#however i am also autistic and have major special interests in mythology and folklore

[inamindfarfaraway]

The Exorcists’ Masks of Virtue

The vast majority of Exorcists in Hazbin Hotel have a notable design element that other angels don’t: their masks are missing an eye. Specifically, the right eye.

I believe this is a reference to the Bible, Matthew 5:29. Jesus says, “If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.”

He’s being hyperbolic. Mr Free Healthcare was not pro-mutilation. What he means is that you have to be willing to make sacrifices to prevent sin. The context of the eye metaphor is him condemning adultery and warning that even something as easy, casual and small as a look full of lustful intent can lead to further, worse sin if you don’t notice your sin, hold yourself accountable for it and do the work to not let it influence your decisions. This will probably be hard. It could be very, very painful. Changing your perspective can feel as horrible as plucking out your eye, so many people can’t bring themselves to do it. But although it won’t feel that way in the moment, it’s healthier for our general wellbeing in the long run to abandon traits and behaviours that damage ourselves and/or others.

(You may notice that Jesus’s teaching that you can have sinned, redeem yourself by giving up sin and thus escape damnation is the founding principle of the Hazbin Hotel. You may also notice that it contradicts everything the Exorcists believe.)

The Exorcists seem to follow this idea of painfully excising badness for the sake of the greater good devoutly to the point of placing it above teachings like ‘Thou shalt not kill’, with their job being to remove sin, in the form of sinners, to protect Heaven. Hence the missing right eyes. They’re a declaration of moral righteousness and inability to stumble.

But the truth is that the Exorcists all have their right eyes. Their flawlessness is a facade. Underneath, they are untouched, think themselves morally untouchable and, as shown by their horror and outrage when even one of them is killed, would much rather be physically untouchable too. This perfectly represents their complete unwillingness to acknowledge their own faults, let alone improve. They are never the ones who sacrifice. They force the sinners to sacrifice and don’t compensate it with any salvation. They metaphorically rip out the sinners’ eyes, but still condemn their entire bodies as inherently, permanently sinful. So they’ll just have to do another Extermination to get the other eyes! And another one to cut off their right hands! And so on until there’s nothing left.

The only exception to the rule is Vaggie, both in appearance and character. Her mask has the left eye crossed out instead. Even before her expulsion, she’s set apart to the audience as an Exorcist who has the capacity to, shall we say, see a different side of things. Her mask having its ‘sinful’ right eye reflects her understanding that the Exorcist worldview is wrong.

When she almost kills a demon child, her hateful vision clears. She discards the part of herself that’s an unquestioning, merciless agent of death, terror and grief… and as punishment for what Lute perceives as treacherous weakness, gets her eye plucked out.

Of course Lute leaves her with only the ‘sinful’ eye. It brands Vaggie forever as the inversion, a perversion, of what the Exorcists are meant to be.

You know, all this talk of eye removal in the Bible reminds of another line - ‘an eye for an eye’. Adam directly quotes it in “Hell is Forever”. He uses it to frame the Exterminations as Old Testament-style punitive justice; the sinners did harm and so they receive it. But putting aside the debate about how ethical the concept of revenge is, the entire point of taking an eye for an eye is that it’s proportional. The punishment fits the crime. If someone cuts your eye out, you shouldn’t murder their whole family in front of them and then slowly disembowel them to death. That would be the sin of wrath. You should just make them pay without excessive pain or collateral damage. This is the fairest form of revenge.

The Exorcists don’t do that! The Exterminations aren’t proportional to the wrongs of all they hurt, nor was Vaggie’s brutal punishment equivalent to her extremely mild insubordination. Lute literally takes Vaggie’s eye, and more, after Vaggie does nothing to her! That’s the opposite of the phrase! Adam and his soldiers are wrathful and cruel, deriving satisfaction from others’ suffering. But they just can’t stop going on and on about how disgustingly evil the sinners are, in total hypocrisy… despite some of the sinners being far better people than the genocidal Exorcists are… it’s like they’re obsessed with specks of dust in the sinners’ eyes when they have massive logs stuck in their own. Oh hey, that’s in the Bible too!

