#Zp’s talk

[zpxz]

Why I think jam/take/tomake/tomxjake/jom cannot workout(in general).

Their a light-switch couple except, they actually broke-up(officially?..) in the recent episode..

I don’t HATE Tom or Jake, yes they have their own struggles, yes they said they were gonna talk to eachother in needs of help, but episode 10 literally broke me.

I myself, the person who is saying this, a tomjake shipper. But although it’s at the seems of canon(their most likely going to be canon in the end) Jake is seemingly always falling for fiore’s and alec’s traps.

Tom is.. ok.. but he’s not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed.( even tho bro’s got mortal combat skills he’s not the first person to think of in need of comfort. )

Anddd finally.. I actually have to blame the writers for screwing jam up. Like they could’ve kept going with the jam stuff till ATLEAST episode 12 if they hadn’t agreed to make Ellie go with alec&fiore, but I gotta say that breakup was.. something.

[indigosabyss]

mikadzuki has the opportunity to be the funniest person in this comedy manga and kill rokudo off screen

[clinesmaddie]

Hey, I figured I'd reach out and let you know that I might take your future husband for a date. It's purely platonic, however, I'd do the same for you if you're done. Just let me know. [ @therestayzakhar ]

[hathawaysanne]

Message To 📱 Tay ZP

Anne: Don't come for me, Nick gave me your number. Hope it's cool. [ @therestayzakhar ]

[ortegasjenmarie]

Message To 📱 Taylor Zakhar Perez-Galitzine

Jenna: Tell me a better name for you in my contacts or I'll have to remove you. Your name is just too damn long. [ @therestayzakhar ]

[robinsonjnicks]

So, I know when we last spoke it wasn't the best time, but I also wanted to say - I'd never try and come between you and Nicholas. However, if you need an ear, I'm here for you as much as him. [ @therestayzakhar ]

[elordijacobs]

How'd New Years go for you, old pal? [ @therestayzakhar ]

[prismatoxic]

loving the timeline i got to witness of:

-yahtzee reviews a game on zero punctuation -in the course of the script he finds a reason to bring up ayn rand/atlus shrugged, mostly as a joke -brings up ayn rand again as the closing punchline -final credits message is "bioshock was a good game wasn't it" -one day later the escapist uploads a new extra punctuation about why bioshock's opening is amazing

did you get bioshock on the brain by any chance, mr. croshaw?

idk what his schedule of making ZP/EP looks like, though i do suspect that EP might possibly be visually edited by someone else? i'm like 99% sure yahtz still does ZP by himself except to pass it by matt the editor for notes on where he should maybe swear less, but EP is kind of visually different (despite using yahtzee's art still) so maybe he just reads his script and lets matt do the visuals? idk. the man's busy he puts out 2 videos like every week, i wouldn't blame him

regardless, my point is that idk where in the process he decided to make an EP on bioshock, but the idea of him writing the sea of stars script, thinking about ayn rand a little too hard, and getting on a bioshock kick because of it is pretty damn funny

if he addresses this in the bioshock video i'm going to feel very silly but i was just taking a food + youtube break so i only watched the sea of stars review for now

[eilishbillies]

I'm super late to this, but I'm like super obsessed with the story of 'Red, White & Royal Blue' and now I've come to bother you about it. [ @therestayzakhar ]

[aufgrundlagedeinerlikes]

I also want a pink cart

[zpxz]

HELP I REALIZED PUFFS A LITTLE SHORTER THAN BLOSSOM.. SHES 24-5 AND HES 26 PLUS HES CANONLY 6’2

I mean not complaining tho.

[vivziepoparchives]

You had mentioned lollygag and dawn being the sins of lust and gluttony respectively, and I'm curious where that was actually mentioned because I don't remember the sins ever being a part of zp (though tbf the line between zp and hh used to be very blurred in her pre-2015 works)

Viv had a looooot of plans for Zoophobia that never came to fruition. One of them was the idea of the seven deadly sins for her demons and angels (I think) arc which was eventually repurposed as Hazbin Hotel/used as inspo for that worldbuilding.

So, she would talk about these plans publicly and draw the characters that she wanted to show up in later chapters of Zoophobia from time to time. You can read about it some on the Zoophobia wiki. But here's a little rundown since the info's a bit scattered there.

