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hazbin-but-good · 7 months ago

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another hazbin hotel rewrite/redesign?

yup! and i'm so serious about it that i made a whole blog for it. i'm a white queer ex-cath tran doing this as an art and writing exercise, so feedback from other creatives + jewish and/or racialized folks is especially welcome.

i'm putting this post and only this post in the main tags for visibility. also, not gonna link my main, but i do make my own original stuff, and i encourage fans and haters alike to do the same.

anyway, here's a mostly good-faith 1.7k-word essay on the original. i think it's pretty funny and brings up some less talked-about points. correct me on the facts, disagree with my opinions, and ask clarifying questions, but don't come at me with any piss-poor reading comprehension.

the hellaverse is garbage, and here's why

cw: strong language, stronger opinions, intersectional feminist critical discourse analysis

1. vivienne medrano, the person

medrano was born as a well-off white-passing latina (salvadoran-american) in bougieass frederick, maryland. while attending new york's top art school, she got popular on deviantart-tumblr-twitter by being a prolific multifandom fujoshi furry who's more into ornamental character design than storytelling. upon graduation, she leveraged her fanbase and industry connections to make the hazbin and helluva boss pilots, get helluva made for youtube, and get hazbin made for amazon prime.

like every woman online, she gets harassed for no good reason, and as a certified autist, i will defend her right to be dumb, weird, annoying, and bad with words. however, there are legit reasons to criticize her:

racism, misogyny, homophobia, fatphobia, some antisemitism, past transphobia, past ableism

shitty boss, bad friend

cowardly, vindictive, manipulative, thoughtless behavior

skeevy friends

sucks at taking criticism

in short, i think she desperately needs a PR person and someone to clean up her digital footprint.

2. medrano's art

incurious

inauthentic

noncommittal

creatively stagnant

overindulgent, and the indulgence isn't even fun

shallow and childish framed as complex and mature

bland and boring framed as shocking and subversive

to be clear, i'm at peace with the existence of suckass art like this; i just think the money, attention, and praise it gets are unearned and should go to more interesting works, of which there are infinite.

medrano's had the time, money, and social cache to grow as an artist, learn from the best, and take creative risks, but she hasn't. if she truly has nothing more to offer, she should let her collaborators take the wheel, but she doesn't do that either. instead, she keeps getting more and more resources to make the same baby bullshit, and that pisses me off. she could be the nicest person ever, and this fundamental arrogance would still make her art blow.

stop with the pointless guilt: liking medrano's work does not make you stupid or evil. however, if you stay in the kiddie pool of culture, if you refuse to engage with a diversity of art, if the hellaverse is your point of reference for anything media-related, you can't expect to have your opinions on art, media, or culture taken seriously. you have not earned a seat at the table. you gotta hit the books first.

i cannot emphasize enough how much incredible stuff is out there if you're willing to look further than what social media and streaming services put right in front of you. if you come away from this blog having learned about just one new artist or piece of art, i'll be a happy camper.

3. the hellaverse

a. empty and confused

hazbin and helluva's content and marketing has no clear target audience. the subjects are inappropiate for teens, but the execution is too childish for adults, and lemme tell you what i don't mean by that, first.

not inherently inappropriate for teens:

sex and sexuality

violence, including when it intersects with the above

politics and religion

not inherently childish:

animation (any style)

comedy

episodic writing and/or loose continuity

young characters

fun, happiness, optimism, the power of friendship, cuteness, tenderness, sincerity, etc.

what i mean is that these shows are literally about adult characters who fuck, smoke, drink, do drugs, go clubbing, work full-time, manage their own finances, and deal with stuff like bureaucracy, sexual violence, domestic abuse, marriage, divorce, late adoption, and family estrangement.

however, none of these "adult" things are given enough specificity to create drama or comedy. it's all too stock, vague, flat, weirdly sanitized, and thus utterly banal—pure aesthetics on top of bad saturday morning cartoons. it's exactly what i'd expect from a sheltered disney kid who needs to log off and get into their local gay scene ASAP so their only contact with things like poverty, policing, addiction, and sex work stops being facile movies and TV.

