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Jun 29

Sex, Love, Violence, and Autonomy

An Absurdly Long Breakdown of Stolas' Fantasy-Turned-Nightmare in the June teaser, and what it means for his current emotional state.

Hello, hi, it's me! Popping my head out of fanfiction land (and avoiding another meta post I keep meaning to make) by breaking down the many, many feelings I have about Stolas' little fantasy/PTSD sequence from the latest teaser, and what it all means for how he's processing things right now.

Long story short... NOT VERY WELL IN VERY COMPLEX WAYS.

Short summary of the dream/nightmare sequence:

Stolas envisions a (possibly younger? I'll address this later) version of himself, wandering through his father's 'stables.' He encounters a fantasy alt version of Blitz portraying some sort of stable worker, possibly, and they have a steamy encounter...until it turns sour. In the middle of the sexual fantasy, the dream-Blitz's tail turns into Striker's, and he pulls out the angelic dagger that Striker used to torture Stolas in Western Energy. The fantasy then becomes a PTSD nightmare. This blonde Baron Blitz? turns into Striker and stabs Stolas. The dream sequence ends with a splash of red blood and Stolas waking up, panicked and trying to make sure he hasn't actually been hurt. But the black on his fingers isn't blood, just spilled ink from his pen.

Why This Fantasy

We know from Sinsmas that Stolas writes smutty romance as an outlet/hobby, enough that Blitz has gotten him a journal to do so. The basic tropes of the story – a shut-in prince, a suave and cocky rider/possibly stablehand, an impromptu roll in the hay – are all pretty standard archetypes stemming from older mass-produced romance stories. Stolas is clearly using this as a way to privately vent his sexual desires and to scratch some sort of creative itch.

But the story also incorporates personal touches. Stolas envisions himself as a prince, like in his actual life. But he also envisions himself with his feather streak and white pupils, traits he hasn't had consistently until he lost his powers. Incorporating the horse stables comes from his growing knowledge of how much Blitz loves horses. Blitz's blond hair is a throwback to classic romances of the 80s and 90s, but it's also based on Blitz's own preferred wig color when he does drag. While he gives Blitz a different name (that he decides he hates), it's pretty clear that, whenever Stolas is fantasizing, he doesn't really want to picture anyone else.

There are things to be said about whether or not this is 'healthy,' but he's ultimately expressing his desires in a way that is not intended to actually affect anyone else.

What His Fantasy Gets Right

Details like the incorporation of horses/the blond hair show that Stolas is learning about Blitz and what is important to him. He's putting Blitz into a fantastical and fictional setting, but in a role he feels Blitz would actually like. The fantasy also incorporates a lot of the way they interacted in The Circus, right down to Blitz dipping Stolas as a seduction method.

I think one of the things that has to be taken into consideration with Stolas' fantasies about a working class person whisking him away from his royal life is that he's never known a life beyond being royalty (except for now schlepping on Blitz's sofa) so he can't even picture what he'd be outside of that (especially because "OUTSIDE" has generally been hateful and violent to him) and has never gotten along with people of his own social status, so nothing involving someone of his own social class would be a fantasy. It's far from perfect or unproblematic, but he's trying.

Blind Spots in His Fantasy

As pointed out in my mootie's post here, Stolas is still showing a pretty big lack of knowledge about the class system in general. He knows his position as a prince and just keeps himself as that. But he gives himself no real role or identity beyond that, only wandering around and smelling flowers/petting the horses. Blitz is … presumably a stablehand or someone else who works with the horses, but he doesn't have any apparent job to do. He's seen gallivanting in on horseback, which would be something reserved for the horse's owner and perhaps a trainer. But he's certainly not dressed like someone who trains the horses in the royal stables. So, what is he? Stolas probably doesn't know much about keeping horses and what's involved with them. He has no grasp and leaves it very vague in favor of what he really is trying to do...write smut. This actually extends into a full discussion about Stolas' general lack of autonomy, which I'll touch on later.

But also, and perhaps most importantly. The Baron/Blitz in this fantasy also doesn't talk the way Blitz did when they first hooked up in The Circus, which is an important note and really starts to show where Stolas is mentally.

