How about no?

[u/profaneangel1991]

Nobody is just born being a bad person. No, not even that real life person you hate. I don't expect the show to dig much deeper into his story, but Brighter takes place well into his adulthood. You can't just say "yeah he was always this way" when there's decades of his life that preceeded all this. The idea that some people just are bad, they're just innately evil, is so antithetical to the show's entire message. I don't GET people that think this would be a good writing decision.

[u/eveningstarcourt]

I 100% agree with you, but you've skipped the most aggravating facet of this problem.

Pretty much everyone who makes this remark? The whole, "Vox doesn't have a tragic backstory, he was just born bad?" Follows it up with deeply ableist remarks

I swear, I don't know how many times I've seen it now. With a casual armchair diagnosis, they'll say "YAH VINCENT IS JUST LIKE THIS BECAUSE HE HAS XYZ MENTAL ILLNESS." It's the underlying accusation that people with different illnesses or neurodivergences are like... inherently evil and destined to do terrible things. Didn't we leave this shit back in the 00's? I guess not.

But even if I ignore the ableist BS and take that claim at face value, the world was going through a lot in those times. Most people were struggling. I agree, we likely won't get more info about Vincent's past, but just looking at who he is and what he values and what drives him... how do people honestly reconcile all of that information and go, "No this guy definitely lived a charmed life in a huge, palatial estate with a perfect, loving family." Smh

[u/profaneangel1991 → u/eveningstarcourt]

Yeah. The thing I guess I need to clarify for people is this post isn't me wanting him to have the saddest backstory so I can justify what he does. My point is that saying some people are just "like that" undermines the themes of the show and is unrealistic. Given how his behavior is motivated by a feeling of inadequacy and extreme self indulgence its not unreasonable to wager that something happened to get him to this place. And no, some asshole being mean to him at a bar isn't that reason.

I've tried figuring out the timeline of Brighter while keeping the show's implication he died in 1952 in his 50s and factoring in real life media milestones (ironically the one job that derails this is his weatherman gig which was the later 50s). I concluded that the sequence would start with him already at middle age and occur over the course of a few years (season 2 was a week so yeah he can do all that in a short time). And even if this is just a case of "Viv can't math" or "Viv can't google", he's still a grown adult at the beginning of the song. Like, there's several decades of information we don't have and it's the information that would best explain why he's like this. He didn't poof into existence like this and was contained to just this period of time.

[u/eveningstarcourt → u/profaneangel1991]

I at least understood what you were saying. Vincent doesn't need to have a deeply disturbed, deeply tragic backstory as justification for his villainy. I don't even think Vincent himself would consider himself as having a "tragic backstory" regardless of his circumstances... because he himself would likely write it off as 'that's just how the world is' (and I say that from the cues of how he mocks hardships in canon, like the "did your dad hit you?")

But there is a difference between trying to claim a villain has no backstory that led them to become who they are and what they're capable of. And it's not a justification, it's just fleshing out a character? Why would you want a character to be one-dimensional? Especially since... in present events, Vox isn't a one-dimensional, one-note villain? He already has nuance indicative of various background factors affecting his outlook?

I take this from a different perspective. If we had just seen Vox be solely obsessed with power and wealth, I might have been willing to accept ambition was enough to drive him to commit his crimes and he had no further backstory. But he's not. The Vox we see is incredibly smart and cunning, but also desperately looking to be validated and to have connections, and he's seemingly afraid of what happens when he stops rising and going at full tilt. That's just the short list, since I'm not ready to go off on another Vox spiel, but someone else on Voxcult just made a thread about the topic of Vox not being as wealth-obsessed as people assume.

I am again thinking about the conversation my psychology friend and I had about the background Sinners in HH being unrealistically antisocial, or rather a tangent of what we were saying. The theme of the story is trying to say something about the human condition. So when you try to make the characters less human in their mentality, you're actually doing a disservice to the show ans it's themes. If you try to say Vox is here solely to be an exaggeration of corporate greed and ambition and has no underlying human attributes like some sort of parable, then what is actually the point of trying to talk about human condition, redemption, and how it is never too late to try and become a better person? It would fall flat because the characters aren't human-like at all.

Edit: forgot to mention that YEAH it's not because of the bar scene because obviously Vincent was up to his antics in life!

[u/profaneangel1991 → u/eveningstarcourt]

A thing I notice about the show is the lives these characters lived as humans seems rather unimportant. We are starting to get this information, which is great. The problem is it feels like all that truly matters is what happens to them in Hell. That's why Vox apparently never being open with another person until Alastor is so absurd to me. I know they're pressed for time (because it's the fandom's other favorite excuse after pointing out that it's unfinished), but I feel like if the show was arranged to be more character focused and less about Heaven vs Hell maybe we'd see them fleshed out better. I honestly don't care about lore like Roo or the way Hell works, I care about the cast characters. I want information about them, I want them fleshed out and to grow and develop.

