In 1x07, Carmilla and Vaggi have a very significant song/conversation in discussing the Angels and how to defeat them: Carmilla tells Vaggi she "won't stand a chance unless she's out for love" in the battle. And as some have noted, this may be why of all the heroes in the fight in 1x08, Alastor is the one who puts up the worst showing.
On the surface, Alastor is an ideological nemesis/counterpoint to Charlie and the series' main themes. Our heroine believes in the power of love and friendship, and love and friendship are continually shown to be the ways through which the characters find redemption and joy. Charlie and Vaggi save each other with their romantic love; Lu's familial love for Charlie pulls him out of his depression, Husk and Angel's love saves/improves them both, and even the Vees are saved from complete destruction by their affection for each other.
If Alastor really believes what he said to Vox - There are no friends in hell and love is a weakness - if he really is just the monster he presents himself as, then the story trajectory seems clear. Charlie, the heroine who believes in friendship/love, will prove him wrong; the narrative will prove him to be mistaken, etc. However, the story isn't simple in that way. It's not just a nihilistic monster who thinks love is a joke vs a classic Shonen/Shojo hero.
The key isn't that Alastor can't love/care and our heroes can. The difference is: the heroes will take the risk of getting hurt that comes with opening yourself up to caring, and Alastor is afraid to.
If we assume (as this video outlines) that Alastor is capable of caring in his own way, but responds to genuine feelings with fear - fear that he'll be used - then that changes the perspective here. The series does not present love as a simple, painless thing. Charlie and Vaggi love each other, but they also hurt each other a lot - Charlie is hurt in 1x06 by Vaggi lying to her, Vaggie is hurt by Charlie in s2 when she pushes her away. Charlie and Lu have hurt each other in their family bond (in the past, in 2x05 when she kicks him out). Husk and Angel hurt each others' feelings sometimes too; Cherrie and Sir Pentious are what Radiostatic would be if it was healthier; and the Vees hurt each other badly in season 2. Love isn't simple. Love can mean getting hurt.
There's a difference, obviously, between the ways love can lead to getting hurt or wounded and actual abuse, as Val and Angel demonstrate for contrast. But the show does show that, when it comes to healthy, mutually loving relationships, you need to be able to risk the pain (go through the pain, as the Buffyverse would put it) of getting hurt.
That is actualized in action from in the battle in 1x08. Alastor has opened himself up, against his will, to caring again; he's almost there, almost in a place where he can take the risk for his friends again. But when he takes a stand against Adam, he gets hurt (physically).
But he's not the only one. Charlie and Vaggi both get injured really badly fighting the angels. Sir Pentious dies after taking some damage. The rest of the crew all face pain and danger here. Vaggi gets injured as badly as Alastor fighting Lute, if not more. But, when Alastor gets injured, he immediately quits and slinks away. The others don't.
Because they have something to fight for - something they're ready to get hurt to protect. And it makes them all very brave.
It's why Alastor comes across as so pathetic and comparatively cowardly/weak in this finale. He has the potential to care for others, but as soon as he gets wounded, he runs away. The others all fight through the pain and take the risks. It brings them friendship, community, redemption (in Sir Pentious' case) and strength. The real kind of strength and courage, not the fake kind Alastor uses to prop himself up.
Metaphorically, Alastor almost takes the risk of opening himself up to others, and once again gets hurt. Just like with Vox in the past (from his point of view). He let someone become close to him, and got hurt, and responded by doubling down on never caring, because he won't take the pain of being hurt.
(Which does make Vox a lot braver than him, be cause he does take the risk. He asks Al to be partners. He's opened up again to friendships with the Vees. He also looks a murderous angel (Lute in 2x05) in the face, who's ready to kill him, and doesn't blink. He takes injuries in battle and keeps going. And he does defeat Alastor in 2x08 - in that he reduces him to crawling around on the ground with a giant fuck off dead canon in his face, and also survives and lives another day - because he has friends. He has Shock.wav to save him, his passionate feelings about Alastor to motivate him, and Vel and Val to protect him from himself.)
Alastor, for all his bravado, is too afraid to take the risk of the pain that can come with love. And that's what he's missing - the courage to take the risk of the hedgehog's dilemma. And ironically, that fear makes him incredibly weak, almost pathetically so. Real strength, as the show demonstrates, comes from both working together with others (the hotel, how the Vees are nearly unstoppable as long as they remain a team, Hear my Hope, etc.) and having someone to care for, someone to fight for.
I think that Alastor's fear of letting someone in needs to be his downfall somehow in order to support this point. Love needs to be shown to ultimately be worth taking the risk. Possibly this will be simple enough. Alastor will be defeated and stripped of his power and left with nothing, not even Nifty's friendship, because of that fear.
Because you don't stand a chance unless you're out for love.
