cheesytoucans - Tumblr blog

cheesytoucans · 1 month

Text

A Loving Analysis of Charlie Morningstar

While I realize that this might be premature, and that Charlie will undoubtedly continue to change and grow as more seasons come out, I cannot help but look at her character as it stands now. Even in this state of prematurity I’ve found her and the themes that she represents to be extremely compelling and she seems to me to be very misunderstood or at the least not looked at enough in terms of her character.

I do not think it’s a stretch to say that Charlie is, at her core, a living embodiment of the themes of love, redemption, and forgiveness, that the show is trying to portray and the pain that she goes through attempting to instill this upon others has been nothing short of heartbreaking to me.

So here’s something that’s way too long and self indulgent but that I had no choice but to write anyway, broken down into helpful little sections to hopefully be at least a little bit cohesive.

Guilt:

It’s clear to me that the guilt that Charlie feels for being hellborn and therefore having access to power and resources that most others in Hell do not brings her nothing but shame and agony. This is all something that we need to interpret based on her body language and actions as it’s never something that she would come right out and say but I do think that it’s a major aspect of her character that stuck out to me when I first watched the series.

There’s a moment very early on that sticks out to me in episode one. Lute talks about how Charlie and her hellborn kind are pardoned from the extermination by Lucifer and then asks her the question: “How does that feel? To know how little you matter.” Charlie is speechless and then has some amazing body language that really epitomizes these feelings of guilt she has.

I think it’s important to note here that expressions like this are very rare for Charlie. There’s something to be said about the ways in which she seems to hide her uglier emotions. The horns only seem to come out when she’s extremely angry and even then they’re a blink and you miss it kind of reaction. She’s so good at pulling her anger back that we don’t even see that tail of hers until someone dies.

Even the times we see her cry in the series are either for emotions like love, like when Angel forgave her for crashing the studio, or she very quickly attempts to cover them up when she’s actually in distress like with Vaggie in the last episode. Even when she cries when Pentious dies she’s immediately covering her eyes and then hastily replacing those emotions with anger and even though that’s also an emotion she seems to try and hide she also appears to be more ok with that one showing when it comes to the safety of her family. So rarely is her genuine distress on full display, she doesn’t even want to show it to Vaggie of all people when they’re alone in the hallway. Appearing to be strong and put together even when she’s dying inside and just wants to break down seems to be very normal for her.

So when we see these emotions from her genuinely on display I think it says a lot about how she’s feeling, that she’s so lost in her own trauma that she can’t even remember to try and hide it. At first there’s a look of anger at Lute, like she’s trying to remain the intimidating princess of Hell who needs to convince these people at all costs and she cannot look weak.

And then that mask breaks and there’s a look of genuine shock on her face, like she can’t believe that someone just said that to her. And this is not shock in the context of contempt or anger, this is a painful kind of shock where she has been truly hurt by those words but doesn’t want to believe that someone would be so cruel so casually.

I’d like to pause here and remark that we’ve seen just how Charlie reacts when people are mean to her friends. We’ve seen those horns come out and eyes turn red when Angel is thrown around by Valentino, and she didn’t even get to see the worst of it. We can speculate all day about what she would have done if Angel hadn’t stopped her but I think that’s less important in this context. What matters is that she was driven to the point of true unfiltered rage at her friend being threatened and we need to remember that it’s a lot for Charlie to do that, the last thing she wants to do is throw around her power and hurt people.

However, this anger is not extended to her own safety. The only time that demonic anger flares up here with Adam and Lute is right after the line: “so give up your dumb endeavor, cause you don’t have a shot.” Charlie is more angry at the mention of her dreams being seen as stupid than she is at Lute insulting her person and even then those horns are gone in a flash.

Lute telling her that she doesn’t matter just brings her pure and unadulterated sorrow that cuts so deep she can’t even say a word to defend herself. The guilt is so absolutely all encompassing for her that it only brings pain, anger seems the furthest thing from her mind.

