#Some of you really need to tag your shit

[darlingdeeceased]

Dear chicken run fandom

Look, we are all weirdos. I am openly someone who is attracted to Mrs Tweedy, and sometimes we all get too much. But MY GOD, some of you need to get it through your skull that this is a children’s movie. It may be dark, and may be griddy at times, but it is also a movie that was advertised for children. There were books for children, this was a movie made for children. You probably know who and what I am talking about if you saw my Mrs Tweedy post simply exclaiming that I love her.

I do admit in that post I was aggressive but for fucks sake!! There are kids here, children. Children who we shouldn’t talk to about sex or talk about it around them. I have met people in this fandom who are under 15, this fandom is mainly minors. I’m not gonna call this person directly out, because honestly the fact they didn’t understand that this is a fandom with minors in it baffles me and I don’t want to deal with them. I really just wanted to put it out there that some of you need to understand that THERE ARE KIDS HERE! Like, it’s a no brainer. People are always talking about minors invading adult spaces, and how minors shouldn’t be there. YOU shouldn’t be in minor spaces, you can like Bluey, or chicken run, or whatever the fuck you like I do not care but do not bring your:

NSFW.

Adult conversations.

And adult subjects

Into those spaces. For fucks sake it’s that easy, it says a lot about you as a person if you can’t understand that. Chicken run has minors in it, a bunch of minors. Because, omg totally “new” concept, minors are on the internet. Woah, kids exist and it’s like they have every fucking right to a NSFW FREE SAFE SPACE.

I get simping, being like “omg step on me” to an extent BUT MY FUCKING GOD. Bringing up sex or a woman's breasts and body on posts that have nothing to do with that subject matter is disgusting. I get the second one, Melishas body changed but the fact you pointed out her boobs directly is gross.

Please, for the love god, a lot of you need to tag your shit correctly and realize these fandoms have minor in them. It fucks people up man, and that’s not on the minors for finding that content. It’s on you, the adult, for exposing them to said content.

Please also go check out @melishatweedy and @pant-eater rants on this, because they are genuinely way better than mine and probably don’t have spelling errors. (Sorry for the @‘s)

and again, can’t stress this enough, minors deserve safe spaces. You as an adult are responsible to keep those places safe in fandom that revolve around media directed to minors. Get your shit together and tag your shit correctly.

If anyone wants to know the full context, I am happy to explain in DMs btw.

[lunarharp]

if i just told you i love you would this world change

[moonscape]

op turned off rbs but is this about that dark past fangame that everyone is now lauding as basically pre-canon explorers despite it literally being just a fangame that also happens to be extremely racist with some of its messages

[osamucide]

if this bothers anyone they can kindly feel free to leave or ignore it or whatever but can we stop flooding the x reader tags with half-baked thinkpieces on why people should or shouldn’t do whatever with their writing. every other post is “you shouldn’t romanticize [x]” “you’re problematic if you do [x]” “stop writing about [x]” “[x] is gross and if you write about it kill yourself” how about if you don’t like certain content you heed the content warnings, block the tags, don’t interact with it, so on and so forth. of course part of our responsibility as writers, especially ones dealing with sensitive topics, is to label and tag our works appropriately but let’s be real—i hardly see any writers (at least within the bsd fandom) who don’t make it abundantly clear what they do/do not write about, interact with, or tolerate. wait until you find out how much fucked up shit happens in real life and how much some person on the internet coping with their trauma by writing self insert fanfiction about a cartoon character doesn’t fucking correlate to the perpetuation of that fucked up shit at all. it doesn’t even have to be that serious. people are going to write and read the content they want and they’re allowed to and you spilling your complaints all over the x reader tags “to boost attention” isn’t gonna change that. if you don’t like something ignore, unfollow, block, mind your own business. it’s actually super easy

[kaidanalenkosprmanager]

THE BEST OF SHENKO 1/?

The end of the world has a way of reminding you of all the things you forgot to say do. Mass Effect: Legendary Edition (2021)

[bigcats-birds-and-books]

Daisy Chaining; Or, Connecting the TBR!

