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that-ari-blogger · 3 months

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No Thoughts, Head Empty, Evil (Hell Is Forever)

Hazbin Hotel doesn��t have time for subtlety, so it takes the most direct approach to any plot point. I want to stress that this is the fault of management insisting on an eight-episode runtime and not the writers and directors. Everyone who cared about this series put in a lot of effort and skill and that needs to be commended.

Notably, one rout taken to negate some of the pacing effects brought on by management was the first episode being as overt as possible. Here are two songs, one says what the hero thinks, one says what the villain thinks, they cannot coexist.

And Adam is a really good villain for this type of setup, because he isn’t particularly complicated. He’s a misogynist who has made narcissism his entire personality, and that’s about it. He doesn’t need to be complex, he needs to be bad.

Hell Is Forever then only needs to get across the most important parts of Adam’s character: Hypocrisy, bigotry, and unoriginality.

Let me explain.

CONTENT WARNING: Foul language.

SPOILERS AHEAD (Hazbin Hotel)

In this context, the unoriginality insult is levied at Adam as a person and not as a character. Adam is a really novel take on the biblical character, but also the archetype he is playing. There are some really cool details that I will go into in detail in a moment.

But as a guy, Adam is painfully uncreative. Case and point: his language style is so basic.

I mentioned in my previous post that Charlie is characterised as naïve, but I deliberately didn’t say anything about this as a youthful lack of knowledge. The series as a whole takes great care to not get the two misconstrued, and Charlie is always treated as the adult she is.

Adam, meanwhile, has the vocabulary of a twelve-year-old who just learned the word “fuck.” He has nothing else going on than dirty jokes and immaturity. He’s puerile.

Lexicon is a character tool. Every word has its place, and every situation has about a hundred ways of approaching it through language. If a character everything in the same exact way, it implies that they approach the rest of their life with the same brute force technique. One size fits all in this person’s mind.

Note that this does not apply to real people, a person can curse and swear as much as they like. Symbolism is not a force of nature.

Adam’s unoriginality actually does take an interesting form in his music. It’s rock, and it sounds cool, but it misses the heart of what rock is as a genre, at least to me.

Rock is transgressive. It’s about raw expression and emotion. It’s a genre about being free from constraints and letting loose. Take Wolf In Sheep’s Clothing by Set It Off, and The Hand That Feeds by the Crane Wives, for example.

The former is about betrayal and feels like a journey through the stages of grief at a broken relationship as it ricochets from unfettered anger in the verses to a more manic-depressive pleading in the chorus, until crashing into a form of acceptance that immediately subverts itself as the song returns to its chorus and the perspective character is unable to move on.

It twists fairy tales to show the corruption of what could have been a storybook romance and lays the blame entirely on the protagonist's ex-partner.

Meanwhile, The Hand That Feeds isn’t really a rock song until it abruptly is. It’s a slow, lilting melody about powerlessness in the face of capitalism and the danger of “the great American ruse.” It has a bit of venom to it as it speaks of loss like a survivor showing off their scars. Then it goes quiet for a moment as its protagonist starts talking about the present and future, before releasing that stored energy into a mantra that speaks of being unchained in the face of the horrors she is describing. It’s a statement of hope, a war cry to raise the morale the downtrodden and a threat to those who hold together institutional injustice.

“I may never be a rich man but the rich man will never have me, never have me I may never be a rich man but I can make sure that I am free”.

Compare that to Adam, who sings:

“The rules are black and white There’s no use to tryin’ to fight it. They’re burning for their lives Until we kill ‘em again.”

Are you picking up on the thematic dissonance here? Its appropriation of an aesthetic without any thought going into it. It’s Adam using a genre about freedom to say “no, the system is fine actually,” and that misuse plays into something else as well.

Adam's wings also allow him to manipulate the cinematography. As he flies, the audience takes the side of Charlie looking up at him as he regards us both with distain.

Music is a tool of expression being heard. That’s why Seraphine should be the most dangerous character in League Of Legends but isn’t because Riot is Riot. Music makes an idea palatable and easy to convey.

Adam’s use of the genre takes that tool and irons it out. It makes the meaning less special by mixing it with utter horseshit that effectively waters it down, therefore stripping those he oppresses of a key tool to band together and achieve their freedom.

He doesn’t even do this intentionally, he's not intelligent enough to do that; the meaning is a side effect of his greater motive.

In that way, Adam is like an AI image generator. He scrubs the source material for shallow things that people like and turns them into something that looks half decent but doesn’t actually mean anything. It’s a disregard for those who paved the way for the thing he likes because it doesn’t occur to him that any of them had any actual thoughts.

This carries over into the visuals, which are just token edginess without any of the punch to them that actually make edginess special. The black and white shot is cool visually, but it’s the most literal visualisation of what he is saying, same with the thing of the image of the pot a few seconds later. There were so many ways to get the idea across, but Adam is uncreative and went for the obvious because it was easier.

Here is what Adam thinks better is. It's just heaven. He thinks of himself and his people as inherently superior, so to go with a line about chances, he shows heaven. Its uncreative on his part, but really interesting storytelling being done by the writers.

