It’s one thing for Raph and Vivienne to tarnish the meaning of CNC to cover up their rape fantasy and ti escape from accountability and responsibility, but I know damn well vivienne isn’t gonna do a goddamn thing about Angel’s trauma outside of songs and huskerdust moments. Watch Angel escape from valentino, and whatever emotional baggage and trauma he was get magically cured because husk becomes his boyfriend and takes care of him, he’ll be a better person and have a scene or two where he has a nightmare about Valentino but husk is there to take good care of him
My first response is, well yeah. Songs. While she is terrible at structuring a musical and Sam Haft has no songwriting talent and his sound mixing is atrocious, emotional peaks should be the songs.
So I would of course assume the abuse arc will incorporate songs in important moments if it was competent.
Since it isn't, I'll assume the songs will be in improper moments but still present in the story.
So that doesn't work as a complaint. A powerful, well placed song for Angel Dust's story wouldn't be a bad thing. It would be a success. So if the threshold for criticism looks identical to success, your argument needs better definition. What would make the songs a criticism rather than just what the show is?
Improper placement, narrative stagnation, badly written music and/or lyrics, sound mixing failures, voice directing failures- these are criticisms.
The presence of the songs are not.
On the other side of your point, that's more of a criticism to be made. Not in an anti-Huskerdust way; instead treating the ship as a necessary point to the arc. The relationship itself is not the criticism, it's "how does the relationship interact with the abuse arc?"
Because the relationship would have to function around the arc in a competently written production. But the criticism comes from asking what problems does the romance solve?
If the romance solves the abuse, now we have a nuclear failure of trauma-aware media ethics by flattening the graphic abuse and torture scenes in 2 seasons into "true love saves the day". No matter if the series attempts to tone down the visual depictions of physical violence moving forward, season 2's motel scene with Vox would be trivialized by Angel Dust being 'saved' by Husk.
So if the relationship is repeatedly foregrounded as the 'cure' or answer to Angel's abusive relationship with Val, that's an F.
That is a total failure of ethical trauma-awareness on top of the already stacked pile of failings the show already has committed on the individual level between scenes, episodes, and seasons. But an ultimate failure nonetheless. That would make it a bad show about trauma and abusive relationships. So if you insist your show is about trauma and survival, you failed.
If your show is melodramatic trash TV that is just "here's stuff that happens and everyone has feelings about it", you get a passing grade. Like, if the intention is to turn domestic abuse into a form of Disney curse that true love can break, you won.
So it's less about the quality of the show for me and more about the identity of it at this point. Like I would never have a complaint again if Hazbin stopped acting pretentious and admitted it was basically just Mating Season [because Mating Season definitely feels like the guy who made Big Mouth saw Hazbin and wanted to make his version],
It's just Medrano insists her shows are deeper than that. The one thing the creator intent matters is when asking what they wanted to say or why they made the thing. That's an Artist- relevant question that someone may interpret from the media or just get straight from the horse's mouth since their reason for making a piece does not have to be your reason for liking it.
But based on what they said the story was about, you can't say the art is good or bad without running it through their reason as to why it exists. You can love a piece of work and based on what a creator says about why they made it, you can either say "yes they did do the thing they wanted" or "no they did not meet that standard in my opinion and here is why."
But the rubric is based on the artist choosing their own criteria. Hazbin is a bad show based on its own stated goals.
It was a cult classic for how bizarre the choices are in that way where it's such a strange choice that I just appreciate being able to see it made. But this last season felt both more conventional and structured while being way worse a story and experience. It was mainly boring and lacking, which summarize every technical complaint I could give.
"this doesn't meaningfully advance the plot"
"the director and the script are fighting"
"missing context to make this moment meaningful" (repeat this one 200 times)
"there is a shocking lack of narratively relevant violence and the camera frames it weirdly erotic."
Basically all of season 2 was some form of those criticisms. So I have begun associating improved narrative structure with worse storytelling.
Worse in a way that the improvements just draw even more attention to the pre-existing show running failures. The issue I have is that I can't say whether I hope the production returns to being a nightmare to potentially salvage the enjoyment of how bad the story was, or if I hope the production gets more competent for the sake of the employees knowing that it will result in the series being both bad and boring.
Personally I think I'm leaning towards the latter since my enjoyment is masochistic by nature and I'm trying to treat myself better lol.
