You ever knew anybody that was hesitant of getting into the Hellaverse due to its polarizing—albeit amplified—reaction online?
I’d be lying if I said that this wasn’t the biggest thing holding me back. Ever since the HH pilot, it feels like the entire discourse is centered on people going back and forth in proving whether its creator is a hack/fraud/pos and less about the shows themselves.
By all means, it shouldn’t be a big deal and if I realize that it’s not for me then whatever I move on. But a part of me wonders if getting into it is worth the trade off.
Because from what I’ve seen on the surface, I don’t think the Hellaverse deserves the scrutiny that it gets.
I mean, yeah. Me. I hesitated to get into it for that exact reason.
I felt the swirling vortex of misery that hovers in the wake of Hazbin & Helluva Boss from far outside the sphere of the fandom, and it very much put me off from wanting to engage with it - or rather, it put me off wanting to engage with it as a creator, because regardless of whether the flame wars and discourse that surround a show are earned or not, whether they are warranted or not, as a creator you know that that sh** is going to get imported wholesale into your comments sections if you start making videos about the thing, and a lot of the time it just isn't worth it.
Which is depressing, of course, and it's one of the things that culturally grants far too much power to hatedoms and trolls. All they have to do is fuck up the vibes of a space or a fandom enough, and they can very effectively drive out any voices that aren't willing to engage on their rancid level, ceding the space to the worst personalities imaginable.
Doesn't help that social media of all kinds also directly reward incendiary rhetoric and black-and-white battle lines. Those things are how you get the clicks, the numbers, the visibility, the clout. The perverse incentives line up juuuuust so that it can absolutely turbocharge a negative fandom, or deepen the spiral of a parasocial cult-of-personality hate-campaign like what follows Vivienne Medrano around.
The Hellaverse does not remotely deserve the level of vitriol that surrounds it, no. As I've said myself I think Hazbin is largely a 7/10 animated musical, buoyed up by fantastic vocal performances and a solid soundtrack, and badly dragged down by the 8 episode season format imposed on it by A24 and Amazon. It's the kind of show that is going to absolutely take over the life and consciousness of a certain kind of person, and which is going to bounce off of a lot of other people like a ball bearing on a glacier.
Helluva Boss is effectively a soap opera or telenovela, expressed through a hyper-earnest millennial Cartoon Network/Nickelodeon/Adult Swim theater-kid-who-spent-too-much-time-on-Newgrounds-and-tumblr perspective, and elevated by the truly ASTONISHING animation and production talent that has been built up at Spindlehorse. And again, that's the kind of show that is going to become like 40% of some people's entire personalities, while being absolutely eye-rollingly cringe-inducing to a lot of other people.
All media deserves some scrutiny, of course, and with Hazbin becoming the biggest cartoon in the world for a minute there, of course it deserves critical attention and evaluation. But at the same time, it is difficult not to notice the pattern that this kind of fandom discourse has a disproportionate tendency to follow projects that are overtly queer in their content, and which are led by showrunners who are women or perceived as women or who are just feminine.
The scrutinizing, the harassment, the obsessive maintenance of callout documents, the extreme moralizing over content, and dogged, determined inability to distinguish depiction from endorsement... you weirdly just don't see a lot of that for problematic cartoon creators who happen to be men.
