hellaverse crit blog i guess

literally all i do here is talk abt these shows because despite disliking them there is a morbid fascination that will not leave me alone and i have so many thoughts. fucking help me please for the love of god i tend to be pretty overtly negative here but i promise it's not just for the sake of it i am in fact enjoying poking at this stuff 🙏 slug, he/it. 20+

[sludgekludge]

slug, sludge, or just any various of my url thog not care

he/it, in my 20's.

i try to keep my main anonymous on purpose because of how vicious the standom can be so i don't answer asks about my main, even privately. sorry!

asks are always ok but i won't answer questions about my personal life/venty asks.

i do not answer asks about valentino/how these shows handle sexual abuse. i do not want to delve into a topic that rough at length. please respect that

if i didn't answer your ask and it was none of those exceptions, it probably got buried/eaten. feel free to resend

i didn't see the leaks personally, but i don't mind receiving asks about them. you might have to explain context to me, though. i tag anything about the leaks as hazbin leaks / slash included.

i do not care if you like the shows just as you shouldn't care if i dislike them

#iloveeatingsludge

^ blog mascot you have to feed it pocket lint or it explodes

[sludgekludge]

really genuinely im just still fixated on the whole angelic steel thing in hazbin. i adore it. a particularly bold move to have the narrative say 'angels can't be harmed', have an angel find out they can in fact be permanently wounded by their own weaponry, and then go 'wow…angelic steel can hurt us' years later.

also quite a big fan of the followup to that being 'here's an angel who is permanently wounded by something that is not at all angelic steel', but presumably 'angels can be killed by angelic steel, also if you just drop a really fucking big rock on their head' wasn't as catchy

[sludgekludge]

you have to delete one character from helluva. who is it

i know i'm the guy who rambled for 6 millenia about fizz being unnecessary as a narrative device because he's just 'barbie but blitz is allowed to kiss this one' but i would annihilate andrealphus out of this existence in a heartbeat.

there's literally no reason it couldn't have been stella instead. give her the ice powers and have her do everything. absolutely fucking ridiculous misogynistic decision to give the power to another man and have stella be this glorified door stop who's too stupid to function. it's actually insane to me that they have this character who has actual emotional stakes and history with stolas, literally his abuser, and then they're like. no. what if it was a man instead. so they replace this one character who very much has emotional stakes with one of our mains with a random guy. purely so it could be another sexy twinky gay man. i hate andrealphus he makes me want to rip my hair out.

or that fucking cherub baby i hate that cherub baby. stop talking. quiet.

[sludgekludge]

i realise it's an issue with a lot of 'brand' socmed nowadays because it's quirky and relatable or whatever but genuinely what is with the attitude problems of so many ppl on the staff of these shows

[sludgekludge]

crawls out of the mausoleum coughing blood. so hiring a million big-name celebrities to voice act on their merch-funded youtube show totally bit them in the ass right

[sludgekludge]

kind of surprised you didn't talk more about valentino getting merch, honestly. but yeah, totally insane how viv treats her fanbase. /gen

i don't find the way he's handled in the show (or the posts vivzie makes/likes about him) to be any more distasteful than making merch of valentino to be honest. i'm not saying i don't think it's weird or offputting, but stella (at least according to the show) is intended to be this turbo abusive violent husband beater and she consistently gets sexy merch all the time. there's one (maybe more) old valentine's art of her literally featuring impact play gear. the woman who apparently hits her husband enough that he can expect it enough to effectively intercept it

there's 0 tact when it comes to earnestly attempt to depict abuse in these shows and i'm not really surprised they get merch. tasteless but not at all surprising

[sludgekludge]

really i do not think being rude online is the biggest crime in the world depending on the way you go about it but saying 'shut up there are bigger things to care about grow up' to your fanbase, for your merch-funded show, who are the only people keeping your things afloat. these people care enough about your creation to be disappointed that they can't spend money to own a physical piece. often used for escapism from The Horrors. holy shit dude

[sludgekludge]

holy shit telling your fans to shut up and grow up because they're upset that the only characters who didn't get sexy merch are coincidentally the fat villains while the actual canonical rapist and domestic abuser got merch is certainly a move

[sludgekludge]

sometimes i type out a post on here and then go 'no i can't say that'. and rapidly delete it but im thinking it. im thinking it

[sludgekludge]

this is a nothingburger just personal onions but i hate the palette they use for half the valentines merch. the harsh saturated bright red next to the cooler lighter pinks just looks awful to me

[sludgekludge]

to be fair if other people are doing something that makes it more likely to be socially acceptable. other people whitewash biblical figures all the time.

i think if your modus operandi is based entirely on whether or not other people are doing something then it only shows you have a lack of individuality and no backbone.

call it what you want but hazbin is undeniably a unique and unusual project to make its way to corporate funding. this show has an out-there sense of visual design and an almost entirely queer cast centred in hell, it is at least somewhat controversial by nature. it has never been attempting to cater to traditional white christianity. the idea it would bend the knee to societal norms when it specifically comes to white evangelical racism is concerning, if that's why they did it, especially when this show already has an existing history of controversy surrounding racism.

