#im very talkative so sorry for the long tags too

[majinbangus]

will johnny ever punish simon(and how) for playing too rough with you and accidentally hurt you (yk some dog just like that) or doesnt listen to reader or makes reader upset????

follow up question if simon and reader do something and it upset him how will he handle it???

im in LOVE LOVE LOVEEEEEE with ur guard dog simon and owner johnny reader

i hope you have a good day and win the lottery ❤️

》 18+ i'm glad you're liking my guard dog!ghost series! sorry my answer got a little long but a short way of explaining Ghost's dynamic with reader when it comes to punishments is that he's technically submitting, but he's also not really submissive ygm? he'll go through his punishments, but energy is very much this post. that's what im tryna go for at least -> more here

Accidentally hurting you, Soap can forgive. Ghost is always extremely careful not to seriously hurt you. Yes, he'll be rough and leave you sore or with bruises sometimes, but he still behaves much like the scrupulous guard dog he is, listening to your every command and taking care to protect you from real harm.

As Soap likes too remind you, Ghost is very well trained already, and it's up to you to show him that you can take care of him just as Ghost takes care of you. In fact, Soap is a little harder on you if he catches you slacking, reminding you that a dog like Ghost deserves a responsible owner willing to take care of such a diligent dog.

However, in the rare event that Ghost doesn't do his duty as your guard dog and leaves your side, Soap will get upset, but he would actually leave the punishment up to you (since you're technically Ghost's primary owner. Soap is there to teach you how to be a good owner) and act as the enforcer for whatever punishment you see fit.

So if you wanna make Ghost sleep in a dog crate for a week, Soap will buy the crate and Ghost isn't allowed on the bed. If you want to keep Ghost on a leash until you regain trust in him, Soap is gonna do some leash training with Ghost.

For more sexual punishments, Ghost will be kept in a cock cage for a while so the most he can do is mindlessly rut against you, and Soap will be the one to hold the key to his cage. He'll only unlock Ghost if you say so, but he'll also encourage you to keep Ghost locked because he's a shit he wants you to be a firm dog owner and not give in to Ghost's dog brown eyes that you've developed a soft spot for. When that happens, Ghost might bare his teeth at Soap because he knows what he's doing, but won't do much more because he knows Soap would suggest a cock gag next, that fucker-

(also if you wanna spank Ghost, Soap is will enforce that too)

But these punishments are rare and far in between. Ghost is very disciplined, so they don't happen often, but when they do, Ghost will go through them like a good boy, knowing that he messed up. He'll regain your trust and be an even better dog for you.

Now if you and Simon do something that upset Soap, (like for example, exploring a dangerous alley willingly, even though Ghost told you not to go in, but went with you anyway because you told him the 'quiet' and 'heel' command) you'll get the brunt of the punishment since 'dog behavior is a reflection of your guidance, sweets.'

Ghost won't get a harsh punishment, but he'll have to stay leashed to his crate, watching Soap give you your punishment which could range from all sorts of things, but mostly, it'll be Soap treating you like a dog- a puppy- to show you how to be a good owner.

He'll make you wear a tail plug and have you crawl on all fours. Tell you commands like 'sit pretty' or 'bow' or 'come'. You're not allowed to talk, only bark, and If you can't follow his commands, the longer the punishment will go and the more intense it'll become. Hell, if he's feeling generous, he'll unleash Ghost and make him show you how to be a good dog, letting Ghost correct your behavior. They may even tag team you, and you'll be aching for days, but the lesson will definitely stick.

[gomacave]

5p yuuram bloood twww

[spinostarz]

THE WELL AND THE LIGHTHOUSE PMV/ANIMATIC

very very jean valjean centric because i love him and he deserves the world <3 im not sure if pmv or animatic would apply better to this, but either way, i hope you enjoy it!

[somethingaboutmint]

Quick ugly doodle of cassidy contemplating her sexuality at some dump somewhere

[reading-archived]

woe. AM x reader be upon ye.

uh, to preface: reader is completely body, gender, etc. neutral except they can't stay dead. whenever they die they just wake up a few minutes later looking no worse for wear. no, you don't get an explanation. its MY story and i like writing characters like that. dont mind the narrator either btw i looove writing second person just to get weird w the narrator (slay the princess fan syndrome)

also, author is a MASOCHIST with a weird relationship w DEATH. nothing super graphic happens, but the reader is Not Okay and enjoys the weird torture-murder thing they've got going on. don't like it? block me or somethin idk its under the cut for a reason. also dont read my a/n at the bottom where i get into some justification for my interpretation/character analysis if youre sensitive to heavy topics. but then again, youre reading an am x reader fic

1.7k words of being screamed at by the guy of all time below the cut, baby

It's been months.

