I have the headcanon that every time Syldor comes to visit Percy adds more titles to Vex's name because he loves pissing her father off because the only person who hates him more than the twins is him.
It gets to a point where it's ridiculous and they have to stand there five minutes every time they have to introduce her. In Whitestone they use the short version (Lady Vex'ahlia de Rolo, Baroness of the Third House of Whitestone and Mistress of the Gray Hunt) but to Syldor she's Lady Vex'ahlia de Rolo, Baroness of the Third and First House of Whitestone, Liberator of Whitestone from the Briarwoods, Slayer of Brimscythe, Umbrasyl, Vorugal, Thordak, Raishan and Vecna, Mother to [all of the kids names i am NOT writing all that], Mistress of the Gray Hunt + whatever else he comes up with.
He's had to great really creative and whenever he runs out of ideas he asks either Keyleth, Cass, or the rest of Vox Machina.
I'm curious as to who in Vox Machina (and who in general) actually knows about Percy and Vex's secret marriage. Obviously Vax and Keyleth know, as well as Cassandra (whom I assume was actually there), but unless I'm missing something, I don't remember anyone else mentioning it?
I believe that Vax would tell Keyleth, but I can't imagine him telling it to anyone else unless Vex told him he could.
I wonder if this is going to be a (minor) plot point next season, or if the assumption is that Vex and Percy told everyone else off-screen.
Can you do an over analysis of husk and Angel’s relationship through their individual songs from season 1 and 2?
Hi!
That's interesting. 🤔
By "individual" songs, do mean including both Poison and Love in a Bottle, alongside the songs incorporating both characters (Loser, Baby and Losing Streak)?
Because including all four of them in one post would end up being super long, lol.
The songs definitely have a lot of common threads and themes I could pull on, but I think it would probably take multiple posts to properly dissect them. Or maybe even a really long post cut up into smaller parts to make it more organized.
Or were you just referring to Loser, Baby and Losing Streak?
It's definitely something I would consider, but I think I would need a little more specificity in what you are asking for.
About how a snake guy was in love with a cyclops because his hat kept smiling at her and they're both extreme vandalistic weirdos who sing about piss together. Also, she wants to punch him really bad but it's actually really cute.
It's not just about the two dicks, my guys, is all I'm saying.
Okay, so I really, genuinely love the song "Piss (A Love Song)" from Hazbin Hotel. Legitimately my favorite from the whole series. I think it establishes and develops the relationship between Cherri Bomb and Sir Pentious better than all of their screen time together combined in season 1 (though in fairness, that was only about a total of four minutes, lol), and it was what really sold me on the pairing as a whole, and got me to root for them (along with a lot of the rest of development in season 2, but it was mostly Piss).
Therefore, I thought I would make a post kind of breaking down what I liked about it, and presenting what my interpretations of the lyrics are (Note: I am not especially musically adept, so I can't speak to a lot of the instrumentation or quality of lyrics, but I do have some thoughts about the storytelling).
Okay! So, let's start with the beginning: Sir Pentious' part.
(Side note: maybe this is just me, but does any else find the beginning instrumental part of the song to be weirdly quiet? Like, before Pentious starts singing I can barely here any music. Anyway, that's like my only complaint of the song.)
In season 1, there wasn't much of an indication as to why Pentious liked Cherri. He kind of just did. The closest thing we got was this moment:
"You have always been a worthy opponent. With the most brilliant explosive contraptions I've ever seen."
And that's definitely not nothing. I actually really like this scene, and I think it's really sweet. Especially as a character who likes to pride himself specifically on both his mechanical genius, and who clearly has some kind of a high regard for warfare, I think these are really high compliments coming from Pentious.
But I especially like how much more this gets expanded on in Piss.
"I found home in those messy fights." "They say time heals all wounds, but the wounds are what I miss. And every brush with death meant much more than a kiss."
Pentious is a character who is partly defined by his loneliness and isolation. Both from when he was human, but also as he first appears in the series. He has difficultly forming and maintaining genuine connections; in part because he is/was a strange recluse as well as something of an introvert, but also because for the longest time he was a bit too much of a coward to actually put himself out there in a meaningful capacity.
He is able to form something of a companionship with Baxter (who is another strange recluse, for the record), but that ultimately ends up dissolving after Pentious takes the kids.
However, in his turf wars with Cherri, in "those old petty slights", he is able to, in his mind at least, form something of a genuine connection with somebody.
He is able to have a consistent rapport with someone, he is able to maintain consistent communications with someone without actually putting himself out there, and he is able to match wits with someone who also has something of a mechanical mind.
And Cherri? She is basically the perfect candidate for this. Not only is she also a mechanic and explosives expert, but she's also someone who is . . . honestly not terrible compared to the rest of hell. Yes, she's destructive, but she's not cruel, by any means.