Honestly, Radiodoll is such an underrated dynamic/friendship especially when you headcanon them both as being on the aromatic spectrum like me lol!
REAL. I am a strong proponent for all the media demons being arospec in wildly different ways and it is so much fun to play with. I see Alastor as strictly non-partnering, and Velvette obviously isn’t but her partnering is almost wholly divorced from her primary sexual relationships. Something about a girl who fucks around but her emotional priorities lie exclusively in her freaky queerplatonic lifemates (who both want her so bad). Alastor would mostly find this distinction incomprehensible I think but you know, whatever makes her happy.
my take on radiodoll is a little idiosyncratic in that I’m inclined to imagine their friendship as a lot more complicated and fucked up and potentially very hostile at times than is typically the case, but that’s exactly what makes them so interesting to me! They’re hugely similar in many ways that I think would prime them to bond, but then there are also a couple of really critical ways in which they fundamentally clash. For one thing, Velvette hates being condescended to, and that’s kind of just the base level on which Alastor interacts with people on. also even more so than Vox (or Val), Velvette bases her entire identity around being part of a team—she makes a point of namedropping the vees in her solo interactions, she picks outfits to match vox and val’s aesthetics, her personal logo is literally a reference to the three of them as a group (in the shape of a heart, which I do think we should interpret in the most gooey cringe teenage girl on myspace coded way imaginable… she says its just for the aesthetic but shes a fucking liar). she is really the anti-alastor in this regard and we should talk about it more. I actually think there’s something to be said for like, Alastor seeing how Velvette has used Vox and Val to propel herself into power far faster and further than she otherwise could’ve and subconsciously equating it to his dynamic with Rosie. And while he can understand the idea of bonding within that dynamic and being friendly with the person using you—I mean, why make the experience unnecessarily miserable for no reason—what he can’t get is why Velvette seems to view the situation not as a necessary but deeply unpleasant interim measure to secure power but as aspirational in and of itself. Velvette’s based her whole identity around supporting the Vees as a unit and that is baffling to Alastor. She’s competent and clever and clearly capable of making it on her own, yet she’d rather be reliant upon and share her labor with other people.
Something else I think is fun is that like… Velvette is obviously exactly Alastor’s favorite type of person, but she’s also far more unlikely to tolerate his bullshit than pretty much any of the other unhinged women he chooses to surround himself with. and she’s also in a unique position to really get alastor’s number because—well because for starters that’s her thing, she’s good at reading people, but also because alastor’s whole song and dance routine during his captivity in v tower relies a lot on vox and valentino’s preconceived assumptions and emotional involvement skewing their perceptions, and velvette doesn’t have that same kind of baggage weighing her down. my point here being that she can and will challenge alastor in ways he is rarely ever challenged and there’s a lot of different directions you could choose to go with that
Also like, their relationship with Vox, and how they're both coming at it from opposite angles and trying to glimpse the other side through each other. Of course Alastor’s completely certain that he already knows Vox backwards and forwards and doesn’t need Velvette’s insight when she hasn’t even known Vox a decade, but there’s a certain kind of curiosity he’ll never fully cop to, because like… whether he admits it or not Alastor doesn’t have many opportunities to see who Vox is when he’s not obsessing over Alastor, who Vox is with other people who are close to him, who Vox is as a partner (which Alastor is definitely not the least bit interested in knowing because it’s something he could’ve theoretically had, nope, never crossed his mind even once). And Velvette is also sure she knows Vox better than his asshole ex from seventy years ago ever could, but she still recognizes Alastor as a potential window into all the parts of himself Vox tries his hardest to hide, the stuff that happened to him before even Val showed up. And that’s gotta be at least a little irresistible to her.
And then of course this all has to be taken within the larger context their interactions are taking place in. No matter how much they may get along personally, they are still positioned fundamentally as enemies. Velvette will literally never betray Vox, and being on Vox’s side necessarily means being against Alastor. I’m inclined to imagine Alastor as having been more open to a possible future in which things didn’t have to be so contentious between them, since I genuinely don’t think he realized just how loyal Velvette and Valentino were until after the finale, but he still obviously knew that in their current situation she was Vox’s ally. Also, she was still very much his captor in a position of absolute power over him, and while I don’t think she ever did anything particularly cruel or abusive towards him, I also firmly believe she treated him more like a doll to be played with then as someone whose consent she actually had to respect (and half the time I’m not even sure she’d have registered this as like, a violation he might resent her for, because that’s also how she treats Valentino and Vox). And post-s2 I really like to imagine her feeling some sense of betrayal because even though she knows it’s kind of irrational it did feel like they were friends, and he just flat-out wrecked her life before walking out and leaving her to pick up the pieces. Which I guess is something new she and Vox can bond about, at least.
