The Character Corner: Blitz

 

 This animated character took my job, my spouse, the kids, and my house!

I mean, that's what you'd think from listening to the anti-Blitz folk rant and rave about him... 😏

Opinions on Blitz vary. There were and still are a ton of folk out there who react to his existence like this:

As for the people who are more receptive to him as a character, you got people who basically thirst for him because he fulfills their furry muscle fetish/or and project their personal issues/trauma onto him:

 

And finally, people who treat him as a doll they can slap a new generic hero/romantic lead type personality onto:

 

It's pretty lonely for somebody like myself who's actually interested in developing Blitz as a character and showcasing said development throughout her stories. I'm going to try my best not to sound like one of the aforementioned weird cringe fail Blitz fans who clearly are just using him as their self insert, so here goes:

I haven't always liked him like I do now, but seeing all of the ridiculously over-the-top, all-consuming hatred and rage the majority of the fanbase has had for him for decades now has honestly made me start taking more positive notice of him. Like yes, he could be annoying at times in the show, but I found the other Rovers to be just as annoying at times. Later rewatches of the show just made me end up feeling more and more sorry for him. 70% or 80% of the screen time he gets is just devoted to crapping all over him. This kind of humor is unappealing and not funny to me. 

In Road Rovers, character development often tended to be sacrificed purely for the sake of humor, and it seems the writers were really reluctant to have Blitz actually grow up. A perfect of example of this can be found in "Storm On The Pacific". Blitz didn't believe that Hunter could be a good leader, but in the end changed his mind and admitted Hunter wasn't bad at his job. But in the final episode "A Day in The Life", the writers now seem to have completely forgotten that this matter had been resolved already and had Blitz bickering with Hunter over his being the leader again. Just... oy, that kind of bad characterization bugs me so much.

Honestly, it's a real testament to his character that he still sticks by the other Rovers in spite of everything and goes out into the field with them. That to me indicates that he isn't that much of a chicken if he's still willing to put himself into danger like that. I mean, he could just refuse to go all together. Wasn't he the one having to push Shag into action in the pilot (I think?), telling him "Come on Mop Boy!"?

The way his cowardly streak gets handled is fairly inconsistent. In a number of episodes, such as the pilot, "A Hair Of The Dog That Bit You", "Storm Over The Pacific", and "Hunter's Heroes", he doesn't hesitate to charge straight into the action. He also appears to act more courageously as a normal old dog. He only becomes scared whenever he wound up in real danger, like when Fluffy grabbed hold of him or when he was taken prisoner by Zachary Storm's troops in the aforementioned episodes. His faint-hearted nature seems to come and go, but reveals itself most when he's in legit danger. I'm inclined to think that this fear also ties into a character trait he's demonstrated several times - - he's a glass half empty type of guy, the best example of this being his asking Hunter exactly how were they going to free all the dogs Parvo had imprisoned in "Hunter's Heroes", citing the sheer number of dogs there were. To me, the overall vibe he puts off in that scene, as well as his expression when Hunter responds "[Yeah, and] we're gonna free all of them" reads like he doesn't think the Rovers'll be able to pull it off. And if you go around believing that the worst is always going to happen, especially to you, then well, that's probably not going to make you feel very emboldened on literal life and death missions and fights.

Blitz has had his moments of actually not making rude comments and even being *gasp* nice! He was even given a few badass moments. I loved it when, in "Hunter's Heroes", Blitz and Hunter are ready to split after the Rovers have rescued all the imprisoned dogs, when the Groomer shows up and she's pretty pissed. Blitz's response? "Sorry crazy lady, we don't have time to play. Maybe later, okay?" and pulls out his piece and takes a shot at her, sending her packing. I also love seeing him chasing around the cano-mutants earlier in the very same episode. I might have to actually rewatch the show to see if there are any other scenes like this.

