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Chapter 14

Sexual tension! Dry humor! Intrigue!

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Biblically accurate angelic Sirius Black. This is the only other one I have planned right now, but couldn't make a demonic Snape without an angelic Sirius. He looks weird in white.

I decided to keep his canine features, because it looks like Hazbin is planning to keep Sir Pentious looking like a snake even when he's in Heaven. So I essentially just copied Adam's wings and put the eyes on it, which is fun, since, y'know, angels and their millions of eyes.

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Someone requested Snape, and in accordance with the chapter I released yesterday, I figured I ought to release two versions of him.

Character: Snape

Hazbin role he's loosely filling: Adam

Character elements I used: Mostly Adam. The jacket in his demon version is loosely based on Velvette's.

Appearance notes: Demon Snape does not deserve a jacket this cool, but here we are. I am not making any attempt at doing his more humanoid face, sorry, so you only get the Exorcist mask version.

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Part Two begins

Back from my hiatus! Weekly posting should resume.

The fourth Marauder makes his appearance at last!

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Character: McGonagall

Hazbin role she's loosely filling: Emily

Character elements I used: Mostly Emily. The eyes and arms started as Sera's.

Appearance notes: I learned a lot about what makes a character look young or old, and the answer is, unsurprisingly, mostly that round silhouettes look younger. So I changed the face shape, switched out the eyes, and made the dress more A-line and less ballgown. And then I had to give her a bun and a less jubilant expression to make her read as "McGonagall."

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I wasn't originally planning to do any of the angels, but you know how trying to write makes it easier to do anything else.

Character: Dumbledore

Hazbin role he's loosely filling: Sera

Character elements I used: Sera

Appearance notes: This is probably my most successful gender change, probably because the beard, and also because a dress changes to a robe pretty easily.

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I've paused posting while I work on writing part 2 of my Hogwarts Hotel fic, but I thought I'd post a little preview here for anyone who happens to stop by. This is (as of now) the opening to the next chapter.

The whole fic can be found here!

There is a room in a building full of empty rooms that is special. The building itself doesn’t look like the type of building to have a special room in it. It looks, quite frankly, like an old rat-infested office building. The outside literally just says “OFFICE” on it, with the E hanging askew. The rooms in the office building all look the same. White walls, fluorescent ceiling lights, a large conference table surrounded by swiveling chairs. Besides looking slightly cleaner than one would expect from the outside of the building, there doesn’t seem to be anything special about any of them. This one is special, though. This one is conference room three.

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Putting on my sex therapist hat...

I told myself I wasn't going to write a post about the second short, but here we are.

(disclaimer: I'm not a certified sex therapist, in part because the actual process costs money, but I am a licensed therapist who helps people of all genders sexual orientations with sex-related issues.)

Spoilers for the second Helluva Boss short under the cut.

Okay, so obviously, there's a lot of chatter on the ol' Tumblr about the "Blitz doesn't know how to give head" moment in the short. Part of this is just because that whole sequence of events is fucking hilarious. Blitz blushing when Moxxie goes down on that crystal is my favorite moment in the whole short, I want to frame it.

But, because we as a fandom have no chill, there's also a lot of different takes on it, especially because Verosika's lines in Ozzie's seem to reinforce the idea that Blitz doesn't reciprocate oral sex. I've seen a bit of "Blitz is bad at sex and Stolas just doesn't know it because he was married," and maybe that is true! But being a person is all about living in the uncertainty, so I want to remind you of other explanations that also exist!

Blitz was making a joke. He was insecure that he was unable to get the crystal to work when they were all depending on him, and his defense mechanism is humor.

Blitz IS bad at oral sex, but Stolas doesn't enjoy receiving oral sex anyway. I know that oral sex is the most enjoyable form of sex for a lot of people, but Stolas is a bird demon with a cloaca who enjoys bear traps as foreplay, who the fuck knows what feels good to him.

Blitz was panicking. His team was in immediate danger, he's going through this breakup with someone who thought he was a sex god, and his anxiety is real high. I guess this is sort of just another take on the first one.

Blitz is bad at the specific type of oral sex the crystal wanted. I mean, demon bird cloaca has to be different from hard square crystal, right?? ...right?

Also! Friendly reminder that being a top is not a good excuse in the real world to not give your partner oral sex. I'm a firm believer that you can be dominant in any sexual scenario, whether you're giving or receiving, and there's plenty of fanfiction out there to prove me right! Honestly, the absurdity of this remark almost reinforces the idea that this was mostly a joke to me.

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Chapter 12

The final battle! This'll be the last chapter for a while while I get the second part of this fic together, but it's a long one!

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Oz: Well, we've got a saying that's popular in these parts

Fizz: Only little bitches strum the strings of their hearts.

The audience at home:

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Chapter 11

Who doesn't love a training montage? No one, that's who.

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One thing I've learned about my writing style is that if I don't know how to end a scene, I will just have a character say or think "fuck" and end it like that.

I mean...if it's not broken, don't fix it, right?

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Chapters 9 and 10!

I didn't get around to posting last weekend, so I've just uploaded two more chapters!

Backstory! Drama! Intrigue! Tonks! What more could you want?

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Character: Tonks

Hazbin role he's loosely filling: Rosie

Character elements I used: Rosie

Appearance notes: Didn't change much besides the coloring and the hair! But wanted to hold off on posting this one until now so that I didn't give away what role she's playing in the fic.

