So right off the bat I just wanna say: I don't like Adam. In fact he's one of my least favorite characters in Hazbin Hotel. He's obnoxious, he's not funny, his songs are unimpressive, his black and white morality isn't interesting and lacks any nuance to his character, I find his relationship with Lute more confusing than interesting and I hate his design, both human and his costume. But man. is he fascinating.
Adam is such an interesting character to me because he feels like the first time Vivziepop has completely failed at making a villain that audiences could enjoy but also see as in the wrong/irredeemable. It's really no secret that one of the most common complaints about Vivziepop's villains is that a lot of them are just empty hate sinks with no nuance to them. Striker was the closest to an actually grey antagonist but I guess losing Norman Reedus meant they had to go back to constantly humiliating their villains.
But Adam feels like an exception to this. I've seen people who both love and hate this show view Adam as some sort of misunderstood hero, because no amount of misogynistic dialogue and screaming about how he loves killing sinners because its fun changes the fact that morally... what is Adam doing wrong really? And I'm not saying this as a pro-genocide stance, I do agree with the show that Adam killing random sinners and refusing to believe in their redemption is terrible, it's just that this is how the show itself handles bad people. A group of sharks try to gangrape Angel Dust? They're gunned down. Charlie finds out that Valentino is an abusive monster? She looks ready to kill him. Dealing with the angels? Instead of trying to handle them peacefully, they're all gunned down and murdered. Adam himself has an embarrassing death (and a completely out of place emotional goodbye to Lute).
And I was genuinely surprised by the amount of people that didn't register that Adam was a misogynist. sure he didnt scream "i hate women they're all inferior" 24/7 but the only time he talks about women is to either hypersexualize him or degrade him. I've seen people insist Adam naming the female angels after genitalia was "empowering" for women because he thinks vaginas are the best thing ever. Y'all, he's saying that because he views women as holes to fuck, that's literally half his dialogue.
But it's another thing the audience overlooks because once again, its not like the protagonists/writing is much better. a lot of the female cast is notoriously badly written, Angel Dust makes a few sexist remarks and its viewed as an endearing character quirk (Blitzo, who's also a main protagonist and from the spin off show Helluva Boss, mostly refers to women as their genitals to degrade them), Valentino viciously beating Velvette's female models is passed off as a joke and most bizarrely, Lucifer randomly tells Adam that he had sex with Eve to piss him off, which I don't think the writers realize is the exact same kind of behavior that Adam would display (but its okay because Lucifer is the good guy).
Initially it bothered me that people were so overly sympathetic to Adam, saying he lost his two wives and thats why he hates women, as if the show didnt immediately establish that he was already sexist and controlling even before both of his wives left him, but i do sort of get it now. This show bends backwards to frame terrible characters as completely innocent or downplay their actions (Again, what exactly is different about Charlie murdering Angels and Adam murdering Sinners other than what the show determines as morally good). I feel like this is a massive consequence of the writers refusing to engage with these characters. Like yeah, when you portray a majority of sinners as serial killers and rapists, of course people are going to agree with Adam. And when you write Adam in such a way that the audience immediately picks up on the fact that he's more like a moral strawman than a character, of course they're going to defend him.
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