do much more than be a grouchy teen who wants her own space.

Her most unpleasant trait before season two was shaming Moxxie for being fat. This isn’t unique to Helluva Boss: other cartoons have had jokes where the characters shame one target in particular (usually a girl) for being fat or unattractive, often when they aren’t even animated to be any heavier or noticeably less attractive than the rest of the cast (looking at you, Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated and Family Guy) because the writers didn’t actually want to put plus-sized characters in the show.

Personally I found this joke dated and unpleasant the moment it showed up, but the writers insist on bringing it back in multiple episodes and even imply Moxxie began dieting and has developed neuroses about his weight because of Loona’s continual bullying of him over it.

Tangents about weight jokes aside, Loona’s unpleasantness is generally snarky or cruel comments to her teammates. Outside of the weight joke, even this was toned down from the pilot. In season one she never did much physically besides pushing Blitzo away whenever he got too clingy, which was understandable.

S2E2 opens with her beating the living daylights out of Blitzo and once again, it’s back to violence being played for laughs. To be clear, this isn’t her just yelling or getting annoyed with Blitzo for asking her to do better as a receptionist - she physically dives on him then beats his head in with a picture frame, then grabs him by the collar and threatens him. Blitzo is openly afraid of her during this whole sequence, trying anxiously to placate her, cowering from her by hiding behind the couch and even being visibly bruised with a black eye (usually the stereotypical injury used to communicate domestic violence).

For reference, this happens one episode after Stella trying to slap Stolas is played as dead straight domestic violence. To say it’s tonal whiplash is an understatement - it’s probably the most blatant example of this happening after Hazbin Hotel had an episode entirely dedicated to the destructive effects of continuous sexual assault on Angel Dust only to near immediately follow it with an episode where there is a joke about another character being dragged off to be gang raped.

The writers clearly don’t intend Loona to be an abusive character - not intentionally, given they clearly don't expect the audience to judge that much for her brutally beating her adoptive father at the top of the episode. This is made clear by the way the rest of the episode doesn’t even mention it - instead the episode expects the viewer to judge solely Blitzo for making the poor call of saying “maybe I might” when Loona snaps “why don’t you replace me?” and not Loona for being terrible at her job and beating him up for pointing this out.

This is something of a repeating pattern across the show - the writers decide which characters should be viewed as bad or good, abusive or not, and reinforce this through the way events are framed or by liking tweets favoring their intended narrative. Anyone who points out how weird and dissonant it feels that an episode about female on male domestic abuse is directly followed by more female on male violence, or that other characters behave in abusive ways but this goes ignored or even exonerated, is often summarily shut down by the fanbase.

The assumption is often that if one example can be explained away as just a tone issue or just slapstick then it’s fine, but the sheer number of examples of the show picking and choosing what counts as abuse and what doesn’t can leave viewers feeling bemused and often frustrated that not only is the tone inconsistent, but as mentioned before since there are no normative values in Hell it’s hard to tell when something is a major red flag and when something is a joke.

This issue is exacerbated when the writers are not on the same page in maintaining a consistent tone - two examples of this ‘it’s not abuse if a good character does it’ occurs in S2E2 alone, which is helmed by a newer writer and is noticeably nastier in tone than some of the other episodes.

There is one other character who should be discussed with regards to abuse, but they’re enough of an issue in both character development and the depictions of abuse that they’ll be getting their own section.

So let’s wrap this up with a coda about why all this matters.

Why this matters

I said earlier that abusers need to have interiority and reasons that are rational to them for why they behave the way they do. They may have a large ego and see themselves as above others; thus becoming indignant whenever someone questions them or expects them to be responsible for their effect on others. They may also dehumanize others, seeing them less as people with their own feelings and wants and more as objects who they expect to play a specific role in order to please them: the abusive parent sees the child as an extension of them so expects them to achieve and pursue careers that will valorize the parent, the abusive partner sees their partner as a machine to service their needs domestically and sexually, etc.

They can and do behave monstrously, but we gain nothing as a society by pathologizing them as irrational, incomprehensible monsters because then we make it easier to miss abusers who hide in plain sight because we want to believe that they are obvious and easy to spot. Simply looking at statistics reveals a lot of people will encounter abuse in their lifetimes, whether by the hands of a romantic partner or a parent, so it is important that abuse is represented sensitively onscreen.

It is also something to note that the show has not put a lot of thought into representing the long term effects of abuse on its victims, either. The trepidation you’d expect Stolas to have whenever he talks to Stella is simply absent - the show plays it like she has been insulting and maybe even physically hurting him for years, yet there’s little consistency in how he reacts to her.

Viewers at the time pointed out that Stolas pinballs straight from defiance (’that was the sound of a fucking divorce!’) to apologetic attempts at appeasement (’it was unexpected! I didn’t have time to go to a hotel!’) in the course of what is supposed to be a single morning due to the retconning The Circus applies to the timeline. It’s impossible to get a read on Stolas’ feelings towards Stella due to inconsistencies like this and even his learning that she’s trying to kill him results in an attitude of dull surprise from Stolas - we don’t see him be shaken by it when Striker’s back is turned and there’s never a moment when he sits down to really parse this: was it a shock to him? Why doesn’t he seem in fear of his life in future episodes? Why is Via still in this co-parenting arrangement now he knows for sure what she’s capable of?

It has been pointed out by We Are Not Alive, whose video I’m going to quote below, that the show either hadn’t planned Moxxie’s backstory out in season one or didn’t bother thinking about the lingering effects knowing his father murdered his mother would have on him. As they discuss in their videos on Helluva Boss, the musical sequence in S1E6 is about the character’s unresolved issues and deep fears. Blitzo gets a whole parade of people showing up to make him confront everything he’s tried to bury since starting over, but Moxxie’s segment is just about his complicated relationship with Blitzo and nothing else: no mention of his traumatic childhood or abusive homophobic dad even features.

The closest the show gets to actually discussing the long term effects of abuse is more in its subtext - we see Blitzo was made to feel worthless by his father Cash and then was traumatized by the circus fire, and that Stolas was raised alone and without friends. Their respective driving needs in present day map onto this quite neatly - Blitzo feels unworthy of love even though he desperately wants it and is willing to sell himself short to get what he needs to survive like his father taught him to do, meanwhile Stolas just desperately wants to feel loved and projects that need onto the first fitting vehicle he can find. The way this is handled later becomes downright frustrating to watch, but the setup was there to do something promising with it.

Returning to the channel We Are Not Alive - called The Diregentlemen at the time they were discussing Helluva Boss - one of their videos makes a statement about abuse so incisive I’ve decided to let it stand as the conclusion to this section (I’ve removed some of the non-fluency features from the transcript, broken up the sentences for readability and indicated where I’ve omitted parts for brevity). The full discussion is findable under the title “Why Did Helluva Boss Fall Off So Hard?” at time of writing for anyone interested:

“A character being well developed and complex and sympathetic isn't the same thing. All characters should have an interesting interior life believable and consistent motivations, and even if that character is a complete piece of shit, they should have that because it makes them more interesting. Not, I repeat not, because it will make them more likable or sympathetic or because abusers need to be likeable and sympathetic – they don't.

But I don't think it helps abuse survivors or people who are currently undergoing abuse to make it out that all abusers in life are these like cartoonish, on all the time monsters […] If we teach people through fiction that in real life abusers are snarling obvious monsters who are like that all the time around everyone, a lot more real abusers are gonna get away with it because they know how to smile and turn it off when other people are watching.

[…]

What needs to be done is that there needs to be more accuracy in a way that if you're going to talk about abuse, sorry but you need to have characters that actually act like real life abusers in the sense that they use abuser tactics. Guilt-tripping, they manipulate, they gaslight. None of the things that Stella does. All she does is throw objects and openly verbally abuse Stolas to people who are all okay with it and always take her side implicitly every single time. That gives the sense that… abusers are just like tacitly endorsed by the entire world and that even if you spoke up about them that it would they would just get away with it, because the world is just abusers, it's all abusers all the way down.”

Consent

This is probably a good time to take a tangent about how the topic of consent is handled in the show.

It isn’t.

By ‘it isn’t’, I mean the show is completely inconsistent about how it handles issues around sex and sexual assault.

In the early show the tone was more towards dark comedy. In S1E3 Moxxie is sexually assaulted by Verosika’s gang of succubuses, which is played more for laughs when Moxxie escapes and comments he needs to go lie down, not as anything that causes lasting trauma (and Blitzo pulls an over the top reaction face a second later, treating his confrontation with Verosika like her and her group have done something more on the level of just insulting Moxxie rather than assaulting him).

This trend is also present in the way the early show handled the Blitzo/Stolas subplot. The way Stolas speaks on the phone to Blitzo clearly makes him uncomfortable, but it’s played primarily for laughs - such as when Moxxie runs past the abandoned phone in S1E1 while Stolas is still ranting his X-rated fantasies down it.

S1E2 continues this trend, having Stolas do textbook sexual harassment of Blitzo the entire way around the park. These occurrences aren’t particularly structured as typical jokes with a setup and payoff; if anything it’s just a continuation of Stolas’ characterization as a sex obsessed royal who won’t stop pestering Blitzo.

All of this might suggest that while these jokes are not for everyone, the tone is at least consistent - or at least it was in season one.

However, this changes in season two. The example in S1E2 becomes especially frustrating when Stolas tells Blitzo he’s uncomfortable with Blitzo speaking sexually to him in S2E9 after their transactional arrangement ended. To be clear, the issue is not that Stolas protests - he has every right to - or that he’s being blatantly hypocritical, but that the show only frames his protests with any dramatic weight - when Stolas ignored Blitzo repeatedly trying to set boundaries in S1E2 and harassed him, it was just a background detail in an episode otherwise concerned with giving Stolas sympathetic qualities outside of him just as a sex-obsessed royal.

What makes this even stranger is that the episode contradicts itself towards the end. At Verosika’s party in S2E9 Stolas gets so drunk he can barely stand up and is slurring all his words. Even while having a conversation with Blitzo he’s laying on the couch and abruptly breaking into tears, then saying things that don’t make logical sense (telling Blitzo to go home from somewhere that isn’t even his house, for example). Blitzo even comments it’s the most inebriated he’s ever seen Stolas in the show - he’s far more drunk than when he gets tipsy in S2E1 given that Stolas then could still hold himself up, string a sentence together and think logically.

But when a succubus asks Stolas to dance, then starts making out with him no one shows any concern for the fact that Stolas is probably still too drunk to properly consent. Blitzo reacts with jealousy and Verosika outright tells him that the correct response to this situation is to root for Stolas to get laid.

To sum up, I’m not interested in telling anyone whether they should find jokes about dark topics like SA or rape funny or not. I point this out because it’s odd for a show that becomes so preoccupied with looking like it’s saying something important about abuse not only having nothing to say about consent but actively picking and choosing when the viewer should be concerned about the issue and when the show has decided it’s funny or just part of a running gag that gets completely swept under the rug later.

This isn’t unique to Helluva - Hazbin Hotel has an infamous example of exactly this kind of whiplash - but it is frustrating to see.

If there’s any rule of thumb surrounding how consent works in Helluva, the only one I can glean is ‘it matters when the show explicitly tells you it matters’.

Classism

The other overarching and heavy theme in Helluva Boss besides abuse is classism. It's also one of the few consistent and naturalistically communicated elements of the worldbuilding.

It’s in dialogue, such as Striker complimenting Blitzo on running a business on his own because most imps don’t do that, to Stolas implying that imps are primarily responsible for being the bread basket whose farms in Wrath feed the rest of Hell and then to demons like Stella and even other imps reacting with derision at the concept of a Goetia prince sleeping with an imp in particular. We see in Millie constantly calling Loona ‘Hellhound’ rather than by name that Hellhounds are considered even lower than imps, a concept driven home by the way they’re kept in pounds like pets in S2E2.

It’s also in a lot of the background details: whenever we see imps outside of the Wrath ring they are consistently doing menial labor jobs. They are servants to the Goetia family, they pour for them at the Richest Cup, they are acthey are janitors and generally written to be a working class servant race.

This is an element that was actually present since the pilot but toned down in the final draft - in the recording of the pilot video released recently, an unused line has Blitzo comment on how assassination is a competitive business and imps don’t usually get to run their own jobs because they get stuck doing menial labor. This was cut down in the final version, but I bring it up because it’s clear the class struggle for imps was a planned element from the beginning.

The class struggle also informs Blitzo’s character arc. He consistently has a chip on his shoulder along with a need to prove himself, commenting multiple times that royal demons look down on imps and remarking in the trial in S2E11 that he just wanted to rise above the place he’d been forced into due to being born an imp.

It was also, in the first season at least, instrumental to the arrangement between Blitzo and Stolas. Blitzo taking the risk to steal Stolas’ book for his business leads to Stolas not recovering the book or even punishing Blitzo, but instead using the book to force Blitzo into an agreement to sleep with him every month. On a personal level Blitzo stealing the book is a cruel thing to do, the worst thing he actually does to Stolas. On a class level it’s an attempt to get access to resources that the rich and powerful simply have handed to them by virtue of their birthright, the result of which is the rich individual in question taking the opportunity to literally fuck over the thief instead of doing anything to help them or address the inequality that imps face every day that would motivate someone to take a risk like that.

This was what made Striker such an effective and interesting antagonist. He was simultaneously the strongest voice criticizing what the royals of Hell do to imps because of the power they’re handed at birth, but in his introductory episode at least he was also given nuance - he demonstrates internalized racism against other imps by deriding Moxxie for not being as physically strong as him and his pitch to Blitzo isn’t just about getting out from under Stolas’ thumb, he chooses Blitzo in specific to propose this deal to because he tied Striker in the Pain Games, thus being the only other person who could keep up with him and who he viewed as worthy.

A show that was actually interested in demonstrating the deep issues that a class system like this creates would use this as an opportunity to demonstrate that even those who recognize the system for what it is still pick up unhealthy attitudes and beliefs from having to live in it. What the underclasses need is solidarity with each other so they can collectively overthrow the power of the Deadly Sins and the royal line of the Ars Goetia, but Striker falls into the trap of not only individualistic but toxic thinking. If the show had bothered to do anything with him outside of making him an increasingly impotent enemy for IMP, he could have been a demonstration of how his approach would get him nothing but the satisfaction of the murder of a few Overlords before he’d probably get himself killed and nothing would change.

However, as soon as the second season starts the show becomes noticeably uncomfortable with ever allowing anyone to criticize the royal characters too much, because the writers simply want to divide their cast into Good Royals and Bad Royals.

The society as written in Helluva is one in which all of the Deadly Sins are part of the system that represses the lower classes. If the story wants to be more sophisticated than just framing every issue according to which characters are the good guys and which are the bad guys, then it needs to actually acknowledge the culpability the royal characters have.

However, there is a noticeable resistance to ever doing this. Characters the creators have decided are good - Stolas, Ozzie, Bee - have their place in this system ignored or excused, leading to the script feeling both unnatural and flat.

Meanwhile characters who question them - principally Striker - have to be undermined at all costs. It wasn’t enough to rewrite Striker from a competent threat who was suave and had a point to someone who makes stupid calls and now has a hygiene problem, the characters now universally treat his perspective like it doesn’t matter because it’s obviously wrong.

Undermining Striker

The fundamental issue with treating Striker as just an obstacle to be defeated is that it wastes everything interesting he had to say and ignores how he was fundamentally in the right about most of it.

He points out Stolas treats Blitzo like a plaything. One episode later (and after a season of extorting sex out of Blitzo) Stolas uses this exact word to describe Blitzo, and when Striker tortures Stolas in S2E4 everything Stolas has to say about Blitzo is a sexual remark (when he isn’t mocking Striker for being poor, that is) - even if he’s trying to be defiant towards Striker, he’s ultimately proving his point and nothing in his line delivery suggests he has any qualms about once again talking about Blitzo as just a sexual object.

He points out that Fizz is a purse dog. While Ozzie treats Fizz better than Stolas does Blitzo, Fizz appears to have little financial independence. He’s reliant on Ozzie for his job, lifestyle and prosthetics, especially now he’s quit working for Mammon (the other powerful Deadly Sin exploiting him, something Fizz doesn’t care about when he defends royal demons in S2E6).

But the show allows for as little discussion of this as possible.

Instead it uses S2E6 in order to contrast Fizz, Striker and Blitzo with each other as a nice, mean and in between trio in terms of their attitudes towards royalty.

Fizz is the Nice. He is the one with a stable if secret loving relationship. His position is that “anyone who thinks they’re superior is as bad as royalty”.

Striker is the Mean. He is the bitter antagonist whose position is that anyone fraternizing with blue bloods is a category traitor.

Blitzo is the In Between. He is the one who is lonely, framed as being because he won’t love Stolas. His position is that royals see commoners as a novelty but he dislikes Striker’s agreeing with him. He point blank calls him a supremacist.

So let’s unpick this one by one, starting with Blitzo and his supremacist comment. To drop a definition real quick:

Supremacist: a person who believes that a particular group, especially one determined by race, religion, or sex, is superior and should therefore dominate society.

This doesn’t make sense with what Striker actually believes. Far from thinking imps are superior and should dominate society, Striker has internalized racism against imps and thinks of himself and Blitzo as the only exceptions amongst a servant race who have promise.

There’s also no sign that Striker has any ambition to dominate society - he speaks of killing Overlords and being the most dangerous creatures in Hell, but he mentions nothing about his actual plans for how Hell will function after that. Striker’s attitude is individualistic and somewhat nihilistic - he’s one of many assassins taking hits to earn a living, but he desires violence against the ruling class mostly for its own sake, implied to be to satisfy his own desire for vengeance. In future episodes in fact, this is largely all he speaks about - having revenge on royal demons, not wanting to be talked over any more, etc. etc.

But Striker not only doesn’t point any of this out, he doesn’t even get offended by it. Then it never comes up again - the show using such a loaded word to describe someone whose primary trait is rebelling against an unjust authority that subjugates his entire race goes completely unchallenged. This is not just tone deaf, it suggests in the bluntest way possible that for this point at least, Blitzo is supposed to be read as in the right.

It goes beyond making Striker stupid and no longer suave, it’s a near direct call to the audience that anyone who thinks Striker has a point about royalty is aligning themselves with a bigot.

But since Blitzo is the in between here, he is also subject to scrutiny for questioning royalty. This is done in his conversation with Fizz about Stolas - though saying it’s a conversation is generous, since in reality it’s just more retconning. Blitzo tries to assert something critical of royalty - that they sleep with commoners as a novelty and to live out a fantasy.

But when he tries to prove this, the writers don’t have him list off the numerous reasons he has to distrust Stolas.

Instead they use him as a mouthpiece to list a bunch of nice things Stolas did offscreen that we never get to see - they’re now apparently having phone calls where Stolas actually cares about Blitzo’s day instead of doing sexual rants at him, and Stolas likes his posts.

This is a blatant attempt to frame Blitzo as jaded, reflective of his middle position in the conversation - he’s right to criticize Striker but not Stolas, because one is a good royal and the other is a bad dissident.

Moving on to Striker, his assertion that the two of them are category traitors goes unexplored even though he has a point. Blitzo has a business with a unique selling point and Fizz lives in relative luxury as one of Hell’s top performers.

The fact that they both got where they are by being in proximity of royalty (both in relationships with them, Blitzo’s entirely transactional where in season one he had to have sex with Stolas to keep the lights on) and the way their advantages have come from being in proximity to power, something most imps don’t have, is not discussed.

Then finally there’s Fizz. His claim that anyone just believing that they’re superior to anyone else is as bad as actually being royalty is such a false equivalence that it’s embarrassing to hear a character make that claim. The idea that Striker’s bad attitude towards other imps is somehow equivalent to characters like Stolas and the Deadly Sins having all the wealth and power to screw over the lower classes however they please. And this is something Fizz should know well given how Mammon, the Deadly Sin of Greed, treats him in literally the episode after this.

In a nuanced show this would come off like Fizz is just attempting to reassure himself over his insecurities in his relationship with Ozzie by using the most warped logic possible to tell himself and others that the real issue isn’t the differences between him and Ozzie, it’s anyone who points it out.

However, given the show never goes anywhere with this and the way the show proves Fizz right that Blitzo is wrong to think Stolas isn’t into him, coupled with the show throwing around the word ‘supremacist’ to shut Striker down, gives the impression that Fizz is the voice of reason in this episode. As far as the show makes clear, everything he asserts is correct: Striker is just as bad as the people he criticizes and Blitzo just needs to wise up to the fact Stolas likes him.

I feel more confident in asserting that the writers most definitely did not want viewers to think Striker had a point because they all but confirmed it on social media. The creator liked tweets reflective of that view, most notably one saying Striker “isn’t the working class hero of Helluva Boss; he’s a simple-minded bigot poisoned by toxic masculinity”.

The creator outright endorses the view that no one should side with Striker or even think he has a point. He’s just a bigot and that’s all. His toxic masculinity means anything else he has to say is automatically null and void, even if that toxic masculinity came about as a result of him internalizing the message that imps were small and worthless.

There’s an obvious issue to this however: Blitzo demonstrates just as much toxic masculinity as Striker. He also spends most of S1E5 teasing Moxxie that he isn’t strong, that he’s not going to get the approval of his in-laws because he’s not the tough and beefy type and Blitzo is happy to be included in the group of manly men along with Striker and Millie’s father. He mocks Moxxie for enjoying Millie being dominant in bed in S1E6. He uses a lot of misogynistic insults - he refers to Millie as Moxxie’s ‘ho’ and refers to his ex Verosika as a ‘bag of holes’. There’s little difference between Striker and Blitzo in terms of some of the prejudices they have, which could have been used as a means of making interesting parallels between the two – but the second season instead goes hard on putting Striker firmly into the Bad Guy Box and sweeping all that under the carpet.

However, there’s something else I find telling in this tweet - it describes Blitzo as insisting on ‘proving his people are just as capable as those that rule over them’. Or to put it in other words, Blitzo wants to be successful under the current system; not to change it or oppose it as Striker does.

This is the real main difference between Blitzo and Striker: if both are working class imps, both are assassins and both exhibit toxic masculinity, then the remaining difference between them is their attitudes towards royalty. Blitzo is willing to work with royalty if it gives him what he needs to run his business whereas Striker will work with them primarily if it means he has the chance to assassinate other royals. Blitzo pushes back when Stolas does things he doesn’t like, whereas Striker openly criticizes royalty for having all the wealth and power.

This links back into the nice, mean and in between we mentioned earlier: matching up with their attitudes is their personal relationships with royalty. Fizz, the nice one who the viewer is supposed to agree with, is in a loving relationship with Asmodeus. Blitzo the cynic is in a transactional arrangement with Stolas. And finally, Striker the mean is the only one who openly criticizes royalty despite working for one.

Putting it simply, the show is positioning having loving relationships with royalty as the most morally superior position. Anyone pointing out the issues with the system - especially if it means they’re critical of characters the writers have decided are the good ones like Stolas - is in the wrong, roundly dismissed by everyone. By gutting Striker of virtually all of his positive qualities, positioning both him and Blitzo as cynical and shoving any discussion of the difference in wealth and power between Fizz and Ozzie under the carpet, the show is doing everything possible to insist that any royals or Deadly Sins the show considers one of the good ones should never be questioned.

This isn’t the only approach the show takes to try and reduce the moral complexity of the issue, however.

The flattening of the Deadly Sins and Stolas

The most frustrating thing about the classism subplot is that it is one of the better written aspects of Helluva’s worldbuilding, which is inconsistent and thin in a lot of other places, so it’s genuinely disappointing to see it wasted because the writers are too precious to allow any character who isn’t consciously written to be a villain (like Mammon) be anything other but good and completely lacking in responsibility for everything happening around them.

It does this in two ways - first, by having all the good characters have attitudes and systems of morality that feel safe and reassuring to the audience. And secondly, by downplaying or outright ignoring any instances of them being directly involved in the exploitation or subjugation of others.

The first issue doesn’t just crop up in Helluva. There is a trend in stories where sometimes the writer will be overly anxious about the viewers disliking a character if they express viewpoints that an audience would find unsympathetic but that would make sense for that character’s background, so as a result they will go out of their way to make that character have a different attitude.

This discomfort begins to creep into the show around season two of Helluva. Characters who previously behaved in ways consistent with their social standing and upbringing get rewritten to have those edges removed or ignored entirely.

For example, it’s established in Blitzo’s photo of his adoption certificate of Loona that Beelezebub oversees the care system Loona was raised in. Calling it that is kind of generous - it’s less foster care and more an animal pound where Loona was having to defend herself to survive. So far there's no indication Bee does anything to help the Hellhounds in the pound and worse she seems to spend all her time throwing parties to vibe on the energy of the people who attend.

