#no bad things won’t happen.

[inamindfarfaraway]

The Exorcists’ Masks of Virtue

The vast majority of Exorcists in Hazbin Hotel have a notable design element that other angels don’t: their masks are missing an eye. Specifically, the right eye.

I believe this is a reference to the Bible, Matthew 5:29. Jesus says, “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”

He’s being hyperbolic. Mr Free Healthcare was not pro-mutilation. What he means is that you have to be willing to make sacrifices to prevent sin. The context of the eye metaphor is him condemning adultery and warning that even something as easy, casual and small as a look full of lustful intent can lead to further, worse sin if you don’t notice your sin, hold yourself accountable for it and do the work to not let it influence your decisions. This will probably be hard. It could be very, very painful. Changing your perspective can feel as horrible as plucking out your eye, so many people can’t bring themselves to do it. But although it won’t feel that way in the moment, it’s healthier for our general wellbeing in the long run to abandon traits and behaviours that damage ourselves and/or others.

(You may notice that Jesus’s teaching that you can have sinned, redeem yourself by giving up sin and thus escape damnation is the founding principle of the Hazbin Hotel. You may also notice that it contradicts everything the Exorcists believe.)

The Exorcists seem to follow this idea of painfully excising badness for the sake of the greater good devoutly to the point of placing it above teachings like ‘Thou shalt not kill’, with their job being to remove sin, in the form of sinners, to protect Heaven. Hence the missing right eyes. They’re a declaration of moral righteousness and inability to stumble.

But the truth is that the Exorcists all have their right eyes. Their flawlessness is a facade. Underneath, they are untouched, think themselves morally untouchable and, as shown by their horror and outrage when even one of them is killed, would much rather be physically untouchable too. This perfectly represents their complete unwillingness to acknowledge their own faults, let alone improve. They are never the ones who sacrifice. They force the sinners to sacrifice and don’t compensate it with any salvation. They metaphorically rip out the sinners’ eyes, but still condemn their entire bodies as inherently, permanently sinful. So they’ll just have to do another Extermination to get the other eyes! And another one to cut off their right hands! And so on until there’s nothing left.

The only exception to the rule is Vaggie, both in appearance and character. Her mask has the left eye crossed out instead. Even before her expulsion, she’s set apart to the audience as an Exorcist who has the capacity to, shall we say, see a different side of things. Her mask having its ‘sinful’ right eye reflects her understanding that the Exorcist worldview is wrong.

When she almost kills a demon child, her hateful vision clears. She discards the part of herself that’s an unquestioning, merciless agent of death, terror and grief… and as punishment for what Lute perceives as treacherous weakness, gets her eye plucked out.

Of course Lute leaves her with only the ‘sinful’ eye. It brands Vaggie forever as the inversion, a perversion, of what the Exorcists are meant to be.

You know, all this talk of eye removal in the Bible reminds of another line - ‘an eye for an eye’. Adam directly quotes it in “Hell is Forever”. He uses it to frame the Exterminations as Old Testament-style punitive justice; the sinners did harm and so they receive it. But putting aside the debate about how ethical the concept of revenge is, the entire point of taking an eye for an eye is that it’s proportional. The punishment fits the crime. If someone cuts your eye out, you shouldn’t murder their whole family in front of them and then slowly disembowel them to death. That would be the sin of wrath. You should just make them pay without excessive pain or collateral damage. This is the fairest form of revenge.

The Exorcists don’t do that! The Exterminations aren’t proportional to the wrongs of all they hurt, nor was Vaggie’s brutal punishment equivalent to her extremely mild insubordination. Lute literally takes Vaggie’s eye, and more, after Vaggie does nothing to her! That’s the opposite of the phrase! Adam and his soldiers are wrathful and cruel, deriving satisfaction from others’ suffering. But they just can’t stop going on and on about how disgustingly evil the sinners are, in total hypocrisy… despite some of the sinners being far better people than the genocidal Exorcists are… it’s like they’re obsessed with specks of dust in the sinners’ eyes when they have massive logs stuck in their own. Oh hey, that’s in the Bible too!

[houseswife]

[exilepurify]

it’s been four months since December 2022 and I’m still not over the fact that Reigen was apparently so haunted by guilt from that one time in S2E2 where he scolded Mob for eating too many french fries that it showed up in the super emotionally charged eyecatcher montage during the series finale.

I wonder if reigen will ever find the closure he needs to free himself from the poltergeist of regret that obviously follows him around as a result of this incident. the confession incident really had reigen re-evaluating everything from the past three years.

[strawbubbysugar]

Oh gods I’m slightly scared to ask but um…has Moon smiled ONCE ever since the incident? Like It’s been a year… :(

Maybe smiling at a pretty night sky, or a part in a book or something?

He has not 😔

He called you starlight for a little while. Now the stars make his chest hurt.

He hasn’t had the chance to read since it happened. Every moment he’s managed to have for himself he has spent investigating the incident and looking over his shoulder.