Yet viewers carry on like Blitz is literally this supervillain barely able to restrain himself from raping anything female and attacking their wonderful, beeooootiful  totally not annoying at all LOL OFCs. People make Blitz out to be both unnecessarily and overly aggressive, threatening, and outright cruel towards others (small children and other animals included) when all he did in the cartoon was just be a silly pompous windbag and a one-time catcaller at worst (for the record, do I like cat-calling? No, but that doesn't make Blitz a woman-hating rape machine). He's viewed as the worst kind of chauvinist pig, a mean bully, or a threat to the Hunter/Colleen ship (crazy shippers strike again!). It all just begs the question: if Blitz literally is Satan, P. Diddy, and Hitler all combined, then just why would the Master recruit him in the first place? Doesn't that reflect poorly on him? Makes him look like a real bad judge of character if one of the Rovers he picked was pure unfiltered evil, y'know. 🤔

But it isn't like the people screaming about all this are super logical and write the Master's character very well either in their fics either, so...

Someone once said that he'd leave the rest of the Rovers behind just to save his own skin. Um, wasn't Colleen totally willing to abandon him to the villains at least twice (again, see "Storm" and "Day In The Life")? 

Oh, it's okay when she does it? My mistake then, I'm so sorry.

Honestly, I don't get the people who quite clearly intensely hate Blitz and yet still include him in their fics. At this point I'm of the mind that you should either write such a character out of the story altogether somehow, or even kill them off. I mean, y'all are just making yourselves mad by having Blitz there hitting on Colleen or being abused by your OCs tormenting your OCS or whatever. But the show made sport out of bashing him, and people who hate Blitz seem to get up early in the morning to burn incense and animal sacrifices at the alter of Hunter, so maybe that's why.

Most Blitz fans don't do a good job of handling his character either. Most of them tend to whitewash his flaws and turn him into an entirely different character with none of his old quirks just so he can be their idealized leading man. To me, doing that completely defeats the whole point of writing fanfiction in the first place. You might as well just use a fan character in that case. I've also noticed that some people who do stuff like this tend to have these completely off the wall views about Blitz as well as the rest of canon. I'm sorry, but there's no evidence in the series indicating that Blitz hates the other Rovers and wants to seriously harm them. No, they don't hate him either -- he irritates them, yes (some more then others), but they don't actually hate him. Again, all that stuff was played for laughs and these are the good guys. You know, upright, heroic, generally caring types, the exact opposites of villains? Yet ya'll have them all acting just like villains. But the people who think that the other Rovers want to snuff Blitz in his sleep also treat him as a proxy character they project all their personal issues onto. I've always found this kind of thing to be frankly, well, pathetic, as well as extremely uncomfortable to witness. Just go and talk to a reliable mental health professional. Stop going after other people for not conforming to your bizarre obsessive views on a cartoon doberman.

Now with the way Colleen usually treats him, I can at least see where the whole "she hates him" thing actually comes from. But even so, I still can't really see them actually wanting to murder the other in cold blood or anything like that, Blitz especially. I'd like to think that she'd be just as worried as the others would be if Blitz were to be say, seriously hurt or something, but unfortunately the show often made it seem like she wouldn't give a -- pardon my French -- a golden shit. The show definitely had her go way overboard in how she dealt with Blitz, to the extent where she's the one who comes off as a complete jerk and a bully a lot of the time. Granted, while rewatching RR their interactions weren't quite as physically abusive on her end as I remembered them being, but still. A very passionate (a polite way of saying "batcrap crazy") ColleenXHunter shipper (I want to try to avoid making generalizations here, but speaking honestly ColleenXHunter shippers in my experience tend to be very exhausting people to be around) once told me that Blitz deserved the grief Colleen gives him because he called her stuff like "pretty girl dog" instead of using her actual name. Yes, because that's the adult way to handle a problem with a teammate. Schoolyard taunts and constantly antagonizing them! Not just that, but if the situation was reversed, then do you guys honestly think Blitz could get away with doing all that to Colleen?