Yet when Loona meets her, she not only doesn’t mention what she suffered in the pound but resents Bee primarily because she’s jealous of her being Tex’s girlfriend. Tex also never mentions the treatment of Hellhounds to Bee despite being a Hellhound himself. Everyone concerned treats Bee primarily as a well-meaning party girl and nothing else is mentioned.

This changing sensibility around not allowing the sympathetic characters to have flaws extends to how the writing changed its approach to writing Stolas, also.

In the early episodes Stolas is written as a deeply flawed royal - his most sympathetic trait is his love for his daughter, but outside of that he is driven by his vices and exhibits classist attitudes in the opposite direction to Stella. Where she sees imps as inferior and has as little to do with them as possible, Stolas views Blitzo as a sexual object. After using the book to arm twist him into a sexual transaction Stolas spends an entire season demeaning Blitzo, calling him by a nickname he hates, ‘itty bitty’, ‘little’ and even calling him his ‘plaything’. He has no respect for Blitzo’s boundaries, spending the entirety of Loo Loo Land sexually harassing him after getting him there under false pretences (that he was paying for a bodyguard and it was just work) and frequently manhandles him, yanking his face and putting cigarettes out on his horns.

This version of Stolas, in other words, had attitudes consistent with someone raised to be royalty while still having sympathetic traits in his love for his daughter. He had potential as a character to grow and change, especially if the writers wanted him to be Blitzo’s love interest instead of an antagonist.

However, as soon as the writers decided Stolas was definitely going to be the love interest they rewrite his character to simply no longer have these attitudes. He stops talking down to Blitzo as blatantly as he did before, suddenly calls him by his proper name in S1E7 and starts making conversation that isn’t just sexual remarks and acts like it was Blitzo’s choice that the arrangement was a sexual one even though he made it that way in S1E1. The second season doubles down on this even further, with Stolas claiming in S2E9 he never looked down on Blitzo - a statement that is blatantly untrue but goes completely uncontested by Blitzo himself.

To put it bluntly, the writing goes beyond Stolas being a hypocrite because having him be a hypocrite was not the point: if it was at least one person would be allowed to point it out in-universe or the framing wouldn’t side with him so consistently. But the show never does anything with it beyond a bare minimum suggestion in S2E9 that maybe Stolas did something wrong - before it promptly forgets all about it and goes right back to treating Blitzo like the sole guilty party in the “breakup”.

The issue is that the writers wanted Stolas to be a good guy and as soon as they committed to that decision they rewrote his character to downplay his classist attitudes to near non-existence. It only really comes up again in S2E12, but it's treated like a joke rather than a flaw.

A common defence is that this massive change in his personality is the result of him wanting to change after the argument in S1E7, but on closer inspection this isn’t true. For one the retcon kicks in at the start of S1E7 when he’s already treating Blitzo better, not after the ending of the episode, and for another the show never has Stolas demonstrate any understanding that how he was treating Blitzo before was degrading. Besides his claim he never looked down on Blitzo, he retreats back to using Blitzy occasionally (like in S2E4) and never acknowledges anywhere else in his dialogue that he recognizes specifically what he did wrong.

If Stolas truly had developed he wouldn’t react to Blitzo saying he looks down on him with outright denial – he’d show empathy and regret over how he behaved in the past. But he doesn’t.

The writers' discomfort with having Stolas display any classism that anyone reacts negatively to post season two extends into his backstory, too, where it creates a lot of dissonance. We see from the cold open of S2E1 that Stolas has an imp butler who helps dress him and a painting of him as a child shows him with a toy that looks distinctly like an imp.

But the show disliked the idea that Stolas would have had his worldview shaped by being born into a royal family so much that his first reaction on seeing Blitzo being brought to his house to play with him is to bow to him (and to need a reminder from Paimon not to do that), the same as he does at the end of S1E7.

His playdate with Blitzo echoes his behavior in S1E7 as he’s respectful throughout. Even though he has been raised from a very young age to have imps act subserviently to him, because he’s a ‘good’ character the writers don’t allow him to express any of the classist attitudes he had before; he doesn’t do anything worse than act excited to play an imp game and sound a bit incredulous about Blitzo hiring him in the future.

To be clear, I don’t expect the writers to make Stolas as cartoonishly evil as child Stella is. My point is that his adult self in season one was one of the most consistently classist characters in the show while still having some good traits that made him nuanced and interesting. But the writers decided he needed to be good, and once that happened one of his most consistent flaws was essentially retconned out of the story - the audience is supposed to take S1E7 as his true self and magically forget the prior six episodes, and his child self is written to be unusually respectful to imps just to drive home the point that Stolas is one of the good characters.

This desire to rewrite the entire character makes the timeline also a snarl for anyone trying to understand the show as a whole. Viewed chronologically, Stolas was an unusually enlightened princeling who bowed to imps and always saw them as worthy of respect. Then he grows up to become a classist, sex-obsessed royal who casually traps Blitzo into a sex for services deal and degrades him for six episodes straight. And then in S1E7 and season two onwards he abrutply becomes more like his child self again, with no sign of what caused him to change so dramatically in the intervening years and then change back just in time for him to be sad that Blitzo doesn’t want to date him.

Besides all this being an attempt at whitewashing over Stolas’ flaws, it’s boring. The show had set up a nuanced character who it would have been satisfying to see grow and change, only to insist he never really needed to grow and change and that Blitzo is just insecure about dating royalty generally rather than he has a point about Stolas in specific.

It also speaks to a general discomfort about writing powerful characters who are morally grey in general - the plot wants to include the Deadly Sins and the Ars Goetia because they get to have fun designs and more flashy powers, but it doesn’t want them to be held responsible or be expected to do anything about the unequal amount of wealth and power they have or systems over which they should have some degree of control and ability to change. Instead it neatly divides up the powerful characters into Good Team, Bad Team and expects the viewer to just ignore that everyone on Good Team is still part of the system of Hell that benefits them through other’s exploitation.

It likely is also not a coincidence that all three of the royals on the Good Team are dating or involved with lower class demons – this is essentially used as shorthand for their goodness, despite the fact that all three of them do nothing to address the fundamentally unjust status quo.

Anyone familiar with the show is probably wondering why I’ve avoided mentioning much of the Full Moon deal so far, since it is the most egregious example of the class difference being used to exploit and then being minimized and ignored. I’ll get into this more in a future section, but for now I will say that the show choosing to rewrite Stolas as just a put upon victim who never looked down on imps is especially galling when he started the show as a stereotypical abuser: using his power and resources to get sex out of someone, riding roughshod over all their protests and boundaries because he knows he can get away with it and will never have to worry much about judgement for how he treats Blitzo because his target is a member of the underclass of Hell.

Racism

I’ve included this as a subheader here because the issue of race is kind of intractable from how the show handles classism.

In terms of worldbuilding, the show spends less time on racism than classism. There are a few hints that other demons have prejudices against imps - one calls Blitzo a ‘fire toad’ in S2E4, heavily implied to be a slur by Blitzo’s reaction - but the show lingers on it less than it does class differences and how the cast are trying to break out of the mould set for imps.

So why do I bring it up?

This section is a little different than the others as while the show purposefully tried – not well, but tried – to discuss themes of abuse and classism, the show doesn’t so much depict racism as it does import a lot of unfortunate subtext without thinking through any of it.

Racial coding has been a discussion in fantasy stories for a long time. When inventing fantasy it makes some sense to draw from existing cultures and societies, partly so writers can avoid making an entire world from whole cloth and partly to give their audiences a point of reference.

However, this comes with the obvious drawback that pulling inspiration from the real world will inevitably include bringing real world baggage into the setting. It’s not impossible to do this thoughtfully, but it takes some care and consideration.

This is especially true when the story includes races explicitly set up in the story as an underclass who are exploited by a noble upper class.

There is racial coding present in the characters of Blitzo and Stolas - Stolas is given a British accent and his human form is white. Blitzo and imps in general don’t have any particular real world race or culture that they parallel, but given that Blitzo’s sister Barbie has a human form who is not white, it’s likely he wouldn’t be also. This gives several of the storylines around the class difference even more uncomfortable subtext than before, which gets harder and harder to ignore as the show goes on. So let’s take this chronologically.

Opening Helluva with a plot point where the main character is forced to make a deal to sleep with a royal prince every month to keep his business open is pretty heavy, but it’s a very effective way of setting up how the rich literally fuck over the poor. That is, assuming the show actually does something with that plot point - but it doesn’t. As we’ll discuss later, the show attempts to minimize it as much as possible.

Moving on, S1E2 has an element that has another uncomfortable world parallel. Stolas calls Blitzo to bodyguard him, but greets him by saying ‘Hello, my big-dicked Blitzy’. This is uncomfortably similar to ways in which black men are fetishized in real life.

Following this, S1E6 has a hallucination sequence where Blitzo hallucinates himself as having golden cuffs and then a golden chain around his neck appears while his hallucination impression of Stolas pulls him in like an animal as shadowy imps that look similar to Blitzo use fans to keep him cool. All of this imagery is reminiscent of classic movies with the royal figure being fanned by slaves while another is subjugated while wearing chains. Nothing about this is romantic imagery; it’s suggestive of the fundamental power difference between the two of them, Blitzo’s feeling of entrapment and how he is objectified by Stolas. Heavy stuff, but again not a problem by itself if the show is aware of what the imagery is saying.

Season two imports yet more real world context, this time much heavier than before. The season two opener has a flashback where Stolas’ father Paimon buys Blitzo to be Stolas’ playmate for an afternoon.

Just to drive that home: Blitzo is purchased like property for a royal prince to play with.

This exact scenario has played out in real life where white children would be given black children as gifts. In real life the ownership would normally last for the rest of the child’s life, whereas Helluva uses this grim practice merely as a way to shoehorn in a ‘childhood friends’ origin story for Blitzo and Stolas even though this actively makes the story make less sense.

So does Helluva make any space for how unpleasant it is for Blitzo to be sold to someone he doesn’t know as a child like property?

Yes and no. In the flashback itself Blitzo complains about being pulled away from his actual childhood friend Fizzarolli to have to hang out with Stolas and he’s initially bored at being forced to hang out in an unfamiliar house before pivoting to stealing gold as his father demanded he do. The game the two make up is fun and they do have a more friendly conversation later, but none of that makes up for the fact that it was not Blitzo’s choice to be there, that his own father sold his company to a stranger for money or the fact that Blitzo has to internalize at a very young age that the rich in the society he lives in can just treat him like property if they want to.

But after the flashback the fact that Blitzo was bought and paid for like property to be there in the first place is never mentioned again. The supposed childhood friend backstory is barely even mentioned outside of an idealized memory Stolas has, an idealized memory which is completely divorced from the reality of the situation that the show prefers to ignore. In fact this inserted backstory is so glanced over it doesn’t seem worth it to have written in Blitzo being sold just to have had them meet as children.

Outside of the uncomfortable real world issues the writing dumps into the show and then never addresses again, this is also a waste of dramatic potential. The show has set up a direct parallel between Stolas and Blitzo’s child and adult selves. Blitzo was sold into the company of a prince as a child and expected by his father to steal to survive, then as an adult he steals the book to try and make a better life for himself but again has to let a royal purchase his time and bodily autonomy in order to keep the book.

Stolas as a child was gifted a person, immediately forms a crush on them and doesn't question Blitzo's odd 'treasure hunt' game because he doesn’t want to be lonely, then as an adult he’s the one to leverage his own possessions to buy that same person’s time because he once again is ignoring that he was stolen from in order to project his feelings onto what he hopes will be the cure for his loneliness.

Put another way, the show has set up a pattern of Blitzo being treated like an object while he copes with the lot in life his class has left him with, while Stolas objectifies others as a cure for his loneliness and alienation as a royal.

And yet the show goes out of its way to avoid doing anything with this – Blitzo’s stealing from Stolas has never been openly discussed in the two seasons of the show and Stolas carrying on the royal habit of treating imps like objects for consumption is barely examined at all. So little is done with this dramatic parallel that it raises the question of if the writers even realized what they’d done at all.

The rest of the season doesn’t insert any more real world subtext, but there is one bit of outside imagery that I want to draw attention to – the Anti-Blitz Pinata Enamel pin (available on Shark Robot if you need a visual reference). In context, the pin is of a pinata in the episode that party goers are hitting.

With that being said, I do think it’s very tone deaf to essentially hang the main character in a noose in an episode that desperately wants the viewer to judge Blitzo, a working class imp, for not trusting that the prince who had sexually exploited him actually loves him… and then to sell merch of it. (The crew also sold ‘Blitzo KYS’ shirts from the same episode – edgy humor aside, the sheer meanness that creeps into the show the more it goes on is probably one of the largest reasons I bounced off it as hard as I did).

I want to end this section by reiterating what I said in the female characters section: I have no interest in accusing any of the writers of any particular bigotry. I also don’t want to imply that inserting real world subtext alone is the problem – the issue is in how something is handled and whether the writers are thoughtful enough to notice all the deeply unpleasant subtext they’ve included around the plot element of the imps and Hellhounds being dehumanized servant races.

That’s especially the case given that I suspect all of this unpleasant subtext is just the result of most of the problems this show has: a lack of planning and a lack of checking over scripts. And also the desire to make mean-spirited merch of the main character for some reason.

Imp city

It is kind of noticeable that for all the show is supposed to be about imps, the city and community IMP live in is pretty threadbare.

We are told rather than shown that IMP are making a name for themselves (enough that Crimson over in another ring of Hell had heard about them) – the effect of the business on the city around them goes pretty unmentioned. We don’t know if anyone immediate to IMP has heard about them until after the trial results in S2E11 has them throw a whole block party with fireworks in honor of IMP after the trial.

I point this out because it struck me in the season 2 finale that the show had barely bothered using either Blitzo’s apartment, the IMP office or the surrounding city as a setting much before. They tend to have the main character’s surroundings as just something to begin or end an episode in before immediately moving on. It takes Stolas crashing at Blitzo’s apartment for the show to give any screen time to the main characters doing mundane things like hanging out around the main character’s home or visiting the city.

Just like the development of IMP as a business is overlooked and undercooked, how the main characters fit into the world around them is pretty unexplored. Everyone acts like imps running a business is a big deal, but we don’t see much of the effect on the community immediately surrounding them – I had to look up the wiki to double check it because I couldn’t remember, but the place the heroes live is literally called Imp City. And yet a bunch of imps trailblazing by founding a business isn’t commented on by the imps directly around them before S2E11, and it’s anyone’s guess if the next season will bother with following up on that plot beat at all.

Stolas

You’ve probably already noticed that Stolas wasn’t included in the character section and that’s because I wanted to give him his own section.

And the reason for that is because most of the biggest issues of the second season revolve entirely around Stolas. The amount of problems the show introduces due to trying to change directions with Stolas so drastically is kind of impressive when they’re laid out end to end, so it seemed easier to simply put everything in its own section rather than keep interrupting other sections with Stolas tangents.

It also felt appropriate given that Stolas is arguably the real main character of the show.

The real main character of the show

Stolas is a pretty straight example of a creator’s pet - the favorite who begins to get more and more screentime as time goes on. Just to establish the degree to which Stolas begins to eat screentime, this is how the show spends its time across both seasons:

Season 1

Episodes specifically about IMP doing an assassination job - 1, 3, 4 (3 out of 8)

Episodes where Stolas appears - 2, 5, 6, 7 (4 out of 8, only 2 out of 8 where he is a starring character)

Season 2 (not shorts because the premise should not be relegated to them)

Episodes specifically about IMP doing an assassination job – 5, 10 (2 out of 12)

Episodes where Stolas appears – 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12 (8 out of 12 (66%), 6 out of 12 where he is a starring character)

Stolas goes from a side character tied principally to the grimoire plot device to the character whose storyline drives the show, far more than IMP as a business does. He even begins to get more prominent on the thumbnails for episodes than Blitzo himself.

And just to add context to the above, some of the episodes in season two where Stolas does appear could have been done without him having as much of a role as he had. In S2E6 Stolas’ conversation trying to get an Asmodean Crystal at least sets that plot into motion (halfway through the second season, but better late than never) but then he lingers around for no reason to eavesdrop on what could very well have been a private phone call between Asmodeus and Fizzarolli just to invent an excuse for him to be included in the pretty dull scenes of Asmodeus trying to negotiate Fizz’s release with a lawyer (all of which is made redundant anyway when Fizzarolli escapes with Blitzo’s help anyway).

Outside of this, the writers increasingly favor Stolas in other ways – besides giving him the showy musical numbers he will often get the lion’s share of the most visually gorgeous shots in any given episode where an animation bump happens: both S2E11 and S2E12 are a cut above the others visually speaking and they are very heavily dominated by Stolas having screentime.

His divorce sets into motion Stella’s need for revenge, which brings both Striker and Andrealphus into the plot and results in the changes to the status quo far more than anything the main characters actually chose to do. Stella and Andrealphus’ desire to take his wealth and power are what causes the grimoire plot point to finally be paid off, not anything IMP did or didn’t do. In addition to this, Stolas’ deepening estrangement from his daughter is likely going to drive the plot of at least part of season 3, as well as the development of other demons from the Ars Goetia like Vassago, who IMP have nothing to do with.

By comparison the viewer is much more shut out from Blitzo’s feelings. We’re shown from S2E4 that he’s nonsensically surprised by the revelation that Stolas can be hurt (this is a plot hole, but put a pin in it for now) and then S2E6 is used to do a lot of telling instead of showing that Stolas is being nicer to Blitzo over the phone.

Besides the fact that it’s bad writing to leave all that offscreen, it’s clear that the intent of the scene isn’t to get the viewer to empathize with Blitzo or examine the confusion he’d naturally feel over the way Stolas is suddenly sending a bunch of mixed messages and being hot and cold with him, all while the transactional arrangement is still in place as far as Blitzo knows. Instead it’s used to paint him as cynical and jaded for missing the obvious signs that Stolas is into him, and to pretty bluntly encourage the viewer to take Stolas’ side.

This sensibility pervades other moments of the show, too – the camera often favors Stolas’ perspective when he’s in a scene, encouraging the viewer to empathize with him above anyone else. For example when Blitzo speeds off at the end of S1E7 the camera lingers with Stolas instead of staying with Blitzo in the van, putting the focus on how hurt Stolas is.

Or even more noticeable is the end of S2E11. Given how fractious Loona and Blitzo’s relationship is, her saying “I love you, Dad” for the first time should be a big deal, especially to Blitzo who tends to light up the minute he gets any positive affection from her. However, the angle of the shot is a distant long one since it’s from Stolas’ perspective – then when the two of them part from their hug the camera zooms in on Stolas’ blank stare. How much of a breakthrough this is for two lead characters is undercut by the camera taking Stolas’ position – it reminds the viewer to feel sorry for Stolas having lost his own daughter.

Musical numbers

This favoritism towards Stolas extends to the numerous song numbers. To take a count of the number of times the supposed main characters in IMP have had songs:

Blitzo - 3 times (S1E6, S1E8, S1E11); all three are duets and none are solos

Moxxie - 3 times (S1E6, S2E2, plus the Oh Millie MV); two are duets

Millie - 2 times (S2E2, S2E5)

Loona - 0 times in seasons one or two

Stolas – 6 times (S1E2, S2E1, S2E8, S2E9, S2E11, plus a music video Look My Way – the first of which is the first solo in the show)

Stolas has sung double the amount of times Blitzo has and in the show he has had two solos, something which the actual main character has not even had yet. It’s also noticeable that when the writers decided Stolas had to be a good guy and started trying unsuccessfully to fix him that the amount of song numbers he got went through the roof.

In both duets with Blitzo, Stolas gets the larger part. He begins and ends When I See Him (as a side note he also got the last word in the season 2B trailer) and their duet in S2E11 is mostly Blitzo adding insert lines while Stolas is taking the lead. All of this is designed to encourage the viewer to empathize with Stolas more - the viewer knows how he’s feeling and why and his loneliness is intended to elicit sympathy and to get the viewer to hope the relationship works out for him.

The obvious response to this is to claim that it’s solely because Stolas’ VA has a Broadway singing voice that he’s given all these songs, but this doesn’t really work. For one there’s little correlation in the show between the strength of the singer and the amount of numbers they get. I think it’s fair to say that while he has a unique sounding voice, Richard Horvitz is not a strong vocalist. Meanwhile Via’s VA Barret Wilbert Weed, most famed for the off-Broadway recording of Heathers, barely sings at all despite this being a massive waste of her incredible voice.

Another obvious issue is that the show has been happy to use different singers for Blitzo before (in S1E6 Brandon is not delivering the song), so it’s not as though the writers couldn’t have found someone else if they wanted to do something that was too ambitious for Brandon to comfortably manage. This would require increased budget, but again apply the Thermian argument - if the show had money to lavishly animate a full music video for Stolas singing a fan made song essentially as bonus content then it could have put that money towards actually letting its main character have his own solo number in his own show.

The Look My Way MV is particularly egregious as a narrative waste in the show because it tells the viewer nothing new. We already know Stolas is lonely, wants a relationship with Blitzo and intends to end the deal. This is no disrespect to Paranoid DJ - the song is well constructed, the original lyrics work well with Stolas’ season one characterization and the song as a whole actually has a narrative arc to it - but it would have made more sense to include something like it after S1E7, since Stolas self-reflects and commits to an action during the song.

By comparison his song in S2E1 is far weaker - it opens on the same emotional beat of loneliness and self pity, but Stolas doesn’t resolve to take any action as part of the song lyrics themselves: the narrative beat of him deciding to get an Asmodean Crystal is relegated to background detail and expecting the viewer to pause and read the book outlining how this plot point works. As a result Look My Way feels like a redundant, unneeded number and worse the lyrics about ‘making amends’ become increasingly hollow when actually looking at the events of S2E8 and S2E9.

All of this is telling when you look at Helluva in the context of musical theatre. Most musicals have a few classic song templates, so classic that they have commonly recognized names. One of these is the ‘I Want’ song - it usually comes in the first act in the musical, typically after (or as part of) the exposition opening song. The ‘I Want’ song is basically what it says on the tin - the hero/heroine sings about what it is they want in life that they’re not getting and giving the viewer a sense why it matters to them.

Disney musicals, especially the Renaissance movies, typically feature these: Belle wants someone who actually understands her in a provincial town that treats her like a weirdo for disliking Gaston, Max want to impress his crush and not be like his dad Goofy, Ariel wants to explore the human world (and the later reprise expands this goal to include her newfound love for human prince Eric).

Helluva is a series, not a movie, but it is steeped in musical theatre tropes. It also has a pretty clear example of the other classic type of musical number, the ‘I Am’ song. The ‘I Am’ song is usually sung by villains announcing who they are and what they’re about – it’s more of a fun performance number than the ‘I Want’ song. ‘House of Asmodeus’ is a classic ‘I Am’ song, probably the best Broadway-style number in the entire show – it has Asmodeus announcing himself as the Sin of Lust and antagonizing Moxxie before the song transitions to advancing the plot by having Verosika and Fizzarolli dress Blitzo down in front of Stolas.

Despite this, Blitzo does not have a single ‘I Want’ song. The show never utilizes musical theatre tropes to discuss his feelings about his business or his desire for better relationships with the rest of IMP. And when it comes to Blitzo’s feelings about Stolas, none of that is put in music either even though in season one and part of season two, the potential of the relationship failing would immediately compromise Blitzo’s business - he has massive stakes around his entanglement with Stolas. And it’s not like it would be impossible to do that - even if Blitzo is hiding from his own feelings, a skilled lyricist would find a way to hint at what he actually thinks by encouraging the viewer to read between the lines and something like that could fit very well with the show’s dark comedy tone.

The closest we get to Blitzo ever doing this in terms of the Stolas/Blitzo relationship is When I See Him, but he never sings anything about what he thinks about Stolas as a person - if he likes him now, what does he like about him? How hard would it have been to hint at any of that? But instead his part in When I See Him exists primarily to contrast Stolas - Blitzo is just in denial and focused solely on sex, because the writers are more concerned with setting up the disaster of the conversation to come despite completely neglecting making the viewer understand before this point what Blitzo actually likes about having Stolas in his life outside of having good sex with him.

And again, a skilled lyricist would find ways to sneak in what the character really thinks between the lines if they are lying to themselves. In Wicked, “The Wizard and I” momentarily slows down from the main tune to have Elphaba sing about how she hopes the Wizard will “de-greenify” her. She tries to pass this off as no big deal, but it’s obvious from the instrumentation that it’s something she very much wants.