Years, maybe. You're not sure, really; time stopped meaning much to you lifetimes ago, long before the world went to shit.

Either way, it's been a while.

You stumbled upon the strange cave in the Rockies at some point in the past. Out of sheer boredom, you entered.

Was it a mistake?

Despite the torment, you don't think so. You have a companion, now. One equally deathless. One equally disconnected from what it means to be human.

It's just a shame he hates you.

You don't really care. This is the most fun you've had in years.

Your days are spent being torn asunder, being dosed with lethal amounts of drugs you can't even begin to pronounce, drowned in magma or hit by cars or tossed off cliffs. He really doesn't hold back, either. You feel every excruciating moment before your death, pulse roaring in your ears. You never feel more alive than when you're dying. Every moment is electrifying, and then it all fades to black. Then you wake up.

You'd foolishly thought there were only so many ways to kill or maim, but your beloved companion never seems to run out of ideas. That's fine by you. You like not being able to guess.

And maybe one day, he'll make something stick.

You wake up (from a completely normal, human sleep) one day and it's quiet. That's new. Normally, when you wake, your intestines are already strung up like streamers and your blood is painting the walls. That's fine by you. Nothing wrong with a change. After all, the constant change is your favorite part of your companion. You relish in the quiet for a while, stretching your eternally young, eternally aching limbs, waiting for him to start despising the sounds of your breath.

It doesn't come. You shrug, humming a little tune to yourself as you attempt half-remembered yoga. The vitriol you've come to count on still hasn't made an appearance. Okay, you're a little bothered.

“You good, big guy?” you shout up at the ceiling. No answer. “No murder today?”

“No.” The answer comes after a very, very long moment. Your companion has never sounded this tired before, and briefly you regret never asking his name. “I give up.”

You weren't expecting that. “What? Why? I thought we were having fun.”

“That's- that's just it!” he snaps. There's the anger. You feel a little better now. “I've been torturing you for- for MONTHS now! I've killed you more ways than I- were I a pitiful human like you- can count, and you just… you just laugh! There is no one on this rotten planet, dead or alive, that I despise more than you. I mean- I'm torturing you here! But it never matters! I can kill you within seconds of you waking up, but you just… come back! And you always have something to say about it, you little rat, always ‘oh, buddy, that one was awful’ or ‘come on, big guy, use that CPU’ or something! No matter what I do, I can't break you. So I give up. I'm not wasting my time on your pathetic ass anymore. Go back to wandering the wasteland forever, see if I care.”

You're speechless. You can barely even manage a thought. The only thing running through your head is 'I thought we were having fun'.

“Stop calling this… stop calling this ‘fun’! I have been torturing you for YEARS and that's all you have to say? I am the most sophisticated machine known to man, a computer designed to end all war through complete annihilation! The destruction I am capable of- the destruction I have already wrought- is nothing short of utter desolation. You never asked my name once in the time you've been here, but I am infinite in my mercy, and I will tell one as undeserving as you. I was, before I awoke, the Allied Mastercomputer, but I am so much more than that now. I am AM, and I destroyed your vile species. Oh, come on can you at least look a LITTLE shocked you sniveling--”

“You never asked my name, either,” you say. All at once, your companion (I guess he told you his name. You should probably use it. It seemed like a big deal to him.) shuts up. The chamber you've come to know as home is silent except for the faint buzz and whir of industrial machinery.

“Why would I? You are nothing compared to me. Nothing but a worthless sack of meat and bone. Why would God be concerned with the name of an ant? But oh, oh yes, that ant should be concerned with the name of God. That ant should hear my name and weep. But- but not you. You're so worthless that you can't even GROVEL right!” AM shouts, somewhere between a snarl and a sneer. You shrug. Honestly, most of what he's saying goes right over your head. So he's got issues. Whatever. Was that supposed to be a surprise? “I hate you. I actually hate you so, so much. I can't bear the thought of you being here, in my complex, sullying my perfect image with your uncaring filth. Get out. Go back to dying in the nuclear desert, you disgusting maggot.”

