Aha you have activated my trap card! I am constitutionally incapable of shutting up about this topic so here we go. Buckle up because this got long as fuck. Oops?
So there are four basic pillars to why I think Blitz and Stolas spent more time together as kids than just the birthday playdate we've already seen:
the highly personal character of Blitz's resentment towards royalty
everything we still don't know about the Not Divorced Party
the unfinished plot arc of their childhood encounter
Blitz and Stolas's interactions during their reunion as adults
I'll go through these one by one because this theory isn't based on one singular big smoking gun but rather a lot of little pieces, and each on its own is very "WHICH COULD MEAN NOTHING," but when you stack them all together you start to see a shape in the negative space between them and that's what I keep finding myself absolutely unable to ignore. So let's break it down, shall we?
Blitz's resentment towards royalty
This is maybe a weird place to start, because it kind of feels like starting at the end, but I also think it's important to clarify this up front because to me it's a present-day issue that the things we still don't know may provide some context for down the road.
The thing about Blitz is that he's very class conscious. Arguably he's the most class conscious character in the entire series. He's not a theorist, he's not out here reading Hell Marxist treatises or whatever, but he's viscerally aware of how unjust Hell's caste system is.
In fact, he's a little too viscerally aware. That is to say, we see him snap at Fizz that "royal demons don't give a shit about guys like us," and he yells at Stolas during The Full Moon that:
You royal fucks think you can do this every time, like you can just play with our feelings because we're smaller and not as important!
When he says these things, this isn't just a sociopolitical issue for him. This is personal, and it hurts.
It's possible that all of this resentment, this very specific feeling of being jerked around by royalty, is just coming from his complicated feelings about his current dynamic with Stolas. And in the absence of everything I'm going to outline below, that's how I would read it.
But the depth of this hurt feels older. It feels like it's a scab he's been picking at for a while. And I don't want to dismiss or underestimate just how much trauma Blitz has picked up just by existing as a marginalized person in a very hierarchical and unjust society, of course, because that is real and that hurts. A thousand and one microaggressions stack up. But if that was where this was coming from... it's not just royalty who treat imps like shit, is it? Western Energy is a masterclass in this— we see Blitz disrespected, deadnamed, openly called racial slurs to his face in a hospital waiting room, and then dismissed and condescended to by a doctor who doesn't take his concerns about his daughter's medical care seriously. If it was about that... that's not an issue that is royalty specific. This emotional hurt, for Blitz, is very specifically about interactions between imps and royalty, not about the racism or classism he experiences more generally from many angles.
And so I do keep coming back to that very specific phrasing— "[you think you can do this] every time." That carries some weight here for me. If this was about the low grade trauma that comes with just existing as an imp in Hell, or even more straightforwardly about him being in a messy sex work situationship with a guy he's caught feelings for and being upset about how yanked around he feels from that... well, "every time" feels like a weird way to phrase it if that's all it boils down to.
TL;DR: the hurt Blitz expresses here feels too personal to be a purely political stance and suggests there is more history to this sentiment than just his most recent entanglement with Stolas.
Which brings me to my second pillar...
What We Don't Know (Yet) About The Not Divorced Party
So this actually ties into another theory I have, which I am much more confident in than I am in the "Stolitz knew each other longer as kids" thing (not to say I'm not confident in my analysis here, but it's a 51% sure of the childhood friends theory, +85% sure of this other thing).
Namely, I'm talking about my prediction that there's a lot more to the story of the Not Divorced Party encounter than meets the eye. In particular, I do not think that stealing the grimoire was Plan A. I think it was just what Blitz pivoted to after his original Plans A (contact Stolas and make an actual business arrangement with him) and B (break into Stolas's palace and talk to him one on one since he couldn't reach him through his staff) went off the rails.
When we see Blitz at the window the morning of the Not Divorced Party, it's easy to see that as him casing the joint, except...
His attention doesn't stay on the grimoire, he's not concerned about where Stolas is putting it like he presumably would if he were planning on robbing the place. His focus is all on Stolas, and he actively tries to get in while Stolas is still in the room. He's pulling at the window to try and open it, and when Stolas goes to leave the room, he appears to be calling aloud to try and catch Stolas's attention.
That is not the action of a man who is trying to stealthily scope out a target for a burglary.
To further underscore this, later in the day once Blitz has been waylaid by security, he actually tries to explain himself, saying: "Look, I didn't mean to interrupt your, whatever— party? I was just trying to—" but of course Stolas cuts him off and starts making sexual jokes out of the blue, so Blitz seems to give up on being honest at this point.
