Leitmotifs drive me insane, like I hear *repeated melody that has an association with a person, idea, or situation* and I go *tears up the fucking rug like a dog*
TL;DR: Hazbin Hotel is not paced as a TV show. It’s paced as a stage musical.
The pacing in Hazbin Hotel is something that is brought up and criticized frequently in the fandom. I agree that I wish we had more episodes so we could have more character-focused B-plots to further flesh them out. I was struggling with my thoughts on the pacing until my partner told me that to him, Hazbin Hotel is not paced as a television show. It is paced as a stage musical.
Think about it, the show has big story beats that are explained and demonstrated via musical numbers, characters that are integral to the plot but are introduced quickly with little backstory, large time jumps that are used to progress character growth, the lore only extends to what is currently relevant to the plot, and the season as whole is a bit over 3 hours long (the runtime of a long musical).
Many musicals have these pacing elements in them. Hamilton has characters that are only in one act but are still essential to the story. The second act of Rent takes place over an entire year but the pacing works due to the musical structure. All we know of Sweeney Todd’s backstory is what is relevant to his current situation yet audiences don’t complain that we don’t know what he did for 15 years in the Australian prison.
It’s not a perfect comparison and the show definitely has its flaws, but all shows do. We can’t change the episode count and I think they did the best they could in making an “Act 1” to the Hazbin saga. I’m looking forward to Act 2.
My toxic trait is that I want to be flirted with like they do in musicals. I want a pretty girl to break in through my window and kiss me. I want a pretty guy to hold out a paper flower and ask me to come home with him. I want someone to make a fool out of themselves singing and dancing in an attempt to make me laugh and win me over. I want somebody to pester me about when we’re gonna get married or tell me that if they took a meat cleaver down the center of my skull, they’d have matching halves. I want someone help me fight against animal cruelty or help me achieve my dreams while I put a spotlight on the corruption of their employer. I want all of this even though it’s mostly unhealthy and weird.
TOP 10 THEATER ON AO3 BASED ON NUMBER OF FANWORKS, SINGLE CATEGORY TAGS ONLY VERSION (2009-2022)
If you want to see the Theater bar chart with the multi-category fandoms included, please check this post.
To make these bar chart race, all series titles in the Theater Category on November 29 (or the closest date to it) of every year were copy-pasted from Wayback Machine to Google Sheets, rearranged according to number of fanworks, manually filtered for fandoms belonging in only one category, and then inputted to Flourish to turn into a bar chart race.
Locked fanworks aren't included in the count because Wayback Machine can’t view those, only Ao3 users can.
The high-ranking Les Miserables tags (Les Misérables - All Media Types & Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil) are both in multiple categories (Books & Literature & Theater) so it has been excluded in this bar chart. You can see it multicategory version.
Fandom tags that are no longer in the Theater category tag as of posting this are left out of the bar chart race. These tags are usually either miscategorized or already have other tags referring to the same fandom.
Please refer to this post for more fanfiction bar chart races.
Thanks for understanding and hopefully I didn’t mess up anywhere! 🙏