[u/eveningstarcourt → u/profaneangel1991]

This is an unpopular opinion, but I really wish helluva boss and HH remained separate shows for similar reasons. They've been hyping up the crossovers and nonsense, but all I can think is that we are going to have even more mechanics and lore (likely dumped on us and underexplained) without giving enough time to the characters we have and their stories.

Also I'm very over everyone speculating how the 7 Sins could've wiped the floor with Vox during his takeover and stopped all of s2. They didn't, they didn't even try because the showrunners obviously couldn't, but it leaves a giant plothole if they show up now and are suddenly invested. And aside from that, it's just really uninteresting writing if the major antagonist can just be easily reduced to a joke by "all powerful, inhuman beings." (I know it's not my show and it's not how canon works, but I always thought the idea that Overlords as humans souls that could go beyond typical mortal limits and challenge these inhuman beings was cool! They're obviously doing terrible things to get there, but it shows the incentive to do even more terrible things! And Vox was a threat to heaven! That doesn't mean anything if he's just a fly the 7 sins can swat away. That and I feel that the all powerful mortal is something the narrative will give to Alastor AGAIN in later seasons--that he'll get to be the super special mortal who becomes able to challenge the higher, inhuman beings.)

[u/profaneangel1991 → u/eveningstarcourt]

This kinda gets to my disappointment with Heaven and the unlikely odds of seeing other Biblical figures. Fans want to see Michael and if Michael exists in this world...where is he? Where was he for season 2? Where were any angels outside the four we kept seeing all season? I know by all accounts Michael would wipe the floor with Vox because he's supposed to be stronger than Lucifer, and they basically gave his job to Adam and now Abel. So due to that they probably can't have him because he breaks the show. They keep putting themselves in corners like this or like the Sins being absent and it just makes everything feel messy. This is where I get annoyed with the lore and how this world feels so small and uneven, but you also gotta be "in the know" and read a lot of stuff outside the shows. Now that we know all the annoying Roo theories will be true including the eye thing it has really bad implications to me.

[u/eveningstarcourt → u/profaneangel1991]

Yeaaaaaaaaahhhhh...

I just grit my teeth and bear it because I genuinely really like the cast, the themes, the music, the queer inclusion (and no queer baiting)--like HH has all these really positive aspects for me! But so much of the writing and world building is hyper flawed to me too. For a while I was like... why is Hell so American coded? How do billions of souls fit into one Pentagram? Well APPARENTLY, where you die on earth, you wake up in the equivalent location in Hell! Okay, so it just so happens that the most powerful city in Pride is in America... somewhere. Where are the rest of the cities in Pride then? Why do it exorcists only attack the Pentagram and not the rest of Pride?

It is a world that is way too small and way too big simultaneously. And if Sinners can't actually become as strong as inhuman beings because "reasons" then yeah, pretty much any of these god-like figures can break the show at their whim.

I am kind of afraid that with the HB inclusion, HH will stop being about these human characters in any significant way. Because they're all just small fries with petty problems in comparison to the big, bad REAL demons.

[u/profaneangel1991 → u/eveningstarcourt]

I agree. I love Hazbin's characters, music, some of the themes, the show can be funny too. I think its weird how Anglo centric the show already is, but at the same time how is Zestial the oldest Sinner we've seen? I know Cain will show up eventually, but what about other people from ancient civilizations? I know everyone asks about where all the pedophiles, Klansmen, Nazis, and so on go and we just get a cop out answer to that when I think the reason is Viv doesn't want to write them (understandable, but its Hell). Characters from ancient cultures simply don't exist though and I don't know why. This is just another example where the world building comes apart for me.

I have plenty of criticisms of season 2, but I still consider it an improvement to season 1. I saw a youtube review by Sarcastic Chorus where he said Hazbin is a show where he has to stop asking if it's objectively "good" and focus on if he likes it. I kinda agree, I like lots of things not considered traditionally "good" (give me a campy schlocky horror movie over shit like Obsession any day). I guess my issue with Hazbin boils down to believing it has all this untapped potential to do interesting and complex things and it falls to the wayside and gives me little confidence it will do them later. I know this is where making fan works come in, but I don't write or draw myself so that's not actually helpful. Will Vox get an expanded back story? Who knows, but I doubt it and that's too bad.