#hazbin yapping

[asslingerer]

I really need to go back to work- but I- I'm sorry

...Vox...honey... you have tied up TWO male hostages* (*one is your situationship from 40 years ago, and the other you are about to use as an iron dome laser to kill yourself once the first one escapes) in your weird evil bdsm-coded warehouse dungeon to listen to you monologue...and you are STILL begging for attention??

A beautiful talent for writing the most pathetic, neurotic tops. Someone please come euthanize my son immediately.

[asslingerer]

I feel physically smacked in the face I never reflected on the cruel irony of Alastor's eternal form being a deer as a serial killer and cannibal, a man that in life not only managed to carefully managed to waltz around Jim Crow laws to become one of the first prominent black radio stars (the first wave beginning historically in '29), but became one of the most powerful overlords of hell in death. Shown in parallel, painfully tied up by both Rosie and Vox being teased as a 'pet' or captive to his chagrin. The most irritation and vulnerability we've seen from him in the series.

It's a prey animal. His punishment is to forever appear as a prey animal in spite of his capabilities.

[asslingerer]

Ah yes the holy trinity of bible fanfic writers: Dante, Goethe, and Vivienne Medrano

[asslingerer]

This probably doesn't belong here, is long and tedious, and is just honestly at this point projecting. But I've seen a lot of healthy discussion around Asexuality regarding Alastor, am now an old man, and therefore wanted to chime in my two cents on how male homosexual relationships have been depicted in the Helluverse in case it helps anyone to read:

I have always been unnervingly impressed by it. To the point Blitzo and Stolas made me raise an eyebrow and go "Because of Brandon Rogers? Did his friendship with Vivienne help write all this? Did he write it? Only someone who firsthand-"

There are obviously very many queer experiences, but for now I will share a common one: sex for young gay men is very easy. Emotional intelligence, or intimacy of any kind, is not. Ergo, "Haha you're just using me. I'm just using you. This is just sex. Definitely. Oh god. Fuck. Is that an emotion I just had? Did you just show an emotion?!"

Gen Z is now hopefully, maybe, at least in metropolitan areas, on their way to getting over this (I specifically mention this growing up in a rural area with conservative ideas about masculinity baked into me and my - at the time - most progressive friends. Things you don't even realize are there until years pass and you've at least cracked open a sheet on DBT.) Certainly I've seen views on gender-divergent and trans people 180° (to clarify I live in Canada - Americans, 'I know it's rough right now' doesn't begin to cover it and I am so sorry. We think about you, we talk about you, we worry about you sometimes more than what changes to your foreign policy might mean for ourselves.) I see glowing young trans and nonbinary men in their early 20s proud of who they are, wearing pins, talking openly about their experiences with their families (some of which they get to now keep) pass through friends' dinner parties, and it makes my cynical little heart swell.

I've seen several other gay men describe a sort of emotional 'developmental delay' in romantic prowress. Couldn't openly date in highschool? Congratulations, in your 20's, you act 15! Even worse, for years you allow yourself sex but not love? Congratulations Gen X men in your 50's, you act 15! (Again, Blitzo and Stolas, who never fail to make me laugh and choke up.)

In your early 20s, easily charming to everyone around you but being completely terrified (particularly if you've lost your family young after coming out), in the non-literal hell that young adulthood often is, akin to waking up an unrecognizable creature in a new black-comedy psychological horror setting, young gay men tend to stumble into older gay men's company.

Even if the difference is only a half-decade or so, it's a sudden jump once you get your footing: you have a shit job and a half-finished degree, this man has a career, understands basic financial literacy, and does not appear to be consistently shitting his pants. If you were his age, he'd be the same as anyone in your peer group. But he's not, so he's inspiring. If he was your age, you'd be the same as anyone in his peer group. But you're not, so you're cute but not that interesting, and he probably isn't going to stick around that long. You're a piece of shit, he's a piece of shit, and it will be no one's fault. On and on, an ordeal from Greece that will carry out into terraformed exoplanets. It's a story I've been retold back to me by panicked twink friends years ago a hundred times.