In fact, something interesting I've noticed about her is that she rarely ever throws bombs at anyone; she mostly just uses them to destroy things (which makes the moment in the finale when she is about to shove her explosive right down Valentino's throat stick out all the more, but I digress).
(Side note: I know she blows up Pentious here, but because she's also blowing herself up, I don't think it defeats my point. It's not that she never uses her bombs on people, it's just that it's pretty rare.)
Yes, she's aggressive and abrasive, and she can be a bit of a dick to him sometimes, but she's also not someone who would be overly cruel to someone without a reason to be. And I think that kind of kept their turf wars as really a game more than anything else. They messed with each other, certainly, and definitely hurt each other (physically), but there wasn't ever any brutality to it (like there might've been with someone like, say, Alastor).
Pentious had found someone (or more likely, she found him) whom he could, in an odd way, connect with. But who also forced him out of some of the stagnancy he had probably been living in. His greatest vice in life had been his refusal to take action, even in cases where it was necessary (one of the reasons he went to hell was because of his complicity in serial murder), and I think it's quite likely that that was how he spent a lot of his time in hell, though to a lesser extent.
But Cherri is the near opposite to that. She is someone who, despite her faults, can never be accused of "not taking action". She is fierce and decisive and doesn't hesitate to put herself in danger to get what she wants. In early in their days of turf fighting, she probably pushed him a way he had never been pushed before. Gave him a reason to take action and push back.
And in the end, when Pentious died again, it was, in part, to protect Cherri.
"My friends were in danger. Cherri was in danger."
Which bring me to the context of this song for Sir Pentious: it is after spending weeks in heaven. Where he is, once again, stagnant and out of place and alone. Where he is forced into a situation where he is no longer able to make choices for himself, right when he had come to a place in his arc when that was something he wanted.
It only makes sense, then, that after weeks of living in a sterile, cold paradise, his mind would go to the woman who brought vibrancy and life to the hell he was living in. He is brought back to before the hotel, before redemption, and before heaven, when she was the one who gave him a reason to stop being a bystander in his own life. When she was the one who gave him a reason to finally take action.
He obviously loves the hotel, and he obviously loves the friends he had made there, but I think it only makes sense he would be drawn to a time before then, when he is at a point where he has mixed feelings about being redeemed in the first place. The hotel is the reason he's here, after all. But Cherri goes further back then that. "When it was only you and me." Before he had the hotel, he had her.
The last thing that sticks out to me about this first part, is the fact that it is mostly sung in past tense (which is in contrast to Cherri's part being sung mostly in present tense). He is reflecting on his previous feelings and interactions with Cherri because of the fact that he is/has been stuck in Heaven, and thus has had the opportunity to contemplate his relationship with her for a while now (more on this later).
While Cherri has just learned new information on Pentious from both Charlie and from Baxter, and thus has to kind of come to terms with her feelings in the present time.
Anyways, that brings us to Cherri's verse.
I've heard the take that Cherri's feelings come out of nowhere here, and even that this feels like a retcon from season 1.
I do get where these points are coming from, but I also don't entirely agree with them.
Like, first of all, Cherri is an emotionally repressed little scrunkle. She uses drugs and destruction and sex to avoid actually having to confront her feelings, or the situation she is living in (one of the reasons she gets along so well with Angel Dust). This appears most prominently in the semi-canon "Addict" music video, but also carries through to the show.
"I'm addicted to the madness." "We're forever gonna have a fuckin' reason to sin, just concede and give into your inner demons again." "Yeah, you fell in love, but you fell deeper in this pit." "Your money and power, my sinful delight."
"I'm doin' just fine! In fact, I'm gonna fuck the next guy I see." "I just wish I could see him again . . . to punch him in the face for dyin' and shit!"
(Honestly, I find it kind of telling that she spends the whole episode here trying to make Angel feel better by trying to get him to forget his problems. She means well, but she definitely is encouraging him to relapse into the same unhealthy coping mechanisms she's still trapped in.)
So, while I do think her feelings regarding Pentious could have been set up a bit better in season 1, I do buy the fact that it would take him saying he loves her, dying, and then coming back for her to realize "oh, shit, I kind of liked him".
Going back to the actual lyrics: "Those golden days of brawling, were the best of all my years."
Similar to how Pentious was able to experience something of a real relationship and connection via the turf wars, Cherri is able to experience a similar level of connection (without actually opening up). Though the reasons this matters to her are wildly different from Pentious'.
Cherri is not someone who is isolated in the same way as Pentious, but she also has that difficulty forming genuine connections. She's not scared to open up because she is a coward, but because she has been hurt before and doesn't want to experience that again. As far as we know, Angel is her only real friend until she comes to the hotel.
