#by no means am I done with the game

[blueskittlesart]

in the nicest and most non-confrontational way possible. i feel like some of you think that anything that isn't directly openly spelled out for you within a story is "missed potential" or "unexplored." like. sometimes there are implied narratives. sometimes the point is that you as the reader are supposed to think and draw your own conclusions and participate in the story. the writers not directly spelling every little detail out for you doesn't mean that the story is poorly written or missed its own plot details somehow. PLEASE.

[hyakunana]

When you need to lie, but you're a good boy.

[girlboyburger]

i'm alive btw i've just been, um,

[allthepandasintheworld]

nothing will be funnier than the fact that as a cult member, narinder is shorter than lamb (i think it's just bc all the followers are shorter than lamb, by design, but it's still funny to think about)

[genericpuff]

Have you ever considered the idea of drawing your favorite Hades characters in your own style, or do you think they are wonderful as they are drawn?

... y'all asking me to draw Hades AU stuff? ( •̀ᴗ-)

[polux-aka-hyakunana]

It has been forever since the last time I played with drawing screenshots

and some extra doodled ones

[tricoufamily]

an oddball, a freak, a madman, a nutcase, and a wackadoo!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[thedeadthree]

✧ — 𝐓𝐀𝐆 𝐆𝐀𝐌𝐄.

-`. 𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐠𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 @carrionsflower and @loriane-elmuerto tytyy sm lori and airika!!!!! 🥀💌🐦‍⬛

✧ — 𝐓𝐇𝐈𝐒 𝐎𝐑 𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐓.

coffee or tea | early bird or night owl | chocolate or vanilla | spring or fall | silver or gold | pop or alternative | freckles or dimples | snakes or sharks | mountains or fields | thunder or lightning | egyptian mythology or greek mythology | ivory or scarlet | flute or lyre | opal or diamond | butterflies or honeybees | macarons or eclairs | typewritten or handwritten | secret garden or secret library | rooftop or balcony | spicy or mild | opera or ballet | london or paris | vincent van gogh or claude monet | denim or leather | potions or spells | ocean or desert | mermaids or sirens | masquerade ball or cocktail party

✧ — 𝐓𝐎𝐏 𝐅𝐈𝐕𝐄 𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐆𝐒 𝐎𝐍 𝐑𝐄𝐏𝐄𝐀𝐓.

𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐍𝐌𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐌 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐁𝐑𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓 — bel canto.

𝐈𝐌𝐀𝐆𝐎 — nostalghia.

𝐋𝐎𝐔𝐃 𝐁𝐀𝐑𝐊 — mannequin pussy.

𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐅𝐎𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐀 — chappell roan.

𝐃𝐀𝐅𝐅𝐎𝐃𝐈𝐋 — florence + the machine.

— 𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠:

@sunsofdawn, @pavus, @happilyobsessing, @girliefailure, @alvsanne

@auricfog, @jamessunderlandgf, @weisshaupts, @grapecaseschoices, @risingsh0t

@shellibisshe, @florbelles, @full---ofstarlight, @fenharel, @unholymilf

@aelyosos, @anoramactir, @roofgeese, @cloudofbutterflies92, @griffin-wood

@southernreaches, @chainsawsangel, @leviiackrman, @tethrras, @rosykims

@tommyarashikage, @carlosoliveiraa, @courtana, @lilywatt, @kroganloveinterest

@shadowsofrose, @celticwoman, @shadowsofrose, @dialdrunk, @kissingwookiees

@neonshrike, @confidentandgood, @lavampira, @adelaidedrubman, @imogenkol

@kanos, @deadrlngers, @elluvians and you!!!!!! 🥀💌<3

[hungergamesheadcanons]

Post-revolution Annie just posts random videos of Finnick and their son on the internet and they always go viral because people have only ever seen Finnick as playboy extraordinare and now they see Finnick being a dumbass father who's trying his best and it's very endearing and 90% of the time the camera pans out to an unimpressed Johanna or Katniss and it's great

[riddlerosehearts]

idia/vil is such a sweet and interesting ship to me and does not deserve to be a rarepair i'm serious. this might end up a bit incoherent and disorganized because i'm not great with words, but listen. the thing is that while on a surface level idia shroud and vil schoenheit--a nerdy shut-in with anxiety who likes to game all day and a mega famous celebrity who's strict about self-improvement--might seem completely incompatible, their actual interactions show us that that just isn't true!!

like, for example idia's starsending robes vignette is a big one!! the way that vil sees idia trying to hide when he's supposed to be at the ceremony, and idia says he's terrified that people will make fun of him, that he's not like vil and can't just go out and not care what anyone think the way he does. and then vil... tells him he's wrong, that it's the opposite, that he cares so much what other people think but has enough of a grip on himself that he can ignore it and appear confidently in public. the way vil admits to idia that they are so much more alike that he thinks.

also, the way that (in this fan translation at least, as well as in other TLs i've seen--the localization translates it to have the complete opposite meaning, for whatever reason) idia then says "so in other words, you've got to level up your ignore skill", and instead of getting annoyed at him for translating his advice into video game terms vil just says "isn't that obvious?". he's going out of his way to try and give idia genuine advice and is willing to speak his language to get him to understand it. he even does a similar thing later on in book 6, when he tells idia that it's worth taking chances because after all, the star rogue protagonist took his chances and went from zero to a hero.