Anyways all this overly personal nonsense aside. Being delicate that I've read analysis from many PoC on here who interpret Alastor as killing strictly racist, bourgeois white men and is therefore comforting and borderline morally easy to root for - honouring this and talking aside about all other interpretations: Vox and Alastor are monsters. They are fun, they are psychologically fascinating, and loveable. But certainly not men you'd really want at the weekly D&D night (cue Alastor's home strewn with half-eaten corpses and Vox, probably selling data the NSA itself would envy on every sinner in pride to Hell's equivalent of Cambridge Analytica, all the while quite literally referring to himself as Hitler.) They're dead dove nightmares dear to us anyway.

And then there is, of course: an entire other layer of horror and complexity to Vox not taking "No, I will not the solution to your hopelessness," for an answer. The bizarre dead-dove BDSM chamber hostage situation he sticks Alastor in which is both intended to be black-humor funny and disturbing. To be taken as an analogy for holding onto the idea and memory of a person we respected that entertained us to keep ourselves sane when we were vulnerable. To be taken literally as a laughably demonic and childish impulse, with the added weight of Alastor being asexual and both being born in the early 1900s, neither of them having a word to define an entirely different and important brand of "It's not like that. For the love of god do not insult me. Do not touch me, do not look at me, do not want me like that."

gestures to the moment of Vox and Alastor at the bar frozen in Vox's memory exasperatedly anyways. That's all you get. There's a completely different story going on you can look at a hundred different ways, but these character details captured a more mundane, common, human experience that clearly resonated with many people. They're shitty characters (Vox inarguably shittier) but it was cathartic to watch and probably was cathartic for a lot of you too.

[asslingerer]

some of you are going to be too young to remember this and will just have to plead the fifth on this one but. Once there was a time on Tumblr Dot Com where the two most popular mlm homoerotic series were Sherlock and Hannibal.

And *I* for one would like to remember there might have been some ramifications to this after an hour has passed at my desk job of blacking out scrolling through beautiful fan works people have carefully crafted of a TV-head and a deer.

[asslingerer]

I've seen screenshots of this interview before but just go watch it honestly.

I think the funnier implication here is that Alastor wasn't even necessarily thinking of "Vincent has juiced anyone he ever partnered with before. I'd be no different, and it's insulting to ask." he just went "LOL it's a dog eat dog world and you're on your own, pathetic white boy gtfo" and honestly, absolute chad for that.

[asslingerer]

fellow neurotic freaks watching s2: ah yes, silly fascist TV man. You may be a deplorable, Fox-news satire tech CEO who deserves to die, but I too love attention, hate God, and like all gay men - occasionally fantasize about one-upping a mentor-crush figure that deserted me when I was vulner-NO!! NO DO NOT HIT THAT POOR SEX WORKER!! OH MY GOD-

[asslingerer]

*banging first on the table* Vox is not only a well-written character but from references to Disney exploiting child stars ('Trust us'), to Propaganda (Hypnotism, general Fox News satire 'Let's make hell great again! Annex their real estate!"), Corporate America (Literally slitting throats, shark imagery, running a conglomerate with branches in tech and news, alongside every other Murdoch-brand, Koch brothers, sprawling we-own-it-all holding company), and just general ills of entertainment, he symbolizes television as a communication channel with great capacity for mass addiction and evil. As Velvette represents Social Media. As Valentino represents porn (ok look, hey, I love this one too.)

An abbreviated version of the full speech from Edward Murrow, CBS broadcaster known for viscerally fighting with McCarthy on air - despite threats, to the very end of his career, 1958:

Cue 1950s Whittman: "I'll baptize you into a new era of entertainment!" as the Washington Post transitions from publishing exposés on the Pentagon Papers (Vietnam) and Watergate to being acquired by Jeff Bezos. Or however else you'd like to mark the slow, painfully Lovecraftian mutation of TV journalism going gentle into that good night.

...Anyways, I am normal about the demonic embodiment of two forms of mass communication being entangled in at least one-sided psychosexual vortex for all eternity in hell.