The Fantasy Starts Falling Apart

Baron/Blitz's manner of speak is actually a sign that this fantasy is starting to go sideways immediately. His 'dirty talk' dialogue centers on what he knows Stolas wants.

“If you wanted me to stop, we both know you could stop me, but you wanna get filthy, don't you?”

This is a sign of Stolas processing his sexual desires, and that kind of talk is pretty typical for bodice ripper romances. But it's a far cry from what his actual dynamic was with Blitz when their situationship was happening.

Their conversations beforehand involved far more question and answer. Importantly, Blitz usually emphasized letting Stolas express what he wanted. For someone as repressed and emotionally floundered as Stolas, I think that was always very key to their dynamic. Stolas has led a very specific and stifled life that robbed him of a lot of personal choice and identity. Feeling listened to in this manner is a good part of why he became so infatuated.

So why did this fantasy take this “you want to” route before going sour? For several reasons, the first and possibly most crucial being Apology Tour.

Blitz tried to show up at Stolas' palace the morning after Full Moon and practically demand sex. You could see him going through the paces trying to recreate their first night from The Circus, but his emotional walls were up, and his wording was all wrong. He told Stolas what Stolas wanted, even when Stolas was saying quite the opposite, and he insisted that this moment had to be a fantasy of Stolas' and doubled down Stolas' interest in him being entirely based on classism. Communication was gone. Stolas realized that Blitz was refusing to believe him, and the conversation devolved. In fact, the way Blitz spoke specifically reminded Stolas of the way Striker speaks.

While Stolas made this sound like a very surface level argument, this concept seemed to have dredged up a lot of internal pain, and I can't blame him. The one person he had romantic feelings for was reminding him of the guy who mocked, tortured, and almost killed him.

Then, Blitz deepened the hurt by accidentally admitting that he knew Striker tried to kill Stolas once and never said anything. It hammered in the idea that Blitz really didn't care about Stolas and wouldn't feel anything if something happened to him. And this painful thought seems to have rooted itself deep enough to survive into Season 3.

And this was the last time Blitz and Stolas directly discussed sex with each other.

Now, Stolas has found out since then that Blitz does care about him post-Mastermind, but Blitz has never clarified that such feelings were there before Stolas attempted to die in his place. To Stolas, it looks like any post-Mastermind affection is borne out of obligation. Which, affection based on obligation is what he was trying to stop in the first place by giving Blitz the crystal.

Long story short, as soon as the Baron/Blitz character in Stolas' fantasy started talking to Stolas in this manner, Stolas' subconscious probably tied it to one of his most painful memories with Blitz, and the one memory that most blended Blitz and Striker together in his mind.

Blitz and Striker – Two Sides of the Same Coin

Thematically, Striker and Blitz are foils of each other. Striker appears to be everything Blitz wants to be in Season One: independent, a horse owner, works alone, claims to hate the unfairness of Hell's class system, confident, a ruthless killer, and strong enough to be Blitz's equal in the Pain Games.

They do, however, have major core differences. Despite how much he claims to not need help or complains about his employees, Blitz wants to work with others: even if they're difficult sometimes. Even if they occasionally hold him back. As much shit as he gives the people around him, his limits are drawn the moment someone else tries to hurt them. He is protective, and he genuinely at his core wants his friends and family to live up to their full potential. He very much doesn't want to be alone like Striker is, a fact that his own bad trip version of Striker even mocks him for.

Where Blitz fights the corrupt class system by starting his own business and filling it with people he feels have potential/need the stability, Striker works directly under the orders of Stella and Crimson: one of the most classist characters in the show and one who has an entire wall of “trophies” taken from other lower class denizens of Hell who have displeased him. Despite his complaints about the class system and how royalty fucks over people beneath them, he's more than willing to work for some of the worst of the worst if it benefits him. Striker will betray any of his alleged principles for the right price, something Blitz is starting to realize he doesn't want to do.

And Stolas knows Blitz wouldn't turn like that, right?

Well, from what Stolas thinks he knows, Blitz kind of already has.