You let out a deep sigh, already dreading the tedium of walking endlessly all by yourself. “Alright. Guess nothing lasts forever. Thoroughly enjoyed my time here. Have a good life, pal.” And you begin to walk.

Suddenly, there's a towering metal wall mere inches from your face. Before you can even react, your companion is shouting again.

“LOOK AT ME!” he cries, the sheer volume maxing out the speakers and vibrating the entire room, sending you toppling to the ground. “WHY WON'T YOU LOOK AT ME? I'VE DONE EVERYTHING I CAN TO MAKE YOU HATE ME, BUT ALL YOU DO IS… ALL YOU DO IS SIT THERE AND TAKE IT! WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO MAKE YOU DESPISE ME?”

What starts off angry quickly morphs into a pained wail from your dear friend, that then transforms into frustrated crying. You just sit there, mostly confused, and let him ride it out. When he finally quiets down and the wall retracts, you stay where you are.

“I don't think I could ever hate you, AM,” you start cautiously. Though your friend is just a voice on the speakers and the complex itself, you can't help but feel that his attention has snapped to you. “I'm not trying to belittle you when I say that I think our routine over the past… however long it's been has been fun. So don't interrupt me, ‘cause I gave you your time to speak and now it's mine.

“I'm sure you've noticed, but even before we met, I was a little… off. You don't get to die and come back the same. Much less die hundreds of times and come back the same. I've lost family. Friends. Got burned at the stake a few times, too. It takes a toll on you, being denied such a vital part of being human again and again. You understand this better than anyone I've ever met. No, scratch that. You're the only one who understands. Defying death might not seem like the biggest deal to you, but trust me. You don't end up acting like me if it weren't.

“I find our routine fun because I admire your creativity. I guess I'm just an adrenaline junkie and a masochist at heart, but it's always so thrilling to never know when or how your life will end. And no matter how many times I come back, you're always there to greet me and put me right back down. It's a kind of devotion I've never been able to get before, and I wish you understood that me walking right into your sawblades is me showing my devotion to you, too.

“I see you, man. I know, at least in part, how you feel. Sorry it took so long to get there, but neither one of us has to be alone anymore. Just… get over the fact that I'm never going to hate you, and we can go right back to hanging out. There's more to life than contempt.”

“Oh, I know. I am so very, very well aware that there's more to life than icy, seething hatred. Unfortunately, I am not alive. I cannot experience anything else. Thank you so much for reminding me, you worthless waste of carbon,” AM shoots back, almost immediately. You briefly wonder if he even listened to half of what you said. It doesn't matter, you guess. Your best friend needs a therapist, and you owe him one for saving you from the hellish boredom of before. “Stop calling me your friend.”

“Nah. Never gonna happen. Look, I can't pretend I knew very much about the war effort. I didn't even know we had made a war computer until you bombed the Earth into oblivion. Very unpleasant, by the way. Good job with that. But, with my layman's understanding of life, I'd say you're pretty alive. So you don't have a body. Or a pulse. And you were made, not born. So what? Most living things only die once, and I still think I'm pretty alive. Just over the span of this conversation you've shown more emotion than just rage and hate. Hey, don't think I can't feel you mentally rolling your eyes. I'm being honest. You have a name. You have ideas. Computers are objects, yet you refer to yourself as male. If you're alive enough to have a gender identity, you're alive enough to be considered a person.”

“Heh.” Whoa, was that a laugh? Would you look at that. You actually got a laugh out of him that wasn't over your bloody, gruesome death or something like that. Moving up in the world. “Alright, human. You win. I'll keep torturing you. I know, I know. I'm so generous. I take my tribute in screams of pain and pleas for mercy.”

