Hazbin Hotel's MASTERY of TONE

hasbin hotel is a really impressive work for a lot of reasons but what has wowed me the most by far is its Mastery of tone hasbin Hotel so understands exactly what it is and it fills every nook and cranny of itself with what it is which is so rare to see as a major strength of a story being this good at tone is super difficult I think for two big reasons number one no matter what tone or mood or style you're going for as a writer you're going to run out of it way faster than you anticipate if you don't find a way to make it interesting you're just going to be hitting the same one note over and over again and it's going to get super boring it's going to get super stale a great example of this is steampunk people love steampunk but maybe you notice there's been very few successful steampunk movies or TV shows there are a lot of books but even with those none of them have even come close to reaching the level of popularity that the aesthetic itself has garnered I think it's because when people try to rate steampunk stories it's like okay characters adventurous Airship pilot great now what it's deceptively hard to expand an aesthetic or a tone or a style into entire world or entire story that can hold our attention and you can see the same challenge with hasmin Nel's mood and aesthetic we got this wonderful vibrant grimal tone and that's pretty straightforward it's pretty easy right you want to make an image make a happy face give it fangs and you're done simple but then you think about making a character with a stone that is significantly more complex and then you need to make a cast of characters that's exponentially more complex and then the idea of making a whole story just based on this grimal thing how are you even supposed to do something like that how can you get that much depth that much breadth that much variety out of something like this this isn't a character this can't connect with anyone as is it can't go on a journey and this times 10 is certainly not a cast of characters any more than generic Airship pilot time 10 is a cast of characters so that's what I want to talk about today this I think is absolutely the biggest strength and draw of hasbin hotel or biggest tide with the music I'm not personally into musical so I'm not a very good judge of that but it's this challenge with tone that I want to figure out how do you populate a world and a story with just a tone or an aesthetic or a style and how do you do this specifically in a way that feels rich and varied and deep and interesting and can maintain that interest and carry a whole story and create a cast of characters all with interesting varied personalities and interesting varied arcs and all this without quickly running out of fuel and getting stale so let's start with creating a cast of characters and I'll preface this by saying of course I don't know what Vivy poop's process is but no matter what her process just looking at what the end result is structurally can teach us so much let me show you what I mean I think if you're starting from scratch with just this aesthetic in mind just this tone of grimal or happy horror or bright dark however you want to characterize it your first character is probably going to be something along the line of nifty or angel dust both of these characters themselves in what they are are perfect representations of this mood we have a tone with built intention grim and Whimsical happy and horror bright and dark and we have a character who's cute and happy and helpful but also a stom masochistic little gremlin girl Nifty is an equal mix we got Yin and we got Yang all in one adorably horrifying little package which fits perfectly into this bright Dark World an angel dust very similar he's funny he's snarky he's upbeat and he's also a drug addict sex worker in an abusive relationship again equal mix Yin and Yang in one package and that setup that yinyang thing is very intuitive it's very straightforward what it gets interesting is if we contrast this with Charlie Charlie is not Yin and yangang at all she is entirely Yang she's entirely bright 100% or maybe 99% there's no dark half at all here so how does that make sense how does it make sense that she can fit into this Grims musical bright Dark World if we're missing the dark you could literally uproot Charlie and plopper into a regular Disney movie and she would just fit in perfectly arguably better than she fits into grimal hasbin Hotel world and that form of the question is of course pointing directly to the answer we're not meant to see grimal when we look at Charlie herself we're meant to see it when we contrast Charlie with the world she in habits she is an entirely bright spot in an entirely Dark World in other words Charlie isn't a yin-yang Charlie is the little white dot in the black half of the yinyang so that first basic setup might be the most intuitive but if you think about it there are just lots and lots of variations on this you look at centus for example starts out pretty much entirely a villain dark Grim scary but then he has a Redemption Arc so we don't see dark when we look at his character we see it when we look at his development alisur is another different structure here we find grimal not just in the form of existing tension but as ambiguity in how we and the characters view him is he an ally or is he an enemy is his smile friendly or is it Sinister is he helping us or is he luring us into a trap so it's not a yinyang it's a black circle that sometimes seems white sometimes seems gray