I think the Blitz and Colleen interaction in the show would've been far more bearable if he was allowed to successfully sass her right back. I know he tried to a few times in the show, but he just never really had anything good to say back to her. So after while it really does come across like her just picking on him for no reason whatsoever, and it becomes insufferable, dull, and unpleasant to watch. Why not have them snipe at each other like how Homer Simpson does Patty and Selma, or how Uncle and Tohru's mom in Jackie Chan Adventures basically had insult battles, or Ron and Hermione in Harry Potter, you know, make things more even? Not just that, but it'd be so much more interesting than just rehashing the same tired "Who are you again? Oh I know, Blinky/Fluffypants/[insert some dumb name here]!" gags from Colleen that I see get repeated in both the show and fandom over and over again. Do people actually still think that's funny in the year of our Lord 2024? 

Like I was saying before, there are people who like Blitz just because they have a furry muscle fetish. Honestly, I don't even care if anyone does have a harmless (read: doesn't involve harming anybody else, animals included) fetish. What I do care about is you (and this is something that the aforementioned people do) yelling at everybody else demanding they not draw rule 34 or fetish art while you sit there and draw it yourself. What I care about is you rubbing your fetish in my face constantly while smirking and repeating "This isn't a fetish! If you think it is, then you're the weird one!" 

The people I'm referring to here always act horny on main while being massively hypocritical at the same times, and it's so repulsive and grating. Do you go to your grandmother and constantly talk about your gooning habits with her? I hope you don't. Just treat everybody like you do Grandma, unless they themselves actually tell you it's fine to do otherwise.

Some people approach Blitz as being stupid because of how pigheaded and hung up on himself he acts in canon, but I don't actually feel he's stupid as much as he just brags a lot, is impulsive, makes bad decisions, can be rude, has a big mouth, is a cynic, and tends to be rather unobservant. I also think he suffers from social ineptitude to a certain degree. I mean, in the show he never seems to pick up on the fact that the other Rovers tend to find his attitude annoying, and he still persists in acting that way. That's a bunch of character flaws right there, but you know what? I find flawed characters that canon recognizes as being such vastly more interesting than the "crafted by the gods from 24 karat gold" supermen and women type characters (see: Hunter, Princess Elena [and weirdly enough Elena actually has visible flaws, but canon barely ever wanted to treat them as being such]). 

When I look at a flawed character, I ask myself three questions:

Why is he/she like this? 

Do they have the capacity to change and become better, more well-rounded people? If so, how? What is that process like? For the sake of interesting storytelling, it can't be easy.

I know the talented Jeff Bennett gave Blitz a bombastic-sounding voice suited for spitting out the character's self-aggrandizing, flighty dialogue (though I think all the Rovers have this problem), but voice /= personality. In this instance, when I refer to voice, I literally mean how the character sounds and speaks. I acknowledge that it can be tricky to make sure Blitz still sounds like Blitz while allowing him to grow beyond the confines of what the show laid out for him. Somebody on FIM Fiction.net had a particularly interesting quote pertaining to characters like Blitz: 'I've personally always seen flat/underused characters as more like seeds that you could grow into something really neat if you take the time and effort to do it right.' I completely agree. I feel like so many of the characters people turn their noses up at have the the potential to have some very interesting hidden depths to them, Blitz included. Aside from doing a redemption story for him, I would also like to actually flesh him out and make him more interesting to read about.

There's a little show on Netflix called Stranger Things. I dunno, you might've heard of it. Well, I've never actually watched the series before myself, but did see a retrospective on YouTube about it a while ago that made me interested in watching the first season at least, in part due to a character in it named Steve Harrington. Steve is apparently an obnoxious jock who grows throughout the show into a better person. That's what I want for Blitz.

Yes, I know the odds of his undergoing this sort of transformation if RR had gotten a second season is pretty slim, but you think I seriously care about what canon would or wouldn't do?

Blitz definitely seems like an Arnold Schwarzenegger parody to me -- the whole bodybuilder thing and the way Jeff Bennett made him sound like Ahnuld. I love the fact he isn't the stereotypical vicious doberman seen so much in popular culture. The idea of this big scary-looking dog like a doberman being a chicken in actuality is a fun and novel concept. I just don't like the way Road Rovers ended up handling it.