Finally though, after the shock has passed and Charlie seems to process what Lute has said, she starts to frantically glance around the room which could be read in a few different ways. To me though it always came off like she was desperately looking for an out. Kind of in the same way an animal might start looking around the room for an escape route. I think she has been so hurt by what Lute said, the guilt has started to worm its way up her soul, that for a second she is genuinely considering bolting from the room, even if it’s just on a subconscious level and she doesn’t actively think that thought.

This could also be read as her no longer being able to make eye contact because of just how much this hurt her which I think is also a valid interpretation considering how much both physical contact and eye contact seem to matter to Charlie. This is also something we can see in the last episode when she and Vaggie have their duet. Charlie is very reluctant to make eye contact until Vaggie comforts her with physical touch. She glances towards her once at the beginning when Vaggie first starts to sing but then quickly looks away again. She only maintains eye contact after Vaggie touches her cheek and Charlie grabs onto her arm, signifying just how much Vaggie is soothing her with the song.

Lastly, after the shock and the pain have permeated her, she begins to curl into herself, her arms subtly coming closer to her chest and her shoulders sinking in. This is of course a classic way that we self sooth. I don’t think she realizes she’s doing it as most people probably don’t but bringing your arms closer to yourself is instinctual to protect your chest and therefore your heart when you’re feeling threatened. Doing so can make us feel safer since we feel like we’re taking steps to protect ourselves.

Charlie is feeling so threatened and hurt by this one line that she is desperately trying to make herself feel better in any way she can. Just the thought of her getting a free pass on death while her people live in fear of true absolute death at the hands of Heaven is enough to make her feel so much guilt that even all of her love and kindness does not save her. It makes her begin to spiral into her own thoughts and she’s only pulled out of it by the distraction from Adam that they don’t have much time left and if she doesn’t convince him of the hotel now she’ll miss her chance.

This is just one moment from episode one but these feelings of guilt continue to color her actions into the series and I can only assume before that as well. The sadness that Charlie hides from the world is always there and I don’t think it’s about to go away anytime soon, just like I don’t think her survivor's guilt is going to go away even as people start to get redeemed. I don’t want this to come off though like Charlie’s actions are any worse just because they’re fueled partly by this guilt.

At the end of the day the fact of the matter is that Charlie is doing an immense amount of good. She may have no idea what she’s doing half the time and it may go completely wrong and take a lot of different winding paths but the journey she’s on is a good one. Someone just needs to try and it may not be perfect but I don’t think it’ll ever be, even after she finds out that she’s actually been able to redeem someone. The important thing is that someone, anyone, is standing up for those who have nothing and defying a deeply unjust system that everyone follows because of a learned helplessness and a true lack of autonomy.

Charlie’s reasons for doing what she does can only really hurt herself as she doesn’t really seem to care for herself at the best of times and instead runs off to continue to help others. She’s in desperate need of a break and someone to talk to about her feelings of immense guilt and her fear of being abandoned but unfortunately, the ones who she should be able to talk to are partly the problem to begin with.

Mommy and Daddy:

We can make all the jokes in the world about Charlie's mommy and daddy issues, and believe me I have, but the way her parents have treated her has made a huge impact on her personality. We don’t really know exactly how Lilith treated her daughter growing up so we don’t have much choice but to make some assumptions here. I do think it’s safe to say that an adult who runs off on their own child for years on end when they’re in desperate need of a stable, loving, guiding hand in life can only be described as indifferent at best and down right neglectful at worst and frankly I do not care how old Charlie is because she clearly needs her mother. Age should not be the deciding factor on the amount of love a parent gives their own child.

What we do know about how Lilith has impacted Charlie seems to manifest in much smaller and subtle ways. We know that Lilith was the one to inspire Hell when Heaven came knocking and we can assume that this penchant for rebellion was passed down to Charlie, albeit in what I can only assume to be a vastly different tone. When it comes down to it though, we know that Charlie desperately wants to believe that Lilith must be doing something important and that in turn must mean that she has Charlie’s best intentions in mind. I have my doubts as to whether or not this is true but for right now we can only speculate.