Does anybody besides me like to find Connections between Seemingly/Largely Unrelated Books and use those connections to plot a route through the old TBR?? I don't know about you, but I have a LOT of books I want to read, and sometimes I get Whelmed™ by my choices. So I'll either pick a small stack and make that a particular month's micro-TBR (good if I have specific Goals!), OR I'll start with something I really want to read, and I'll daisy chain from there.

For example: I'd been waiting for TRANSLATION STATE to release in paperback since the hardback was announced (because Translators, my beloveds). So I annihilated that in a couple days (it was very good, all right??), and then I had to figure out where to go next despite cruising on the Translators High.

Because the Translators' fucked up body horror (which I mean mostly affectionately, but I'm side eyeing the matching pretty hard) was at times....goopy...I thought a book about a shapeshifter whose default form is an amorphous lump would be good next, which got me to SOMEONE YOU CAN BUILD A NEST IN (which I also enjoyed!! shout-out to @asexualbookbird for gifting it to meee!!).

Since NEST is Monsters in a Fantasy Forest with a side of Politics and Power, my next read is THE BUTCHER OF THE FOREST (because it's also...wait for it...Monsters in a Fantasy Forest with a side of Politics and Power). And after that, I'll come OUT of the forest with AT THE EDGE OF THE WOODS, which promises to be weird and vaguely monstrous but with a literary bent (I put it on one of my writing TBR lists, and my general "read this by the end of 2024" list).

So, yeah! That's how you daisy chain to get from SF to fantasy/horror to fantasy to weird Lit Fic in the span of four (4) books, while maintaining something like a continuity. By the end of the year, my Books Read shelf looks a little chaotic, but there generally really is a rhyme AND a reason about it!

(Please click on the photo for better image quality! I edited it weirdly compared to usual and it looks good on my screen but ah. Less So, in tungledlandia.,.,)

[rxttenfish]

Asking because I’m extremely curious about this, how did MonProm’s writing get different over time? I remember you saying that the lore and characters feel different, and that it's missing sincere character interactions, too. I know almost nothing about the lore and I’ve only seen a few people mention the characters, so I’d be interested in a rundown of what aspects you think got worse in the series

I wouldn’t mind a very long response since I’m not that active in the fandom, I need to catch up on what happened

sorry for taking so long to answer this! i kinda waffled on it for a long bit, mainly because i started doubting myself again, and whether or not this was me simply overreacting or being tinted by nostalgia or simply being extremely picky and choosy in what i like (the last of which is true, i seldom get into fandoms at all for this reason and stay away from most popular media, but i wasn't sure if it applied here). i've posted about it already, but i'm in the middle of a psychotic episode where i can't feel a lot of pleasure to begin with + most things i do experience ending up solidly in the "very bad" category, so as you can imagine, i really didn't want to mislead and check that i was actually in objective reality.

as it is, this is also when a lot more screenshots started to be posted in the monster prom tag, and that helped me bridge the gap back into returning to the games themselves and feel like i was making a more accurate judgement. if you're one of those people who have been posting screenshots, i sincerely thank you, and i appreciated seeing you in the tag greatly.

for those not in the know — i've been in the monster prom fandom since it first released, prior to even the first additional ending to be added (the "Punch the sun" ending, and i recall the minor fandom drama that happened at that time due to it). my impression of monster prom is very much influenced by this, as what got me into the first game was the fact that the characters genuinely seemed to care for each other and were friends with each other (not merely tolerating each other's presences nor dressing it up, they sincerely thought of each other as friends and were open about that fact), on top of the wide variety of small details and statements that, if taken at face value, could create compounding complexity in the lives of each and every character and had wider implications for their lives.

