I’ve seen a few different reasons around the fandom for disliking Loona as a character, but I’m only going to touch on the biggest one I’ve seen, one being that she’s vulgar and vile toward the man who adopted her, Blitz. Now, maybe its my own fucked up relationship with my father that leads me to this conclusion, but I actually really like the way Loona and Blitz’s relationship is set up and the way it’s progressing slowly. I know I touched on it when I first started the account after seeing a post about how someone hated Loona because of the way she treated Blitz and blah, blah, blah…. But after watching the lost Helluva Boss episode, I actually like Loona and the relationship and I wanna talk about why, so let’s get into it.
I wanna start by saying that while I don’t condone how Loona treats Blitz, I understand why and I think the reasoning behind her behavior toward the imp plays a big role in the relationship. Now, to truly understand why Loona acts the way she does and why her attitude is the way it is toward Blitz, we have to remember how Loona came to be Blitz’s daughter. She was nearly 18 and about to age out of the pound, which is the hellhound version of an extremely fucked up fostercare system, and in the Helluva Boss universe, hellhounds are more of a commodity than a people of hell; used for jobs that require high laborand muscle, this does put hellhounds on the same level as imps, if not lower than the little red creatures. If we break this down, this likely means that Loona grew up in this system, either never being chosen to work or being chosen and brought back on multiple occasions when she was no longer useful to whoever she was adopted by, which would lead to a hoard of issues trusting anyone who signed her out of the pound since she would’ve essentially felt like a library book that would be returned when they were done or bored with it. Coupling that with the fact that in the flashback Blitz has to the first time he sees Loona in the pound, it’s likely that being aggressive wasn’t her nature in the beginning, but rather something she picked up to keep herself safe since we see in the flashback that she wasn’t the original aggressor, the slightly smaller hound was and after Loona’s defense, she reverts to someone who genuinely seems rather terrified of her surroundings…. This likely means that even locked in the cages of the pound, Loona was never truly safe in the one place she was the most connected to, and if she wasn’t safe from the other adoptees in the pound, there’s a good chance that the adults running the pound either abused her as well or just turned a blind eye to the abuse happening within the cages. Coming from a background like that and living that way would mean that Loona likely never truly learned to control her emotions outside of turning everything into something manageable (like rage), and never truly learned to foster trust since a place like that wouldn’t breed people she could foster trust with on many occasions.
Blitz, while being the founder of a murder for hire group and an assassin himself, genuinely embodies the phrase “be who you would have needed when you were a kid”. From what we know about his childhood so far, he wasn’t valued by his father and didn’t seem to get much praise from those around him at all. We see on multiple occasions that Blitz is rather softhearted when it comes to the people he considers himself close to. He does what he can to protect them, he’s affectionate, and he values what they think of him…. It makes sense that the imp saw Loona in the pound and immediately wanted to take her away from the horrorshow he saw and offer her the care and protection he feels she (and likely himself) never got in younger years. I think that’s what causes the man to be so much more lenient with her than most people think she deserves.
Now, because Loona grew up in a place that taught her that trust wasn’t something you could put in anyone other than yourself and only fostered aggression and fear in her, I don’t think she actually understood how to be a part of a loving home, which is what Blitz does his best to provide her. I mean if you think about it, the little red creature takes her in at 17, creates an abuse free space, most likely gives her food, clothes, even gives up his bedroom for her so she has a safe, private place to sleep, and then goes a step further and gives her a job so that she’d still have a way to support herself if she chose to leave home when she legally became an adult. Now, if you think about this from the perspective of someone who has nothing and has never had anything like this, it sounds amazing; almost too good to be true….. Most times, people say that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is… so Loona has likely spent most of her time with Blitz just waiting for the other shoe to drop…. And if you think of it that way, from her perspective, while everything that Blitz has given her is amazing, it must also be terrifying since suddenly she had so much more to lose if she let herself get attached to him and everything he’s given her and he were to suddenly abandon her for any reason.
I know, anyone watching the show can easily tell that Blitz does his best to be a good father figure to Loona, even when he’s met with resistance and sarcasm or downright physical violence on her end. We all know he would never purposely do anything to hurt her in any way, and I think Loona knows that too on some level, but everything she has hinges on Blitz wanting her around. Her home, her job, and up until she met Vortex and was introduced to his friends and other hellhounds at the party, her only ‘friends’ were Blitz’s employees so at any given moment, Blitz could have taken pretty much everything from her if he wanted to. If you’re attached to someone and they up and leave, effectively changing your entire life in the way Blitz could have done to Loona, it’s going to hurt and even just the thought can be anxiety-inducing…. I think that’s what Loona holds on to; that feeling of ‘I can’t get too attached’ since she probably knows first hand how badly it would hurt to have the rug pulled out from under her like that.
Looking at things that way, I think it makes sense why Loona is so verbally and physically violent with her adoptive father…. And it makes sense why Blitz puts up with anything she throws at him (literally). The man has gone out of his way to show Loona that he plans to stick around as long as it is physically possible for him, and I don’t think anything short of death could make him change that way of thinking.
Now, I know Loona is an adult now and she should definitely work on controlling herself and getting past everything holding her in that mentality, but I think she actually is healing in her own, slow way. You can see it when she almost calls Blitz dad and when she talks to Octavia about Stolas. Loona talking to Octavia about the importance of a father just putting in effort when it’s not easy to had just as much to do with her and Blitz’s as it had to do with Stolas and Octavia’s in that moment and I honestly think that was a big moment for her because despite there not being any big changes between her and Blitz, I think that acknowledging the struggles of the relationship and everything around it went a long way in her opening that wound in a way that meant it maybe healing properly from it, even if she didn’t outright acknowledge it. I think that’s partly what opened the gate for the scenes we see in the lost episode that was released the other day. Loona’s never let herself call Blitz her dad out loud, but at Bee’s she not only calls him her dad, but shouts it to a crowd of people…. And even as an audience, we can see how much that meant to Blitz, especially after the night he had at Ozzie’s prior. Despite being a small thing, I think we actually saw a huge win for Blitz in that moment as well as a massive breakthrough for Loona. And I think that breakthrough for Loona continues as we watch her genuinely care for Blitz in a softer way, similar to the way she briefly looked after Octavia back in “Seeing Stars”, even gently putting the drunk man to bed and promising him that even if she was alone there, the man wouldn’t spend the rest of his life alone. Does Loona know exactly what she’s promised? Maybe…. Maybe she only agreed to be comforting in that moment since she knew he needed it, but either way, both of those options are big for her in their own ways; like big enough that we might actually see a bigger shift in their dynamic to a healthier father/daughter place.
Do I think things can just get better now that we have a bit of new context involving Blitz’s relationship with his daughter? No. I think we’ll see a lot more scenes with softer interactions between the two as Loona continues to heal and Blitz continues to try to be a good father to her, like the ones we see in “Western Energy”, but I think it’ll continue to happen on the slower end of the spectrum. But the healing and progress is something I love for both of them and cannot wait to see more of as the show goes on. But remember, that’s just a Fizziepop thought on this complex relationship.
