WARNING: The following Looking Glass article contains sad demons, horny demons, mature themes, wall-to-wall spoilers, strong language, overanalysis of beloved characters and sadfeels realizations about beloved characters, so yes, it’s intended for Helluva Boss supernerds.
If the devil is in the details, we’re up for a field day with this one.
I previously looked at sister-series Hazbin Hotel, where Lucifer’s daughter sets out to reform damned souls and give them a shot at redemption. That piece was a bit of a place-marker, a mission statement that I was going to get around to something bigger with this when I felt the time was right. This time we’re digging much deeper into Spindlehorse’s melodious take on Hell, where demons aren’t so different from many of us, and every inch as fucked up and then some.
Helluva Boss is structured differently than Hazbin, with way more breathing room thus far to let its character arcs flourish, and appropriately enough it’s those character arcs that will be taking center stage today.
So without further hellabaloo, let’s dig right in to that year-round pumpkin spice latte of adult animation, Helluva Boss.
I: You’re Poison (I Don’t Wanna Break These Chains)
The main demon at front-and-center of Helluva Boss is Blitz (the O is silent), former circus performer and current imp assassin, and you may have guessed that the title of the series refers to him.
Though lively and spirited and genuinely enterprising, staking out a name for himself despite being trapped in an infernal caste system where Satan created his kind to be subservient, one thing we come to learn about Blitz is that he is a toxic person. This isn’t me extrapolating, this is perfectly in-universe canon – the episode Apology Tour is all about this. He leaves a trail of emotional demon wreckage behind him, to the extent that every Halloween, demons who hate Blitz come up to Earth to have a Blitz-sucks party, bonded by their common experience of being screwed over or otherwise slighted by Blitz. In hindsight, his weathered toxicity makes him feel (either intentionally or accidentally) like a main-character foil to Charlie’s well-meaning optimism and naivety in Hazbin Hotel. Anyone else getting that? Just me? Yeah? Damn.
In fact, there were times when it started to feel like one of Blitz’s only real in-universe redemptive qualities, at least so far as how he treats those around him, is his total love for his adoptive daughter Loona, and we’ve got a lot to dig into when we get to her a bit ways down the page. But for now, we’re taking a look at the relationship between Blitz and Stolas that forms the primary throughline of the show’s long arc thus far, that of the lower-class demon and the infernal noble who shacked up, which the fandom – well, honestly, just everyone at this point – has christened Stolitz.
So here’s the thing about Stolitz: it was a thing, then it wasn’t a thing as of the end of The Full Moon, then it was a thing again as of the end of Mastermind, and this won’t be the last time I talk about Mastermind because that wasn’t the only huge thing to happen on those last few minutes.
The first time it was a thing, it was a deeply problematic thing (in-universe – I am not calling the creators problematic, leave that to trashy 40-minute youtube video essays from darkly fixated weirdos whose obsession with creators they don’t like borders on legit concerning). Blitz needed Stolas’s grimoire for the spell that allowed his business to operate; that business being assassinations up on Earth, so if someone got murdered and landed in Hell, they could conduct their unfinished business through Blitz’s company I.M.P. and avenge themselves on those what did them in, and so forth. No grimoire, no spell that portals them between realms. The ongoing bargain for use of the grimoire was sexual in nature, but all the while, the fraught and really-falling-for-him Stolas aspired that it could blossom into something more.
As such, it dealt in some seriously dark issues like the use of power and means to wield emotional and sexual control over another person. Just because you come to love someone doesn’t mean that your coerced sex with them is strings-free consensual. And they say they enjoy it, but they desperately need what you have in order to put food on their table.
Yeah, Stolitz was a lot. Along the way, we witnessed Stolas’s family life and meet his wife Stella, who can only be described at this point as one of the most psychologically repugnant characters in all of fiction, in a loveless marriage dictated by the constricting whims of family and legacy.
But then The Full Moon shattered that version of their relationship in grand emotional form, ironically caused by Stolas attempting to directly address and remedy the deeply troubling aspects of his dynamic with Blitz by giving him an Asmodean crystal, which for you Dark Souls fans out there, think of it as the moment I.M.P. gets the lordvessel and unlocks fast travel. Realm hopping without the grimoire. He’s doing this in an attempt to remove the toxic aspect of power and control from their romance, in hopes that Blitz will still want to continue to see him without obligation.
What follows is one of the most brutally painful exchanges on the show, where Blitz, caught up in a cocktail of self-unworth, absolutely unleashes. We’re talking scorched-earth screaming, burning it to the ground. The Full Moon’s climax is split into two parts, first the wicked action setpiece against the powersuited Cherubs and then this confrontation. The battle gets your blood pumping, but this confrontation takes your breath away. For as musical as this show is, it’s harrowing that this scene – which in musical dramas like this could easily have been done as a confrontation-song sort of deal – is bereft entirely of any music, and I think is at its strongest for it. Nothing but raw emotion.