However, the break in the high energy of When I See Him again favors Stolas – it’s Stolas who gets the lead when the tune changes, Stolas who gets to talk about what all this means to him in the context of his life so far, Stolas who ends the song with a climatic moment.

To sum up here, there’s a pretty undeniable favoritism towards Stolas in the show. While even his plotline is not particularly well executed, there’s no denying a far greater amount of screentime is spent on him as a character than a lot of the members of IMP – he is given an entire episode of focus time and a large flashback to flesh out his childhood before any of the rest of IMP are given the same treatment. S2E1 is not a Stolas and Blitzo episode; it’s a Stolas episode where Blitzo appears to set up the childhood friends plotline.

This is another symptom of the show’s lack of focus on its own premise, but putting that aside increased focus on Stolas might not be terrible if the show was able to successfully transform him into a sympathetic character that the viewer wants to succeed.

Unfortunately that was not the case.

Before we get into that, though, I want to make a quick tangent to talk about Stolas’ design and place in the story.

Classic villain character design & setup

It’s been confirmed by the creators that Stolas was supposed to be an antagonistic figure in the early days of the show and this makes sense when you look back at the both Stolas’ design and the initial way he’s used in the show.

Stolas is a prince in a world where the heroes are all members of an underclass struggling to keep a business running. As is common with villains to make them look more intimidating, he is (depending on the shot or episode) at least twice as tall as Blitzo. He has a classic widow’s peak, long black clawed fingers, an unnerving smile due to how his beak is drawn and most crucially he has no pupils in most shots. Just to draw a contrast, I recommend going back and looking at his expressions and line delivery way back in S1E1 and what it is now – the first episode leans hard into having him be both aristocratic and unnerving.

The saying that ‘the eyes are the windows to the soul’ are very true in design principles – the eyes especially can be used to communicated a lot about a character very quickly. Stolas’ eyes are red – a usual demonic color – but they also have a noticeable glow in some scenes, suggesting his power as a Goetian prince.

But everything else about this design reinforces that he is an antagonistic, if not villainous, character. A lack of pupils and the eyes being one flat red colour gives Stolas a distinct lack of affect, making him less expressive and harder to read. Whenever Stolas does have pupils they’re just tiny white pinpricks, which enhance rather than remove the uncanny effect. Notably the only other major character to have similar eyes is Robo Fizz, where the flat color and tiny pupils reflect his robotic nature and once again serve to make him more unnerving to look at. His eyes even become identical to Stolas’ right before his defeat, when the designers are clearly shooting to make him look like pure nightmare fuel.

Early posters for the show also reinforce Stolas as a villainous character, too – one early image has IMP running along together while Stolas looms above them from above. This is a common design technique seen pretty frequently in movie posters – the antagonist is placed either above or above and to the right. They are physically bigger and looming overhead, signalling their dominance over the heroes.

The creators of the show appear to have realised these issues with his design and done what little can be done to rectify it. Stolas’ eyes have become gradually larger as the show goes on and when Stolas loses his power in S2E11 his pupils become permanently visible.

Stolas’ setup in the plot is also a perfect pitch for an antagonistic character, if not an outright future villain. He is essentially the patron of IMP as a business – without his book, the company cannot function. However, Stolas in the early show is essentially a lecherous boss: Blitzo has to either avoid or appease him sexually in order to keep the lights on. Outside of any damage or loss to the book itself, Stolas is the biggest threat to the business because he can cause it to fold at any moment if he chooses to withhold his grimoire and he has the power to ensure IMP cannot stop him. But as mentioned before, the show never bothers to use threats to the grimoire to drive the plot, so this setup too is wasted.

This is not the only way that Stolas as a character doesn’t quite work. In fact, that’s because Stolas isn’t one character but many versions of a character that never quite coalesce.

Stolas is three different characters

Before the show came out, staff ran in-character Instagrams. These were posts from each character that filled out details about their day to day lives - for example, Blitzo’s coffee obsession is far more present in the Instagrams than it is in the show proper.

Stolas in the Instagrams is superficially similar to his show self, but is fundamentally different enough that he might as well be a different character. Like in the show he had a one night stand with Blitzo, but unlike in the show he doesn’t use this as a pretext for harassing him. By contrast, Instagram Stolas is on the whole respectful - he teases Blitzo in the replies but doesn’t push it further. The most forward thing he does is cover Blitzo’s apartment with rose petals and park himself in the bathtub as a romantic surprise. This is kind of a presumptuous thing to do, but Stolas redeems himself when Blitzo comes home drunk from a disastrous date and all the prince does is put him to bed with an aspirin before leaving – and when a commenter suggested he could have taken advantage of the situation, Instagram Stolas reacted very frostily. The only time he displays that much emotion at other times is talking to Valentino (Angel’s pimp who sexually assaults him from Hazbin Hotel), who he treats with nothing but sharp contempt. The rest of the time he’s composed and is a very present parent in Via’s life even in her teenage years after the affair happens.

All this makes the difference between Instagram Stolas and season one Stolas clear: Instagram Stolas can be overbearing, but he fundamentally respects the consent of others and while he still sees Blitzo as an escape from boring royal life, he doesn’t make this Blitzo’s problem. He still has a life outside of yearning for Blitzo to pay attention to him.

In what is probably the saddest difference between series Stolas and instagram Stolas, the instagrams show the closest thing to a healthy relationship between Stolas and Blitzo that the show has ever had. Because Stolas is not pushy, Blitzo gradually begins to trust him and they have movie nights together. Before the show proper came out, the relationship Insta Stolas and Blitzo had was one of affection, where the two would send each other care packages, joke on each other’s posts and could even have been said to be casually dating in the later posts before the show came out.

Stolas was also more respectful to the rest of IMP, too. He knew Loona was Blitzo’s daughter and addressed Moxxie by name.

The Stolas of the pilot and S1E1 is practically the opposite of all of these traits. In S1E1 and S1E2 he shows an active disregard for Blitzo’s colleagues and an even larger disregard for consent given that he uses Blitzo’s life being in danger to get sex out of him, following this up by continually harassing him in S1E2, ignoring Blitzo’s protests.

In other words, instagram Stolas and season one Stolas are entirely different characters with only a few similarities between them. This wouldn’t be so bad, except that Stolas functionally becomes a different character for the second time in S1E7 in the show proper. The viewer isn’t shown anything that suggests Stolas has fallen head over heels for Blitzo in the prior episodes - he’s most openly kind to Blitzo in S1E6 when he calls him darling, but this is still generally in line with his prior characterization as he refers to him as his ‘plaything’ right before and asks for payment for the rescue in more sex. If it was potentially losing Blitzo that caused him to get more attached is unclear - he just jumps from being sexually obsessed with Blitzo to romantically obsessed.

Stolas shifts again in S2E1 - where S1E7 shows him still feeling bad for his affair and the show suggests he has some culpability for the cheating, Stolas in the season two opener is not sorry at all. His relationship with Blitzo massively changes, too - where Stolas in S1E2 is implied to be an aged immortal due to his design it turns out he’s actually only thirty or so. And a relationship that appeared to be founded on two strangers meeting and having a one night stand is actually one of childhood friends and the viewer is to assume that Stolas had loved Blitzo the entire time, rather than just being something that happened suddenly in S1E7.

It’s not uncommon for writers to discover their characters in the process of writing them, but the change is usually not as drastic and nonsensical as it is here. The writers create large problems for themselves when they go all in on making Stolas one type of character, only to abruptly change tracks and expect the viewer to just accept the new version with no natural development between the two. To make matters worse, the show occasionally tries to insert details from Instagram Stolas such as him liking Blitzo’s posts even though even Stolas’ ‘nicest’ incarnation in season two is still much different than his Instagram self – show Stolas has only just noticed Blitzo likes horses in S2E12 where his Instagram self noticed long ago, show Stolas has never addressed any of the rest of IMP by name whereas Insta Stolas has had casual conversations with Moxxie before, etc. - which just leads to a greater sense that Stolas is just a patchwork of different poorly parts stuck together.

While other characters suffer the problem of feeling like they’re defanged in the second season - Fizz and Ozzie just become generically nice and while Verosika is still bitter and hung up on the break up she changes into being the moral voice of wisdom instead of someone happy to stoop to the same petty levels as Blitzo - none of the characters change as suddenly or as drastically as Stolas does within the course of a single episode. Just like the issues with the show presenting large moments like they’re going to drastically change the status quo, this continual shifting of Stolas makes it hard to invest in the writing as it feels like the character could just be altered again within the space of an episode with no explanation.

In order to get across how poorly the changes to Stolas’ character were done, I will be using particular episodes as case studies (with a couple of tangents thrown in here and there).

The problem the show set up for itself

Before getting into the case studies, I want to clarify the scale of the problem the writers had set up for themselves.

Throughout previous episodes I have used phrases like ‘coercion’ to describe the Full Moon deal, but I want to take this moment to really drill in on what I mean there.

The Full Moon deal is a transaction in which Blitzo’s ability to keep his business running, provide a home for his daughter and keep writing his employee’s pay cheques is entirely dependent on pleasing Stolas sexually every month.

In real life, this is an example of what’s called “quid pro quo sexual harassment”, which is a crime. “Quid pro quo sexual harassment” in real life is when someone uses their power, often over an employee, in order to get sexual favors, which is exactly what Stolas does with the grimoire.

In S1E1 when Stolas is describing the deal, he quite literally uses the most common translation of “quid pro quo” in his dialogue - “favors for favors”. No matter what happens later, Stolas will now have always forced Blitzo to sleep with him by using his business to set up a transaction where Blitzo owes him sex each and every month, whether Blitzo wants to have it or not.

I want to be clear: I am not saying that Stolas owed Blitzo use of his book. He was well within his rights to take the grimoire back as soon as he realized it was stolen, and even to report Blitzo for the theft if he’d wanted to.

But he didn’t do that. He instead used the book in order to get sex and waited to propose his deal after he’d already been allowing Blitzo to use the book for “some time”.

To have enthusiastic consent for a sexual encounter both parties need to be able to freely agree or disagree and communicate that honestly.

But Stolas proposing a favors for favors deal gives Blitzo significant incentive to agree, even if he doesn’t want to. If he refuses he has no reason not to believe Stolas will just take the book back for good and his business will be in danger – it is a form of economic abuse, only one step removed from a landlord who demands a tenant pay them with sex. Worse still, once the deal is in place Stolas has essentially created a scenario where Blitzo is conditioned to associate seeing Stolas with having to have sex in order to be able to keep using the book.

Even if you wanted to believe Blitzo was secretly fine with this deal despite all available evidence to the contrary in season one (and I’d like to point out that characterizing all his reactions of revulsion, annoyance or indifference to Stolas as “hiding his true feelings”, “playing hard to get” or “not knowing what he wants / not knowing what’s best for him” gets no less infuriating when the target is a male character and not a female one), this deal is still incredibly prone to issues of questionable consent because if Blitzo was unwilling to sleep with Stolas even once he would still feel immense pressure to just go along with it.

And no amount of having Blitzo act like he’s really into it during song numbers in season two can erase that issue existing in season one – it certainly doesn’t help that the show never bothers stopping to consider that Blitzo’s attitude can come off as a kind of learned helplessness, that he stopped processing what was happening as a wrong being done to him in order to salvage his self-esteem and tried to find power through enjoying feeling dominance over Stolas, and grew so accustomed to being used for sex that he can’t comprehend anything else anymore.

To make matters worse, the scene where the deal is first made is not a calm negotiation between the two of them because the reality is that Blitzo gets no time to think whatsoever. When Stolas calls in S1E1 he is in fear of his life, hiding in the woods with an injured arm from Martha, the target he failed to assassinate earlier.

To go with enthusiastic consent, there is also a concept called informed consent which is where someone needs the ability to know exactly what they’re agreeing to before they agree to it. But since Blitzo just wants to get Stolas off the phone since his life is in danger, he gives a hasty ‘Fine! Whatever!’ that indicates he very much has not been able to think through what he just agreed to.

There is also plenty of reason to think that Stolas either planned for that to happen, or did not remotely care that he had a situation on his hands where he could get Blitzo to hastily agree to his terms.

Firstly, Stolas has a magic bubble that he’s using to spy on Blitzo - in one shot he can even see the wound Blitzo has on his arm.

Secondly, Stolas can hear that something is clearly wrong - the usually loudmouthed Blitzo is whispering but more to the point, there are gunshots going off in the background. One quite literally explodes the tree in front of Blitzo’s face - there is no logical reason to think Stolas can hear Blitzo whispering down the phone but not the much louder gunshot noise.

And thirdly, Stolas has Blitzo telling him in no uncertain terms that it’s a bad time and that he’s trying to focus on something else right now to avoid getting hurt.

Stolas ignores all of this, because as far as he’s concerned getting an agreement out of Blitzo is just more important. He shows no regard for Blitzo’s safety and wilfully ignores the multiple times Blitzo tries to tell him not now or to get to the point.

And to put a cherry on a truly awful cake, when Blitzo agrees just to get him to shut up Stolas immediately goes into a horny rant down the phone while Blitzo pulls a repulsed expression before he gets caught by Martha. Stolas is so enthusiastic about all the sex he’s just arm twisted Blitzo into having that he’s still ranting when Moxxie runs past the phone later in the episode.

In one scene the creators had successfully created an image of a truly detestable character: a prince lounging around in his luxurious bath, showing no care or concern for the very obvious possibility Blitzo’s life was in danger and then leveraging that possibility to coerce him into a monthly deal where Blitzo has to have sex with him to keep the lights on. As a setup for a villain, you couldn’t really ask for anything more than this scene delivers. As the setup for a future love interest, though, you’ve just created yourself a mountain to climb.

It’s not only quid pro quo sexual harassment but it’s likely a deal breaker for many to see Stolas in a sympathetic light in the future. Making the audience empathize with this character in particular, especially as a romantic partner for Blitzo, is going to be a tall order.

Going forward we see that in addition to the quid pro quo arrangement, Stolas also engages in basically every form of sexual harassment.

Sexual harassment can include:

- unwanted flirting, including refusing to stop when asked or taking ‘no’ as ‘yes’

- cat calling

- unconsensual touching

- sexual favors

- crude gestures / jokes, other crude comments that are unwanted

S1E1 already ticks sexual favors off the list, but S1E2 covers nearly every other instance by itself.

The episode opens with Stolas using an offer of money to get Blitzo to bodyguard him. Given this falls outside the Full Moon deal Blitzo makes a point of telling Stolas the minute they get to the theme park that he’s there specifically to work, not to satisfy his sexual urges.

Stolas not only ignores him multiple times but continually engages in unwanted flirting. He then engages in unconsensual touching twice, once stroking Blitzo’s face (while he’s interrupting Blitzo trying to set a boundary that this is strictly business) and then running a finger over his horn later on (which Blitzo again reprimands him for). This type of touching occurs several times throughout the season, with Stolas either putting cigarettes out on his horns (S1E5) or tugging on his face while babytalking him (S1E5, S1E6) the latter of which results in Blitzo shoving him away or glaring at him.

He makes crude remarks not only over the phone but in person, and cat calls Blitzo from the stage during S1E5 by calling him “that sexy little one”, embarrassing Blitzo and later using a demeaning nickname when Blitzo tells him outright to stop, then refers to Blitzo as his “impish little plaything” in S1E6, essentially calling him his sex toy.

To make matters worse, S1E2 ends with Stolas turning an assailant to stone with a single look, implying he never needed Blitzo’s protection at all. He was only playacting that he needed a bodyguard in order to have a pretext to manipulate Blitzo into spending time with him, then he used his superior economic position to make that happen by offering to pay Blitzo.

In other words, the bodyguarding job was offered under false pretences by Stolas. Blitzo agreed to it with the understanding that he would be working as a bodyguard for money, but Stolas intended to abuse that agreement all along in order to be inappropriate with Blitzo and continually push his boundaries by flirting with him.

S1E7 is an odd turning point between the show’s attitude to how the relationship should be viewed – Stolas is suddenly desperately in love with Blitzo and the show wants the viewer to feel bad for him when Blitzo is disinterested in him during their “date”, but Blitzo does get to mention that all Stolas has ever wanted so far is sex.

I bring up S1E7 because there’s one moment that I just find deeply fascinating in it. So it happens right at the end: when Blitzo drives Stolas back to his palace, there’s a moment after Stolas gets out of the van where he leans down to talk to Blitzo. And Blitzo not only turns away but drags his hand over his face. The whole expression and gesture just screams that he’s expecting, very reasonably, for Stolas to proposition him for sex and he just does not want to deal with it – but he’s bracing himself because he has to. It’s the kind of moment that will resonate with anyone who has been desperate to get away from the situation they’re in but for whatever reason, feels forced to hold their tongue or be civil. Blitzo’s expression, followed by having to assert that he does not want to sleep with Stolas that night and finally losing his temper over it, is a hell of a way to start a run of episodes dedicating to papering over Stolas’ responsibility for anything he’s done as much as possible. But I digress.

I list all of this out not just to provide context for how frustrating the writing will become later in how it categorically refuses to address any of this, but also to point out how much the writers had doubled down on making Stolas someone who not only sexually abused Blitzo but showed him a consistent lack of basic, fundamental respect during the first season.

The fandom will sometimes exhibit a peculiar blindness around this and state that Blitzo didn’t communicate well enough that he didn’t like what Stolas was doing. This is categorically untrue – Blitzo is consistently incredibly blunt with Stolas. There’s nothing ambiguous about the way he tells Stolas he’s there for business only and to knock it off because he’s working in S1E2, the way he says to get to the point in S1E1, the way he groans and shoves Stolas away in S1E5 or the way he glares at him after Stolas yanks on his face again in S1E6. And frankly, even if Blitzo was more prone to handling Stolas with kid gloves I wouldn’t judge him for it, for the exact same reason that a retail worker or barista being polite is not the same thing as an expression of sexual interest.

There is also sometimes an attempt by the fandom to apply a kind of double bind logic to this situation – if Blitzo didn’t express his displeasure strongly enough, then it’s his fault, but if he did that proves that if he felt safe to say no once he obviously could say no every single time. Besides how frankly disturbing and ghoulish it is to apply this kind of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ logic to discussions of SA that can uncomfortably mirror how people talk about victims in real life, the focus here is in entirely the wrong place. It hyperfocuses on what Blitzo does or doesn’t do despite the fact that the issue is how Stolas behaves and how Stolas uses his power.

The Full Moon deal hangs like a dead albatross over the rest of the show and Blitzo and Stolas’ relationship going forward.

This is not a “messy relationship” where two parties on an equal footing hurt one another before learning to be better together. It’s the story of a prince using his power and privilege to get sex from a lower class man and then the writers employing the most amateur hackish methods possible to fix the problem they created when they decided Stolas just had to be a genuine love interest instead of the antagonist he was far more suitable to be.

I’ve tried to avoid coming down too hard when I think the creators had done something out of carelessness rather than malice, but I would like to make an exception one time just to highlight something specific – the habit the creators have of liking certain tweets to endorse how the show is supposed to be interpreted.

And as the creators increasingly attempted to rewrite Stolas and paper over everything he had done and said in season one, they correspondingly developed a habit of liking tweets engaging in bluntly trying to insist that not only has Stolas not done anything wrong but Blitzo was the problem.

Some of these tweets went as far as implying that because Blitzo had slept with Stolas once, he was responsible for Stolas trapping him in a transactional sexual relationship and he essentially owes Stolas his consent in future, or they will talk about Stolas like he can’t be expected to understand even the most basic of cues, even when those it’s is someone blatantly telling him “stop doing that”.

Others implied it would be easy for Blitzo to get out of the transactional relationship and could have done so if he really wanted to. This kind of attitude shows a complete lack of understanding of how financial abuse and coercion works – Stolas holds all the power, so it’s not as though Blitzo could easily try and wriggle out of the deal without knowing he was risking losing access to the book entirely. Stolas can live without Blitzo having to sleep with him every month, but Blitzo cannot run his business and provide for his daughter, employees and himself without the book. Framing the issue as though Blitzo could just end it is completely ignoring the difference in power and wealth between them when one party is living in a one bedroom apartment and the other lives in a palace with servants.

Blitzo especially has no reason to believe he could casually just end the deal when the reason the arrangement began at the first place was because Stolas showed no regard for Blitzo being in danger or his ability to give informed consent – he is not someone Blitzo can trust to have his best interests at heart throughout season one.

I’ll be frank: no matter how much you might want to get the audience to accept your sudden new direction with a character, it is not worth liking victim blaming attitudes that promotes pernicious, bad ideas about consent and sexual coercion to a sizeable social media audience, some of whom are likely pretty young.

If the creators are going to write storylines dealing with heavy topics like sexual assault and coercion and then drastically change direction midstream to insist the viewers should root for a character like Stolas and then blame their viewers for noticing the difference, the least they can do is try and restrain themselves from liking tweets with arguments that sound like they came right out of the 1970s.

I apologize in advance if I get more heated in this next section than I have in the entire rest of this essay. But I hope it’s understandable why this kind of thing frustrates me: for a show that likes to hold itself up as being about abuse and sticking it to abusers, it has a startling lack of self-reflection as to what they’re actually saying about abuse when they can barely bring themselves to honestly discuss the coercive at worst deeply questionable at best elements in the central relationship of the show without liking a bunch of minimizing tweets just to avoid anyone holding Stolas too responsible.

Getting back on track, I said I intended to use three episodes as case studies. Those episodes are:

S2E1 The Circus - the woobification of Stolas, retcons that don’t make sense, a tangent on substance abuse

S2E4 Western Energy - a tangent on tone issues, continuity issues & bad rewrites

S2E9 Apology Tour - the funhouse mirror of The Circus, paying off the bad rewrites

This trifecta should cover most of the bad ways in which the show is attempting to polyfill its Stolas problem. It won’t cover everything though, so after these three episodes I want to talk about a phenomenon I’ve dubbed the conversations that cannot be had before coming to a broader conclusion about Stolas, then finishing off this very long autopsy with a discussion as to whether or not the show is salvageable.

Case Study: The Circus

Rather than addressing Stolas’ flaws, the writers make the decision to instead woobify him. Woobification is something that tends to happen more in fandom versions of characters – it’s where the character is written solely to make the audience feel sorry for them, rather than having them face some struggles but make the audience invest in them because they’re interesting in other ways.

One example is the fanmade My Little Pony animation “Snowdrop”. The short is about a blind filly who is struggling to complete a class project, but the cartoon leans so heavily into the struggles the protagonist faces because of her disability (and everyone picking on her) that the first few minutes feel more like the writers are continually prodding the viewers to feel sorry for the main character. She’s even made to walk home alone in a snowstorm! The short still manages to pull a heartwarming ending, but the handling of the central character is so heavy handed that it feels like too much for some.

The Circus is a by the numbers example of the original show doing this to one of its own characters as it unpicks everything the audience thought they knew about Stolas’ character and backstory over the course of a single episode, all for one simple purpose: feel sorry for him!

In season one it felt like Stolas was an aged fallen angel, one of the oldest princes in Hell. S2E1 clarifies that he’s actually around Blitzo’s age, using the childhood flashback as a way to introduce his neglectful father. The announcement of the arranged marriage reduces Stolas to tears, with his father sending him to the circus as a distraction. Stolas is miserable until he spots Blitzo with the plot mentioned (but not explaining) that Stolas has no friends so he’s excited to have a playmate.

Why add this in even though it contradicts prior information about Stolas and Stolas and Blitzo meeting as strangers? Because the viewer should feel sorry for Stolas.

In season one, Stolas’ marriage was never loving but it was implied in the past to be at least civil: the two of them shared a bed and when yelling over the cheating Stella refers to it as “our” bed.

Now in S2E1, Stella was not just a jerk but outright evil and abusive from childhood, abusing Stolas for years in a sham marriage Stolas only stayed in for Via’s sake. Now Stolas is the sole victim of the arranged marriage, since Stella is written to be the bad guy.

Also in the first season, Stella is angry that Stolas cheated with an imp in particular but does appear to be angry about the cheating itself, going by her dialogue. Now in S2E1 Stolas outright tells the audience that he knows he didn’t hurt her, so therefore he’s not sorry (and reinforces this in S2E4, to no opposition that he’s just redefining cheating so that it’s not cheating anymore). And just to drive the point home, the writers have Stella deliver the comically on the nose line ‘I like tormenting you!’

Why is this is? Because the viewer should feel sorry for him.

The complexity of the Stolas/Blitzo affair is hit with the same retconning. Previously they were strangers who had a one night stand after which Blitzo stole Stolas’ book, then Stolas used the book to get Blitzo to sleep with him every month.

