Welp, I’m back on my Hazbin Hotel shit again, so hello everyone and welcome to my totally normal response to the most recent two episodes of Hazbin Hotel and my thoughts on the subjects there in:
So, first and foremost, let’s touch on the elephant in the room… or is it more off a giant demon shark in the room…
Yeah, Voxtech and the Vees is such an obvious call to the Tower of Babel story it’s pretty funny. I mean, top of their glorious tower, wanting to climb to heaven to usurp God, yadda yadda. It’s such a simple story of pride that it’s honestly not even that interesting. I’m much more interested in Val and Velvette’s reactions to Vox’s blatant narcissism than the actual story of trying to rise up against heaven and even then they aren’t exactly the most engaging parts of the two episodes we got.
One side note: What’s up with Not-Vaggie’s voice? I don’t HATE the new name subplot, especially considering I entirely expect it to be a loop back to “love yourself not what others thought of you” type beat that modern stories tend to lean on so heavily, but like she sounds like she got punched in the throat? Is that just me? Is the VA okay? Does she have like a throat disease or something cuz she went from sounding gruff but feminine to sounding like a trans man and it’s so jarring to me. Can we stop making the tom boy characters border on trans? Cuz uh… news flash that’s seriously fucked up. Anyway, I’ll stop that rant there before someone starts flinging death threats because I don’t like trans people. I do like them, I just think your belief in affirming self destructive behaviors is why pre and post op trans people have a ridiculously high suicide rate.
Now, the next thing I really want to lean on considering my last Hazbin Hotel post: Sera’s Confession is such a great song with a wonderful moral and I genuinely appreciate the fact that, once again, this show is better than most media for portraying the actual good parts of this religion.
“Oh, but Lute is also in heaven and she’s a bad person”
Yeah, Heaven isn’t for just good people. Unfortunately, being a “good person” isn’t actually a requirement for making it to heaven — at least not by modern tumblr opinions. Being a good person only gets you more, as God will take in any and everyone that finds their way to Him and truly gives their soul to his care. Lute starts as a character with righteous convictions — for a ttrpg reference, she’s basically an Oath of Vengeance Paladin from D&D 5e, so she’s given herself to God but that’s an ongoing choice you have to make. What matters is the fact that we’re watching Lute LOSE to her sinful nature. She’s Sera’s foil in this arc and I really appreciate that. And I do mean that, she’s SERA’s foil, not Charlie’s, not Vaggie’s, Sera’s. Why do I believe that? Simple: They both took the lessons given at the end of the last season and reacted in starkly different ways. Sera went to God for guidance, asked, begged, pleaded for wisdom on how to repent and fix what she’d done. She was inevitably told that, no, she couldn’t FIX the past, but she can change how she acts going forward. She’s confessed and is seemingly on the path to repentance.
Meanwhile, we have Lute. Lute has quite literally personified her anger, spite, and sin into — funnily enough, Adam — a quite literally Devil on her shoulder, cartoon horns and all. She can’t see why what she did was wrong, all she sees is that someone she cared about died. She doesn’t realize that he died because he sinned against God, because he acted as better than any other sinner despite being quite literally the FIRST sinner — and all you nuts that don’t realize it, yes Genesis 3 is about the fall of ADAM, through his failings to properly protect his wife who had not even been named in the Bible up until that point, but that’s a story for another day.
Adam died not because of the sinners, but because he thought himself better than them. He fell, both literally and figuratively, to his own pride once again. Lute, in her blatant sinful love for him — and yes it is sinful, Adam HAD a wife, hell he technically had two in this story, and yet she coveted him all the same — is ignoring all of his failings and putting all the blame on someone else, just as Adam and Eve did. Adam blamed not only Eve but God in giving Eve to him and Eve blamed the Serpent. So not only is Lute breaking her Oath to fight God’s enemies, as her wrath is being targeted towards technically guiltless sinners, but she’s doing so in the belief that she knows better than those above her including, but not limited to, the Speaker of God, and blaming that logical disconnect not on her own anger and discontent but on the Seraphim being “traitors” which wonderfully contrasts Jesus’s open LOVE for Judas despite knowing he would eventually be the betrayer that put Him on the cross.
Anyway, despite the main focus of the show being a gay couple in hell, I still see Hazbin Hotel as one of the best modern representations of Christianity in this weird, subversive way. Honestly, a lot of the story decisions make me feel like the writers want the show to come across as anti-Christianity and arguably anti-religious, but every villainous character is blatantly sinful and the entire structure mirrors the corrupt nature of some eras of the Catholic Church which makes it some of the strongest propaganda in favor of Christianity I’ve seen in a while.
Good stuff, here’s hoping my opinion doesn’t change as this season goes on, but honestly, given the vibes the songs have given so far and where I think the arcs are going, I’m hopeful.