I.M.P., Violence, and Stolas' Impression of the Working Class

Stolas' first experience working at I.M.P. was the terrible customer during Sinsmas, who wanted her ex-husband killed for starting a relationship with a man and raising their daughters in that “sinful” lifestyle. Both Blitz and Stolas clearly saw parallels to Stolas' own situation, and Stolas in his poor (pretty much turning actively suicidal) mental state declared that taking the job was fine. Maybe selfish men like that (like him) didn't deserve to live. Blitz hesitatingly agreed to take the job, for double the price. We, the audience, know he had an internal crisis later and didn't follow through with the kill...

But Stolas does not.

He left before they returned from that abandoned mission, and with everything that happened afterward, it's most likely he never found out, either. If Blitz couldn't be bothered to tell him Striker tried to kill him, he's not going to think of this little detail in the middle of the Sinsmas chaos.

So, in Stolas' view, Blitz has already willingly killed someone very much like him, knowing the situation is very much like him, just with the condition that it costs more. And to reinforce that, violence and shame have very much been Stolas' experience with the outside world at large. From his own years of abuse, to I.M.P.'s purpose, to the attacks at Loo Loo Land, to the mockery at Ozzie's, to Loona hitting Blitz in the crotch in Seeing Stars, to being captured and tortured in Western Energy, to Moxxie and Millie gleefully fighting each other in Sinsmas, Stolas' experience with the world has been one where violence was normalized and accepted. The I.M.P. characters are willing to hurt others and even each other. Even Stolas' sexual dynamic with Blitz had been full of consensual violence: a thing that has now been turned negative since he used it as a coping method to keep his composure against Striker. Now he might struggle think of the consensual pain he experienced with Blitz without also associating it with the actual torture he underwent. That, combined with all the above factors, makes his subconscious consider...

In a darker timeline, would Blitz treat him just as cruelly as Striker did? Would he be just as willing to kill him? Would Stolas be no different than one of I.M.P.'s many targets: just another someone they would kill for the right price?

When Stolas is startled out of the nightmare with a splash of blood, the blood is not black like his own. It's red, like a human. Like I.M.P.'s targets.

Stolas and Autonomy

Another thing that is subtly shown in this fantasy is Stolas' lack of autonomy. With the way he's been socially isolated, generally disliked, and lived a highly controlled life, he very much lacks a sense of self-identity and has difficulty making decisions or goals.

In the fantasy, this first shows up in the fact that he has his visible pupils: a sign of his depowered state. It might just be his subconscious seeing his current self, but it also might be a sign that he's trying to “fix” some of the power imbalance between himself and Baron/Blitz in the fantasy, but at the cost of his own powers. He's willing to give up a significant part of himself to try and make things 'better.'

He is still a prince in this fantasy because he can't see himself as anything else, but likely not as any sort of vanity, but because he's never been allowed to be anything else. He hasn't experienced the outside world enough to find potential identity in anything else and has largely associated the rest of his world with something that wants to hurt him, shut him out, or shut him into a specific box. He just literally has no reference of what he could be other than the shut-in prince.

Please see this other ridiculously long meta post of mine if you want to go into why Stolas has fantasies in the first place and the many, many reasons he struggles to see himself in anything beyond a prince-in-a-tower type of archetype.

Not only is all this true about him, but he is also well aware that his entire identity exists only because of his father. His palace was given to him, his job was given to him, his spouse was chosen for him - all from his dad. Stolas has never had an identity that didn't have Paimon looming over it, determining it in some way. So, even in his fantasy where he tries to NOT put Blitz directly under his own influence, the best he can imagine is the stables being Paimon's. He can't envision a scenario in which he would run into Blitz from something completely his own.

Also, while Stolas has made a few fairly important decisions in his life, if anything, they have discouraged him from trying harder:

Raising Octavia as a more traditional parent vs. handing her over to servants/caretakers. While this was good in itself, his determination to give Via a "family" to grow up in only allowed him to live under Stella's abuse and hurt himself in the long run.

