Heaven, Hell, Hierarchy & Hazbin Hotel

These thoughts on Hazbin Hotel (2024) are from engagement with the 8 episode adult animated series, not including the pilot or any online fandom content. This will be a discussion of the show particularly in relation to reformist vs revolutionary politics and tactics, anarchy, power and autonomy in relation to sex work and harm reduction. This is all just my interpretation.

**Spoilers for season 1 of Hazbin Hotel!**

Hazbin Hotel follows Charlie Morningstar, the daughter of the fallen angel Lucifer and rebellious first woman, Lilith, in a world where things have roughly gone down in the same way as the Biblical story, with Lucifer being cast out of Heaven into Hell. The angels of Heaven have decided that an uprising from Hell is a constant threat to Heaven and must be contained by periodically exterminating enough souls from Hell that it is never a possibility for them to rise up against them.

Charlie, as the Princess of Hell, sees the extermination happen each year, with angels from Heaven brutally murdering the people of Hell on the streets (Hell in this universe is largely an urban cityscape), and understands this unfairness as something that she needs to challenge for ‘her people’. She resolves to do so by opening the Hazbin Hotel, with the aim of rehabilitating ‘sinners’ to show that they can change to be allowed into Heaven instead of being exterminated.

By the first episode setting out this premise, I was so excited by the idea that this reformist dream would quickly be shattered – that Charlie would start off playing by the rules of the dominant ideology, particularly because of her age and privilege of being a princess, but quickly realise that the entire system is wholly and irreparably unfair, and that a different more radical solution would be needed. This seemed to be starting to take shape when Charlie meets with angels, including Adam who is head of the extermination squad, and they don’t listen to her ideas and instead bring forward the next extermination date by 6 months. But Charlie isn’t deterred by this, or unfortunately any time that her singular idea to reform the people of Hell is shown to be unworkable, continuing to push through the designated channels.

On a systemic level, Charlie is the next-in-line to be the leader of an oppressed society, who has been conditioned to view this oppression as natural and just in some way. Charlie believes that the extermination can be ended through assimilating Hell’s citizens into Heaven’s norms and values by allowing those who live in Hell to be made better so that they would deserve to live in Heaven, thereby rendering them not a threat to Heaven because they have already been assimilated and won’t rise up violently like Heaven believes they might. This leaves the idea of Heaven and Hell as a concept completely unchallenged.

On an individual level, this means that Charlie has a tendency to push her privilege and reformist ideology onto those around her, generally folks who have decided to give living at the Hotel a try (with the choice here being to try being ‘good’ in Charlie’s rehabilitation program in the hopes of being allowed into Heaven, or to risk being exterminated in 6 months time.) A great example of this is her interactions with Angel Dust, who is living at the Hotel but, in the beginning, is labelled as someone who is not really trying to change. He is a drug user and a sex worker, and is often derided and shamed for his choices, despite Angel seeming to be a self-assured, sex-positive person who is proud of his work, showing his friends at the Hotel one of the films he starred in as a porn star, much to the outward disgust of most of the others at the Hotel, and labelling himself as an ‘actor’ when the Hotel bartender, Husk, continues jibing Angel that he is ‘fake’.

The unequal power relations between Charlie and the folks that she is trying to ‘save’ is also seen really clearly when Charlie goes to a film set that Angel is working on, despite Angel asking her not to, to try to get him more time to work on his own salvation instead of his job. Charlie is a princess who feels like everyone in Hell is symbolically ‘her people’, but her privilege and lack of ability to get out of a hierarchical headspace of thinking of herself as a pre-ordained leader who needs to save everyone, means that she is incapable of understanding the basic concept that Angel is at work and needs to be for his own survival and that her intervention in that is not helpful, and, in fact, causes Angel to be punished by his physically, emotionally and sexually abusive boss, Valentino.

