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For years, people have been asking, what is the deal with the devil? Well, unless you are Faust and are considering making an actual pact with said demonic overlord, the deal is this: he's become cool. While many western religions still posit the devil as the fallen archangel of heaven, Lucifer, and set him up as the ruler of hell, where wrongdoers go for the eternity of the afterlife, a large majority of the world now sees the common image of the red devil complete with horns, hooves, and forked tail as a symbol of pop culture and a joke.
If the devil is angry about his mutation from a figure that inspired fear of the horrors of hell into a figure that invokes laughter, he certainly wouldn't be upset about this graphic design, in which he appears as a slightly humorous but mostly cool figure with his stolen halo riding cocked to one side around one of his filigreed horns. His bright red colour and his squinted eyes and scowling mouth make him look sufficiently intimidating as it is - when you add the three pronged trident to the mix, he becomes almost the epitome of the slogan that is emblazoned above his head: overheat.
The fact is that hell has been given almost as many popular culture references as heaven now. In films, actors descend to the underworld to participate in various heroic activities, in television shows like South Park, hell is ruled by a devil that is more fairy than demon, and is populated by strange people. Because of this, people have ceased to fear hell as a large majority, and tend to see it as somewhat of an old wives tale that you tell to children to make sure they get to bed on time: "go to sleep or the devil will take you down to hell!", and such.
This graphic is quite simple, and, in truth, some might argue that it needs a little bit more spice to make it more appealing. However, the simplicity gives it an edge - it lets the humour and the fun of the design stand out juxtaposed against the actual gravity of the image of the demonic lord of the underworld, thus creating a fun and interesting contrast all set up in one image.
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