Garen x Quinn I don’t really buy, specifically because they are too similar in some ways, but also don’t have that much to offer each other. They’re both patriot soldier types, both emotionally constipated, they both have some serious complexes about their siblings, but their differences don’t really lead to interesting tensions. Quinn prefers to be way out in the wilds, mostly alone, with her bird, and Garen is most at home during drill practise with his band of brothers.

Jarvan x Quinn makes more sense, at least from Jarvan’s perspective that Quinn represents both an escape from his royal duties and a real chance at freedom, while still soothing his guilt that if he was out there with her, he would still be of service to his country. A desertion without deserting, you can see why he would find her perspective and worldview compelling and want to know her better. What Quinn would get from Jarvan though… hm, I mean she might be charmed just by the fact that he is The Prince, he might represent a sort of youthful fantasy of being a princess swept off her feet, and certainly there’s a class tension between them there where he could give her access to the highest echelons of Demacian high society, a world she has never known before. Luxury and comfort. She would grow to hate it if she was stuck there, but I can see why she would be enticed by the idea of being able to visit it.

Jarvan x Sivir makes TOTAL sense to me, though. Jarvan would be attracted to her for similar reasons why he might be attracted to Quinn, but even more so. If Quinn is a fantasy of escaping his royal duty while still serving his country, Sivir is the forbidden fantasy of just fully running away from it all, escaping into the great wide world and making your own way, living on your wits. Sivir is herself a princess running away from her royal family (Azir, in her case), and BOY could that be a seductive fantasy to our erstwhile princeling.

Meanwhile Jarvan would be attractive to Sivir… well, without putting too fine a point on it because he is rich. He represents access to a whooole lot of money, influence and power, and Sivir is a practical woman. But also, Jarvan with his upper class noblesse obligé attitude and relentless moral character represents an interesting tension with Sivir. For all that she is running away from Azir and his blather about her “imperial duty to Shurima,” Sivir isn’t a heartless woman. She does care about the people of Shurima, and the idea that maybe as a leader she could do something to make a better country…

She is far too cynical to believe in that kind of nonsense, but I think somewhere in her heart she secretly wishes that such things would be possible. And Jarvan would be exactly the kind of man to encourage that hope in her, to encourage her to believe in ideals bigger than herself. And that can be seductive to a cynic, even as it is incredibly annoying. I think she would enjoy the thought of fucking the stupid idealism out of him, there’s a darkly kinky thrill to corrupting a stupid privileged princeling by exposing him to the real gritty muck of the world.

they are pretty anime boys having big feelings at one another

I am always extremely proud to be the source of vocal stims, tics and echolalia 🫡

They’ll go public in the new year. Right now I’m just catching up on LoL skin reviews.

I mean, Jax has hella gender issues, is my main interpretation there. Or at the very least: incredibly acute identity issues that he is projecting outward and inflicting on other people to cope.

Jax insists that people are just their archetypes. Nobody is anything more than the role they are assigned, and it isn’t possible to change from those roles. “Gangle is The Sad One!” he proclaims, despite how much she’s smiling recently. And he proclaims it in total hypocrisy of how much of his time he spends making Gangle sad.

So you see the self-reinforcing loop there. Gangle is The Sad One, and so if Jax makes her sad that’s fine because that’s what she’s supposed to be. She’s The Sad One, and that means by making her sad Jax is just doing what his archetype (“The Funny One”) is supposed to do, which means he’s not doing anything wrong.

And so long as he keeps doing that, Gangle keeps getting more and more sad, confirming that she is nothing more than her archetype, which justifies Jax doing everything he can to make her sad, which confirms that it is impossible to be anything other than your archetype, and so on.

Jax is terrified of the idea of change, the idea that people CAN change, that the WORLD can change. He’s terrified that things don’t have to be the way they are, because if things aren’t ordained by the laws of nature or divine mandate or whatever other absolute power outside of himself, then he will have to face the responsibility of what he has done, and he will have to face the responsibility to be better and make amends.

And that is deeply, DESPERATELY terrifying to him, for reasons which seem intimately connected to his trauma flashback in the big button room. So, to avoid having to face all that pain and fear, he spends a lot of time trying to ENSURE that breaking out of your archetype isn’t possible, by enforcing people’s archetypes through abuse.

So… connect this to gender. Zooble is this infuriating living proof that people CAN change - Zooble changes all the time! And seems to be HAPPY and CONTENT in that change!

So Jax does to Zooble what he’s been doing to Gangle: he tries to bully them into conforming to their archetype, their social role, to their gender (as he sees it). In his mind, I am sure, he wouldn’t express it that way. He’s just misgendering Zooble because it annoys them, and annoying Zooble is funny, and he has to do what’s funny because he’s The Funny One. And you know what’s super funny? Misogyny is super funny! Nothing is more foundational to comedy than hating women! I’m not being a sexist asshole, I’m just telling jokes! And Zooble should just get with the program already and understand that she can’t ever be anything other than a woman ha ha ha no but for real it’s just jokes I don’t mean it I’m just The Funny One ha ha ha can’t you take a joke? Typical hysterical damsel!

