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that-ari-blogger · 4 months ago

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A Special Kind of Hypocrisy (Stayed Gone)

If you have been following my blog for a while, the fact that I take issue with the rules of writing will probably not be a surprise. I think that there are generally accepted guidelines, but these are tools and the best stories use them in unexpected ways.

“Put your readers in the action,” Darksouls is phenomenal and most of the stuff in that story has already happened. “Make your writing flow,” Turtles All The Way Down goes out of its way to feel jagged in order to portray the discomfort of its protagonist’s mind, and that is a book that shattered me for a solid week and a half.

“Show don’t tell”. That one is tricky. If an audience sees something, they are more likely to believe it, so it isn’t a tool for good writing, it’s a tool for making writing feel real. If it’s played straight, it can evoke a feeling of safety and trust, or can evoke emotions in a reader that are difficult to achieve otherwise. If subverted, this idea can present unease, deceit, or even hypocrisy.

Let me explain.

CONTENT WARNING: Not much in this one, but a standard warning because of the show I’m analysing. Gore, foul language, etc. Read at your own peril.

SPOILERS AHEAD: (Hazbin Hotel, The Family Plan)

I feel like clarifying everything I am about to say with the fact that tropes aren’t bad, and that subverting everything doesn’t make for good writing. Stories are about using what you have to build something, and if that something is just a box you can put things in, it doesn’t need to be complicated.

For example, The Family Plan is a perfectly fun movie that I really enjoyed, and it doesn’t push any boundaries at all. It’s just got Mark Wahlberg playing a cooler version of himself and some road trip shenanigans crossed with a spy thriller. It doesn’t invent at all, but its tightly written, well shot, and genuinely quite funny.

I think we look at art these days from an overly critical fashion, evaluating how it contradicts tradition or makes a point that will be remembered for generations, and some stories are aiming for that, but some just want to be a fun ride, and that’s ok.

Some stories, however, want to be controversial, and want to ask questions. Most notably in this context, Hazbin Hotel.

Hazbin Hotel’s selling point is that it dissects morality on an intrinsic level, and part of this is done by the character of Alastor, whom is objectively a villainous character, but who serves as a protagonist for the majority of the season.

Alastor has a song in the pilot, but because I’m not covering that for my own reasons, let’s talk about his musical introduction to the actual series, Stayed Gone.

This song introduces Alastor as a villain, but not an especially powerful one, and I feel like that’s kind of the point. Alastor certainly has an ego, but he’s a parasite. He works by twisting people’s intentions into benefiting him. He’s a schemer, a talker, a forger of Faustian bargains. This song sets up what kind of evil Alastor works with, and it isn’t brute force.

This is exemplified by the music choice, in that Alastor doesn’t add anything at all to it. This is Vox’s song; Alastor just changes the direction a little.

From that perspective, this song depicts Vox more than Alastor, and explores how he causes his own downfall with the barest of inputs from his ex. Remember what I said in the start about show don’t tell? Let’s observe it in action.

Starting with the runup, because this feels heavy, right? It feels like someone is marching with that Mortal Combat style of walk that lets you know they mean to mess someone up. This sound is implicitly threatening.

Part of that is that it is so calm. There is nothing going on here, no fancy movements or anything of the sorts. The base line is the same two notes played an octave apart on repeat. It’s an A then an E played twice, then a few lower notes that rise higher before resolving back to that E. It's like the creature is taking a breath as it moves. A big, lumbering breath for a massive creature. It feels steady and adds variation.

Meanwhile, the higher chords are exactly the same as each other. A Major repeated four times, then the bottom two notes shift down by a semitone each, to throw the listener off balance.

But its more than that, right? These notes make you feel unsafe, there is intrinsic malice to the steadiness. I sent a friend of mine who knows music better than I do a message to try and work this out, and they mentioned that the higher notes give add suspense, which I think serves to make the bass part feel even heavier by comparison. They give you a moment to weight for that strike, like pulling back a bow string, and they give you something higher to contrast that low tone.

Then we get Vox’s singing voice. He’s been talking and vaguely rhyming up to this point, but now we get a song.

Also, there's a drum now. You would think this creates cohesion, but its offset, adding to that feeling of unease. It matches the second note of each bar to further accent the force of that first step by giving it some backwards force, then the same drum plays twice, once off the beat, once back on. Again, we’re lurching.

But notice how Vox’s sentences interact with the bars. Vox is the only thing that messes with the standard rhythm established by the backing music. Where everything is the same beat repeated each bar, Vox talks quickly for a bar then regains composure.

This is enjambment, linking ideas between thoughts and giving vox momentum. Now that weight has direction behind it, and judging by his word choice, that being the repeated use of the pronoun “you”, that direction is towards you.

Skipping ahead for a moment, I’ve found a ton of disagreement in the online sheet music for this song as to whether there is a tempo change for when the TV goes live.

If there is, you could analyse it and point out how it portrays the superficiality of Vox as a person and how he presents as someone less in control of himself when on camera. Maybe there is a question of which the real Vox is, the composed version or the manic newscaster. Maybe.

On the other hand, maybe there is nothing there, and I am going to wield executive privileges gained from this being my blog and go with my favourite one, this one. (I also used this one, for the record, I just prefer the first)

The score I followed gets so much more complicated once the television starts going, and so do the visuals, honestly. Everything about Vox gets so much more complicated, every joke is earning your attention like a TikTok, terrified you’ll look away. This is how advertising works on YouTube by the way, at least the adds that have to contend with the skip button. They compress everything into five second chunks because they need your full focus.

