I like your tags on the post about it starts with sorry/live to live bc I've been saying that. It's one of the reasons so many people are so adamant this show has terrible writing. I've been rewatching season one and so much of the stuff that happened there was setup for later plot points in season 2. I also was kind of upset about how Lucifer was handled at the end of season 2 but then I gave it some thought and realized they were saying a lot with his behavior and how he responded to everything - he's desperate to do anything to prove he's a good dad, he's never had to fear anything or anyone since he fell, he's so powerful he barely felt anything from being hooked up to a machine that could raze buildings until it has been used continuously for quite a while, Charlie has never had to worry much about him... Etc.
[context]
Yeah that's the thing about engaging with a canon that's not "closed" yet— you are allowed to have any kind of feelings you want about the direction a story is taking, but also you have to recognize that you don't know what the purpose of those writing choices is yet.
There is always room to be asking "is this bad writing that X wasn't addressed, or is it a possibility that this is something that will be explored in a future episode/season?" There is always room to be asking "did plot point Y not make sense, or is it a possibility that the questions you still have about Y are questions that will be answered when more information is revealed later?"
In my experience, when people online decry "bad writing," what they are actually describing is usually one of three things:
Writing that does not function well on a technical level
Writing that isn't to an individual's personal taste, or
Writing that does not match the expectations they had going in and caused cognitive dissonance between what they thought they were getting and what the writer(s) was actually attempting to do
You may notice that 2 and 3 are not actually bad writing. One is a matter of taste, and the other is a function of a clash between expectation and reality. I think most of the criticisms of the writing on Hazbin that I've seen over the years fall into these categories.
That doesn't mean that there are no criticisms that fall under category 1, of course. For instance, I think some of the writing on Hazbin suffers from the limited season length that has been externally imposed by Amazon— to tell the story Vivienne and the rest of the creative team are trying to tell, which is a story with an epic scope and a huge cast, these seasons really should be ten episodes at a minimum, and probably realistically should be at least 12. By trying to compress that into eight-episode seasons, it does mean that many of the major characters aren't quite as fleshed-out as one would wish after two seasons, and that is a technical flaw that's fair to talk about.
But the thing with an open canon that is still a work in progress is that sometimes you don't know what's a technical flaw and what's a "wait and see" until the thing is done. Maybe something that seems like a weird choice or that doesn't mesh with your (general "you" here) understanding of what the story was doing up until now actually is a technical flaw in the writing... or maybe you (again, general "you") have missed something in your analysis and the story is actually doing something different from what you initially thought and future installments will elaborate on what's actually happening.
I see this a lot because I have a habit of coming into fandoms either well after the canon is closed (seriously, my first internet fandom experience decades ago was for a show that went off the air before I was out of diapers) or when the canon is in its final chapters and very nearly complete already, so I will often go wading into the archives of fan writing and meta on the source material and see complaints people made about a series as it was airing and go "well this is nonsense, it's so obvious that X thing they were complaining about was a setup for Y that happened later in the season" but like.... you don't know that when you don't know what comes later because it hasn't been released yet.
That's a huge part of why, although I will always analyze and discuss and have opinions, I always try to remember to take my own thoughts with a grain of salt or two if I'm working with an open canon— you never know when a new development could completely upend your understanding of what's going on, and that's not a bad thing!








