Overlord Outsourcing: Why Are the Vees Falling Apart?

Three Overlords walk into a TV studio. One wants to be God. One wants to keep his talent captive forever. One is actively holding the whole operation together with social media strategy and pure spite. The Vees  Vox, Valentino, and Velvette  were supposed to be Hazbin Hotel's most formidable villain faction: a slick, modern media empire sitting at the top of Hell's entertainment pyramid. By the end of Season 2, Vox had his head ripped off by his own business partner. So what went wrong? The answer isn't a simple power failure  it's a masterclass in why building an empire on ego, obsession, and codependency is a catastrophic structural flaw. This piece breaks down the Vees' internal dysfunction, their strategic missteps, and what their collapse actually tells us about power, loyalty, and the cost of letting one person's personal vendetta drive a three-person operation into the ground.

Who Are the Vees? A Refresher on Hell's Media Oligarchs

Before we autopsy the corpse, let's identify the body. The Vees are a trio of younger Overlords who built their power base by doing what the ancient, soul-hoarding Overlords refused to do: adapt to modernity. They control the entertainment district of Pentagram City through V Tower, their combined corporate headquarters, splitting dominion across three industries that mirror real-world media consolidation with unsettling accuracy.

Vox (born Vincent Whittman) is the de facto leader  a television-headed technopathic Overlord who spent his living years murdering his way up the network TV ladder before founding a literal entertainment cult. In Hell, he built VoxTek Enterprises into a media stranglehold over news, advertising, and broadcast. Valentino, the towering moth demon, runs Hell's adult film industry with equal parts charisma and cruelty, scouting souls from nightclubs with the promise of fame, then trapping them under contracts. And Velvette  the youngest Overlord and the group's social media architect  functions as both PR manager and the person most responsible for the Vees not imploding sooner.

On paper, the arrangement is genius. Each Vee controls a different media vertical. Their combined reach means they can manipulate public opinion, suppress unfavorable narratives, and monetize Hell's population from multiple angles simultaneously. Their opening number in Season 2, "Hazbin Guarantee (Trust Us)," spells it out plainly: they are the Bad Samaritan alternative to Charlie's hotel  promising sinners fame and fortune while systematically exploiting them until their commercial value expires.

Vox Is the Problem (And He Always Was)

Every collapsed empire has a founder who eventually starts believing their own mythology. Vox is that founder  and the mythology in question is that he deserves godhood.

His backstory is essential context here. In life, Vincent Whittman was a weatherman who killed his colleagues to climb the TV ladder, eventually founding an entertainment cult before dying in a random accident on the exact day he finally took over the network. His entire arc, living and dead, is the story of a man chasing a feeling  the feeling of being worshipped  and never actually grasping it long enough to satisfy him. Hell just gave him more resources and an immortal audience to torment.

The critical inflection point in Season 2 comes when Vox shifts his operating principle from "we can rule Hell together" to something far more dangerous. His arc words, as catalogued by TV Tropes, shift tellingly from "Trust Us" to "Trust Me" a two-letter pronoun swap that signals the entire psychological disintegration of the Vees as a collective unit. He stops seeing Valentino and Velvette as partners and starts treating them as stage dressing for his personal ascension narrative.

"We have the chance to be more than Overlords. We have the chance to be gods!"

The gods line is doing a lot of heavy lifting narratively. Notice he says "we" but the vision he's actually selling, as detailed in his villain song "Brighter," is entirely first-person. He wants the stars to align for him. The Vees are invited along the way you invite people to watch you perform: as an audience, not co-leads. His obsession with Alastor compounds this fatally. A 70-year grudge over a romantic rejection metastasizes into a galaxy-brained plan to weaponize an angelic cannon to obliterate one Radio Demon  a plan that ends with him nearly vaporizing half of Pentagram City and his partners turning on him in self-preservation.

Valentino: The Liability Nobody Could Fire

Here's a staffing puzzle: you have a business partner who regularly tears apart employees in fits of rage, cannot attend meetings alone without bringing uninvited guests, is so emotionally erratic that Vox has to actively manage his tantrums, and whose entire operational model relies on coercive soul contracts that create massive legal (demonic?) exposure. Do you keep him?