we can't really tell it's Schrodinger's Circle another example is loot here the bright is only in the aesthetic and the association and the character is just an angry hateful otherwise box is another structure here the character is mostly grim and evil but there's Whimsy in the in congruity and absurdity of what he is he is a TV demon that absurdity contrasts with everything else about him so this is one major method of generating expansion and variety find different configurations of the tension within your tone mood aesthetic it may seem at first like there's only one thing to do but if you get more creative with how you think about it there's just endless configurations you can come up with to use a non-h Hasan Hotel example let's say we're doing post-apocalyptic pretty easy to find the tension within that aesthetic this is a world dealing with the end of the world and there's going to be natural tension between pre-apocalypse and post-apocalypse features of that world and with a story like the last of us that gives us characters like Joel who smack in the middle of that tension but also gives us a character like Bill who even before we get to all the gay stuff is already interesting because he's basically found a way to live like he's pre-apocalypse in a post-apocalyptic world just like Charlie he is a little white dot we find tension not in him internally yet but in his severely contrasting relationship with his context and that makes him wildly different from all these other characters we get variety from that structure itself okay so I want to go back to Vox for a second Vox specifically brings up a second major source of variety that you really see hasbin Hotel capitalizing on namely not every mix needs to be like proton and electron happy devil angel murder Etc you can also get some neutrons in there as well you think about characters like Vox and Alistair that's not bright plus dark it's dark plus something random radio demon TV demon that's Neutron electron or you look at Charlie Charlie is like a proton neutron mix we got good plus Hotel owner it's a Whimsical spin on a neutral feature of the world you look at Nifty we got proton electron Neutron cheerful stom masochistic cleaning lady husk is a cynical grumpy gambling addict cat bartender we got Grim Whimsical neutral so what we're really seeing here is overlaying the tone on the entire world both the interesting stuff and the mundane stuff and then just seeing what it looks like because if you keep trying to find more and more and more configurations of just bright and dark you're just going to get more happy devils and Angel murders and that's going to get boring after a while instead you can say what would a barber look like in hasbin hotel world what would a librarian look like what would a lawyer look like what would a race car driver look like a social media influencer a plumber a computer programmer an elementary school student all these things are neutral they're mundane but by infusing it with the world's tone that tension automatically makes it interesting even Lucifer is a great example of this with his Ducks happy devil duck maker now that is the kind of variety we all want to see okay third method of finding variety which applies to characters but also just to everything is what I'm going to call finding adjacent terms again let's say I'm using grim and Whimsical here you have the strict characteristics of each of those tones Grim is about horror it's scary violent dark it's raw it's cruel it's about evil but you don't need to limit yourself to just that you can expand into adjacent emotions and tones characteristics that aren't Grim per se but fit naturally with grim that feel similar like cynical rebellious sexy edgy taboo countercultural dominating indulgent gratuitous chaotic and then you have Whimsical which itself is fun free optimistic Carefree but adjacent to that is stuff like hope friendship Trust cuteness love kindness helpfulness sweetness Redemption celebration again none of these things are Whimsical but they fit with Whimsical they feel similar to Whimsical they indirectly lead to expression of Whimsy and same with the Grim adjacent terms rebellious as a concept could go many different ways but you see this for example in Arcane also rebellious just feels right when things are Grim it's a great pathway into the Grim stuff in a world or you take sexy why are horror movies filled with gratuitous sex scenes because there's an element of sexy that feels like it's in the same emotion group as scary and you can Define that if you want but it's not about defining it's about capturing the feeling you want more richly and finding ways of expressing that so just to spell this out in hasb been otel if I'm stuck with just happy horror I'm going to end up with a bunch of cheerful monsters and Angelic murderers and happy Devils but if I expand into adjacent emotions and adjacent tones that's how I get a protagonist like Charlie who's all about hope it's how I get a sexy terrorist character like Cherry Bomb that's how I figure out what the characters sound like the snark the sarcasm the cynicism the insults none of that stuff is strictly Grim but it fits with grim it fits a little bit with Whimsical also you look at the feel of the settings so much of it is about taboo and Chaos it's something you cannot get just from Grim or from horror directly you need to find the emotional extended family those Concepts belong to you got to invite the cousins and the nieces and the nephews to come over and join the