Still, his pivot away from whatever his real objective was and onto "fuck it, I'll just steal the stupid book" doesn't prevent him from letting slip another clue:
This heavily implies that Blitz has been trying to contact Stolas through official channels in the past. Like, that is the unambiguous meaning behind this statement.
So you may be wondering: what does this have to do with their time together as children?
Well, that's a little bit roundabout. The critical piece is that, based on all these little clues, the story of the Not Divorced Party is not all the way told yet. We haven't seen Blitz's side of the story... and if we haven't seen Blitz's side of this, I think it also stands to reason that we may also be missing pieces of the puzzle when it comes to their childhood together.
The other side of this is that Blitz is not a stupid man. He plays the fool well when it benefits him, but don't let that trick you into thinking he's not highly intelligent. He had to have known that outright stealing the grimoire was not a feasible long-term strategy... but striking a business arrangement with his old friend from childhood? Somebody who was supportive of his ambitions way back then and who just might still be willing to support him now? That seems like exactly the kind of thing a relentless optimist like Blitz would try as a crazy hail mary shot at getting access to Earth.
TL;DR: What we see in The Circus strongly suggests that Blitz was not originally at Stolas's palace to steal the grimoire on the night they reconnected, which suggests both that there's more to the backstory than we yet know and that there is real emotional weight for Blitz in their time together as children.
Which of course segues nicely into...
So About That Loose Thread
One thing that really strikes me about The Circus is how Blitz makes a big deal about how he's worried about getting caught stealing. He's scared. It's the looming threat that's hanging over the entire scene of his and Stolas's playdate. They're having fun, being goofy kids together... but Blitz is being put at real risk here by his father in being asked to steal from royalty.
And yet, despite this being a significant source of tension in the flashback portion of the episode, it's a threat that remains... shockingly unresolved. In a medium like animation, where every second of screen time requires an enormous amount of work even in comparison to live action television, you don't give the amount of focus that's spent on Blitz's fear of reprisals if there isn't going to be any payoff for that unless you're just... not a very good writer. And frankly the creative team behind HB have proven too good for that kind of sloppiness. They're incredibly good at making use of every second of screen time to convey enormous amounts of information about the characters and story. So for them to have introduced this emotional beat and simply leave it hanging, to me, says that this story isn't finished.
Also this line haunts me. Everything that goes unspoken here haunts me:
That's further reinforced by the fact that Blitz does in fact seem to have successfully smuggled an enormous bag of valuable items out to his father, but based on other scenes we see throughout the series, this does not appear to have had any significant impact on the Buckzo family's circumstances. One could make the argument that all those stolen goods didn't benefit them because Cash drank the money away immediately, which is certainly a possibility. Combined with the above unresolved emotional beats, however, I think it points to something else.
Whether it's a case of Cash wasting the income from the stolen goods on his vices, or perhaps them getting caught and this somehow resulting in further contact between Blitz and Stolas, I strongly feel that this element that's been left dangling suggests that there's more to the history.
TL;DR: The emotional arc of Blitz's fear of getting caught stealing as a child remains unresolved, which makes me strongly suspect that there is more to the backstory, and if there's more to the backstory, it seems probable to me that there was more contact between Blitz and Stolas as that would contribute to resolving the other points brought up in this post.
Now last, but certainly not least, let's come back to present day to talk about
Because boy oh boy there is a lot to be dissected here so let's go through it point by point.
First, we need to acknowledge that this whole interaction is obviously weird because from the minute they're away from the party and behind closed doors, Stolas has inadvertently poisoned the well by immediately making two different remarks about them having sex back to back. Blitz obviously finds this off-putting (at least at first), which seems to be why he pivots away from just, like, talking to him? That seems to have been his original goal, but Stolas's drunken horny jokes just make him clam right up and pivot to a little bit of larceny as Plan C. But as weird as the whole convo is, let's actually take a look at some of the things that get said:
Stolas's remark that "I recall how you enjoy making an entrance" is... weird, right? It passes the audience sniff test because we as the viewer know that this is in fact true about Blitz... but why is that something that Stolas has reason to observe? Like, let's really think about what we saw during their playdate on Stolas's birthday. You can... maybe make an argument that he's talking about Blitz coming into the ring during his performance at the circus? But that's a performance, and Stolas, sheltered though he is, does in fact know the difference between the way someone acts when putting on a performance and that person's actual personality. My point is that unless we really stretch and apply it to Blitz's stage career, this is not something Stolas has any reason to know about Blitz based on the interactions we've already seen them have as kids. That, to me, suggests a longer acquaintance than has been acknowledged thus far.
Which nicely leads me to another line from Stolas, where he describes the time that has passed as: "Over two decades since I last saw you."