The Vees do. And the reason is both simple and damning: Valentino controls Hell's entire adult entertainment industry, which is apparently an untouchable revenue stream. His value as an economic node in the Vees' empire is the only thing insulating him from consequences. Every time Vox quietly manages the fallout from one of Valentino's explosions feeding away his impromptu guests to Shok.wav, warning him not to publicly hit Angel Dust because it's "not funny anymore"  he's performing the CEO equivalent of a crisis PR firm cleaning up a celebrity scandal. Indefinitely.

What makes Valentino such a fascinating structural problem is that he represents the dark mirror of what the Vees claim to be. Their pitch to sinners is opportunity. Valentino's reality is captivity. He doesn't just exploit talent  he owns it, literally, through soul contracts. Angel Dust's entire arc is the lived consequence of what happens when you accept the Vees' "Hazbin Guarantee." And as long as Valentino's model works, nobody inside V Tower has any incentive to address it.

His relationship with Vox deserves its own analysis. It's romantic, co-dependent, and functionally abusive in a way the show doesn't editorialize about heavily  it simply lets the dynamic play out. Valentino antagonizes Vox deliberately. Vox manages Valentino's outbursts while privately enabling the behavior. Velvette is stuck watching both of them from a position of structural dependence. This is not a business partnership. It's three people trapped in a dysfunctional loop that the external success of their empire has made impossible to escape.

Velvette: The Backbone Who Got Left Holding the Bag

Velvette's self-description  "I'm the backbone of the Vees"  is treated as narcissism by other characters. It shouldn't be. She's correct, and the show gradually makes that clear.

According to show creator Vivziepop, Velvette is the glue between Vox's megalomania and Valentino's volatility. She manages the Overlord relationships Vox damages with his arrogance (note her having to smooth things over with Carmilla after Velvette herself instigated friction  she antagonizes, then course-corrects, because someone has to). She calls out Vox when his plans stop making sense. She's the only member of the trio who consistently engages in what could be described as rational self-interest, rather than obsessive fixation or reactive chaos.

Her role as the "least bad" villain in the group  as Faustisse has described her  doesn't make her sympathetic in the traditional sense. She dismisses her dismembered model with total apathy because finding a replacement is inconvenient. She weaponizes media to destroy Charlie's reputation without blinking. But she's operating from a coherent strategic framework, and that framework tells her, by the Season 2 finale, that Vox has become a liability larger than any asset he brings.

The moment she agrees with Alastor  of all beings that Vox would be nothing without her and Valentino is the tell. That's not trash talk. That's a sober assessment from the person who has been running internal damage control for the entire enterprise.

The Structural Collapse: When "Trust Us" Becomes "Trust Me"

Let me be honest about something. I've covered Pentagram City media dynamics long enough to recognize a pattern when I see it: the moment a media empire's public-facing message stops being "we" and starts being "I," you're watching it fall in real time. The Vees' brand was always built on a kind of manufactured unity. Their introduction video labels them as a package: Vox the Tech Overlord, Valentino the Film Overlord, Velvette the Style Overlord. They even have coordinated merch (the Voxsicle, Bubble-O-Val, and Velvetto ice cream bars are not a coincidence  they're brand architecture).

The structural problem that Season 2 makes visible is that this "we" was always contingent on Vox's goals remaining aligned with Valentino's and Velvette's. Valentino and Velvette's ambitions are, relatively speaking, materialistic and personal: more industry control, more influence, more money, more souls. Vox's ambitions escalated past the point of shared interest into something his partners neither signed up for nor benefited from — full cosmic dominion over both Heaven and Hell. The plan to use the Might of Lilith (an angelic superweapon Carmilla built for them) to break into Heaven wasn't a Vees plan. It was Vox's plan, run under the Vees' brand.

This is a classic principal-agent problem played out in the underworld. The Vees as partners agreed to a certain risk-reward calculus. Vox, as the operational lead, unilaterally shifted those parameters without their genuine consent  he "convinced" them with his "Brighter" song pitch, but Valentino and Velvette's actual motivations remained grounded while Vox's spiraled. The moment his personal Alastor obsession started overriding strategic logic  culminating in him willing to obliterate half of Pentagram City, including his own partners, just to kill one Radio Demon  the implicit partnership contract shattered.