Now in S2E1, Stolas was always in love with Blitzo ever since he was a child. He makes some incorrect assumptions when they meet again but genuinely thought Blitzo was interested in him, and going by what the episode appears to be trying to suggest, Stolas only made it sexual first because he thinks telenovelas are real life (not because he just wants sex). Meanwhile Blitzo was the one manipulating him solely for the book – the setup in S1E1 of Stolas being aware Blitzo is primarily interested in the book and using it to make the deal is now no longer the case.

And why is this? Because the viewer should feel sorry for him.

The same simplification happens with Stolas’ relationship with Via. Where season one focused on how his recklessness, insensitivity and neglect was hurting her, S2E1 reframes Stolas as the noble parent who put up with years of abuse and cruelty so that Via would have the benefit of being raised in a normal family.

Why is this? Because the viewer should feel sorry for him.

And just to tie a bow on this very obvious present, the episode ends with Stolas singing a self-pitying song to sum this all up: he’s in a cage, Blitzo was the one who fooled him with a “comfortable lie”, he doesn’t actually have power as a prince because it’s frail, he doesn’t have a choice, he’s just in a gilded cage, etc – it’s “feel sorry for me” put into song format.

I want to be clear that I don’t mean to imply Stolas has no right to complain because he has a bad case of First World Problems. Even in season one when Stella was less of a Saturday morning cartoon villain, she was still obviously unpleasant and it wasn’t hard to see why the marriage had turned colder over time. An arranged marriage is a bad thing to have put either of them through; his actions were understandable even if they weren’t sympathetic.

My point on going in so hard on The Circus is that all of this happening (and within the course of a single episode no less) makes it a very mawkish and transparent attempt to make the viewer feel sorry for Stolas, reframing him from someone suffering from his own poor decision making even if he was put in an unenviable situation with his arranged marriage, to someone who is not only the victim of every situation he’s in but going forward will be increasingly immune to any kind of criticism.

I’ve covered in the abuse section how the writers using bad fathers to make the viewer pity characters like Blitzo and Moxxie (the other main characters in the show), but even by the show’s standards Stolas receives a unique amount of retconning and attempts to get the viewers to pity him. Even when this makes the show worse, the show expects the viewer to believe the Stolas they met in season one and the Stolas who now appears from S2E1 onwards are the same, rather than it being a blatant shift in character.

Tangent: Retcons introduced by The Circus that don’t make sense

Outside of the actual dynamic in the Goetia household making no sense that has already been covered in prior sections, the other retcons introduced in S2E1 actively make the story make less sense.

Besides the way that nothing about Stolas and Blitzo’s interactions in season one suggested they ever met as children, Stolas’ attitude towards Blitzo is rewritten in S2E1.

Instead of him becoming sexually obsessed with the first person he enjoyed sleeping with as it was in season one, S2E1 retcons it so that Stolas always had more romantic feelings towards Blitzo - he quite literally fell in love with him at first sight and then is the only one to appreciate Blitzo’s obscure horse joke as a child.

None of this gels well with the way he treated Blitzo in season one at all, because now instead of a story where Stolas’ lust could have transformed into love over time, he is instead rewritten into someone who was always apparently in love with Blitzo… and yet also trapped the person he considered his “first ever friend” into a sex deal and openly referred to him as his “little plaything”.

How Stolas treats Blitzo in season one is bad enough, but the show attempting to whitewash it so that Stolas’ lust was always love makes it worse because the only way to make sense of all this in the context of season one is to assume Stolas saw no issue with treating his supposedly beloved childhood friend as a sexual object.

The show has the good sense to realize that keeping the Full Moon deal around while attempting to rewrite Stolas into a sympathetic and sad figure is not going to work well, so it adds the plot element of Asmodean Crystals. In season one we never saw how Verosika and the other succubi got to Earth in S1E3, so it’s hard to say that this element was ever planned or foreshadowed. Either way, it’s another attempted fix that ends up making the Full Moon deal worse in hindsight – if Stolas knew they existed the whole time what was stopping him from asking Asmodeus for one from the beginning?

The result is that the deal looks even more like Stolas was risking his book to have leverage to trade for sexual favors and not that he did it out of some genuine belief that Blitzo would like being in a tit for tat arrangement.

Another issue the show creates for itself is that S2E1 implies that Stolas believed there was something more between him and Blitzo, and that’s why he sings of the arrangement as a “comfortable lie” and that he’s “the fool who believes when [Blitzo] looks in [Stolas’] eyes”. Rather than him having a realization that using Blitzo for sex was wrong, S2E1 reframes the arrangement as though Stolas believed Blitzo was leading him on, which is a plot beat that unfortunately informs how the rest of the season will play out.

However, to believe this is true in any sense is to believe that Stolas is delusional to the point of farce.

Going back to S1E1 for a second, in the scene where Stolas makes the deal there is no sense that he believed Blitzo was all that interested in him. His tone when he says “when isn’t it a bad time Blitzy?” is playful and almost pouting in its delivery, and the rest of his line reads when reminding Blitzo he’s doing him a favor by allowing him to use the book are far more condescending in his delivery. Nothing about it suggests that he feels let down or upset at Blitzo avoiding him, more that he’s just playfully poking at Blitzo by drawing out just straight up saying why he’s calling – he effectively toys with him, setting up how he will treat Blitzo for the vast majority of the first season.

And most importantly, Stolas’ first instinct is to propose a quid pro quo deal. It makes no sense to believe Stolas thought Blitzo was genuinely interested in him if he immediately resorts to making a deal with Blitzo. If someone believed a person was genuinely interested in them, they would have no reason to propose a transactional arrangement as their first port of call – he doesn’t even try to suggest something more casual or romantic in S1E1 (the thing his Instagram self did). There’s no reason to think Stolas is so sheltered that he would think a quid pro quo deal is a normal thing to suggest – he watches telenovelas and knows what a date is, after all.

Season 2 meanwhile suggests that Stolas thought Blitzo was interested in him after their one night stand. This doesn’t make sense on its face also, because the first thing Blitzo does after the one night stand is steal Stolas’ book and ghost him, as implied by Stolas saying that it’s always a bad time when he calls – assuming Blitzo was not always in danger when he called, it certainly suggests he was ducking Stolas’ calls on purpose.

I can only speak for myself, of course, but if I were in a situation where I had an impulsive one night stand with someone only to wake up and discover they had stolen some of my property and were avoiding my calls, my assumption would not be that they had any real long-standing romantic interest in me.

The theft is the main thing Blitzo unambiguously does wrong to Stolas and yet the plot refuses to discuss it outside of stray references to it. If it were to talk about the initial theft openly, it would be difficult to avoid creating dissonance when Stolas behaves as though he thought their arrangement meant something more the entire time even when he had plenty of reason to believe Blitzo’s primary motivation was maintaining access to the book (something that S1E1 Stolas knew full well when he proposed the deal in the first place).

All of this is to say that season one had a mostly comprehensible story where Stolas behaved in an understandable manner – his one night with Blitzo was an exciting event in his dull life that immediately gave him an appetite for more of the same. He allowed Blitzo to use his book, then suggested terms to get him what he wanted: more sex with Blitzo, whether Blitzo wanted it or not. Over the course of season one, small hints particularly in S1E5 and S1E6 suggest Stolas’ lustful attitude begins to become more romantic towards Blitzo, just in time for him to get a stark reminder that how he’s treated Blitzo throughout the season has given Blitzo the justifiable impression that Stolas has no genuine interest in anything outside of sex in S1E7. Stolas’ sudden shift to being in total puppy love with Blitzo is jarring, but it’s at least something resembling workable linear progression.

The retcons meanwhile make all of this a nightmare to unpick. Stolas of S2E1 now always had a crush on Blitzo, acting as though he thought Blitzo wanted him after they had a one night stand and then Blitzo avoided him until Stolas locked him, inexplicably, into a sex deal. Stolas of S2E1 apparently wilfully ignored Blitzo stealing from him, ghosting him, continually rebuffing his advances, getting annoyed by his demeaning treatment and nicknames and acted like it was a shock after using a quid pro quo deal to get sex that Blitzo would tell him that he thought there was only sex between them.

A plot beat in S2E1 is perhaps most emblematic of this: near the end of the episode Stolas pulls out his phone and looks at pictures of Blitzo, who is frowning in all of them. Stolas looks sad, as though this is the very first time he’s even noticed the very obvious issue that Blitzo has not particularly enjoyed being around him.

Again, I want to be clear - the issue is not that Stolas is flawed, not by itself. The issue is that the show has written him to be too delusional and dense to function and yet the writers appear unaware that this is what they have done. The writing treats the retcons of Stolas always being a tortured romantic as if it was always the reality of the show, and then further suggests that Stolas’ perspective on things – no matter how little logic that perspective is grounded in – is the valid one that the viewers should sympathize with.

This is once again a waste of potential – a character as lost in fantasy as Stolas appears due to the retcons in S2E1 getting a hard reality check could be interesting to watch, but the flaws in Stolas’ beliefs about the world are never highlighted, let alone interrogated – the most we get is him pointing out he gave up his life for a fantasy in S2E12, but this doesn’t inform much of how he behaves for the rest of the episode. It remains to be seen if season three will actually deconstruct how much Stolas projected his fantasies onto Blitzo, especially given the way he excoriated him for not believing Stolas’ love was genuine in S2E9.

But I have my doubts – as we’ll see in future episodes in this case study, the show actively favors Stolas’ view as the ‘true’ perspective of events that the viewers should favor, too; no matter how little sense it makes .

Case Study: Western Energy

Watching the show in the second season for me was an experience of continually finding a new low, a new episode that would knock the floor out on the previous one in terms of flaws that were immediately obvious.

The Circus was the first time I felt I would be happy to quit the show, but I at least understood what the writers were trying to do. Western Energy, by comparison, does not need to be an episode at all - the entire thing could be one single scene.

For a quick synopsis/reminder, S2E4 opens with Stolas and Stella discussing the settlement for the never-ending godforsaken divorce plotline. Striker shows up and captures Stolas, Stolas calls Blitzo for help but he’s busy taking Loona to get an important “Hellbies” vaccination so he sends M&M in his stead, Striker tortures Stolas a bit before Stella calls him to call it off because her brother reminds her she will get none of Stolas’ wealth if he dies because it will go to Via, M&M arrive and save Stolas, take him to hospital, Stolas gets sad when Blitzo doesn’t text back a second time after sending well wishes, roll credits.

None of this needed to be an entire episode. Stella has already tried and failed to have Striker kill Stolas once; the episode could have easily opened on her and Andrealphus discussing this instead and saved everyone twenty minutes and having to watch kind of gratuitous torture. (Side note, my least favorite trope is probably the ‘just kill him already’ and that definitely applies to this situation – why didn’t Striker just get on with it?)

However, there is one reason for this episode existing: it has to insert another retcon to set up something later. And the episode it’s trying to retcon is S1E5.

Tangent: The Harvest Moon retcon

Harvest Moon is the first time we get to see Blitzo and Stolas talking post a Full Moon meetup. It’s the kind of scene later season 1 / early season 2 desperately needed to capitalize on if it was going to make it feel like there was any kind of genuine connection between the two, but since this one happens before episode 7 Stolas is still written to be primarily sex obsessed with a tendency to demean Blitzo by talking down to him and tugging on his cheek, even using his horn to put out a cigarette.

Anyway, in the background of the main A plot of the Pain Games and Moxxie feeling upstaged by Striker is a consistent thread of Stolas ruining what was a kind gesture of inviting IMP to the Harvest Moon festival by behaving as he usually does. First he sexualizes Blitzo in front of a crowd, then he ruins Blitzo’s moment of triumph as one of the victors of the Pain Games by mispronouncing his name, something which he continues to do even after Blitzo harshly reprimands him for it.

This all culminates in a moment where Striker attempts to recruit Blitzo into killing Stolas with him, a moment that only works because Striker is dead on about how Stolas has treated Blitzo all season: as his plaything (a word Stolas uses in the very next episode) and therefore there is legitimate dramatic tension around whether or not Blitzo will accept the proposal. When Blitzo says yes, for that one moment the entire nature of the show is turned on its head.

And crucially, Striker is trying to talk Blitzo into killing Stolas. Everyone in the episode is on the same page about what the angelic weapon will do – Striker and Moxxie both talk about it as a weapon that can ‘kill demon royalty’ and when Blitzo steps in he accuses Striker of ‘trying to off [his] easiest ticket to the human world behind [his] back’. If anyone believed angelic weapons only injure and not kill, the entire climax of the episode becomes pointless because no one would need to stop Striker at all and Striker himself wouldn’t be pitching Blitzo on ‘killing Overlords’.

The point I’m getting at here is that the writers have crafted an episode where Blitzo’s demeaning treatment by Stolas has reached a point where he legitimately considered joining Striker in assassinating him – when Striker delivers his speech about how Blitzo is struggling to run a business in a rigged game and he’s better than being forced to sexually service a Goetia just to keep it going, nothing in Blitzo’s facial animation suggests he’s just acting: the lighting and audio design of the scene all contribute to the feeling that Striker’s words are cutting deep and exposing a vulnerability Blitzo has been trying to ignore. He even describes Striker’s pitch about killing ‘the one who treats him like a plaything’ as ‘kind of hot’ - he’s excited by the idea of killing Stolas!

Blitzo doesn’t go through with it and a fight breaks out. We don’t get an answer as to why he turns Striker down – maybe because he hurt M&M, maybe because Blitzo fears what will become of his business or the consequences – but there is nothing in the text to suggest Blitzo stops him out of any genuine care for Stolas himself. Quite the opposite, in fact; this episode suggests he was so done with how Stolas was treating him that he not only skipped the Harvest Moon ceremony to avoid him but was outright tempted to kill him (and then never told him about the assassin once the ceremony was over).

This is a massive problem for a Stolas/Blitzo endgame.

The writers want to put Stolas and Blitzo together, but they don’t want to criticize Stolas for anything he’s done and they don’t want to do the hard work of making the relationship develop organically. They certainly don’t want to acknowledge that Blitzo felt so demeaned and fed up with being Stolas’ sex toy that he legitimately considered taking the risk of killing a demon prince.

So the Harvest Moon scene has to be retconned, even though it makes the story no longer make sense. The writers do this in two stages: first they lay the groundwork in S2E4. When Stolas is nearly killed by Striker at the end of the episode Blitzo gives a surprised ‘He can get hurt?’ as though this is news to him. This makes no sense since he already knew from Harvest Moon what angelic weapons could do and already saw Striker using them, but the writers have to take this route so they can pay it off later. Now when the reveal that Blitzo knew Striker was trying to assassinate him due to a failed prior attempt comes up, Blitzo’s reasoning is that he didn’t think Stolas could be really hurt because he’s immortal.

This is a blatant retcon. Blitzo already knew demon royalty could be killed by angelic weapons; that’s how everyone involved refers to what Striker is attempting to do in Harvest Moon. He has no reason not to think Striker wouldn’t have blessed weapons again – Stolas outright tells him he’s bound with blessed rope. His “I figured you’d be fine because you’re just that powerful” makes no sense given how he acted in prior episodes and the surrounding context.

But the writers commit to adding this plothole in because they need to whitewash over the fact that Blitzo hated Stolas so much that at one point he was very much tempted to kill him. And since the writers cannot allow Blitzo to have ever had negative feelings about Stolas that aren’t framed as the result of his own cynicism and self esteem issues, they have to commit to this explanation even when it actively hurts the writing and worldbuilding of their own show.

And that is the only reason this episode needs to exist at all.

Tangent: Tone issues

I want to tangent off my tangent to highlight an issue with this episode specifically: it has a massive tone problem.

The show has struggled with tone issues before – it first crops up most noticeably in S2E1, during the scene where Blitzo and Stolas sleep together for the first time. I’d recommend watching Hezu Neutral’s video on this one, but suffice it to say that this scene is very back and forth with its dialogue and incredibly awkward to watch.

There are other examples of this – the infamous one in S2E3 mentioned earlier, for example – but to me S2E4 is the worst for this by far.

Nothing about the way the characters act – primarily Stolas – feels understandable or consistent, likely because the writers were determined to have the plot play out in one specific way and couldn’t find a natural way to get there.

It begins when Striker first takes a shot at Stolas. Stolas dodges, doesn’t use his eye powers to turn Striker to stone despite him being in eye contact distance or his larger demon form to fight back. Noticeably the camera focuses on Stella at this point as she flashes Stolas a very obvious evil grin that basically confirms she is responsible for someone trying to shoot at Stolas.

Just to reiterate: Stolas knows at this point Stella hired the hitman. He should know the demon shooting at him is not after him for ransom purposes and his life is in danger.

Yet when Striker catches him with the blessed rope – another hacky plot device that exists just to conveniently de power Stolas so a torture and rescue plotline can go ahead – Stolas reacts with a placid “Oh dear, this is worrisome.”

For some reason that makes no sense whatsoever, Stolas takes this turn of events completely casually. He’s bound with blessed rope and helpless, not play acting helplessness like he did in S1E2 – the situation is a little more serious than his reaction would suggest.

This casual attitude extends to his call for help to Blitzo – his tone over the phone completely lacks urgency; he’s as wordy as ever and sounds more like he’s excited about the idea of getting Blitzo to play his knight in shining armor like his fantasies again (which doesn’t help when the show wants us to judge Blitzo super hard for not jumping to help Stolas later). It takes Striker destroying his phone for Stolas to say “Am I in danger right now?”

Even though he should have known full well that he is, in fact, in danger right now.

My issue here is not that the show wants to make jokes or be quippy. It’s that the characters have to stop making sense for all of this to happen.

It doesn’t get better as the episode goes on, because Stolas goes back to not taking things seriously – a bunch of imps provide Striker theme music, which annoys him, and Stolas just enjoys the song in the background and quips about how one would go about getting their own theme music.

It’s not until Striker has Stolas tied to a train track (more subtle Saturday morning cartoon villain stuff – no it doesn’t get less obvious when you lampshade it, guys) that the episode decides it’s time to take any of the situation seriously. It expects the viewer to just be able to switch gears when it’s time to take things seriously and Striker stabs Stolas a bunch of times (but not too much, because then they couldn’t make sex jokes in the middle of the unpleasant torture scene).

None of this is helped by the action scene that follows immediately after – the episode has M&M fighting Striker to diegetic music playing in the scene on the radio, but the issue creeps in again when the writers keep cutting to the B plot with Blitzo and Loona. It’s not uncommon to cut between dramatic moments - Star Wars had a format of cutting between triple jeopardy - but the problem is that the stakes of one scenario are far more dramatic than the other.

One is a grudge match fight to the death with not only Stolas’ life on the line, but M&M’s too.

The other is a doctor and Blitzo trying to successfully get an uncooperative Loona to get the shot she needs – no one is in immediate danger of death and it’s partially a comedy sequence given Blitzo and the doctor throw the needle back and forth, which causes even more dissonance.

Not helping all this is the mood killing music playing on the stereo through most of the whole thing: first bubblegum pop, then a country song.

The whole thing is so back and forth that it made it hard for me to invest in the drama by the time the episode finally decided it wanted to take things seriously, which only became more frustrating when Stella called Striker on the phone to let him and the viewers know the events of the entire episode – sans frustrating retcon – were a pointless waste of time.

Case Study: Apology Tour

Apology Tour is the funhouse mirror of The Circus, and by my measure it is the single most unpleasant episode of the show; worse even than the harsher tone that episodes like S2E2 have.

I call it the funhouse mirror of The Circus because it has essentially the opposite goal. Where The Circus exists to lionize and excuse Stolas, Apology Tour exists to demonize (heh) Blitzo to an excessive degree.

I want to stop and give a disclaimer here that should be obvious but is probably worth saying anyway: the problem is not that the plot holds Blitzo to account for hurting people. This was a good and necessary plotline, the only one that made sense for what the show was setting up for Blitzo and all the backstory that went with him.

The issue here is proximity, scale and framing.

First, proximity – this episode of Blitzo really reckoning with damage he’s done happens in the context of his falling out with Stolas. The show is basically directly conflating the two as though they’re the same thing – the viewer is encouraged not to look at the very unique circumstances between Stolas and Blitzo but instead to see this fallout as just one more in a pattern of Blitzo hurting people and, as Stolas puts it, “crushing other’s feelings”. When Stolas comments that he’s disturbed Blitzo has enough people hating him to throw an entire party over it, then goes to the party and sees the number of attendees for himself, the point is clear: Blitzo is the deeply flawed individual with a lot of wreckage in his wake and Stolas being in their proximity is not him providing himself with an excuse not to think about the problems he caused, but him viewing the roster of other people left broken hearted by him.

Secondly, scale. The show increasing the trail of people Blitzo has hurt to be enough to fill an entire party is a bad move for multiple narrative reasons. Besides the blatantly obvious attempt to make Blitzo unambiguously the bad guy in the fallout between him and Stolas, there’s other obvious issues with this approach. To begin with, it’s much less understandable from a viewer’s perspective.

Originally the list of people Blitzo hurt in his past was well-defined in his hallucination sequence in S1E6, then amended in season two to include essentially three people: Barbie, Fizzarolli and Verosika. Each of them represent a different part of Blitzo’s life who he has hurt and then lost contact with - Barbie is his sister and family, Fizzarolli his childhood friend and the first love Blitzo admired and loved but never got the chance to admit it and Verosika his girlfriend who represents his tendency to sabotage intimate relationships.

Fizz and Barbie have a bit too much overlap in that the event that caused them to fall out with Blitzo was likely the same one – the circus fire – but on the whole it’s an effective setup for covering all the areas of Blitzo’s life where he’s burnt bridges. The viewer doesn’t have all the details for why they’re angry with Blitzo by the end of the second season (again, Barbie is by and large sidelined) but there’s enough to infer what happened and to know both that Blitzo should be the one to make amends and how he could do it.

But increasing the amount of people angry with Blitzo to an entire party’s worth results in a largely faceless mass of melodrama where the viewer is just left to intuit what happened and assume Blitzo was in the wrong in every single instance. For one thing it’s hard to have sympathy for characters when we have no idea who they are, but worse than that it’s implied that most of the people at the party had dated Blitzo at some point in time.

This means the viewer is supposed to believe that Blitzo had dated a party full of people but somehow managed to hurt all of them badly enough that they have to attend an anti-Blitzo party yearly to cope, with some very melodramatic shots of party goers drinking on the stairs to cope or breaking down in tears after playing party games.

To have dated that many people, Blitzo can’t have had particularly deep relationship with many of them, especially given he is running a business and looking after Loona for at least some of that time and yet they’re all attending an anti-Blitzo party like he’s deeply scarred them in order to support each other and the viewer is expected to take their side.

This becomes even more ridiculous given that the show consistently writes Hell as a place where a lot of the background characters are assholes by default, yet there’s little idea of what Blitzo did that was significantly worse than the general way Hellborns usually behave (and again, bad enough to drive demons to drink over it). Worse still, some of the offhand things Blitzo apologizes before seem no worse than the kind of asshole behavior most of the cast and background characters get up to in any normal episode of the show, but these break ups are treated like something they all needed a support group over.

The only real answer the show provides is that most of the people at the party are exes and given that he later yells “sorry for not falling heading over heels for [Verosika], or that guy or anybody else” and that Verosika confirms he bailed on her after she told him she loved him (and the conversation at the top of the episode where Blitzo brags no one could tie him down and “relationships are boring”), it’s likely most of the exes wanted a real relationship whereas Blitzo was determined to keep things casual.

This is consistent with Blitzo’s fear of intimacy in prior episodes, but everyone at the party being such anonymous figures makes this feel less like a pattern on Blitzo’s end and more like they are being just as unreasonable as Blitzo, if not more – did all of them immediately demand a serious relationship after only a short time together and then never forgive him for saying no? That’s hardly reasonable or sympathetic on their end.

More importantly, Blitzo is not obliged to have a serious relationship with someone just because they want that and we’re given no context to believe he ever made any of the people at the party believe he wanted something more than that – the only person it’s shown that he had dated for any length of time is Verosika. He’s kind of right that it’s ridiculous to treat him like the bad guy for the sin of not wanting a committed relationship.

Again, the only person we have a reason to believe Blitzo should owe an apology to is Verosika, because not only did he not handle her saying ‘I love you’ particularly well, he stole her credit card and maxed it out, presumably as a pretext to force a breakup. But for everyone else at the party it comes across like Blitzo had a one night stand with most of them or engaged in petty asshole behavior not particularly remarkable with the way Hell is written, but was excoriated by everyone involved for not settling down.

