#so anything that emphasizes the inauthenticity is good in my book

[artbyblastweave]

Hi! You seem to know a lot about Worm and I haven't read it in too long. You posted a thing I liked about Siberian and it reminded me of a question I had that I may's well ask you.

If I remember correctly, in the interlude where Siberian tries to recruit Bitch, they can communicate, right? Like, isn't there something in there about Siberian having body language stuff going on so that is as easy as talking to a dog? Do you know why that is? It makes sense at the time and then we find out Siberian is a projection and suddenly I'm not sure why Manson should have any idea how to do that.

Honestly? No idea. Two theories off the top of my head, which I think would have some thematic resonance-

He really was following her for weeks, observing her interactions, mannerisms and body language, and as one of the world's foremost experts on parahumans and how powers can modify the host he came up with an educated guess about how to best conduct himself with her. Thematically resonant because it means that the first interaction Bitch has in the entire book that feels natural to her, is in fact the result of weeks of premediated observation and preparation for the encounter, coming from someone whose entire pitch is a life free of bullshitters.

Two, for reasons completely unrelated to Bitch, Manton actively cultivated the "natural predator" mannerisms as part of his overall commitment to the bit, and his alignment with Bitch's preferred mode of engagement is some combination of an accident and why he thought they'd get along in the first place. Also thematically relevant because a major element of Bitch's POV in this chapter is her confusion and uncertainty about... basically everything. Her own motivations, her level of loyalty to her teammates, how her own power works, who she should trust. The way she lives her life isn't as much of a considered lifestyle choice as what she ultimately winds up with in Gimel; it's just who she is, and what she's dealing with. But it's what Siberian actively wants to be and has to actively cultivate- even if he's authentically after it, it would rankle Bitch for sure to know how much he as to work at being "free" when, again, the pitch is a life where you don't have to pay attention to expectations or roles.

Just my best guesses, though. It's also possible his vial modified his psyche in the same way it did hers. Who knows

[hazbin-but-good]

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.

[a-lion-in-summer]

A Herstory of Transmasculine Identities is a book I find I’ve really been wanting now that I see it. It’s a mixture of editorial essays and personal accounts by trans men and non-binary transmasculine people who spent years or decades of their lives being active in the feminist and/or lesbian communities talking about those experiences, how those histories affect who they are today compared to if they’d been born as cis men, the (usually negative) reactions they experienced coming out as trans, and their experiences in the transgender community.

It isn’t, and makes very clear it isn’t, a universal experience of trans-ness, but there are a lot of experiences in there I’ve very much wanted to hear. We say “there’s not just one way to be trans” or “you can still be trans and not follow this particular mainstream, normative narrative”, but some views are definitely more popular. Historically and today, “I always felt I was a man and did not want to call myself a lesbian even though I dated women and I want to date straight-identifying women and not lesbian-identifying women” has always been a gold star for a trans man trying to emphasize his Real Man status, even if you hear different rhetoric around it.

“Trans men who date women are straight” is a good one-liner and certainly needs to be emphasized over and over again for awareness in mainstream society to combat purposeful misgendering. But… it’s a deep over-simplification of many trans people’s actual, messy lives. Some trans men identify with this sentiment very strongly, others have much more mixed feelings. Some trans men have long histories in the lesbian community and date only queer women, not straight women who don’t share their culture. Some trans men call their sexual orientation queer rather than straight because of their histories in the queer or lesbian communities and the rejection they receive from cis straight people inherent in their trans status. Then there’s a broad range of identities people place under terms like butch, transmasculine, or trans men but still “lesbian”, rather than easy, neat boundaries. (Likewise the community of trans women who want to date straight men and assert their identity as straight women is different from trans women who were active in the gay men’s community and are partnered with gay men, and trans women who are proud lesbians who want to be part of the lesbian community and upset about transphobia against them from other lesbians from trans women coming from “straight men who crossdress” communities with straight-identified partners and often very negative views of lesbians or being seen as lesbians.)

I’m not a huge fan of the popular sentiment in the trans community: “I am A and not B. I was always A all my life. I was not affected in any way by the fact I and those around me believed I was B for many years of my life, because I have now realized I am actually A and always was A.” I get why it’s become so popular--anything to emphasize you are A and deserve to be treated as A and validated as A. Some people feel it perfectly describes their experiences, I suppose. I like this anthology for voicing reservations I too have to it, though. Whether or not I was “really” a boy all along, the fact that I was raised as a girl and treated as a girl for decades has profoundly affected who I am today, very differently from an alternate reality where I was magically a cis boy from birth. And then things get further complicated if we acknowledge non-binary people, for whom “I am A” might not be consistent with their experiences or something they want to say, but who feel “I am not B”, either partially or entirely.

This was especially emphasized by older trans men. “I transitioned at fifty, not fifteen,” to paraphrase, “but I’m just supposed to pretend I did and not talk about all those decades of discrimination I personally received or activist causes I personally fought for?” I was in my mid-twenties when I started to transition, and I still find it inauthentic to deny all those years I spent trying to fit in with “girl” and the expectations around it and the broader social consciousness of feminist realization that “I am being treated this way because I am a girl and that’s different from how it is for boys.”

This anthology also mentioned reservations some people had about the contingent of the trans men’s community that gets super into this sentiment--it’s often tied with rejecting of all things female/feminine in favor of sexism and toxic masculinity in order to emphasize the speaker’s Real Man status or to help them overcome their difficulties or insecurities about passing. As a feminist, yeah, I’ve seen that too from some trans men and grates against me how easily “being a woman is not for me personally” becomes standard misogynist rhetoric about why women/femininity are bad or inferior. Obviously this doesn’t sit well with trans men who have been active in the feminist community for years and who still feel strongly about feminist ideals and equality, no matter how many of their former friends have rejected them as traitors to daring to transition.

And of course the push-back from the other side that any ambiguity will lead to invalidation of their own identities or that these other people are being trans wrong or aren’t trans enough. As if if we only present a united front around a single, minimal-complexity narrative then, then cis people will accept us!