The ukeifaction is a plague in Viv’s writing. I think fizz has a bad case of it because in season 1 he was never depicted or foreshadowed to be a “pillow princess, baby slut” Viv’s words via Raph btw. He was the most dressed in Ozzie’s and antagonistic towards moxxie and blitz. He was affectionate with Ozzie but it was wholesome now all fizz talks about is fizz’s “kaiju dick” and dildos. I get mammon exploits fizz for money and objectification is greatest sin of greed (Hudson Williams has been objectified but the way Hollywood sexualizes men and women is night and day, but the way fizz is objectified is how Sabrina carpenter and Katseye are objectified. He’s not a man he’s a woman) fizz’s trauma and disability don’t impact him and he’s grateful for blitz for the accident because he has a rich and powerful boyfriend who pampers him, builds him cybernetic limbs and he is set financially for life. The rich literally saved him from poverty. The only time his disability affects him is if he believes Ozzie will leave him and he has to be reassured that Ozzie won’t leave him. Fizz just became a fanfic of himself, or worse viv saw fanart and fanfic from the crew (Raph) and fans and made it canon
Fizzarolli is a master class in how to assassinate your character.
He went from being Ozzie's hype man with a jester motif that lent itself to the parallel that the Jester/Fool was the unofficial advisor to a king who could actually critique the power the king held. It was easy to see there was a relationship there, but between Ozzie and Fizz, Fizz was the more masculine presence in the relationship without either being boxed into the Seme-Uke dynamic.
Fizzarolli and Ozzie felt more like complete people who genuinely complimented each other. While Ozzie was rather bare bones as this King of Lust, his position of social power worked to characterize Fizzarolli as someone socially intelligent, caustically witty, self-assured, and emotionally regulated.
On one hand, he is romantically entrenched with someone of an even higher position of power than Stolas, and unlike Stolas and Blitz, they felt balanced. Very established-relationship. Which says a lot about Fizzarolli's capacity for long-term, functional relationships as well as juggling someone else's power and crafting an image of that person that showed reverence, mutual support, and healthy power transfers.
Because all relationships are a power exchange. Healthy and unhealthy, you compromise, share, and even surrender power in all these little ways that has nothing to do with sex. And Ozzie's, for all its flaws in how it fumbled Stolas, managed to set up the foundations of a compelling, believable, healthy relationship with Fizz and Ozzie.
And that's utilizing every aspect of the narrative in that episode. The character design, the line reading (I loved how Ozzie says "we" and "our" as a very subtle nod to the fact that he actually sees Fizzarolli as an equal and not a possession), the plot (Stolas' delusional abuse of power juxtaposed with this healthier dynamic), and the themes of the season leading up to this point.
Point being, people didn't imagine Fizzarolli as being more than Ozzie's pet from nowhere. And yes, yes, the fans will say "But that's the whole point, Fizz isn't Ozzie's pet".
You mean Ozzie doesn't see Fizz as his pet.
But Ozzie has to cook for him. It's one thing to say Fizz doesn't know how to cook because he makes so much money, why would he have to? But then why is Ozzie cooking? He is even more rich and powerful, he has over a dozen servants, but not a single cook/chef? How funny, it's almost like that is contrived to show how Fizz is utterly incapable of taking care of himself in basic tasks and Ozzie has to take care of him.
Add that with Ozzie fretting over Fizz leaving the house at the beginning and then ending the episode by saying he was going to get Fizz cleaned up, and you get the reason why my wife and I summarize Fizzarolli's character as "He needs Ozzie to wipe his ass for him".
He is just so (UwU). And I don't think I have to point out how much whiplash Fizz goes through in Oops where one second he's having a panic attack and the next moment he's snarking and saying jokes. Have one or the other.
And then you get Fizz in the Mammon episode going from secure in the relationship with Ozzie to suddenly thinking Ozzie won't be into him anymore if he isn't Mammon's favorite clown, even while Ozzie is actively saying he doesn't want Fizz to go to the pageant. And that is just a complete deterioration of narrative. That is Fizz willfully not listening to Ozzie AND lying about it all to manufacture some kind of plot.