When it comes to her father he clearly loves her with a passion that I rarely see with men in media (though if you find that to be an interesting character trait I would recommend you read a Justin Cronin book, specifically The Ferryman, as his depictions of love and anguish a man can have towards a daughter immediately came to mind when watching More Than Anything for the first time. I’d also recommend Salvage This World by Michael Farris Smith for the same reasons.) but it’s also difficult for me to forget about the impact that his neglect and then sudden return to Charlie’s life had on her.

I do not in any way think that Lucifer is overall a bad father but rather that the mistakes he’s made have had a direct impact on Charlie’s world views both for the better and the worse. At the end of the day I find him to be a very realistic and complex father who loves his daughter but just truly does not know what to say to her, which is amusing in its own right considering he’s the actual devil but that’s just part of the show’s charm in my opinion. All of this to say that his neglect of her has led to a good chunk of her character flaws. One of the biggest being her constant need for love and validation.

This is something that I don’t think we’re really going to see in full for a while but I do think it’s still pertinent now, especially with the major character drama that we see between Lucifer and Alastor. Charlie is the kind of person who just wants to see the good in people. She wants to believe that everyone has the best intentions and can be reasoned with if she just finds the right words to say. At the same time she carries an immense amount of power both literally and from a political standpoint. Having Charlie on your side could mean a huge leg up in whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish.

Alastor is what I can only lovingly call a master manipulator. He took one look at Charlie and saw someone who was incredibly driven but also incredibly kind and knew that he could use that for his own gain. While we don’t yet know exactly what he wants from her we do know how he’s going to get it and we see that in song form during Hell’s Greatest Dad.

To Alastor Lucifer is a threat to his hold on Charlie. If Charlie becomes too close to her father that could mean that he might recognize Alastor’s manipulation for what it is and take Alastor completely out of the picture, in whatever form he sees fit. This leads to their fight in episode 5 where Alastor uses both Lucifer’s guilt at his neglect of his daughter as well as Charlie’s need for love against them at the same time.

Charlie states that while she and Lucifer are not exactly on bad terms, they’ve never really been close and I think it’s clear from the very beginning just how that’s affected her. There’s this sort of deep loneliness and anxiety that seems to come out of Charlie from time to time. For all her attempts at showcasing love and positivity to anyone and everyone who comes within a square mile of her, she can’t help but let it slip from time to time just how difficult things can be for her.

Her mother and father never being around has led her to believe that she needs to do anything and everything on her own but at the same time she needs to be told that what she’s doing isn’t stupid or useless. She has never once had her ideas be proven true. She’s run into so much opposition that at this point it’s a miracle that she continues to try at all. This would be difficult for anyone but for someone who loves as deeply as she does it’s a continual deep cut into her psyche that she tries to patch at any opportunity.

The look of complete happiness and relief on Charlie’s face when Alastor says that they’re so proud of her for what she’s accomplished is enough to make a bystander feel for her, let alone her own father standing right there. Alastor of course knows this and uses this information to try and keep the favor on him and not Lucifer. Charlie and her father do manage to have a very sweet moment in More Than Anything and while it’s not enough to totally repair their relationship it’s certainly a start.

I’d like to draw special attention to More Than Anything and specifically the body language from Charlie during the line: “I’ll shelter and adore you more than anything.” This entire time Charlie has been desperately trying to get Lucifer to take her seriously. It’s clear that he is protective to a fault where he is so terrified of Charlie making the same mistakes that he did that he will not allow Charlie to even try at all.

But to Charlie Lucifer is where her need to fight for her dreams came from in the first place. Lilith may have inspired the rebellion in her but it was Lucifer championing free will above all that got her to start dreaming of something better. Something where people don’t have to fight and can instead work on just being better people.

So when Lucifer grabs her and pulls her in, talking about how he will shelter her from all the wrongs in the world, Charlie puts her hand on his arm in a gesture that always seemed to me like she was about to push him away. She doesn’t want him to baby her, all she wants from him is to support her and be with her while she works towards her dreams.