In a video showing off her sketchbooks, you can see concepts for the seven rings of Hell. Lust and Gluttony can be seen below.

She also drew and talked about a couple of the characters meant to represent the seven deadly sins. Lollygag was the sin of Lust and notably asexual. She was said to be asexual because she'd seen and done it all and now she was just bored of sex. She was also the mother of Tom (an incubus) who played a major part in Zoophobia via his relationship with Addison: a main character. She had a few other children but not all remained canon and Tom was the most important one story-wise.

We also saw the country gentleman Dawn O'Deedle, the sin of Gluttony. He was a jovial moth demon who had children of his own but I don't believe they were ever intended to be any sort of main focus. It was also mentioned once he had a very large wife lol

While this version of Hell had its own Lucifer, he wasn't the sin of Pride that I'm aware of. The sin of Pride was originally Jestine who was disgraced and exiled. She had a daughter named Ink who got a fair bit of art and some interactions with Damian as they were both children of Demon royalty.

But the most interesting sin of this original version of Hell, was Jex. Jex was Viv's first concept of Wrath. However, early works by Viv are very inconsistent and shifting. Characters morph and meld and become something else often. They gain and lose canon facts over time.

Before Jex there was Malvada. Malvada was a very old villain character from the 2000s. He was an eldritch deer creature and Jex in her original concept was only a very violent minion of his.

Eventually Viv combined Jex and Malvada's roles, taking traits from each, to form the Zoophobia version of Alastor.

And that's all I really know about the seven deadly sins in Zoophobia's version of Hell. Not all of this was always canon at the same time because some of these characters were around for many years and saw a lot of changes and repurposing. But it's fun to look back on these early concepts of things to see how we got to where we are today with Helluva Boss and Hazbin Hotel.

(Please correct me if I'm wrong about any of this. I'm writing this one on the fly. This is also why I didn't provide sources, but sources for each of these things will be or have been provided when uploading the individual art pieces.)

[hathawaysanne]

You can't hide from me forever, Taylor. How about we hang some while on this trip together? [ @therestayzakhar ]

[tobiasdrake]

What are your thoughts on the Nostalgia Critic?

Complicated.

I was a big fan of the NC in my twenties. I discovered him later than a lot of other people did but that's kind of normal for me, and it meant I had a lot of videos to go back and laugh at. By the time I got onboard, the anniversary movie "To Boldly Flee" had already officially ended the NC's run, before he failed out of his attempts to move on and be a filmmaker, and wound up coming back.

At the time, I really liked the format of "Wacky skits and personal plotlines mixed with video essay". Writing a story with characters and storylines and also riffing on existing media at the same time. It was basically a modern MST3K, which I'd never really been able to find accessibly.

But the thing that really grabbed me was Channel Awesome itself. The community of creators who would cross over into each other's videos and do collaborative projects and mix up their storylines together and stuff.

And I loved the movies. I watched all of them like dozens of times. It was so cool seeing these creators that I had parasocial relationships with going on adventures and fighting villains and stuff.

...but then things fell apart for Channel Awesome, and we started learning more and more about how shitty everything was behind the scenes for those creators. And how the channel was never really invested in those creators to begin with, and only cared about propping up the Nostalgia Critic.

It soured me on the whole thing, and made me stop and really think about the series. How a lot of those other creators that the channel was exploiting are doing what Doug does better than he does.

I'm not going to say Doug is untalented. He has a Jim Carrey-esque comedic talent, which is to say that he has a remarkable aptitude for flailing his limbs and making sounds erupt from his throat.

Doug's bread and butter is wildly over-the-top reactions, frantic body movement, and the kind of shrieking that will absolutely murder your throat. Which sounds simple but is surprisingly hard to do yourself and, with good comedic timing, can be very funny. He got big for a reason.

But. At the end of the day, all he's bringing to these movies is CinemaSins- or Zero Punctuation-level critique mixed with physical comedy, while other creators in his space were offering thoughtful, serious analysis.

And I like CS and ZP, don't get me wrong. They can be very funny when you remember that this is not a proper review but basically a comedy roast. I've always found criticism of those videos to be akin to sitting down to an hour-length special that's literally just stand-up comedians talking shit about Tom Cruise and going, "Wow, they are being very mean to Tom Cruise. Do they have to be so mean to him?"

But it's a very different sort of thing from, say, listening to F.D. Signifier explain the complete history of the legendary Drake and Kendrick rap beef for three hours.