So, again, she is able to have a funhouse-mirror image of a real connection and relationship through "beating the piss" out of Sir Pentious. Someone who was a consistent part of her life, someone whom she could have fun with, someone who wouldn't actually hurt her if it came down to it, and someone with a similar love of engineering weapons and destruction.
Yes, he probably was a bit of a doof, but Sir Pentious is also someone who has the resilience and intelligence to put up a pretty good fight when he puts his mind to it. And to me, "What's the score?" and "We were rivals" both imply that they were fairly evenly matched.
"I'm bored as fuck without you, are you bored without me too?"
This line, to me, says two different things about Cherri. First of all, she still hasn't fully come to terms with how she feels about Pentious, and thus frames her feelings towards him as her "being bored without him". She does care, she wouldn't be singing dramatically from the rooftops if she didn't, but she has difficulty reconciling that with the fact she had convinced herself she didn't.
In her mind, she had framed their relationship as being turf rivals, plain and simple. Regardless of how much his presence really meant to her, this is how she conceptualized her relationship with him.
Which brings me to my next point: Cherri can't believe that Pentious really, honestly likes her.
Obviously she knew he was attracted to her, which is why she messes with him in S1E6, but she has difficulty coming to terms with the fact that his feelings go beyond that.
She sings the whole song right after her conversation with Baxter: when she learns that not only was Pentious kind of a decent guy, but that Cherri, and his turf wars with her, really meant a lot to him. Meant so much that she was the person he went to after losing his only friendship (not that she knew it at the time).
And even then, she doubts the fact that he really even thinks about her in heaven. "Are you bored without me too?" She's not even certain he likes her as much as she's willing to admit she likes him.
Heck, even by the final, she doesn't seem completely certain in how much he values her. "You better not have some new rival."
"I'm longing for just one night more, of beating the piss out of you."
This definitely goes back to my previous point of Cherri conceptualizing her affection for Pentious as her enjoyment of fighting him, but I think there's also something oddly sweet about it.
She misses him, she misses the wild, strange, violent competition they had been entwined in together for possibly decades, and she misses the thing that brought together in the first place. The turf wars.
And that brings us to the next bit. (I'm only half-way through the song. Save me.)
So here, we get to see a snippet about what their turf wars together actually looked like. It is, in a way, a microcosm of what their relationship looked like for however long they knew each other pre-hotel.
And there are several things that stuck out to me here. Firstly, Cherri is, again, the one to initiate. She comes aboard his giant airship and starts blowing shit up, clearly enjoying the whole thing. She pushes, he pushes back. I very much think it was a running theme in their relationship.
Secondly, Sir Pentious certainly seems quite annoyed with her. He doesn't have his typical awkward, enamored attitude that he displayed in season one. I think this is for two reasons. Partly because of this line: "somehow I couldn't see, through the cloud of debris, at the scene of the crime" (again, this is Pentious singing about his past experiences). It took him a while to realize how much he liked her too; though definitely not the length it took for her.
I don't think he entirely understood how he felt about her for a long time, but when he's in heaven, he really gets a chance to contemplate how he feels about her, and how much those past experiences meant to him.
But also:
His hat is smiling almost the entire time. He is enjoying this as much as she is, even if he pretends he can't stand her.
(I think there's something interesting in the fact that Pentious seemed to be the more annoyed of the two, while also being the one who was able to come to terms quicker with his feelings.)
Thirdly, Cherri doesn't actually aim for him, she just blows up his ship (and the Egg Boiz, RIP). She's more interested in messing with him than anything else.
Fourthly, I think Sir Pentious saying "Egg Boiz, kill that vandal" and "I will destroy you at last" (along with several of the later lines of the song) has kind of an interesting implication that murder was occasionally a part of their relationship. Obviously, the murder was temporary, given how they are in hell, but I think the fact that they both sometimes actually killed each other is somewhat amusing.
(Side note: "get your punk-ass off my ship" gets stuck in my head all the time. It's such a weirdly satisfying thing to say.)
Fifthly, Cherri looks so pretty and cute this whole flashback. It's not important, but I wanted to point it out.
Precious.
Anyways, that brings us to the final part of the song.
The final verse where the instruments present for both of their separate parts mix together in an epic, dramatic, pop-rock power ballad.
Can we pretend that airplanes in the night sky are like shooting stars?
The first thing I want to point out is that on the word "wounds", Cherri punches her fist, while Pentious holds his heart.
Which, to me, implies that Pentious misses receiving wounds, while Cherri misses inflicting wounds. I don't think this is entirely indicative of their total respective thoughts on the matter, but I do think it's kind of funny.
