An ongoing story that I have been following quite closely as an independent animator trying to make it on the internet (you can see my stuff here if you wanna see lol: https://www.keanimation.com) is the success of an animator that goes by Vivziepop online. Though she had a few viral shorts that made their way around youtube (like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PKNuZovuSw), today she is most known for her two shows, Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss.
Both projects are animated adult comedies set in hell. In Hazbin Hotel the princess of hell sets up a hotel to rehabilitate the souls in her father’s kingdom. Helluva Boss is about a group of demons who offer the service of murdering people in the living world for a small fee. Both are raunchy stories that probably couldn’t have come to fruition under different circumstances.
After a failed partnership with an exploitative production company, Vivziepop decided to take her future projects into her own hands. So, she crowdfunded a 30 minute pilot for Hazbin Hotel, spent 2 years producing and animating it and released it on youtube. Soon after, she produced Helluva Boss and released it on youtube as well.
Both shows quickly developed a massive fanbase, but have since gone down different paths. Hazbin Hotel was picked up in 2020 by A24 for tv release, and episodes of Helluva Boss continue to be released every month or so.
It is easy to see how choosing youtube as the primary distributing platform for Helluva Boss has clear implications. It is easy to see how many views each episode gets, and the comments give a sense of how the audience receives it. Some dialogue is cleverly written to get around the strict guidelines (“commit die” is a phrase that comes to mind). The links in the description make it clear that Patreon and merch are the main ways the episodes make money. When Hazbin Hotel airs, it will be interesting to see the differences that the distribution method creates between the shows. Will the add breaks work differently? Will the raunchy nature of the show shift to make it more appropriate for tv? Whatever the case, the fact that two projects from the same creator, of the same genre, operating in the same universe, produced around the same time will each be distributed in different ways provides a rare opportunity to compare the flows of two popular methods of storytelling: traditional television, and self-directed youtube.
