I’ve never encountered a show structured like Hazbin Hotel before — possibly because there hasn’t been one. The closest parallel I can make is to the structure of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels and The Silmarillion and other posthumous books: The comparatively small story of two hobbit journeys — the canon work published during Tolkien’s lifetime — is in some ways dwarfed by the millennia-long history documented in his unfinished background material. In the same way, there’s so much more background and setting lore to Hazbin Hotel and its sister show, Helluva Boss, than what’s appeared on screen.
But whereas Tolkien’s son collected, filled in, and published his father’s background material, Hazbin Hotel’s equivalent is scattered all over the internet, across a thousand social-media posts and Q&As. Once you start digging into it, there are a lot of surprises, because while both shows are entertaining, either separately or together, the ancillary material is crucial to fully understanding what’s going on in Hazbin Hotel in particular.
There are clear reasons why the show is structured that way, stemming from its origin. Vivienne Medrano’s vastly popular adults-only animated series is an unquestionable product of the internet age. It has deep roots in Tumblr and webcomic culture — some of the fandom has been following the series’ evolution on Tumblr since Medrano’s art-school days, as well as through her 2012-2016 webcomic ZooPhobia, where some of the characters started out.
Medrano designed and refined her shows in public over more than a decade, documenting their artistic and narrative evolution via social media accounts and a YouTube channel under the name Vivziepop. As part of the process, she’s released all sorts of details about the world she was building — the Hellaverse, home to both shows. In interviews, she’ll often explain background lore that hasn’t yet made it onto either show. But that means casual viewers who aren’t following her obsessively won’t know the whole story.
Looking for answers to my own questions about the Hellaverse (or just researching the shows ahead of my own interviews with Medrano) I ran across a lot of things I wished I’d known going into both Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss. None of this lore will spoil anything in season 2 of Hazbin Hotel — it’s all background information. For me, it’s all been particularly useful in understanding the series’ bigger picture, both what’s going on with the characters right now, and what seem to be the series’ larger aims and possible future.
So here’s what I’d consider the essential background lore for Hazbin Hotel — the things Medrano herself has revealed about the setting, but hasn’t expressly stated on the show. (A note on sourcing: All the documentation is over at the Hellaverse Wiki. I didn’t reproduce all their links here because I don’t want to steal the immense amount of fan research that went into that wiki. See below for more details.)
Sinners and Hellborn characters are radically different
So far, Hazbin Hotel has mostly focused on mortal souls trapped in Hell. But that isn’t always clear, because in the Hellaverse, those souls, labeled as Sinner Demons or just Sinners, lose their human forms when they die, and become demons. Many of the primary characters are Sinner Demons based on some sort of animal: Angel Dust is a spider-demon, Alastor is a deer-demon, Husk is a cat-demon, and so forth. (Their animalistic forms reflect their origins in the anthropomorphic-animal comic ZooPhobia, though Medrano has said Sinners’ animal/demon forms may or may not reflect their personalities, histories, or sins.)
Sinner Demons are different from Hellborn demons, like the show’s seeming protagonist, Charlie Morningstar, the daughter of fallen angel Lucifer Morningstar and Lilith, the first woman. Sinner Demons don’t age, will regenerate any wound not dealt by an angelic weapon, and are functionally immortal. They also can’t leave the first ring of Hell, the Pride Ring, where all of Hazbin Hotel’s story so far takes place. (As opposed to Helluva Boss, where Hellborn characters like Blitzø and his assassin crew travel to other rings.)
We see on the show that some characters don’t fall into either category. Lucifer was an angelic being kicked out of Heaven. Lilith was human once, but her status is unclear. Vaggie is an angel warrior. There are also demonic animals, like Angel’s pet pig Fat Nuggets and Charlie’s shape-changing cat/hotel key KeeKee, but most of the main cast are Sinners.
Why it matters: For one thing, Charlie’s Hellborn status explains a lot about why she’s so different from the rest of the cast: how it’s possible for her to be so naïve, sheltered, and idealistic, when everyone else around her is bitter, cynical, and often violent. She hasn’t led a mortal life, and hasn’t committed any sin that would consign her to Hell.