if the shows were aware of this and played with it, that could be amazing, but they're not. they give you the mickey mouse version of the world with a straight face and then play looney tunes sound effects to try to make you laugh and sad_violin.mp3 to try to make you cry. now that's funny.

b. old and tired

let's make like americans and pretend that the rest of the world doesn't exist. even within the confines of the USA, home of the hays code, the red scare, and reaganite propaganda, this neopuritan fascist state ruled by 1000 megachurches in a trenchcoat, the indie/underground animation scene has been doing crazier shit for decades. anti-war films in the 60's, bakshi movies in the 70's, the simpsons shorts and r-rated movies in the 80's, adult swim and MTV in the 90's, flash/newgrounds/youtube in the 00's, streaming in the 2010's—so what are we doing in the 2020's with this wet white rice drowned in expired ketchup? i feel crazy making this point because it's obvious if you've watched these things, but if you haven't, you're gonna be like "well, there's gotta be something new here". no! there isn't! in the words of jimmy "the scot" jordan, nothing, nothing, NOTHING!

c. ideological purgatory

actually, there is one thing in these shows i've never seen before: the presbysterianism. shout out some interesting or at least intentional presbysterian art in the comments, because the way these ideas are presented here is not compelling. it just makes the rainbow neoliberalism even more confusing and contradictory.

i guess the big presbysterian things are protestanism, calvinism, and, uh, big church government? presbysterians, get your shit together. get your brand down. catholics have BDSM and vampires, evangelicals have TV and corporatism; what do you have? celtic crosses? no wonder medrano has such uninspired ideas on divinity.

d. queer deficiency

when i look at a piece of art, i ask myself: "what does this give me that i can't get from the hunchback of notre dame (1996)?" if the answer is as limp as "uhh, gay people, i guess", i can probably look for my gay shit elsewhere and rewatch the hunchback of notre dame (1996) in the meantime.

but let's say that you have no standards. you've been waiting for ages for a show about gays by the gays for the gays, and by god you're gonna get it. this is it! here we go! time for some

generic twink obliteration

male sexuality as aggression and dominance displays

WLW (sex and chemistry not included)

a couple straight femdoms

and the stalest sex jokes known to man

...yeah, it's not very queer. and by "queer", i mean "questioning or subverting gender norms (including sexual roles) within a given cultural context regardless of creator identity and intent". i'm not a queer studies scholar so LMK if there's a more specific term for this, but whatever you call it, it's not in the hellaverse much.

there's not even any transness, literal or metaphorical, just ancient drag jokes. i guess the writers thought we would've been too controversial. so much for an indie animation studio that prides itself in the diversity of its staff both above and below the line, bakshi-style. i wonder how medrano, a bisexual woman, would've felt if told that a lesbian main couple in hazbin would be "too controversial".

4. spindlehorse and the vivziepop brand

spindlehorse toons underpays its overworked staff and keeps outsourcing more and more labor to even more overworked freelancers overseas to cut costs. a rainbow sweatshop is still a sweatshop, and just because these practices may be "industry standard" doesn't make them any more ethical.

the studio has also been repeatedly accused by current and former employees and contractors of creating a hostile and abusive workplace. AFAIK, it still has no dedicated HR person, and victims are too afraid of retaliation like blacklisting and online harassment to speak out.

this is exactly the stuff that unions exist to prevent. as i'm writing this, the IATSE (the parent union of TAG, which is the parent union of all US animation unions) is negotiating with entertainment industry executives for better working conditions, and if the execs fuck around like last year, it's strike time again. so watch this space, voice your support, and don't cross any picket lines.

i hope spindlehorse unionizes, but until then and for these reasons, i don't think you should give money to the company.

first of all, all content on amazon-owned platforms is ok to pirate, and all youtube ads are ok to block. everyone involved in making the episodes has (or should have) been paid upfront, so you're not taking the bread out of anyone's mouth.