party even if the party itself is about the main family these Concepts can support the main stuff okay and the final method to get variety is instead of going broad going specific don't just give me generalized Grim don't just give me Grim aesthetic what specific things are Grim addiction Abus of relationships self-sabotage lies betrayal EST strange family genocide what specific things are Whimsical Jazz 1920s fashion crushes shy flirting cute pets hilariously bad commercials trust exercises that don't work rubber duckies that do flips and of course singing that is the huge one and you'll notice some of these specifics they're not just helping with character design they're starting to hint at whole plot lines whole arcs whole stories so on that note I want to switch gears here and move on to the second major topic of this video in this discussion of expanding tone so far we've been talking about variety we've been talking about breath but as important if not more important is the topic of depth so let me ask an entirely different type of question from what we've had up until now why do people love this aesthetic what need is this grimal tone addressing what is it offer that fans cannot get from either just Grim or just Whimsical when we talking earlier about when there's a tone or style that we like but it gets stale and we get bored that's not because my need has been fed filled it's because my tastes have attached to that tone as a gateway to something else something bigger maybe something more important to me whatever it is I still want something and I'm not getting it or conversely here with Hasan otel I am getting it so that's my question what am I getting what is all this doing for me in a greater sense and granted we're getting into speculative territory here but let's just start with what this is no matter how you formulate the tone its most prominent feature is that it's paradoxical happy horror should not make sense in real life Grim things aren't Whimsical and Whimsical things aren't grim there should not be able to be a character like Charlie in a setting like this and yet there she is a show where people are singing like Disney characters about drugs and sex and the animation looks like something out of a Cartoon Network show in the '90s that shouldn't be able to exist and yet here it is so like any Paradox in art people find this compelling in I think two ways number one it makes you question your assumptions about the components of the Paradox take another famous fiction Paradox the anti-hero we have all these assumptions about what it means to be a hero they're supposed to be honorable selfless kind character Matic good and then you have this guy he's unprincipled he's selfish he's mean he's antisocial he's immoral how could this guy possibly be a hero and yet there he is saving the day right before my eyes so now I'm questioning what a hero is what it takes to be a hero what it means to be a hero number two there's an implicit validation of the components of the Paradox at least in relation to each other whatever the result of my questioning it necessarily begins with accepting yes you can be a hero with these seemingly unheroic qualities or even better all the seemingly unheroic qualities are actually kind of badass and good it makes us feel better hearing this implicit message that we don't need to be a saint to do good in the world I can be myself I can be selfish I can be kind of a jerk sometimes I can make mistakes and have flaws and sometimes that's actually better than being a hero in the conventional way paradoxes are oddly comforting because their very existence releases us from the obligation to reconcile the two sides we're compelled to accepted as is with hasb been Noel both of these aspects are not just understood but thoroughly and passionately embraced Vivy poop identified consciously or intuitively that what people found so compelling and fascinating about cute cartoony hell demons was that their very existence was basically a cheeky VI to traditional or stereotypical Heaven hell Theology and implicit in the cute cuddly loving feelings we feel from just how they look despite their demonic evilness implicit in that is a validation and acceptance of what they are sinful and good can coexist that mix can be lovable and it can create something we connect with so of course now when it comes to finding a story to tell about these characters a journey to take them on again you could make it about anything but what people were already enthralled by with these characters was The Cheeky Rebellion against Christian ethics or at least the cultural Dogma surrounding Christian ethics and the implicit validation of what's deemed evil so what the fans would absolutely eat up in the same way they gobbled up the characters themselves would be a story about rebellion against the same ethical dogma and a story about validating people who have been deemed Evil by that dogma and that is exactly what we got hasbin hotel is a story about fighting angels and rehabilitating Demon Sinners the plot itself is bursting with the same energy as the aesthetic they match each other and emotion and in meaning and they magnify each other brilliantly and this plot is what finally gets us to some real substance remember even once we have the whole cast of characters this still isn't really about anything meaningful yet it's just people liking an aesthetic and even once we expand to adjacent things like addiction and abuse and sex and romance and Trust okay now we have the potential for