/hhg/ talk about ep 4 of helluva boss part 3

from /hhg/ Helluva Hotel general #667, #668
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The episode kinda scked until the fight, honestly. The pitchman felt pretty shoehorned into it.
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I'd describe the individual setpieces as okay but the overall writing tying them together as weak.
>Happygolucky angels vs Thisisallhotgarbage devils on their respective shoulders, whispering in some stupid clod's ears
Fine premise
>Guy who did a lot of good (enough that he's got people in the afterlife rooting for him) but did it for wholly self-serving reasons, Caesar style
Sure, why not, great philosophical question to contemplate. If you become a surgeon and develop a revolutionary life-saving brain surgery technique for the sole purpose of legitimizing your overwhelming gre ftish, are you actually a good person or just a well masked monster?
>Shell story that ties background character from episode two into Wacky Sinner #1's unspoken bond of mutual evil with Wacky Sinner #2 via some TV commercials
Confounding. "Okay the souvenir hawker from one scene in E2 is back, and he's running a Cash-4-Gold style operation now". The whole thing comes out of left field and the conclusion in particular really feels like someone was struggling to find a way to wrap up a story so they just did a full ass-pull
>Exposition of the damned mortals done mostly through offhand dialogue without any on-screen representation of their underlying wickedness
Total crap. In Murder Family, you could see bone sculptures and human trophies in the background the outwardly wholesome family's house. They keep making scant-second references to them being cartoonish mustache-twirling cad-rake-bounder-toff supervillains in life, but ONLY through the dialogue. It lacks teeth if they're supposed to be two-faced tech bigwig cutthroats. We needed to hear about how wonderfully their marvelous technological advances have benefited all of mankind by curing bone-cancer, doubling crop yields, and donating 10 trillion wingwangs to education, then give us a hard cut to a filthy, unsafe factory in a third world country where malnourished children are laboring in 18 hour shifts.
<cont>
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We needed to see a couple of emaciated brown kids working nonstop under the watchful eye of some blck-clad PMC duchebags to produce the miraculous not-iPhones and anti-cancer rays and Instant-Nutrition-Trons that they'll never be able to afford themselves and then ship them off to the nasty, morally gray base, posting #saveZambukistan and #kurethekids via the very devices that are being built using cancer-inducing wageslave-laor. Instead we got a few vapid lines that boil down to "haha I'm rich entirely through fckery and I don't feel the least bit guilty about that", with no proper on-screen demonstration of the fact that Whoever The Fck Esq. and Sir Forgettable Name definitely deserve to be in Hell. The whole thing felt like what I do when I'm on the last dregs of a six pack and I start to get hungry: see what's in the fridge (grab up any ideas you've had lately that are still lying around), then shove everything in between two slices of bread (write anything to bring together these tightly scripted vignettes, no matter if it makes sense)
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Eh, they could go down that route as long as they dont play it off as serious, kinda like that simpsons couch gag that Banksy did
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Going back on my thoughts on the whacky nonsense that is Hell's power levels.

I'm just going to assume that Helluva Boss is going to operate under the pretense of being 'whacky bullsht' whereas whenever Hazbin Hotel gets going, and it plays things far more straight, that we're going to be told to just discount the whacky nonsense that get's spouted in Helluva Boss, or to count it as exaggerations for the sake of comedy.

Or the response will be to stop asking perfectly logical questions and stare at the cute imp couple.
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OR the seemingly whacky bullsht will be explained in detail as the machination of higher powers within and beyond Hell, drastically raising the stakes.

Also, has anyone considered that just because I.M.P, kills someone, they may not end up in Hell? Sin is only precluded for the client, not the victim.
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Oh for sure. Most of their victims are probably fairly unremarkable people or even notably good people who get on the express elevator to Halo Land once they die.
>Deranged, garbage digging, panty sniffing, super rpey stalker still can't get over the fact that the object of his maniacal obsession never reciprocated him
>Kill the btch she deserves it for being so cold to me

>Cartel lord who sent kidnapping victims heads to their families in the mail when they didn't pay up is salty over the one unbribeable cop who got the ball rolling on the feds cornering him and mowing him down
>Kill the fcker and his kids too, he screwed up my opulent cocaine fueled life on Earth. No one crosses Juan de Calzone and gets away with it.