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Fandom is so funny to me sometimes, because people are like "Stolas is Bad for using Blitz" and "Blitz is Bad for not being able to consider other people's feelings" and it's like guys they are literal demons who would kill us all if it suited their needs, they're going to continue to make morally bad choices.

(But I very much love you all for having high standards of how people should treat each other, I am just constantly amused by the behaviors we are and are not willing to forgive in fictional characters.

Mass murder? Fine. Bad at words? Unforgiveable.)

(Reminds me of conversations in the OFMD fandom of people being like "is Ed gaslighting Stede in this moment?" and it's like my man he is a mass murderer, we have bigger moral issues to deal with here.)

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Chapter 7

Apology Tour AND a new chapter of my fic out on the same day? What a great day for the world.

(I told myself I couldn't do a second watch of the episode until I posted this. Enjoy!)

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handling moral dilemmas in fiction: Helluva Boss vs Harry Potter

As always, this blog is anti-JKR, and this post in particular is Harry Potter critical. My brain contains such a high level of Harry Potter knowledge that sometimes I have to do SOMETHING with it.

I'm going to be comparing how Helluva Boss handles Stolas's unethical power over his relationship with Blitzø to how Harry Potter handles the enslavement of house elves. It's not an entirely fair comparison -- they're different media, written for different audiences, at different times, and tackling an issue of a single relationship is different than tackling the issue of systematic oppression and slavery in a (fictional) society. But it's a comparison that's been in my mind and I'm writing about it anyway.

We'll start with Harry Potter. In the second book, we're introduced to Dobby, the first house elf we meet. Dobby is enslaved to work for the Malfoy family, and seems magically compelled to follow their orders, or punish himself if he fails to do so. Dobby wishes to be free of his slavery, and at the end of the book, Harry cleverly tricks Lucius Malfoy into freeing Dobby. We don't see a house elf again until the fourth book, at which point we learn that the Hogwarts cooks and janitorial staff are all house elves (with the exception of the non-magical human caretaker, Filch, but that is an entirely different issue). Dobby is there, having taken a job at the castle -- he gets a salary and vacation time, although he tells us that he negotiated both of those things down from the original offer. We learn that Dobby is actually an exception, and most house elves enjoy being enslaved, and are emotionally distressed at the idea of receiving payment or being separated from the families they serve. Hermione starts a campaign to free the elves, and is met with resistance at every turn from the elves themselves, who are insulted by her efforts. She's also treated as naive, ignorant, and silly by the other characters. This plotline is mostly dropped after the fourth book, although Hermione does continue to insist that other characters at least treat the elves kindly in her presence.

Years ago, I saw someone suggest that JKR introduced Dobby, then realized she'd written herself into a corner: If an entire species was being enslaved by wizardkind, that could not be ignored in her narrative. So, she changed things so that the house elves were happy with the situation, so that her story didn't have to pivot to focus on the slavery that was commonplace in the world she'd created. The result is a situation where nothing can be done. While it's right to end slavery, it's also wrong to decide, as Hermione does, that you know what's best for another group of people. It's an impossible situation that bears no actual resemblance to how things look in the real world, and one could argue that it creates an alarming suggestion that some people might actually be better off as slaves. There are no lessons to be learned from the story of the house elves, because it simply would not happen outside of this fictional situation.

Now let's look at Helluva Boss. Stolas, a member of Hell's royalty, creates an arrangement with Blitzø, an imp (and therefore a member of Hell's lower classes), where Blitzø has to have sex with Stolas once a month in order to keep access to magic that allows Blitzø to perform the basic functions of his job. That's the bare bones, at least. They are literal demons in literal Hell who both do objectively terrible things, and I am not trying to hold them to the standards that I would hold humans to, but rather explore how the story handles this particular moral dilemma. At some point, Stolas realizes that he genuinely cares for Blitzø, and that he has no way of knowing how Blitzø feels about him, since Blitzø is obligated to please Stolas.

The writers of this show could choose to gloss over this issue, honestly, because, again, it is Hell, and it is fiction. I've definitely consumed fiction where there's problematic dynamics in a relationship, but because the characters are in love, there are certain things that I'll allow in a story (and certain things that are too far for me -- and everyone has that bar set in a different place, which is fine). I think enough of their audience would have been willing to see Stolas and Blitzø  move smoothly from this arrangement to a more equitable partnership without acknowledging that the original arrangement was fucked up.

But! That's not what the show does. Stolas comes to terms with the harm he has caused, and devises a way to address the power imbalance. He expresses fear about discussing this with Blitzø, but he does it anyway. It goes badly, because they are both characters with a lot of baggage and poor communication skills. But they both know that the arrangement they had was wrong, and that it has to change for them to move forward. Blitzø does not want to have this conversation, and, as a character with an extreme level of self-loathing, it probably wouldn't be ridiculous to suggest that he might even think he deserves to be used however others see fit. But it's never implied that this type of treatment is actually best for him and should continue, or that it's in any way a healthy or natural way for their dynamic to work.

Again. It's not a perfect comparison, and we're still in the middle of the Blitzø/Stolas dynamic, so who's to say how it will resolve. But so far, I appreciate that this particular moral dilemma that the characters find themselves in is being approached with nuance by the writers rather than avoidance.