and on that note, book 6 is so good for them. book 6 has idia get all excited and carried away while infodumping about star rogue, only to abruptly lose his enthusiasm and start talking quietly and stuttering. and who is it that tells him he shouldn't act so embarrassed and that they weren't judging him? it's none other than vil. vil who also shows an interest in gaming, much to the surprise of idia who believed, in his own words, that a "sparkly, gorgeous supermodel" like vil couldn't possibly like any of the same things as him! but no, vil wanted to try out the games they had and vil expressed a desire for idia to talk about his passions without fear of being judged. vil enjoyed playing star rogue and he was glad to discuss the movie adaptation with idia and ortho.

it's also vil who, when idia expresses his disappointment at the star rogue sequel being canceled and his wish for the original team to get back together and create a sequel that would be made with passion behind it, is the only one to genuinely understand where he's coming from (as opposed to jamil who's like "is it really that complicated?" and leona who suggests that he just throw money at the creators). vil is the one who encourages him to take a chance at doing what he can to make that wish a reality, to let the original team know that there's a passionate and loyal fanbase waiting for a sequel, and tells him that he just generally shouldn't give up on changing his future and achieving his dreams before he's even tried. of course ortho heard this advice too and took it very much the wrong way, but vil showed a surprising amount of understanding and support for idia and i feel like it was exactly the kind of thing he needed to hear.

also. remember the scene in disney's hercules where hercules temporarily gives up his godhood and his youth by diving into the underworld to save megara? because vil literally did the same thing to save idia. yeah, he may say he only did it for plot reasons, but like come on, how am i supposed to just not ship them after they parallel one of my favorite disney couples like that? vil is a world famous actor and model who was terrified of aging, and he still took such an insane risk!! i'm sure idia would have a crush on him after that.

i'm trying to wrap this up now because it's already too long but also idia has actually been said to have great fashion sense as his online persona and shown to enjoy cosplay and dressing up on occasion (for example, he went all out on his pumpkin knight costume and this hasn't made it to EN yet but he liked wearing the masquerade outfit). vil had pretty high praise for his design sense when he saw ortho's burst gear. and vil gets along incredibly well with ortho and is in the film club with him post-book 6, which is something i imagine idia would appreciate a lot. the contrast between them and the things they unexpectedly have in common are just so neat to me.

so, in conclusion,

i love them and i think they should be boyfriends

[friendsdontlieokay]

I love Mike and Dustin, no questions asked but them not attending Lucas' game and choosing Erica, Lucas' sister, as a sub for the campaign was a really messed up thing to do, I'm sorry.

It's the way Lucas was so happy that he's finally getting appreciated like he wanted to and his friends just not being there even when he so dearly asked them to, and worst of all it's the way his smile drops after seeing the group cheering on their win without him, but with his sister that gets me everytime. Like he was so happy and then the people who he was supposed to share his happiness with just weren't there, that sucks man!

They didn't even try their best to convince Eddie even when Lucas requested them to come to his game. It's not just the championship game, he wanted to join Eddie's campaign too but he had to move on with a 'it is what it is' sorta thing

[ween-kitchens]

i realise im getting ahead of myself here, but before the next minecraft live, can we all remember that this is a 15 year old game that gets annual FREE updates that we can give feedback on. yes it can be upsetting when your favourite mob isnt added into the game but the fact that the community CAN vote on mobs and give input on literally everything (and have the devs actually listen) is something that is so rare and so special.

[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.

[chronurgy]

Okay sorry the longer I think about it the more bizzare this trailer becomes to me? This is your reveal trailer for a game that people have been anticipating for nigh on a decade? A meet the gang trailer with not a single piece of information about the world of your ROLE PLAYING GAME???? What??? It's an rpg, of course there's gonna be a gang. But why??? WHY is there a gang? What is going on in the world that requires a gang?? Why would that not be the first piece of information you'd want to get out there? Why do I still not know the basic premise of this role playing game??

[spicyicymeloncat]

Idk if this is a hot take but why is it always “Kai slaved away and worked his ass off to raise his sister” and never the other way round or them working hard together?

Like, I know he’s older but in the show, does he really… act older? Like if you think about Kai and Nya’s dynamic yknow? Because from my understanding:

When Kai and Nya are introduced we see Kai fail at making a sword and Nya being the one to chide him for it. Kai makes an overconfident statement about wanting to be a better blacksmith than his father. This suggests that one, Kai is rather rash as well as inexperienced (something that lines up with the rest of his character arc in the pots and also generally), with Nya being the more mature figure in contrast

Also just a note but in the shorts: “I can handle it!” “No you can’t, stupid”

Kai frequently being very good at neglecting people or things: leaving Lloyd at an arcade whilst being focused on finding samurai x, not even knowing samurai x was Nya or that she only did it because she felt left out by him, completely abandoning both Nya and Lloyd in s3 (and Ik he was going through it at the time, but in line with the fandom’s characterisation of him)

Kai in season 5: “After I lost my dad, I lost my way. But I was lucky to have my sister watch over me”

Generally, their dynamic isn’t one where Kai really provides for Nya at all. In fact, judging by the fact that Nya can make entire mechs and Kai struggled to make a sword, Nya was probably busting her ass to provide for Kai. And judging by the s5 quote, that’s probably true. I’m not saying Nya raised Kai, it just rubs me the wrong way when she’s treated like a decorative flourish to a narrative that paints Kai as a burnt out child who was forced to grow up too soon especially since that is such a mischaracterisation of him in the first place.

[waterdeeping]

I love you. But for the man that you are. Not the god you'd pretend to be.