no, they were not necessarily explored nor even necessarily "real", with so many conflicting events and statements, but i liked this too, because it meant a wider flexibility in what you could imagine, helping to create a more tailored experience for everyone who thought about these characters. this was what i liked about the early fandom too. what was baseline "canon" was so vague and minimal that you could have wildly different interpretations of the same characters' histories and relationships with each other. you would have radically different perspectives on what the world itself looked like, what it was like, that there wasn't really any wrong answers so long as their personalities remained the same. this is where you got the old headcanon of polly and liam being childhood friends who knew each other as humans, or that the world of monster prom was post-apocalypse where humanity itself had gone extinct or only existed in tiny pockets, or my personal headcanon that both monster and human society existed right next to each other and had minimal crossover for petty cultural reasons. this was also prior zoe-as-ro, and there were wildly different interpretations of zoe's personality, with most going for a far more disquieting creepy-cute than the deep nerd we got.

this is why you get stuff like the timeloop theory, where everyone is repeating the same weeks leading up to prom over and over, and are perhaps vaguely aware of it but broadly unconcerned. this is also why it felt like the joke that, the characters were still in high school but were all fully legal adults with most in their 20's, best landed, because it was absurd and strange and didn't quite make sense, but the world itself was inherently absurd and semi-malleable to begin with. realistically, i felt like everyone understood it was making fun of the trope of having adults play teenagers in american sitcoms and wildly casting outside the age range, but for more in-universe explanations it wasn't any different from the way that you would have a large, dramatic ending in which everything changed, but then you'd restart and everyone would be right back at the beginning with nothing different, or even having conflicting events in the same run. it was a dream-logic that fit with the tropes and, thus, diagetically made sense.

to be clear, i don't mind canon having a set, well, canon on which it refers back to itself. i don't mind expanding that or including more things which are set in stone. but there was a perceivable shift in how the games handled this over time, becoming a lot more... bitter, it felt, towards all of these different branching ideas and concepts that, yeah, the people making them knew wouldn't necessarily be "canon" because "canon" already liked to contradict itself so much. most people weren't even sold on any one idea, and there was a much greater sense of enjoying and appreciating all the varying ideas people would come up with even if you personally didn't share them. making the characters be out of character was the real crime, because then it didn't diagetically make sense in the same way, didn't wholly fit.

(again, this is not to say fanon didn't happen and characters weren't smoothed down into a simplified personality that fit these varying fan-interpretations instead of the game itself. certainly damien love/lust was just as bad as it had ever been, and everyone loved to mangle his character into a more stereotypical "bad boy with a heart of hold" all the time. but it certainly felt less set-in-stone about it than it does now, with any deviation from the norm being considered strange and odd and even broadly shunned from the wider fandom.)

all of this is setup for establishing what the writing, lore, and characters felt like in the earlier days. the characters were the strongest part, with their relationships to each other being equally as important. the lore played it fast and loose and was far less interested in setting anything in concrete because that wasn't the important part. the lore wasn't the important part, which was what made it all the more intoxicating to think about, all the more fun to play with.

montrip is easily the biggest offender when it comes to setting everything in all-or-nothing terms and demanding absolutism from the world. broadly i blame the hitchhiker conversations for the worst of it, but i think ultimately the way they handled the entire premise of the game is where this problem stems from. it's not really an exploration in the same sense that you might explore the first game, discovering different perspectives and different people with different relationships to each other. it's an exploration in the sense of a sequel that over-explains the monster, that takes the most boring option out of all those that were possible and floating around and settles on something that was blatant, obvious, typically rejected not because of how novel it is but how trite and par for the course it is in the rest of the genre.

yeah, okay. humans know nothing about monsters and there's a "monster dimension" that exists separately from the human dimension. there's no crossover between the two of them. of course there's a big grand-scale fight between the eldritch powers that zoe used to be a part of, from which not only are slayers the main organization against them, but also the merkingdom has some horse in this race too. it's an urge to make things so universal in explaining them, in revealing connecting threads which unite everything that's ever happened in here, that makes the worldbuilding and lore immediately much more boring than it ever was before.

