https://bsky.app/profile/hellaphim.bsky.social/post/3maerryko622t

In the 2025 Pride standee, Vox has some interesting shoes that don’t really match the rest of his outfit. I noticed this when we were looking at the standees and hadn’t seen anyone else mention it, so we actually went and bought it (Those standees are really, really expensive lol) to get a better look in person.

I think his shoes are the aroace flag.

Obviously, the colours on a piece of merchandise aren’t enough on their own to establish anything concrete, but they caught my attention because I think there’s already good reason to believe Vox might be somewhere on the aroace spectrum, same as Alastor is. Looking back over the show, there are quite a few things that stand out to me, and I figured I’d collate these here as best I can.

The follow-up pride merch had Vox in completely different shoes and a different outfit, but by that point, I’d already really got to thinking about Vox’s sexuality and romantic alignment and couldn’t put it all back in the box, and I don’t think I need to.

Vox appeared in his Catholic bishop outfit in Stayed Gone, and then a few episodes later, Alastor appeared as a Catholic nun in Hell’s Greatest Dad. Both are celibate religious roles, given to two characters who are already very closely paralleled throughout the series.

That could really easily mean nothing on its own, but it becomes more interesting when set alongside and in addition to the way Vox actually reacts to sex and attraction within the context of the series.

Katie Killjoy offers to sleep with Vox, and he instantly recoils with an “Ew, no.” It is almost exactly the same kind of response Alastor consistently gives Angel Dust through the pilot and first episode when Angel offers to sleep with him. Just absolutely not. There is no temptation or interest there at all – Vox just seems disgusted by the suggestion. We don’t see him actually flirt with anyone else either; when he interacts with strangers, it tends to be more forceful steering and charm than anything else.

Then there are the Love Potions.

In universe, we see Vox depicted on Love Potion posters, but completely baffled as to what Val’s love potion is supposed to do. On the site, it is subtitled with “What do you mean by that, Vox?”

There are a lot of interpretations one could make from this, but for me it always just really made me think he was aroacespec in some way, that it couldn’t force him to love or lust after anyone, however temporarily.

Vox also reacts unusually when he thinks he might have accidentally implied that he and Valentino are romantic partners rather than business partners. He immediately corrects himself and stresses that they are BUSINESS partners.

I do really think Vox tends to put himself into social roles because he thinks that is simply how things are supposed to work. He should have a successful business, he should have status. He should have a partner. He should look like the successful American businessman with the right person beside him. It’s his bread and butter from life.

There is even merch of him and Valentino in a retro car where Vox is dressed and positioned like the stereotypical husband with his stupid hat while Valentino is effectively put into the role of the glamorous wife.

Art is by smiles/hat_teeth on the Hazbin Team

He seems very invested in performing the structure of a relationship, whether or not his actual feelings really fit neatly inside it. It makes sense to me, he spent his entire life playing roles, this is just another one.

In Brighter, we never see Vincent show any inclination towards anyone throughout his human life.

There are situations where he could potentially manipulate or seduce people, and instead he simply pushes them aside. He has an ardent following and eventually leads an entire cult, so he is clearly surrounded by people (both men AND women) who admire him and could have been available to him as options, but we never see him with anyone. In his human life, there is no lover, spouse, affair or indication that he particularly wants one.

That stands out to me because Vincent is by no fucking means a passive character. He aggressively pursues the things he wants. His entire life is built around ambition, control and obtaining more.The SONG is about him taking whatever he wants.

Sex and romance just really don’t appear to be among the things motivating him. He doesn’t appear to straightforwardly want them.

During the final battle Vox declares, “This is better than sex!” which seems to upset Valentino a bit.

It is obviously a funny line, but it also, in my opinion, fits well with everything else. Vox is having the absolute fucking time of his life because Alastor is losing and being publicly humbled in a way Vox couldn’t previously force him to be. Alastor is also in agony, which, to a sadist like Vox, is possibly the icing on an already excellent cake.

The whole scene appears to satisfy something much deeper and more primal in him than sex does.

All of this is why I think Vox might be somewhere on the aroace spectrum.

I am deliberately saying aroacespec in a really general way, rather than trying to assign him an extremely specific label. He could be greysexual, greyromantic, demi, bi-oriented aroace, or somewhere else on either spectrum. He could be some new label we don’t even have defined yet, or between terms. I don’t think we have enough information to pin him down further than that, and I am more interested in the pattern as we see it anyway vs naming it.

I also don’t think any of this conflicts with Vox being canonically bisexual.

He is explicitly represented with bisexual colours, including on the Pride merchandise. Bisexuality and being on the aroace spectrum can absolutely coexist. Someone can experience attraction rarely, conditionally or differently from an allo person and still be bisexual. I personally headcanon Alastor as bisexually/pansexually inclined alongside his own ace identity, though he has only ever been defined as ace in merchandise.