He hasn’t been happy since it happened

[daily-rgg-posting]

I finished Yakuza 4, look how happy Daigo and Majima are for saejima’s patriarchal inauguration 😭

[siflshonen]

Katsuki Bakugo, I miss you so much.

[milimeters-morales]

ACAU Miles doesn’t like thinking of Aaron being the Prowler (i’ve decided he figures it out in year two, but doesn’t tell anyone about it) because he doesn’t like that Aaron is doing bad shit and lying about it, and a smaller part of him doesn’t ever want to consider that Aaron and Peter are remotely similar right now, but he sort of… like, he starts to believe “playing favorites is fine when it comes to family” and doesn’t give any hints to anyone about his uncle being the Prowler, when he hears about what the Prowler’s done some nights he’ll brush it off and make himself forget a few days later, and if it sticks with him he tries to convince himself he’s jumping to conclusions and Aaron surely had his reasons. If he accepts that his uncle is capable of this evil, that means he’d have to tell people, and that would no doubt get Aaron taken away from him, and would send him (and his possible sister) into the system. Besides, his uncle is just trying to provide for them the best way he knows how, and life isn’t fair anyways, why ruin what he’s got? Why does he have to be the one to be good all the time, why can’t the adults just know without his intervention, why can’t he just sit back and let them do whatever they want? Especially since it’s not really negatively affecting him. He’s got a roof over his head, always has food, a warm bed, and a loving guardian, soooo… 🤷🏾‍♂️

[phoenixmetaphor]

angry kitty Leon from @thebrandywine ‘s [cat scratch fever]

[starbuck]

well, today i read 100 pages of my book, made a (currently) complete calendar schedule for the entire year that encompasses work, school, and free time activities, and got myself completely set up to start the next semester on Monday, so i may not have gotten everything done that i wanted to, but i’m still proud of myself!

[evansbby]

bestie i don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with this but apparently noah schnapp is really shooting his career in the foot with all his pro-zionist propaganda and it’s getting to the point that people want him fired/recasted IMMEDIATELY

some people say that jaeden martell would be a better recast for will based on his performance from defending jacob but like 😳 i have never seen defending jacob 🫣

i know jaeden’s performance from it was great but was he really that good in defending jacob i need to know i need this zionist to be jobless like YESTERDAY 😭

No it’s actually really fucking awful bc celebs like Bella and Gigi Hadid have to be SO careful with their words and how they say things meanwhile their father’s homeland and people are being b*mbed and killed, and Bella gets fired from Dior and replaced by an Israeli model. But this stupid white boy can say shit like “Zionism is sexy” and face no repercussions??? Bc I bet he will face zero repercussions for this. And the fact that he literally does not care about the literal genocide of the Palestinian people, he’s some privileged kid from New York who feels “personally scared” meanwhile he’s putting videos out saying Zionism is sexy like THIS IS INSANE. The world we live in insane. Anyone who is pro-Palestinian is INTERROGATED on TV whenever they are given a platform when all they want is freedom of their people, meanwhile Noah Schnapp can do shit like this “Zionism is sexy” and TRUST ME NO ONE WILL SAY A WORD. And by the time stranger things comes out whenever, everyone will have forgotten and they’ll be his number one fan again.

[fawndlyvenus]

.

Is this the part where I spill that I legit am hanging onto KimChay by a single fraying thread because of people making this once happy place a nightmare? Because-

[deklo]

i’ve got 1h 45m left of the summer sons audiobook but even less considering i’m listening at 1.2 speed BUT it’s so hard for me to pay attention when im drawing UGH

[rackartyg]

in therapy today i just talked about the dark urge and astarion and my therapist was elated about it. it was fantastic. “wow you’ve really been using this story and those characters to process things. that’s amazing!”

the era of being ashamed of my interests is over. it’s apparently Cool and Healthy to use fiction to cope. i wish i could tell fifteen year old me about this it would blow her mind

[boltgunkiller-archive]

i find it damn near impossible to get mad at santana’s behavior in 3x06 and 3x07 because i genuinely do think she had the right to be lashing out at everybody. sue me idk

[mothboyhalo]

Just like Richas said that he dosent think 4halo will happen to qFoolish when asked. I think qBad has accepted that reality. It’s why although gets jealous he tries to ignore it and is like more aware of his loneliness. The one sided heart goodnight killed me and unlike other times qBad didn’t get sad about it he kind of just accepted it and continued doing his thing. I’m here living for it.

[upsidedog]

we know for a fact billy would take the girls he was seeing and max home together. so max would have to meet most of the girls he was with, and assuming not all of them were seniors, in season four she would be going to high school with some of them and man i hate that. like imagine being in spanish class with a girl you had to listen to your dead brother hook up with. at the time she treated you like little kid but now you’re expected to be her peer, she calls you maxine in a way that makes him live through her, she talks about it his death like he was a close friend when in reality it couldn’t have been more than a day that she spent time with him. the feelings in max collide, there's a defense of billy's image, that only people who truly cared about him should be speaking on his death, and a defense of this girl, that she wouldn't be calling billy sweet if she knew what he called her when she wasn't around. there is really no escaping billy even after his death he haunts every aspect of max’s life.