The separation between Charlie and the Sinner class of demons gives Hazbin Hotel a lot of thoughtful nuance that isn’t immediately apparent. First, as seen in season 1, Sinners can be redeemed and go to Heaven, which Charlie presumably can’t, even though she’d fit in there far better there than she does in Hell. Second, while she identifies with Sinners as “my people” and has made it her life’s goal to help them, she isn’t one of them. Her altruism is aimed at a class of people with experiences she’s never had, and her inability to fully understand their complexities, sorrows, guilt, and anger all reflects that. She doesn’t really comprehend sin.
Third, because Charlie isn’t a Sinner, she isn’t a valid target for Extermination. As Lute says in season 1’s opening episode, Lucifer negotiated a deal with Heaven’s murder squad to ensure they wouldn’t kill Hellborn demons, only Sinners. This means Charlie is putting her life on the line to save others from a threat she theoretically wouldn’t have to face herself if she wasn’t interfering with the Extermination plans. Fourth, it means that unlike in the classical (and in the fantasy genre, often modern) model of Heaven and Hell, there are demons that were never angels and didn’t fall from Heaven, and who have no relationship to Heaven at all.
And fifth, it means that whoever’s in charge of this system — whoever set the rules that neither the rulership of Hell or Heaven seem to understand, that led to Sir Pentious’ redemption — apparently wanted to make sure that Sinners lasted forever, possibly so they’d have time to work out their issues and redeem themselves. I suspect from what Medrano has said about God, the Good and Evil gods of the Helleverse, and the system “breaking down,” that we’ll learn more about all of that in upcoming seasons.
Hazbin Hotel’s setting is a traditional, classic Hell — except when it isn’t
As noted above, Hazbin Hotel is set in the Pride Ring of Hell, which seems to be modeled on the version of Hell laid out in Dante’s Inferno. There are separate areas representing different classical Deadly Sins, with each area ruled by a powerful demon representing one of those sins. (The origins of those demons are unclear — we know they aren’t Sinners because none of them are in the Pride Ring, but whether they’re fallen angels, primordial Hellborn, or something else is a matter of fan debate.)
Lucifer is the demon of pride, while other Deadly Sin demons, like Mammon (greed) and Asmodeus (lust) are significant characters in Helluva Boss. Inferno is just one classical text Hazbin draws on for the structure of Hell and its denizens — other source texts for design and iconography in particular include the Ars Goetia and the Key of Solomon.
That said, there’s virtually no sign of Sinners being tormented by demons in Hell. While Adam and Lute claim that Hell is a place of punishment for sin, the punishment seems to be being shut out of Heaven, with its endless supply of sugar and huggable animals, and being forced to live with other Sinners, who are often cruel, violent, and random.
Why it matters: The physical structure of Hell and the lack of active torture of Sinners — or any other clear attempt to push them toward redemption, or any pushback from a higher power against them being slaughtered en masse by Heavenly forces — all raise the question of what Heaven and Hell are for, exactly. Who, if anyone, is overseeing them? If Hell exists to punish and isolate Sinners, and Heaven exists to reward “good” souls (loosely defined, given the example of Adam, a lecherous, bloodthirsty creep), then what are all the circles of Hell that aren’t for Sinners meant for? Again, these are points that seem likely to come up in later seasons.
Extermination has left Hell in a constant state of war
It’s possible to intuit this from Hazbin Hotel’s YouTube pilot, and it’s borne out in bits and pieces throughout the show, as when Vaggie drops Angel and Sir Pentious into a war zone as a trust exercise. But it’s never exactly spelled out: Heaven’s Extermination policy means powerful Sinner Demons are constantly being permanently wiped out, which leaves power vacuums that are decided through violent combat. The fact that demons who die via “mundane” Hellish means — shooting, stabbing, or eating each other — will eventually regenerate lowers the stakes of any particular turf war, and makes it easier for Sinners to fight recklessly and without regard for their own safety.
Why it matters: Season 2 is built around exactly this kind of power vacuum, with the season’s central villain, the TV-themed Sinner Demon Vox, stepping up to exploit the chaos caused by Charlie’s season 1 battle against Heaven. But the pilot suggests the cycle of death, disruption, and ensuing turf wars has been going on for quite a while.
