Dr. Discourse, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Hazbin Hotel

12.23.25 // 3:32pm

I recently had a nightmare about Hazbin Hotel. The nightmare involved a Hazbin-themed amusement park opening up near my house, and I decided I wanted to go because I thought it would be funny. All of my immediate friends regularly clown on it, after all, and it seemed like a wacky thing to do ironically. I dragged one of my friends with me who wound up complaining the entire time—it was mostly themed restaurants and character meet-and-greets and pop-up carnival rides. It was a nightmare because my friend wound up falling out of one of the roller coasters and dying tragically… or something to that effect. I don’t remember. Dream’s a dream, y’know.

Yet something about this dream haunted me, even long after I woke up. I had never seen Hazbin Hotel before then. I watched the pilot when it came out, as everybody did, and I thought it was painfully cringey. I can’t handle cringe comedy in any fashion—I physically wince and have to look away, and the pilot on Youtube was kinda chock full of those types of too-fast, unfunny jokes at the expense of a nice character. I also watched a little bit of Helluva Boss when it was coming out… maybe about half of the first season? I didn’t vibe with that one, either. The characters were all mean-spirited and unlikeable, the constant swearing was annoying, and the whole thing was just… cringe.

I hate that word, cringe. I regularly boast and tout that I am a fan of “cringe culture”, or that “cringe culture” is dead. I have a whole rainbow, LOL XD themed website where I post a blog and ramble about my OCs! That’s cringe to a lot of people, and I recognize that—but I do my best to ignore that stigma and do what makes me happy. Yet, despite this, I’ve called the Hellaverse cringe for many a year, and I’ve physically winced whenever a friend of mine starts cosplaying Alastor or an artist I liked starts drawing copious amounts of Huskerdust ship art instead of the Thanuri I followed them for.

It’s never entirely sat right with me. There’s a bit of hypocrisy involved, isn’t there? How can I say that cringe is dead and still lambast people who are into Hellaverse—or The Amazing Digital Circus, or Murderdrones, or whatever it is that young people are into these days? When I was 18 (18 I say, as if it isn’t obvious that people much younger than that are into this show aimed for adults), I was into cringey stuff—I was into Superwholock, the MCU. But if someone had called my interests cringey, I would’ve been really hurt. It’s not fair for me to dismiss someone’s interests like that….

I stopped watching Supernatural at season 5, like a true gentleman.

…But the Hellaverse isn’t comparable to Supernatural. I think it’s much more in the same vein as Harry Potter—and god, I hate Harry Potter, and I hate people who still like Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a loathsome, unforgivably flawed work created by a loathsome, unforgivably flawed woman. My problem with Harry Potter stems nearly entirely from its creator: by engaging with Harry Potter, especially in buying merchandise or watching the new series, you are actively putting money into the pocket of a woman who uses that money to directly fund programs that disenfranchise and oppress trans people. This simply cannot be argued against: JK Rowling is immensely proud of the fact that she’s transphobic. It’s all she fucking talks about.

People often claim that the creator of Hellaverse, Vivziepop, is similarly despicable. I’ve been aware of Vivziepop for years now; my first exposure to her was from her animated Kesha music video, published… 8 years ago? The original video appears to have been deleted. I guess that time frame sounds right, though I could’ve sworn it was older than that (maybe closer to 11). Anyway, ever since that video went viral, Viv herself went viral, and it was only a matter of time before the pilot of Hazbin Hotel dropped on Youtube.

Ever since she found success, Vivziepop has been involved in countless controversies. I’m not going to recount all of them here—I don’t want this random diary entry of a blog post to be used as a secondary source for anybody else wanting to come to their own conclusions—but, much like all controversies that occur in left-ish spaces, I can tell you that they can be split down the middle between “meaningful issues” and “oh my god who honestly cares about this”.

The controversies I can remember about Viv that cropped when I was still frequenting Tumblr often fell into the latter category. They involved her past art depicting problematic themes—sometimes sexually problematic themes. Like monsters having sex with snakes. I could not give less of a shit about that, to be honest. I believe in freedom of expression, and while I may find artistic depictions of certain themes uncomfortable or creepy, I think people have the right to create whatever they want within the realm of fiction—and if Viv wants to explore these themes through her art, then she has that right.

