this show doesn't know if it wants to be an edgy dark comedy, or a serious exploration & social commentary of its characters and world. not only does it fail at both, it fails at visually being a good show to watch or even interesting to think about as a concept. for starters, it's just not funny. within the first four episodes i watched, the show does not make a single attempt to actually construct a joke - there are no visual gags, no kind of puns, nothing that's cleverly written to be intentionally funny. most of what i've been laughing at have been animation errors, and i'm completely serious about that. if these things exist at all, they are written on a poster that's in the background of a shot that cuts away before you can really look at it. its sense of humor centers around "look! we can say swear words! we're saying so many swear words!" to a point where, once again in just the first four episodes, my friends and i counted up close to 100 instances of them just saying the word "fuck". the majority of those were strung together back-to-back in what i'm guessing are the points where the audience is supposed to laugh. so for obvious reasons, this show comes across as very juvenile despite its showrunners intent for it to be SERIOUS and ADULTS ONLY. i can only guess that the show constantly referencing SA - my bad, THEY SHOW THE ASSAULT HAPPENING IN A MUSICAL NUMBER - and other forms of interpersonal violence is an attempt at bringing down the tone to be a bit darker. it just does not work, and only attracts an audience of literal children who don't know what they are getting into mixed in with people who think SA is funny. despite my disgust with this occurring, i am not surprised: if you look on the official merchandise stores, you can buy a keychain of a pimp character posing with his sex worker victim. that's totes kewl, right? speaking about the sex worker, angel dust is the only character who has any kind of personality or development in this entire series. he's a self-sabotaging hypersexual drug addict who has no regard for his well-being, down to outright saying that he doesn't care if he gets roofied because his day-to-day is miles worse. out of all the characters, he's the only one that feels the most human and the only one that i actually feel very sorry for. for that reason, this show cannot have him be redeemed and go to heaven - not only is his trauma a constant punchline that they would need to fill with something equally terrible, hazbin hotel would lose the one interesting thing it has going on for it. i would like to think that angel dust's arc would conclude with his pimp dead and him leaving his reputation behind to become someone new someplace else, but realistically it just isn't going to happen. without angel dust, the show would leave us forced to engage with our very unfortunate protagonist, charlie. she's naive in a way that isn't endearing and makes no attempt to apologize for what she's done wrong despite being the series posterchild for "goodness". her savior complex even directly results in characters around her facing more mistreatment as a result. circling back to angel dust for a brief moment, there is a scene in this show where angel dust does not want her to interact with his pimp and repeatedly begs her to leave - sure enough, she doesn't, something goes wrong, and angel dust's the one who the hammer comes down on. does she acknowledge his visible injuries? no. all she does is cry in front of him, forcing him to accept her apology, and then send a different character off to talk to him wherein actual progress is made and angel dust feels better. when said character would've more than likely talked to angel dust anyways, charlie has no positive impact on the situation she created that wouldn't have happened if she'd respected her friend's boundaries. there is something to be said about how people will frequently try to interact with the mentally ill and those trapped in abusive relationships in ways that have no respect to their situation. charlie slots into that perfectly, and in a better show a character like her would realize that she's not perfect either & start trying to redeem herself in order to be a better friend. while i think hazbin hotel is going to make an attempt at that, i can safely say that it'll be poorly executed and the second that the show needs a joke or some drama, she'll immediately backslide into being insensitive. it's already poorly executed - nobody calls her out, there's no hints that anyone's uncomfortable with how she handles things, nothing whatsoever. this series may as well be a bunch of cue cards stating "here is where you're supposed to laugh" and "here is where you're supposed to take things seriously", and it'd unironically be a better show if it was just that. it's extremely polarizing otherwise to have a(n attempt at a) sympathetic depiction of a SA victim followed by what i'm assuming are jokes about how said SA victim is a "whore". unfortunately, and i wish they did, the issues do not stop here. not only is it poorly written, it's really ugly to look at. it's cocomelon for edgy millennials with how quickly the shots jump around sometimes, and the color palette doesn't add any contrast or help with points of focus - EVERYTHING is black and red with little pops of grey or white. the majority of the characters have the same silhouette from the neck-down due to most of them being suit-wearing lanky demons. (aren't some of them supposed to be from different time periods? why is it the same suit with a bowtie?) this gets most egregious when you get a proper look at the angels. uncreatively introduced as ophanim (winged many-eyed wheels, also known as the misnomer "biblically accurate angels" despite existing in the torah) in the first episode of the show, they look exactly like demons when fully shown and animated. lanky, large horned, and with spiky teeth. the only real difference is a slight color palette tweak and the fact that they have a little halo. assuming that they're designed this way because "lucifer was once an angel too!" and not out of laziness is giving the show more lenience than it deserves. it's very clear to me that this show was worldbuilt by someone who's still bitter about having been forced to go to sunday school as a child and has not made an attempt to examine religion ever since then... but also still wants to make an attempt at sticking "the finger" to religious people despite clear the lack of understanding. why else would adam be a swearing sexual maniac when he's supposed to be the embodiment of goodness if not to "offend" some imaginary crowd of religious people that might watch this show? why is adam even performing the role of an angel when he explicitly has free will as a human being? to sum it up, this show is nothing but contradictions. the plot dictates that all of hell must be saved, but the jokes are unsympathetic to the characters' plights and situations. it has absolutely nothing to stand on and no direction that it can really move in. the only reason why i don't consider my time wasted is because i watched this while hanging out with friends and we all had fun talking to each other and occassionally riffing on what was playing. i hope this show ends with angel dust driving away in a convertible with cat-eye sunglasses on and a scarf tied around his head. someone please get him out of there.