Author: Keyra English

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.

(tw: sexual assault) Bridgerton was an interesting watch. My mother and I watched it together in one sitting after she put on a random show to watch during a workout on her stationary bike (it was kind of weird when we reached the sexy stuff, but by then we were invested), and at the time it was lovely. The netfilx original served as a rollercoaster of an experience that was silly enough not to need deep thought while still be an entertaining escape from quarentine. My mom and I had a great time laughing at our theories about what would happen next, thirsting over the duke, and hoping the characters could solve their problems and get together already! For the most part the show was fun, but towards the end the need to keep the tone of the show light and something to escape to caused important moments, choices, and dynamics to be glossed over in away that takes very little thought to tinge that enjoyment with some disgust.

Though the unexplained race dynamics (is this a race-blind world or not?), the pattern of casting light skin characters as likable characters and dark skin actors as the villains, and skirting around the realities of privilege in the world of Bridgerton all come to mind, what is likely the most egregious example is how Daphne and Simon’s relationship is depicted after they get married – after (many scenes of) a very sexual honeymoon period, Daphne learns of the mechanics of conception. This causes her to realize that her new husband lied to her – he is not actually infertile but has been using the pullout method to prevent her from getting pregnant and Daphne didn’t know enough about sex before marrying him to know that’s what he was doing. What Daphne didn’t know was that when Simon said he could not have children, he was referring to a vow he made to his father, who mistreated him as a child, not a physical condition.

At this point, as an audience member, I was on Daphne’s side. It was a cathartic moment of the character finally realizing what the audience already knew, and I was on the edge of my seat to see how she reacted. I expected a new string of events that would finally allow Simon to resolve the backstory responsible for the character flaws that had plagued him so far. Instead, I was treated to a very sudden rape scene: Daphne marches into the master bedroom, engages Simon in more sexy time, and at the last second overpowers him to force him to complete the deed still inside her while he struggles against her.

For the sake of argument, there are a few reasons that this choice could be, well maybe not a good one but maybe an effective one. One possibility is the idea that it introduces an opportunity to examine the danger of inadequate sex education and how people who love each other can hurt each other when information not available. Another is that Daphne’s redemtion and the rehabilitation of relationship after this could be a compelling story. Unfortunately neither of these directions are followed.

Daphne is never held accountable for how she hurt Simon, nor is her choice ever acknowledged as rape, or even something wrong. Instead, only Simon is challenged, not even for lying to Daphne but for not wanting children to begin with. By including the rape scene very serious ideas were introduced to the show, Simon’s stance on children was not the thing that needed to be examined at the moment.

Not enought time was alloted to detangling the drama introduced by the scene. The second to last episode of an otherwise thoughtless show is not the time to introduce a complication this serious. There was no time for the characters to really understand where each other was coming from, for Simon to react to being violeted the way he was, for Daphne to recognize the harm she’s done, for growth to occur, for me to get back on board with this relationship. Instead, the show ignores the issues it introduces and tries to uphold the lighthearted drama vibe it had established earlier without resolving them. A happy childbirth scene in an epilogue scene a year later is not the satisfying conclusion this development demands.