We need to remember just how long Charlie has been on her own. Even when Lilith was around it appears like her father wasn’t in the picture much. The separation from Lilith just seems to have made that fracture even deeper. Even with all of that though, even after being abandoned and then babied by her father, she still wants him around and makes a genuine attempt to connect with him for the first time in a long time with this song. Charlie just loves so much and feels so deeply that she cannot forsake her father even with everything that’s happened.

It is love that defines Charlie and to love someone means to forgive them.

Redemption and love:

What exactly does it take to redeem someone? What makes them worthy of that redemption in the first place? Is it naive to believe that love and forgiveness can drag a person back from the darkness even when everyone and everything is constantly trying to pull them back?

One of my favorite aspects of the show is its overall themes of redemption and the ways that Charlie encompasses those themes. This is one of the biggest aspects of Charlie’s character that I think gets glossed over too much and I want to highlight just how much I think that this part of her character is not in any way something to demean. I find this often in fiction that features characters like Charlie. It must say something about how we view emotions like love and forgiveness and kindness to look at someone who constantly and unconditionally champions such things to others and ask: “Why are you so naive to think that something like that is even possible? Are you so stupid that you think that’ll actually work?”

I’d like to be clear that I do indeed think it’s naive to assume that something as complex as “redemption” can be brought about just by cleaning up your act and role playing your middle school DARE program with all your friends in your living room. You know and I know that we cannot make amends for all of our wrong doings by pretending they aren’t there anymore. This is especially true when, for a lot of the cast, these so called “wrong doings” exist because of systemic issues that they simply cannot escape from. Angel cannot just walk away from everything that keeps him both literally and metaphorically chained to Valentino and the very act of being chained to such a monster has caused him to spiral down into any sort of reprieve that he could possibly get his hands on, even when such things may be making everything so much worse in the long run.

That being said though, while I understand that the ways in which she goes about seeking redemption for her people may be naive on the surface, at their core I believe that the emotions and intentions that power these actions are nothing short of admirable. It’s truly a test of your soul to look at the worst that humanity has to offer and still say that they are deserving of love. As Lucifer so aptly puts it: “They got gifted free will and look at what they did with it!” To Lucifer they could have done anything with that free will and all it got them in the end was a trip straight to Hell where they proceeded to learn nothing and be nothing more than exactly what they were on Earth.

To Charlie though, a person is not defined by their sins. Not only that but their sins do not in any way mean that they deserve an eternity of suffering or that they should be brutally slaughtered by the very ones who claim that this is just how things are meant to be. Charlie will look at someone who ten minutes ago was trying to kill her, who has done nothing with their afterlife but bring about more suffering and destruction and does not see, or just does not care about the hurt they have caused, and she will offer them true forgiveness and love for the first time in a long time, maybe in forever.

And I really, really want to stress here that coming from Charlie this love and forgiveness is truly unconditional. The only thing that Charlie requires is that you want it. If you ask for forgiveness it’s yours in a heartbeat.

This of course can absolutely be detrimental to her and we see this in just how much she wants to trust Alastor even when both the audience and Charlie herself can see just what a bad idea this is. Charlie just hopes deep down that in the end he will accept the love that she’s giving him and maybe that’ll mean he will try for her just like Sir Pentious decided to finally stop fighting and start trying. It of course remains to be seen whether or not his character arc will follow anything of the sort but I remain hopeful for Charlie’s sake as well as his own.

As I said at the beginning though Charlie is truly the living embodiment of the themes that the show is trying to portray. In the absence of a God or a religion that is offering unconditional love the devil’s daughter offers it instead. While Adam and the angels want to act like heaven is just and kind while simultaneously committing atrocities on those that they view as lesser, Charlie says it doesn’t matter what they have to say about you, I still love you.

I find this to be fascinating in that Charlie is the antithesis to a lot of toxic fundamental religious beliefs that want to say that God’s love is unconditional but then proceed to pile on condition after condition until you’re not sure just how many of these rules you’ve already broken by the time you’ve had breakfast for the day. Charlie is of course not a God and she makes mistake after mistake in her endeavors. She has a tendency to get too excited and rush off without thinking. Sometimes she gets foot in mouth syndrome and doesn’t think about how her words might hurt people like Angel or Vaggie who are trying their best but tend to fumble because of their own self worth issues.

