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atomicpowered · 15 days ago

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So I watched Hazbin. Let the record show that I am not a hater unjustly or unduly. I will put in the effort to fully experience the thing people are dumping on to see if it's legitimate. I went in with as blind a mein as possible given that I am Online and dialed in to various goings on in my swamp. My curiosity finally got the better of me.

I know some of the background of the show and the creator of said show, I have heard rumblings from the edges of my dashes and things passing megafauna-like underneath me. These cries of 'worst fandom ever!!' are pretty overwrought for what, by my eyes, is the pretty standard slew of agitated bees that follows this kind of thing.

Before I get into some thoughts about the show I do know that there was some talk about people not being properly compensated for their work on the newest, hottest, invader zim animated television programme. I have heard various things about what vivziepop (might be spelling this wrong I'm on a fight and bored so I can't check) has done, what fans of this show are capable of blah, blah— I get it. When you've been around the loop of this stuff as long as I have you know what many fandoms and sole operators are capable of. By my metric these examples are all pretty bad. Not the worst but not the best either. Definitely stand out from the other fan based background radiation on websites and in real life.

But I'm gonna talk about only what I've directly seen (the amazon joint and youtube pilot) for both brevity and my sanity.

I sell at conventions for a living, I've done so for years and have also been at that long enough to see swells and ebbs of trends that match up with their digital counterparts. Hazbin is… special. Not often do you see merchants throwing table balance to the winds to have MULTIPLE Hazbin (Helluva thrown in there too they're basically the same thing) monocultures for what they are hawking. I get the drive behind it too, no shade, make your bag, sex sells, but I can't overstate how rare this is! Even during the heyday of Genshin (lessening now) you still had different properties orbiting the cash cow on your display. Nobody just brought one thing and one thing only.

Now, on to what I have to say about the show. I'm sure some of these points have been echoed by a pngtuber with crossed arms but I feel compelled to throw my two bits in.

The show is all together, not good. Not horrific (barring some specific instances), but firmly overwhelmingly mediocre.I watched all of it, including the pilot, and besides occasional drama crossing my dash didn't interact with it much beyond that until now. Now that I have, I am very confident with my pre-watch assertions I made based on spitballing what I saw represented on and off line. I'm good at this kinda thing, you see certain patterns emerge from the data and you can make some accurate generalizations no problem. I frequently withheld a question when I would see groups of 14 year olds in pinstripe suits looking at my prints at weeaboo united or whatever convention I was at that particular weekend. Why are kids watching this show?

I know Why kids are watching the show, Hazbin is made (probably unwittingly) to appeal to kids! This is a neutral statement, I'm not saying it was to entrap kids or anything like that. The kids are a side effect drawn to what Hazbin Is. Not a target.

The appeal comes from a few main points. The characters are all designed like babies' first OCs, they drip little details and playground style power layouts. (My mermaid tail is blue and rainbow and I can shoot lighting and I have a pet sea turtle so obviously it is good or better than your flame covered tail and psychic abilities.) They are all based on a template that is easy to replicate and iterate on with enough play in secondary characteristics to make a bonafide example of some prime Do Not Steal. (Think Sonic, My Little Pony, Homestuck.) This playbook of style is sugar on a kitchen floor to ants.

The characters all say and do stuff with no deeper implication or subtlety, conflicts are raised and finished in minutes if not at least by the end of the episode. They have large gestures, big emotions, little depth, and huge expressions. They are stage acting, and the flat compositions in the storyboarding and directing reflect that. They are tell and almost never show. They walk on the screen and go I'M SAD or I'M MAD with no real subtle work. Yes there's sex, drugs, and alcohol, but, like. Conceptually you easily have characters acting like they're in saturday morning cartoons.

