Hazbin Hotel Episode 4: In defense of the pacing (but I do have one complaint)

SPOILERS for HAZBIN HOTEL episode four.

I don’t want to say “I can’t be critical” of a show that I like, but I do want to be honest about the fact that Hazbin Hotel makes me happy to the point of aches. There are specificities to it that I can’t unpack in detail here today, but in general, it’s a combination of my own sensibilities of taste in media, my love of hyper-aesthetics and the fact the show is a Disney-renaissance throwback that is surprisingly doing more for me than I realised it would. Ultimately, my feelings will depend on the final product, that being the whole series, not just season one.

Something that I have been seeing getting talked about is the pacing of the series being rushed, and I can see where some people are coming from with that, but at the same time, I didn’t really experience that in a negative way, and as such I’d like to do a defence of the pacing before getting into my thoughts about episode four.

I want to keep in mind that the way one experiences the passage of time in media is very subjective. For example, in my case, when it came to the movie Star Wars Episode Seven, my biggest problem with that movie was the feeling that the whole story took place within a twelve-hour period or less, making that movie feel very rushed to me…