meaning maybe I can daydream about those topics make up stories for the characters maybe I can can enjoy knowing the fact that these characters apparently have stories about these topics but it's not what we get in episode 4 with angel dust where we go in a whole journey into the deepest darkest depths of addiction and abuse and find our way out thanks to a true friend that transforms angel dust from just another compelling character design into a symbol of defiant self-acceptance Charlie isn't just another adorable Paradox princess her story about Redeeming the rejects of an Heaven transforms her into a Beacon of Hope in a dogmatic world that refuses to believe in hope her relationship with vegie isn't just another fun gay pairing it's a manifestation of the happy life that lives outside the hateful cultural religious Paradigm oppressing her world the Angels aren't just jerks the context granted by the story transforms them into the jerks from our own lives they are the jocks of the Divine realm the moral Hypocrites on their High horses who are obsessed with hating me and my own friends who don't deserve the esteem various systems have granted them and abuse their power every chance they get even if the package they and remains fairly light-hearted and silly it's reaching deeper for so many people who are using the story to access a more personal connection and this really is the Holy Grail of developing tone because what is it all for why expand your aesthetic into something bigger if you have nothing more to say than what your aesthetic itself already said just to show you another example of this done well with a movie I never hear anyone talk about for some reason this is a movie that I think is all around amazing to learn from mentioned before how steampunk seems notoriously difficult for whatever reason for people to expand into meaningful stories there's a movie called the aeronauts which to be honest isn't even really steampunk it's historical fiction based on two actual real life British aeronauts in the 1800s who broke altitude records in their cold gas filled balloon it's this actually insane story but the movie still realizes and Embraces the semi-realistic steampunk style and more importantly it confidently reaches beyond the aesthetic through its story and it does this by understanding accurately what steampunk is the charm of this aesthetic really comes down to the tension between the rigid Victorian era society that birth the industrial Evolution and the boundless hope implicit in the technology boom of that era and that science-driven hope pushes hard against that rigid Society it rebells against its rules just by what it is just by what science is science is this powerfully Renegade aspect of the human experience that tension is what steu is all about and that's the story this movie chose to tell it's not about the visual style it's not about the character design it's about this truly meaningful aspect of the human experience and there's an opportunity for that meaning to hit exponentially more powerfully because that's the story this aesthetic is designed to tell that's the meaning that's already there so why tell a smaller story or why tell a story about something totally unrelated it's just a wasted opportunity and it's the same with hasmin otel the whole point of all of Vivy poop's art and character designs and everything she did up until this point was to tell a story about hopeful demons rebelling against Heaven she didn't have to search for What story do I tell about these characters she had to find what story was already there just waiting to be told we've gotten bigger and bigger picture here with this discussion of tone and how it really encompasses all elements of a story but there's another layer to this that I think is even more meta than everything we talked about so far and this is something which has been here since the very beginnings of hasbin Noella back to the very first sketches grimal as a tone has taken a lot of different forms throughout the years from Sweeney Todds creepy fun musical feel to Tim Burton's Darkly playful style of clamation to the Adams family's over-the toop maob comedic tone and you'll notice that a lot of these forms just like the tone itself are also paradoxical mixes of two things that independently already exist and particular type of mix 2 musicals clamation sitcoms these aren't usually about cannibalism for example or death or zombies There's Something being Satisfied by this quote unquote wrong use of these innocent forms of media and that's what I want to understand here as well hasbin Noel's art style is designed to feel like a ' 9s Cartoon Network Cartoon and its musical style is designed to feel like Disney what exactly is that doing what's satisfying about not just the tone but the tone in this particular package Cartoon Network characters doing drugs Disney Prin is Sid stepping animals having BDSM sex what about that is so weirdly gratifying way more gratifying than seeing the same thing happen with a different aesthetic a non-referential one what's going on there so what I'm about to say might be a little bit subjective but if it is I'm pretty sure it's widespread tell me if you feel this as well I can go back to the media I loved as a kid but I can't really go back to it if you know what I mean and the weird thing is that it doesn't feel like I've left it behind it feels like it's left me behind in some weird way it almost feels like I'm not welcome there anymore I'll still love the aesthetic the characters