On the other hand, the lyrics of this song pull double duty by undercutting Adam at every moment possible to display his hypocrisy. The man is a walking satire of himself, and the writers know it.

Why do I think this? You may ask. Context, I answer.

This song is one of those moments from media that I have heard misused a few times by people who agree with the guy who say it, and by a few people who disagree and think that the author shares the character’s views. I would put the “You Can’t Handle The Truth” speech from A Few Good Men in this category, as well as Feed The Machine by Poor Man’s Poison.

Feed The Machine is a song about political corruption and classism. It’s the idea of “what if we said the quiet part out loud” and is aggressively morbid. It is most definitely not a song about gamers not getting what they want. There are a ton of reasons to get upset with Microsoft, don’t get me wrong, but using this song to protest in that context just looks like Dudley complaining about only getting 36 birthday presents.

A Few Good Men is the most egregious example, because holy moly is it misconstrued. The speech declares that the army is necessary and therefore allowed to get away with whatever they want because the truth is too unpleasant. It talks about the sacrifices needed to win.

But you do realise he’s wrong, right? Jack Nickleson is charismatic, sure, but his character, Jessep, is the villain. The sacrifice in question was the assault and death of a recruit, and this is happening in peace time. The man is a prison guardian in Guantanamo Bay after the cold war and before the war on terror. What is he guarding against? He’s justifying manslaughter with the vague concept of an enemy. He’s overtly in the wrong.

This is the Alf Garnett problem. It doesn’t matter how bad you make a satire, there will always be someone who is actually worse and who doesn’t read the writing on the wall.

For the record, I would also put most of what Catra does in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power into this basket, but I have an entire other series exploring that, so check that out if you want to know more.

Adam is, like Jessep, the villain of the story, and his antagonism is based in his hypocrisy. He spends the entirety of the song claiming that the rules of heaven are set in stone, but are they? He declared that the extermination would be sped up because “fuck you, I do what I want,” and the rules are never actually stated.

Most notably, how does anyone actually get into heaven? We still don’t know that and season one has wrapped up and hinted at an answer. It’s all speculation at this point.

I mentioned in my previous post that this series is aimed at the internet and Tumblr specifically, and Adam actually factors into it, because for a satire set in the Judaeo-Christian afterlife, the series is weirdly averse to critiquing its setting.

Instead, the series uses it as a visualisation of the themes and relies on the version presented in the Devine Comedy rather than anything more specific to the source beliefs.

As such, Adam exemplified the idea of retributive justice. The idea that if you are good, you can make bad people suffer, which I personally disagree with as a concept.

Adam takes on a mournful affectation for this line, the dissonance of which makes me laugh so much. It's like "I have to do a murder, or I will be sad, and you wouldn't want me to be sad, would you?" He's such a shmuck.

“For those of us with divine ordainment, extermination is entertainment.”

It is fun to Adam to watch bad people get their just deserts. And putting aside for a moment the inherently dubious morality of “bad” being ambiguously defined, it also doesn’t take into account the complexity of individuals that cannot be generalised.

Perhaps a person made a mistake or genuinely didn’t take into account the consequences. Maybe a person needed to make the decision because they had no other choice, like stealing money to pay for a medical procedure. What if someone wasn’t thinking straight and made a rash decision because they were tired or inebriated.

Or how about this: A person knowingly and willingly did an abhorrent thing, like a murder, and then regretted it and devoted themselves to getting better as a person and atoning for it.

Your mileage may vary on the morality of all of these people, but if I was to ask you individually if each of them deserved death, what would you say?

The show's specific word choice here, "winners", is a representation of Adam's justification. He thinks that he has earned the right to do genocide and that the penalty for losing a game whose rules he is actively making up, is death.

Looping back to the ethics of this, what is defined as bad in this story?

Is stealing enough to get you into hell? How much would you have to steal? If you walked home from school with a pencil you borrowed from a friend and forgot to give back, that’s technically stealing, so are you going to hell?

Similarly, the series implies a Judaeo-Christian moral code, but that changes depending on the denomination and location. In some places, homosexuality is a sin, would that get someone in this universe damned for all time even if their particular church disagreed with that specific doctrine?

This is all compounded by the fact that, it doesn’t matter what you did to get to hell, the extermination aims to kill as many people as it can, one size fits all punishment.

Which leads to my critique of the internet, because say what you will about its benefits, the internet is awful at nuance, and it is awful at morality. Youtube and Twitter incentivise controversy through their algorithms, and while Tumblr doesn’t have that problem as bad, I have seen so many people in the media analysis side of this platform complain about how x character didn’t receive enough punishment for what they did, or y character’s redemption arc can’t work because they were too bad before.

And people act like Adam and Lute online, either shouting down others to drown them out or by speaking quickly to out debate people with arguments that don’t actually make sense when you think about them.

This is why the popular moral grey character these days is just either a fully good character who wears eyeliner or a fully bad character who’s blonde, but it also strays into how we view our own world.

The internet talks about the world with a black and white morality that just doesn’t fit. I live in a country where one politician being unapologetically terrible as a person means that everyone else is suddenly an angel and everything they do is forgiven, which is exhausting.