I didn't need Oops or the Mammon episode to believe Ozzie and Fizz were in love. You convinced me back in Ozzie's. I didn't need to see them "work through something", I already said I would buy what you were selling. I just needed a realistic progression of their relationship from mutual and stable to secure. Fizz and Ozzie are favorite side characters.
They do not need a story on the same level or even thematically or narratively similar to Stolas and Blitz. They needed to be a divergence from Stolitz to really show how and why this kind of relationship works. They were perfectly poised to be the very subtle and mature answer to how Stolas and Blitz could work and why they currently weren't. And it is rich as a multi-faceted foil. Not only as FizzaOzzie vs Stolitz but also Fizz vs Blitz, Ozzie vs Stolas, and Ozzie vs Blitz.
Throw Verosika in there and you complete the entire narrative picture by having her be a counter balance to Fizz in relation to Blitz. Which goes into the emotional regulation aspect. Fizz is far less impacted by Blitz's existence despite still clearly holding animosity. Blitz is an old injury that throbs on occasion but otherwise Fizz is entirely able to ignore. And that is someone who is emotionally mature. Which is a character we desperately needed in this show. That's the real diverse representation I'm craving.
And I should say, Fizz's more interesting character is mainly implied and relies heavily on the idea that the show has any idea how stories work. It relies on context, character interactions, background details, and interference of themes based on plot, narrative, and character design.
So when he shows up in season 2 as Ozzie's sugar baby, technically he had no explicit character to contradict in order to call it Character Assassination. But writing isn't a magic trick, it's labor. Every single decision you make is there for a reason. Not in the sense of "why are the curtains blue" and trying to find themes in every little thing, but the curtains are blue because it fits the color pallet, blue is a color that fades into the background and you are not trying to draw attention to it, or it can be thematic/symbolic. But those are all intentional choices.
Taking an interview from George R.R. Martin and his discussion about the "Two Types of Writers"
Most writers are some kind of Gardener. You can set things up and the characters organically move plans around or shift the tone or context of a planned event. But
1) You need to actually allow the characters to organically experience the story themselves, and nothing happens that isn't on screen.
Character revelations and every turn a character makes needs a cause, an effect, and an introspection. What happens, how does it affect/change the story, and how does the character feel about it. When these character beats are not tangible or happen too quickly, you get the Game of Thrones Final Season.
2) Even a twist needs setup.
This is just great in general about why creators/authors shouldn't even read fan theories or debates because (a) you don't want to feel compelled to correct fans, you should let your story say all you would say for you. (B) You don't want fan theories to influence your work in a direction you didn't plan for. And finally, (c) when fans see what you're putting down and piece the details together for a reveal you don't have planned for a while, you may feel compelled to change course.
And that's bad writing. As he says, you cannot write an entire story where the butler did it, but someone realizes the butler is guilty in chapter 4 of your 20 chapter story, and then all of a sudden you say "It was the chamber maid, actually(☝️🤓).
Because now all you have done is perpetually lead an audience by the nose where nothing you say can be trusted and nothing you built matters. All that work was wasted and the audience leaves feeling cheated. Worst of all, they will never suspend their disbelief because they don't know what they can believe in, because it clearly isn't YOU.
That is to say, while only implied, all that work was for nothing. One of the better musical pieces in the entire show where the song actually functions in the narrative like a musical and it came out to be all spectacle with no substance. It did nothing to change anything in the story, nor did it adequately introduce these characters whom we are seeing for the first time.
And structurally, you don't introduce an audience to a facade only to then pull a complete 180 turn 6 episodes later with no lead up. Build-up and Pay Off require appropriate timing. Sometimes that's actual time (if Fizz was entirely fake in Ozzie's, that needed to be established in that same episode concretely) and sometimes that is in relation to other plot events (Blitz falling in love with Stolas before Stolas changes. Blitz having feelings for Stolas was the ultimate payoff for both the story and Stolas' character) otherwise, what pay off is anyone actually looking forward to?
So we had a very interesting, nuanced character implied in Fizzarolli where the big reveal was a literal downgrade into Ukefication where the relationship is loving because Fizz can't do anything for himself and Ozzie wants to do everything for him.