The overacting is great when you're sakuga brained like I am but it is so all the time and in your face that it just ends up feeling like those twitter videos of 60fps interpolated anime openings. (God I fucking hate those things.) Every character is moving and talking and wiggling around so much that it's like parents trying to catch the attention of a crying baby with hastily jingled keys. Even the swearing and the depictions of the more devious acts are so… juvenile. Everything feels like a combination of boys talking in hushed giggles at the back of the bus and what you scribbled in the back of your history notes among the drawings of the best realistic eye you could put out at the time. Like I highly doubt any of the audience knows what 'bolivian marching powder' is or does. And I don't think its main writer does either? Like one of the characters is in high profile porn, like at least make his vice a designer drug? It's like when kids speculate on what it would be like to be white girl wasted with barely trying a sip of Mom's vodka out of the cabinet.

So you got the combo of these character designs which mirror every tumblr sexyman since the bronze age and a very paint by numbers barbie house of characters. Of COURSE it bags kids like fortnight und cola. But like, why are people in charge just letting this rock? Is more my question. Who is letting Timmy get at a new glossary of stuff to yell at his substitute teacher? Don't answer, this is rhetorical. I'm all for letting kids self select but I kinda worry about this one and what it's doing to the teens. I'm sure someone more willing to explore that has said smarter stuff than me. But what I can see is you have the volatile type of person (kid or not) who is attracted to what I just listed grappling with badly handled (fumbled most of the time, let's be honest) adult stuff. This is the recipe in how you get a fandom that acts like this one acts.

My next thoughts concern Concepts and Themes. The ones here of heaven and hell are just kinda skated over as set dressing. In fact everything in the show is more like the plato's allegory of shit to stand on. It's basic on basic. Hell being an alright bunch and heaven being snooty know it alls has been done, demons that are niceys has been done, even interpersonal relationships set with a backdrop of a home for wayward characters has been done. Like again color by numbers isn't BAD! Just because these things have all been done doesn't mean you can't learn from and uplift your own idea with what came before. In fact, when you're having trouble making something a quote always comes to mind.

Wholesale ripping a chunk out of red letter media here: "Now I need to explain that I don’t think that all movies," ((Shows for my use case)) "-should be the same, or conform to the same kind of structure, but it works well in certain kinda movies. So unless you’re the Coen Brothers, David Lynch, Paul Thomas Anderson, Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock, Lars Von Trier, David Cronenberg, Gus Van Sant, Quentin Tarantino, John Waters, Wes Anderson, Sam Peckinpah, Terry Gilliam, Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, or Jim Jarmusch, you really shouldn’t stray away too far from this kind of formula."

It's clear that this show has its roots in musicals. (Not just in the presence of musical interludes, the talky bits too.) Musicals often are color by numbers stories that expertly perform these fundamentals. They are a perfectly cooked egg. Simple, but a test. If you can't do the basics you cannot be expected to deliver on anything more complicated! It's also obvious that Hazbin's nest was lined with disney musicals specifically. I have my qualms about disney, especially the disney of today, but that's not for right now. Disney by and large knows how to color in said book to the point that it's a formula, and if you can't study this formula to excel at the formulaic you kinda deserve the crit.

You have rules and lore set by your world and you don't follow through with anything, your plots all revolve around introducing the coolest character yet or making your favorites even cooler but not like. Actually. Exemplifying what the hell is going on. I know people here are going to counter that they didn't have time it was only a handful of episodes with no knowledge if they were gonna get more, but so much of the show is donated to bad dialogue that goes nowhere, points and facts that the audience knows that are reiterated half a dozen times for no reason. They had TONS of time.

While I'm on the subject of dialogue, the dialogue is one of the things that is not mediocre but straight up bad. I already listed why above but to cite a specific example of something I haven't touched on, dear god you cannot lampshade your own bad writing by having the characters calling it bad. It is Marvel style spandex is stupid and comics are silly am I right guys 'jokes'. This 'joke' happens at least three different times in vitro and it made me audibly groan every time.

I am not a musical person nor am I musically trained but many of the songs are lyrically poor, abruptly plonked into the narrative, unfitting compositionally or, uh, poorly sung.The cast of VAs is insane, (looking at you David) and also often badly vocally directed. They are trying their best with the script but I'm more talking about how they are mixed. I found it hard to understand what was being said much of the time due to technical failures. Guys like Keith David can phone in a performance and Sell it to me better than some of the other actors putting their foot into it and that juxtaposition is also a form of whiplash that the show excels in. Vaggie is probably the worst offender for not being able to pick up the slack in this regard.