Here I feel like I need to break away a little to address Angel as a character, as it has been stated a lot that he is based on a lot of stereotypes that can be harmful, particularly in relation to him being queer, a sex worker, and a drug user, and how these combinations play off one another to create a character that brings together a lot of tropes seen in media about characters with these labels. At first, I was really pleased and relieved to be seeing a character who worked as a sex worker, consensually, and who took pride in his work and seemed confident in who he was. I think that this basis of Angel coming across as willing to defend himself against the attacks of others considering him to be in some way lesser than because of who he is makes him a really likeable character despite a lot of the tropes, and made his portrayal more complicated when introducing the abusive elements of his life. Usually when seeing a sex worker character in media being beaten up by their boss/pimp character, I sigh and resign myself to the fact that we just aren’t there yet with representation – there is still such a conflation of consensual sex work with trafficking and abuse. But with Angel, he had already made it so clear in his words and actions previously that he enjoys sex work and the only way to undermine that is to suggest that Angel does not have autonomy and does not know his own mind, that he is lying, or that his story is so tragic as to render his thoughts on his situation wrong or dismissible. I see a lot of nuance and complication in Angel’s story because his relationship to sex work and his own sexuality can be positive (for example seen in the fact that Angel’s answer to what would build trust between the friends at the Hotel is to suggest BDSM as something that requires absolute trust) while also acknowledging that the power dynamic of his relationship with Valentino specifically is abusive, both on an interpersonal level, a professional level, and the more esoteric spiritual level of the show of being his ‘Overlord’ who literally owns Angel’s soul.

(NSFW, content warning: BDSM imagery, abuse, drug use)

The song “Poison” I think comes the closest to fetishising and victim-blaming to do with Angel’s abusive relationship, with lyrics like “I should have known that this would happen”, “the worst part of this hell, I can only blame myself”, “I made my choices”, and “my story’s gonna end with me dead from your poison”, but perhaps a read not reliant on tropes of sex workers in media is that this is Angel internalising these ideas about himself and believing the worst that people think of him at a very low point in his abuse. It also cuts between scenes of Angel looking in control and scenes where Angel is being genuinely abused, or scenes where Angel is doing BDSM porn scenes, with the visuals making it difficult to distinguish between consent and non-consent, and visually giving the idea that Angel is projecting a fake strength and confidence in comparison to looking powerless. A lot of this plays into SWERF (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminist) ideology and not trusting sex workers to communicate their experiences accurately if it doesn’t coincide with seeing them as purely a victim of the industry, but Angel comes across as so self-possessed that I think he seems strong in everything he does despite his flaws, and it is cathartic to see him stand up to his abuser later in the series even though he is punished for doing so.

To me, Angel’s character brings up a lot of thoughts to do with liberatory harm reduction and the idea that people need to be able to make their own choices on how they survive difficult situations without the judgement of others around them that label certain coping/survival strategies (e.g. sex work and drug use for Angel specifically) as unhealthy. Because the show has a framework that doesn’t seem to really deliberately challenge mainstream ideas of drug use and consent, Angel’s friends often don’t seem to support him for making the choices that he needs to make currently to survive the material situation that he is in, falling back on ideas that sobriety=good, promiscuity=damage and not really taking into account the wider backdrop of anyone’s behaviours and why anyone would be being labelled unfavourably for making these choices when already confined to Hell for an eternity for some perceived lack of goodness. This functions in much in the same way that survival crimes like drug use, theft, sex work, etc. are demonised within our own society, individualising the behaviours rather than understanding them as taking place within a society based on control and needing an underclass, like how Heaven needs Hell to exist in this way but similarly doesn’t want Hell to become uncontrollable.

The line in the song “Poison”, “I got so good at telling you what you want to hear, I dissociate, disappear”, made me think of Barbie Wilder’s essay on Neurodivergence and sex work (https://tryst.link/blog/neurodivergence-and-sex-work-how-i-work-differently/), talking about her experiences as a sex worker and how she views dissociation as a skill in her job, while other people mistakenly conflate that with sex work being traumatic. There is a lot of reality to Angel’s character and experiences but it needs to be viewed with a lot more nuance than if you’re reading him according to usual stereotyping of sex workers, because Angel is experiencing many different elements of trauma and conflating that with his involvement in sex work in general over-simplifies his story and reactions and fails to see him as a fully-realised three-dimensional character. Reading Angel’s reactions, it is necessary to understand the underpinning that sex work is labour and labour in any job is exploitative, but sex work is not uniquely so.

