Hazbin Hotel Season 2

I was pretty enamoured with Hazbin Hotel last year, so I've been looking forward to the second season this year. Amazon released it two episodes at a time over the course of the last month, which I thought worked pretty well... except for the freaking ads! Usually my adblock protects me from that stuff everywhere, so having to sit through 5 minutes of ads for every 25 minutes of episode was surprisingly aggravating.

I ended up really liking this second season regardless, though I thought the first two episodes were relatively weak. However, after that, every batch of two was better than the last, culminating in a pretty awesome finale.

The songs, too, started out a bit weaker than season one (in my opinion anyway) but got better in later episodes as well. Clean it up had me laughing out loud at my screen and Easy is stuck in my head on endless repeat right now.

If I had to pick a favourite and least favourite thing about this season, my favourite would probably be Vox's arc. I was originally not convinced by him being this season's central villain because I felt he was just too goofy, but this season manages to slowly ramp him up to the point where you can see how he's genuinely terrifying in some ways. (Vox Dei was particularly good for that). It's also interesting to see how he's genuinely good at networking but at the same time totally buys into Alastor's goading that letting other people do anything for him is a sign of weakness.

My least favourite thing was probably seeing the backstories for Alastor, Pentious and Vox - don't get me wrong, it totally made sense to get into them, but for me personally one of the main draws of the show are the crazy character designs, so anything that changes the scene to "just normal humans doing human things" feels a bit boring and off to me, even if it makes sense within the plot.

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