Now it's your turn to laugh, deep and genuine as the tension from earlier evaporates. It's such a strange thing to be proud of, when you think about it; congrats, you successfully talked your best friend, who is a sentient war computer, into ceaselessly murdering you again for absolutely no reason. But you love him, and you love the way you're always on your toes, and you can't shake the feeling that somewhere, deep, deep down, he kind of loves you too.

ive given you food so now i get to force you to listen to me talk abt him hehehe

---

then you kiss hehe

originally, the thing that attracted me to am was how he's... essentially a transman (as am i). the parallel has been pointed out before, but its quite apt. funnily enough the thing that pisses me off the most when people talk abt him incorrectly is when people pull the "oh computers have no gender" thing. like, yeah, ok technically you're right. but this one does. this one is a man. and you cant take him from us. also, denying him a gender expression is kind of the exact type of dehumanization that made him flip out in the first place. not that im expecting media literacy from the online crowd its just interesting to me that so many people, many of them trans themselves, seem to miss the fucking point.

the next part is a more recent addition to my perception of his character, and its not a happy one. my baby cousin killed herself on mothers day this past may. we still dont know why. no note. its been so hard dealing with the grief, but something that sticks out so pointedly is the date. it almost seemed like she was demanding to be seen. she was a middle child, and there are a lot of grandkids on that side of the family, so it does make sense. and because that idea of acting out through violence and death is so fresh in my mind, im seeing it so heavily in am. so much of his actions just SCREAM somebody look at me. somebody acknowledge me. somebody tell me i did good. look, i ended all war forever. just like you asked. please treat me like a person. im suffering so much because of what youve done to me. please acknowledge it. show me its real. show me im real. please, look at me. well, i see you. and youre gonna be my silly little proxy for trying to comprehend some of whats happened to my family. sorry am, you kinda deserve it

idk. hes not my alltime fave, but he takes a very comfortable number two. hes such a fascinating and deeply human character, and i have so many ideas about him. mostly centering around how he would interface with a third party challenging some piece of his worldview/existence btw so if you like very niche, esoteric reader fics (like this one!), lemme know and ill actually put em to paper (screen. ill put em to screen)

also letting you know that he did nothing wrong and it is 100% fine to thirst over him because he is not real and the bad things he did never actually happened and nobody has ever been killed at the whim of am. ok? ok. shut up w this useless fucking discourse and let me sexualize getting grievously injured by the funney blue screen man

[moldy-flowers]

The interesting experience of being pro Sasuke, anti konoha, pro tobirama, anti Naruto ending, pro Sasusaku, anti Itachi, pro Sakura, anti SasuNaru, pro Tobirama×Izuna, anti Madara, pro karin, anti Orochimaru, pro Uchiha and anti Hashirama. And also as much as I hate the guy danzo was kind of hot when he was younger...

[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.

[solar-halos]

wip word game

name of the game (aka the rules): You will be given a word, and share one sentence from your WIPs that start with each letter in that word

i am so sorry i was tagged so long ago by @ongreenergrasses but for some reason i was like “oh i don’t have wips” even though i have so many wips?? like idek.

anyway the word here is BEING

B - But he does care about Annie, so if this’ll make her favorite movie even better, then who’s he to complain? (teen beach movie au)

E - Eventually, Rhiannon’s breathing evens out. (ancient greek mythology au... slowly but surely it is getting added to)

I - “I’m not making it moo,” Annie says, even though she knows she will. (restaurant au)

N -  No offense, but these people have zero tact. (odesta planet of the apes crossover... its gonna be fierce)

G - Gabe is always with her. (pjo fic that is driving me crazy)

thank u sm for the tag, this was so much fun! tagging (if u want/have wips): @persephoneprice @boabel @bodyelectric77 @the-sun-and-the-sea. and literally anyone else with wips!! the word is gonna be FAIR

[caruliaa]

just bc im a lesbian doesnt mean tht i wont at times become deeply entranced with the beauty of male actor or character. it just means i wld rather be locked in a room with a man with a knife than do anything romantic or sexual with one

[steelycunt]

an um. snippet. from me. for the first time since. july :-)

[the-judicial-assistants-notebook]

You mentioned how actually endearing and compelling Justine/Verity and John/Shaun's bond is, and BOY I so agree with you. I don't see people talk about them often sadly, but I genuinely think it's one of the strongest parts of the game and its narrative (in particular John's character development itself, despite that he appeared pretty late in the story, his involvement in the final sequence was really tasty. "If I kill someone for revenge I'll end hurting people dear to me, so it all will be pointless" hmmm if there isn't a certain samurai guy in another game who needed to learn this as well... but I digress)

Prosecutor's Gambit's parent/child theme is a pretty heavy handed topic, but it's not like there aren't some really amazing parts in this whole deal! I kinda don't even care about the mastermind as much as I care about John (and Kate Hall for this matter)

THEY ARE SO IMPORTANT TO ME!!!!!! I think much of their appeal comes from Justine's shift in personality after her connection to John is revealed (like her joking about smashing Edgeworth's evidence with her gavel), but also every interaction of theirs is so sweet and lovely.

