Charlie Morningstar

"We lost so many souls, and it breaks my heart to see my people being slaughtered every year. No one is even given a chance! I can't stand idly by while the place I live is subjected to such violence! So, I've been thinking: Isn't there a more humane way to hinder overpopulation here in Hell? Perhaps we can create an alternative way to change souls through... redemption? Well, I think yes! So, that's what this project aims to achieve! Ladies and gentlemen, I'm opening the first of its kind! A hotel that rehabilitates sinners!"

- Charlie's pitch for the hotel, Hazbin Hotel pilot

Charlotte Morningstar, more commonly known as Charlie, is the Hellborn princess of Hell, the founder of the Happy Hotel, and the main protagonist of Hazbin Hotel.

The estranged daughter of Lucifer, Charlie wants to do right by her kingdom and find a way to redeem Sinners into Heaven through rehabilitation at the Hazbin Hotel.

Appearance
Charlie is a tall, slender hellborn demon, standing at over 6 foot, around 6 and a half feet tall. She has long, blonde hair, with lighter blonde and pink highlights, which is tied into a twice-banded low ponytail. Her blonde bangs flip to her left with a curl.

While appearing humanoid, Charlie does feature animal-like traits such as fangs and red-toed hooves. Her lips are black and she has rosy red cheeks, which Vivziepop has mentioned taking inspiration from dolls and marionettes. Her eyes have red irises with light yellow sclera and she has thick black eyelashes.

Charlie accessorizes with a small black bowtie and black suspenders, with an untucked white, long-sleeved dress-shirt. Over this she usually wears a fitted red tuxedo jacket with dark-red lapels and a pair of red fitted pants. She wears black and white saddle shoes.

Full Demon
When in her full demon form, a pair of dark-reddish horns protrude from her head while her eyes' sclera turn bright red with white irises and slit pupils; above and below her eyes appear black streaks. She also gains a long black tail with spikes and a triangular tip that has a heart in the center.

Personality
Charlie is compassionate and empathetic to a fault, feeling genuinely upset at the idea of harm coming to others.

Although she isn't unaware that Hell is populated with souls that have committed egregious acts in their living lives, she still views their yearly extermination as a senseless waste and makes it her personal mission to help them avoid it via self-betterment and eventual redemption, something she is seemingly alone in believing is possible.

Charlie's idealism, while setting her apart from many of her hellborn peers, can also make her naïve to many of the harsh realities that appear to stand in the way of her potential success - something her girlfriend, Vaggie, tries to remind her of, only to be cheerfully ignored in favor of a more blinkered, sunny optimism.

This can also cause her to rush headlong into the initial stages of her plans without much preparation (her prompt list before her big news appearance reading only "unicorn kisses, dolphin high fives, sing showtunes = happy ending?").

Charlie has a love for musical theatre, song and dance, and will often convey her emotions and ideas through showtunes and ballads. She appears to take perceived failures hard, as she believes her heartfelt theatrical passion should be enough to bring people over to her way of thinking, and is disheartened when it's not as simple as she imagines. She openly admits during a dejected voicemail to her mother that she doesn't actually know what she is doing, or how to make her plan for reforming sinners work in practice.

Despite being sweet and lacking 'street-smarts', this doesn't make Charlie a pushover or stupid. When people insult her or openly mock her ideals and plans, she has no hesitation in standing up for herself, or even rolling up her sleeves to physically fight back. She is also not above letting a few cuss words slip.

Charlie also displays some grounding in her idealism, understanding that not all demons can be redeemed, or even likely to change for the better. She displays sensible hesitation when confronted with an ambiguous deal from Alastor, the notorious Radio Demon, refusing the shake his hand and using her status to make demands of him (albeit with some sheepishness).

Abilities

 * Demon transformation - Charlie can enter a fearsome, more powerful Demon form.
 * Pyrokinesis - Charlie is able to summon fire at will while in any form. The pyrotechnics shown during "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" were summoned from the palm of her hand. She can later be seen using it again (albeit offscreen) to set Tom Trench on fire during her brawl at 666 News.
 * Demonic magic - Being the daughter of Lucifer, Charlie can access powerful magic that is exclusive to the higher-ranking demons.