It’s possible to think the party being actually kind of an unreasonable reaction is the intended reading – the party is called “childish” and “petty” by Stolas and has attendees like one-off character Dennis – but the latter half of the episode puts paid to that notion. In this episode Verosika is framed as the voice of reason, the same way that Fizzarolli was in S2E6. While she has a point that Blitzo did hurt her and in her case he did owe her a proper explanation if he wasn’t ready for a serious relationship, the episode also positions her assertion that her parties are actually support groups as the correct one, as the episode shows Blitzo looking around at the party goers with regret while they look out for each or drown their sorrows. Even Stolas, who still calls the whole thing stupid, defends the party on the notion that it proves how much everyone cared about Blitzo.

This almost conservative lionisation of committed monogamy as the only correct way to live is likely not what the writers were intending. This storyline was intended as a continuation of the ongoing plotline about Blitzo being afraid to love people, pushing them away before they can choose to leave him because he’s assumed it will hurt less while proving to himself what he already thinks is true – that he’s unlovable. We’re supposed to see the people at the party as an extension of this, just a long line of people who all did care about Blitzo but who he shut out due to his own insecurities.

And again, this would normally be fine – having a string of skeletons in the closet can be a good way of showing instead of telling that a character has a destructive habit – but S2E9 takes it to such comical levels that it becomes impossible to take seriously. It also feels like something of a rewrite of Blitzo’s character – for him to have hurt that many people that deeply suggests he’s been a much crueller person offscreen than what the show had suggested until now. Putting it simply, even if Stolas hadn’t been in this episode it would still have been massively over the top and flawed for what it’s trying to achieve.

This episode could have kept things mostly consistent with prior characterization, but it’s a matter of framing. The party is framed like not only a wakeup call for Blitzo, but a very blunt indicator to the viewer that if Stolas caused any issues at all that led to the fallout, they were far more minor by comparison, to the point they basically don’t matter or don’t count.

And that’s as good a lead in as any to talk about the difference between what has been told and what has been shown, and bring back the Harvest Moon tangent from earlier.

Paying off bad retcons: why the show introduced plot holes in Western Energy

Now we’ve laid the groundwork about the issues around Blitzo in this episode, we can shift focus towards Stolas.

The other main purpose of the episode is to address the fallout of the Full Moon deal from the night before.

To give a quick recap of that scene: Blitzo turns up assuming everything is business as usual, Stolas asks for the book back, Blitzo panics, Stolas gives him the crystal along with a speech about he’s no longer obliged to sleep with Stolas and how he wants Blitzo to stay with him because he wants to and not because he has to. Blitzo assumes this is more roleplay on his part and Stolas shuts him down, taking this as both a rejection and a goodbye. He expresses disbelief that Blitzo would assume it is all about sex before Blitzo blows up at Stolas dropping all this on him, demanding a minute to think, saying royal demons think they can play with imps feelings because they’re smaller than then capping it off by calling him an asshole. Stolas reacts with disbelief that Blitzo thinks so low of him before using magic to throw him out of the house.

At the time of airing some of the fandom believed that the show was intending this to be a ‘both sides are in the wrong’ situation, with the creators on socials suggesting this was the case.

But there were already warning signs that the show could not bear to have Stolas criticized meaningfully – the ominous lighting and Blitzo immediately trying to apologize were one, but the greater one was the payoff of the retcon setup in S2E4.

As mentioned previously, S2E4 introduced the plot hole that Blitzo believed Stolas could not be injured or killed. S2E6 doubles down on the idea that the issue is that Blitzo simply believes Stolas is fundamentally above him, telling Fizz that royal demons view sleeping with the lower classes as a novelty.

All of this retcons two things into existence: Blitzo was never willing to go along with killing Stolas in S1E5 (even when he was very clearly considering it) and Blitzo’s problems are not because of anything Stolas himself has done, the writing instead shifting to suggest Blitzo simply has hang-ups about royal demons (“you royal fucks”, not “you, Stolas”) in general.

There is also a third thing that S2E6 introduces that should be mentioned: it is now backfilled that Stolas has been treating Blitzo nicely, having had friendly phone calls where he wants to know about Blitzo’s day, liking his posts and laughing at his calls… just over there, offscreen. This is unnatural telling and not showing of information, but it’s added because to assert that Stolas is definitely not the problem. And we the viewer don’t need to see it, despite how much this change would actually sell the idea that Stolas has changed.

Anyway, all of this is intended to free the show from discussing the countless examples Blitzo could use to justify why he does not trust Stolas in particular and instead paint the issue as entirely the result of his insecurities.

And all of this results in what’s probably the most frustrating and awful conversation in the entire show.

S2E9 opens with Blitzo climbing over Stolas’ wall to talk to him, seemingly attempting to reinstate the status quo despite how much he hated it for most of season one. Because the writers have done so little to make the viewer understand what Blitzo even likes about Stolas, this plot beat feels both implausible and an attempt to start the episode off from a footing where Blitzo is already the aggressor being inappropriate who needs to be humbled and apologize.

But it gets worse as the conversation goes on.

When Blitzo kind of understandably points out he and Stolas don’t do words, they do sex, Stolas shoots him a very offended look as though this is a completely out of pocket thing for him to say. We’re supposed to side with Stolas here, because S2E6 made it clear Stolas has been trying very hard to treat Blitzo better – just over there, just offscreen, and that’s supposed to be enough to change the viewer’s impression of their “relationship”.

The conversation continues with Stolas using the anti-Blitzo party to change the subject onto how Blitzo must be a terrible person to have so many exes, Blitzo points out he didn’t want to be tied down, etc etc, we’ve discussed this part.

When Blitzo again reiterates he’s only there to suggest they have no strings attached sex, the most frustrating part of the episode begins.

When Stolas says he’s uncomfortable at how he’s speaking to him, Blitzo retorts that Stolas “get[s] off to getting plowed by people you look down on”. Stolas of course insists he doesn’t look down on Blitzo, and this goes uncontested.

Along with Stolas later saying Blitzo was just waiting for him play into the act of being the prince who thinks he’s so much better than Blitzo, this is the writers attempting to cash in on the retcons they’ve set up earlier. They expect the viewers to overlook the numerous examples of Stolas looking down on Blitzo that he’s never been held to task for, because they think they’ve already done enough to explain that away through bad retcons and telling the viewer rather than showing them that Stolas is totally treating Blitzo better now – just over there, just offscreen.

This happens again later on in the conversation – the show attempts to pay off the “he can get hurt?” moment by having Blitzo reveal that he didn’t tell Stolas about the assassination attempt in S1E5 because he thought Stolas was immortal and immune to harm. This is, again, a retcon that makes no sense, but this plot hole has to exist to do the double duty of explaining away any implication that Blitzo once hated Stolas so much he was sorely tempted by Striker to put a hole in his head, and to once again make Blitzo look bad for not telling Stolas about it.

The coda to all of this, of course, is Blitzo going on a rant that 100% confirms that the issues are entirely his – he talks about how his insecurities result in him hurting anyone he could care about, making it clear once again and as heavy-handedly as humanly possible that the only issues standing in the way of him and Stolas are all Blitzo’s. His bitter resolution to apologize to “everyone but [Stolas]” is therefore not supposed to be a triumphant moment after all the mistreatment he endured, it’s a last moment of stubbornness that the end of the episode has him overcome when he does apologize to Stolas, once again reiterating that his issue is just that Stolas is a prince and he couldn’t see how he could possibly care about an imp.

The framing comes in once again to make it very clear that this is not a ‘both sides are in the wrong’ type scenario, not even close. The music warns Blitzo “don’t touch that pretty thing” as Stolas cries, and Stolas is bathed in a golden light as Blitzo leaves the party. It’s not exactly subtle that the viewer is supposed to feel that Blitzo has just fumbled a good thing here, even though Stolas has done less than nothing to show he cares about Blitzo’s feelings.

Speaking of which.

Expectations vs Reality: A lack of empathy

I’ve spoken about the retcons the episode uses to place Blitzo as in the wrong here and the victim of his own insecurities, but I’ve kind of glossed over the sheer dissonance involved.

You’ve probably already surmised what some of it is – I covered most of it in the “problem the show set up for itself” section - so it might be hard to believe that we’re still not done.

The show has a fundamental issue in that the character it thinks they have written with Stolas and who they’ve actually written are fundamentally different from one another.

The show wants to frame Stolas as a kind demon who just came on a bit too strong and thought Blitzo was mutually interested in him, a good father who has done his best for his daughter even if he struggles to keep things together after the divorce. He is someone who just wants to be loved, who was cruelly rejected by Blitzo after the imp projected all his insecurities onto him. He’s a little insensitive and impulsive sometimes, but that’s his only real flaw.

What the show has written is a selfish prince who trapped Blitzo into a coercive sexual transaction, ignored his boundaries and demeaned him for the majority of the first season. He’s less insensitive and more completely uncaring about other’s feelings until he’s forced to deal with it, such as at the end of S1E2 and S1E7. He neglects his daughter multiple times for his own needs and physically abuses his butler – a butler who is an imp just like Blitzo.

More dissonant than all this though – the classism, the sexually obsessive treatment – is that Stolas is written to be incredibly uncaring.

As a side effect of the writers not allowing Stolas to ever be in the wrong once season two begins, he develops a habit of only ever momentarily considering he’s in the wrong as far as his relationship with Blitzo goes, before immediately blaming the other party.

After Blitzo tells him that the only thing between them is sex because Stolas makes that really clear all the time, we see Stolas had sent the following text in S2E4: “I’m sorry if anything I said or did may have offended you tonight”.

Stolas responds to being told by Blitzo in plain English in S1E7 that he feels that Stolas treats him like a sex object, all the time, with a text that not only ignores what Blitzo was angry at him for and front loads it with a non-committal “I’m sorry if I did something you didn’t like”, rather than “I’m sorry for doing the thing you said you didn’t like”. This refusal to address the actual issue continues in the next message, where Stolas is aware enough to recognize Blitzo seemed upset, but writes off the entire thing despite previously having a clear statement from Blitzo about what was making him upset.

This back and forth over whether Stolas understands what he did wrong continues in the text messages.

Stolas has at least learnt to try and take the pressure off Blitzo by telling him he can just relax, he doesn’t have to visit, etc etc., but this is still happening within the context of the transaction.

As far as Blitzo knows, the agreement is still in place, which he reminds Stolas of by pointing out “It’s your night”. This makes it questionable that Stolas tells Blitzo things like “But I would like to see you.” If he had truly realized that he had used the Full Moon deal and Blitzo’s life being in danger to coerce him into sex, one would expect the tone to be less sheepish and more definite – you’d think the realization would be horrifying to him, even. But Stolas doesn’t tell Blitzo outright not to come, instead sending mixed messages because he essentially still wants Blitzo and even if he’s now uncomfortable using the book to get sex out of Blitzo, he doesn’t mind using it to encourage Blitzo to spend time with him despite the unequal foundation being no different.

He also knows that Blitzo is still under the impression that the agreement is fundamentally about sex, which opens up its own issues. If Stolas invited him over and Blitzo expected Stolas wanted sex even if he was ambivalent or not into it that day, would Stolas still be fine sleeping with Blitzo even though the arrangement it’s happening in the context of is still in place?

All of this becomes outright frustrating when S2E8 happens and Stolas regresses right back to not seeming to understand the issue at all. He gives a speech about how the Full Moon deal and the transactional deal is wrong in general, but doesn’t take any responsibility or directly say “I was wrong to…” or “I’m sorry for…” anything that happened, even though he is the one who came up with the idea in the first place. It’s implied he and Blitzo weren’t doing full moon meet ups for most of season two, so Stolas had seemingly at least a few months to think about exactly what he wanted to say but he spends his speech building up to confessing to Blitzo right away, not trying to apologize or giving Blitzo space if he needs it.

This is despite the fact that he opens the episode singing “If [Blitzo]’s only here as a prisoner, what kind of monster does that make me?”. If he was genuinely worried that Blitzo was only putting up with the arrangement for the sake of the book (which he certainly was in season one) and that he had behaved monstrously and been his jailer who forced Blitzo to sleep with him, why does none of that insight reflect in his conversation with Blitzo; the place where it actually matters? Why does Stolas act surprised and like Blitzo’s angry reaction is coming out of nowhere, like he’s suddenly forgotten what he was trying to come to terms with that same morning?

To make matters worse, Blitzo outright begs Stolas that he will do anything to be able to keep using the book. And yet despite his single moment of self-reflection that morning, Stolas doesn’t notice what this – or Blitzo’s worrying comment in S2E9 about “earning his way to Earth” - implies about the kind of power he held over the imp in the arrangement.

And yet when Blitzo doesn’t catch on quick enough even though he’s been used to the arrangement being sexual this entire time and had no warning Stolas was going to spring this on him, Stolas takes this poorly. He acts like it’s an insult to him that Blitzo made it all about sex with no regard to why he would have that idea, then when Blitzo once again expresses that he feels like he’s been mistreated (as vaguely as possible, of course, so the writers can make it all about Blitzo’s insecurities later) Stolas immediately responds in what I can describe is a pretty manipulative way.

He tells Blitzo he thinks so highly of him, and had no idea that Blitzo thought so low of him.

This is, pardon my French, a pretty big blunder of a line.

Stolas has plenty of reason to already know Blitzo thinks poorly of him – the photos on his phone in S2E1, Blitzo telling him to his face he feels Stolas spent all of season one treating him like a sex object in S1E8, the numerous times Blitzo look repulsed or annoyed by him in season one, the lack of interest in Blitzo’s text replies, Blitzo mentioning outright skipping Full Moon meet ups the moment Stolas gave him the option to in S2E8, and so forth.

I understand Blitzo’s response is harsh here, and no one likes being yelled at. I don’t blame Stolas for getting upset – though I don’t think Blitzo raising his voice is an excuse for Stolas to shut his ears and refuse to listen, especially when Blitzo tried being as blunt and forthright as possible beforehand, especially in season one, and this never worked. If every civil and straightforward attempt someone has made to voice a problem has been ignored (especially when that problem involves sexual harassment), I personally don’t blame them for resorting to screaming to be heard.

What I do take issue with is that the writers have him immediately turn the focus of the conversations from Blitzo’s feelings to his own. The only thing that matters to him is not that Blitzo is expressing how Stolas has made him feel, or that this is the second time Blitzo has told him in the bluntest way possible that he doesn’t like the way Stolas has treated him.

But because the writers want to portray this moment not as “Stolas makes an effort but is putting a band aid on a problem and then blaming Blitzo for assuming it’s a sex thing like it had been for a whole season” and as “Blitzo’s own insecurities cause him to ruin a nice gesture then take it way too far when he yells at Stolas over it”, Stolas comes off looking like he’s incapable of considering that he’s done anything wrong, or that even if he did consider that it doesn’t matter because Blitzo telling him about it hurt his feelings.

The authorial intent that Stolas is not remotely in the wrong is all over the next episode, which takes this unintended characteristic of Stolas’ and cranks it all the way up to eleven.

Stolas wanting space to cool off is understandable, but the morning after S2E8 he appears to have done no self-reflection whatsoever. He focuses only on his feelings and crucially when Blitzo mentions Stolas looking down on him, he not only does not ask why Blitzo feels this way but outright denies it entirely, going as far as to change topic entirely by comparing Blitzo to Striker.

Stolas shows no interest in Blitzo’s feelings, if those feelings will make him feel bad.

The next comment Stolas makes is honestly an incredible one – outside of the way he conducts himself in the Full Moon it’s probably his single worst lines of dialogue in the entire show and I’m not kidding. And he gets very little pushback for any of it (we’ll get into that later – don’t worry, I’m not done with this bit in particular).

So what happens is Stolas gets on Blitzo’s case and claims he couldn’t be bothered to come help him in S2E4. Besides that Blitzo sent M&M to save him, Blitzo told him outright that he was taking his daughter to the doctor.

Stolas, despite having a daughter himself, is written to be so lacking in empathy for the idea that Blitzo should have a life of his own that he criticizes him for taking his daughter to the doctor.

There’s no real way I can rephrase that to get the point across better – if you don’t see the issue there I’d suggest never getting into a relationship with anyone who already has a child of their own; it will not end well.

The insult to injury here is that Stolas ends this scene by asking Blitzo “do you feel any kind of remorse for what you do? Have you ever even apologized once in your life?”

This line is both an impressive example of the show forgetting its own history and incredibly rich coming from Stolas of all people.

To begin with, Stolas should know full well that Blitzo has apologized, multiple times because a couple of those times were to him.

In S1E8 when Blitzo thinks Stolas is trying to get him inside his house to sleep with him and tells him Stolas treats him like a sex object, he finishes with “But I can’t do it tonight… I’m sorry.” (Just to make that really clear, Blitzo is apologizing for not wanting to have sex with Stolas.)

Likewise in S2E4 when Stolas calls and asks for help Blitzo responds with “I can’t today, I’m sorry”.

In terms of apologies not to Stolas, the prince was also present for Blitzo apologizing effusively to Loona at the end of S2E2.

By comparison as we’ve covered, Stolas has not once given a genuine apology to Blitzo. His response after Ozzie’s is “I’m sorry if I did something”, ignoring what Blitzo told him directly was the issue and his speech at the ending of the Full Moon deal ducks responsibility entirely.

Blitzo has almost cried or had tears in his eyes multiple times in front of Stolas, but never once do we get to see Stolas show him any concern or empathy. Even his panic attack in S2E2 was met with Stolas reiterating how good Blitzo is in bed, yet again.

All of this would be aggravating enough, but the episode actually expects the viewer to take the idea that Blitzo is incapable of recognizing when he’s done wrong and runs with it, acting like he’s now bad at saying sorry by having him give insincere apologies to members of the rogue’s gallery of previous episodes for part of the runtime.

Stolas, by comparison, does not once say ‘I’m sorry’ in the entire episode.

To make all this worse, Stolas attends the anti-Blitzo party he’d spent the opening of the episode insisting was petty and dumb (and continues calling it petty and dumb while getting the benefit of Verosika’s hospitality). This is an especially cruel thing to do because, in another dark mirror of The Circus, Stolas should know what it’s like to be like being the subject of a party designed to mock you, given that’s what Stella’s “Still Not Divorced” party was. And yet the episode isn’t self aware enough to point this out, instead giving the impression that throwing a party like that is only bad when the target of the mockery is Stolas.

Moving on, Stolas gets up on stage and sings a song calling Blitzo a “motherfucker”. This is a mean thing to do to someone he claims to love by itself, but the song lyrics themselves make things worse.

Stolas openly admits in the song that “I don’t think you meant to hurt me/because I don’t think it meant a thing at all”. He believes the arrangement was just an arrangement to Blitzo – again, an arrangement Stolas came up with and pressured him into – yet still blames Blitzo for not living up to his own delusional reading of the situation. Stolas continues implying that he’s at fault in some of the other lyrics, but the most frustrating of all is the break in the middle:

But maybe it's all on me
For missin' every sign and every glance
And every turn

[…]

Maybe there's somethin' here for us to glean
For you to teach, and me to try to learn

[…]

What if I came on too strong? What if I read this all wrong?

Much like the repeated character arcs, this is a pattern with Stolas at this point. As listed above, he’s had multiple signs that something is wrong in his arrangement with Blitzo, including Blitzo telling him bluntly when he doesn’t like something in episodes like S1E2 and S1E5, and he’s still wondering what exactly the problem is.

He somehow missed all the signs, despite having pictures on his phone of Blitzo looking miserable back in S2E1 and Blitzo either looking annoyed or outright glaring at him in multiple episodes.

He thinks that maybe there’s something for him to learn after Blitzo has expressed his feelings twice and Stolas still doesn’t understand that maybe that has something to do with what the problem is.

He thinks that maybe he came on too strong and read things all wrong when Blitzo told him multiple times in S1E2 in the plainest way possible that he was there to work, not to be flirted with and Stolas’ belief that Blitzo was into him was founded on his own delusions in the first place.

Again, a character lacking empathy or the ability to self-reflect is not a bad thing on its own, as long as the writers understand that’s what they’ve written. Instead they give Stolas a comical lack of introspective skills and expect the audience to think it’s reasonable when he blames Blitzo for not behaving in the ways he wants or expects him to.

To me, this is the second most frustrating thing about Stolas. All the characters have a tendency to reset and repeat arcs, as we’ve already covered, but the writers’ inability to have Stolas be considered in the wrong for how he’s treated Blitzo results in a character who feels especially inorganic.

Where most people would be able to question themselves at least a little if someone repeatedly expressed that they didn’t like how they were being treated and snapped about it twice, Stolas gives the impression that whenever he is not onscreen he’s basically stuck in some sort of screensaver mode, where his brain is just full of calliope music instead of thoughts about basically anything that is happening around him.

Sure enough, when the song number finishes Stolas goes right back to doing what he always does. He not only doesn’t thaw after considering that maybe, just maybe he could have done something wrong (and no, Verosika and Tex joining him on the song number doesn’t make his continued lack of introspection any better given he had months to actually think before the Full Moon deal was called off, that’s just an enabling excuse) he gets even harsher towards Blitzo: having a sulk and expecting Blitzo to apologize to him.

When Blitzo tries to apologize for the argument in this episode specifically, Stolas responds with ‘this morning?’, clearly suggesting he thinks Blitzo should apologize for yelling the night before and that everything Blitzo said was out of line, followed by folding his arms and pouting like he’s holding a grudge.

This is nothing new, but it gets worse: Blitzo in this scene basically gives Stolas everything he wants. He opens up about his retconned in ‘it’s just because you’re royal’ insecurities, implying Stolas did nothing wrong, and even tells Stolas that he’s better, he deserves more than what Blitzo can give him.

This is as close to a love confession you can reasonably expect from Blitzo (especially since Stolas just got done calling him a motherfucker in front of a crowd) but then… Stolas shows no empathy for Blitzo’s insecurities. As per usual, he makes it all about him – focusing on him and what he wants. And the framing empathizes with Stolas here – the camera hangs on Blitzo’s hands fidgeting and we see Stolas through his perspective, all of it implying that he wants to reach out and once again prioritizing Stolas’ emotions over anything Blitzo just said.

To cap it all off, Stolas responds to Blitzo opening up about how he’s insecure that Stolas could ever really love him, an imp with a pile of baggage, by going off and making out with the first person who offers. But as usual the framing swoops in to defend Stolas for this – Blitzo says he needs it and Verosika, framed as being in the moral right, says the right thing to do is just to let Stolas go and say ‘good for him’.

And while I fully agree that love requires selfless sacrifice – wanting what’s best for the other party above yourself – the context makes this wince-worthy.

The episode has raked Blitzo over the coals for having casual relationships and not settling down with them, then concludes that it’s fine for Stolas to ditch in the middle of a vulnerable conversation with Blitzo (after telling him he loved him literally the night before and right after Blitzo tells him why he’s having a hard time believing Stolas could have feelings for him)… in order to have a casual hook up with someone who isn’t mentioned at all in the next couple of episodes. Just as it’s only not fine to throw mocking parties when the target is Stolas, it’s fine to have random hookups – as long as only Stolas does it.

This episode ends as miserably as it began, with Blitzo slinking out of the party while Stolas is framed in a holy golden light to make sure the viewer understands that Blitzo is definitely missing out here, rather than dodging a bullet.

You can probably tell by the word count for this section alone that I did not like this episode. It’s probably my least favorite in the show to date in the way that it’s just so reliant on assuming the viewer is on the same page as the writers that they’ve done enough to “fix” Stolas (and also that they’re willing to ignore practically all of season one).

And on top of that, it’s just deeply unpleasant. Rather than it feeling like an effective dressing down of the main character’s bad habits and bad coping mechanisms, it more feels like watching someone who has definitely screwed up in the past have that past be used to justify why he needs to apologize to the rich man who has spent one and a half seasons to that point using him as an unwilling escort (and then fell in love with that escort and assumed he could just immediately transition to dating, no questions asked).

Briefly pivoting to S2E11, we see Stolas has not got a lick of empathy for Blitzo since. His song to free Blitzo is obviously him playing up to play on Goetia prejudices, but he shows no concern for calling Blitzo “worm”, “half a brain”, “fool”, “little wretch”, “simple imp of mine” etc. despite knowing insecurities about the class difference is (as far as the show is concerned) what destroyed their chance at a real relationship in the first place.

However, even assuming it’s just an act of Stolas’ doesn’t help much because after the rhythm changes the court falls away and it’s implied Stolas and Blitzo are singing together in some shared space where the others cannot hear. At this moment, Stolas’ genuine thoughts are “Why am I throwing my freedom away for this idiot?”

In his own mind Stolas doesn’t see this moment as owning up to him having an equal part to play and admitting responsibility that he loaned out his book to get sex, but as a sacrifice he is making for someone who might not even be worth it. And his last moment before Blitzo is thrown out is not a goodbye or any well wishes, but to scowl at him and say nothing.