#both emotionally and symbolically i am rooting for vaggie or charlie to take out one of lute’s eyes #i was like ‘cool vaggie’s missing the opposite eye to her former mask!’ #and then i went back and saw that her mask was also different #and then i went down a rabbit hole of biblical mentions of bad things happening to eyes #i know god and jesus (and the holy spirit) probably won’t appear in the show #at least not in person #but i do cherish the mental image of adam and his genocidal army hanging out #when jesus christ bursts in with a whip #and gets all ‘you have made my father’s house into a den of thieves’ on them but an order of magnitude more intense #because HE SAID LOVE ONE ANOTHER #WHERE IS THE LOVE #HE SPECIFICALLY REQUESTED IT #i’m not christian! i’m a hardcore atheist! #religion is just as fictious to me as egyptian mythology #however i am also autistic and have major special interests in mythology and folklore #so here i am fervently writing analysis of the sermon on the mount #hazbin hotel #hazbin vaggie #hazbin hotel vaggie #vaggie #hazbin hotel exorcists #hazbin exorcists #hazbin hotel analysis #hazbin analysis

[scriptautistic]

Hi! This blog looks so great I'm really excited by it. In a story I'm writing (it's fantasy), there are elves, and as well as being off folklore/mythological elves, they're also based off autistic people but I'm struggling to figure out what an only autistic society would be like, do you have any ideas?

First of all, having a whole, non-human race be autistic can be quite problematic in terms of representation. See Mod Aira’s thoughts on non-human autistic characters here.

Since elves look a lot like humans, and are usually positively described as a race equal or superior to humans, that might not be that much of a problem, but you should still give this issue some thought and make sure this is really something you want to do. This is not a decision I can make for you.

As for the specifics of an autistic-only society, this is where things get fun !

Here are some ideas in no particular order. Of course I can’t cover everything and other autistic peeps are encouraged to pitch in as always!

Everyone is stimming freely and openly. This is seen as a completely normal thing. I don’t know how modern your universe is, but people are allowed to stim in school or in their workplace. Shops have whole “stim toys” aisles. There are sensory rooms available throughout cities for everyone who might get overwhelmed.

Social norms are completely different. Making eye contact is seen as rude, people are expected to explain their jokes and sarcasm. Actually, communities might write down and edit regularly their social rules so they are explicit and available to all.

Kids are taught in schools strategies to cope with sensory overload or to get stuff done with executive dysfunction. They are encouraged to work on their special interests and it is used as a medium to teach them other things. There is highly individualized teaching and varied teaching styles since all kids have different needs. They would also be taught (either by caretakers or educators) many life skills, such as self-care, taking care of a home, taxes… more explicitely.

In our society, there are things that are seen as “basic needs” that everyone shares such as be well-fed, warm enough, not be in pain, have enough time to sleep… In a workplace or school for example, those needs are supposed to be met. The other needs, the ones not everyone has, are seen as “accomodations” when they are met, and are often more begrudgingly met. In an all-autistic society, meeting needs such as sensory needs or break time when you are overloaded wouldn’t be considered as making accomodations, but as meeting basic needs and as a normal thing.

Autistic people are very diverse and sometimes our needs are conflicting. For example, some might be hurt by loud noises, while some may need to stim and regulate themselves by making/ listening to loud noises. So it is probable that people with similar needs would gather in communities.

Since a lot of autistics are nonverbal at least some of the time, I think all verbal people would also know a nonverbal language such as a sign language they could use to communicate with nonverbal individuals or when they go nonverbal themselves. Communicating via AAC wouldn’t be seen as unusual or surprising.

Art and culture would probably be very different. Autistic people are often creative, but they create different things from what allistics create.

