I previously understood (wrongly, it turns out) that having a state meant that you could not have another instance of that state. For example if you have the blue side of dazzle up, the side which has no effect, then you could not be dazzled again until it went away. This would be similar to diminishing returns and most MOBA games. But the rules state that you simply with the token over to its red side, so what then is the purpose of the blue side for tokens such as dazzled why are they not simply removed from the game when they flip?
The upcoming expansion Smoke and Mirrors whose characters are previewed on the website aristeiathegame.com has a character Tao Wu. One of his character specific Tactic cards, "Ignorance" forces the opposing player to discard a Tactic from his hand for each character that has at least one State token on it. A blue side State token would fulfill this condition even if it had no other further effect in the game play. Also blue sided Focus tokens still allow for all the effects of Focus. So the blue state is still useful in the twelve characters already released.
So essentially I could read states like dazzled or imobilized as "penalized for 1 turn, vulnerable to certain abillities for 2" ?
The main purpose of the blue side is that some states last 2 turns (+2 initiative becomes +1, -2 energy becomes -1, -2 movement becomes -1, Focused lasts 2 turns). The reason all tokens have a blue side is so that players can get in the muscle memory habit of flipping them. The fact that some abilities/Tactics trigger off of blue state (X) tokens is sort of ancillary, but it is important too.