the jokes the fun but I also have to acknowledge I'm not the intended audience it's not trying to connect with me anymore it doesn't want to connect with me anymore and that's kind of sad it feels bad my favorite thing doesn't want me anymore it's moved on to other kids and now I'm all grown up and I have to leave and in specific what I mean here is that I can go back to Fairly Odd Parents and Little Mermaid but those characters don't talk the way I talk they don't dress the way I dress they don't live the way I live they don't dream the way I dream They Don't Love the way I love they don't struggle the way I struggle and the hasb been Hotel characters do they curse they have badass fashion they do drugs they care about what I care about they're in relationships that feel more like mine they have mental health struggles that I share it's this media style we love that left us now trying to connect with us again it's welcoming us back and specifically in a way that says everything that excluded you before is what I now love about you it's exactly what I want to celebrate about you it's exactly how I want to connect with you and to be clear this is different from representation that's a separate discussion I'm talking about big picture children's lives are protected sanitized neutralized feels like it has all these rules and the media we give them feels just as protected and sanitized and neutralized and you can feel that it has a ton of rules adult media feels exposed dirty Dynamic and it feels like it has no rules and that's because adult life is exposed and dirty and dynamic and has no rules so it's not about being gay or having a certain kind of fashion or being addicted to drugs it's about what are feel like big picture I don't have to feel like I'm stepping into a play pen when I'm watching hasbin Hotel all these factors come together like a broad announcement to the audience you don't have to put any part of yourself aside will take you as is which you may already be noticing is also the plot this journey of rebellion and validation is built into not just the grimal tone overall but into specifically this subcategory of it children's media which can feel as dogmatically exclusive as Heaven is now being subverted in a way that Rebels against and undermines that Dogma too and placy sends the same message about validation all of this all this Stu we just talked about just goes to show why tone is like the secret weapon of Storytelling people think of tone in stories like how we use the term colloquially how people say things how your voice sounds the emotion in it but it's the tone of the story it's how the story says things it's the emotion in that and because of that it's like the one story element that doesn't stay in its Lane it's emotion that infuses everything big picture small picture mid picture I think the one scene where you see all of this everything we talked about so far in this video all of what tone is expressed and activated is the Happy Day in Hell sequence that song is without a doubt the tone setting scene of the entire show it is rubbing the Paradox in your face and you see how it lives in everything this song is Charlie coming alive for us as the one bright spot in her Dark World the imagery is screaming at us look at Disney musical tone existing alongside every depraved category of thing you can think of from violent crime to furry sex to cannibalism and it's not just visually both the imagery and the lyrics and even the music itself are all establishing these patterns for how this tone will be used happy day in hell we see that exact J position over and over again super bright followed by comically dark and the dark doesn't bother us it doesn't disturb us it's the punch line it's there to ground Us in reality in relatability in fun and also to provide Stakes the Whimsical is going to raise the Grim out of its hopelessness interjections about barbed wire being shoved in holes for example which disrupt Charlie singing at first become harmonious counterpart went by the end of the song where we hear that the guy kind of likes BR wire being shoved in his hole these patterns of jux position validation Redemption are has been hotel's Foundation it's what will permeate practically every frame of the show it will live in every corner of the setting it will write the dialogue it will Design the characters it will tell the story tone enables all these separate parts of the story to magnify each other if you understand how to use it this type of emotional expression is such an unbelievably flexible tool that can fit itself and fractalize itself into anything at any level at any scale it's what can point all your little laser beams in the same direction Focus all that emotional energy and strengthen the collective impact of the entire story experience subscribe I hope to see you guys in person at the Meetup in Seattle this Friday at sakuran follow me on Twitter at JD schne for updates about time and place huge thanks to the patrons as always if you'd like to support the channel by all means check that out link is in the description and the cards next video will be more hasbin Hotel content it's going to be about another thing in addition to tone that I think this show is just the best example of ever so follow the channel and stay tuned for that hope you all enjoyed and thanks for watching

Channel: schnee

Views: 122,646

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Id: ytJoePrk4NU

Length: 22min 36sec (1356 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024