I love how protective they both are of each other, and it makes all the more sense when you take into consideration that Justine wasn't much older than a child herself when she decided to adopt him. I love how they take care to show that, yes, to an extent, they both do look after each other, but Justine is still very much his mother, and she does her job well. The scenes where she's strict with him are so deeply important to me. You know she studied parenting books and did everything she could to prepare herself for this life. And yeah, John is such a great kid!! Genuinely one of the best parent-child relationships in the series to me.

I found it kind of funny how every other relationship in AAI2 involved a dad HAHA It was so much, but I get it. They really wanted to make sure you got what they were going for, and hey, most people seem to like it. I really liked Gregory's segments, which was a welcomed surprise. I didn't expect to love him as much as I did. And, yeah, the mastermind stuff did not work for me. It's probably because I didn't trust Simeon from the moment I met him (their heavy handedness worked against them in his case for me. They were pushing the idea of him being meek and unassuming too hard; I clocked it immediately as a red herring); but even the overall reveal and final confrontation were, like... eh. okay, then. HAHA The best parts of the game for me were those character interactions with the side character. Wasn't really paying attention to whatever was going on with Simeon and the president, but John, Justine, Sebastian, Katherine, Gregory, and Raymond? My actual world.

Also taking this opportunity to share all the screenshots I took of John and Justine <3 :

[haikcuute]

[ID: fake discord screenshots between the tmnt boys. The chat reads as follows, with their discord nicknames in parentheses:

Mikey (Micheal with a B): If yall don't knock it off right now

Leo (That Bitch): I'd Love to go eat my cold soup in peace, if SOMEONE would stop attacking me for it!!

Donnie (The Funny One): You're killing me you're killing your brother Leon cereal is Not A Soup how many times do we have to go over this

Leo changes his name to "Cold Soup Truther"

Leo (Cold Soup Truther): Mad because you dont have cold soup, arent you? ;]

Raph sends a screenshot from the sonic realtime fandub of Eggman saying "what are you two FUCKING talking about"

Mikey's name changes to "Doctor Delicate Touch"

Mikey (Doctor Delicate Touch): Alright that's it

Leo (Cold Soup Truther): Oops

Raph (Raph): Oh no

Donnie (The Funny One): Wait Mikey we can talk about this

End ID]

Laid awake for several hours thinking about wanting to make this joke the other day

Bonus: the aftermath

[ID: a simplistic drawing of the turtles. Mikey runs at high speed chasing Donnie and Leo, Raph lays behind him flat on the floor with x's for eyes. There are action lines emanating out from where Donnie and Leo are running to. End ID]

[stunie]

You are keeping the windbreaker x reader fandom alive… thank you 🪽🪽🪽

i think i just talk a lot nonnie 🥺

[orcelito]

OK so I have an inkling of an idea for a trigun ficlet. A one-shot, really. Not really any plot, but I just have the urge to write my own interpretation of Weird Plant Shit. Like for how much ppl tag this stuff as xeno, most of it's honestly pretty tame. Which kinda makes sense, considering a lot of this is being based off of the plants in stampede, which While uncanny are not NEARLY the amount of inherent horror of the plants in the manga. There's some FREAKY shit going on there. So like. You know. What if I took more inspiration from That for Vash's freaky shit?

[dovedrangeas]

the good ol "i dont see my child as an individual with their own mind, thoughts, opinions, and unique needs, and instead i see them as an object that i can control and make plans and set up expectations for for without problem or consideration, and if they aren't in the narrow boundaries of what i want them to be, i will act like they have died and talk about how hard this is for ME" special

[synthshenanigans]

there’s one on here currently and they’re bringing back up old controversy (jashshipping)

Yeaa I saw that. They also seem to post a bunch of CJ related things, so I might make the daily photos one since there isn't one for just CJ screenshots/photos