Freaks.
Which, again, implies that Cherri was the more active member of their fights. Cherri is more aggressive, while Pentious is more resilient. ("I still taste the blood" vs "I still taste your blood" has a similar sentiment to this.)
The next thing I want to point out is that Cherri sings "Though I don't know if it's love", while Pentious sings "Could this be love?". To me, this illustrates pretty well their different views on their relationship. Neither of them are certain or secure in the idea of a relationship or of love with the other, but they both approach it in different ways.
"Though I don't know if it's love." Cherri know she feels something for Pentious, but she doesn't know how to put a name to it. If we're going to assume "Addict"/Izzi is canon, then it's possible Cherri is reluctant to fall back in love again after being burned badly in the past. A serious relationship went badly, and now she doesn't want to open back up again. Either way, Cherri is unsure if what they have/what she feels is love or something else entirely. It's something she doesn't entirely seem sure how to respond to.
Whereas, "Could this be love?" not only sounds more hopeful than confused (like Cherri's did), but I think also illustrates an interesting aspect of his character. Pentious probably hasn't been in love before, or at least not in a proper relationship before (Obviously with Baxter it's partly up to interpretation, but I personally don't believe they were ever fully long-term.). He doesn't really know the feeling of love as more than an idle fantasy. He believe, at least on some level, that he's in love with Cherri (though I will point out that those words were said in the heat of the moment), but he still doesn't feel entirely certain due to lack of experience.
Alternatively, it's possible "Could this be love?" is referring to the sentiment of "could this really be a relationship?", instead of "could I really be in love with you?". In which case I think it still carries a similar sentiment of being in a realm that is new and difficult to understand that he has little experience with. I think either interpretation works. But I digress.
The second thing I wanted to point at is the fact that this song is melodramatic and cheesy and goofy as all hell (it's perfect). And, yes, it is really funny. But that also doesn't detract from the depth and meaning behind it.
Because the humor doesn't make it any less meaningful to the characters. Cherri and Pentious mean everything they say with their full hearts, and that's not being treat as "silly" or "stupid". It's real to them, and we as the audience are meant to sympathize with them.
This is actually why it does annoy me just a bit when Piss is referred to as a "joke song". It is a comedic song (if you couldn't tell by the title), but the premise of the song is meant to be taken seriously.
Which is unlike something like "Clean It Up" where the premise is meant to be silly from the get-go (for the record, this is definitely not a criticism of "Clean It Up". I love that song. But "Niffty singing about how disgusting the hotel is" isn't really emotionally moving subject matter.)
The "joke" of Piss isn't the fact that we aren't supposed to take Cherri and Pentious wanting to see each other seriously. That part is played completely straight (bisexual). We're meant to feel bad that Sir Pentious misses the woman who changed his life for the better and made him want to change too. We're meant to feel bad about the fact that Cherri didn't realize how much he meant to her until he was gone, and now she doesn't know how to feel.
The "joke" is the fact that they are both complete dorks who somehow met the love of their life while fighting over mediocre property. As one does.
A big theme of Hazbin Hotel (and of the hellaverse in general) is finding love and beauty and community in the strangest of places.
Whether that be a group of misfits becoming a family together through a small business for assassinations, or a couple of losers finding solace in each other through the crappy hands they were dealt in life (and death), or the princess of the damned falling in love with a lost angel who was cast aside in a dark alley.
Anyone who finds love (platonic, romantic, or familial) in hell, can do anything, baby.
They are a stories of the damned, the screwups, the lost, and the lonely finding others just as fucked up as they are, and creating something beautiful.
And, yes, that includes a pair of bisexual dumbasses whose love language is trying to one-up each other.
They are ridiculous and melodramatic and goofy, but that doesn't mean there isn't something sweet in the way they found someone just as odd as they were.
Across centuries and continents, and against all odds, they found each other.
"You blew a hole right through my soul while I was beating the piss out of you."
It's incredibly silly, but that doesn't mean there isn't also a lot of emotional weight behind it. They both had something really special when they were fighting each other, and there is something honestly sad about the fact that they can't go back to that because they are separated.
Also, this shot at the end is legitimately gorgeous.
Piss is fun and entertaining and goofy, and it's meant to be. I know that I always have the biggest smile on my face whenever listening to it.
But it's also genuine and sincere and honestly heartfelt. Not everyone is going to care or be invested in this relationship or this song, and that's fine. It's not for everybody, and I get why a lot of people would find this relationship underdeveloped.
But I honestly think Piss was written with a lot of emotion and depth behind it to work in beautiful tandem with the humor, and I think that's pretty neat.
So, yeah, I liked this song. :)
That was a whole lot of words for a song called Piss. I hope at least somebody likes this, lol.
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