Skillset

 * Multilingualism - Charlie speaks fluent English and is said to also be able to fluently speak the Demonic languages she grew up learning.
 * Hand-to-hand combat - As demonstrated in the Hazbin Hotel pilot, Charlie is able to hold her own when in hand-to-hand fighting. She did not hesitate to engage in a round of fisticuffs with antagonistic news caster Katie Killjoy.
 * Musical talent - Charlie is considered a very talented singer, even outside of the show's non-diegetic musical numbers. . She can also play the piano.
 * Dancing - In addition to her musical abilities, Charlie is also a skilled dancer and a fast-learner, as shown in Alastor's Reprise, wherein she dances perfectly in sync to Alastor's steps. Charlie's personal style of dance is tap-dancing. It's something she can do very well.

Gallery

 * Charlie Morningstar/Gallery

Concept & Creation
Charlie was created during Vivziepop's time at the School of Visual Arts college, and was one of the later additions to the main cast of demon misfits.

In very early proto-drafts of what would eventually become Hazbin Hotel, a red, very steampunk themed character named Charlie was created to act as a kind of "den-mother" to the demon gang that would eventually go on to become the main cast of Hazbin Hotel. The character featured an arm of molten lava that could change into various things.

Vivziepop considers this version of Charlie to be an entirely distinct entity, with a completely disparate design and personality from her current iteration. She was also not the daughter of Lucifer; she was a mortal soul, who was planned to have died in the 1830s.

However, Vivziepop liked the name "Charlie" so much that she transferred it to the new character that now features as the protagonist of the current version of Hazbin Hotel, a character who then changed very little once she entered the cast.

