Hazbin Hotel in Context

OK, so hear me out. I had an idea for a whole post on what I was going to call the GTKC: Goth Theater Kid Continuum.

At the near end, I was going to put Hazbin Hotel, which has premiered and blown up (in a good way) the past few weeks. Edward Scissorhands and The Nightmare Before Christmas sat at the far end. And the fun thing about this anthropological timeline is that it wasn’t even hypothetical. A time-lapse of Hot Topic shelves should have shown the exact same things.

There were other pieces of media on the list: Coraline (film), Sweeney Todd (film), and Heathers (musical), but by now, you’re seeing what I’m seeing, right?

Tim Burton had a stranglehold on the continuum. And yes, I know that Henry Selick directed Nightmare, you’re not going to “um, actually” me on that one, but it was still Burton’s brainchild, and he did direct Scissorhands and Sweeney Todd. Even the Coraline film owes a ton to Burton and Selick’s stop-motion, goth-kid inspiring Halloween/Christmas extravaganza. The man had a near cultural monopoly on the whimsical macabre.

And now we see a new contender. I don’t mean that Vivienne Medrano is just ripping off Burton, either. That lady is darn talented, and Hazbin Hotel has a style all its own (it’s giving… Hot Topic meets Neopets meets Invader Zim before the FCC got to it?). And it manages to be simultaneously darker (every third line on that show would be caught by a school’s firewall) while feeling brighter: it is a show about hope in disastrous times and awful places.

But I can see it now: the Hazbin aesthetic spreading to high school drama clubs across the nation; a generation of edgy-but-we-still-want-to-sing-a-long kids defining themselves by the show’s characters; Hot Topic shelves of merchandise as bottomless as Hell itself…

Sorry, what was the question? “What’s on my mind?” Uh… you know. Sports…