Idk, the interesting bit to me is how Vox seems to comprehend attachment. It’s kind of unique to me. He’s a character I find deeply compelling, and I’ve figured out a lot more about my own identity by exploring what I think about him and why.

Obsession

Vox gets told “you are obsessed with me” twice, once by Alastor and once by Valentino, and both times he reacts almost like they have accused him of being in love with them.

With Valentino he outright blushes.

That is one of the things that really made this click for me. I asked myself why would this evoke such a strong, embarrassed response from Vox, who is clearly someone who wears his fixations on his sleeve? (Sharks)

Vox’s strongest relationships seem to be built around obsession, possession, control, rivalry and the need for acknowledgement. He’s a needy man. When he attaches himself to somebody, it becomes all-encompassing. He wants their attention. He wants them thinking about him. He wants to watch them. In Alastor’s case, he wants to win against them, possess them, impress them or become impossible for them to ignore after being ignored by them in the past.

“Obsession. Not love” is basically how I think Vox experiences a lot of this.

That doesn’t mean he can’t love anybody or can’t experience romantic or sexual attraction at all. Again, aroace spectrum. I just think his strongest interpersonal drive is very clearly obsession, and it’s something he understands more easily.

Alastor is by far the most obvious example.

Vox has spent decades completely fixated on him. His mood can change instantly because Alastor appeared on a screen for a fucking second. He reorganises his priorities around him. He needs Alastor to acknowledge him, harassing the hotel and Charlie endlessly in an attempt to get his attention. He needs to beat him and earn his respect, so he can be strong enough to be worthy of him after his initial rejection. He needs other people to understand that he beat him because Alastor cares what others think. Public opinion matters, even if he didn’t care about Vox. Alastor occupies a truly absurd amount of space in Vox’s head. Valentino even recognises it.

Valentino is complicated, I absolutely do think Vox cares deeply about Val, as stated, he’s obsessed with the people he cares about, and he watches Valentino almost relentlessly through the cameras (you can see them watching him in various scenes)

But it’s complicated too. Valentino is a sexual guy, he likes sex, he comes from a background immersed in it as far as we can tell. It’s a language he’s fluent in. Vox has been with him for forty years (probably).

Vox is clearly engaged when he and Valentino sing together in the finale, giving openly inviting body language and physically flirting with him, but I think the context matters. I think it’s about something more complex than just attraction.

In that moment, they are singing about Alastor losing, the thing Vox said was better than sex earlier, tangling in obsession with the interaction while he’s already in a mood.

Vox even sticks his tongue out directly on the beat about Alastor “fleeing with his tail between his legs.” It just feels like it brings in that complex sadistic obsession again in a small way.

Still, gotta stress by no means do I think every sexual interaction Vox has needs to be explained away as secretly nonsexual. Ace-spectrum people can have sex, enjoy sex, have libido and sometimes experience attraction. None of those things is incompatible with being aroacespec. I just think its interesting when he tangles other things up in it.

Vox also utilises sex as a tool of manipulation and in the scene with Valentino does so in a way that DIRECTLY mirrors how Alastor previously used sex as a tool of manipulation to get Vox to do what HE wanted. Once again the two characters are paralleled in this way.

Vox is clearly embarrassed when people catch him doing it to get what he wants. Alastor catches him doing this more than once, and both times he blushes.

Vox knows Valentino is attracted to him. He knows Valentino wants sex and attention from him. He knows that gives him leverage; he’s good at leverage. That doesn’t necessarily tell us what Vox himself is experiencing.

If anything, I think Vox having an unusual relationship with attraction could make some of this behaviour make more sense. He may simply see sex as another resource he possesses and can use to influence somebody, the way Val might cause a ruckus or smash up some of the tower to get Vox to do what he wants and come see him. I don’t think it means he cares less about Valentino either; it’s just how their world operates.

Obviously, explaining why I think he does this doesn’t make using sex as leverage/a tool less shitty.

Vox has very little empathy to begin with. He is manipulative, controlling and extremely sadistic (as Angel Dust finds out first hand). He frequently treats other people’s emotions as weaknesses he can exploit. If he is aroacespec, those qualities absolutely belong to Vox as an individual rather than having anything at all to do with his being aroace. His identity is layered alongside his personality, not the source.

I think that distinction is important because Vox would be a terrible character to use as a representative example of what aroace people are like. He is absolutely a villain. His relationships are dysfunctional because he is controlling, abusive and obsessive. That’s also what makes him so fucking interesting, though. He’s not an archetype or a role model, but I think the core is still there.

I’m just trying to stress that his sexuality would be another complicated element tangled into that psychology. And what a fucking psychology it is.