[sludgekludge]

it really is fascinating to me the criticisms viv will choose to dodge because if she's ever responded to the racism stuff i've never heard about it. but she'll make passive aggressive posts about random literal-who reviewers or criticism about a minor plot hole or something. why is she more willing to put forward pithy comments about critique she disagrees with from random people making that critique in their spaces than give any kind of explanation as to wtf was on their mind when they designed st peter

[sludgekludge]

'st peter hate is forced/boring/mean/whatever' its less that he's annoying or whatever and moreso that they chose to whitewash a brown man. like actually make him the most clearly white character across both shows. the one based on a brown man

[sludgekludge]

if i can be a little more real than silly usually hyperbolic takes about a show i never liked very much i think what bothers me a lot about framing these shows as like, intending to uplift people is how fucking mean they are if you're a viewer who is fat or a woman or lgbt in any way that isnt a sexy cis gay man or poor or a vocally angry minority or a million other things.

i don't inherently really fault people massively for intending one thing in their writing and not sticking the landing, writing is hard, go figure. but when there is a clear demographic of people who you are obviously belittling, just innate characteristics they can't change, it feels disingenuous at best and cruel at worst to claim you're writing a story about finding love and hope in an unjust world. especially when the people you're belittling are statistically more likely to be victims of unjust systems.

[sludgekludge]

'helluva boss is a story about rising above what a powerful world tries to tell you-' when the main character gets upset and raises his voice to a royal who has been belittling and speaking down to him for months, tells him 'we're not toys for you people to play with and discard', we are meant to perceive this as an act of cruelty on our mains part. the royal in question, even if subconsciously, has objectively been looking down upon and mistreating our main. this royal is our mains endgame relationship and has not acknowledged fault once.

ozzie, someone who is a royal himself, was going to let his lover's best friend die to an unfair justice system because his boss said so, and the writer of this actively liked posts defending ozzie's decision to do and say nothing. fizz depends on ozzie almost entirely, has just left an abusive workplace, and it goes as far as relying solely on ozzie to help with fizz's disability aids. ozzie's willingness to help is conditional and can be influenced by a higher power's decision alone.

this show has never been about standing up to a cruel and unjust authority. it's about surrendering yourself to the 'right' one.

[sludgekludge]

see helluva boss could've worked with looser canon and as many characters as it wanted if it stuck to being an episodic 'story of the week' show but it dropped that premise pretty quickly so i have no earthly idea why it continues to introduce a million new characters and subplots to distract from what is now meant to be a character-driven romance with (alleged) stakes and a plot

[sludgekludge]

worst eps in your opinion? mines the circus lil stolas ugly as fuck and the childhood friends thing dumb as hell

lil stolas ugly as fuck 🤝

tossup for me between the circus and full moon honestly. the circus was probably the worst in terms of the story, it kind of represents the point to me that there was a hard shift to the stolitz stuff and it's full of blatant retcons that it just bothers me. no viv we can all tell the childhood friends thing was not planned from the beginning and if it was it's incorporated in a way i can only describe as Ass. also has the worst scene in the show that i muted on first watch bc it was actively giving me second hand embarrassment and i couldn't take it lmao. i would probably skip that if i were ever to rewatch. it's also the one episode that like, really, really emphasises how man-centric this show is. does a woman even speak this episode? lol lets give blitz's childhood scene to his bestie instead of his sister he was allegedly super close with who gives a shit

that being said full moon was boring and also the only episode i think i've actively skipped through on first watch so far. the setup was boring and the baby cherubs voice actively grated on my nerves. like genuinely bothered me to listen to, so i skipped through his dialogue lol. i have no idea who decided to make him sound like that. christ. the cherubs and agents are a waste of screentime at this point and should be dropped imo. they worked as bit villains but have no place in the narrative as-is. the little nugget of story we got at the end is stupid and makes the stolitz 'fight' nonsensically lopsided. the way they chose to make blitz 'in the wrong' is almost comical considering what stolas does. it's baffling.

runnerup is unhappy campers because the entire conflict of that episode is honestly ridiculous and shafting what should've been a major character reveal at the end of bad episode so we could focus on *checks notes* watching two of our adult mains act like tantrum throwing toddlers instead is so incredibly frustrating.