There are a few people who complain that the Rovers' powers are boring, but I think they work for them myself. I mean, it makes sense for a guard dog to have super jaws, teeth, and claws that can rip up anything. Really, Blitz should be like Wolverine or Inuyasha whenever he busts out his Iron Reaver attack, just slicing people up left and right. 

Thinking about this made me wonder if the producers or whoever partly decided to make Blitz a coward so they could get around showing a dog person mauling people in a cartoon aimed at kids and their families.

I don't have this limitation when writing fanfic.

Blitz/Colleen shippers are the ones I referred to earlier who are most often guilty of just suddenly turning Blitz into what they perceive to be a more suave or gentlemanly personality, but in the process also making him extremely bland and depriving him of the traits shown in the show. Though as I said before, I do think he'd be much cooler were there more to his characterization than just his calling everybody "[Adjective] Boy" (which isn't even something he does all the time in canon like fics would have you believe) and being obsessed with biting people in the rear. But I don't believe completely changing his personality in the blink of an eye is the solution. 

I deplore it when people pair together characters who either dislike/or hate each other, or one character dislikes/hates the other. So as you can imagine, I'm not a ColleenXBlitz shipper. At all. Plus, Colleen is also usually extremely OOC in these kinds of stories (or what passes for being OOC with her anyways, given her extreme flatness in the show), so I avoid them like the virtual plague. ETA: Also there's this subgroup of BlitzXColleen shippers who seem to (poorly) write... really weird, juvenile, fetishistic stuff about them.

I'm personally of the mind that Blitz's whole thing with Colleen was lust rather then love. He did seem to dial back his flirting with her later in the show, though that could've also been due to him seeing that his attempts weren't successful.

For the record, hell no I do not ship them together. I can only think of one scenario where I could ever see that happening, but both characters would need to be in their golden years, i.e. pretty old, and their respective partners would both have to either be dead or otherwise out of the picture.

When it comes to Blitz pairings, I prefer either OCs or crossover pairings, where a character from a different series/movie/game/etc is bought in somehow and they go on to develop a relationship. No, I don't have any crossover couplings for him at the moment. I've seen some fans pull for Blitz/Exile, which I'll take over the Blitz/Colleen ship, but personally I just prefer for Blitz and Exile to be chums more than anything. One reason I'm not real interested in them as a coupling is due to my latest headcannon about the age difference between the two characters. Let's just say that I think Blitz is actually much too young for him. I'll discuss this further in my headcannon section in the follow-up post to this one. I'm still mulling over what Blitz's romantic life will be like within my fan-verse. 

I simply just don't like Hunter, so pairing him with Blitz makes me go "blegh". If someone ever did write a fic that was really different -- for one, they actually took the time to explain how a romance could develop between them in the first place and toned down Hunter's Gary Stu aura -- then I might check it out out of curiosity (I say "might" because RR is a fandom where I have to screen authors ahead of time to make sure s/he isn't somebody who has preexisting beef with me or something). But I never see anything like this. It's always just Hunter and Blitz suddenly making out together and being lovers with no buildup whatsoever. I think this is just furbait basically.

I will say Blitz's paramour is not gonna be Huntress (OC created by a fan called Greywolf Lupous who's Hunter's sister and Blitz's girlfriend in Greywolf's fics, as well as the fics of a few of her friends) per my setting -- at least, not in the long run. In my AU, they date early on and wind up having an amicable breakup. There are other fan characters I'm eying as eventual partners for him. I'm finding that I prefer for Blitz's ships to be subversive -- you expect him to prefer a certain type of lady as a girlfriend just because of how we see him behave in Road Rovers, but oh, surprise -- you wind up getting something totally different instead. And then I as the writer have the fun task of trying to show readers how we got from point A to point B with him and his beau in first place.

The Road Rovers fandom can give Sonic The Hedgehog and Disney fandoms a run for their money in terms of sheer social ineptitude, obsessive behavior, and unpleasantness, so if I get anyone trying to attack me for my opinions here, then I'm not going to even try and engage, I'm just gonna nip that mess in the butt immediately. Please understand that I don't mean calm rational disagreement, I mean flinging insults and throwing temper tantrums over my having a different opinion than you or your favorite BNF.