not a believer in the vees retrieving Vox's body after the finale or in Alastor taking it home with him but a secret third option (the body falling prey to the ravages of mob justice and being desecrated in an extremely public and symbolic fashion, and when the pictures circulating all over social media inevitability get back to Velvette she and Valentino kind of just stand there cringing at the close-ups until eventually Val is like, well, at least it's impressive how organized the masses managed to be with designing the display and all, and Velvette is like okay but we CANNOT let Vox find about this under any circumstances, and they both fully commit to keeping it secret/erasing its memory from the public consciousness, but obviously it inevitably still gets back to him regardless)
not only do I think staticmoth's sexual relationship is public knowledge, I actually think the question of who tops is an everpresent and hotly contested discussion across the Pentagram. Like, you've got to keep in mind that Val's public persona is also curated to embody (heavily sexualized) hyperdominance—in some ways even moreso than Vox's, who is concerned above all with being likable to as many people as possible. But then when they appear together Val does often take on a softer, more effeminate position specifically in relation to Vox. The stereotypes aren't stereotyping, or maybe it's that they're stereotyping too much. Either way, it's a whole thing. It is ridiculous what the public would do just to get pictures of these guys having penetrative sex. There are conspiracy docs compiling evidence from the last three decades and analyzing every detail to make their case. There are locked discussions on message boards thousands of pages long. There are hashtags. Particularly intense debates have at times escalated to violence in the streets. Every now and then an exceedingly brave reporter will ask one of the Vees' the question directly, all of whom have their own method of dodging it.
Val thinks it's the funniest thing and collects his favorite arguments on the topic, and sometimes he'll read them aloud to Vox just to see Vox's soul leaving his body in real time (sometimes Velvette is also there to provide color commentary and an insider opinion which makes the whole thing immeasurably worse). It's so fucking invasive and embarrassing and stupid, but he still tells velvette not to post anything that could be interpreted as too definitive because damn it, publicity is publicity
I also think staticmoth have definitely done like. public fan service before. The romantic element of their relationship IS concealed even if the sex isn't (that might actually interfere with their branding!), so not in that sense, but they've definitely been asked to like, do horny couples challenges on Velvette's accounts or make out a bit at public events or whatever. It does NOT happen often given that it is just about Vox's least favorite thing to do ever even if part of him does kind of get off to it, and anyway, leaning into that part of their relationship too heavily will make people start thinking of them as a Couple couple instead of really good friends who occasionally fuck, and that's the perception they are actively avoiding for the sake of their image. but every now and then they do give the people what they want
I do think that even at the height of their friendship, Alastor could be quite cruel to Vox at times. This is based primarily on his other positive relationships and in particular his relationship with Charlie (which I very much approach as a direct parallel to his relationship with Vox)—he can feel and express great affection for someone while delighting in pushing their boundaries and verbally degrading them. Also with the bar scene and how tolerant Vox initially was of being laughed at, the casual comment about how Alastor already knew Vox could be pathetic sometimes, how seventy years later Vox seems genuinely surprised by the admission that Al ever respected him at all... like, obviously that whole interaction was unusually cruel and shocking in context, but there's a fair argument to be made that Alastor often treated Vox as a bit of a joke, in much the same way he routinely dismisses and mocks Charlie's ambitions as ridiculous and impossible. And this is just kind of how Al is—he's a sadist who enjoys cruelty for cruelty's sake, and in that way, liking to make Vox a little uncomfortable is a natural extension of liking Vox.
And the thing is, it's also clear that Vox didn't take it that seriously. He still clearly believed Alastor liked him enough that he had a real shot at that partnership. Which is super interesting and kind of heartbreaking to think about, because it demonstrates Vox having a much higher level of confidence and security at least in the context of that specific relationship—that Alastor could openly bully him and he could shrug it off fully believing that Al didn't really mean it, or that if Al DID mean it, it wasn't a big deal because he has other worthwhile qualities and Al clearly recognizes that, so he doesn't even need to be perfect. I generally maintain that the rejection exacerbated Vox's issues rather than caused them, and this is still true, but there's something to be said for their relationship having actually enabled Vox to get better before proceeding to make him so much worse
And in a way this even informs their current dynamic, because sure, the things Alastor says now are a lot more vicious and pointed on average, but he's still just saying shit! And even as he leverages Vox's insecurities against him he on some level still expects that once the kneejerk emotional response fades Vox will shrug it off just like he always used to. Because obviously they both know that this is just how Alastor likes to play
I think Alastor gets way more out of his pseudo-rivalry with Vox than Vox does. He seems to find Vox entertaining and hasn't just eaten him or enslaved him like he's done with other overlords. He's still bitter about Vox "ruining" what they had and is positively giddy over the attention Vox still pays him. Even when no one else cares, he knows Vox cares.