Fast forward to Mastermind, and at the utmost end of need, with Blitz facing execution for his illegal use of Stolas’s grimoire, Stolas frames himself for the crime, ultimately stripped of his rank and his power for a century, and he ends up living with Blitz and Loona.
Despite everything, Stolas did this for love. And the thing is, this reignites Stolitz, but everything is different now. From a narrative perspective, I would argue that the original Stolitz, absolutely fraught with very problematic questions of power and consent, had to end in as acrimonious a way as it did in The Full Moon, leaving no question that they had slammed the door. It was done, the earth salted.
When dealing with the deeply troubling questions that the original Stolitz presented, I would argue that Stolas giving Blitz the Asmodean crystal was not enough, and if Blitz had accepted it and continued seeing him at that point, then that would have presented more troubling questions of its own. Because as sympathetic a character as Stolas is, the power in their relationship ultimately belonged to him. Having him simply give Blitz an out and have it be gratefully accepted, with no repercussions for either party, wouldn’t have eliminated the problems – it would have merely transformed them into a slightly different set of baggage, because you’re then taking those intensely troubling issues and presenting them as speedbumps instead of fatal cracks in the model.
Instead, scorching the earth allowed – again, from a narrative perspective – for Stolas to create something new for them from scratch by sacrificing himself for Blitz, which starts their relationship fresh from a place of earnest love and selflessness.
Because the story took this step of taking a Molotov cocktail to the old Stolitz, it allows this new version of their relationship to feel purified of much of the baggage from before. That moment when Blitz and Stolas both get swallowed by the ice dragon and Blitz swashbuckles his way out of it with Stolas in tow, and they share that sweet midair kiss that immediately became a whole bunch of people’s bluesky avatars, feels like a redefinition of the groundwork of their relationship.
All that coalesces such that the last we’ve now seen of our demon pals to this point – Stolas and Blitz dancing together on Blitz’s balcony, truly amorous – feels genuine and earned. A scene like this could not have been as powerful as it is if their relationship was still being dragged down by those particular forms of baggage that previously defined it.
That doesn’t mean there’s no baggage at all to claim here. There is a great big heartbroken ‘but’ to all I’m saying about nu-Stolitz – but we’ll get to her in a bit.
(I was seriously considering titling the Stolitz section Love & Monsters because it would have been pretty perfect. But as much as I am wont to reference Doctor Who everywhere, I didn’t want to pay unironic lip service to what I think is its worst episode of all time so you get a reference to a song about a toxic relationship instead)
II: Living On A Razor’s Edge, Balancing On A Ledge
But when you think about a cocktail of trauma and guilt and sheer horror, nothing quite tops Blitz, the circus, and the fire. I have to put this part here relatively early, because it – like a certain other flashback pertaining to a certain other member of I.M.P. we will get to – is so incredibly foundational that it essentially recontextualizes a lot of the dysfunction we’d seen from him up to that point.
This moment in the episode Oops – which I thought until this very moment referred to the main plot of Fizz and Blitz drawing too much attention to themselves in the glut of Greed and getting kidnapped, but now writing this, given the monumentally character-forming nature of this flashback, I think just has to refer to the fire – is one of the most profoundly revealing single moments in the entire series.
When a young Blitz – or Blitzo, as he went by at the time, was a circus performer along with a young Fizz, his jealousy at Fizz’s popularity led to him shoving someone who was bringing a cake with lit candles backstage. Candles met curtain, causing a fire that swept through the grounds. With that one wayward shove, he lost his mother to the flames, a thing he’s never stopped blaming himself for, he earned the eternal hatred of his sister, and scarred Fizz for life in more ways than one.
As Blitz and Fizz are reconciling this in Oops, Fizz finding out that it really was an accident instead of juvenile sabotage gone horrifically wrong, it becomes very difficult not to let the mind wander and understand that everything stems from this. I’m treading the murky waters where analysis starts to give way to theory at this point, but we start to wonder how many of Blitz’s decisions throughout the series are compelled, either conscious or subconscious, by raw, unfiltered, unprocessed guilt. This isn’t without on-screen evidence; that drugged-out dream-vision I mentioned just earlier from Truth Seekers cuts to the quick with Blitz’s subconsciousness, taking the form of an ex-girlfriend, indicting him for always pushing away those who try to get close to him. Gee, I wonder why that is.
Because there’s more than one way to get burned, some more horrible than others.
Because here’s the thing that Oops makes us understand: while the intention was not there, it was still Blitz’s fault that everything went up in flames. And that’s an open question, by the way, as to how much of Blitz’s behavior throughout the series stems from this. Just something to think about.