and it didn't have to be this way! nothing in the first game contradicts any of this too explicitly (see the above, the first game loves to contradict itself), and i would even be happy if this was basically canon but never stated or confirmed to be the big overarching everything going on underneath it all. i believe you should probably know these things about any world that you create and have them in the back of your mind. the difference is that you can know these things and keep them in mind, even focusing on things where its very relevant, and still not reveal them. this is why you have lore bibles, after all. every horror writer knows exactly how their monster works and the full underlying reason for everything that happens, but that doesn't mean the audience will see it or possess this same information too, and leaving it intentionally obscure will make far better stories.

which, this is bad enough, but it wouldn't be the breaking point for me if this was all there was.

but the worst thing of all has to be the slow decay of the very same characters that sold me on this world, this lore, this game in the first place. monster prom is nothing without the characters in it. it's a dating sim, it has nothing but characters to get you to play, and liking these characters are the entire reason anyone would pick up monster prom in the first place.

and the first game pulls this off extremely well. it's all in the tagline: be your worst self. they are, indeed, all terrible people. yes, even that character that you just thought of right now. they all have points in the game where they commit atrocities, where they kill or hurt people, where they do inexcusable things that could not be ignored in a more serious setting.

but that's the point. i think there's something very powerful in creating a character who not only do you love and love their personality and the way they interact with the world, but who also are inapologetically terrible, and to have the humor and the charisma be so good that you don't get bogged down in the "this is awful". likewise, it never feels the urge to really go out of its way to justify what's going on. this is not to say theres no discussion of if someone "deserved it", but usually there's still the sense that the joke is on them, that this is still an extreme reaction specifically for comedy and not necessarily something that can be justified. you can have damien set leonard on fire and have it feel earned, without prompting the needed reaction of what it's actually like to watch someone burn to death.

this is what sets the prank masterz ending apart from the rest of the game, and really establishes it as the first real "bad ending". because nothing that you do or happens in the prank masterz ending is any different from anything else that happens in any other run. you summon evil beings from other dimensions as a throwaway gag on how visiting one location raises your stats. you kill other people and damn them to terrible fates. you watch as body horror happens. the only difference is that, in the prank masterz ending, the laugh track doesn't play.

the rest of the game and the writing echoes this philosophy, this careful interplay of tropes that keeps everything tongue in cheek and yet sincere enough to make sure emotional beats still land when they're needed. the characters feel true to themselves and their own emotions, even when the world is extreme and excessive, when everything else runs on comedy logic.

this is also what i noticed failing first as time went on.

like i said, fanon has always existed and there's always been very specific ideas as to what characters are like in the same way fanon always flattens down characters into the same tropes over and over. scott is stupid and innocent and doesn't know what sex is. damien is violent and hot and too cool for anyone else. miranda is the idiot girl character. repeat over and over and over until you get sick of it.

but it's been an issue as time has crept on that canon has started to approach fanon and began to merge with it. now, scott is so innocent that he can't even curse. polly starts being mean to her friends and saying things that would be very hurtful to hear. the merkingdom isn't really super evil and fucked up, it's just miranda that's like that. they become simpler, easier to digest, streamlined for social media posts and mass-sharing. they become less and less subversions of existing tropes and moreso just another example of them, something else to add to the collection, not their own individual stories.

even further from this, what more complex traits they had are now stated and not shown. polly is stated to be smart and clever in a way that her party girl persona doesn't imply and to be sincerely rather down to earth with the people she cares about, but we seldom ever see this anymore unless its the game specifically trying to make a point about it, in which case it won't let her do anything that implies cleverness and moreso will just outline it in the narration. vera is stated to care for people in a very genuine and heartfelt way, but seldom will get a chance to do so, and every opportunity for her to do so to their faces is missed while she will just outright state it later. it does not feel consistent, it does not feel like any of these are intended reads of their actions. it feels like the devs have something they want to do but no idea on how to actually do so. and forget it if you want these traits to manifest in small ways that show up in unrelated moments and scenes.