next, let's look at the succulent offerings of the official vivziepop merch shop:

$10 pins and keychains

$15 sticker packs

$20 mugs and acrylic cutouts

$25 shirts

$30 metal cards (not even tarot)

$40 lounge pants

$50 mini backpacks

random $80 skateboard deck

forgive my latin americanness, but this is all stuff you can get made by a local metalsmith, print/sublimation shop, or just crafty people in your life. it's cheaper, customizable, and better for the environment to skip all the shipping and packaging. also, not painting your own skateboard is poser shit.

the hazbin website also has $15 pins, one $20 keychain, and $6 trading card packs. people are weird about trading cards, so if for some reason you wanna gamble for a mass-produced bit of cardboard, plastic, and tinfoil, at least bulk-order for all the vivziepoppers in your area so it's less of a huge waste. better yet, trace the designs and make infinite bootlegs.

at the end of the day, buying merch is not activism. your bulk order of trading cards will not save any wage slaves from getting evicted from their overpriced studio apartments. however, the shop links you to all the credited artists/designers, and more of your bucks will actually reach them if you buy their designs directly, then turn them into body pillows or life-sized bronze statues or whatever the fuck.

go through the credits of any episode of helluva or hazbin, and you'll find even more creatives you might wanna support. get jinkx monsoon's albums on CD. subscribe to actually good artist, animator, and composer gooseworx. lots of voice actors now have patreon, cameo, or self-hosted pages where you can write better lines for their characters and have them read it. these things may not look as shiny as Official Merch™, but we all need less plastic shit and more culture anyway.

#spindlehorse #vivziepop #hellaverse #hazbin hotel #helluva boss #spindlehorse critical #vivziepop critical #hazbin hotel critical #helluva boss critical #hazbin hotel rewrite #hazbin hotel redesign #helluva boss redesign #communism #degrowth

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println-archive · 7 years ago

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warning for tumblr user epiphanct

disclaimer: most of what happened between us was on now deleted quotev/quizazz accounts and my old blog that i deactivated after getting stalked by someone irl. all the screenshots i can give are from our email conversations, but i can get some testimonies from people who knew her about how she treated me in public and what i told them at the time it all went down.

(@stillwritinghaikus & @sadcryptid knew me and eli most of the time, but @gafou was there towards the end and can say what they were like the few times we all hung out also only contact these ppl off anon, they don’t all want to be involved too publicly but agreed to be included as character witnesses to who eli is-- there are other people but i don’t have ways to contact a lot of them because we fell out of touch over the years)

anyone who has followed me for long or knows me knows i still deal with panic attacks, issues in relationships, issues with self worth, and nightmares because of a bad ex-girlfriend.

me and eli (i think that’s what they’re going by now and i believe they use they/she pronouns now) were best friends and on-again off-again since 2013 up until some time in 2017. consistently from 2014 until 2016 (i tried to detach from them in late 2016 so we talked significantly less and i would ignore them when they got angry or anything), they emotionally abused me.

tw for incest, daddy kink, and emotional abuse under the cut-- don’t harass her about the things regarding incest or daddy kink because most of that is from when they were 13-15, i’m only including it because its a testament to what type of person they are and something that is available in our email chains to prove. i was complicit in a lot of the incest rp/kink but at no point was i legit into it, i just never called them out on it and i went with it

we met when they were 12 almost 13 and i was 13 (i think) on our first accounts on quizazz (now quotev), a quiz and story-making website, because they spoiled fred dying for me in a post about harry potter.