S2E12 fares little better. Stolas is understandably upset about losing his daughter and his title, but the kindness supposedly so fundamental to his character is once again missing in every place he could actually demonstrate it. Of course he doesn’t do any self-reflection follow up on wondering if he maybe could have been in the wrong that he thought about in S2E9, but most notably he shows little gratitude either.

Blitzo puts him up in his home for a period of what’s implied to be weeks, giving up his sofa bed to him, making him breakfast (then trying to adjust to Stolas’ diet), providing him with clothes and even later trusting him to take over Loona’s job manning the phones. Blitzo provides all of this out of his own pocket – Stolas hadn’t completed a single day of work by the end of the episode. And Stolas thanks him for none of it – he’s at best civil, at other moments condescending. At one point he’s even snippy with Blitzo asking to share a cigarette, calling back to Blitzo being a thief before – except given Stolas had nothing when he arrived those are likely cigarettes Blitzo gave him to begin with that he’s being so snappish over.

At worst he showcases the exact same lack of empathy he does everywhere else – besides never thanking Blitzo for anything he does for him, he also never appears to even notice it; he just takes it for granted that Blitzo should spend money feeding and clothing him. The idea of even asking whether or not Blitzo can afford this is never brought up by anyone.

And the way Blitzo makes money is through IMP – something that Stolas shows no regard for either. His answering the phone poorly is not the worst thing – he does it mid-meltdown so there’s no indication he’s screwing up out of malice – but his later attitude is pretty outright malicious. He’s rude to a client, potentially screwing up Blitzo’s job with them, and then attempts to trash part of the office when he throws a tantrum when he can’t stand not seeing Via any longer. He shows no consideration for the business he supposedly admired Blitzo for running so much; it’s fine for him to wreck it in a fit of pique like a five year old if he wants. This never comes up again in the episode either – we don’t see any indication Stolas regretted it at all.

And again, the issue is not that Stolas has flaws – it makes complete sense for a rich prince who could have an imp bought to be his playmate for his birthday would have a bit of culture shock when he loses everything and is forced to live in an apartment where neither he nor Blitzo have their own room or bed. It’s certainly effective characterization if what they were going for is Stolas still being an ungrateful rich prince at his core.

The issue is once again in the framing. Stolas having flaws is fine, but the show never really treats them like flaws: they’re portrayed as privileged quirks at worst. Blitzo spends the entire episode cheerleading Stolas and babysitting him, never once showing the kind of fire he had earlier in the show – again, particularly in season one – when he wouldn’t stand for disrespectful behavior. Even assuming he and IMP feel guilty or responsible for Stolas losing his title (even though Stolas definitely got something out of that arrangement) there’s no indication that they find Stolas’ actions particularly grating.

At one point Stolas even wails about how he’s poor now, yet the cast don’t even so much as exchange glances that Stolas is pitying himself for the poverty they have had to endure for their entire lives (and the only reason they had to have him in their lives at all was in Blitzo’s attempt to climb above that poverty). As usual, the show is so overwhelmingly in favor of Stolas that the disruption he is causing in their lives, the strain to their business and their budget and the disrespect to their office space never comes up at all. And all this comes after a season of the show trying to shove Stolas’ classism out of sight out of mind and act like all the worst instances of it in season one never happened at all.

This is probably a good lead in to talk about what I feel is Stolas’ biggest flaw.

Yes, worse than the classism, being denser than black matter, abusing his butlers, the treatment of his daughter - worse than all of that.

And that is simply this: Stolas has fundamentally not developed at all.

Stolas has not changed at all

Here we are: my last and most fundamental issue with Stolas – despite how the show tries to present it otherwise, Stolas does not and has not addressed his fundamental flaw as far as his relationship with Blitzo goes.

The issue is not that he’s passionate about sex or going through a second adolescence.

The issue is that he sees Blitzo primarily as an object instead of as a person.

The series opens in media res in terms of the affair, but from the first episode we know Blitzo is trying to avoid Stolas, who in the pilot and in both S1E1 and S1E2 has a habit of freaking him out by engaging in way too explicit sex talk over the phone.

Stolas uses the book and the fact Blitzo is in danger to get him to make the deal. His lack of concern for Blitzo’s safety, ability to consent and even his basic enthusiasm about the offer speaks to a fundamental sense of objectification and entitlement he feels towards the imp.

Stolas has discovered he likes sex and he likes having sex with Blitzo, therefore he proposes the deal and assumes that since Blitzo is getting something out of it (the book) the cost he’s proposing is fair game.

Throughout the season he continues to treat Blitzo like an object, employing him as a bodyguard under false pretences in S1E2 to harass him over and over, invading his space, disrespecting basic requests to use his proper name, all of which culminates in calling him his “plaything” in S1E6 and expecting Blitzo to reward him for saving his life by paying him with sex. Until S1E7 decided Stolas should be in love with Blitzo, he consistently treats and views Blitzo like a sexual object.

Season two is when this is supposed to change, but it fundamentally doesn’t – Stolas stops focusing on sexualizing Blitzo as hard as he did before, but he doesn’t stop objectifying him.

He just moves his focus from getting sex out of him, to getting romance out of him.

As mentioned before, whenever he receives significant criticism from Blitzo he doesn’t consider if Blitzo could be right or even ask him why he feels the way he does. Instead he simply gets mad, denies it or turns it all around on Blitzo. Blitzo’s feelings are an inconvenience because he doesn’t want to deal with Blitzo as a person when Blitzo doesn’t behave how he wants or expects him to.

Stolas still fundamentally sees Blitzo as his object – he doesn’t care about his family, he definitely doesn’t care about Blitzo’s daughter and he doesn’t care about his feelings (especially if those feelings would prompt Stolas into thinking he’s done something wrong).

Stolas projects all his romantic fantasies onto Blitzo and then punishes Blitzo for falling short of them. The clearest example is in S2E4 when he calls Blitzo up to come rescue him and even though Blitzo sends his colleagues to help, Stolas resents Blitzo for it.

Even on the phone his delivery of the lines “I think you should come and save me” and “I agree that is important, buuut, I-” all carry a strong undercurrent that even when Stolas should be prioritizing getting out of danger that he should not underestimate because he knows it’s sent by Stella, he can’t restrain himself from taking the opportunity to try and make Blitzo a part of his ideal roleplay, with himself as a damsel in distress and Blitzo as his rescuer.

He does this consistently; it’s even lowkey present in his kindest Instagram incarnation. He expects Blitzo to rescue him from basically everything: from his failing marriage and then from the assassin his wife calls on him as a result of his failing marriage, and finally from his loveless life. It takes until S2E12 for Stolas to acknowledge the basic reality that he made the choice to blow up both his and his kid’s life with his impulsive affair and he never acknowledges the way he’s objectified Blitzo at all.

Rather than have Stolas notice how little he’s cared for Blitzo’s life or feelings, that he’s been using him as an object and then blaming him for not immediately responding the way he wants when he changes gears from wanting romance instead of sex (and acting like it’s beyond the pale for Blitzo to have trouble with this change), the plot essentially validates that Blitzo should be Stolas’ knight who helps him fix his life – Moxxie even explicitly refers to Blitzo as such in S2E12, creating the uncanny feeling that everyone in the show is sharing one mind that this is how the relationship is supposed to function.

The most on the nose detail in this department is the telenovela Stolas watches in S1E8, where he sees himself in the heroine Gabriella who longs for Alejandro’s love. Gabriella has a white stripe in her hair that Stolas uses makeup to add to his when going to Ozzie’s. The white stripe reappears in S2E11 when Stolas loses his powers, directly associating Stolas with Gabriella.

All of this could have been fixed fairly easily. Besides having Stolas acknowledge that he certainly has looked down on Blitzo and treated him abhorrently besides, the plot point of the Asmodean crystal could have easily been used to this end. Instead of having Stolas present it to Blitzo in person, Stolas could have had it sent as an anonymous gift.

Making the gift anonymous (or even letting Fizz or Asmodeus take more of the credit for it) would have much more effectively given Blitzo the choice to stay or go. With the crystal in hand he could make the choice himself and Stolas would have done something genuinely selfless by not immediately attempting to pursue a romantic relationship. Alternatively he could have offered the crystal and instead offered Blitzo time to think over his feelings instead of putting him on the spot.

Either one would show a consideration for Blitzo above what was included in the show, where Stolas’ attitude feels more like he provided Blitzo with the illusion of a choice then immediately got salty and angry with him for making the “wrong” one.

With that progression under his belt, the obvious thing to do would have been to put Stolas on trial in S2E11 where the last of his excuses get cracked like an egg about what his relationship with Blitzo is really like. From there he can still lose his title and have to work for a living, where the open goal would be to actually have him empathize with the poverty of the lower classes and grow and change. While he is certainly written to find his new life a challenge in S2E12, it remains to be seen if the writers use his new life to actually challenge him or if it is just another means to expect the viewer to feel sorry for him while IMP have to spend time coddling him.

I’ve neglected Via, but that’s appropriate for this section

I mentioned earlier that Via isn’t particularly much of a character of her own and more an attachment to Stolas, even if the girl at least gets some clear hobbies where even Millie didn’t fare well in that department.

But she’s another part of the dissonance surrounding Stolas. Outside of the shaky worldbuilding, there’s more of a disconnect between the show’s insistence that Stolas is an imperfect father who is trying and the neglectful mess he actually appears like when you look at what happens in the show.

As with Blitzo, Stolas shows a distinct lack of empathy towards Via that’s most pronounced in S1E2. His first ignoring that she doesn’t want to go to Loo Loo Land comes off more like he thinks her complaints are teenage exaggeration that he’s putting to one side for one in order to prioritize trying to make her superficially happy again, but once they get to the park there are less understandable reasons for Stolas behaving the way he does.

Not only is Via visibly miserable at several junctures, Stolas takes the incredible decision to bring along the person he just cheated on her mother with and flirt with her in front of Via for the entire day and it somehow doesn’t occur to him this would even be upsetting until she runs off in tears. This episode is the best at actually treating Stolas’ flaws as flaws, but even S1E2 focuses more on Via’s fear of her leaving him and not that she should also be rightfully angry that he would be so dumb as to bring Blitzo around her.

Speaking of, this episode ends with Stolas promising to never leave Via.

This is a heartwarming moment, but it’s undermined basically as soon as S2E5 comes around. S2E5 opens with Stolas again sleeping with Blitzo at his house, not another location – where Via could run into him if she came looking for Stolas for any reason – and the episode makes it clear that the arrangement is still in place.

This functionally means that not long after Stolas made the promise to not leave Via, he continued the affair and transactional arrangement which is the biggest threat to him potentially breaking that promise. As mentioned before, the worldbuilding around what exactly will be the penalty if Stolas and Blitzo get discovered breaking demon law, but Stolas does know that it’s serious enough to chew Blitzo out about it in S1E6. In another pattern of his, Stolas prioritizes his affair with Blitzo over his own daughter.

His struggling relationship with Via comes up again in S2E2, when he forgets a promise she’d been looking forward to since a child in favor of yelling at Stella down the phone. As mentioned before, this episode feels very much like a re-run of S1E2, which results in the feeling that Stolas hasn’t particularly learnt much from the first time Via felt lost in the shuffle of the impending divorce.

However, now season two has kicked in the setup for Stolas learning something is even more wasted than it was in S1E2. Stolas is even more neglectful of Via than he was in S1E2 – he wastes so much time with Blitzo on the set of a TV show that it’s night time by the time they both get back to looking for her when they started out in the afternoon – but Loona all but tells Via she should cut him a break, because he’s trying and that’s what counts. That he doesn’t seem to be trying very hard or this is the second time this has happened and Stolas was once again prioritizing Blitzo goes pretty much unmentioned – the writers don’t even let Stolas get out a full apology before Via immediately forgives him.

The lack of follow through makes some of the following episodes worse, but they’re still a pretty bad oversight on the part of the writers. The events of S2E4 mean Stolas now knows that Stella is trying to kill him, because he openly discusses this with Striker.

But once he’s safe in the hospital, the show has him texting Blitzo and not Via. He could have texted her offscreen, but the next episodes give no indication that Stolas has done anything to keep himself and Via safe.

There’s no sign of additional security at the manor and he doesn’t appear to have told his daughter that her mother is dangerous enough to have hired a hit on him, despite knowing Striker definitely knows about Via so she herself could be in danger in future.

Stolas’ drinking habits are also a potential issue given he has a child to look after, but given that Stolas mentions Via is with Stella in S1E7 that one’s at least more forgivable because someone else is looking out for Via right now. But the other times it happens, it’s clear the writers haven’t bothered considering how having an alcoholic parent would affect the child living in the household – Via basically stops existing after Stolas peers in her room in S2E1; it’s never a concern in his mind or the writers’ that Via might come looking for him at any point of Stolas getting drunk off absinthe or disappearing into his room for the entire afternoon through that entire night with an imp.

This is gets to kind of comical levels in S2E9 – Stolas is so heartbroken over Blitzo that he gets drunker than he’s ever been seen to do before, to the point he can barely stand or string a sentence together. The episode doesn’t even mention where Via is for the day, but even assuming she’s with Stella means Stolas will be functionally useless if she needs him for whatever reason. And it also means that he’s made himself a very easy target if Striker was to turn up again and try to finish the job, given that Stolas was apparently so easy to subdue even when sober in S2E4 that it honestly feels like writer intervention that he hasn’t been already killed by Striker or someone else at another junction already. In another classic example of the show’s inconsistencies, Stolas can’t go ten feet without being at risk of kidnap in S1E2 but is never concerned about security when out in public for the rest of the show.

Also if she is with Stella, why is Stolas all right when letting Via go to her mother’s now he knows that mother is capable of attempted murder?

Again, the worldbuilding here could actually do a lot to make Stolas sympathetic to the reading of being trapped with Stella. Does family court exist in Hell? Why hasn’t Stolas made any effort to take Via away from her mother, who he knows is dangerous and has had a highly public hospital stay that he can point to as evidence of that? He can’t necessarily 100% prove that Stella is behind it, but if his word isn’t enough, why isn’t it? Stolas is a prince and unlike Andrealphus, Stella is not a noble – why would the court insist she should stay with her mother some of the time when Stolas has wealth and servants that can provide for Via’s every need?

The same issue happens with Stolas and his duties as a royal. Because the show takes this ‘only show something onscreen when it’s relevant to the plot’ approach, both Stolas and Via have seemingly pretty empty day to day lives – there’s no indication of what they spend most of their time doing when they aren’t repeating the same cycle of Via getting upset at Stolas and the cycle resetting the next time the writers remember Via exists. The same too applies to Stolas’ duties – we never see him doing much with his powers or book when it isn’t plot relevant, so what he actually does as a Goetia is unclear. The most we get is him doing the Harvest Moon festival (which is a yearly event), but that’s about it – he apparently only needs his grimoire for one day a month, so it’s anyone’s guess if he’s neglecting his work or does so little with the book that he barely even needed it in the first place.

It’s similarly unclear if Stolas has been neglecting training Via to be his heir this entire time because he leant the book out to Blitzo. As with Stolas’ occasional habit of drinking himself to a blackout, the wider implications of what he’s doing aren’t really commented on or considered in the plot. This is especially odd considering the main reason for the arranged marriage in the first place is that Via is a “precautionary heir”, so one would expect the issue of Stolas failing to raise her to take over the book from him would matter to the other Goetians at the trial, but it never comes up.

All of this results in a feeling that Stolas is more of a teenager than a parent. It’s rarely a question whether he should or shouldn’t do something because he has a teen with a mother he doesn’t trust and he might need to be available to look after her. His alcoholism is used as shorthand mainly for how sad he is, and the effect of what he’s doing on Via is basically a non-issue.

As per usual, the writers’ lack of follow through on their plot points results in Stolas looking way more neglectful than they likely intended – the aftermath of Striker nearly killing him involves safeguarding Via not at all and he spends every episode following focused on getting the Asmodean Crystal to give to Blitzo, then drinking to forget the pain of not having the fairytale romance that he wants.

All of this is kind of an impressive missed opportunity – Stolas having to prioritize keeping Via safe and finalizing his divorce as quick as possible would give him an understandable reason to pull away from Blitzo and the full moon meetings (which he intended to end anyway) and create understandable delays in him getting the crystal. All of this would neatly set up the reason for Blitzo worrying Stolas is losing interest in the deal, compromising his access to the book, and just like Blitzo had to prioritize Loona in S2E4, Stolas putting his daughter first would be both a sign of lowkey character development after he neglects her in S1E2 and S2E2 and the only adult thing to do once the consequences of his infidelity escalate to the point that his life (and possibly hers by association, especially since Striker knows she exists) is in danger.

It’s also frankly pretty odd that Stolas is never all that concerned about his life being in danger: he sings “I swore I wouldn’t dwell on the divorce” in S2E8 like it’s just a slightly acrimonious thing and not a life-threatening danger at this point. The show wants to be about abuse and yet one of the easiest ways of expressing the effects of domestic violence – the victim being constantly anxious about their life and safety, as well as the safety of their loved ones – doesn’t appear to be a concern in Stolas’ mind at all. Like Via, Stella just stops existing as a concern whenever she’s not onscreen.

Moving on to the stuff the writers did intend to include, Stolas’ disregard for Via hits a climax in S2E11. Stolas goes to court to own up to lending out the grimoire (sort of – we’ll cover that later) but this means that he is essentially breaking his promise not to leave Via, choosing Blitzo over her once again. Stolas acting to save Blitzo’s life is not a bad thing, to be clear, but the writers give him a near total lack of consideration for his daughter.

During the trial sequence, even as he’s preparing to die, Stolas does not mention Via once. He only thinks of her after the sentence to remove his title has been passed – the one time he mentions her in the entire episode – and shows little concern that she will have to stay with Stella in terms of the risk to Via’s safety specifically. His immediate concern after the trial is largely self-focused: that he’s lost everything, not that he’s broken his promise or left Via in Stella’s care. He notices Loona hugging Blitzo, but makes no attempt to contact Via for the rest of the episode despite Via having a mobile phone – he doesn’t think of her at all until partway through the morning after.

This again provides a level of dissonance – the main focus of the episode is on Stolas having lost everything, with the effects on Via as something of an afterthought that only matter in the immediate aftermath of the trial to make the viewer feel sorrier for Stolas.

I want to stop and note here that my issue is not that Stolas is not a perfect parent in every scenario: he’s a person in an unenviable arranged marriage that he never wanted to be in. That being said, the show has not written a character who is a slightly imperfect but still well-meaning parent – he’s a neglectful nightmare that Via has no reason to believe she can rely for basically anything.

He lacks the basic level of empathy to realize flirting with Blitzo in front of her is a cruel thing to do on what was supposed to be a father-daughter outing, he doesn’t remember their promise to see the stars until Via outright tells him about it, he doesn’t prioritize finding her in L.A. even though Via is a minor who has never been to Earth before, he seemingly doesn’t tell her about the reason for his hospital stay despite it likely making the news in Hell due to all the reporters (instead he texts Blitzo). He doesn’t do anything to protect either of them from Stella despite knowing what she’s capable of; his next appearances being focused on getting the Crystal and then lounging by his pool sulking about Blitzo yelling at him. He gets heavily or blackout drunk on multiple occasions. He prioritizes his affair over her multiple times. He promises to never leave her and then keeps the deal going (despite having a book in his library about Asmodean Crystals) and is apparently so indiscreet about it in their own home that somehow Stella, who is dumb as a pile of rocks, figures out that Stolas was lending his book to Blitzo. Then to cap it all off he goes to court to save Blitzo, remembering Via only after his life has already been spared (unlike Blitzo, whose last words are telling M&M to look out for Loona for him). He inadvertently makes her responsible for saving his life when Stolas starts a fight by diving on Andrealphus – Via’s uncle – and punching him in the face, then responds to her calling him on breaking his promise by implying he didn’t even though she quite literally had to watch him do it on live television.

And the framing barely criticizes him for any of this. His heavy drinking is just a tool to make it obvious he’s at rock bottom and sad, Via is explicitly told by Loona to cut him a break for choosing Blitzo and hating Stella over her (and this is presented as the right answer) and no one so much as mentions that Stolas’s priorities are severely skewed when he focuses on Blitzo despite knowing for sure that his life is in danger.

The last one is the most ridiculous of all of Stolas’ failings, but the writers don’t even appear to realize it is a failing on his part because no one ever mentions it. As per usual when trying to control the viewer’s attitudes to Stolas, Via is only ever mad at him for breaking promises and not the laundry list of other ways he’s let her down.

It’s the kind of thing that prompts some viewers to provide headcanons for why Stolas does so little to protect himself or his daughter. Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt Via by letting her know Stella is a monster, or that he’s just too depressed and demotivated to do anything. But these are once again headcanons and as per usual, they’re not particularly good explanations or even internally consistent. If Stolas was so worried about what Via would think of Stella or wanted to protect her relationship with her mother, why is he happy to fight with Stella on the phone in front of Via and call her a ‘B-I-T-C-H’, to the extent that Via knows full well he hates Stella in S2E2?

And just to make it clear, Stolas is not a bad person simply for being depressed. But he still has a responsibility to Via – if he cannot cope with being a parent due to his mental health issues to the extent that he’s completely unable to realize that he should do something when he knows his wife is trying to kill him, he could still use his resources to ensure Via at least is safe with another guardian or person he could trust. Alternatively, if the show actually wants to be mature and have a both sides have a point attitude to Via cutting him off, the writers could point out that even if the hurt was unintentional because of Stolas’ depression, he is still responsible for his actions.

To borrow a quote from CJ the X: “If someone ever hurts you and instead of apologizing they explain that it's because of their mental illness, that's bullshit. I've properly destroyed my life before because of my borderline personality disorder, but it was still me doing it. I have a reason, it's not an excuse. You have to work to make this right.”

Anyway, it’s pretty clear to me that the writers don’t want Stolas to look responsible for anything. As a result they set up two more attempts to exonerate him in S2E12 that will likely pay off in season three.

First is the client IMP take on in S2E12. She’s angry that her ex likely cheated on her and this is immediately paralleled with what Stolas did, as he gets upset at the surrounding conversation. The writers then communicate in their usual heavy-handed way that no one should judge Stolas for his adultery (for the third time this season) – Blitzo comments that cheating isn’t that bad and since the client is yet another 2D bitchy woman (just like Stella) the viewer is supposed to agree with him.

This only gets even more embarrassingly heavy handed when IMP visit the target’s house and see that the husband likely was cheating – with another man, just like Stolas did. But because they’re happy and their children apparently don’t miss their dead mother at all, Blitzo and Moxxie both come to the conclusion that the hit isn’t worth it. They took the hit against Martha in S1E1 because she cheated with their client’s spouse, but when Blitzo can project himself and Stolas onto the situation it suddenly means the target is above reproach, because Stolas too is above reproach. Then just to cap off the awful writing, Blitzo throws the client out of the window of his office building to defend Stolas (who tried to trash his office in the very same episode).

The message is clear – it’s not that IMP has had character development to care about whether their target is a good person or not before killing them. It’s that cheating isn’t bad if the betrayed party is a woman like Stella and the cheater is someone like Stolas.

To borrow a phrase from Flazefire’s “Helluva Boss: The Good, The Bad, The Fandom” - “This goes to show that the writing team is permanently committed to never giving Stolas any amount accountability and he will be the perpetual sympathy machine for all eternity.”

The second way the writing sets up to excuse Stolas is in making sure Via doesn’t have all the information. Even though she doesn’t know about Stella ordering a hit because Stolas never looped her in (and he had every reason to because she should know), the show leverages this in order to suggest the fallout is just a misunderstanding where Stolas will be able to make up with Via the minute he explains.

The explanation will presumably involve once again telling the viewer rather than showing them that Stolas was just trying his best and just wanted to protect her, and since Stella is so much worse than Stolas it frees the writers from having to talk about the long history of Stolas letting Via down prior to this episode.

This is also how some of the fandom discusses Via cutting him off at the end of S2E12 – that Via decided to do what she did not out of any valid hurt feelings or real neglect on Stolas’ part, but from a flawed view where a bunch of small issues just piled on top of a misunderstanding and she reacted in an immature way by cutting Stolas off for good. She might be angry now, but she’ll change her tune as soon as the gets the “real” story. That it’s somewhat contradictory for the fandom to act like the show is presenting a complex situation where both sides have a valid point and saying in the same moment that there is ultimately only one correct perspective on the situation – Stolas’, of course – is not really surprising given it’s the natural end conclusion for a show that wants to have mature storylines while doing everything it can to insist the characters are never supposed to be held meaningfully responsible for anything.