It’s common in online spaces to equate legitimate issues (like those we’ll discuss later—transphobia, unethical treatment of labor, etc.) to nonsensical ones, like an artist drawing weird porn. I find it so frustrating when I open a callout Google doc only to find something like “this person drew pornography of Pokemon” listed in the same breath as “abused an animal”. One is make-believe, one is real. The inclusion of these fictional acts alongside real ones completely guts the power of anything else contained in the allegations, because I sit there wondering, “If this is considered a major issue by whoever wrote this doc, then who’s to say that these other controversies aren’t just blown up out of proportion?”

Whatever happened to “DLDR”?

I digress. All of the allegations levied against Vivziepop in that regard, I couldn’t care less about. But it’s because of the scope of those allegations that I found myself wanting to give Viv the benefit of the doubt when it came to her other numerous controversies—namely those related to transphobia, and… well, let’s start with the transphobia. She drew fanart of Blaire White and shoe0nhead in 2016—holy shit, not great, but also… ten years ago, and she appears to have apologized. I’ve also said some shit I wasn’t proud of when I was younger. Viv’s problem, though, is that she loves to argue with people and call people idiots when they bring up these past mistakes. She doesn’t appear to have a lot of humility or common sense.

She doesn’t strike me as particularly pleasant. That doesn’t mean that she’s an evil person or that her work is reflective of her theoretical inner evil—I think it just means that she’s exhausting. There’s another controversy, for example, wherein she based the design of Sir Pentious on an ex-friend of hers to make fun of them… I guess—though there isn’t really proof of this beyond secondhand rumors. I don’t think it’s my place to give credence to those accusations, given that nobody, especially not me, can confirm or deny them. The nuances of her personality aren’t really for me to be able to judge or comment on, given that I do not know Vivziepop personally—and neither do 99% of the people making angry Tweets about her.

However, Viv’s transphobia does seem to extend to at least 2023, where she made some posts in a personal Discord server calling transmen “trenders”. Which is horrible, 100%. The logs could’ve been doctored, sure, but I find it unlikely. You could also make the argument that these logs were taken out of context, but I struggle to envision any scenario where claiming somebody is a “transtrender” is reasonable. This is the only claim against Vivziepop that I think is legitimate and that I find especially egregious.

There are also controversies involving her being a bad boss—which I guess is to be expected, given her general aura of unpleasantness. I can recall some vague posts about her hiring an abuser. I can’t find any sources about that, though, so maybe I made it up (unless this is referring to the infamous MLP groomer who did the singing voice for Alastor in the pilot, which is a wild and horrifying story I don’t feel like getting into—recommend reading into it if you want to feel disgusted). There’s also the matter of how she parted on bad terms with pretty much everybody who worked on the original Hazbin pilot, as she chose to hire Broadway actors instead of sticking with the original indie cast. I find it entirely believable that Viv was a jerk about firing them, given what we’ve seen of her public-facing personality. I also think, though, that it’s entirely reasonable to hire bigger-named voice actors when your show gets greenlit by a major institution like Amazon. Also, when one of your voices was a pedophile… yeah, I dunno, maybe burning bridges was warranted.

I don’t mean to sound like I’m defending Vivziepop. I don’t know her, and I don’t really care about what other peoples’ opinions on some woman I don’t know are. However, I do kind of care about your opinion of me, Y/N, given that you’re still following along to this. If anything, this ramble has been more of a defense of myself, and why, after everything I’ve just discussed, I still chose to watch Hazbin Hotel.

Viv has said some deeply troubling things in the past. However, I can find no evidence that she uses her platform, nor the money earned by her projects, to disenfranchise and hurt people. In fact, she regularly lifts up LGBTQ+ people—she draws pride art for her characters for Pride Month, for example.

The straight ally flag is hilarious. You couldn’t have just given Nifty a progress flag or something?