Meanwhile Vox makes a fool out of himself in public and neglects his actual relationships because he still feels like he has something to prove to Alastor.
Basically Alastor gets a playmate while Vox gets his mental illnesses exacerbated.
I agree insofar as Alastor does get more out of it than Vox does. He enjoys the attention and seems to enjoy some of their interactions, and if he really wanted Vox gone for good, he would have done something about it decades ago.
But I question how much of it is actually just a game to him, because "jovial" is Alastor's persona. He adopts it (to varying degrees of success) at the Overlord meeting, in day to day interactions, when manipulating Charlie, when first meeting Lucifer, when fighting Adam, when talking to Rosie, when surrendering to Vox. When mocking Vox's offer, even though he'd just been pulling on his hair in distress.
I find Alastor to be at his least trustworthy when he seems to be having fun, because those are the moments when he's most likely to be hiding how he really feels. "Just because you see a smile, don't think you know what's going on underneath." And he generally feels firmly in control of the situation when dealing with Vox, so his mask is better (as compared to most interactions with Lucifer, where he felt threatened because he thought Luci could smite him).
All of that said, Alastor genuinely enjoys violence, so I do think he also enjoys their fights to some extent. But only because he knows he's the more powerful of them, and can control how far things go; if he doesn't want to hurt Vox, he's not going to (case in point: he gets on top of him during the finale and makes a good show of ripping his wires apart, but isn't actually doing any damage). I don't think it would have been as fun if Vox actually posed a real threat to him, because then he would have had to take their altercations seriously.
And I think that's where he ultimately messed up. Because yeah, Alastor was hurt by their falling out, and it clearly cut deeply enough that he hasn't let it go even seven decades later (he brings it up entirely unprompted during Stayed Gone). But he still had that sense of control, and could tell himself that their current dynamic was entirely on his terms. Vox was the one being blamed for everything that went wrong between them, the one having his self-esteem continually torn down, and the one fighting desperately for any sort of win and getting nowhere. Nothing about this was fun for him.
Alastor was playing a game where he made all the rules, Vox didn't want to play in the first place.
my take on the last Vincent sequence in Brighter is that it was 100% an intentional mass suicide gone wrong. like I simply don’t think Vincent is so stupid that this whole thing was accidental, I fully believe that Vincent was intending to kill himself and all his followers on live TV (note the sign behind him that says on the air)
And we know from the last episode of S2 that Vox is suicidal and will resort to killing himself if he feels like he has to. Something about the frantic way he’s speaking and jumping around the aquarium (along with his pointed feeling criticisms at the network about feeding people the same old crap) indicate, to me, that Something was happening with his life or career and he felt cornered. Maybe he felt his influence slipping, maybe something was happening with the network that would’ve pushed him out of TV? I don’t know, there’s not a lot to go off of, but I do think something pushed him over the edge much like what happened during S2E8
The new era of entertainment he’d be ushering in would be whatever followed after he killed himself and his followers on live TV because someone broadcasting a mass suicide would be HUGE. And, more importantly to Vincent, if he pulled it off it’d ensure that no matter what people would always remember him because being the guy who killed himself + his entire cult on tv would be legendary. He’d cement himself in television history forever, even in death people would pay attention to him!
Also important to note is that we never see him kill anyone for fun/without reason, he only kills people when he needs to further his career in some way. So what benefit does he get out of killing his entire cult? And critically to Vox’s character is that he needs people to love and adore him, so he only stands to lose from killing off his cult, unless HE was planning to die along with them. The benefit to his career here would be that he’d be immortalized in television history through doing a mass suicide on air
I don’t think he ever intended for the TV to fall on him, I think his manic jumping around the room probably loosened whatever rigging he had set up and it made the tv fall directly on him, and probably set off the mass suicide before he was ready for it to happen. But like, I do fully believe that he wanted to kill himself + everyone else during Brighter
staticsilence but vox isn't actually any less of a freak about alastor, it's just that for the first time he's genuinely committing himself to not touching the hot stove that is his own maladaptive obsession and doing a surprisingly good job of it, but that doesn't make it feel any less like he's sawing a limb off every time Alastor shows up on his metaphorical and/or literal doorstep telling him that this whole floundering indifference bit is getting old and Vox just has to. Not react. He's succeeding but at great personal cost. And the fact Vox is obviously just as emotionally vulnerable as he's always been even if he's choosing to be smarter about it just encourages Alastor that much more to be devastatingly vicious in all his attempts to break Vox's composure. so vox continues to be slowly gutted and alastor keeps digging himself further in a pit of his own making and the vees feel agonizingly helpless to change the situation and everyone at the hotel would really just like to not have to deal with the vees anymore and no one has a good time ever
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