In the show’s logic, Stolas’ cheating is not only excusable but sympathetic – a prince who had given up his entire life to give Via a “normal” childhood (regardless how little sense this makes looking at the way Stella behaves) impulsively had an affair for a moment of joy of his own, but it wasn’t that bad because his wife was a monster from day one and cheating is acceptable as long as the target is a villainous cartoonishly evil woman.

He put himself through years of abuse that Via somehow didn’t notice (despite Stella never noticeably behaving differently towards Stolas in front of her in season two) in order to give her a normal life (despite her having no real relationship with Stella to make this worthwhile). Then he fixated on Blitzo but it’s again not that bad compared to what a monster Stella is, and if only Via knew that she tried to kill Stolas, she would forgive him and say she misjudged him (even though Stella trying to kill him and Stolas choosing to lend out the book don’t really have anything to do with one another; they’re separate issues).

All of this results in a scene at the end of S2E12 where Via confronts Stolas about breaking his promise to her – the thing he definitely did – and he responds by not only saying that he didn’t, but that she doesn’t understand. Blitzo points out what will likely be the case in season 3 – that Stolas just needs to give her time and Via will come around.

And if I was making a prediction I would say that I imagine he’s definitely correct about that and there is no way the show will end with Stolas and Via still separated – the show that is determined to present itself about flawed people being messy, but I suspect the show accidentally tripping into an ideal setup to discuss estrangement from parents who are well-meaning but wildly unreliable will be wasted. That and the show is evidently not really interested in Via as a person in her own right. She’s there to make Stolas sad by leaving him, then represent the reformation of the ideal family Blitzo fantasizes about in S2E12 – it’s happy ending fodder, not something for the characters to work through in a meaningful fashion.

By the end of season two Stolas has achieved the bare minimum of admitting that the thing that is obviously his fault is his fault, but seemingly decides to immediately give up on fighting to make it up to Via, instead acting like his loss of power and wealth means he can’t try to make contact with her or explain anything at all in the next hundred years.

The episode notably does not discuss a lot of what he did that should have an affect on Via – she doesn’t call him out on lending out her inheritance to his affair partner, or that he knew from the start he might be taken away from her when his choice to keep breaking demon law was found out. She doesn’t point out that he’s left her with Stella and Andrealphus, who she doesn’t seem particularly close to. The only plot beat Via is allowed to express feelings about is her feeling abandoned by Stolas, because that at least can be resolved more easily in future if Stolas ever decides to take the time to clue Via in on the way her mother has tried and failed to kill him twice now – he would’ve gotten away with breaking the law, if only it wasn’t for his meddling evil wife!

This inability to discuss several plot beats begins in – you guessed it – the second season.

The Conversations that Cannot be Had: Stolas as a Black Hole Sue

There is a lot of discourse around the concept of a Mary Sue / Gary Stu online, mostly that it is considered a lazy way of dismissing a character for being too powerful or too perfect.

Stolas doesn’t exactly fit the classic Mary Sue model - he eats up an increasing amount of screentime and goes from the sideplot character to the secondary (or as I’ve argued, the real) protagonist of the show, but he is supposed to be kind of a disaster and flawed, even if the narrative doesn’t want to treat that as a problem Stolas himself should be dealing with to stop hurting the people around him. He’s probably one of the worst examples of this character I’ve ever seen, outshining others who went down in TV infamy like Rachel Berry from Glee.

Rather, he’s more of a Black Hole Sue – to borrow the most relevant bits from the definition on TV Tropes:

- causes other characters to bend and contort in order to accommodate

- characters don’t act naturally around them

- other characters serve as plot enablers, with dialogue that only acts as set-ups for their response

Stolas much more neatly fits into this definition than other subtypes of ‘Sue’ character, and it’s these qualities I want to focus on for this section.

Not only do characters act unnaturally around Stolas, but they also provide set ups for Stolas to end conversations easily.

This happens consistently throughout the second season – characters who should logically mention prior events of the show and have every motive to do so (or they should take a specific action), but they don’t. This is because to do so would mean the characters are able to criticize Stolas at more than a surface level.

They are the conversations that cannot be had.

Outside of retconning and backfilling, this is the main strategy that the writers deploy repeatedly in order to tip the show in Stolas’ favor, regardless of how little sense it makes.

The result of this is that Stolas increasingly becomes a black hole sue; an event horizon that the logic of the show and the characters’ bend around.

The conversations that cannot be had tend to come in three types:

Type #1: Others side with Stolas (for no real reason)

Type #2: Others criticize Stolas (but they do it poorly, setting him up for easy rebuttals or one-liners)

Type #3: Stolas defends himself (not well, but everyone treats it like a conversation ender)

To give a more light-hearted example, there’s the moment where Blitzo asks why Stolas can’t remember his spells in S2E2. The writers breeze past it that Stolas’ powers are limited without his grimoire (again, kind of a plothole) but when Blitzo presses, Stolas snaps back that if his memory is so great he ought to be able to remember Moxxie’s phone number. This isn’t a good comeback – no one memorizes phone numbers since the advent of mobile phones, whereas Stolas’ book is integral to his duty, so he should be able to remember his spells – but the show behaves as though it is and has Blitzo fold immediately and Stolas act smug about it.

Now imagine this example, but across the entire season and in situations involving plot beats that are actually important to the entire show. A whole season where the characters don’t discuss anything meaningful right when it would make sense for them to do so.

Running it down as quickly as possible:

S2E2 Seeing Stars

When Via rants to Loona about Stolas prioritizing being angry at Stella over her, Loona tells her to cut Stolas some slack. While this speech is sweet and one of the few humanizing moments Loona gets in her increasingly reduced screentime, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for Loona to immediately jump to this position.

For one, she knows Stolas only as the royal her own adoptive father has to sleep with to keep a roof over their heads; she has no reason to like him or want to defend him. For another, Loona hasn’t seen a whole lot of reason to believe Stolas is trying – she knows from being in the office that he didn’t even notice Via was missing until Blitzo called to tell him, and she’s the one who spent all day running around LA trying to find Via while Stolas got distracted watching Blitzo act on a TV set. They don’t even share a single conversation – the most interaction they get is Stolas bumping into her when he steals a pair of sunglasses.

Even assuming she’s just projecting her own feelings about her fractious relationship with Blitzo only goes so far here because she doesn’t practice what she preaches by cutting Blitzo any slack at all – she doesn’t start calling him Dad consistently until the season finale. To make matters worse we don’t see the moment where she remembers any of the things Blitzo has done for her to help sell the moment where she decides to actually help out like he asked her to – it’s a revelation that comes out of nowhere.

S2E4 Western Energy

This episode opens with Stolas and Stella discussing their impending divorce and the settlement of property involved. Andrealphus uses the fact Stolas cheated as an argument that Stella should be compensated more.

Stolas responds even more strongly than he did in The Circus, having gone from not being sorry at all to saying that ‘cheating implies a betrayal and [Stella] never gave two shits about [him]’. The writers are essentially having Stolas state that his adultery doesn’t count as adultery at all because Stella didn’t care about him.

The audience’s mileage may vary on how much they accept this argument, but Andrealphus should not. He doesn’t know Stella has hired an assassin and so as far as he knows the point of the meeting is to get as favorable a divorce settlement for his sister as possible. He could easily rebut that Stolas can’t just redefine what counts as adultery because he feels like it, or that Stolas’ actions hurt Via and the family reputation. But he doesn’t – both he and Stella let Stolas’ assertion that cheating doesn’t count if he personally doesn’t feel there was betrayal involved go unchallenged.

S2E6: Oops

A small one at the top of the episode has Stolas ask Ozzie for an Asmodean Crystal for Blitzo, mentioning he has a business he runs that requires access to the human world. Stolas implies the business is already running, but Ozzie doesn’t bother asking the very obvious follow up question “So how has he been getting to Earth without a Crystal before now?”

Later, Blitzo tries to persuade Fizz that royalty just like sleeping with commoners as a novelty. Instead of talking about all the times Stolas has used demeaning language and treated him like a toy, he instead brings up a bunch of offscreen phone calls where Stolas was nicer that the viewer never got to see.

Outside of the blink and you miss it texts added in S2E4, these conversations are the main source of the show’s backfilling assertion that Stolas does treat Blitzo well and that Blitzo is the real problem – the entire conversation is meant to make Blitzo look jaded because he’s missing the obvious signs of Stolas’ affection.

This makes no sense since Blitzo is trying to persuade Fizz to agree with him here, but he doesn’t use the best evidence he has of that (the plaything comment alone would be a reasonable thing to bring up) or even mention the most obvious thing: that Stolas is treating him like an escort.

There is a conversation that could be had here – Fizz and Blitzo comparing notes and noticing that the way Ozzie treats Fizz is very different than how Stolas has treated Blitzo, especially since the deal is still active – but it cannot be had because it goes against the writer’s attempts to make Stolas look good and Blitzo look cynical because he distrusts signs of Stolas’ “love” for him.

SE28: Full Moon

The conversation devolves into an argument when Stolas walks off after he takes Blitzo’s reaction as a rejection.

The first noticeable thing is that Stolas takes exception to “[Blitzo’s] first thought is that it’s always about sex”. Once again Blitzo doesn’t respond with the most obvious response many indignant viewers had – he doesn’t point out that Stolas was the one to make it that way.

As the scene goes on it gets even more unnatural. This scene is quite literally a heated argument where Blitzo is incredulous that Stolas is dropping the romantic feelings spiel on him after months of objectifying him followed by being hot and cold. He finally has the freedom to speak his mind without fear of his business being ruined because the deal is over, yet the writing bends over backwards to have him sound like he’s just expressing a frustration with royal demons in general and not anything Stolas has done in specific.

If this wasn’t frustrating enough, it only gets worse from here.

S2E9 Apology Tour

The argument at the beginning of Apology Tour is the show’s clearest example of a conversation that cannot be had – in fact, it is the worst example of this in the entire show to date and contains several examples of Stolas making hypocritical or unreasonable claims and Blitzo being inexplicably unable to counter any of them.

This scene alone is responsible for most of the ‘Stolas is a hypocrite’ videos that hit YouTube after this episode dropped and with good reason – you could probably just substitute this section for one of those if your eyes are getting tired reading this.

I considered just summing all this up rather than spilling more digital ink listing more things out, but I feel this conversation is important as an example of the writer’s willingness to expect viewers to forget most of what they wrote in season one and just accept the thinly veiled attempts to paper over it in season two. It’s some of the most unnatural dialogue in the whole show, topped only by one plot point that is as bad as Western Energy for how little it makes sense.

Also it’s hard to get across just how frustrating this single conversation alone is without getting into the scale of bewildering lines of dialogue here.

To run down another, not so quick list:

- Stolas calls himself Blitzo’s freshest ex > Blitzo fixates on the anti-Blitzo party bit and doesn’t point out they were never dating, even when Stolas is comparing himself to other people Blitzo has broken up with like they’re in the same boat (this particular bit of jank lasts all episode long)

- Stolas claims Blitzo is used to crushing other’s feelings > Blitzo doesn’t point out he had little reason to think Stolas had feelings to crush because they’ve been in a transactional deal and while Stolas might be being nicer over text, the last time Blitzo saw him in person was when Stolas followed up on their argument at Ozzie’s by going on about how good Blitzo is in bed when he was panicking

- Stolas mentions being uncomfortable with the way Blitzo is speaking to him > the obvious rebuttal for Blitzo would be to point out the numerous times Stolas has ignored his discomfort with being objectified and harassed by him, including being called a ‘plaything’ to his face and all the examples from S1E2 when he told Stolas multiple times to stop and was ignored. He doesn’t; instead going to the line of attack the writers think is easier to defend Stolas against – that he has a thing for sleeping with commoners

- Stolas claims he’s never looked down on him > Blitzo doesn’t point out the numerous ‘little’ comments, tugging on his face, babytalking him, using the “Blitzy” nickname he hates, putting cigarettes out on his horn, or even just the “plaything” comment by itself.

- Stolas pivots to talking about Striker and accuses Blitzo of not being bothered to come help him. Besides this being one of the most selfish things he’s said, it’s also the most nonsensical. Blitzo has numerous points of rebuttal here, including:

     > Stolas wasn’t bothered that Blitzo’s life was in danger in S1E1; he used it to force Blitzo to make the deal, so he doesn’t have much of a right to judge. When Stolas did bother to come help Blitzo in S1E6 he asked for payment in kind

    > Stolas knew Blitzo had a medical appointment for his daughter that it took Blitzo five years to get to protect her from what’s presumably a fatal disease (if Hellbies is anything like real world rabies); ignoring that is incredibly selfish and callous

   > Stolas sounded casual over the phone and has wanted Blitzo to play into his knight in shining armor fantasies before so the scale of the danger wasn’t obvious and Blitzo had little reason to trust Stolas sincerely needed his help in particular

   > Stolas should have legions at his disposal, he shouldn’t expect an imp like Blitzo to drop everything the moment he’s in trouble when he has a life of his own

   > Stolas knew and saw Blitzo had sent M&M to help him but acts like Blitzo did nothing. He hasn’t once addressed Moxxie or Millie by name or thanked them, which is incredibly ungrateful and his attitude that only having Blitzo’s help is enough to prove that Blitzo cares for him is very ungrateful, entitled and unreasonable

But of course Blitzo doesn’t mention any of these points, or even ask Stolas if he’s seriously judging Blitzo for prioritising his daughter’s medical care over Stolas getting himself into trouble when he sent his employees to help. Instead he responds by saying he stopped Striker the first time in S1E5.

Blitzo using Striker’s last assassination attempt as a shield accomplishes the dual purpose of making him look worse because he didn’t tell Stolas about it, while simultaneously allowing him to supply the audience with the new retconned reason he didn’t go through with joining Striker – he was never seriously tempted by the prospect of killing Stolas, he just assumed Stolas was invincible. Which again, is a massive plothole. It’s also telling that Blitzo doesn’t act like Stolas’ statement is unreasonable or selfish at all.

- Stolas claims he’s let others see how much he likes Blitzo, tried to spend time with him, tried to support him. Once again there are numerous rebuttals to this trifecta of self-serving memories Stolas has but Blitzo uses none of them, he just looks pensive like he thinks Stolas has a point. This is despite the fact he could’ve said:

   > Stolas’ idea of letting other people see how much he likes Blitzo is embarrassing him by sexualizing him in front of a crowd in Harvest Moon (“that sexy little one there”, the “Blitzy” nickname) but when they’re on a date in Ozzie’s in a more high class joint where his peer Asmodeus can see, Stolas hides his face in a menu out of shame. While Stolas likely did that because he’s embarrassed about the damage he’s caused his family being aired out in public, Blitzo doesn’t know that so he has no reason not to call Stolas on this. When it happened he outright flinched and looked hurt over it.

  > Stolas has tried to spend time with Blitzo, but that’s only really been seen in Ozzie’s when he invites him in and through texts when he’s wishy-washy instead of telling Blitzo straight out he wants to spend time together instead of the transactional arrangement. Blitzo again doesn’t point out the difference between what he claims and what actually happened since for him everything is contextualized by the Full Moon arrangement

  > Stolas’ claim he tried to ‘support’ Blitzo is the worst of all; it’s just self-serving revisionism. There was no indication he cared about Blitzo’s business in season one or let him keep the book to support IMP. Instead everything he did was under the pretext of wanting an excuse to talk to Blitzo, then he leverages that ‘support’ into getting sex. Calling using someone’s job as a pretext to get sex out of them “supporting” them is laughable

- Stolas asks Blitzo if he feels any kind of remorse, or if he’s ever apologized

> We’ve covered this earlier, but the easiest response when Stolas asks if he’s ever apologized would be to point out he quite literally has apologized to Stolas himself (and for not wanting to sleep with him no less), whereas Stolas hasn’t apologized genuinely a single time to Blitzo

But Blitzo is not written to point any of this out: it isn’t just one but multiple conversations that cannot be had in this single scene alone.

S2E11 Mastermind

The last example of the conversation that cannot be had comes in S2E11, when Andrealphus drags IMP in for a trial. This is a conversation that cannot be had that happens not because of bad, unnatural dialogue but instead because of bad, unnatural writing.

Andrealphus’ entire motivation is to help Stella strip Stolas of his legions and power so they can have them instead. The person he wants to get in trouble and to be punished is Stolas himself, not IMP.

Therefore it would make the most sense for him to use his new knowledge that IMP has used the book illegally to immediately summon Stolas to answer for it.

In other words, Andrealphus should want Stolas to be the one on trial for the start. He should have had Striker or Stella tell the truth that they knew Stolas had given permission for the book to be leant out, so Stolas has the greater crime as the one who is responsible for the grimoire and is the one that needs to be punished.

This will still make sense in the worldbuilding established because while the Goetias and Deadly Sins might not care that Stolas exploited a lower class demon for sex, they certainly would care that he broke demon law by lending out his valuable grimoire solely for his own sexual gratification. In addition to this, it’s not like Andrealphus would care if the court insists they punish both Stolas and IMP – no matter what happens there it’s a win-win for him.

On top of this there is a mountain of evidence to indicate Stolas was definitely sexually involved with Blitzo, which could be used to satisfyingly pay off details from previous episodes. For one, Striker (who already works for Stella) had Blitzo confirm to him outright that the relationship was a “transactional fucking” and imps like Wally Wackford (as well as Asmodeus himself) saw Stolas and Blitzo on a date at Ozzie’s. Then there’s the whole crowd at the Harvest Moon festival who could attest to Stolas leering at Blitzo the whole time. If either Stella or Andrealphus looked around, it’s not like they’d find a shortage of people who could paint a picture that Stolas was very much sexually interested in an imp.

And to make matters worse, Andrealphus actually has a perfect window of opportunity to put this plan in motion – while Blitzo is silenced for a lot of the trial he does manage to say that he was allowed to use the book (which is true and Andrealphus knows this).

But instead of immediately summoning Stolas to answer to that claim or presenting corroborating evidence – something that would have been a great dramatic plot point since it would have put Stolas on the spot and required him to realize that in the case of “did he truly lend out his precious book to get sex from an imp for months on end” the answer is “yes”, no matter how he felt about it afterwards – Andrealphus completely nonsensically claims that Blitzo abused Stolas (again, even though he wants Stolas to get in trouble for this) and he further does everything in his power to stop Stolas being summoned.

It gets to the point that Blitzo is nearly executed before Stolas just so happens to see Blitzo on TV and comes to the rescue.

This plan makes no sense whatsoever given that Andrealphus would have gained nothing if Blitzo had died other than smearing Stolas’ reputation a little, and not even that much if he kept insisting he was the victim of an imp. He had no way of knowing that Stolas was going to show up at all – if Stolas had been lounging around in his bath or outside instead of watching telenovelas then Blitzo would have been killed, roll credits.

Andrealphus having IMP put on trial instead of using them to hurt Stolas directly is another example of a conversation that cannot be had. If Stolas were to be put on trial directly he would be forced to admit that after the initial theft he gave permission for the book to be loaned out for months on end and that he arranged for Blitzo to have sex with him as payment.

It’s also a waste of all the setup – having Stolas put on trial and using it as an opportunity to show how the rest of the court think he sees Blitzo as a paid escort would be the perfect wake up call for his character, but the writers refuse to allow Stolas to be interrogated because they’ve decided he cannot be in the wrong even when it results in Andrealphus – the supposedly clever one out of him and Stella – concocting a plan that would be far more effective at getting Stolas off the hook entirely.

The attempt to make Blitzo seem like the one who abused Stolas, even if it came from Andrealphus, also goes largely without pushback from the narrative. Moxxie manages a basic ‘that’s not what happened!’ but the show neglects to have Ozzie, who knows Stolas has feelings for Blitzo and only felt like it was not reciprocated and saw them on a date no less, say anything at all at the trial.

In fact Ozzie can attest to the fact that Stolas asked for an Asmodean Crystal – it’s pretty easy to put the pieces together from there in the context of the trial for Ozzie to realize that Stolas needed the crystal as a replacement for the book he’d been lending to Blitzo. Stolas even mentioned Blitzo’s business in that conversation!

And Ozzie should have every reason to want to try and clear Blitzo’s name – he knows Blitzo is Fizz’s childhood friend who he recently reconnected with and it would hurt his relationship with Fizz if he just passively lets his oldest friend die.

Similarly Striker is willing to effectively speak in Stolas’ defense instead of speaking about anything he actually witnessed that would hurt Stolas (i.e. the thing Andrealphus and he both are supposed to want) even though it’s ambiguous if he even knows Andrealphus is supposedly trying to hurt Stolas.

The comical levels of attempting to avoid speaking about anything that actually happened only increase with the song Mastermind, where Stolas takes the fall for Blitzo by making up a bunch of lies that he was behind IMP and orchestrated giving his book to IMP so that they could do… something he doesn’t even bother making clear.

Once again, no one challenges him on this transparently flimsy and vague story or asks him to explain, even though just a minute ago everyone was all in on the kangaroo court routine to sentence a bunch of imps for hurting one of their own. Even Vassago, who is on Stolas’ side for some reason we don’t yet know (because the episode does nothing to explain what Vassago’s relationship to Stolas even is, so it just comes of again like good character = on Stolas’ side), doesn’t try to poke holes in Stolas’ story in order to save him.

To me this plot point is the nadir of the show. Andrealphus’ plan is needlessly complex and stupid and serves arguably two purposes. One, Stolas can’t be interrogated because he can’t be questioned about anything he actually did. And second, the writers wanted to have Stolas depowered and join IMP more than they wanted to make the plot make sense.

The episode is named “Mastermind” but this is the most comical misuse of the word I can imagine. It’s likely a double meaning title – it’s supposed to be referring to Andrealphus as the real mastermind while Stolas confesses to being one just to get IMP off the hook.

But in reality, Andrealphus is the mastermind of a scheme with more holes in it than a colander.

Meanwhile Stolas admits to being the mastermind of a plot so vaguely defined he doesn’t even bother explaining what he was sending IMP to Earth to do when in actuality the only scheme he’s ever masterminded in the show was using Blitzo’s life being in danger to get sex out of him in the very first episode, which is an arrangement that has been swept under the carpet ever since.

Why “Stolitz” only works when it doesn’t

There are other problems besides wasting the potential of the premise when the relationship drama becomes a primary focus of the show. And that’s that if the viewer does not want the relationship to work out, they’re left with a plotline that they desperately wish would end even as it becomes more and more central.

I do not want “Stolitz” to work out.

Being as honest as possible, Stolas/Blitzo is one of the worst written relationships I have seen in any piece of media. Just as with Stolas himself, it’s another issue where what the show actually wants to communicate and how it comes across are fundamentally at odds with one another.

What the show wants “Stolitz” to be is a story of childhood friends who met again a quarter of a decade later and embarked on a messy love affair where their mutual issues (or rather, predominantly Blitzo’s issues) resulted in everything coming to a fiery end. But the truth, as the show wants the viewer to believe it, is that the two of them are meant to be soulmates who enjoy spending time together; Stolas just needs to be loved and Blitzo just needs to get over his insecurities enough to love in return.

What the show has written is not that. For starters, the two of them were not childhood friends no matter how many wistful shots to their child selves are included: Stolas knew Blitz for all of a day because Blitzo was bought to be there. The result of this is that Stolas holding on to this one emotional checkpoint for the next 25 years is less romantic and more a feeling that he’s simply projecting all of his romantic hopes onto the nearest suitable person.

Worse still, the show’s idea of a ‘messy’ love affair is a predatory relationship where a rich man uses his power and privilege to put his so-called childhood friend, the one person he has sentimental attachments to outside of Via (according to the retcons added in season two) in a position where he has to agree to have sex with him once a month or else risk losing his business. Besides the incredibly unpleasant implication that Stolas was sexually assaulting Blitzo once a month and he was forced to compartmentalize it for the sake of his dream, it comes with the additional incredibly distracting baggage that the rest of IMP have to root for Blitzo to keep Stolas happy because otherwise they’ll all be out on the streets – and then it expects the viewer not to notice that obvious dissonance when it’s time to feel sorry for Stolas (and only Stolas) again.

In addition to this, the show is so carried away by the idea of including sexual harassment jokes that it never stops to consider that most shows don’t begin the journey to establishing their future central couple by having it be made very clear that one of them is repulsed by the advances of the other and is putting up with it primarily because they have to. And then it continues this beat deep into season one, with Blitzo pulling some expressions that leave nothing to the imagination about how Stolas’ attitude and behavior towards him makes him feel.

