#if this even counts for us ofc

[themintman]

Yk this was a silly doodle but then my tablet momentarily DIED died and I thought I lost this so I finished it out of spite.

DOGtor Trayaurus and.. uh.. UH.. Dan (I PANICKED I CANT THJNK OF ANY PUNS-)

[artifeast]

some more telesphore :3

[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.

[spilledstars1234]

It makes me so happy to know I somewhat was able to help somebody feel better today. I know that they don’t actually want to get worse, nor disappear at all, deep down inside.

People I know take my words and listen to it through one ear and let it go out the other. They disregard them. This is often the case with various people in my life. But this isn’t the case with that person. It doesn’t seem to be, and they’ve said it wasn’t in the past, and I know they aren’t a person to lie either.

Helping others… I suppose it's how I find worth in myself. It’s all I truly have for myself, really. It’s the one thing I can probably do correctly.

I guess it’s just how my brain works. It’s somewhat wired to find meaning in my view on my "self" off of other people’s input, off of the sense of fulfillment in being able to alleviate other people’s pain, even if it’s for a fraction of a time before their pain flares up for said people again.

[bugprinz]

get goromi'd

[elysianasterism]

just tweeted this but like. if you told past lucie, even lucie from last year, that they'd get obsessed with a pop band, they wouldn't believe you. but here we are 🕺

[li-rheinn]

I find a great tip as someone who deals with panic attacks: when panic arrises - create a plan. Something simple, with steps. To-do list kind of. Like: 1. I'll go to kitchen, 2. then I'll grab glass, 3. full it with water. 4. turn off the lights, 5. go to sleep.

[walking-fnaf-encyclopedia]

yk whats really funny to me? people tend to characterize lolbit as highly aggressive, but like.. its not. like genuinely, it doesnt ever kill you. it just.. what, stops you from using stuff?

if anything, its the least dangerous sister location animatronic??

AND its one of the helpful animatronics in fnaf world!! it provides you with all sorts of helpful bytes! and dee dee (also a shopkeeper in fnaf world, and originating from there like lolbit) in the main games is only characterized as a nuisance by fans, not aggressive. if anything dee dee is worse - they dont offer a way for you to stop them like lolbit does, and you have to scramble to figure who the hell was added because they could very well kill you.

[darkclouds-rainsounds]

The above is a screenshot of one of tropes from Shadoo's section in the SPM TV Tropes page that caught my interest.

“Never mentioned to be killed...” Hm. If I go by my headcanon of how Dimentio fits into the story of the Pixl Uprising (i.e he's both the Magician's son and the surviving apprentice who defeated the Pixl Queen), then that would give another parallel of how Dimentio was once a hero who had a Pixl that could see the truth who stopped an antagonist who had the Dark Prognosticus who several thousand years later switched sides. And by another parallel, I mean it works perfectly alongside this.

The reason Shadoo exists (if they are the Pixl Queen) is because he couldn't go through with killing his sister; he cared for her too much and now here she is stuck at the bottom of the Flopside Pit of 100 Trials and wanting to exact revenge on the Ancients for sealing her away. Based on how Shadoo has a robotic text box and says that they were created by the Ancients, it can be presumed she forgot she was ever human. She forgot who she was.

Fast forward to the events of SPM and Dimentio's intended kill-shot for Count Bleck gets intercepted by Nastasia and knocks her unconscious in addition to injuring her. Either he had the power of that shot just enough to kill Bleck and no further and that's why Nastasia survived, because why waste precious energy? All he has to do is finish Count Bleck off who is already at death’s door thanks to the heroes.

Or Nastasia was just very fortunate to survive a full-powered blast. My money's on something like the former because Dimentio has well more than enough power to absolutely guarantee no one would survive an attack like that. (the average person who isn't a hero or built for combat— which Nastasia very much isn't— anyway.)