Trivia

 * Charlie is the only character in the main cast who is a native hellborn demon, and therefore, not having been previously human.
 * Demonic Charlie.png When asked if Charlie has a true and full-fledged demon form, or if it only appears when she's extremely angry, Vivziepop said that she does, but would not elaborate further.
 * Charlie has been stated to be "a tall girl" and is taller than her father, Lucifer. Not by a large amount, but still notable, with Charlie standing at around 6 feet, or over. In a Q&A on January 31, 2024, Vivziepop stated that she is 6 and a half feet tall.
 * Charlie's design is inspired by Vaudeville-style porcelain dolls, puppets, marionette-type things, and to a lesser extent goats. Vivziepop described Charlie's nose as being like a lamb or puppy dog, that looks very animal-like from the side, even though her character is mostly humanoid/marionette.
 * On December 15, 2023, Vivziepop explained that Charlie is not a goat but does have hooves, and added that she was going for a Satyr vibe because Satyr legs have been associated with demons for a long time.
 * According to the "Clocktower Countdown to Premiere" livestream, Charlie's demeanor was heavily inspired by from .
 * Charlie's lips are naturally black.
 * Charlie apparently does not have human shaped ears.
 * Charlie was confirmed to be bisexual by Vivziepop, who tweeted a doodle she had done for National Coming Out Day featuring Charlie with a bisexual heart. She later tweeted a picture for Bi Pride Day, which featured both Charlie and Moxxie holding bisexual flags.
 * Charlie has an ex-boyfriend, Seviathan von Eldritch. She dated him during her hell school years, and he is depicted as taking her to the prom in one of Vivziepop's illustrations of the two. He is Helsa's brother, as seen in their family portraits in the background of the hotel.
 * Vaggie as Sally × Charlie as Jack Skellington.png Vivziepop has confirmed that Charlie and Vaggie are indeed a canon couple.
 * She compares Charlie and Vaggie's relationship to that of Jack Skellington and Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas.
 * Vivziepop stated that Charlie and Vaggie have known each other for "a very long time". When asked who she thinks fell for the other first (Charlie or Vaggie), Vivziepop stated that she thinks they were really good friends for a while, and it was "kind of a natural progression for them", so she doesn't really know who was in love first, thinking it was a more mutual feeling that developed between them. She also thinks that their becoming a couple happened a fairly long time prior to the events of the Hazbin Hotel pilot, and even before some events that she had planned to occur before the pilot.
 * When asked what kind of things Charlie and Vaggie were doing before opening the hotel, Vivziepop declined to answer, mentioning she would actually love to explore this within the official comics.
 * According to Vivziepop, Charlie sees something magical in the idea of being human. She sees it as a kind of incubation stage where they have the choice whether they go to hell or heaven. She has a very fantastical idea of what humanity is, as far as its flaws are concerned, and she likes humans, despite never having ever seen one.
 * Vivziepop stated that Charlie would like books that have happy endings and strong characters, specifically young adult adventure books.
 * Teenager (Charlie and Crymini).jpg]] Vivziepop talked about how Charlie's attitude towards the patients of the hotel is to treat them "kind of like children". That she views them as similar to wayward teens who need righting and disciplining, and that her view of the situation is immature. Charlie doesn't take the patients' issues seriously enough, and characters that should be in therapy would simply be given a time-out. Vivziepop said that her answer to Angel's bad behavior would be to try and send him to his room.
 * Despite Charlie's position as royalty in Hell, nobody within the sinner area of Hell respects her or her family. Dave Capdevielle explains this as there being a lack of consequences or incentive for sinners to show anyone respect, describing their view of Charlie as being like "a Disney princess". Vivziepop agrees with this assessment, adding that the royals theoretically should be respected, but that they're ruling over a group of people who don't currently respect authority, and probably didn't respect authority when they were alive, combined with Charlie being a completely unintimidating person.
 * Charlie isn't the most mindful of her position on a day-to-day basis and is far too trusting of everyone, causing Vaggie to have to be more on guard for her.
 * Charlie is said to take very much after her dad.
 * Despite her youthful appearance, it appears that Charlie's age is a matter of question. Although Vivziepop thinks that Charlie does celebrate birthdays with the standard kind of party, she is still unsure of how demon years and time work for someone like Charlie. In a later stream, Vivziepop stated that demons age in "hell years". This may hint that Charlie's biological aging is different from how humans age, although it is unknown if hell years are similar in length to Earth years.
 * In one of the Hazbin Hotel pilot teasers, a portrait of the Magne family taken in the year 1871 hints that Charlie is decades older than she appears. Although this detail is omitted in the final version of the pilot, Faustisse has corroborated that Charlie is over 200 years old.
 * According to Faustisse, both Charlie and her mother, alongside Alastor, are fans of pineapple on pizza.
 * According to Dave Capdevielle, if he were to describe Charlie with a My Chemical Romance song, it would be "Sing".
 * Charlie doll in Too Loud.png Charlie makes a cameo in an episode of Too Loud as a small doll. According to Vivziepop, this was the first Hazbin Hotel easter egg.
 * In an interview, Erika Henningsen explained that in the songs written by Sam Haft and Andrew Underberg the way she sounds as Charlie is like a rebel Disney princess that drops an F-bomb in the middle of the most delightful melody you've ever heard.

Development

 * The character of Charlie was created as one of Vivziepop's characters during her time at the School of Visual Arts.
 * In the Hazbin Hotel pilot, Charlie's family name was "Magne". A new last name, or possibly suffix name, for Charlie was announced on February 22, 2022, as "Morningstar". This is likely a reference to her father, Lucifer, whose name is translated as "shining one" or "morning star" by many Biblical scholars.
 * Charlie's name in the pilot seems to have been a pun on "Charlemagne", the King of the Franks and the first Holy Roman Emperor, and a play on the translation of "The Great".
 * The hotel's (managed by Charlie and Vaggie) now-archived Voxtagram account username "@hotel_magnement" is a pun on the word "hotel management" combined with the former's then-surname, Magne.
 * In a stream, Faustisse believed that both Charlie and her father have the ability to summon wings and are capable of flight. This however is shown to be false for Charlie, as even when falling from a great height she never showed or used wings