Season 2 Finale: The Head Comes Off

The Season 2 finale, "Curtain Call," is a masterwork of dramatic irony, and nowhere more so than in Vox's final undoing. He outmaneuvers Charlie, captures Alastor, hypnotizes the crowd, and forces Hell's population to declare him the strongest sinner in existence. It's the peak of his arc  the god moment he's been chasing since before he died. And then Alastor, who has been setting up a legal loophole the entire time, gets Vox to break the terms of his own deal by touching Charlie. Chains fall off. Alastor is free.

Vox, faced with the evaporation of his entire plan, does the only thing a man fully consumed by narcissistic injury can do: he decides to go nuclear. Literally. He begins overloading the Might of Lilith  an angelic weapon capable of destroying half of Pentagram City  to kill Alastor, with zero concern for the collateral. This is the moment Valentino and Velvette realize what they've actually been partnered with all along. Not a strategic visionary. A man who would rather destroy everything he built than accept losing.

Velvette kicks him off the cannon. Valentino rips his head off. The head-ripping is, narratively, the funniest and most precise possible ending for Vox's Season 2 arc: he built an empire on the idea that he was the head of the operation, and his own partners separated him from it. He survives  demonic immortality  but loses VoxTek, his reputation, and the trust of every entity in Hell simultaneously. Valentino gets branded "New Boss Daddy" on the 666 News panel. The machine continues without him.

The Enemy Mine moment  Velvette, Valentino, and even Alastor collectively containing the Might of Lilith is entirely motivated by self-preservation, not redemption. The sadistic grin Valentino gives Angel Dust after the crisis is contained makes clear: nobody changed. The Vees just had to cut a malfunctioning component before the whole ship went down.

What Happens to the Vees in Season 3?

Hazbin Hotel has been confirmed for Seasons 3 and 4, which means the Vees' story isn't over  it's restructured. The interesting question isn't whether they'll return, but what they look like without Vox as the operational center of gravity.

Valentino, as the new public face of VoxTek ("New Boss Daddy"), has the industry control and the name recognition but lacks the strategic intelligence and media manipulation instinct that made Vox genuinely dangerous. He's a force of nature, not a chess player. Left unsupervised at the head of a media conglomerate, his history of impulsive violence and visible cruelty  the exact behaviors Vox used to manage  are now the brand's problem to absorb without a crisis PR buffer. His continued hold on Angel Dust's soul contract ensures his narrative thread isn't resolved, either.

Velvette's trajectory is the most intriguing. As the person most consistently operating from rational self-interest and the least personally invested in any single obsession, she's paradoxically the Vee most capable of adaptation. Some fan theories suggest a potential redemption arc  she is, after all, the "less bad" member  though the show has been careful not to sand down her genuine villainy. Her rivalry with Carmilla Carmine is unresolved, and Carmilla's moral position in the story is shifting.

And Vox? He lost his company, his reputation, and his head temporarily. His obsession with Alastor is unresolved. His god complex is, if anything, likely to intensify under the humiliation of public defeat. If Season 2 was about what happens when a narcissist is given too much power, Season 3 might be about what happens when one is taken away from it. Neither direction looks stable.

The Curtain Falls — But Stays Warm

The Vees' Season 2 collapse isn't a story about villains being defeated by heroes. Charlie and her hotel didn't dismantle VoxTek. Alastor didn't destroy the Vees. The Vees destroyed themselves or more precisely, Vox's unchecked megalomania destroyed the partnership, and Valentino and Velvette performed emergency surgery on the enterprise to keep it alive without him.

What makes the Vees such compelling characters is exactly this: they're not incompetent. Their instincts for power, media manipulation, and soul-exploitation are sharp. Their failure is structural and psychological, not a matter of being outclassed. They built something real and then allowed one person's personal mythology to metastasize through the whole operation. The lesson embedded in the Vees' arc is quietly ruthless  the same qualities that make someone dangerous enough to build an empire (ambition, obsession, willingness to exploit) are the exact qualities that will eventually tear it apart if they go unchecked.

Valentino is the new public face of VoxTek. Velvette still has her social media empire. Vox is deposed but not destroyed. And somewhere in Hell, Alastor is smiling  which is never a good sign for anyone's long-term strategic prospects. The Vees aren't finished. They're just rebooting under different leadership. Whether that makes them more or less dangerous in Season 3 is the question the show has very deliberately left open.