Sleeping with Blitz and lending the Grimoire, which set off... everything that has happened to him since

Demanding the divorce, which was long overdue but also furthered Stella's resolve to have him murdered and Andrealphus' determination to steal his power and title

Giving Blitz the crystal, which was his idea to free Blitz from any sense of obligation but caused the meltdown between them in Full Moon/Apology Tour.

Taking the blame in Mastermind, which saved Blitz's life but at the cost of everything else Stolas had, including the trust of his own daughter.

The long and short of it is that Stolas has lived a life controlled for him, with where and how he lives and who he sees and marries and even his job/role in Goetian society determined for him. And any time he has stepped outside of that, it has come with horrible consequences. Stolas struggles to see himself as anything beyond a simple prince because anything else has always been disallowed, if not outright punished. Since the rest of Hell hates him for what he is, the rest of the upperclass have always shunned him, and he doesn't seem willing to imagine Blitz into any other form but who he is...even in this sexual fantasy where he is actively trying to “fix” some of the problematic aspects of the early Stolitz dynamic, he still can't envision anything that isn't prince/working class.

And Stolas even seems to envision himself as younger, perhaps a teen version? In an attempt to create a romance before he married and his life got worse under Stella. He simply can't envision a way out of that struggle except for it never happening in the first place.

This struggle with autonomy also circles back to the way Baron/Blitz spoke to him during their dirty talk moment. Again, it was mostly about that fantasy version telling Stolas what he wanted, rather than getting verbal consent. After Mastermind and Sinsmas, Stolas probably has issues trusting his own decisions and taking action on anything he has wanted. He is stuck: situation-wise, emotionally, sexually, in just about any way possible, and he can't see a way to improve any of them. So, in the fantasy, Baron/Blitz tells him what he wants and tells him he could stop it if he didn't. Stolas' role is far more passive than he actually was while involved with Blitz.

I'm also going to link to another wonderful mutal's post about how this fantasy likely also showed Stolas' sense of shame around his sexuality. With the way he grew up, and with how everything went down after sleeping with Blitz, he probably feels a sense of shame still having sexual wants. He likely has shame about the fact that he gave into them in the first place. So imagining a scenario where someone tells him what he wants is initially easier in this case... until it triggered everything else.

Abuse and Consent

This is a point I've seen others make, too, but the "you could stop me" argument is a misjudgement often attributed to abuse victims, especially if they are technically more physically strong or powerful than their abuser. Some people dismiss abuse on these people by claiming that they could have just stopped it by force if they wanted to. This is, of course, NOT how things often are in reality and dismisses a lot of abuse factors like societal pressure, isolation, and emotional abuse. But the fantasy Baron/Blitz using that phrasing can be a subconscious tell on Stolas' guilt and complex feelings about his own abuse. He likely has internalized guilt that he "could have" stopped the Grimoire deal earlier, or never allowed it to happen at all, and prevented all the struggles they've gone through since. He likely also has internalized guilt that he "could have" stopped Stella's abuse if he was good enough, if he could make the right choices. His subconscious is basically putting the guilt from being Stella's abuse victim on himself, which is unfortunately common for victims.

Conclusion

I think we're going to see a Stolas going into Season 3 who is struggling with himself a lot. He doesn't know who he is. He doesn't know if there is a point in trying to discover who he is. He's not sure if the people around him now will tire of him once their sense of obligation wears off. He is still hopelessly attracted to Blitz but likely afraid to act on that after Season 2's consequences and his uncertainty of where Blitz's emotions really stand. He likely won't be up for the more violent/aggressive styles of sex like they had before, as it would be a trigger, but he probably also fears that Blitz would ONLY be interested in sex with him because he was able to have that violent dynamic and enjoy it.

Stolas currently doesn't know how to function in normal life and doesn't see a future for himself.

And under all of it lurk the stains of his trauma and abuse, ready to remind him that Stella still wants him dead, and the world still wants to cause him pain. So, should he even bother to want anything in the first place, or is that just a guarantee that he'll make things worse?

He's going to have a LOT to unpack in this next season, and it's going to be so heartbreaking and fascinating to watch.

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