But at the end of the day I think the beauty of her love comes in its simplicity. She does not need complicated rules and conditions for it to be meaningful. It is meaningful because it’s pure love for those with no love for themselves, with nothing asked for in return, and it does not need the catalyst of God or religion. It’s love that comes from deep down in her soul and she doesn’t even require you to love her back for her to fight for you, she’d do it regardless.

That’s part of why I think Sir Pentious and his redemption work so well. Truly all that was needed of him was love. This is something that I don’t think will work on everyone because of the aforementioned systemic issues but for people like Pentious all he really needed was to be loved and love someone back. Seemingly he has spent his entire afterlife fighting turf wars and marking out territory and trying to earn respect through violence and the only love that he’s had has been artificially created by himself with the eggs boys.

It makes perfect sense to me then that when he has finally had enough, when he’s at his absolute lowest and is ready to be killed for every single horrible thing he’s ever done in this afterlife, Charlie puts a stop to it with a single sentence: “It starts with sorry.” Because to apologize requires humility and humility requires you to truly care about the people you’ve hurt. To allow yourself to put your pride aside and say that you’re sorry even when it’s difficult for you to do so is a test of love that a lot of us struggle with. It’s not easy to make yourself so vulnerable like that but Pentious allowing himself to feel those emotions opened the door for him to accept the love that Charlie was offering and in turn learn to love others.

After that moment with Charlie, Pentious proceeds to make incredible strides with his emotions and comes to care for the residents of the hotel in his own way. He cares for Nifty at the club, cries when Charlie reconnects with her father, pets KeeKee on the couch, and flirts with Cherri in his own genuine and nervous way (also as a side note I’d like to say that the line from Husk that Pentious watches the residents sleep sometimes was probably meant to come off as mostly kind of creepy and amusing, I found it to also be sweet in the sense that I read it as the way that a parent might watch a child sleep to ensure they were still breathing, sort of a “please don’t leave me now that I finally have you” sort of thing.)

I don’t think him kissing Cherri and confessing his love at the end was in any way the only deciding factor to his redemption but I do think it was a good exclamation point at the end of his emotional journey. It was proof once and for all that he was finally okay being seen as vulnerable. He was allowing himself to actually feel and love the emotion of love instead of being scared that it would make him weak and open to attack from others. Telling someone you love them requires trust, it requires you to believe that them and those around them will not hurt you and I think at the end Pentious finally accepts all of this. He has taken the love that Charlie gave him and amplified it and put it back out into the world to maybe do a little good for once and that right there is what I think made him qualified for redemption, it just needed a little love.

So ultimately Charlie may not consciously understand what exactly gets someone redemption but she sure did land on it by accident. She gave Pentious the tools to fuel his own redemption whether she realized it or not because all he needed was for someone to try for him. He could have taken Charlie’s mercy and ran back off into Hell to continue to do what he’s been doing this entire time and keep hurting others in the process but he didn’t. He needed someone to actually care about him and give him love, he needed Charlie, but not only that, he needed the security and friendship of the rest of the hotel. Even when Charlie is not there she has given them all a place that they can be okay in. Even if it’s not perfect and shit always seems to be going down, even with Alastor’s ulterior motives, that hotel is still the safest place any of them have had in a long long time.

Vaggie:

On the topic of love and the simplicity of Charlie’s, I would be remiss to not talk about Vaggie and her relation to Charlie now. I have to say to start that I honestly find the people who talk about their relationship as if they have no chemistry or “they feel like friends and not girlfriends” to be extremely amusing to me. While I understand that their relationship dynamic may not be everyone’s cup of tea, I also think it’s just inherently incorrect to say that they’re poorly written or don’t feel as though they’re actually dating.