The reality, I think, is he is doing it because Zooble is threatening to him. They are threatening both because they embody change, because they seem to be HAPPY with who they are (something which Jax resents instinctually), and worst of all they are threatening because they keep extending more empathy to Jax than he deserves. This is the same thing that set him off with Pomni in episode 6 - she showed him affection and care and he freaked the fuck out about that, because it threatens his self-perception.

Jax hates himself deeply, and his only coping mechanism for that self-hate is to try and convince himself that he has no choice except to be shitty in the way that he is, and therefore it’s kind of not really his fault. It’s everyone else’s fault for not being as smart and clever at seeing through the illusion as he is, and if his behaviour hurts other people, well, then that’s also their own fault for not knowing better! That coping mechanism isolates him, and constantly reaffirms to himself that he is a horrible person who cannot change, and anything that threatens the total dissociation from himself that he is pursuing becomes a target for his cruelty.

or, tl;dr basically: hurt people hurt people.

The “I can’t change, I can’t be anything different, life CAN’T be better, I CANNOT love myself, I CANNOT become who I wish I could be, it is IMPOSSIBLE and everyone who says it’s possible is a LIAR who’s out to HURT ME and make me look STUPID by believing a LIE!!!” is a kind of defensive, self-protective misery which is familiar to—certainly not all—but to a lot of trans people and their experiences of being closeted and ashamed, and a trans reading of Jax dovetails very nicely also with the ways TADC explores themes of body dysmorphia and identity and self-actualization.

Trans Jax is not the ONLY reading of his identity crisis you can make, of course, the kind of pain and dissociation he’s presenting is applicable to other life experiences as well. But it does feel to me like an apt reading for the story as it has presented itself.

Of course! I’m excited to play it when it drops in 2026 2028 2034 2042!

I mean, yeah. Me. I hesitated to get into it for that exact reason.

I felt the swirling vortex of misery that hovers in the wake of Hazbin & Helluva Boss from far outside the sphere of the fandom, and it very much put me off from wanting to engage with it - or rather, it put me off wanting to engage with it as a creator, because regardless of whether the flame wars and discourse that surround a show are earned or not, whether they are warranted or not, as a creator you know that that sh** is going to get imported wholesale into your comments sections if you start making videos about the thing, and a lot of the time it just isn’t worth it.

Which is depressing, of course, and it’s one of the things that culturally grants far too much power to hatedoms and trolls. All they have to do is fuck up the vibes of a space or a fandom enough, and they can very effectively drive out any voices that aren’t willing to engage on their rancid level, ceding the space to the worst personalities imaginable.

Doesn’t help that social media of all kinds also directly reward incendiary rhetoric and black-and-white battle lines. Those things are how you get the clicks, the numbers, the visibility, the clout. The perverse incentives line up juuuuust so that it can absolutely turbocharge a negative fandom, or deepen the spiral of a parasocial cult-of-personality hate-campaign like what follows Vivienne Medrano around.

The Hellaverse does not remotely deserve the level of vitriol that surrounds it, no. As I’ve said myself I think Hazbin is largely a 7/10 animated musical, buoyed up by fantastic vocal performances and a solid soundtrack, and badly dragged down by the 8 episode season format imposed on it by A24 and Amazon. It’s the kind of show that is going to absolutely take over the life and consciousness of a certain kind of person, and which is going to bounce off of a lot of other people like a ball bearing on a glacier.

Helluva Boss is effectively a soap opera or telenovela, expressed through a hyper-earnest millennial Cartoon Network/Nickelodeon/Adult Swim theater-kid-who-spent-too-much-time-on-Newgrounds-and-tumblr perspective, and elevated by the truly ASTONISHING animation and production talent that has been built up at Spindlehorse. And again, that’s the kind of show that is going to become like 40% of some people’s entire personalities, while being absolutely eye-rollingly cringe-inducing to a lot of other people.

All media deserves some scrutiny, of course, and with Hazbin becoming the biggest cartoon in the world for a minute there, of course it deserves critical attention and evaluation. But at the same time, it is difficult not to notice the pattern that this kind of fandom discourse has a disproportionate tendency to follow projects that are overtly queer in their content, and which are led by showrunners who are women or perceived as women or who are just feminine.

The scrutinizing, the harassment, the obsessive maintenance of callout documents, the extreme moralizing over content, and dogged, determined inability to distinguish depiction from endorsement… you weirdly just don’t see a lot of that for problematic cartoon creators who happen to be men.