Human depictions of hell are always so cute.
Hazbin Hotel is a human depiction of hell about some girl who decides that human souls have moral value and are only in hell because they’ve done something bad, and thinks that putting them in a hotel will make them less bad, because that’s the function of hotels, of course.
It’s thirty minutes long and time isn’t a particularly interesting topping, so don’t cry to me if you find out what happens at the end while reading this, okay? If I had to watch it to write this, you should have to watch it to read it.
Also, I’m not going to summarize the plot because basically the plot is “Girl opens hotel. Horny demon is horny. Dapper demon is douchey. The end.” It’s not the hardest thing in the world to follow, but that’s not a strike against it—it’s a story written by a human, after all. It can only have so much going for it at all.
Humans really seem to like this and I guess to be fair to them, it is pretty colourful and loud, which are really all it takes to maintain a human’s attention span for thirty-one minutes in a row. The songs are cute if you like one tune and the characters are fun if you like one note. As far as entertainment for human goes, this is pretty up there with the moon landing and erotic horticulture.
The best thing about it, of course, is that it’s a human rendition of hell, which is always a delight. I probably don’t even need to say that hell isn’t like that, though I can understand why humans with their desperate, pathetic need to make unfathomable things shaped like fathoms would want it to be. I’m not going to waste time spoiling you on what hell is like, but it’s all, you know, metaphysical terror that turns you into spectral goop as you get soul-raped by entities you can’t comprehend for all of eternity compressed into the span of one little needle. Humans don’t actually go there, especially not after they die, and if they do, it has really nothing to do with morality.
What’s up with the human obsession with morality, anyway? Like, I get that the point of it is to control the people in your society so that you stay a society, I’ve known enough humans to understand that part. I just don’t get why you think that morality has some intrinsic value that alters your soul somehow? Your soul is just some spices that have been boiled too long. Giving candy to babies doesn’t make it taste any different, and it sure doesn’t impact what any kind of higher entity thinks about where you ultimately belong in the cosmos. Just throwing that out there.
The morality thing is kind of where this falls down for me honestly. I heard it was funny, and even if we limit ourselves to the very narrow human definition of funny, this didn’t really work beyond a few fun visual gags. Like, if you’re going to do this, why uphold an idea that drugs and alcohol and sex are what keep you morally impure? Why not have jokes about “anyone who pets a chicken goes to hell, we must not have any chickens here?” I just think it could have done fun stuff that really exposed the arbitrariness of human morality and actually like, made the audience think. I know humans hate it when media makes them think, I get that. But it could have actually done that instead of just repeating the same boring jokes about how porn stars and drug addicts go to hell.
Fuck angels, though. They definitely don’t have the kind of power that this thinks they do, but fuck them anyway. Birdnosing Wingbags.
So yeah, this is cute enough, so give it a watch if you want to distract yourself with pretty colours and sounds for a half hour. The creator got a lot of unwarranted harassment after it came out, and as much as I love unwarranted harassment, also fuck those guys who did that and I kinda want to support her just because of that, so yeah, give it a watch or fifty if you’re into it. Just don’t expect hell to actually be like that if you ever get there.
Our music is much better.
How Best to Use a Sword 