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Life Lessons From The Princess of Hell
On Charlie’s Relentless Optimism And Caring As Strength
This essay contains spoilers for season one of Hazbin Hotel.
The world is on fire.
We hear it so consistently that it’s become a punchline. A meme. The (God help me) New Normal.
But despite the jokes we make to cope, living with the doom and gloom of the modern age is a psychic drain. We’re more burned out than ever before, autoimmune and stress-related illnesses are on the rise, and we hear regularly that the planet’s natural resources are running out. Yet we still have to live as though none of that is happening.
We plan lives, get married, and have children (if we can afford it). We map out our careers and grind away while everything around us burns. There’s this weird optimism that Millennials, Gen Z, and younger generations need to cultivate as we try to carve lives out of this mess. That weird dichotomy lives in the back of my mind most days as it is, but jumped to the forefront when I saw Hazbin Hotel.
I’ve been a fan since the pilot showed up in my YouTube recommendations in 2019. For anyone unfamiliar with the show, it follows Charlie Morningstar, the Princess of Hell, as she opens a hotel to try and rehabilitate sinners so they can enter Heaven and escape eternal damnation.
When the official series finally aired five years later, I saw Charlie through the lens of my current life experience—namely years of economic struggle and pessimism. I watched her dance through the streets of Hell belting an infernal version of a Disney princess ‘I Want’ song, and something clicked in my brain. As she dodged hanging corpses and bits of brain, shouting out the local porn studio from the side of a moving garbage truck, I thought, “Oh my God, she’s one of us.”
Here was a character making a life amid absolute carnage and trying to see the best in it. The kindest being you’ll ever meet, born and raised in Hell. She’s written that way as a joke, because who would expect Lucifer’s daughter to be a gigantic cinnamon roll, but the…