Just as a personal indulgence I would like to interject and say that while I get that a lot of people want their fictional relationships to be messy and have drama my crusty old self personally loves the biblical levels of beautiful tragedy that Charlie and Vaggie have going on and I find their subtle, comforting love to be very cathartic to me. Just the idea of love between a fallen angel and the devil’s daughter is enough to get me interested and then add on the fact that the angel is fallen because she showed mercy to a single one of the princess’s people and they just love each other so much and would do anything for each other, makes me go feral, but I digress.

I want everyone to keep in mind what I’ve said about Charlie’s love so far while talking about Vaggie. Remember simple and remember unconditional, those are the two fundamentals of Charlie’s love that are constantly on display with Vaggie. I find it very remarkable just how much the body language between Vaggie and Charlie exhibits the love and comfort that the two have for each other especially in a medium like animation where every flick of the eye and turn of the mouth and hand gesture is another cut that someone out there needs to draw. That tells me that there was significant effort put forth to show a couple like Charlie and Vaggie who have been together for years and know exactly what to expect while also making sure that their love was simultaneously not downplayed or inadvertently exploited for sex appeal. It’s a very fine line to walk but I feel as though the show did a very good job of it all.

There are so many tiny little moments throughout just about every single episode of the season that have body language showing the love that Charlie and Vaggie share. Just from the first episode alone there’s Charlie sliding over on the couch just to lean on Vaggie’s legs. There’s Vaggie cupping Charlie’s cheek while she tells her she has faith in her dream. There’s the small soft look that Vaggie gives Charlie when Charlie grabs her hands at the beginning of Happy Day in Hell.

Even putting aside body language for a second there’s also the way that Vaggie tries to continue to make the commercial with Charlie gone even though it means she ends up having to work with Alastor who she hates specifically because she doesn’t trust him around Charlie. There’s also how Charlie is hesitant to tell Vaggie at first that Adam didn’t listen to her because she doesn’t want to let her down when she believes so much in Charlie.

I also really like their little character drama in episode three because I think it really exemplifies just how trusting they are in their relationship while also highlighting their character flaws at the same time. Charlie is so trusting of Vaggie that she’s willing to let Vaggie take over in their daily lessons even when this inevitably backfires. I’ve seen a few people think Charlie was doing this to use her girlfriend or be mean to her but frankly that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

While things did eventually go south and Vaggie had a difficult time thinking that she was failing Charlie I think it’s important to remember Charlie’s intentions with asking Vaggie to take over in the first place. In no way did Charlie do that to see Vaggie fail, it’s just that Charlie has such unwavering trust in Vaggie’s opinion and really does believe that she has skills that she herself lacks that Vaggie can bring to the table. It’s easy to forget sometimes but Charlie really does have some pretty impressive emotional intelligence. She just tends to run off without thinking a lot of the time and get carried away but when she allows herself to step back and look at a situation she’s very understanding of how exactly her actions are affecting people.

Charlie recognizes pretty quickly that Vaggie is having a hard time with this and attempts to step in and take back control but Vaggie is stubborn in her desire to prove herself to Charlie. Vaggie thinks that if she lets Charlie take over again that she’ll have failed her and Charlie might see her as useless to the hotel. Of course Charlie would never think that and once again I must reiterate that Charlie’s love is unconditional. It does not matter to Charlie that Vaggie was unable to immediately get everyone to be best friends, setting aside the fact that it actually did work in the end, all that matters to Charlie is that her and Vaggie work together and are there for each other no matter what.

Charlie was just frustrated that things weren’t as simple as she hoped and Vaggie was frustrated that she couldn’t fix it. Both of them recognize this mistake by the end of the episode and acknowledge the need for them to be a team even when things are hard and neither of them have an answer.

All of this combines together over the season to portray a couple who love each other but who are adults long since removed from a honeymoon phase where they can’t keep their hands off each other. This doesn’t mean they don’t still love each other and it doesn’t mean they’re not loving on each other behind closed doors, it just means they’re comfortable and understand each other.

