Hazbin Hotel Review!

hazbin hotel review!

yeah, i’m late to the bandwagon. i saw the pilot when i came out, was fiercely praying for the rest of it, but fell out of love with the fandom tbh for a while. but it’s good to be back on the air!

solid 7/10 show. very fun to watch, enjoyable characters and musical numbers, and compelling visuals. misc observations below the cut; some of it will be critique, some of it analysis.

i really liked zestial but the writers switched between thou/you so inconsistently and even incorrectly

carmilla was a compelling character, but i don’t think they can give her that moral code and also make her an arms dealer. why wouldn’t she want war? why wouldn’t she want to sell the only weapons that can aid demons in this war? “i need to protect my family” wasn’t enough of a motivation for me. they could’ve easily given her a different profession and it would’ve made perfect sense. i also didn’t like her hands.

favorite characters: alastor, vox, lucifer, charlie

least favorite characters: cherri bomb and,,, im sorry,, angel dust

favorite/least favorite status comes from how interesting or annoying they were for me to watch, not which ones were the most sympathetic (i thought angel was quite sympathetic, just poorly written)

angel mostly just got on my nerves in the first half of the show because every bit of dialogue was either a sex joke or exposition about his trauma and why he is the way he is. but mostly just talking about sex. and they gave him jack shit to do in the second half of the season. i think conceptually he’s a great character but in execution there’s not a lot of depth to him; they need to give him a personality beyond his profession imo

alastor’s best moments came ‘seeing him in action’ like in his songs and the scary animation moments (those were soo good). i also really liked the cannibalism town scenes with rosie. i often thought his dialogue was lacking and they sometimes didn’t do a great job separating things he would say from generic things any ‘vivziepop character’ would say (‘i’m going to fucking kill you’ or whatever he said to adam)

charlie could be grating at times but i feel like all in all she was a solid and sympathetic protagonist and kept me rooting for her the entire time

one aspect i really really liked is the fact that no one knows what gets souls into heaven. i think that’s a good way for covering the lack of a cohesive standard of moral degeneracy in hell—most people just drink, fuck, and do drugs. the murderers and cannibals make sense, val makes sense, etc, but most actual characters in hazbin and helluva boss seem to have an inherent understanding of right and wrong that is quite standard. i really hope the criteria for salvation is explored further—is it conservative christian values? is it something else? is it predestination? is it haphazard? this is really really interesting to me!!!

furthermore, the fact that sir pentious died and went to heaven is obviously a sign in charlie’s favor that redemption is possible, which paints hell as more of a purgatory or even ‘second earth’ than a traditional christian hell. i wonder what god/jesus will be like in the hellaverse. i’m half predicting a sort of wizard of oz situation

my only other theory is that by the end of the show a shift will have occurred from charlie focusing on reforming souls to get into heaven and instead on reforming souls and hell itself to be a better place