>Crooked mogul who poisoned thousands of kids with his shoddily run factory finally gets roasted in a lawsuit, dies in poverty.
>Kill my lawyer, that stupid faot didn't defend me hard enough in court. I know I'm guilty as sin but I never wanted to actually face consequences for it.
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So... I.M.P. is technically impartial.
Sure, they're assassins for hire who kill the living, but they don't explicitly bolster the numbers in Hell. And in the same vein, C.H.E.R.U.B.'s modus operandi wasn't to keep people on the straight and narrow... They just acted as guardian angels, keeping them alive and generally helping them, regardless of their character.
Literally the only time both sides broke this neutrality (as far as we've seen) was with this old man they fought over, since I.M.P. explicitly needed him to end up in Hell, whilst C.H.E.R.U.B. wanted him to turn a new lead in his sudden old age.
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Precisely. If morality is on a sliding scale, IMP's home is definitely on the evil side, but not all the way to pure evil, and they have enough free will and just enough of a moral compass to reconsider their actions, but at the end of the day they just murder people for a living and 90% of the time they don't lose sleep over it.
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Just saw the new episode last night and I wasn't around here to see if anyone discussed this yesterday, but did anyone else find that some chunks of the episode had a noticeable drop in animation frames used?
Like, there were bits where it looks as good as ever, and then there are moments like when the Cherubs get banished from Heaven and the animation looks choppy and odd.
I dunno if there was an issue and they had to rush the episode out before finishing up any remaining cleanup that other episodes normally get or what, but it really stood out for me.

Otherwise, it was a decent episode. I think it would have been stronger if it dropped out the stuff in Hell at the start and end (I'm probably in the minority on that opinion). Fem-Moxxie was weirdly sxy, and the cat costumes for Moxxie and Millie were also cute. And the cherubs were great and I dig how they set them up as future antagonists by having them get royally fcked over by IMP (and I love that the fawn cherub who breaks the news to them is an utter saccharine btch).
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>the episode unintentionally confirms that redemption is impossible

That wraps up that arc of the story
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I thought it was okay but the pacing was off. Also, they had a telling not showing problem with the two sinners. They just mentioned off hand that they were a pair of heartless money grubbing industrial-revolution type businessmen without in a few lines of dialogue and we never saw them doing anything comically evil enough to really support them manifesting in hell as a pair of spastic robotic supervillains.
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>Also, they had a telling not showing problem with the two sinners. They just mentioned off hand that they were a pair of heartless money grubbing industrial-revolution type businessmen without in a few lines of dialogue and we never saw them doing anything comically evil enough to really support them manifesting in hell as a pair of spastic robotic supervillains.

Yeah, they were a weird part of it. The bit with the imp who finances wacky inventions also felt tacked on (despite being set up at the start), like they couldn't figure out how to end the episode, which is part of why I feel they could have done better without the first and last scene.
Still, for those who dig into Hazbin lore, I guess seeing those two reborn as supervillians helps explain how characters like Sir Pentious come to exist in Hell.
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Yeah the comical supervillains thing does establish that its a standard issue thing for people to become caricatures of what they were in life upon arriving in Hell. Pent was probably a penny dreadful-grade mad genius in life.
*play the Skull Crusher Mountain-Jonathan Coulton Storyboard Animatic video*
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I know this is not ep 4 but I want to share this.
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i wonder if a picture of IMP in the real world like this would blow up on social media in-universe
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For a short while, it would.
According the insta accounts, Blitzo was captured on camera when they had a vacation on a beach - only as a shadowy silhouette, but it did earn him a stern talking-too from Stolas (which he promptly interrupted via vibrator).