But for Blitz, family is chiefly a thing that he’s lost, either in body or in spirit. No wonder he’s so permissive and doting on Loona even in the early days when she isn’t reciprocal in the slightest; to Blitz, Loona is the first thing in his life after the loss of family that he can truly call family found. (I originally started that sentence with ‘maybe to Blitz’, but, there’s no maybe. She just is, objectively.)
And Blitz’s toxicity, his inability to hold down a relationship, his general asshole-ness – if we’re digging deep and peeling through things that may or may not be subtext, if we really and properly start to close-read the demon assassin show, Apology Tour hits a lot differently with the foundational context of the fire in mind. Like he’s never stopped setting irresponsible fires in different ways, and why not, because none of them are ever going to be as devastating as that first one.
I wanted to tie it in to the rest of I.M.P. as well, but I can’t really, because real talk, he does not treat Moxxie all that spectacularly for most of the series, but we’re getting to that right now.
(I just want to point out that while I was re-watching relevant scenes to refresh myself for this article, the comeback “Great, the fuckin’ supremacist is on my side, wonderful” is an incredible line.)
Moxxie’s father shows us a unicorn of a more metaphorical variety than Blitz’s ever-increasing collection: straight-up queerphobia manifesting in Spindlehorse’s Hell, both the more common “gays are bad” song-and-dance in addition to a scene that tackles bi erasure, another part of the network of ways in which people are shitty to queer people.
Exes And Oohs is a remarkable episode in this regard because the Helluverse is front-and-center a proud queer space, with those characters who aren’t out-and-out queer being allies, either explicitly or assumed. But as much as a huge part of the queer experience needs to be queer joy and belonging, pretending that shitty people don’t exist doesn’t make shitty people go away. So that leaves the show to grapple with how to best handle jokes that are made, in-universe, at the expense of queerness without actually being anti-queer on a meta level.
And I do feel that they nailed it. Just make the source of the anti-queer jabs an absolute abhorrent asshole in his own right, that’s really the crux of it, and other than that, just forge ahead with it and do their thing. It’s like what Kevin Smith said on that one Q&A DVD about how – this is just my takeaway from what he said, not a direct quote – by putting shitty things in the mouth of the character who is meant to be seen as an asshole or dumbass or otherwise piece of trash, you are not condoning the shitty thing, you are actively criticizing it through context. (I believe he was talking about the character on Chasing Amy who opined that lesbians just need ‘a good deep dicking’. So yeah.)
But for what it’s worth, the CONGRATS GAY scene is one of the few times where a piece of media almost had me doing a literal spit-take.
But beyond that, Moxxie’s father is cruel, abusive and manipulative, a thing Moxxie has been running from ever since, and the flashback that heavily implies, if not outright says, that he made Moxxie complicit in murdering his own beloved mother puts him so far beyond the pale that it’s a wonder the lasting scars from this only really surfaced for one episode so far. In a word, Krimson is evil by the standards of any metaphysical plane of existence.
But it does recontextualize a lot of Blitz’s dismissive or outright insulting behavior towards Moxxie, a bit harsher in hindsight as it were. If one was being rather uncharitable towards Blitz (and I have seen some fans of M&M who are quite displeased at how the show has essentially given Blitz a pass on a narrative level for ruining their anniversary in Ozzie’s, for example), you could argue Moxxie’s traumatic upbringing and his current employment has trapped him in a cycle of being a submissive lackey to domineering men who want to wield him as a weapon.
Mind you, I’m not saying that I personally subscribe to that all the way (as Blitz is, for all his faults, nowhere near as callously monstrous as Krimson in any way, and in fact he and Moxxie have the shared trauma of losing their mothers to an act that was not a thing of intent by them, but which they were involved in), but the parallel becomes so solid that I really do have to assume it was intentional to at least some degree. But at the end of the day, again, for all his blemishes, Blitz does care. Krimson does not in the slightest. (And Blitz has gotten markedly better about how he treats M&M as the series has progressed.)
Meanwhile, I’m surprising myself by how little I actually have to say about Millie in this context. Millie’s family dynamic is, all things considered, pretty non-traumatic from what we see of them, and later on in the first minisode, a problem between Millie and her sister is resolved in a very grown-up and reasonable way once it manifests.
Don’t get me wrong by the fact that I have relatively little to say here; I think it’s good in terms of the story’s long arc that Millie can boast a perfectly healthy, loving, wholesome Wrathful upbringing, because not everything needs to be a trauma bond (her and her husband inadvertently sharing the same obnoxious ex-boyfriend, whose resurgent presence in her life drives Millie to a state of rage that can only be called transcendent, notwithstanding). Millie being on good with her folks both then and now helps lend important context to the traumatic stuff; it’s a reminder that the pentagram has plenty of happy demon families. In fact, seeing how well she gets on with her folks in The Harvest Moon Festival has aged really well and is honestly pretty joyous in light of all the much darker family ties that have bubbled to the surface come season two.
