Beyond redemption and interest

from /hhg/ - Hazbin Hotel #285
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Reposting from the last thread:

>So what do you think the exact nature of Alastor's cannibalistic behavior is? Given when and where he lived, it obviously wasn't any sort of "wholesome" spiritual/religious cannibalism, where your friends and family are supposed to eat your body after you've died of natural causes to keep your spirit close to them or whatever. Given his asexuality, I'm assuming it wasn't the kind of fucked up sex thing it was with certain other serial killers either. So was it Wendigo psychosis? Some kind of Hannibal Lecter thing where he eats people who irk him as a show of contempt? Perhaps more importantly, does he still engage in cannibalism now that he's dead?

>He offers to make jambalaya at the end of the pilot. I can imagine imagine everyone sitting around the table afterwards, enjoying a wonderful Cajun meal, and then one by one, they all remember that The Radio Demon is a murderer. And a cannibal. And none of them actually really watched him make this food. What they took for pieces of pork suddenly look a whole lot more suspicious. They don't actually know what the meat came from. Or WHO the meat came from.
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>It's no doubt a form of psychosis, but not the Wendigo kind. I think he just stopped drawing the line between game and "people walking around his neck of the woods" whenever he got hungry, BESIDES being a serial killer for fun (and possibly rituals).

Cont.
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>Also, a somewhat troubling thought. Cannibalism is sort of implied to be relatively prevalent in Hell. You've got those ravenous little dapper dans openly waiting in the wings for Labcoat and friend to finish yanking those spears out of the corpse in front of Rosie's emporium so they can feast on it. Neither they nor Rosie seem at all perturbed by this. Then you've got that guy who's scooping up the corpses the exterminators left behind into his "meat cart", and again, no one around him seems to give a damn. Cannibalism seems to be as innocuous to demons as humans having fish frydays or kosher/halal menus or being vegetarian or low-carb.

>>Charlie is a native-born denizen of Hell. Never known anything else.

>In spite of being such a kind and altruistic person, she might have no moral compunctions about eating people.
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>I wouldn't be surprised if most of the Hotel residents (apart from Vaggie) would be fine with cannibalism, or just ignorant about the possibility.

>On a somewhat-related note, I wonder if at one point Angel will sort-of recognize Alastor as an urban legend of sorts from his mortal years - after all, Al died during his lifetime, so he may have been, on some level, familiar with the "Louisiana Wendigo" or "Louisiana Butcher".

Cont.
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>>Al died during his lifetime, so he may have been, on some level, familiar with the "Louisiana Wendigo" or "Louisiana Butcher".

>I don't know how that would work into the overall story or character interactions but that is a pretty neat idea. Gotta remember that there is some overlap between these character's mortal lives. Angel might remember when he was on an "errand" down south and the other mobsters kept warning him not to get too drunk or stay out too late or bring any strangers back to his room, not with a slasher on the prowl. Niffty might remember being young and seeing a newspaper article about how "The Spider" had been found dead, not at the hands of the FBI or his family's many rivals, but from an overdose of the strange "wonder drug" he'd nicked from the government and been peddling ever since.
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>True.
>Husk may have been familiar with the "spurred maid murders host family" stories spread by counterculture activists as an example to why the '50s sucked, or even watched some cheesy B-movie or early detective thriller about a murderous maid.

>Vaggie is the only outlier here, as she was born far later, and probably not even in the States.
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>Do you think that Charlie actually has any issues with her full demon form? Like >>29197690 said, Charlie was born in Hell and has lived there for her entire life, surrounded by other demons. Seems like shifting into monster-mode when getting excited would feel perfectly normal to her. If she met a human and then got worked up over something, she might not even understand why her new friend was suddenly cowering on the other side of the room begging her not to hurt them.

Cont.
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>>Alastor always had a predator's urge to kill, he just stopped differentiating his prey

>I know we have our pet theory that Alastor suffered an abusive childhood, and that does indeed make sense given a modern understanding of how serial killers are made, but here's another idea.

>>Alastor had a happy life
>>He doesn't speak with a Mid-Atlantic accent because it was either talk "correctly" or get the belt in his house
>>He picked the accent up from having been sent to prestigious boarding schools and rubbing shoulders with upper-crust socialites during the hunting trips his father would take him on with his many business associates
>>Then one day he found himself staring down the sights of his rifle, not at a deer, but at another person
>>And he just shrugged and said, "Why not? This one actually looks quite tender."

>Alastor is admittedly a much less complex character in this situation, but it could add complexity to the story. Charlie, little miss "You've got something good deep down inside, I know you do", keeps trying to fix Alastor. She keeps looking for the trauma that she's certain must have smothered the little spark of good in that sweet little bayou yokel, but she can't find it. There's nothing there for her to heal. Eventually she's forced to face the notion that maybe she was wrong about people being fundamentally good. She has to confront the disturbing, disheartening idea that maybe, just maybe, some souls are just fundamentally wicked, and that she can't do anything about it.
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>...Until someone informs her that psychopathy is inherent, not developed, like sociopathy.
>But yeah, she'll have to come to the conclusion at one point that not everyone can be saved - at which point, she'll either crumble, or focus on those she CAN save.

Cont.
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>Yeah it'd either go

>>Dad WAS right about me
>>This was a stupid idea from the start
>>I can't make a difference
>>I guess I'll just go home and let my parents keep grooming me for the throne
>>Hell will always be a pit of suffering
>>It's what these people deserve

>Or she doubles down and works even more feverishly on her redemption project, with better focus thanks to the knowledge that there are some souls beyond saving. But in the latter scenario, what happens to Alastor? Would Charlie continue accepting his help? Having a renowned overlord who can crush potential threats with a snap of his fingers is useful to be sure, but she originally took his offer on the basis of believing "everyone deserves a chance to prove they can be better". Now that she's lost that belief, how does she view Al? Is he reduced to a tool, a means to an end, in her eyes? On the flip side, how would Al respond to Charlie losing faith in him and not wasting her time trying to redeem him?
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>I think Al would be more affected by Charlie loosing faith in him than he would think he should be - he's a performer, so a feeling of failure would gnaw at the back of his mind from then on.
>With every sad, accepting smile from Charlie, every bemused look from Vaggie, and every knowing smirk from Angel, he'd have to face the fact that the only thing he gained was the pity of others. Not fear or triumph, just... Pity.
>That's going to eat away at his ego (and composure) for sure.
>Sure, he knew he was a lost cause, but it just didn't register to him what that actually meant: being a social cripple.

Cont.
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>This is a good thought. Beyond anything else, like all creatives, Alastor wants attention. If everyone realizes that there's actually nothing to him, that he's just a bad seed, he loses the air of mystery and intrigue. People start to see why he's doing what he does, and stop falling for his tricks. He loses the leverage he needs to tug on everyone else's chains for his own amusement. Sinners still fear him, but not because they don't know what he's capable of, but rather they know EXACTLY what he's capable of, and how to dodge it. He's not a monster anymore, he's more like a busy intersection; just pay attention and don't do anything stupid.
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>>Al's greatest fear is being reduced to mundanity, meaning he'd either need to get involved in the logistics of overlordship, or in the politics of Hell, no longer being able to rely purely on infamy

>What an artist.
>What a blowhard.
>What a sucker.


Finito.