#i don't want to attack anyone who feels this way about the series though........ fjddkxnxkxm

[uiruu]

i just saw someone say they don't like monster factory because of the bodyshaming and like... if that's how it hits them then I'm not gonna argue with them of course, but i don't really know of any instance of shaming... it's either about celebrating bodies or it's just neutral and about creating the character who fits whatever improv narrative they're coming up with. and any time they do go "oh no that's horrifying", it's about some feature that's totally non-human, like having a giraffe neck or teeth that glow, or some feature that, if it were on a real person, would be a conscious choice someone made, like a bad haircut or extremely bad fashion sense.

like, I'm not gonna tell someone who feels this way about monster factory that they're wrong because they experience what they experience, you know? but at the same time it's just not a conclusion i would have ever come to, i think. I've never gotten the impression that they're making fun of real people at all, and something like 99% of what makes the character creation parts funny is the way the narrative and personality of the character unfolds as they shape them.

they have made characters who are fat, sure, but that's not ever The Joke, you know? Justin actually always makes a point to appreciate when games let you play as overweight people because he himself is overweight. they make an effort to vary up gender options, height options, size options, all sorts of variables like that between their various characters, just to keep things fresh. and i don't think giving a character a big nose when not all of their characters have big noses means that they're making fun of big noses, because the joke literally never is "haha big nose". the joke that the nose serves might be just to help shape the face into something funny, but the joke is about what emotion, mood, or character background the character might be in or have, not about how ugly or whatever the character is.

i can't really think of many times, if any, where they've made a character where the whole point is that theyre ugly and worthy of ridicule. most of the time, their goal is to make a character who has an eccentric personality, or is extremely sad, or trying their best, or idk something else like that lol. i can think of more monster factories where the character's physical attributes don't get goofed up that much and the majority of the monstering comes from the clothing/accessories/story they make up for them, etc than i can monster factories where the monstering mostly has to do with what they look like (and only that). like, the final pam isn't that weird looking. if you stripped arby the meathead mcdonald of all his clothes and accessories he'd just be a normal old man.

but then also, when they do goof up a character physically, it's usually so nonhuman that it doesn't read to me as having anything to do with actual people at all. like toucan dan the toucan man. or squirtle. or knife dad. or yoba skywalker starwars rules. or truck shepard. or j'aam lmao

if it felt meanspirited, i wouldn't be into it. and like, i felt like if almost any other people other than Griffin and Justin were doing this series, it definitely would be meanspirited. i don't think many people are capable of not only walking the line here, but like thriving in it, and creating a space to make fun characters with really large personalities and eccentricities and physicalities that reflect those things, WITHOUT it veering into just joking about physical appearances. in a vacuum, you could view some of the creations from a distance and think it's veering into that, but in context it doesn't really, in my opinion. when they give a character long arms and short legs, it's so long and so short that it doesn't resemble anyone, and even still, the jokes are less about how wild it looks and more about the utility of these features and what they say about the character and the world they inhabit.

idk, that's just my two cents. i understand if there are people who feel this way though, because i can only speak for my experiences and they can only speak for theirs. but i just felt compelled to post this because like... that's a criticism of monster factory that i haven't really seen before, and i wouldn't really have gotten that impression just from watching them. especially once the series really got going and they started focusing more and more on the narrative, to the point where the creation segments of episodes like the #noid, turbovicki, daz, stang, etc aren't even that prominent, and definitely aren't even the funniest parts of those episodes lol. well maybe daz, i liked the creation of daz lol. but anyway.

their goal with monster factory isn't to create things to laugh at, it's to create things to laugh with lmao. to create a monster and find how to love them. to create art.

long story short, monster factory is a monsterfucker series. i think. that's not the conclusion i had in mind when i started writing this, but that's what im going with. it's about beauty, power, and beautiful powerful monsters who definitely fuck, for sure