the dialogue becomes harder and harder to tell between each speaker, if you are just looking at what's said and not at the pictures attached to it. the characters' distinct voices have been eroded away, so that they speak more and more like each other, relaying the same terms and ideas in the same words. perspective becomes a suggestion, instead of a must.

this is something that started back in monster camp too, as all of the endings in that game felt ultimately the same as every other ending. it's very hard to place or define the full reason why, why there feels like there's no emotional stakes nor investment, why everything feels moreso like selecting different coats of paint and trying to find all the different ending pictures rather than being interested in exploring the characters as characters.

stranger yet, the series that started with the tagline of "be your worst self" has experienced a kind of... softening, for lack of a better word? what i mentioned about being able to handle the balance between terrible people who do terrible things and the light tone of the game starts to change, as abruptly the same characters who were down with violent murder in the first game start to lose their nerve, acting more and more on more typical morality. it's one of those things that feels like it's starting to damage the tone, as abruptly it's not as absurd as it used to be, demands less suspension of disbelief which could buffer and support the rest of the setting on it. there's even a part in one of the endings in montrip which involves current-polly and current-scott looking back on their monprom selves and reacting in horror at how violent and careless their pranks are, in a way that fundamentally felt like it was undercutting and disparaging all the things that felt fun and made monprom what it was.

which is odd, really, because more and more i feel like the characters in these games like each other less and less. the friendships and genuine enjoyment of each others company that brought me to this game in the first place has gone. now they don't mention each other as much, don't care for each other's feelings and reactions as much, aren't as willing to support each other. they are more and more found on their own, relied on their own, seem to seek out contact and interaction with their own friends less and less. it feels like they're all separating out into their own worlds, but also feels like they wouldn't willingly want to interact with each other if they weren't already forced together by some other outside contrivance.

if anything, i'd compare it to every other dating sim out there, where you, the player, are the most important person in these characters' lives, and they only feel ambivalent or antagonistic towards every other character. which, again, is not why i picked up monster prom or why i liked it so much in the first place.

and it's because of this that it feels like the current state of the series has to focus on its increasingly weak worldbuilding and lore, trying to form a more serious foundation without character relationships being so tightly bound together, without the characters themselves being more developed and rich, without an aspect of absurd humor to rely on.

more and more i've noticed monprom has to rely on referencing other series to make itself funny and create humor, which, again, it's always done. it was just easier to ignore back then, if you didn't know what was being referenced, because there was always more going on in the exact same scene to bolster it and give context clues as to the setup and punchline at play. it feels like the current games are much more dependent on you knowing pop culture references in order to have any fun with it, and i'm someone who, again, is very picky in what i like or what i'll seek out. i'm not interested in a stream of references about other things that i would much rather be doing than playing through a game that feels like it hates that i like it at all, when i could, again, just be engaging with the thing that takes itself seriously and knows what it wants.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[fantasticalleigh]

🖤🖤🖤🖤Another one for The Education of a Lady 🖤🖤🖤🖤

used this Pin as a reference

[the-vibing-ghoul]

some people will be all about mental health awareness and leftist ideals of at least tolerating the mentally ill who show ''ugly'' symptoms until it's someone they know and ''care'' about having a bad day and acting like it in a way they don't find appealing

[morgana-ren]

You ever see a piece of media that is very blatantly meant for adult consumption but for some reason, the fan base around it is ultimately comprised of packs of rabid 12 year olds who shouldn't be indulging in the media in the first place and utterly lack critical thinking or comprehension and couldn't understand nuance or perspective if you gave them baby's first homework assignment on it?

[imavikingo]

There is something that I can’t understand and will never understand about fandom “culture”

Why EVERYTHING (or a lot of things) need to be canon or acknowledged by the actors/directors/producers to be accepted by the fandom? In specific ships?

And why when a “ship” (two characters, really) have more screentime than others/other characters aren’t in the picture anymore, people take that as a victory as see their ship as more valid and “actually canon”? And mock/harass others for it?