There are a few jokes in here of note. I would be foolish to not mention the venison pun, but none of them are of particular importance, which paradoxically makes them extremely important.

Notice here, he presents two versions of himself. The purpose of a conversation is to have two different perspectives come together, even if they are similar. But this is the same guy pretending to be varied.

Nothing that Vox says means anything at all. It is all one liners and insults, there is nothing going on behind those eyes, and that is exactly the point. He is all talk, no show.

Vox says he’s powerful, he says he will mess up Alastor’s day, his music makes you feel scared, and yet he is empty.

There is a disconnect between what he tells you and he shows you, which is made even more obvious by his obsession with Alastor. Everything he is saying is “Alastor doesn’t matter, he’s insignificant, meaningless, that’s why I wrote this song to tell him as such.” It’s like an ex who is insisting the breakup hasn’t affected him.

Which, side note, sets Vox up as the type of villain who doesn’t respect boundaries. He’s a stalker obsessed with someone who will not reciprocate his affection.

Vox is the personification of those “I can fix him” twitter incels that view sexuality as a challenge to be overcome. He’s one of a triumvirate of chronically online villains, and trust me, there are people out there in real life who are worse than him.

In his watch through and analysis of Hazbin Hotel, @ohnoitstbskyen posited the idea that, since Alastor doesn’t sing his own song at any point in the actual series, we don’t get any moments of interiority. I would like to politely disagree.

Alastor’s entire deal, as presented in this show, is being a Machiavellian schemer. Like I said earlier, he’s a parasite. What we learn about his interiority here is that he doesn’t ever bother to create, he just steals and repurposes.

It’s that thing about Alastor where the show doesn’t tell you what he wants, it just shows you how he works as a person and how he moves towards his goals.

Case and point, here Alastor just takes Vox’s song and makes it his own, offering questions about Vox’s strengths and pointing out the hypocrisy. Although it's interesting what Alastor choses to highlight, because that does shed some interiority.

“Is Vox as strong as he proports? Or is it based off his support? He’d be powerless without the other Vees”

In other words: look at this guy, he has friends that he relies on.

Now, the Vees are awful human beings, Valentino especially but Vox isn’t too great either. But by far their least bad trait is the fact that they support each other. Again, they are cruel, vile entities, but they are cruel vile entities together.

To my knowledge, Vox doesn’t ever deny that he is working with others, or even obfuscate that knowledge.

It would seem that Alastor, in his attempt to criticize his opponent, has revealed something about himself. That sounds a bit hypocritical to me.

Speaking of which, Alastor is entirely hypocrisy. He spends the entirety of the series talking a big game about how strong and powerful he is, but he never actually demonstrates that. He turns off the electricity in the city, but that’s not strength, that’s flicking a switch. He makes threats, and yet doesn’t back any of them up.

“You still pissed he almost beat you that time?”

“Almost” is a key word in that question, it would seem Alastor has a bit of an ego problem.

Which leads me back to the concept of tell don’t show, because if you don’t show your audience something, they don’t trust it. Alastor and Vox are paired up because they both keep talking and proclaiming their intimidation factor, and yet neither of them actually demonstrate any power beyond that which is normal.

Yes, they mow down mooks, but so do Angel Dust, and Husk, and Sir Pentious.

Before I finish up, I want to talk a bit about how performance can affect personality, and with that I want to contrast a cover with the original.

This is a cover by Annapantsu, Cami-cat, and Chloe Breez. I highly recommend checking it out.

But I want to note how different the acting choices are to the original. I’m not saying one is better, I’m saying they are different.

First, Anna’s version of Vox is so much wilder than the original. Like, the version in the actual series rockets between emotions like a greyhound on skates, but when he is in control, he usually has that malevolent smile that tells you he enjoys messing with your perceptions. I don’t think Anna’s version of the character would ever smile except in that forced, news presenter way. This character seems permanently unbalanced and making only the barest effort to present as otherwise.

She also seems like a more active character than the original, who can only react to Alastor’s advances. This version of the character might make an appearance in a later episode beyond the gratuitous dad-watching-the-big-game commentary of the final fight. Maybe she rocks up to the hotel while Charlie, Vaggie and Alastor are on their quests for allegiances in order to just menace the characters in a way they are completely unprepared for.

Meanwhile, all that posturing has been put onto Alastor. Who has one main difference in performance, but one that shakes up the rest of the song. This version of Alastor is put together, just like the show. She’s casual and almost disinterested, just like the show. She’s detached and hands off, just like the show. Until that final verse.

Then she growls, and that little break in character implies that this version is concealing a much more physical menace. The best way I can put the difference is this: For the original version, it seems like transforming is an effort and something that he becomes. For this version, I think the transformation is Alastor’s natural state, and it is taking every fibre of her being to hold together the façade of civility.

Final Thoughts

I despise the concept of genre, and this is actually a good example of why, because… what is this song? Is it pop? Is it rock? Is it jazz? You could argue it is anything, but I would argue it doesn’t matter.

This song is fun, that’s all that matters. It sets up two villains, one of whom I think could have used more screen time in the series, but ho hum, and the other who got so much screen time and yet remains so mysterious.

Next week, I’ll be covering It Starts With Sorry, and I am genuinely shocked by how many people don’t like that number. I think it’s great. Stick around if seeing me argue that point interests you.

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#rants #literary analysis #literature analysis #what's so special about...?#character analysis #hazbin alastor #hazbin hotel #hazbin vox #hazbin hotel alastor #hazbin hotel vox #annapantsu #chloe breez #cami-cat #meta #meta analysis

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