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"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink": comparing Emily and Charlie's 'naïveté'

I considered this point before in a rb where I asked myself why I feel so differently about CharlAstor and RadioJoy, but knowing that I didn't invest as much attention into Charlie as I did into my favourite characters, I decided to rewatch the show to better ground my impression of Charlie.

On the surface, Charlie and Emily seem like almost the same character, but my argument here is that Charlie is actually not naive at all; rather, she is a radical optimist. Meanwhile, Emily is actually the "naive" one, and self-admittedly so.

Moreover, it doesn't really make sense to make two characters who have identical roles, especially in a show with such a big cast and such limited time. I also think Emily being "the other" seraphim could be a nod to her role being more than the double-up that it seems.

(There will be a part 2 to this where I compare RadioStatic to RoyalHalo as foils :ppp)

In 'You Didn't Know', Emily and Charlie have a verse together where it's almost impossible to decipher the difference between who is singing because they sound so alike.

If Hell is forever, then Heaven must be a lie If angels can do whatever, and remain in the sky The rules are shades of gray when you don't do as you say When you make the wretched suffer just to kill them again

While they are singing the same lyrics, their thought processes are worlds apart. Emily gets the song started in the first place because she is genuinely confronted for the first time with the fact that sinners can do good, and Heaven doesn't care about it. Then, when she sings with Charlie, this is a revelation for her, and she is immediately disillusioned with the "separation between the righteous and the wicked" (as Sera refers to it).

Was talk of virtue just pretension? Was I too naïve to expect you To heed the morals you're purveying?

Charlie, on the other hand, already knew about exterminations, and in fact, her very first bit of dialogue in the show is critical of the angels for outcasting Lucifer and Lilith. Charlie is fully aware of Heaven's flaws and is demanding that they do better – it's not that she believes they already are better.

What are you saying? Let me get this straight You go down there and kill those poor souls? You didn't know?

Demanding better behaviour and electing to ignore the bad – along with the 'excuses' for it – is very core to Charlie's M.O. and is entirely present in how she tries to encourage redemption and her relationship to the Hotel Crew.

The fairytale about how Hell was created by 'rebellious dreamers' and the privileged, Hell-born princess is going to continue the legacy, is Charlie's comfort during the exterminations.

The rest of episode 1 treats us to the human view of Hell, via the sinners and Adam.

Alastor says, via the commercial, that Hell is not a place of rebels who use the gift of "free will" to empower themselves for justice, but instead, they pursue "blood, violence and depravity of a sexual nature". Angel Dust concurs, suggesting that sinners will not be attracted by altruism, but by the potential to feel empowered via the exploitation of others (e.g. commodifying his and Alastor's bodies lol). As we come to learn, Husk took such a gamble and ended up losing his soul to Alastor, and Niffty is only present because she feels most comfortable under oppressive duress.

This continues into 'Happy Day In Hell', where Charlie has a positive outlook on the Pentagram, despite being fully aware of the sinners torturing each other, and having her eyes open to all the flaws, to the point of the cannibals getting carnage in her literal eye, lol.

Doing what is required, we all have our role I'm not doin' well Another shitty day in Hell [...] I can hear all their stories, the lost and displaced And I know that they're more of an acquired taste But if I open the door and I give them a place At my Hazbin Hotel It'll be a happy day in Hell

Adam then gives his take on the matter in 'Hell is Forever', which is that humans had a life, and they chose sin, which is true, and the sinners we have been presented with so far expressed alignment with.

At the end of the day, Charlie also agrees, which is the motivation for running her redemption hotel. She is not claiming that every sinner deserves to go to Heaven, but is making the point that they should be able to choose to do better, rather than to eternally suffer as crabs in an immorality barrel until they die in extermination roulette (shot like fish in a barrel, perhaps, heh).

Interestingly, Charlie obviously does not have the option to be redeemed because she is not a sinner, and she repeatedly refers to what she is doing as her "destiny", rather than a choice (Vox tease; put a pin in it). But presenting the choice between good and evil is exactly her version of Lucifer presenting Eve with the apple. She wants to bring that kind of free will to the Pentagram.

I will grant that Charlie's Puritanical views and ignorance about systems of oppression are genuine naivety, although I don't think this is what people are getting at, because Vaggi displays similar views but isn't really called naive.

I think the naive accusation Charlie usually gets, particularly when viewing her and Emily as being the same, is the way she buries her head in the sand about how popular redemption will be.

