My hottest Hazbin take is actually a critique on fandom's insistence on positioning sex crimes as worse than all other crimes, and where that differs from how characters likely perceive their own traumas. Thoughts below, and they'll be heavy.
I grew up asexual in a community where I didn't know anyone who had been murdered, tortured, or imprisoned, and I knew very few people who had ever experienced war... which meant that the violence affecting people I knew was inevitably domestic violence, sexual assault, or both. I can't remember everyone I know who's been assaulted off the top of my head, there are too many. Worse, this isn't unusual. I'm telling you this to say, I understand why people have a uniquely visceral response to sex crimes, because I do too.
But I don't think my response indicates some kind of objective moral ranking. Enter an essay by a sex worker that I read many, many years ago online and can no longer find. What stuck with me was that she said rape wasn't even in her top three traumas. There were other forms of abuse and exploitation that she, personally, considered worse, and she resented the way that everyone assumed that her rape must be, by default, the worst thing that had ever happened to her (and by extension, frequently the only thing society cared about.) And I keep thinking of Angel Dust. He has more sexual trauma than any other character we've seen so far, but if you could ask Angel what the worst thing that ever happened to him was... what would he say? And I think we have an answer based on what he tells Husk at the end of S2, and it's selling his soul to Valentino. It's the limiting of his autonomy, in a way that goes beyond the sexual abuse. And all the discourse about whether or not Vox is a sexual predator skips right past my conviction that Angel likely considers Vox's mind control the other worst thing to ever happen to him, because it further limits his autonomy. Assault would have been terrible, but more bearable.
Valentino: "I own you, bitch."
Angel Dust: "Yeah, ya do. In the studio. And you can do anything you want to me there. Just like our deal says. But out here? I get to do what I want."
Vox shatters this illusion.
Another thing that's lived in my head for years is this quote from Terry Pratchett's Discworld:
"Do you understand what I'm saying?"
shouted Moist. "You can't just go around killing people!"
"Why Not? You Do." The golem lowered his arm.
"What?" snapped Moist. "I do not! Who told you that?"
"I Worked It Out. You Have Killed Two Point Three Three Eight People," said the golem calmly.
"I have never laid a finger on anyone in my life, Mr Pump. I may be–– all the things you know I am, but I am not a killer! I have never so much as drawn a sword!"
"No, You Have Not. But You Have Stolen, Embezzled, Defrauded And Swindled Without Discrimination, Mr Lipvig. You Have Ruined Businesses And Destroyed Jobs. When Banks Fail, It Is Seldom Bankers Who Starve. Your Actions Have Taken Money From Those Who Had Little Enough To Begin With. In A Myriad Small Ways You Have Hastened The Deaths Of Many. You Do Not Know Them. You Did Not See Them Bleed. But You Snatched Bread From Their Mouths And Tore Clothes From Their Backs. For Sport, Mr Lipvig. For Sport. For The Joy Of The Game.”
I personally headcanon Vox as a demisexual sadist. We don't see much interest in anyone other than Alastor, Valentino, and Velvette, and there's commentary on one of the DVDs that indicates Valentino and Velvette are his only friends. He likes seeing pain, and Angel Dust in pain (in my opinion, due to jealousy) but arguments about how far he would go regarding Alastor or Angel Dust or anyone else also elide the fact that the Vs don't need to rape anyone personally (although Valentino certainly does, and since this show isn't shy about that, I'm pretty sure that if Vox were willing to go that far personally, it would have been depicted) to facilitate wider sexual abuse. They literally run an exploitative empire that sells roofies and films pornography that is frequently if not always unethical to its participants.
Even if Vox and Velvette are white collar criminals who facilitate sexual assault indirectly rather than with their own bare hands... they are sexual predators. Maybe worse ones, since their evil is scalable. Harder to quantify and further removed, though, so it gets less focus.
But the other bone I have to pick with discourse on this issue is the portrayal of torture and genocide as lesser evils to sexual assault, and I find myself scratching my head when people claim that they are because sexual assault is always unnecessary. Are we claiming that torture and genocide sometimes are necessary? Is that the argument we want to make? I think we sleep on the fact that Alastor has eaten someone alive canonically onscreen but that pales in comparison to the scale of evil perpetuated by a mass media empire and, more importantly, the scale of what Sera, Lute, and Adam did. The genocide is more evil, in terms of consequences and scale, than anything else we see sinners do in the show. And I think fandom's lesser reactions to torture, genocide, and cannibalism occur mainly because there are many fans who do not have direct personal experience with these things, even though they are likely the worst things to have ever happened to many of the sinners in Hell.