Yes, there are evil people out there, and there are good people, but the vast majority of humanity is somewhere in the middle.

People get really emotional online, and the desire to take revenge out on fictional characters is fine, they’re fictional. But take care to not let that stray into how you interact with real people. The internet has far too many horror stories of angry people hurting others because “its ok to hurt them, they hurt someone else, and this is payback”.

After I wrote this @comicaurora put out a post that made my point in a really succinct way, so go read that.

The most chilling example of this is that while writing this post, I was worried people would think I was generalising and assume I have accused them of being awful human beings for misconstruing characters. That’s not what I’m trying to do, I’m just saying that morality is complex and the internet as a whole isn’t very good at understanding that, so we should all try to work together and get better at nuanced thinking.

Be kind to people, essentially. Everyone has a story and some even have reasons for what they do.

Before I go, I despise the visual designs of the angels. I think in concept they are cool, but in practice I don’t quite buy them. However, the one thing that really works for me is that the exorcists all have one eye crossed out. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.

Final Thoughts

I want to focus on my thesis for this series. As in, I think the series is fundamentally about hope. Hope for a better future, hope that you can get better, hope against all odds. So it’s important to me that Adam as a villain goes out of his way to tell Charlie that her hope is misplaced and that it won’t go anywhere.

But that’s the thing about hope, if there was a reason to believe, hope wouldn’t be necessary. Hope exists when there is no proof, and it inspires. Adam’s attempts to tell Charlie that she’ doesn’t have a chance fall on deaf ears because she knows what he’s telling her, it’s all been said before.

The difference being, thanks to the extermination, Charlie and the crew as a whole have no choice but to hope. Adam has brought on his own destruction through his callousness. If he had just left hell alone, it would have got better over time, sure, but it wouldn’t have done so in battle.

In other words, oppressors can only bring about their own demise when they make resistance the only viable option.

Next week, I will be looking at Stayed Gone and Alastor’s introduction, but I also have a post planned for this Sunday in which I will go into Lavendertowne’s second batch of redesigns and explore how they tell their story. So, stick around if that interests you.

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welcometohell09 · 10 months

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I've come to the conclusion that Wolf in Sheep's Clothing (Set it Off) is actually really fucking musically interesting, regardless of the sheer cringe that overcomes people when they hear the opening chords and enter a state of horrified flashback.

(Really I think the 'cringe' associated with nightcore and those kinds of animatics are just more teenage-girl-hating nonsense, because as far as phases go, it's a pretty good one; it's almost, for some people, the first kind of musical subculture they know because it's the first time they're able to deviate from the set songs of their childhood and family to listen to their own music. Looking back to your nightcore phase with nothing but disgust and cringe only hurts you in the long run because if you're constantly scared you'll be cringe one day, you'll never be able to express yourself in a way that feels emotionally authentic and you'll never grow as much as a result.

This is Tumblr, though, so I'm preaching to the converted here, and it's a conversation for another post.)

But holy shit, that song is SO MUCH BETTER, musically, than it has any right to be. The use of two emotionally/musically contrasting bridges coming in quick succession before that final chorus? Inspired. You start listening to the first bridge, and you're like 'yeah, ok, we're at that part of the song now', and it's that Slightly Annoying Contrasting Section that lampshades the limited emotional range of the rest of the song, and we're going to be smooth and flowing here because it's about the potential for forgivene- hOly hEll WHAT THE FRICK IS THAT. Because suddenly, out of nowhere, there's a SECOND BRIDGE. And it's VERY DIFFERENT.

And your sense of tonal stability is ripped away by the lack of continuous chords as you grapple with not having constant support from the backing, and the vocalist is yelling about wanting to kill someone, and the whiplash is real, because it's a complete 180 from earlier and it came out of nowhere. You expected it to transition smoothly back into the chorus like every other song that does the same thing. By the time the 'burn in hell' bit comes, you're grasping for anything with a tonal/emotional centre to tell you what to expect.

And then the chorus hits again, but better.

You've found that tonal/emotional centre that you were looking for, but it feels so different than before. The texture of the chords is different, and you're sort of wrapped up in them, and you suddenly fully realise how emotionally cathartic the chords themselves are, with the constant building tension and release. The lyrics now have new meaning; the 'so tell me' is contextualised, now, by all the anger and hurt of the vocalist, and it means so much more. It almost seems more like they're begging for an answer, even if it still retains traces of that mocking, taunting tone from the other choruses. It really feels like that point in an argument when someone has just thrown their (metaphorical) cards down on the table and is looking the other person in the eye and daring them to tell them how they should feel, how they should react. It's so perfect for what the song is, and it's well supported by the musicality of the piece and the emphasis of the lyrics ('so tell me how you're sleeping easy, how you're only thinking of yourself').

But all of that was enabled by the composer's use of structure; the complete emotional recontextualisation of that chorus takes the piece to a completely new emotional plane, which is simultaneously more vulnerable and more cutting.

Like, damn. That's some good shit right there.

#set it off #wolf in sheep's clothing #nightcore #musical analysis #it's not really that deep but it's there #a slight foray into the dangers of cringe culture but eh it's Tumblr what do you expect

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