Then there's him saving O'Chunks and Mimi from what would have been certain death by teleporting them to Dimension D. We know they didn't end up in the same place as Peach and Bowser because neither they nor O'Chunks and Mimi make any mention of such. Pair that with the fact that the Void can't be seen from Dimension D and thus heavily implying that anyone inside it would survive the Void that would destroy everything else, and you're left with the only explanation of Dimentio having saved them. I do believe that Dimentio screwed up by not only "catching feelings" and he genuinely did care for the other minions deep down as much as he tries to deny that; and I have mentioned in a prior post about him putting all of the people who could have possibly done something about the Super Dimentio fusion in the same place.

If he hadn't cared as much as he did for them and just left them to their fates, he would have won. I feel that the reason why the floor came out under Bowser and O'Chunks is because of Dimentio— because why make a trap like that that is intended to kill any who don't make it out in time and then have it to where after a certain amount of time, it would give any of the heroes still inside who may somehow still be alive an escape and make a comeback? It makes no sense. And it's because of that, that Peach was able to survive by landing on top of Bowser.

Had he only teleported Bowser out and left O'Chunks, and teleported Peach while leaving Mimi, the minions wouldn't have been able to band together with Count Bleck and Tippi to recharge the Pure Hearts and destroy his invincibility. It was his inability to go through with killing them or just letting them die because he actually cared about them— cared too much— that caused his own undoing.

History literally repeats itself if one subscribes to believing Dimentio is both the Magician's son and the last surviving apprentice.

First Shadoo who may or may not be the Pixl Queen, was spared by her brother who couldn't bear to go through with killing her therefore causing future consequences for if she ever gets free. Then the minions— including Nastasia and Count Bleck who for the latter, Dimentio in his ever present wisdom decided to spare killing for later— with their love for each other that was allowed to continue existing all because he spared them for the time being, recharged the Pure Hearts and caused immediate consequences for himself and was the catalyst for his defeat.

In the first instance, he was on the “heroic” side. For the last he was on the “villainous” side.

[mythvoiced]

hiatus 🥺

saw Ferre's post from a few days ago and felt WELP might as well make it official on my end as well~ no worries or concerns, i am merely either working or completely devoid of any creative juices, truly, i stare at my fingers and dramatic music starts playing as i wonder where my writing has gone

i plan on cleaning up around mythvoiced while i take an official break from invading y'all's notifications, and that will probably entail a drastic cut on muses. DRASTIC! my deepest apologies to the people who i might impact like this (yknow, our lil threads 🥺) but i just think it's?? better to put those folks on ice that i can't wring anything out of anymore, those damn idiots DAMN IT gosh i haven't posted anything in here in what feels like ages i have lost TOUCH with the VIBES

but yes, thank you for your patience & pls have a lovely timezone TELL ME IF SOMEONE'S MEAN, I'LL FIGHT

[aria0fgold]

Well that was... unsettling...

[elecmon]

@beelko

Right 😭😭 like that's why the original 20~30 prices I was thinking of just felt too off. The other ones I would be making are Technically more complicated as I'd have to remove a lot of the original figures hair/fabric folds on the body to build up the new design.

Materials are whatever I have enough left over from this and other previous projects, it's super about the time it'll take me to get to the end look that's landing me on the 50/per

[dimiclaudeblaigan]

fe heroes stop giving us catria alts and give us characters we don't actually have multiple of challenge

oh well at least there are as many claudes as dimitris again so i can marry my last dimitri to him (also the only reason i accept the stupid amount of claude and dimitri alts is because i'm too busy shipping them to care abt anything. realitsically they should not get a pass and it does annoy ppl, i just am in shipville and it's not like we're getting janaff so i have very little else to distract me).

(also claude actually thematically fits so i have less complaints there. randoms get complaints tho)

[heeyspacecadet]

Starting my day off at 5.30 am sharp dealing w cat piss and cleaning up the whole cooker- I was like might mop the house as well and at around 6.40 I was done I could feel the humidity begin to settle in and stick to my skin, early signs of sweating… lol gonna have breakfast then return to sleep now

[onceuponapiece]

ooohhh it was zoro who first said nami should be navigator! that's fun! granted, luffy wasn't here to hear about it since he got early worm'd by a bird, but still! i like how proactive zoro is about scouting possible crew at the start of the journey lmao its cute

[chisungie]

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