III: You Found A Home In All Your Scars And Ammunition
People who hang around me online can attest I’m Team Loona, so it comes up a milkbone treat that we have a whole lot to unpack with her arc so far. (Are we…is that a thing here? Are we doing teams for this? No? Fuck)
Assuming, in a vacuum, that your first experience with these characters comes from watching the show in a sequential fashion as one does, then based on when you first watched the show, your first introduction to Loona will either have been in the pilot, whose official upload was eventually taken down by Spindlehorse entirely, or in episode one, Murder Family, where she has a small ancillary role.
Funnily enough, even though I’m OG enough to have seen the original upload of the pilot, my first experience with the show was Murder Family, because I don’t know, I guess I thought that the numbering system started with one like an asshole.
But anyway, during the time it existed as an official part of Helluverse canon, the pilot was structured such that it introduced I.M.P. and the main cast one by one. And Loona as portrayed in the pilot is r-o-u-g-h ROUGH, compared by Moxxie (not inaccurately from the way she acts in this one) to an awful meth-addicted homeless woman. She’s angry on a hair trigger and prone to violence and generally unpleasant. Blitz loves her to the moon and back, her being his adopted daughter for one year as of when the show lets in, but the way she acts in the pilot, you’d really think she hates him and everyone around her.
Even by the time we hit Murder Family, she’s leveled out significantly, her small role in the episode coming off more as “too cool for school, bored, would meh you to death if that was physically possible”. By the time we hit Spring Broken, we see her anger coming out in flashes when she sees that her co-workers are being idiots, we see her acknowledge that she treats her adoptive dad like shit and in that scene she clearly understands that what she’s doing is not okay and that she should feel bad about it, and we get to see her experience something relatively normal, like inching her way closer to a cute guy and managing to make inroads with him despite her exceptional social awkwardness, but then finding out last minute that he’s taken.
But don’t get me wrong; the writers distilled her characterization after the pilot, but for our purposes here, that just means we can look at the things she does as deliberate tells as to what’s going on inside that hellhound head. As the season progresses, she’s more liable to be aloof than invested; on her phone with an apathetic look rather than paying attention to people around her unless there’s something exceptionally interesting going on, such as Moxxie trying to be a country roughneck badass and failing at that exactly.
But rather than these being signs of simply an uninvested girl who’d rather be anywhere else (which I’m sure a lot of us thought was the case back in season one), in hindsight I think it’s more fair for us to consider the word resistance. She resists showing affection to almost anyone. She doesn’t reciprocate Blitz’s love and resists his doting. She resists mentally committing to the idea that she is part of this team and this family.
However, Truth Seekers shows just how dead-serious she can be when she has an important mission to carry out, all aloof apathy cast aside. She clearly cares, but won’t parse it in conventional ways.
In fact, at the outset, Loona resists so much that it takes a whole lot for her to so much as validate her relatively newfound family ties, often refusing to call Blitz ‘dad’, instead just calling him by his name. Season one coaches us effectively to recognize that it’s an important moment whenever she does call Blitz ‘dad’, and we’ll do well to remember that come season two.
Then we got to the early season two episode Seeing Stars. This episode was a lot of things for a lot of people. Octavia provides the plot thrust and Blitz gets the ridiculous dark humour setpiece, but it’s not-so-secretly a Loona episode at its heart. Not just for the character-defining sequence of events where she spends all literal day running around Los Angeles trying to find Octavia while the rest of the team are variously fucking about (again showing that for as aloof as she projects a lot of the time, if she cares about you, she’ll do you one better and show the hell up for you), but for the flashback we get to when Blitz first met her.
This scene is lowkey kind of a masterclass in conveying such a huge amount of context, character and worldbuilding in a very short time. If imps are a low caste, hellhounds are the level beneath that, seeming to occupy the very rock bottom of Hell’s caste structure.
Even though hellhounds are just as sentient as any other demon, Hell’s institutions treat them like, well, dogs; we see the kennel that Loona lived in right up to age 17, an ostensible orphanage that has all the trappings of the kind of cartoon dungeon or prison that gave us 90s kids nightmares, all twisted shadows and long bars and sad sparse cells. She’s already violent and lashing out, but if this was your life, how different would you be?
As the long arc continues, effect details only worsen it; I’m jumping way ahead here, but for instance, in Mastermind, when I.M.P. are on trial and Loona is shackled and muzzled, she’s the only one who remains muzzled for the entirety of the trial, implying that hellhounds aren’t even allowed to speak in their own defense when accused of a crime.