To me, Angel’s character brings up a lot of thoughts to do with liberatory harm reduction and the idea that people need to be able to make their own choices on how they survive difficult situations without the judgement of others around them that label certain coping/survival strategies (e.g. sex work and drug use for Angel specifically) as unhealthy. Because the show has a framework that doesn’t seem to really deliberately challenge mainstream ideas of drug use and consent, Angel’s friends often don’t seem to support him for making the choices that he needs to make currently to survive the material situation that he is in, falling back on ideas that sobriety=good, promiscuity=damage and not really taking into account the wider backdrop of anyone’s behaviours and why anyone would be being labelled unfavourably for making these choices when already confined to Hell for an eternity for some perceived lack of goodness. This functions in much in the same way that survival crimes like drug use, theft, sex work, etc. are demonised within our own society, individualising the behaviours rather than understanding them as taking place within a society based on control and needing an underclass, like how Heaven needs Hell to exist in this way but similarly doesn’t want Hell to become uncontrollable.

Husk creates a lot of tension in the narrative with Angel by rejecting who Angel is, always saying that he is ‘fake’, rejecting advances (fine!) but often in a way that comes across as toxically masculine and somewhat homophobic (not fine!), until developing a friendship with Angel that seems to be based on finding that Angel has more to him than Husk had first considered. It’s only at this point that it feels as though Husk reaches out in a way that Angel can relate to, dancing with one another in the song “Loser Baby”, with Husk starting the line “It’s okay to be a…”, and Angel finishing it with “…coked up dick sucking ho’?” with such a questioning tone but with a sense of hope of acceptance – that he is okay with himself in that way, but is almost disbelieving that anyone else could also be okay with that. The moment with Husk replying “Baby, that’s fine by me!” is when Angel spreads his arms and starting to sing along, taking the label of ‘loser’ and the acceptance that is coming with that, with Angel standing underneath lots of usually ‘negative’ labels to do with being a sex worker and a drug user but owning them as part of his identity. This is one of the only times that the show seems to take into account how characters feel about their own behaviours and sense of self, rather than projecting morality onto them.

As the saying goes “Hell is other people”, and it’s really true for the Hell of Hazbin Hotel, since there is such an established and unchallenged hierarchy within their society – the leader of Hell himself Lucifer, princess Charlie, the Overlords who own the souls of folks in Hell and have power over them, and characters lower down the hierarchy but with a close enough proximity to Charlie to be given some amount of character and agency. Heaven is shown to be a place of hypocrisy, but Hell is made hellish through hierarchies established by the folks who live there – most people seem to be surviving hell through keeping their head down, doing their jobs, and not upsetting their Overlords, and it seems as though on a personal level we as the audience see owning the souls of others as a problem when we are treated to physically seeing the manifestations of chains around the necks of characters that we follow, but the dynamic has not been challenged systemically. Overlords, like the capitalists of our own universe, are often in competition with each other and self-interested to the point of isolation from the rest of the society they live in, despite the dangers even to themselves. One Overlord, Carmilla Carmine, an arms dealer, found that she was able to kill an angel during the last extermination but keeps the information secret, not wanting to bring trouble to herself or her family, despite – or perhaps because of – how that information could change the entire landscape of Hell in making people aware that it is possible to fight back and that, contrary to the popular belief, angels can be killed.

Until there is absolutely no other option but to fight and it has been revealed that fighting is not necessarily completely futile, the focus of change is based on individually reforming characters and asking institutions of power nicely if they would please consider not killing folks (as we see unfortunately playing out in real life in relation to all threats to life, and mediating rebellion through the ‘proper channels’). By this point, I was furiously telling the screen “The Master’s tools will never dismantle the Master’s house!”, and wondering when we might ever see our characters realising that Charlie isn’t actually doing anything to help the situations by always ceding power to Heaven’s authority and keeping power for herself in Hell, and that there needs to be a time of realising that speaking politely with oppressors is not the only option. Charlie unfortunately keeps seeing herself as a divine leader in all of this, whose job it is to lead the masses to a revolt where she gets to dictate the terms of what is acceptable rebellion and what is not. For example, when residents of Cannibal Town agree to join the fight against the angels and are enthusing about wanting to taste angel’s wings, Charlie is taking their physical support as an army while distancing herself from and dismissing their methods, asking them to tone it down and not be so violent.