That chaos seems to strongly differentiate the Pride Ring from the other Rings, which are occupied solely by Hellborn demons, and run as a much more stable and unchanging system. Lucifer’s depression, his indifference to Sinners, and his resulting lack of intervention in their turf wars may also have promoted the lawlessness and chaos of the Pride Ring, as compared with other Rings, whose rulers seem far more involved in their local societies, and dominant over them.
The constant wars — and the Pride Ring’s overpopulation, which may stem from the fact that it’s the only place dead humans wind up — aren’t just enabling Vox’s uprising. They’re also preparing Sinners for living in a constant state of war for dominance and power, which makes it all the more likely that they’d rise up against Heaven, and see it as just another form of turf war.
Hazbin Hotel’s characters have nearly endless backstories
A lot of the details Medrano has dropped in her Q&As and livestreams have to do with the minutia of the characters — their human lives on Earth, their relationships, their personal tastes, and so forth. At the same time, many of these characters have been around in different forms for more than a decade, so they have lengthy origin stories in terms of how they were first written, how their designs have changed, and why.
Any favorite character you want to know more about probably has a lengthy biography online, as well as a long rundown of trivia and tidbits. If you want to know more about how Alastor’s signature microphone works, or dig into the theory of why some characters have eyes with black sclera instead of white ones, it’s out there.
Why it matters: It mostly doesn’t! While it might be interesting to know that Alastor prefers whiskey to other alcohol, that Angel has two sisters, or that Sir Pentious does eat eggs in spite of his affection for his Egg Boi minions, none of this has any particular story effect. That said, all the trivia sometimes answers questions you may not have known you had, like why Husk, a cat-demon, has wings, which doesn’t seem to fit the pattern of other animal-themed demons. (It’s because Medrano didn’t design him to fit either the ZooPhobia or Hazbin Hotel world — her sister designed the character independently.)
Any and all of this is subject to change
Virtually all the information above was gathered by fans and meticulously documented on the Hellaverse Wiki, which links out to the sources on each fact, from Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss’ social-media accounts to formal interviews with Medrano to more casual convention appearances or online videos. (As I said above, I didn’t want to steal that research by reproducing it here — head to the wiki to find all the original source links.)
But the fact that most of it hasn’t appeared in the show itself means it’s all ultimately mutable if Medrano decides a given piece of trivia, revealed in a livedrawing session a decade ago, doesn’t fit the current narrative she and her team are building for the show.
Some of the central points, like the difference between Hellborn characters and Sinners, are so baked into the show’s background assumptions that they seem unlikely to shift. Other details may eventually change, as we saw when Helluva Boss was added to Prime Video, and Medrano’s team created a new pilot episode, “Mission Zero,” to retcon some elements of the show’s original YouTube pilot episode that no longer fit the world reflected in Hazbin Hotel.
So take any piece of lore gleaned from that wiki — or any older stream or Q&A — with a grain of salt, because it may have moved out of canon at some point as the series continues to develop. And speaking of grains of salt…
Be careful where you get your Hazbin Hotel information
Here’s an “exciting” (by which I mean frustrating and stupid) new way in which the ongoing AI revolution is making search engines worse all the time: There’s a lot of Hazbin Hotel fanfic out there, including one seemingly massive project that has its own expansive wiki — and the sites using AI to generate Hazbin Hotel articles cannot tell the difference between Medrano’s stated canon and fanfic.
Time and again, while digging into some of the show’s ideas that I was curious about, I ran across articles with what seemed to be lengthy, detailed answers about, say, the history of the Goetia demons, or how Sinners get started on the path to becoming Overlords. And then when I checked the source links or looked for supporting evidence, I found out those articles were digesting fanfic or a fanfic wiki, and spitting it back out as canon.
So while this goes for anything on the internet these days, really, it’s particularly true here: If you’re digging into Hazbin Hotel lore, follow the links, look at the original text, and don’t trust anything that doesn’t include a source. Medrano has already generated more than a decade of Hazbin backstory and detail, enough to keep any fan falling down the Hellaverse rabbit hole for weeks at a time. Her personal Silmarillion is already long enough, without piling in all the fan lore and headcanons as well.