Pretty much everyone tells her that humans are motivated by power, and Lute tells us that Charlie's privilege as a Hell-born (to escape divine judgment and extermination), despite feeling empowering to her, is not real power in the grand scheme. Charlie's lack of influence is a consistent dilemma for her throughout the show, and the masses only listen to her when she's hitching a ride with Alastor and Emily ('Ready For This', declaring Vox the strongest sinner, 'Hear My Hope').

In E2, nobody wants to join the hotel, but Pentious does, because he is pursuing an in with the Vees via Alastor. Obviously, Pentious is lying about his good intentions here, and Angel and Vaggi spell it out for Charlie, but she chooses to be hopeful about his intentions. It's not like she doesn't know things could go wrong, but she holds out, and it does pay off in the end.

Charlie is seen as naive for this, but in her excitement about Pentious joining, she reveals that she doesn't take any of the sinners at the hotel as 'real guests'. Their moral positions are merely tolerated, which is upsetting to Angel, who actually is trying, but his circumstance makes his journey more challenging than Pentious'.

While we are presented with only Angel being upset by this, what this moment tells us is that Charlie has also been simply ignoring Alastor, Niffty and Husk, too, because they aren't trying. She is NOT naive to their faults, yet has no disdain for them. Instead, she actively chooses to take advantage of their practical assistance and invest her redemptive efforts elsewhere, which is 100% the realistic thing to do.

When Alastor is presumed dead or MIA in S1E8 after his (voluntary!) showdown with Adam, Charlie does not dwell on it. And when Alastor quits the hotel and gets 'kidnapped', her initial reaction is to be annoyed with him. She does have some concern for his well-being, but she accepts that if Alastor chooses to put himself in a precarious situation for, seemingly, no reason, he's within his rights to do that, and it's really not her problem.

By contrast, Emily is willing to take accountability for a genocide she didn't know about, is immediately willing to speak for Charlie in her media war against Vox, despite having 0 context for the situation (and this is before the threat of war arises), is willing to risk her life to save the sinners instead of evacuating herself, and, of course, risks her life and loses a wing to save Alastor.

That last one, I'm sure, everyone is going to feel the burn of in the future (baby Hitler moment lol), and generally speaking, I've seen Emily get a lot of flak for insinuating that all sinners are innocent from the fandom. But that is precisely the difference between Charlie and Emily that I don't think people appreciate. Charlie gets accused of seeing the good in truly lost causes, but she's pretty strict, honestly. She just chooses to not be negative about it and always leaves her door open IF people want a second chance.

"Heaven believes in the capacity for good inside of each and every one of you!" "You all just need to decide if you believe in yourselves."

Again, I know it sounds like they're saying the same thing, but they categorically are not. When Charlie tells Vox that she believes anyone can be redeemed, including him, she is 100% combative. She is not inviting him to her hotel, but resolutely sending him away. Charlie's belief that anyone can be redeemed makes her demand better of people, and she doesn't give them the time of day if they aren't putting enough effort in, because she knows exactly how fucked up people can be.

Emily doesn't know, and I do not think naivety is going to be a persistent trait for her, but rather this is the beginning of her arc. Comparing how Charlie deals with Angel Dust to how Emily deals with Pentious illuminates a very core difference between them.

Charlie, at the moment, is frankly closed-minded, which goes hand-in-hand with that strictness about who she judges as trying hard enough or not. She is insensitive about Angel's addiction when she makes him participate in the roleplay with Pentious, diminishing it to a simple matter of saying "no". In S1E3, Angel Dust suggests BDSM as a trust exercise, and nobody has a problem with it, except Chaggie, who basically only hate it because they're sex-negative and presumably super vanilla, with Vaggi calling BDSM "disgusting" and saying nobody would be into it... (Girl, what the fuck are you talking about?!?!)

Furthermore, BDSM scenes require legitimate trust and respect for boundaries via negotiation of all parties involved. Charlie's scripts and roleplay scenes, on the other hand, are entirely dictated by her and leave no room for anything earnest. Angel Dust is a professional actor and sex worker – he knows better than anyone that the performance of intimacy is not the same as actually having it.

This gets followed up in S2E3, with the Western roleplay that Charlie drags everyone into to simulate self-sacrifice. Up until that point, she has given Angel a bunch of restrictive rules in 'Speedrun to Redemption', including bangers (/s) like total sobriety is required to be a good person, and how one dresses is a measure of "dignity".