Here Charlie is making a distinction between the righteous killing of self-defence – the kind that is done as a necessity in only the degree needed to fend off outright genocidal attack – and killing as an uprising, or as vengeance. Charlie wants for the Cannibals to kill, and potentially die, on her behalf, but doesn’t want to lose the moral high-ground as she sees it by condoning violence, even when it is against a force that has been one-sidedly attacking and killing them for thousands of years.

When the angels come to exterminate the citizens of Hell, Charlie’s forces have trained enough to kill many of them, although Charlie is unable to best Adam and it is only by the leader of Hell himself showing up that saves Charlie, which I thought was a really disappointing message in terms of hierarchy, patriarchy and just unsatisfying story-telling by centring a character and relationship with less weight given to it. I think it would have been a lot more cathartic to see Charlie’s girlfriend, Vaggie, take on this role to help Charlie considering her arc as an angel turning on other angels, it being personally a big achievement for her to fight Adam who has been trying to blackmail her, and solidifying her relationship with Charlie even further in repairing the damage of her lying about being an angel. Even at this point, Vaggie, Charlie and Lucifer are all preaching and practicing mercy where they are able to spare individual angels who have been presented as characters. It is only a misunderstanding where Niffty has been told to stab any angels she sees that leads to her stabbing Adam in the back and killing him after the other characters have concluded on showing him mercy, allowing Charlie and friends to still keep playing into a type of morality of not wanting to kill forces that have been literally sent there to exterminate them all.

The battle ends with the angelic forces being warded off, with one of our main characters, Sir Pentious, having sacrificed himself earlier in the fight to try to kill Adam, but failing. Even with this loss and the only victory that they could really hope to achieve being to show enough force that Heaven does not try these tactics again, mercy is seen as a virtue and Charlie is seen in the ruins of the Hotel, in the throes of self-pity that she should have done better at convincing Heaven and none of this bloodshed would have happened. Charlie absolutely misses the point that this occupying and murderous force is the problem in this, not showing active resistance to it. She still sees herself as a leader, despite that she is often not as helpful at direct action tactics like combat than her friends, and doesn’t seem to ever start to place herself as part of a group or dismantle the hierarchy that has her at the top. She is surrounded by yes-people who keep telling her that this is all her destiny and everyone starts to rebuild the Hotel from the ruins, still clinging to the fantasy that individual reform is the way forward rather than challenging the systemic problems and authority. This is even after experiencing violent direct combat, because it is all framed as self-defence rather than considering that Hell could and should have an uprising that completely throws off the authority and value judgements of Heaven, and reorganises their own society to make Hell not a punishment for the folks that live there. There is no one in Hell that is orchestrating the will that Hell should be a terrible place to live, only selfish and authoritarian power relations put in place by those who want to seize power.

Despite not having mentioned Alastor, the Radio Demon, before this point, I feel like I have to mention that when Alastor is saying that he wants freedom towards the end of the last episode in the series, I momentarily was there with him – I was finally resonating with someone who I believed was understanding that they needed to throw off the chains of every aspect of Heaven and Hell and hierarchy, until realising that Alastor just has authoritarian machinations and wants individual freedom for himself, with that equating to him being at the top of the pile instead. It lead to me realising that Heaven is full of bad guys, but Hell is also not the inverse of this, and is unfortunately not on the edge of an anarchist revolution either – everyone, even the characters I think we’re supposed to like, is so invested in their own power and authority that Hell isn’t ready to show Heaven that it could be a utopia for the damned.

No one in Hazbin Hotel seems to want genuine freedom, despite the oppressions involved systemically and individually throughout the whole series, and it leaves me confused about why. I really enjoyed the world-building and the characters in this series, but I was so certain that it was going to tell a story of liberation over assimilation, and coming to the realisation that revolution achieves things that reform cannot, and that in many circumstances, continuing to try to reform something in the face of this oppression and danger harms everyone.

Because of the lens I see things through, I would love to see Charlie meaningfully recognise, confront and dismantle her own privilege and power, starting to see herself as a member of a group rather than the leader of it, and for the masses to rise against the Overlords in Hell as well as the angels in Heaven, with the understanding that this kind of uprising is justified and doesn’t need to be softened. I hope to see the citizens of Hell rejecting labels of goodness or badness and living according to their own sense of justice and freedom, with no rulers, and creating a society where Hell isn’t a punishment but a community that can fly in the face of Heaven as a force that wanted to crush it and see it fail.