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I’ll be honest, I’ve pretty much neglected this blog so much worse than my dad neglected my brother and I when we visited as kids, and I don’t have the slightest excuse. I’m kind of having a moment where I have so many things I want to do, and was randomly hit with the urge to update this bad boy. The timing is pretty good though, I’ve been yapping on Bsky and Xitter (pronounced shitter) and this is probably a better medium for me to dump all that in a relatively cohesive manner. So this morning on Xitter I responded to an engagement bait post that asked for opinions on Stolas of Helluva Boss fame. RIP to op who might not have intended for such long ass replies. ˚˖𓍢ִ໋ 𓍯𓂃୨ৎ .⋆ ✧˚ I have a lot of issues in regards to the way the HB fandom tends to discourse about Stolas. Chief among them is this false characterization of Stolas using things like his lack of medication, his experiences being a victim of abuse, his mental health, all as excuses for his shitty actions, or at least the narrative is. It’s such a ridiculous line of thinking because the show might as well be holding the viewers and using slow, simplistic word to express that these details are meant to explain why The Full Moon episode went so drastically downhill. I can’t fucking stand this idea that if you dare depict a character being influenced by things like traumas mental illness etc it’s using excuses, and honestly it feels like a result of the kind of rhetoric used commonly that can be summed up as ‘mental illness and trauma responses are super valid just make sure not to display any of the ugly aspects of those things.’ And like, I know this is a delicate, nuanced topic but I’m just so irritated by this like idea that like if you’re mentally unwell and it influences your actions, or god forbid you ever lash out, it means you’re toxic or whatever. Steering back to my original thread, another fandom thing that’ll always pmo is how people have to jump hoops to villainize Stolas when there isn’t enough evidence for any of their misreadings to hold water. (Granted, he does have many good reasons to not like him which is why it’s baffling as to why people have to make shit up.) Like the claim that Stolas never takes responsibility because in Apology Tour he says he doesn’t look down on Blitz when he very much does. It doesn’t matter that later in the same episode he comes to the realization that he’s likely the one in the wrong, even if he doesn’t quite understand everything. ‘But maybe it’s all on me for missin’ every sign and glance and every turn’ (All 2 U, Apology Tour.) It also doesn’t matter I guess that in Sinsmas Stolas outright says that everything going wrong was a result of choices he made. ‘You don’t need to feel any guilt for my situation, it was my choice. It was all my choice.’ (Sinsmas) And like I’m not necessarily pissed that people don’t like my blorbo, it just rankles me so fucking bad that someone could be shown all of these objective facts (ie; Stolas does change throughout the show, things like trauma and mental illness tend to have an effect on decision making especially when untreated) and they’ll be like. No. And it’s like what do you mean no?!? You can’t just look at facts and decide they don’t matter!? It’s like losing chess to a fucking pigeon and drives me insane in a way nothing else can, ffs