There are, notably, not a lot of trans people in any of her shows, and literally zero trans men; perhaps this reflects her inner distaste for them. She also appears to be a deeply unlikeable person: even if she is completely innocent of every sin she’s been accused of, I don’t think a one-hundred percent kind, honest, likeable person winds up with this many negative rumors about them. Something is spurring this. If I had to bet, I’d guess that Vivziepop is an annoying, aggravating person to be around—both in private and on social media—and it drives people to exaggerate her flaws in an attempt to humble her. “Crabs in a bucket”, so to speak: so many people in artistic (and leftist) communities are jealous when they see their peers achieve success, and they do everything in their power to see them fail.

But again, I don’t know her. Neither do you. Most likely.

So—do I think it’s ethical to support and give money to Vivziepop? I dunno. Maybe. In my opinion, I think the good the franchise is doing to elevate LGBTQ+ prominence and sexuality in this regressive age of ours outweighs my personal grievances with the creator. If you disagree, I completely understand. The definition of “ethical” varies from person to person, and I respect people who choose not to consume any of her content given these past issues. I, personally, decided I wanted to consume the content, though I didn’t give money to the creator by doing so. How I managed this… is a mystery.

Image unrelated.

I felt the need to preface my “analysis” of the show with this long diatribe because I think it’s necessary for not only understanding, but enjoying Hazbin Hotel. What you have to understand before going into Hazbin is that Vivziepop is part of old blood DeviantArt OC communities. She created lots of colorful characters and drew webcomics about them—though most of the webcomics were that in name only, and instead were just ref sheets of OCs that could exist and be further expounded upon in a theoretical, never-to-exist comic/show/movie. This is super, super common in OC communities—creating an OC in a universe that you’ve kinda developed in your mind, but not actually created yet. My OCs don’t usually fall into this, being TTRPG characters, but I would say that most OCs I’ve seen online (on this OC webring I’m a part of, for example) fall into the same category as Vivzie’s.

Hazbin Hotel, then, came to fruition solely as a medium to explore Vivzie’s OCs. The characters were created first, the plot second. The characters are the main driving appeal behind Hazbin Hotel, while most criticism of the show involves it having lazy writing or nonsensical worldbuilding. These are criticisms I agree with whole-heartedly, but I think it makes sense when you realize that the OCs and the plot of the show were created as two separate entities.

Every character in Hazbin Hotel can be sorted into two categories: those created for the show in order to advance the plot, and those created long before the show who are ascended OCs. The “plot” of Hazbin Hotel is about a rehabilitation hotel run by the princess of Hell. Hell is populated by colorful characters with busy designs with no real sense of cohesion. This is poor world-building, certainly, but it makes sense when you step back and realize that it was created this way on purpose to fit any and all kinds of OCs into the same universe.

This is how I would organize them. If they’re not listed here, presume they fall into the leftmost bubble.

Some characters I’m presuming the origin of, but others have canonical evidence of their OCdom. Alastor, for example, was created for Vivzie’s world of Zoophobia, while Angel Dust was an OC with fanart dating back years before Hazbin’s creation… also intended to appear in Zoophobia, I guess (didn’t know that before looking it up). I’ve split up the characters based mostly on vibes and how they interact with the plot. Charlie and all of the divine characters exist to further the plot; they relate directly with the main thesis of promoting the hotel or opposing it. They are inarguably the most “plot relevant”—Vaggie, Lucifer, Adam, Lute, the seraphim, etc., all act as either opposition or support to our main character Charlie’s main goal of redeeming sinners.

I also think that, by extension, this group of characters are the least interesting.

I hate Adam and Lute. They’re supposed to be hateable, I think, but man do I hate them: they’re so meaninglessly cruel. I do really enjoy the idea of Charlie grappling with sin; she believes people can change and do good, and exploring why redemption is more difficult than she believes makes for an interesting moral quandary. Redemption is in itself a very debated, very personal issue. Do you believe Vivziepop can be redeemed for the hateful things she’s said in the past, for example? I believe she can. Others can’t. This thesis, I think, makes for an interesting premise.

Unfortunately, the show isn’t really about the hotel, but about the opposition to the hotel. It’s about Heaven not believing sinners can be redeemed and Hell’s opposition to the concept of redemption, and there’s big battles about it. The second season isn’t even about that—it’s about some TV guy wanting to take over Hell.