In dictating that Angel needs to be exactly like Pentious, pressuring him into sharing his trauma, and overall just denying Angel agency on his own path to healing, Charlie is actually the one denying Angel dignity and humiliating/shaming him. This leads to Angel, while still at the hotel and clearly still trying his best to turn his life around, declaring that he believes himself to be irredeemable, too.

Sorry to quote Avatar '09 on you, but "it is hard to fill a cup that is already full", and Charlie's is very much so. She seems to become aware of this flaw by the end of the season when she steps down as hotel manager.

This is how Emily's naivety is both a weakness and a strength: her cup is totally empty, she is open-minded and "determined" to learn. Whereas Charlie just keeps pushing Angel to live his life her way, Emily is extremely excited to get to know Pentious as an individual and tries until she gets it right to help him settle in Heaven.

In 'Speedrun', Charlie knows that redemption is possible, and on the flip side, in 'Like You', Emily knows that descending is impossible (in this circumstance at least, lol). Both Pentious and Angel have been thrust into their respective songs because they put in the work to be better people and have been deemed the worthy ones.

However, a huge difference is that Charlie breaks into song to represent the hotel's values to the media, not taking Angel's personal journey into account, whereas Emily is trying to show Pentious that he doesn't have to be lonely in Heaven, because he says that he misses his friends, and she's sincerely trying to address that (not having the context to understand his feelings for the Hotel Crew in particular).

When it doesn't work, Charlie just tells Angel to try the same things again, but when Emily notices, she stops trying to push Pentious into Heaven society. Instead, she ends up making him the golden eggs and giving him his own space, which he appreciates. In Hell, Charlie ends up really hurting Angel and herself, despite being desperately warned by Vaggi and Angel about Vox and Velvette from the start. This is obviously made a lot worse by the fact that Charlie already had her encounter with Valentino in S1... she is not naive or ignorant to Angel's situation in the way that Emily is to Pentious'.

This open-minded trait is a follow-up on what we saw in 'You Didn't Know' from Emily: when presented with new information, she takes it. And this is why I titled the post "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink", because I think people have been mistakenly assuming this is a lesson that Charlie needs to learn, but time and time again, she has shown she already knows this. The person who is in for a rude awakening is Emily, which is what happens in her first appearance, and also at Vox's rally in 'Silenced' with the gift baskets thing.

Emily feels extremely guilty and accountable for how hurt the sinners are, even though, again, she is not an exorcist, was not privy to the exterminations, and also does not blame Lute or Sera for making Heaven look worse for throwing their weight around. Meanwhile, Charlie blames Vaggi and Lucifer for the hotel's bad press with, honestly, OUTRAGEOUS fury (she came in on demon form, sent out a ring of fire and flipped a couch like... damn, Valentino tease 💀). Charlie buries her head in the sand ("bullshit", as Vaggi puts it) about the fact that Lucifer was hardly a factor in what happened at the rally.

Something that is really core to Charlie's philosophy is that, while her view of what effort looks like is quite narrow, and hopefully we will see it expand over the series, she is always going to give an A for effort, largely because she wishes she would be given such grace. Because of her being such a fiend for fluffy escapism, she doesn't talk Emily out of the gift baskets. She also takes umbrage with Vox showing the pictures of the extermination, because she recognises the angels are trying to help her.

And I'm not gonna lie, while Vox was going to talk shit no matter what, I think the gift baskets made the angels' presence genuinely offensively ignorant. Of course it was, though; it was Emily's idea, and she lives in a bubble, completely insulated from sinners. She is self-aware of this massive blind spot and wants to address it, hence why she brings Pentious to the meeting as a "Hell expert" and is so eager to go down to Hell and talk to Charlie.

But neither Pentious nor Charlie helped her out and told her it was a bad idea, so she had to learn in the hardest way possible (Alastor tease... pinnnn).

While Charlie gives Emily her A for effort, Vaggi and Lucifer don't get theirs because it doesn't fit into Charlie's aesthetic. Honestly, the angels did not come to speak with Charlie to address Vox, either; the gift baskets were originally okayed by Pentious for Charlie (and presumably her hotel guests). The angels addressed the situation as an extension of Charlie, and that is who she reserves her gratitude for.

We see the same thing happen when she tries to rally the Cannibals, then wants to reject them for being... cannibals, but she has Alastor and Rosie save her from making perfect the enemy of good. This is also something that Velvette criticises her for in S2E3.

"Is it true that you believe sinners need to change literally everything about themselves in order to be redeemed? And that the Morningstars currently dislike 98% of the population of sinners?"