With Blitz and the fire, I left an open question as to how much of his behavior throughout the series is directly influenced by that traumatic event, but with Loona I’m answering the question and parsing through this piece by piece, scene by scene. Get a hot drink, we’re going to be here a minute.
After the kennel flashback, every single thing about Loona makes perfect sense: her too-cool-for-school deflection, her quickness to anger, her callous brush-offs of her dad’s doting, everything is recontextualized by this short but crucial flashback. She’s in a fight-or-flight mode that she never learned how to turn off before the events of the main story let in and may not even realize is there at all because she’s never been without it.
In short, she’s an abuse survivor, the saddest kind who to our knowledge has never known any life other than endless neglect, deplorable jail-like conditions, violence and a terrible lack of love.
That funny line at the beginning of Seeing Stars – Loona going absolutely crazy at the start because her dad decided to stage an intervention of her anger issues to try and make her more of a people person, to which she exclaims in a super-angry tone, “I AM a people person!” – I only just realized while writing this that it wasn’t just a throwaway gag. She actually thinks that, because she’s never been able to flick off the fight-or-flight reflex, so she doesn’t even know what it’s like to not live your life with barricades raised high around you, ready to slap back at anyone who tries to get too close. She doesn’t realize it’s not normal, because it’s her normal.
(And then there’s the as-yet unproven thing that teeters on that precarious line between fan-theory and implication by the fact that she’s recognized by the bitch girls at the start of Queen Bee that she had another family at some point, who punted her back to the kennel like returning a shirt that doesn’t fit, and that adds a whole other layer of abandonment issues to the trauma, but that’s total implication at this point and I’d prefer to stick to things the story has outright shown us instead so that this stays in the realm of analysis rather than outright theory.)
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that they chose to show us the kennel at the exact moment that they did; they let us go a full season without this context, let us think Loona was just Baseline Grumpy, so rough around the edges you could prick yourself (especially in the now-defunct pilot, when I presume Medrano was still ironing out her cast and the right vibe for her world), but in reality, when we see her lashing out at others or failing to reward like with like, this additional context lets us understand – just like her dad and the fire, hurt people hurt people.
By the end of season one, it seems the prickliness of the pilot has been smoothed into mere social awkwardness, a feeling of being out of step. But it’s still more than that – remember I said Loona never learned how to unlearn fight-or-flight; go ahead and re-watch that scene in Queen Bee where Vortex makes introductions and Beelzebub is immediately super-friendly to her. Bee’s trying to get her involved and Loona immediately goes full emotional defense barricade. She’s displaying a fight or flight reaction to being made friends with. She takes her first encounter with Bee like she’s just been lowkey insulted. She makes to leave and just about breaks down crying. This goes so far beyond social awkwardness and right back into learned trauma reactions.
I’ve watched Queen Bee a whole bunch, if my vibes are off on a given day it’s one of those things where I can watch a few minutes and it’ll set me right back to baseline, but only as I’m writing this am I really noticing just what those little moments in this one scene appear to represent.
Sure, part of it is the fact that Beelzebub comes on strong and accidentally did all the things you don’t want to do when trying to break the ice with an abuse survivor who might see your enthusiasm as insincerity and your forwardness as force. But something lowkey bugged me about just how put off Loona is by that exchange, until I realized all this and it all made sense.
Now, all this at Bee’s party was meant to be shown to us before the flashback in Seeing Stars put all the pieces into place, with Seeing Stars being an early season two episode and Queen Bee being the season one finale. But Beelzebub is voiced by huge stadium-filling pop star Ke$ha, whose lawyers must have combed through every particle of the creators’ lives before agreeing to the Beelzebub role, which caused the episode to be delayed so long that Spindlehorse decided to forge ahead with season two in the meantime.
All that is to say, ground-floor acolytes of the pentagram saw Seeing Stars long before Queen Bee, so we already had the context I’ve been talking about here. If Queen Bee had come out first, and I was banging on about learned trauma reactions without the receipts, then it could be argued that this episode shows mere social awkwardness and not something darker. But now we’ve got the receipts, and they’re scanning in as learned trauma reactions, final sale, no returns.
But Queen Bee is actually a pretty crucial episode for her because by the end, she’s mingling, she’s partying, and the friends she makes at this party end up being lasting connections for her. Season one ends with a drunk Blitz inadvertently coaxing a ‘dad’ out of his damaged but healing daughter.
But on the note of those real hellhound hours, after Seeing Stars the pacing of season two got a little…odd; this is pure speculation on my part, but I’m bringing it up here because I really think it has to do with the fact that Erica Lindbeck, Loona’s actress, was unable to record for an extended period of time (they didn’t air why exactly – quite right, private is private), but – again, this is speculation and I have zero internal connections to the Spindlehorse gang – my guess is that Medrano didn’t want to barrel ahead on the main plot without Loona, so they compensated by writing much of season two’s midsection so that it dealt with other subjects that enriched the world and deepened some other character dynamics.