from then we started talking and eventually became best friends. things were mostly normal and healthy overall for the first year until i got into my first relationship w/ someone. they started to get possessive of my time and over me but i thought it was normal and it pretty much was especially when i found out why-- they confessed to having a crush on me. i got permission from my S.O. at the time to be poly and date both of them but eventually i dumped my S.O. for eli alone. it was around when we became exclusive (when they were 13 and i was 14) that things went from normal messy teenager dating to controlling my entire life

they would get angry when i went to sleep, saying that i had to stay up for them or giving me the silent treatment the next morning if i went to sleep when they didn’t want me to. they didn’t limit asking me to stay up to when they were unstable either, most of the time their reason was that they wanted to rp. they would snap and withhold affection from me if i went to sleep on accident or my mom took my laptop away so i would go to sleep. at some point it reached the point that i was missing days of classes in a row because i was sleep deprived and throwing up in the mornings from stress and lack of sleep. i told them this and they still didn’t stop.

they would also control what i posted on my blog or what i had my layout look like on quotev, because if they didn’t like what it was they would claim we had nothing in common and should break up or they should unfollow me or they should block me. most notably, when i made a sideblog for taylor swift posts at some point i started spending most of my time on that blog because taylor swift was a hyperfocus at the time. i switched that blog to my mainly active one and made it a multifandom with a focus on taylor swift, and they got mad at me for posting so much taylor swift. to placate her, i changed it so i only posted taylor swift in my queue and then, finally, i just ran a multifandom blog and avoided reblogging anything about taylor swift more than two or three times a week. i need to emphasize here: i never tried to make eli talk to me about taylor swift after they made it clear they didn’t like them, i didn’t talk to them about it and i didn’t require that they interact with my posts or anything. they just didn’t want me to post about my interest. this also happened with pokemon and homestuck, but to a lesser extent-- the fight was over once i changed my layout from having art for them, i was still allowed to post some.

we broke up sometime in late 2014 for good, but they still made all of my decisions. they were possessive and called me theirs, they didn’t like it when i liked girls who weren’t them, and only let me show affection for them. i was allowed on relationship other than eli, and only because they approved of her and set me up with her. in the end, we broke up because, with eli’s manipulation and forced dependence on them, i was still in love with them. then, within the month of breaking up with this girl, eli switched the script completely and would randomly go through bouts of anger where they would give me the silent treatment and vague about me for still having feelings for them.

they also made it very clear that they got to pick who i could and could not be friends with. most notably with my then best friend dani (@sadcryptid, dont message them publicly abt this). when they found out i was talking to dani in any capacity-- whether i mentioned her or posted something about her-- they would give me the silent treatment or yell at me about it extensively. this went on for YEARS (two? i think) until i ended up dropping dani for entirely unrelated reasons (we’re cool now). when, briefly after, i made friends with a girl who went by luna (who sexually harassed me so eli ended up being right but they didn’t know about that at the time), they lost their shit guilt tripping me into dropping luna too because they wanted to be my only close friend. another time my friend irl confessed to having a crush on me and eli made me talk to her less and said i was theirs

they also briefly shipped reylo and wincest, i have no idea if they still do but i know they did as long as i knew them, and shipped nico from percy jackson (a canon gay character) with their girl oc. (they had a whole breakdown when nico was confirmed gay, saying it ruined the books for them)

they also would give me the silent treatment whenever something good happened in my life-- when i got tickets for the nebraska comic con, or got to see taylor swift, they would give me the silent treatment or yell at me

they had an incest kink to the point of making up ocs to be their twin and older sister, only agreeing to human aus for michael/lucifer from spn if they were related in them (until they changed their mind to getting angry at me for suggesting them), and had a literal daddy kink-- not just into calling their partner daddy but to the point where they would propose rps where their self insert was the literal child of michael and they would have sex.

they also liked professor/student plots, especially in harry potter with professor snape and their self inserts.

so here are the screenshots now, for your ref in the screenshots, they’ve gone by “mya”, “lottie/charlotte”, “wren”, and “matt”. they also have an oc other than the fake siblings that come up a few times named “juliet” and one named “holly” and one named “casey”. i know that the screenshots don’t have proof of everything i’ve outlined, like i said above most of it happened on accounts that have since been deleted or deactivated so i only have what i could find in my gmail.

i’ll add more screenshots as i find them

#spence.txt #u can rb if u want i dont want anyone to be stuck in a toxic friendship w them #call out post //#long post //

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