Vox’s behaviour towards Valentino’s other partners is especially interesting. Vox displays violent and controlling jealousy around them ranging from the fish woman he brings to the meeting to his persistent physical and emotional abuse of Angel Dust.

He KNOWS Angel is important to Valentino. Angel is one of the main things Val talks about with him, he brings him up constantly, even though Vox mostly seems enthused about him going away.

Vox treats Angel with obvious disdain and hostility when he meets him and even drags Angel’s sin out for basically no reason in front of Charlie just to hurt him as deeply as he can, despite this making Vox look bad in front of someone he was previously attempting to charm.

I think possession matters enormously to Vox.

Valentino is his.

Alastor was supposed to be his.

His whole motto was having exactly what he wanted.

That does not have to mean Vox relates to either of them through ordinary romantic jealousy or by the same mechanisms. Vox reacts badly when somebody threatens the position he thinks he occupies in another person’s life.

I wonder who else is obsessed with being in control?

Vox and Alastor

One of the things I find most interesting about this theory is that if Vox is aroacespec, then he and Alastor are even closer foils than I thought. They may even have been right for each other in a very specific and deeply unfortunate way. Viv mentioned in an interview once that they would have been a “very jolly villain duo” if things had gone differently, and I think about it often.

Both Al and Vox are super controlling. Both are performative and theatrical. Both are extremely private about genuine emotional vulnerability. Both struggle with intimacy. Both are capable of forming incredibly intense attachments without those attachments necessarily looking like conventional romance or sexuality. Alastor bonds to people who are shackled to him or people he’s shackled to, determined to have plausible deniability and the ability to threaten people back from closeness.

Vox pulls people closer, unbearably close, as close as a stalker might (if the cameras are anything to go by) but even as close as he can have them, he maintains a distance in there. He and Val live in different parts of the tower; they are “business partners” he pushes Val away when he is spiralling; there are flaws in their relationship. He loves Val, clearly (for want of a better term to define his unique obsessive fixation/devotion), but doesn’t seem to ever tell him this, or be capable of finding the words.

Alastor runs, Vox seizes, Alastor keeps people far away, Vox pursues and tries to become impossible to escape. Alastor reacts to being vulnerable or weak by closing doors and wearing a mask; Vox reacts to it by trying to own what made him weak so entirely that he can metaphorically wear its skin and be as strong as it was instead.

If Vox experienced something unusually intense with Alastor, especially if attraction is already rare or complicated for him, it would explain a lot about why that relationship became so psychologically devastating. I think he saw something of himself in Al, and Al saw something of himself in Vox in return, and I think neither of them understood what it was.

All of this would also fit with how strangely soft Vox appeared around Alastor in the past compared with both his human self and the Vox we see now. Neither of them had yet come to see feeling safe with the other person as a vulnerability. Everything that happened between them really clearly mattered to Vox in a way very few people ever have. He was hung up on it for seventy years.

Maybe Vox interpreted that intensity as romance. Maybe some of it genuinely was romantic attraction. Maybe it was sexual. Maybe it was obsession. Maybe it was all of those things tangled together in the perfect serial killer stew. Being aroacespec absolutely leaves room for that complexity.

And, god if Alastor was one of the extremely rare people Vox actually experienced attraction towards, whatever happened between them blowing up as catastrophically as it did becomes even more interesting.

Complicated and sad.

Two guys who might both exist somewhere on the aroace spectrum, who potentially formed one of the most important attachments of either of their lives, and rather than figuring it out at all, managed to turn it into seventy years of becoming everyone else in Hell’s fucking problem.

So yes, this all started because I noticed Vox’s shoes.

I don’t think the standee proves anything by itself, and I obviously don’t know whether any of this will ever become explicit canon, nor do I really care if it does.

I just think there are enough recurring details around Vox’s relationship with sex, romance, attachment and obsession that an aroacespec reading makes a surprising amount of sense to me.

It is something I have also found rings true writing Vox myself, be it with my wife or in fic. There is a lot of fun to be had with somebody who has spent his entire life pursuing control, status and the relationships he thinks he is supposed to have, while potentially experiencing attraction in a much more limited or unusual way. I think there’s endless stuff to mine in fiction from a man who spent his whole life performing and acting, and then carried that into the societal roles he thinks he’s supposed to play.

Since coming to this fandom, I learned that I was bi-ace too, that everything I felt had a place and had a name and that it didn’t need to adhere to the incorrect stereotype that gets bandied around, that there are folks in every iteration imaginable along the spectrum of identity.

And to me it just felt right that these two characters, foils in every other regard, could have this one unifying thing in common.

My perfect ending (and not one I expect) would simply be Alastor and Vox getting to have the relationship they had at the beginning without panicking that one wants more from the other than they actually did. I don’t think this excludes Valentino either; I think Vox should be with his gun-toting sexy wife too, because Vox has two hands.

And because not every relationship needs to be the same.