My anecdotal evidence for this is because the moment we got Lindbeck back behind Loona’s vocal cords with The Full Moon, the main plot and character arcs immediately stepped on the gas again. And, you know what, I’m for that. There was a vision here for the plot and this was the best available way to not compromise it when real life throws you a curved one. Besides, it’s not like those middle episodes were filler, they progressed things in some big ways (including the reveal about Blitz and the fire), it’s just that I’m sure I’m not the only one who noticed the massive sea-change from The Full Moon onward.
Incidentally, they did manage to sneak in a Lindbeck-less Loona in Western Energy where the B-plot is about Loona getting her shots, and like any Earth dog, she’s against it. The animators did a whole episode where Loona is too terrified of the shots to speak so her demeanor is expressed entirely through body language (Western Energy is the origin of that one shot you may have seen where Loona has comically huge fear-eyes – that one was in contention to be my current Discord avatar until I settled on Beatrice Santello instead) and various doggy noises. It’s amazing and gives a whole other dimension to her character by playing up the Furry Confusion angle, though it is probably the kind of thing that they can get away with Exactly Once before it starts to look conspicuous (though they retained going forward that Loona would revert to doggy noises on occasion when in a state of heightened/intense emotions.) I would probably be pushing the boundaries of the obvious by stating that “doggy doesn’t want to get her shots” is a relatively harmless form of “trauma” effectively played for laughs compared to the kennel flashback which is dead serious and respectful of the implications at play.
Circling back to what has now turned into a way-too-deep psychological evaluation of our patient, I’d like to direct your attention back to the end of Mastermind, and this actually took until my second viewing to properly parse, because it’s a moment that just sort of passes by relatively lowkey in light of all the other things happening in that whammy episode. It’s when Loona says those four words.
And it hit me that this might actually be the most seismic moment in Loona’s arc so far. At long sight, we’re better able to parse Loona’s arc as that of a life-long abuse survivor who is finally able to both openly accept the sincerity of others’ love for her, and to be able to give it back to them with equal sincerity instead of deflecting – which is also a huge step for her. Because nobody can abandon you, or reveal you don’t deserve their love and never did and then crush your heart, if you don’t fully let them in. And this is the moment, from what we as viewers can point to on screen, when those emotional walls that have been raised up from years of abuse and neglect finally crumble to dust.
She knows she’s loved, she has a family, and she’s ready to accept everything good that’s happened to her as real. She’s just been through something extremely traumatic in real time – arrest and trial, including a humiliating muzzling that treated her more like a beast than a person, and the threat of her father being executed before her eyes – but instead of locking up or deflecting or retreating into fight-or-flight, she’s finding solace in the right places, providing comfort to others who need it and possibly even showing how much healing is already in her rear-view mirror at this point.
Only the Spindlehorse gang knows what’s coming next, but from what we as an audience have seen, I think it’s super-important that in the season finale after that, she still refers to Blitz as ‘dad’.
So as far as family issues go, Loona is something of an inverse of Blitz, Stolas, Moxxie etc in that family isn’t the issue with her; family is the answer. Loona’s arc is something of a metaphor for the course of the show itself, both becoming something a bit different since the caustic dead-baby-humour of the pilot: warmer, more heartful, not without their claws and teeth but more sure of what they want to be.
When last we see her in the final scene of season two, it feels like the natural endpoint of her character arc so far, a (deliberate?) opposite to how we saw that younger her in the kennel: warm and cozy, surrounded by family and friends, safe, smiling, content. She’s happy.
IV: A Bird In A Gilded Cage
On the note of fathers and daughters, Octavia is breaking our hearts. Viewers who have been unfortunate enough to feel like the burden in their parents’ acrimonious divorce will find much to feel seen by in Octavia’s arc.
I don’t think I’m terribly far afield in saying that Octavia’s running family issue is agency, or lack thereof. But where Loona is a bottom-caste girl whose lack of agency in her past is borne from that, Octavia is born to a high house, with her lack of agency coming not in spite of her privileged birth, but because of it. In her future, she’s set to live for eons, marshal great power both political and magical, and command legions. But in her now, she never, ever, ever, ever gets her way. And that’s not just ‘oh well she’s a moody teenage girl’ talking. She really doesn’t, and she has very good reasons to be moody.
The same regal trappings that surround her in luxury also imprison her, first in a house full of hateful screaming matches that leave her baseline grumpy and embittered by the time we even meet her teenage self for the first time in Loo Loo Land, then in something much worse by the end of season two.