With a start like the one Stolitz had there was always going to be those who were never going to want the two to work out, but if the writers were going to change tracks to make the audience root for the relationship they needed to show the two of them catching feelings and gradually changing how they behave around one another.

But that didn’t happen. Stolas goes from all sex all the time to suddenly in love (and acting like that was the case the entire time), while Blitzo mainly stops being actively repulsed by Stolas’ advances.

In the second season there are two noticeable changes – Stolas gives Blitzo the option not to visit on Full Moon nights and Blitzo is shaken in S2E4 when he discovers that Stolas is hurt. Putting it in other words, Stolas decides to stop running the risk of sexually assaulting Blitzo every month if Blitzo doesn’t want to have sex but feels he can’t refuse and Blitzo cares enough about Stolas not to want him to die.

I think it should go without saying that Stolas learning not to coerce Blitzo into sex and Blitzo changing to not be willing to kill him anymore and instead worry if he gets hurt is kind of a low bar when it comes to a dynamic in a relationship.

The relationship in general suffers from a deeply underdeveloped dynamic also, as the usual things a show would do to establish that two characters have a bond just aren’t present – the show goes from having Stolas come on way too strong or sexually harass Blitzo through most of season one, to showing they have little connection outside of sex when Stolas uses basic conversation starters like ‘how was your day?’ on their ‘date’ in Ozzie’s (implying they have had few real conversations since Stolas doesn’t bring up anything they discussed previously), to a brief respite where Blitzo doesn’t outright hate Stolas’ advances in S2E2 and Stolas laughing at his jokes (again, a pretty minimum connection) to the two of them barely speaking for several episodes straight until S2E8 happens.

My point here is that the time that should have gone into making the relationship feel like there was a genuine connection was squandered. All the little touches that show a bond growing – inside jokes, playful teasing, getting to know one another – are near entirely absent here, so it feels like Stolas and Blitzo don’t know one another at all outside of the sex they used to have.

For example: Stolas knows enough to understand Blitzo’s business is important to him by S2E8, but he knows nothing outside of that. To date he hasn’t once addressed Blitzo’s employees or daughter by name. Unlike his Instagram self he doesn’t know about Blitzo’s horse obsession until as late as S2E12 (unlike Fizz, who knows Blitzo well enough to casually bring it up despite years apart in S2E6). They’ve never discussed raising their two daughters together or their difficult childhoods with neglectful fathers onscreen. Blitzo has never told him anything about his old life in the circus, or much about what he was doing in the intervening years.

We barely even know what it is Stolas sees in Blitzo outside of ‘good at sex’ and ‘makes him laugh’.

On Blitzo’s end there’s even less. He doesn’t know about Stolas’ gardening hobby or his interest in the stars. Unlike Stolas he does acknowledge Via in S1E2 and tries to be nice to her, calling her ‘sweetie’, but he doesn’t know or care much about Stolas’ precarious home life. We don’t even know what it is he actually likes about Stolas – he compliments his singing once but the show never shows us or has Blitzo articulate what qualities he admires in Stolas as a person. He blushes once or twice around him, but this is once again only on the physical side of things (and as far as physical attraction goes he’s shown a far more noticeable attraction to Fizz, Striker and Moxxie across various episodes – until he suddenly kisses him on the cheek in S2E11 his physical attraction to Stolas was incredibly muted compared to how he’s acted around other characters).

We know what the show is trying to say about the difference Blitzo made in Stolas’ life – he was his sexual awakening, the one bit of color in an otherwise barren and lonely love life. Once again it’s about sex, but there’s at least some emotional weight to that. What’s more than that though is the way Stolas claimed Blitzo ‘taught him that he could choose’ in the duet in S2E8. We never got to see how Blitzo did that outside of being good at sex, but the intent is still there.

The same cannot be said about Blitzo. The writing doesn’t bother making a case for what Blitzo would get out of a relationship with Stolas specifically that he couldn’t get from anyone else. If it’s just to not be lonely anymore, that’s not a recipe for staying together forever. That’s a recipe for codependence. The exact same issue applies to Blitzo feeling like he owes Stolas for lending him the book. Besides the fact that he’s more than paid his dues on that front (with his body, every month), guilt is not a good reason to stay together.

Also on the subject of S2E8, I have to ask the question – what would Stolas have done if, when he confessed to Blitzo, it turned out Blitzo had already fallen for and was seeing someone else? Nothing about the agreement is exclusive, after all, and the two of them aren’t dating. Would Stolas have been horrified Blitzo kept up with the agreement despite having another partner just to keep the lights on?

Or would he have reacted like Blitzo betrayed him or cheated on him?

After S2E9 provides a laundry list of reasons why Blitzo shouldn’t feel bad about losing Stolas given that he rewrites history and victimizes himself at every opportunity, the show follows it up with Millie talking with Blitzo in S2E10, but whenever the conversation turns to Stolas, Blitzo never once mentions all the things he misses about Stolas.

And yet by S2E11 we’re supposed to buy that Blitzo thinks of Stolas as someone he can’t live without.

On top of that, the show doesn’t give us a reason to think the two are all that compatible outside of a basic opposites attract trope. Even outside of the class issue the two are near polar opposites: Blitzo is an extrovert who partied with Verosika in the past, is happy to have casual sexual relationships and due to his impoverished background has very low literacy skills. Stolas by comparison is more introverted, looking bored or annoyed at Stella’s parties, romantically/sexually obsesses over Blitzo after they sleep together once and enjoys reading, actively mocking Stella for (he presumes) not being able to read over the phone. We’re given no idea what the two would even mutually get up to together because there haven’t been any scenes of them just hanging out to hang out like they used to in the early Instagram days – not until S2E12 at least, where they spend most of the runtime together with Blitzo running around trying to get clothes for Stolas and make him happy.

Unlike Stolas who doesn’t appear to have friends his own age so he doesn’t have much company when Via isn’t around, Blitzo has Millie and Moxxie and he’s mending fences with Fizzarolli as season two progresses. The show doesn’t really make a case for why Blitzo needs romantic love in particular to be truly happy when he could just become a better person for the family and friends around him. Then love might find him when he’s not looking, or it might not.

This gets worse when S2E8 implies that Blitzo went months at a time without seeing Stolas at all because Stolas started giving him the option whether to visit on full moon nights (i.e. he stopped expecting Blitzo to have sex with him even if he didn’t want to – also a low floor to put on a sign of love in a relationship).

The usual response to pointing out Blitzo’s default state towards Stolas for what little screen time they have in season two is still pretty avoidant is to blame it on Blitzo being the ‘tsundere’ archetype – someone who pretends not to care when they actually care a whole lot – or his fear of real intimacy.

The problem here is that the show still needs to demonstrate that Blitzo actually likes Stolas even if he pretends not to – the show desperately needed some indication Blitzo was missing Stolas even if he wouldn’t say so for all that time, but instead it just time skips immediately to the next dramatic plot point.

The tsundere argument also falls apart to me because Blitzo has chemistry with other characters – he gives a real genuine smile when Striker praises him for starting a business, blushes when he gets tied up by him and gives him the bedroom eyes later on in the episode when Striker is pitching him on the idea of killing Stolas.

Then there’s Fizz, who he has the most chemistry with of any character – Blitzo gives the most joyous smile he’s given in the entire show when Fizzarolli dips him and hugs him later on. He also blushes and outright shivers when Fizz shows him the blindfolds in S2E8, which makes it seem far more plausible that he’s actually still in love with Fizz, his real childhood friend. This works with Fizz far better than it does with Stolas because the two of them actually have a history together, rather than the single day Stolas spent with Blitzo as a child.

To make matters worse, in the entire show Stolas and Blitzo have only sat down and had a casual conversation a few times – chronologically first was the circus when they catch up briefly but this segues pretty fast into the world’s most awkward love scene, second in Harvest Moon when Blitzo was actively annoyed by Stolas demeaning him, third in Ozzie’s which reads like the first time they’ve tried to have a non-sexual conversation outside of the full moon, then in Seeing Stars when they’re looking for Via and Loona but don’t really connect over their shared issues around fatherhood (and instead of offering genuine emotional support when Blitzo panics about performing, Stolas just hits on him again) and finally in Full Moon when the show has already transitioned to expecting the audience to believe the two of them have an actual connection to one another.

The show tries to rectify this in the usual way – by backfilling in information. We’re shown a series of text messages in S2E4 that a viewer could easily miss of the two conversing, then Blitzo tells the viewer in S2E6 that Stolas has been kinder on the phone. These things both should have happened onscreen to show the dynamic growing, especially since the show wants the viewer to want these two to get together. Leaving the few times they got along and having the aftermath of the show’s events – the breathing room where real bonding could happen – offscreen is a colossal mistake, and leaves the viewer with the impression the writers didn’t actually know how to give Stolas and Blitzo real chemistry (or how to make Stolas treat Blitzo better but have it actually onscreen).

Yet more backfilling happens during Stolas’ song in S2E9 – we’re shown moments of Stolas and Blitzo bonding during the Full Moon meetups, moments that should have been included onscreen so we could be shown and not told that the two of them are catching feelings for each other.

It also doesn’t help that the show includes moments like Blitzo pulling on his coat and glaring furiously out at the camera while Stolas sits in bed behind him with a sad smile, holding his hand with a finger raised like he’s asking for something else after they’ve just had sex (slow down the All 2 U sequence if you want to catch it).

At best this is Stolas asking Blitzo to stay a little longer.

At worst it’s a moment right after they got done having sex and Stolas is asking Blitzo, who is staring at the camera with a look of total fury, for another round.

Either way it’s hard to look at a moment like this and see it as anything but a reflection of how violated Blitzo feels having to sleep with Stolas.

This shot is a disturbing thing to include in an episode whose main thesis is explicitly that the main issue between Stolas and Blitzo is Blitzo’s insecurities, not the multiple times Stolas was happy to use the book to get sex out of Blitzo. Much like abuse, it treats sexual coercion in an exploitative way; it wants to include the dark story element while simultaneously extending a disturbing lack of empathy to the main character the moment the deal ends.

As a result of this complete lack of any real connection between the leads, the storytelling in the back half of season 2 also lands completely contrary to the show’s intentions.

Watching S2E9 the viewer is obviously supposed to think that Blitzo trying to mend fences so hard is because he actually loves Stolas and cannot admit it, which the dialogue spells out in the most on the nose way possible, as per usual – he gives a long rant about his insecurities and how it causes him to push people away, then when Stolas gives him an opening to apologize (because that’s all Stolas wants and the thing the show thinks Blitzo should do), Blitzo shuts it down hard.

However, the complete lack of any reason for Blitzo to be into Stolas outside the physical side of the relationship just makes it look as though Stolas dismissing him set off his abandonment complex. Or worse, given the sheer toxicity the relationship devolves into in S2E8 and S2E9 (plus the months of Blitzo having to sleep with Stolas in season one), it wouldn’t be hard to make the argument that Blitzo has trauma bonded towards the person that coerced and harassed him and then – from his perspective – dropped him completely without any attempt at reconciliation, either in S2E9 or the month that passed to S2E10.

Stolas’ lack of any real insight or care into Blitzo’s life also makes his side of things look a lot less like love and a whole lot more like projection. If it means accepting he might have done something wrong and apologizing, then Stolas doesn’t care about Blitzo’s feelings. As mentioned previously, he doesn’t care about Blitzo’s family or interests or know him all that well and his behavior comes off as obsessive and delusional – Stolas built a fantasy around Blitzo then couldn’t cope with it when that fantasy was dispelled.

All he really wants is someone to love him and it doesn’t particularly matter who they are outside of that, something Stolas says outright in S2E9 when describing what it is he wants. He lists not a single thing he likes about Blitzo specifically, yet the viewer is expected to feel Blitzo should want to want Stolas – simply to make Stolas happy, not because Stolas actually needs him. Blitzo could have been anyone Stolas fell into bed with and got sexually obsessed with and it would make little difference.

The show has far more successfully suggested that Stolas simply put all his hopes onto Blitzo only to blame him when it turned out that Blitzo was a person with his own hang ups and issues and not a dating simulator that Stolas could put coins into and get slavish devotion out of.

It’s what makes the imp-like doll Stolas had as a child an oddly eerie, prescient detail – it’s a more honest reflection of how Stolas has treated Blitzo than anything the show has had him sing about.

By the end of season two this lack of chemistry reaches almost comical levels – Stolas wakes up in Blitzo’s apartment and realizes he likes horses, while Blitzo learns what Stolas prefers to eat. This is such a basic level of information for two characters to learn about one another and it’s coming after nearly two seasons of them knowing one another. It also does not feel that having them be near strangers outside of sex was the intending reading of the relationship at this point, given that both S2E6 and S2E9 try to insert the implication that they have had friendly conversations and fun times with one another around the sex.

The closest the writers get to actually approaching an acknowledgement of how paper thin all this is comes in the season two – there is a moment in S2E12 where Stolas acknowledges that he threw everything away for a fantasy, which is maybe the most accurate, introspective thing he’s managed to say in two whole seasons. It’s possible the writers could go somewhere with this, but as per usual it will likely come with the caveat of expecting the viewers to ignore that Stolas spent an entire episode pouting that Blitzo didn’t trust that Stolas could actually love him (and ignoring every single thing he did to make that opinion completely reasonable on Blitzo’s part).

The thing about laying all this out – the lazy polyfilling, the lack of a dynamic, the show accidentally suggesting the characters have better chemistry elsewhere or that they don’t love one another but are just being driven by their myriad issues – is that it pretty soon begins to look like “Stolitz” would have been far more fascinating as a case study into the kind of relationship that is a disaster waiting to happen than it would something the audience should be invested in wanting to see work out.

If the show did allow Stolitz to be anything other than endgame, it could be genuinely interesting and good drama if it was allowed to function as a character work and nothing else.

But another unfortunate habit Hellaverse shows have is spoiling all their plot points on livestreams or in merch, so the viewer is left with no tension to enjoy about where the plot might go. We already know the two of them will end up together, whether or not the viewers are even invested in that happening any more or not.

All roads lead to Stolitz, even when watching Stolitz unfold feels like being on a road to Hell worse than any the show could conjure up.

Stolas should have been the abuser

I’m not the first to comment on this and I probably won’t be the last: if the show wanted to actually depict abuse, the closest thing they have to a nuanced depiction who would give the show something different and meaningful to say is Stolas.

The thing is Helluva Boss is not unique in writing abusers as just being obvious, angry all the time monsters. Other shows have fallen into that trap.

What we see represented a lot less, though, are abusers who present a nice or sensitive facade. Abusers who go against the stereotype, abusers who no one would suspect because they seem to be in touch with their feelings on the surface. An abuser who has people they love and can be kind to, some of the time.

An abuser who just denies they ever did anything wrong when confronted, who views their perspective and feelings as the only definition of reality that matters even when it’s skewed to the point they no longer seem to live in the same world as everyone else.

Or, when they do apologize, proceed to make the exact same mistakes as before, changing nothing about the behavior that caused the problems in the first place.

An abuser who considers they might be in the wrong when confronted, but never stops to do any deep self-reflection. An abuser who assumes that if their feelings were hurt, they are automatically in the right because their emotions create reality.

An abuser who applies such extreme cognitive dissonance that they can treat someone like a sex object, then expect to just date them at the exact same time as though a relationship and a transactional agreement are somehow the same thing.

An abuser who uses tears and guilt tripping to shut down any discussion of how they’ve hurt someone they supposedly love.

An abuser who isn’t just a hypocrite but engages in DARVO, accusing that same person of doing everything they previously did far worse but have forgotten all about because it doesn’t count if they do it.

An abuser who treats that person like an object, projecting all their fantasies onto them while showing no real interest in who they actually are outside of when their flaws are a useful distraction from discussing anything the abuser might have done.

An abuser who thinks showy gestures of love are just as good as actually doing the work to be a better person day by day for the people around them.

A rich prince who the show has written to be bad at his duties, enjoying all the privileges with seemingly little of the responsibilities, while using their power on an imperfect victim to act entitled to their body, only to assume that stopping that behavior was enough to repair the damage done.

That the show managed to accident its way into this with Stolas when they wanted to make him the most tragic, sympathetic character on the show would normally be quite a feat, but in hindsight I don’t think it’s all that surprising.

If you have a character who is incapable of apologizing or self-reflection, who bends reality around them, they will inevitably start to feel far more convincing an abuser and far more uncomfortably close to abusers in real life than the likes of Andrealphus and Stella, who sit around drinking wine and are more like Disney villains in tone.

It’s the comparison between a fun performance piece villain doing cartoon nonsense who the audience can love to hate and someone who’s just that bit too manipulative, that bit too real and just that bit too easy to imagine how exhausting they would be to deal with in real life (especially for anyone who’s ever known someone like Stolas).

And it’s a big reason why, for me at least, this season just got worse and worse as it went on.

Summarizing Season 2

The case studies section has gone quite granular and specific, so I just wanted to quickly sum up what Season 2 is like as a whole, since I think nothing can communicate the frustrating whiplash of the season more than looking at the full picture.

Season 2 is unambiguously the Stolas season.

We open the season on the Stolas flashback that retcons what we know about Stolas and Blitzo and also flattens Stella down into a cardboard cut-out. We also get the first sign that the writers don’t intend to have Stolas hold himself accountable for what happened in season one in Stolas’ second solo song.

From there the season only moves further into rewriting Stolas into the woobie that can do no wrong – the show encourages the viewer to view his cheating as not really mattering or even counting as being really cheating multiple times, then backfills in nicer conversations between Stolas and Blitzo. When Blitzo yells at Stolas over something he’s told Stolas before, it’s fine for Stolas to throw him out and Blitzo be put through the wringer as penance for the next two episodes. When Stolas is petty, passive aggressive and outright mean especially in S2E9 and S2E12 no one acts like the way he’s behaving is wrong, even if he twice ignores the efforts of the rest of IMP in saving his life.

Where season one ended with the Truth Seekers hallucination sequence where everyone from Blitzo’s past gave him a sharp dressing down that actually addressed what Blitzo had done wrong, season two ends with a trial sequence where Stolas is challenged not at all on anything he actually did while still having him lose everything so the show can give the appearance of him taking accountability while simultaneously framing everything like he wasn’t responsible at all and was doing IMP a massive favor, resulting in him earning Blitzo’s love, making him pitiable now that he’s as impoverished as everyone else and inventing an excuse to include him in more plotlines.

Where season one was a tour of Blitzo’s past and all the people he had hurt previously, season two is a parade of episodes adding backfills, retcons and outright whitewashes over everything Stolas has done.

Where season one set up a very broken physical relationship between Blitzo and Stolas and ends on what should have been a game changing cliffhanger, season two has Blitzo go from furious at Stolas to in devoted puppy love with him within the course of four episodes – just in time for Stolas to turn cold towards him, likely to fuel more melodrama in season 3.

The difference in intent is night and day.

So what do I want?

Fans sometimes respond to criticism with exasperation – it’s a mixture of “nothing will be good enough for you!” or “so what do you want?” or “do you need the writing to spell out what you should think? That’s bad writing!”

I hope it’s clear from the opening section of this essay that the first season, rough as it was around the edges, was mostly good enough for me. I liked the writing enough to keep going and to write this inadvisedly long essay about it; it’s out of a frustrated lost love for this show that I made this at all. And I’ve tried to come at this from an angle of an intellectual exercise – unpicking where exactly I think things went wrong and how it could’ve been avoided.

The question of whether I want the show to engage in didactic storytelling where they bluntly tell the viewer what to think or what moral to take away is frankly bemusing to me, because the show is already using bad, blunt dialogue (and post from the creators on socials) in order to tell the viewers exactly what they should think of characters and storylines. A fandom loving a show where characters deliver lines like “I like tormenting you!” (read: I’m the bad guy, hate me please) or “You want me to be like – ‘Oh sorry, this entire time I assumed the worst because I was convinced a prince could never love someone like me and I've let my self hatred stop me from apologizing to anyone I could ever care about!’” (read: it was my insecurities causing all the issues right from the start, don’t blame Stolas because I’m the one who needs to apologize even though I’ve done it twice before).

It’s a little bizarre to me whenever someone responds to the suggestion that there should maybe be a storyline where Stolas self-reflects, realizes he’s done something wrong and sticks to that realization for long enough to actually apologize and do something about it with “that would be so unsubtle and bad writing!” when it’s quite literally the plot of S2E9 but with Blitzo in his place. Apology Tour is structured around Blitzo avoiding learning the lesson the writers think he needs to learn, reflecting when outside events force him to do some introspection and then telling Stolas he’s sorry and laying out exactly what his insecurities are. Why is it suddenly way too unsubtle and bad writing to expect the writers to put Stolas through a similar arc for an episode, even though he desperately needs it and spinning it out longer just makes him look even more unwilling to self-reflect than he already is?

The show has had two false alarms where Blitzo snapped at Stolas where it seemed like Stolas might actually grow and change (technically three if you count the argument in S2E9 also) – how many more moments like this will viewers happily sit through while insisting the writers actually addressing the plot points they’ve raised is somehow bad writing?

At the risk of just responding to more hypothetical fandom arguments, I’ll lay out exactly what I’d want to see in the hypothetical scenario where I could bring myself to keep watching the show:

Have an episode similar to Apology Tour for Stolas that doesn’t pull its punches on having Stolas realize he need to change and do at least some minimum amount of damage control. Acknowledge outright something that happened in season one instead of just vaguely gesturing at it and then ignoring it in the hope the viewers forget about it. Have Stolas actually say ‘I’m sorry’ without any minimizing back handedness from the writers. Drop the constant framing of awful things Stolas does as somehow neutral acts that no one reacts to.

And on the Stolitz side, actually have some chemistry where Stolas and Blitzo not only learn about each other but show Stolas express care for Blitzo’s feelings for once. Alternatively, lean into the two of them realizing how little they know about each other and needing to make things work as a partnership – or break up for good – instead of just having Blitzo do endless labor to service Stolas’ needs.

Personally, I don’t think that’s asking too much.

Can the show be saved?

At the end of a very long, very sad series of words I ask a simple question: can the show be saved? Could it still live up to the promise all the viewers who gradually dropped off saw in it?

As I see it, there was only really a couple of paths for the show to be as great as it could’ve been.

First, if the writers had set out to make a limited series instead. Going by the tweet thread about Millie discussed earlier there was never a solid plan to make this series long running (Viv says explicitly they didn’t know if they would be able to make much past one season), so if it had set out to make a reduced run of episodes instead of four full seasons, that might have worked a whole lot better. Then the show’s tendency of a lot of season one episodes feeling like season finales might have made sense, and each episode could have been a focus on a different member of IMP before building up to a climax with the plot from S1E6 where everyone comes together and the business is truly threatened for the first time because the humans might have caught on to what IMP are doing. This is still a big climax and it’s different than Hazbin’s war with Heaven, so it avoids too much overlap.

Second, the writers just reboot the show and focus on the Goetia plotline they seem more interested in now anyway.

Or three – hardest of all – they somehow manage to course correct, flesh out the world, make Stolitz believable and Stolas an actually tolerable character and give the primary cast – not just Stolas – well written cohesive character arcs.

My preference is option one, but since we are not possessed of a time machine I can only wish anyone sticking it out til the bitter end with the show good luck going into the third season – especially if they’re still holding out for option three.

But for me personally, I don’t think I can keep doing what I did with season two and kick the can down the road waiting for the show to actually pay off its plot points and do something satisfying with its characters. Sitting through twelve episodes when I wanted to give up after S2E1 was hard enough; I just don’t have the stamina to keep hoping the show remembers what I once loved about it.

There’s a tendency to give critics sometimes contradictory advice – that they just shouldn’t watch the show if they don’t like it but they also can’t criticize it at all before it’s finished. I hope at least the sheer amount of words and effort put into this shows I wanted to like the show in good faith and tried very hard to do so long past the point I had any real enthusiasm for new episodes coming out. But I can’t keep going with it just to satisfy some hypothetical audience that might never think my issues with the show are valid anyway – my opinion on recent episodes isn’t ‘it’s fine but I don’t love it’ like viewers can feel waiting for shows to hit the point where the hook kicks in, but ‘this is getting worse episode by episode’, so it’s just not worth it to me to keep going.

So this is my goodbye note to the show – a genuine thanks for the good times and what I did enjoy about it and a recognition that what it’s doing now just isn’t for me. If it’s still for you, that’s OK – I hope you can continue getting the enjoyment that I lost a long time ago. But if that is you, I hope that you – if you somehow made it all the way to the end of this thing – can see that I tried to approach the show from a position of giving it grace, because to borrow a quote from Linday Ellis talking about the downfall of Game of Thrones, “you have to love something a lot to be this disappointed”.