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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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I think the answers to all your questions is tumblr the show is tumblr personified and very feminine it's just shipping tumblr OCs in problematic relationships.

Yeah, there's a certain degree of the storylines matching whatever SuperWhoLock fandom would like best (aka Literally Lucifer In A Glass Ball). On the other hand, the show's increasingly put Everyone's Favorite Shipping Solution as explicitly a non-option, so there are some limits, and to an extent I think the writers have gotten the point where the characters have run away from just being vehicles for Tumblr OC Shenanigans.

I don't think the show really does highlight the flaws of traditional sexual norms... Stolas and Stella have an arranged marriage because of rule of cool by girl norms.

True, to an extent, but they're also just two pressured into marrying and having a kid by their family (as a conduit for society), and they're not the only ones. Moxxie's parents relationship was even worse than Stolas/Stella, with his father literally murdering his mother for encouraging Moxxie's morality. Blitzo's mom was good, and we don't know much about her relationship with Blitzo's dad before the fire, but given how much a piece of work he is in every scene we see him, that relationship probably wasn't a healthy one, either.

They're not 'real-world' relationships (Mafia don, circus owners, respectively), any more than the non-traditional relationships are (demon/cyborg clown, bee royalty party hound/bodyguard), but they're still about real-world problems: Crimson is very explicitly the homophobic parent that sees his children as extensions of his will and body, Cash is a neglectful boozehound who trades his son for a fiver and a condom (and is heavily implied to beat him), Fizz and Asmo's situation is a parallel for coming out, .

One of the only healthy relationships is Millie and Moxxie's which is also basically the only monogamous heterosexual one.

Beelzebub and Vortex is... probably not strictly monogamous, given the ending to Spring Break, but the episode actually focusing on the two present it as monogamous enough for Loona to be jealous and excluded, and for it to be healthy, and it's also straight. That said, it's a mirror to Asmodeus and Fizz's relationship, which is overtly gay and, to the extent there's anything but maximally uwu loving tender care, it's just because Asmodeus isn't willing to be out (... about loving, rather than just fucking, an imp) at first. In Hazbin Hotel, you've also got Sir Pentious/Cherri Bomb (heterosexual, not-strictly-speaking-consumated except with explosive fights) and Charlie/Vaggi (lesbians) as healthy relationships.

((Millie's parents aren't awful people, but their expectations and Moxxie's inability to compare to them are as much the opposing force in their episode as Stryker is. I think they're intended to be a generic parents rather than a healthy relationship, but we see little enough of it I don't know if it's really possible to put into a category.))

And while Millie and Moxxie's relationship is monogamous (barring an invite from Michael Crawford) and heterosexual (ditto), it's very far from traditional norms (as is Pentious/Cherri). There's the pegging jokes, of course, but there's the time she literally wears the pants in the relationship, the love song, so on. They're how progressives see the ideal New Relationship, once you remove the trapping of the show from it. To the extent they have problems, those problems (the summer camp episode, Moxxie's inferiority complex, Pentious/Cherri's Love Song) exist to explore and resolve them within progressive understandings.

That is, as you say, girl gooner bait. Indeed, these sorta analysis wouldn't be unusual in Omegaverse fic, and the sort where the plot is little more than Oh No Stepbro Alpha, I'm Stuck.

But while it doesn't mirror directly to how the world works, it does still reflect what people want to see as changes, and do see as problems to be fixed, in the real world.

I also realize I'm replying to a two year old comment but I was curious if there had been talk about either of here shows on here as they seem a prime culture war topic.

I got a PM about it a while back (on reddit?), and from a search there's a couple off-hand mentions but beyond that, not much really. Hazbin does say a lot about broader philosophy, as you'd expect from a show more directly about damnation and redemption, but I'm not sure how much the culture war touchpoints would be unusually specific to it.