While Stolas genuinely loves Via with all his heart, his busy divorce from Stella causes Via to resort to drastic measures just to be able to witness a rare star shower that Stolas promised her so long ago, setting off the events of Seeing Stars.
When Stolas frames himself to save Blitz’s life in Mastermind, he is making a choice that separates him from Octavia. She has no say in what is about to happen, once again, even though her entire world is about to change on it.
At the end of season two, Sinsmas takes Octavia’s arc in a sad direction going forward: she’s stewarded by those who possess zero genuine love for her, her mother Stella and Stella’s brother Andrealphus whose implied there’s-some-Lannister-ass-shit-going-on-here-between-them proclivities are less subtext and borderline just straight-up text at this point.
To them she’s a political pawn, a birthright to ensure legacy.
Yet her misreading of Stolas’s situation has led her to disown her father’s attempts at mending bridges with nothing short of heartrending contempt. She’ll save him from being killed, but seeing to it that he keeps his life is now where her affections stop cold. And the saddest part of it is that while I called some of Via’s reaction a misread (no, Via, you are not the reason your dad needed to medicate his brain just to be able to smile), when Octavia gestures to Blitz and says heartbrokenly, “You chose him,” she’s not wrong.
It might not have occurred to Stolas in the intense moment when he intervened in I.M.P.’s trial, but Stolas was choosing romantic love over the love of his child. He had expected to be executed in Blitz’s stead, even, thus abandoning Via to Stella’s vile devices either way. With the forces moving against him in the way that they did, Stolas was never going to have it both ways. He was given an impossible choice, yes, but he chose Blitz. Imagine being Via, and knowing you weren’t chosen.
Now here’s some bitter birdseed to line the gilded cage. I talked about how much of Loona’s ongoing trauma comes from a childhood and adolescence full of abuse and empty of love, and how so much of her healing comes from drawing closer to family and friends. Now take Octavia, who has always had, at the very least, her dad as a source of love both given and received: as of Sinsmas, she hates her father, but she doesn’t think highly of the rest of her family either, given we finally saw her inborn Goetia powers emerge against her own uncle.
Fans were very hopeful after Seeing Stars for a deepening of Via and Loona’s friendship, and while that is now its own subgenre of fanart and some official material has nodded to it (such as Loona and Octavia being next to each other in an official Pride month art spread), the actual show has kind of kept its powder dry on that for now. (Just for my part, I’d be for it; deepening the Via/Loona friendship would make for a wonderful thematic echo to Stolitz, just with friendship instead of romance, in the sense of it being a relatively freewheeling low-caste demon bonding with a high-caste demon who’s trapped in their trappings.)
But anyhow, I’m letting them cook rather than make some sweeping prediction that will age like milk, so while I do think more will probably come of it, for now it is what it is.
So all that about Octavia turning away from her family, and her existing friendships not being deepened quite yet, is to beg the question: as the curtain falls on season two, does Octavia love anyone anymore?
A bird in a gilded cage, as utterly alone as you can be in the heart.
And dare I Go There before the show has decided to poke at this? (Which I think may be an inevitable subject to breach as the story continues.) At long sight, Stolas has all the time in the pentagram to potentially smooth things over with Via; they’re Goetia. They’ll endure the breaking of ages, barring accidents or murder. While I’m confident that Things Will Happen in coming seasons re: Via and Stolas, unless something absolutely canon-changingly massive happens, even if Stolas gets everything he wants, reconciliation with Octavia, a flourishing relationship with Blitz and a wonderful blended family, he and Via will eventually be forced to face a day when they’ll be all that’s left of that family. We don’t exactly know the average lifespans of imps and hellhounds, but we do know from Goetias. It’s the timescale of a Time Lord falling in love with a mayfly. And that, I think, is when they’ll really understand how the Pentagram in which they live is truly Hell. It’s the moments we steal and the connections we make that echo and matter, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be pain when that day comes for them.
But in the here and now, as Loona draws closer to her father, Octavia has fallen away from hers, a dynamic contrast that hits all the harder knowing that this is the worldstate they’ll be living in for the foreseeable future, as a cornucopic 2024 for Hellufans will likely be the last content we get for a while (and the makers definitely deserve to be able to kick back, though that’s probably not an entirely accurate assessment of what’s happening behind the scenes, given how long they spend cooking these episodes before they see the light of day. Producing animation is like…really complex and hard).
And it makes me think about Seeing Stars a bit more. I mentioned it was a character-defining moment for Loona because it showed how far she’ll go to show up for someone and how driven she’ll be to put right, but for Octavia it’s sadder in hindsight, because hey – she doesn’t see those stars. She doesn’t get what she wants, because the grown-ups around her are too busy clawing away at their own bullshit. And while the fiery divorce from the start of the season has given way to icy power-games at its end, that, for Octavia, tragically remains her character-defining moment as we close the grimoire on season two.