Not only that but I think it also exemplifies what I’ve been saying about Charlie’s love: it’s simple and that’s a good thing. To Charlie, loving Vaggie is easy. To Charlie Vaggie is a constant that has been there for years who loves her and would never hurt her or betray her. The only one who has stood there and supported her while her Mother runs off to god knows where and her Father isolates himself with his depression. Vaggie supported the hotel when everyone this side of Hell and up to Heaven thought she was an idiot dreamer who didn’t know when to quit.

To Vaggie, Charlie is the unconditional love that she never had in Heaven. Someone who quite literally picked her up while she was dying and put her back on her feet and loved her regardless of the fact that Charlie had no idea who she really was and honestly I’m not even sure that mattered to Charlie one bit. She trusted Vaggie to not hurt her and have her best intentions in mind just like she trusts everyone else around her to do the same and time and time again Charlie was proven right when Vaggie never left while she undoubtedly soothed a bit of Charlie’s fear of abandonment by never leaving her side.

And to Charlie that was enough. She doesn’t need huge grand gestures from Vaggie, she just needs her to be there and help her. It’s love and it’s simple because it’s Charlie.

Of course it all inevitably comes crashing down as it’s revealed that Vaggie has been lying this entire time. I don’t want to come off like I blame Vaggie for what she did. Frankly I can’t say that I wouldn’t have done the exact same thing in the same situation. The more that time passed and Charlie and her fell deeper in the love the harder it would have been to just come out and say it. The time to be honest would have passed months and months ago and now she’s just forced to completely live the lie as we can tell by how she barely reacts when Adam shows up at their door in Heaven. I think a part of her was so deep in this lie that even the presence of him and the lady that straight up maimed her doesn’t cause her to lose composure until he makes it clear that he definitely remembers who she is.

Vaggie also has very little besides Charlie. She has dedicated herself so fully to Charlie and what she wants that to lose her would have been a blow to her soul so severe I’m not sure she would have recovered. I do think there’s something to be said about Vaggie’s dependency on Charlie and how that fueled this lie to begin with. If Vaggie had other support systems then it’s possible that she wouldn’t have felt the need to hold onto this lie for so long and I think we can see that in the way that she immediately tells the others in the hotel after they get back from Heaven. Whether she likes it or not they have become an extension of her family too and not just Charlie’s. Of course it’s obviously a lot easier to tell them because she’s not nearly as emotionally attached to them as she is to Charlie but I do still think that being able to tell someone at all is a step forward for her and most likely helped her better come to terms with it.

Unfortunately while I understand all that, just like with Lucifer, we have to be honest about the ways in which this affects Charlie as a character. As I said before I really don’t think it mattered to Charlie one bit who Vaggie really was. If Charlie had known about who Vaggie was from the beginning, knowing who Charlie is as a person, I think she would have been livid at the way that Heaven treated one of their own but I don’t think in any way would she have hated Vaggie or blamed her for what happened.

Even so, everyone needs their own time and space to cope with such intense revelations about people. If Vaggie was going to tell Charlie the truth after so many years the only way to do it and even remotely soothe any of the grief and shock Charlie would have felt would have been to do it in private very quietly and then give Charlie the space to try and come to terms with it.

Regrettably that is most definitely not how Charlie found out. Instead she found out in probably the worst possible setting at probably the worst possible time. Forced instead to deal with the horror of it all while in Heavenly court of all places, out of the mouth of the man who had a hand in casting her own Mother and Father to Hell. Humiliating both Charlie and Vaggie in a desperate attempt to shift some of the heat off of them for admitting to genocide.

With all that though, Charlie still doesn’t blame Vaggie. She would have every reason to hate Vaggie after this but that would also go against everything that Charlie stands for. So that just leads Charlie to instead blame herself. Instead of blaming Vaggie for lying to her, Charlie just asks herself what is so wrong with her that she’s unable to be trusted. Instead of hating Vaggie she just hates herself. This causes Charlie to spiral down a bad mental path where the fear of abandonment from her parents and her need for validation rear their ugly head.