Comedy isn't easy. But it's easier than the kinds of thoughtful critique that other creators who walked away like Lindsay Ellis or Dan Olson were doing.

And at the same time they were walking away, the Nostalgia Critic's revival was... underwhelming.

While the other collaborators were leaving, the NC was becoming an island reliant on his own stable of paid actors and divorced from the collaborations that made him big to begin with. And the passion just... wasn't there anymore.

It was pretty clear that he'd fallen back on doing NC because his attempt at branching out, his new series Demo Reel, never took off with audiences. The NC revival was Doug passionlessly returning to what made him successful and paid his bills. And it never felt the same after that.

After Change the Channel, it all fell into place. I wasn't enjoying Doug's passionless new videos because he was just going through the motions. I couldn't go back and watch the old stuff I used to love knowing how miserable the other collaborators were behind the scenes and how much Channel Awesome as mistreating them to prop up Doug. My parasocial relationship with him fractured after finding out how he treated the other creators.

(It's worth noting that his paid employees who he pays to support him came out in support of him during all that. The NC isn't some guy's internet show that he films in his bedroom, it's a company. Doug himself is an employee. He doesn't even own the legal rights to the Nostalgia Critic; He signed it over to an executive to manage him.

Tamara and Malcolm are not his buddies; They're his hired staff, so take their opinions while on his payroll with a grain of salt. This is a professional operation, which makes how unprofessional it all is appalling rather than endearing.)

And there were other creators out there, including the ones he'd mistreated, making the same kind of stuff he was making but better. So I made a choice to leave and never looked back.

[robinsonjnicks]

Private: It's been a while since we spoke last. Are we cool or? [ @therestayzakhar ]

[showtoonzfan]

I don't know if this is a hot take, but I feel like Viv only likes her characters on a surface level. Like every time she talks about how she loves her characters and their backstories I'm just like "Do you really though?" because every time Helluva has massive plot contradictions and character retcons, it gets harder and harder to really define what these characters' goals and storylines really are(ironic since that seems to be the same critique Viv got when ZP was running). It makes it seems like characters and stories happen because it needs to happen because without it there isn't an actual story.

Rereading through the Millie thread, you can feel her struggle to list any interesting traits that aren't just surface-level things we already know. The fact she kinda went all "you guys just want to give her a sad and tragic backstory" makes me feel like she admitted that the only way she can make characters more interesting is to give them a sad backstory about how they were mistreated when they were a kid because that's exactly what she did for Blitzo, Moxxie, and Stolas. It's that kind of thing that makes me groan about Hazbin's whole "redemption" plot because it's just going to reveal more of her personal character bias and poor character writing.

I can feel your pain, I remember when Viv said Octavia and Millie were personal favorites of her and I laughed aloud. However, at the end of the day, it’s not that I don’t believe Viv doesn’t care about these characters. She clearly does, it’s just that she favors more than others. You can watch helluva and the Hazbin pilot and it’s obvious who her favorites are, she just puts more effort into writing some than others, but yeah, whenever she opens her mouth on twitter or mainly livestreams regarding this stuff, it is ironic and hilarious. She talks as if the show or her work is so deep and compelling and that she knows what she’s doing when….yeah she makes it VERY clear she doesn’t and is pulling stuff out of her ass, then takes to twitter and gets mad when people accuse her of not knowing anything despite her accidentally proving it constantly, having admitted TWICE now that the majority of what we’re seeing in Helluva wasn’t planned.

The Millie thread was a laughable desperate attempt to show people Millie has a personality and character traits, expect she constantly contradicts herself by saying things like how it’s difficult to write a newlywed couple since their attached to each other, and then literally admit that Moxxie still was able to have more to him outside of their relationship, then act like everything she said didn’t matter by pulling a “er…well it’s a male driven show so…”- like be for real girl LMAO. There’s a reason why the majority of her beloved male characters all have the same tragic daddy issue backstories but are painted to be good deep down and praise for it, while her female characters are either bitches or fan service with flat one note personalities, if you can even call them that lol. Hazbin is definitely fucked, I mean….if Viv can’t even call Hellborn characters out on their bullshit without excusing them constantly, what makes us think she’ll call out the characters that actually went to Hell for a reason? She’s just ganna excuse them all and baby them lol.