I believe this is implied to be a critique of hers via Katie in S2E1 as well, and it would be a follow-up on the themes presented in 'Respectless', where Velvette is dismissed mainly for not fitting in, despite raising a good point, and not getting heard out; Carmilla is talking about how the overlords can prevent losing souls on THEIR chains to exorcists, and Velvette contributes. She gets shut down because Carmilla is cowardly hiding her involvement and a hypocrite, who is happy to arm sinners in turf wars against each other, but not against their collective enemy, since revolt has the potential to involve her family.

Velvette is antagonised, not for being wrong, but mainly because she doesn't suit Carmine's vibe (+ what polite respect is anyone owed, honestly? They're all evil overlords). Of course, she is ageist to Zestial, but it's in retaliation... anyway, much to say on this topic, but this post isn't about Velvette. My point here is that I believe that there is some thematic dialogue occurring here, and since Charlie is the main character, I wouldn't be surprised if Charlie's closed-mindedness is addressed when Velvette gets her time in the spotlight.

Going back to Emily, I think it's possible Alastor will be the one to truly teach her that you cannot make the horse (deer, heh) drink if it refuses to. As I said, this dynamic usually gets attributed to CharlAstor, but on top of Charlie already knowing this, Alastor also notes and relies on the fact that "[Charlie] will never admit to Hell she was wrong". Meanwhile, Emily profusely admits wrongdoing at every chance.

"Those sinners need help", she says, and ends up giving it to someone who, perhaps, didn't want or deserve it. We saw a similar kind of thing play out with Vaggi and Lute in S1, where Vaggi shows Lute mercy and expects her to be changed by it.

"Live knowing you only do because I let you."

...And we all know how that turned out! What's more – as we, the audience, all complained – Lute has not even made good on coming down like "gravity" yet. And we know she will 😬.

If not Alastor, I could also see Abel being the proverbial horse here. Emily installs Abel as Adam's replacement because she wants to give him the chance to be a less violent leader than Lute. He dodges the responsibility, and when push comes to shove... Abel ends up following in Adam's footsteps. No telling which side of the fence he will fall on, but we see in the S2 epilogue that he's conflicted.

If he does side with Lute, however, that would also be a serious wake-up call for Emily that second chances are only as meaningful if taken, which is exactly what Charlie has been saying.

I will explore it further in the comparison between RadioStatic and RoyalHalo's dynamics, but I believe that a tension bubbling up to be addressed is that, beyond the Puritanical aspects, Charlie's scope of goodness is limited. I think it is alluded to by Pentious in 'Live to Live':

It starts with "sorry" Though it cannot just end there

Apologies, non-violence, kindness... those can be a start, but they won't always be enough. We also see it with Husk, where he helps Angel by not bullshitting him in 'Loser, Baby', is very harsh as a therapist, and breaks Angel out of Val's mind control in the S2 finale with a hard smack to the back of the head.

To tease the next post, essentially, both Alastor and Emily give Vox apologies of sorts (for publicly humiliating him, for the exterminations), and they aren't enough for him, because he is really demanding they make up for things he isn't owed (for not reciprocating his feelings, for not letting him into Heaven).

While Vox, of course, is not the judge of divine, big 'R', Redemption, I think there are various flavours of absolution, including in an interpersonal/emotional context. Atoning is the one demonstrated by Pentious, and specifically called out by Speaker (and possibly Sera, iirc). But, especially since we've been told redemption "starts with sorry", I think forgiveness (both to the self and others) is due to get heavier emphasis in the future.

As I said before, Charlie gives an A for effort, but that's not actually how apologies work, as Angel tells her. Alastor and Emily definitely don't get their As for effort alone, but they also don't expect to. As Rosie said, "talk is cheap, but actions – they speak the truth", and that's something that they seem to live by: Alastor spends most of his time in S2 chastising Vox for being all for show; Emily wasn't looking for forgiveness in the end, but she put her money where her mouth is, was moved to act by true compassion, and Hell was also moved by that. The sincerity was so touching that even Katie Killjoy was loving some gay shit lol.

And here, I hope my foil argument isn't sounding so crazy when I say that Vox and Charlie have the opposite expectations: they want people to recognise their intentions, even when they are doing damage in the process, which is what season 2 was all about. Both of them, though they are supported by their families from the start to the bitter end, learn the hard lesson that it just doesn't work that way. And obviously, their respective teachers, Alastor and Emily, show them the opposite sides of that coin.