The characters being over and somehow under done lies also in their designs and the style that the show wants. I could talk for days about how much I dislike the sticks with a bunch of junk hanging off of them type of look. Nightmare to animate, no good character variation. I didn't even know what some characters were supposed to BE or represent. Alistor is a deer? Charlie is a faun of some sort? Where? Huh?

Too much red!!!! Too much!!!!! Red backgrounds, red characters, everything is a MESS, this is one of the things that actually gets me mad. There are no values! Everything fades into visual noise, which when you pair it with the animation constantly gesticulating at you and everything being bolted on with spirit halloween leftovers makes a leaf and stick tornado. (Nitpicky as well but pick a line weight and color and stick with it.) When blue or yellow came on screen I would audibly shout in excitement.

Multiple characters have tophats. Stop.

I'm not going to go into what I would do to fix the plot or design documents, I know it's been done to death.

God, where was I, I think I'll just finish this off with thoughts about the characters and then open the floor to comments or questions. I don't mean to make this a proper essay.

Charlie: I really dislike her, she's a weak character that has the IM TELLING HOW IM FEELING AND HOW YOU, THE VIEWER, IS SUPPOSED TO FEEL disease bad. Her design is one of the worst. I don't root for her much! Which is bad because she's the main character and I'm at least supposed to feel for her?

The snake guy: He had an arc. He's probably the most endearing.

Angel dust: the pathos they tried with his story beats is ruined by whipping back and forth between irreverent and WAY too heavy handed. People cried? What? Also the pig showing up for its two appearances to sell irl plushies was bad. His back and forth with other characters is hard to watch, and his capitulation to be better both feels forced and confusing. I don't think they know what to do with him. Why is porn bad in hell.

Husk: hi keith david. Bad design so fucking busy. They scaled him back from the pilot and I still flinch thinking about those tie downs. Why is alcoholism bad in hell.

Tv guy: better episode time than most of the other characters to the point where I suspect multiple writers to have been put in the time out chair

Nifty: Gir redux but with none of the heart

Vaggie: they were going for a wholesome lesbian relationship or toxic codependency and managed to do neither well. She has the weakest vocal performance, the name thing is bad, I thought she was supposed to be based off an owl or bird of prey but apparently not?

Mimzy: why are you even here

Lucifer: design so bad he falls into the background when he should stand out THE MOST. No episode, saying you're depressed and estranged from your daughter isn't an emotive beat you have to Show that by doing things.

There's so much I could say about carmella, the overlords, the other V's, adam, heaven in general, the over-designed incidentals, the exorcists, but I'm TIRED.

Alistor.

Man. This fucking guy.

His ethos is one of the worst in that hes just dripping in conflicting ideas from toe to head. He's based off voodoo? He's the 'coolest' one?!?!? He's word salad. Eldritch, forest, radio, dapper, fox like, the teeth, the staff, the vocal filter, he's a deer????! cannibal chaotic neutral shadow manipulator play pretty. He takes valuable screen time from everyone to blow keyframes and my time in being the 'coolest' most bad ass for real bro made in a lab to clinch a demographic annoyance.

Where do you go when you die in hell? If you died in heaven do you go back there? Nobody tried to crack getting into heaven before? Expediting a culling six months when you do it every year isn't as punitive as it comes off, where are the steaks? Why does charlie care so much about hell? Where are 'her people'? Why does charlie know that heaven wants to quell an uprising? Why don't angels know they can be hurt? Why does Vaggie not know? Why aren't people in hell doing like. Actual for real bad things most of time? You have a whole town of cannibals, something that's pretty rare, but barely anyone on any kind of watch list. Why is Lucifer estranged when he's clearly just awkward and it gets better almost immediately? Why does charlie not know anything about her country despite living there?

Auhhhhgh okay I'm done, I'm done. Like I'm frustrated okay!!!

#Blogging for once #hazbin hotel #For the blocklist I guess #I can never sleep on planes

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