I understand, on paper, why the show was written this way. A smaller scale interpersonal drama- forward show may be accused of not having a plot. In addition, the focus on angels, demons, etc. brings up lots of lore questions that I think do justify explanation. Unfortunately, I think this really winds up dampening the quality of the show. The best bits of the story, in my opinion, focus on sinners in Hell trying to be redeemed.

Most sinners in Hell are background joke characters who are mean and evil just for the fun of it. It’s a comedy, so sure, whatever (though I do think it bumps directly against the premise of everyone being capable of redemption—though you can argue whether the show believes that or just the naive Charlie). The interesting part, to me, is seeing the sinners in Charlie’s inner circle change and grow over the narrative: Angel Dust, Husk, Nifty, Sir Pentious, and Alastor*. Every one of these sinners feel, to me, like ascended OCs.

Angel Dust sticks out to me as the most prominent example of the show’s thesis in action. My conspiracy theory is that the entirety of Hazbin Hotel was created simply to give Angel Dust a world to occupy: he’s obviously a Vivzie favorite. I like him a lot, too. He has a lot of depth and dimension, being a victim of abuse and trying to reclaim his agency through hypersexuality… although he’s treated like garbage by the narrative, and sometimes his trauma is written off as a joke. There was a scene in the second season with a comedy montage of Angel Dust being smacked around by his pimp, Valentino, which… yikes.

But Angel Dust’s subtle growth—his gentleness towards living creatures, his fondness for Charlie and Husk that slowly blossoms over the course of the show—is a real highlight. You can tell that Viv loves Angel Dust. I’ve been ogling this character from afar for a while because he reminds me so much of one of my own OCs, Amezi. Amezi’s current backstory is pretty sanitized; the original that I wrote nearly ten years ago now featured far more sexual violence. Sexual abuse is, understandably, not a theme people want to explore when playing a game like D&D, so I scaled it back. I also worry about being able to properly convey a character who has experienced that type of abuse in a respectful manner: it’s really easy to go overboard or delve too deeply into wump. Like Angel Dust does.

Oh, Angel Dust. You deserve a better show.

Vivzie doesn’t care about respectful representation of difficult topics—she just fucking goes for it in all of its complicated putridness. I kind of envy this about her. Sometimes it works, most times it doesn’t… but I do fundamentally respect her willingness to tackle darker subjects. This current era we’re in has done its best to turn transgressive art into sin, equating those who find comfort or understanding in exploring difficult topics within the safe realm of fiction to real life abusers. I’ve witnessed this firsthand. It started off with risque pornography—noncon and the like—but now we see it taken to its only logical conclusion: government mandates against all pornography and sexuality. And the erasure of sexuality will, of course, lead to the erasure of LGBTQ+ identities and further equating them with sin and evil worthy of extermination. Queer people are being threatened by this larger existential threat… while we’re too busy arguing about if a queer woman is allowed to write stories about a queer man. My god, focus on the bigger picture, here.

I don’t think Angel Dust is an especially well-written character, but I like him. I like what he’s trying to do. I like the unapologetic representation of a messy, difficult subject—even if it’s in a show with rape jokes and musical numbers. I think that we as a society need bad queer media. We need bad sexual media. Bad media normalizes queerness and sexuality—not everything queer should be held up as untouchably artistic. Gay people deserve slop as much as straight people do: they deserve smutty romance novels, bad Hallmark movies, and yes, cringey animated adult shows. This, I believe, is one of the only ways to normalize gay relationships in the eyes of larger society. Hazbin Hotel may be objectively bad, but I still enjoy it in the same way I enjoy an asinine fanfiction or a popcorn flick. It’s not perfect, and that’s its appeal.

Listen. I like musical theater. I’m sorry. In another life, I could’ve been a drama kid, but instead I was in anime club.

*You may have noticed an asterisk on Alastor—which was a pin that I’m now going to get back into. Alastor is also an ascended OC, like Angel Dust, except he is way, way more egregious. Angel Dust at least relates to the main plot of Charlie redeeming sinners… Alastor has nothing to do with anything. He is always five layers deep in subplots and mysteries that have Literally Nothing to do with Charlie. He’s in his own show, dude.