I feel like emergencies such as fires would be handled differently. I don’t think loud alarms and blinking lights would be the most efficient. I don’t have ideas for an alternative system though.

Lots of autistic people have trouble driving and I feel like it would have an impact on the most commonly used means of transportation. Either, for a more primitive setting, horse riding would be a huge thing - since horses are sentient they can take care of some of the “looking around to make sure we don’t run over someone or collide into something” - or, for a modern setting, automatized transportation means would have been developed sooner than in our world.

There would be more focus than in our society on precise planning and available information. Navigating administrations wouldn’t be so chaotic, or else no one could deal with it. There would be early on a need to get stuff organized in a very clear, explicit way.

That’s all I can think of for now. I hope this helps!

-Mod Cat

There are some great ideas here and I can think of a million more, but I will restrain myself! I just want to add a couple of things as food for thought:

Sign language isn’t speaking, but it is still verbal (the brain still processes it more or less the same as any other language), so many people (including me) are not able to sign when nonverbal despite being fluent in a sign language. However, many autistic people find signing more comfortable than speaking, so I definitely agree that more people would know how to sign, and it would likely be a second language requirement.

I have to be honest here… Although I have many autistic friends online, I don’t have many that I see regularly face to face. I think there is a reason that autistic people make up a minority of the human race, rather than the majority. For all our advantages, we often have conflicting needs, and we are not at all specialized for living in large groups the way allistic people are. Even though I like my autistic friends a lot, I don’t like spending a lot of time with them in person because they… get on my nerves. I mean in specific ways - for example, we have completely unrelated special interests, and they infodump about theirs for ages, and I have no interest whatsoever but don’t want to interrupt and seem rude (since I hate it when people do that to me). Or they stim and it bothers me. I’m extremely hypersensitive, including to movement, so if someone (besides me) is rocking back and forth or doing another repetitive motion near me, I can’t even open my eyes or I get overloaded. I love my autistic friends and I love the fact that I’m autistic, but I would not want to live in a completely autistic society - I’d have to hide away from other people and I’d become socially isolated even more than I am in this world. Note that this is my personal point of view and NOT true for all autistic people. But there WOULD be people like me who couldn’t deal with being around other people’s stimming, and we might not all get along as well as you might think.

On the positive side: all the things that are considered “disabilities” in this world with regards to autism would be seen as the norm. Not being able to speak some or all of the time would be considered a normal personality trait, like being good or bad at sports or drawing. Suddenly getting up and leaving a conversation due to overstimulation would be perfectly normal. It would be a given that normal respect for other people includes maintaining a quiet and calm environment as much as possible.

Another issue regards public spaces. There is something called “selective attention” which allows people to block out background sensory information and focus only on what is relevant to them at the moment (for example, listening to what one person is saying when there are other conversations happening nearby). In autistic people, this is usually very weak or completely nonexistent. It’s not possible for me to filter out background noise. If I need to meet someone for a conversation or work meeting, it MUST be in a quiet place. I am incapable of following a conversation when more than one person in the room is talking. I literally can’t unscramble their words from the words of other people and it just becomes a jumbled mess of gibberish that rapidly becomes painful. So how would things like restaurants work? Cafes? Parties? Assuming many or most people can’t hear what someone is saying when ANYONE else in the room is talking, how could you have spaces like that? Would they exist at all? Would their be some kind of magic (in a fantasy world) or tech (sci-fi) that can block out all sounds outside of the group you’re in? 

Not trying to poke holes, but trying to point out possible issues that you should think about when creating your society. And as Cat mentioned, be very careful about painting a non-human race as “like humans but autistic”. Being autistic is not an inhuman state, and it can be very damaging to describe it as such, even if your intentions are good. I would be much more comfortable with a human all-autistic society than a non-human one. Maybe consider making the humans all autistic and code the elves as allistic. :P

If you keep all this in mind, I’d be interested to see what kind of society you might come up with. Good luck!

-Mod Aira

#ask #representation #fantasy #autistic society #mod cat #mod aira