Also there is this thing people have been doing a lot too: Thats calling everyone that doesn’t like the ship you like names (and also calling them terms that before actually meant something awful but nowadays can be said for simply tagging the incorrect ship in a fucking post)

Canon isn’t always the norm here kid. At least when it relates to ships and scenarios. (Bc if we’re talking about characterization… yes it needs to be canon in a sense or we’re writing/making ocs out of canon characters)

Most of the more popular ships will never be canon and have never been, especially the gay ones. (See Drarry, Narusasu, Frodo/Sam, Johnlock, etc, etc)

So why suddenly we care so much about what NEEDS to be canon or not?

Why people NEED to see their ships be canon so badly?

Sure, I can be seen as a hypocrite because Ive been talking about Stucky a lot in the canon and what happened in EG, but they actually did that themselves. The directors talked about gay characters, the actors talked about Stucky. So actually it isn’t something ludicrous or anything. (I’ve never thought they would actually make the ship canon -bc that would be a big problem for them “how can you make Cap America gay!” And shit- but I thought they would at least make them still be friends or friendly or acknowledge the “bromance” and they just killed the friendship in one scene with the most ooc shit ever). In fact, I’m more annoyed by that. They assassinated Steve’s character and Bucky’s progress.

Nevermind…

Why people fight so much about ships and use terms that shouldn’t be brought into stupid shit like this?

Fandoms are supposed to be fun and to have discussions (in good faith) about the canon. What we like and what we don’t like about it.

Besides, a lot of current media are about stuff that’s been remade over and over again. So they have a lot of adaptations and you can pick and choose too, if you want.

And if you don’t like the canon? Easy! Do analysis, criticize it, write fics, do fanart, do creative shit or simply ignore it! No one is forcing you to keep on watching the show or the stuff you now hate/cant stand. That’s what Im doing at least.

Sure, I criticize some people and movies a lot and get actually annoyed by the disrespect towards/assassination of some characters, but at the end of the day I can only shrug and say “it is what it is” and leave it at that. (Meaning not giving them money for the new stuff/not watching nor caring about it and only acknowledging the old things I actually care about and like)

But I don’t insult or disrespect other people in fandom because of it. And also I don’t harass the directors or actors either, ffs.

Idk, Ive always been on the sidelines of the stuff I follow, I’ve never been on the thick of fandoms so maybe thats why I don’t understand.

And I’ve also not seen so many crazy shit (the most crazy stuff Ive seen is people calling others racists for tagging a ship incorrectly and also others inflating the tag of a ship in ao3 so their ship would be “the most popular” with most fics, in that fandom) because I actually curate what I see. I don’t like a ship? I mute, if I can’t stand a person or a ship? I block em. Simple and easy.

I’ve always drawn stuff for myself, read fics and made headcanons. Only recently I’ve been sharing stuff more openly, so maybe it’s that.

Idk.

I’m just tired of seeing discourse and people fighting over this stuff.

[julesnichols]

Any time you say it doesn't make sense for a character not to be aspec because they're autistic/that character is autistic so them being aspec makes more sense without like, actually having a reason to think that beyond "they're autistic/autistic coded" an angel loses its wings. Also I'm biting you. Btw

[kohakhearts]

anyone else think theres some kinda bizarre love triangle going on between the player and the dlc siblings cause thats all i took away from it lmao. cant wait for part 2 so i can take carmine on a true american date

[spider-man-2o99]

this idea that some ppl seem 2 have of miguel being an insanely jealous/possessive person is so funny 2 me because i just cannot even fathom where it came from in the slightest, lol, like... one of his Whole Things is respecting individual autonomy, y/k-? nevermind he also just. canonically doesn't fucking act that way,.,. yeah, obviously people can draw different wrong conclusions from the source material but, like, that Does Require at least skimmin' the source material... .

[steakout-05]

how i feel about TBYS causing a shockwave effect of everyone dogpiling on and harassing Illymation and spreading extremely easily disprovable and malicious misinformation about her and putting her in a lot of danger for literally no legitimate reason