And that’s basically all I had planned for this writeup, but there’s one more thing that sticks in my mind now that we’ve discussed everyone involved in this scene. It’s that moment in Sinsmas when Blitz spaces out at seeing that happy couple on Earth, celebrating Christmas with their daughters. And we get this short but, I think, important moment where he fantasizes about himself, Stolas, Loona and Via all together, as one family, happy, warm, celebrating Sinsmas together.
Of all things, it reminds me of a very specific moment in The Walking Dead episode where Negan murders two of Rick’s companions. Toward the end of the episode, a heartbroken and exhausted Rick gets this delirious vision of a beautiful homestead, and a long dinner table in the backyard where everyone is breaking bread, laughing, comfortable, having survived the apocalypse and everything that came with it, including the two survivors who, as of that episode, no longer do.
Because, like that moment on TWD, Blitz’s Christmas/Sinsmas vision is two things – a desperate desire for escape, and as things stand presently, a dream of a happy ending fading out of reach.
V: What The Hell Just Happened
This wasn’t the Helluva Boss piece I set out to write a few years ago when I first knew I wanted to write something about the show. I knew I was going to work my way up to it; the Helluverse reaches some inner part of me where the metal, pop-punk, furry, scene and goth aesthetics all coalesce in the Hot Topic of my soul.
My relationship with this show has been quite something, going from “what is this gothy dog girl everyone’s posting art of suddenly?” to “this show looks up my alley, I should watch it” to the kind of long-term vibing with a piece of media that you’re lucky when you find it for yourself. I became the kind of fan who liveposts reaction threads when new episodes drop.
But back then, I was batting around a potential piece about edgy black humour in media, what works, what doesn’t work, and why; I’d have talked about other shows as well, like how South Park is at its best when it’s earnest and sincere in its aims (Imaginationland, the Lovecraft trilogy) and at its worst when its characters are just soulless ciphers for Look How Offensive Or Condescending We Are or whatever. And I’d have contrasted with Helluva Boss usually managing to wrap its edge in a whole bunch of heart, and so forth.
Looking back at the taken-down pilot, if removing it was a case of a little too much Early Installment Weirdness and the creators feeling like it was no longer the best first-pass demonstration of what the show’s about for new viewers (admittedly in the absence of an official explanation that I’m aware of, I’m biased toward that explanation because as a creator myself, I know), then I sympathize. Because truly, it isn’t; that pilot was almost single-mindedly focused on dead-baby gross-out black humour, which hardly represents where the show was by the end of the first season, let alone where it is now, as a zany and often black-humoured but seriously-plotted and seriously-taken comedy/action/drama adult animated series.
So the old article got scrapped because 1: it was really just a vehicle for me to talk about this show and the other shows I’d be mentioning would have been window dressing to lowkey obscure that I was circling a new fixation and keelhauling you along for the ride, and 2: the show became so much more than that in the time since.
But by the same token, that contrast is instructive, because it shows how the development team has grown with their characters and world.
Because that is what happens when you create. You try to guide your characters, and on a good day you’ll succeed, but on a better day they’ll speak right back to you, and if you’ve the lean to listen, your story will be richer for it. And when the makers love their characters enough to let them and their world grow organically, just look at how many people that can reach.
And that’s how we ended up here, me being overjoyed that I’ve gotten to be there in real time for a show that I liked turning into a show that I loved turning into a show that I outright vibe with, that nebulous but downright transcendent feeling that happens when a piece of media hits you in all the right places to the point where it starts to live rent-free in your head. If you’ve somehow made it this far down the page without being familiar with this show, just think of any series where you’ve been overjoyed to find that the creators leaned more and more into the aspects of their world and story that you liked the most the longer it went on. It’s such a rush of a feeling. Makes me feel like a kid again in some ways even though this is obviously a show for adults.
And that’s how I ended up devoting how many paragraphs to an unqualified, unlicensed psychological examination of the Looking Glass’s favourite hellhound?!
Helluva Boss is available for free on YouTube, all of it. We are actually spoiled rotten. Actual serious disclaimer, I have no formal history in psychology and my well-upbrought suburban ass is possibly not the best person to actually talk at length about learned trauma reactions and the like, beyond having some close friends who could tell you all about it. I just have a website where I get to talk your ears off about my fixations, interests and umfies under the particle-thin veneer of Idiosyncratic Media Analysis That Toes The Line Between Casual And Academic or however I used to sell this. But all that aside, I really hope you’ve enjoyed reading!
Song references for the first three section titles come from Alice Cooper (though I prefer the Exit Eden version), Iron Maiden and Green Day. Helluva Boss is a musical series, it seemed fitting. And if you get the reference in the title, I appreciate you.