And that's true... but it's true in a pointedly vague way that I find interesting, since, as the splash title so helpfully informed us approximately four minutes ago, it has in fact been twenty-five years, specifically, since that birthday playdate. It's one of those statements that... yeah, of course, twenty-five years is "over two decades." But so is twenty-four years. Or twenty-one years. Or twenty years and three months. Whatever.
You get what I'm saying here, right? Stolas describes the amount of time since they last saw each other such that it corresponds with the twenty-five year time frame in a way the audience won't question, but is also just nonspecific enough that there's roughly five-ish years of wiggle room there. Did they last see each other twenty-five years ago on that fateful birthday? Or did they last see each other several years after that before parting ways for over two decades?
We as the audience don't know at this point, and that ambiguity feels pointed to me.
Another interesting moment is this:
I couldn't find a good gif of this moment but the thing that's really striking to me is that Blitz is the one to turn Stolas's head all the way around.
A friend of mine interprets this as Blitz trying to snap Stolas's neck to get him to cut it with the cringy dirty talk, but I'm not sure I agree. If turning Stolas's head around and then covering his mouth were two separate motions in sequence, I'd buy it, but when you watch it slowed down, it's all one fluid motion, with Blitz getting his hand in position to cover Stolas's beak before he has even started to move his head.
The only logical conclusion I can draw from this is that Blitz already knew Stolas's neck works like that. And maybe you could argue that he extrapolated this in an "animal owls can do this with their necks so probably a demon owl like Stolas can too" sort of way... but why would he? Even though many demons have very animalistic traits, that doesn't mean it's a 1:1 correlation. So either this was a split-second murder attempt born out of irritation (which would be funny but doesn't track for me from a character perspective and also is not really what the animation looks like when you really study it closely), or this is another case (similar to Stolas's earlier remark about Blitz liking to make an entrance) where Blitz knows something about Stolas that we didn't see him learn during the birthday playdate.
And so all this leads up to the moment that I bring up every single time I talk about this:
This is the moment. This is when Blitz changes the goddamn timeline. This is Lot's Wife, turning back for one last look even if she'll be turned to salt for it.
And it all comes down, as I've said probably a dozen times on this blog by now, to the fact that Stolas invokes their friendship.
Throughout this interaction, Blitz has been on the back foot. This whole palace infiltration thing he was doing has not gone according to plan. Stolas started off their interactions talking down to him in public, then made a bunch of weird sexual jokes, and Blitz clearly decided that whatever his original plan was in coming here, he's not gonna go through with laying it all out and hoping that Stolas will agree to help him. So he pivots to just stealing the damn thing on impulse, and uses seduction as a distraction technique because all of Stolas's comments about ravishing him and Blitz's "nefarious reasons" for being there clue him in that that would probably work. And he's not actually going to go through with fucking the guy even if he did grow up to be a tall drink of water, because Blitz has got places to be...
...and then Stolas gets vulnerable. He gets real. He makes it clear that their friendship meant something. And it stops Blitz dead in his tracks.
It's so obvious that this invocation of their friendship means something to Blitz. It carries real weight for him, to know that Stolas considers Blitz to have an important place in his life. And to me that suggests that Stolas also carried an important place in Blitz's life once upon a time... and listen, I made a lot of one-summer-day friends playing at the beach as a kid. But if I were to meet one of them again today, twenty to thirty years later? Not one of them invoking the two to six hours we spent playing together on a single day as children would stop me in my tracks like this. (Granted, I'm a slightly more well-adjusted person than Blitz, but still. The emotional reasoning tracks even for him in my opinion.)
It's all just these little tiny details, right? None of them seem like they mean a lot on their own, but once you put them together, they do leave a certain impression, don't they?
TL;DR: Blitz and Stolas's interactions upon their reunion as adults seem to leave a few breadcrumbs that perhaps they know each other a bit better prior to that meeting than we've yet been led to believe.
Now this post is already outrageously long, so I'll try to wrap it up pretty quickly and tie it all together as succinctly as I'm capable of.
The way Blitz and Stolas act around each other the very first night they reconnect suggests deeper intimacy in their shared past than a single playdate. Both the unresolved emotional arc around Cash pressuring Blitz to steal and the unrevealed plot aspects of the Not Divorced Party suggest there is more backstory we don't know yet. And all of these factors ultimately tie back to the emotional core of why Blitz's feelings of being (mis)used by royalty seem so much more specific than just his baggage from being a marginalized person in Hell.
There's history here. More of it than I think we've been told yet. And I'm so excited to finally get the reveal on whatever it is we still don't know.