If the one person who has stood by Charlie’s side this entire time doesn’t even believe in her then who does? The woman she’s loved for years and has trusted with everything from dark secrets to petty grievances doesn’t even trust her enough to tell her who she really is and what actually happened to her. Charlie is terrified that Vaggie doesn’t think she’s worthy of this secret. In that moment of pain she fears that she’s not worthy of the same unconditional love that she has given everyone else this entire time because she thinks that Vaggie must think there are conditions to her love. That Vaggie thinks Charlie will not love her if she knows she used to be an exorcist is all that runs through Charlie’s head.

Deep down I think these are worries that Charlie has relatively often. She doubts herself immensely and uses her love of others as a way to fill the hole in her own heart but so far these worries were unfounded with Vaggie. To have them suddenly come true is like having your worst fears validated to you and Charlie is so lost in her own grief that she doesn’t stop to think why Vaggie would have done this in the first place. This causes her to lash out at Vaggie and accuse her of keeping even more secrets when deep down Charlie probably just wants to break down and beg Vaggie to love her anyway even when she’s the one unworthy of love. Just in the same way she probably wants to beg her Mother to come back and love her again.

Fortunately for all of us Rosie is able to swoop in and help Charlie realize what she knew all along deep down but was in too much pain to admit to: that Vaggie wanted to tell her this whole time but was deeply ashamed of the things she had done. It would have gone against everything that Charlie and her hotel stood for to not forgive her and this is seemingly before Charlie even knows the real reason that Vaggie was cast out of Heaven. She has no idea that Vaggie was damned for sparing a child but even so, the act of turning against the genocide and saying enough, regardless of how it happened, is all it takes for Vaggie to be deserving of forgiveness. Just in the same way that Pentious was deserving of redemption when he was vulnerable about his feelings and allowed himself to love, Vaggie is deserving because of allowing Charlie in to love her, even filled with guilt and grief over the things she had done.

She could have run from Charlie and let that grief and guilt consume her and become just another one of Hell’s sinners lost in their own pain and unwilling to change, but instead she decided to let Charlie in and do whatever it took to make Charlie’s dreams a reality while also seeking her own redemption, albeit in a different way from how Charlie has been trying to redeem people.

I think all that Vaggie truly wanted from Charlie was to be forgiven for her actions but was so afraid of not receiving it that she hid it instead, forgetting that in turn all Charlie wanted to do was love her and forgiveness would have come from her as easily as that love. The only way that Vaggie could have ever gotten her redemption was by being honest, laying it all on the table and then allowing Charlie to continue to love her.

So thank goodness then that Vaggie accepted her unconditional love and gave it right back, amplifying it and putting it back out into the world to maybe do a little good for once and frankly Vaggie doesn’t need Heaven for that to be true redemption for her at last.

So that’s that. Hopefully I at least got my points across somewhat competently. I’m slightly out of practice with this kind of writing but Hazbin Hotel has enraptured me in a way that I have not felt about a piece of media in a long long time. On that topic though, if you’re like me and cannot get enough of fictional Gods and media that tackles religion in interesting ways I would like to be self indulgent one last time and recommend some books with themes that you might vibe with if you’re also obsessed with Hazbin in the ways that I am.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell about first contact with an alien race that turns into an exploration on the nature of God and what it means for us if God truly exists but is indifferent to our suffering.

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins about a bunch of kids training to be Gods that also features a fucked up father figure if you’re into that.

Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg about the dangers of encountering an alien race so early in their development that they can only see our superior knowledge as God-like and worship humanity as deities.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr about the cyclical nature of history as humanity crawls back out of a nuclear fallout only to succumb to the same mistakes centuries later simultaneously clinging to and denouncing their new religion that got them so far in the first place.

Midnight, Water City by Chris McKinney about how a person comes to be deified and the horrible consequences of making a human a God.

And if you know of anything similar I am always open to suggestions, it’s about 95% of the media I consume at this point.

#hazbin hotel #charlie morningstar #the devil wears her heart on her sleeve #and we would all do well to be just a little bit more like her

10 notes · View notes