Alastor is funny. I think he’s a deeply stupid character, and his existence in the show does nothing except to unnecessarily pad it and drag it out… but he’s kind of endearing? He is just so aggressively OC coded, I can’t help but be charmed by him. He is the most Tumblr Sexyman to ever Sexyman: he’s a skinny white (BUT NOT ACTUALLY LMAO) twink, he’s in a suit, he’s got a monocle. He has cute little deer ears, an old-fashioned Will Wood way of speaking, and he’s nonsexual in a way that’s very appealing to young neurodivergent people—but he is also contradictorily, sexualized (see Vox and his hypersexual rivalry which is lampshaded by Valentino—a relationship I do admittedly find myself compelled by, but only when I envision them in my mind’s eye as their hot, glasses-wearing human designs, which I am IMMENSELY compelled by), which allows these same people to experiment with sexual identity in a perceived safe, asexually-neutral manner. I get why these kinds of characters are appealing, though they’ve never really been for me. I’ve never needed “safe characters” to identify with. I just make characters who are nothing like me Like Me through an unhealthy amount of projection, like a real man.

I do not care for a signal one of these characters. I like a twink in glasses as much as the next guy, but idk. Just wasn’t into any of these fandoms, I guess.

I think that Alastor might wrap around to being plot relevant. I think he could have an interesting dynamic with Charlie eventually: Charlie believes that all sinners can be redeemed, but Alastor seems to be one-hundred percent, genuinely evil. He doesn’t seem to care about redemption in the slightest. His existence challenges Charlie’s worldview… which sounds very intriguing, but the show doesn’t seem interested in exploring that aspect. Yet.

I don’t have much left to say about the remaining cast. I really like Husk, and there’s not a lot I would change about him, other than expanding on his relationship with Angel Dust (which I think is guaranteed to happen next season). Charlie is probably my favorite character, though I think she’s done dirty by season two. I love her infectious positivity, and I’m always so annoyed by how every single wider character except for Vaggie treats her. Her hope and positivity is a beacon of light in an otherwise edgy, grimdark show, and I think without Charlie, it would simply be unbearable to watch. This is probably why I don’t vibe with Helluva Boss: it doesn’t have a Charlie counterpart. Everybody in that show is edgy and hypersexual and flat-out mean… the sweet and kind-hearted Charlie, on the other hand, provides necessary relief and contrast. She makes me believe that hey, maybe sinners can be redeemed, if Hell can birth someone as kind as her. I love her, and I love Vaggie, too. I do think the two of them are kinda hit by the bimbofication beam in season two, acting incredibly stupid and out of character (Charlie’s obsession with Sir Pentious… is weird), but I’ll chalk that up to Charlie being overwhelmed and Vivzie using her to project her own insecurities with fame. I hope she goes back to that positive cutie-pie we saw in season one.

I think that is the main reason why I find myself so fascinated by Hazbin Hotel. It’s poorly-written, flawed… and because of that, I find my mind spinning with the ways I, personally, would change it. All of my favorite media are deeply flawed, and that’s why I’m so consumed with the desire to write fanfiction and engage in fan speculation: I want to fix it. I want to fix Hazbin Hotel. What things would I do differently? What characters and relationships would I expand on or nix? It almost makes me want to write fanfiction… almost. Almost.

Flawed media is important; queer flawed media, most important of all. I’m exhausted by the discourse that exists on the internet about Hazbin and its poor representation of queer struggles. It is undeniably queer, but it is also undeniably bad—and that’s okay. It is a passion project, a collection of original characters loosely connected by weak themes and a mediocre plot. Telling a good, comprehensive story was never the point: Hazbin exists solely to present messy, complicated OCs interacting with each other in an equally messy and complicated world. I respect it. I’m envious of its ability to be so unapologetically true to itself, even after a solid decade’s worth of criticism.

Despite everything, I like Hazbin Hotel. I’d even go so far as to recommend Hazbin Hotel, provided you’re interested in messy queer media, and especially if you’re at all interested in OC culture. Is it bad? Sure. Is it problematic? Absolutely. But I think you can find yourself liking it, too, if you learn to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays!