#not even putting it into the game's main tag

[yyaktayak]

Chapter 4📌

tags: @uceyliyahh @charmed-dreamssss

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uceyjucey has posted a story !

*Kimaya's POV*

I scrolled through my phone absentmindedly, my fingers stopping on Jey's latest post. My heart did a weird skip as I stared at the photo he'd uploaded: me, with my head resting on his shoulder, smiling in a way I didn't even know I was capable of doing when I was around him. His arm was wrapped around me, like he was already staking his claim.

I couldn't help it—my stomach did a little flip.

It wasn't just the photo. It was the *caption*—or rather, the lack of one. Jey didn't need to say anything. The silence spoke volumes. He'd just made me the subject of his story, and in doing so, I knew exactly what that meant.

The whole groupchat had been buzzing since he'd posted it, but I hadn't dared check it yet. I knew I'd be mortified. I could already feel the hot rush of embarrassment creeping up my neck.

I quickly shot a text to Kaveri.

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ra💕: Girl, Jey just posted me. On his main. No caption. Just me. What am I supposed to do with this??

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I watched the three little bubbles appear and disappear as Kaveri typed, probably trying to form a response that wouldn't give away just how much she was freaking out, too.

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kaveri💛: Girl, you really gonna act like you didn't see this coming? He's been onto you since, like, forever.😩

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I groaned, dropping my face into my hands. Of course she was right. I knew it, too. But seeing it *there*, on his story for everyone to see? It felt like stepping off a cliff and realizing there was no net below.

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ra💕: This is insane. Why didn't he warn me? What am I supposed to do now?

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A minute passed before her reply popped up, almost like she was waiting for the right moment to hit me with the truth.

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kaveri💛: Girl, you know you're not fooling anyone. He's already made it clear he's into you. You're on lockdown now.😉

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I blinked at the message, rereading it twice to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. *On lockdown*? That was one way to put it. My heart skipped a beat.

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ra💕: Lockdown?! What do you mean by that?

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The three dots popped up again. I could almost hear Kaveri's dramatic sigh through my phone.

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kaveri💛: Stop pretending like you're not already all in. You're his, Ra. He's not playing, and it's obvious.😛

--

I stared at the screen, feeling that familiar nervousness bubbling up. Was she right? Was I really all in, or was I just pretending to be? I could feel my emotions doing that crazy back-and-forth dance again—one minute I was convinced I didn't want to be tied down, the next I was thinking about how Jey made me feel, how I wanted to be with him in a way I couldn't really put into words.

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ra💕: But what if he's just... messing with me?

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Kaveri's response came almost immediately.

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kaveri💛: Girl, please. He posted you for a reason. He's not gonna do that if he's just playing around. He wants you, and it's clear he's not hiding it anymore.

---

I let her words sink in for a moment. Was Jey really that serious? When I thought about it—about how he'd been with me since day one, how he'd always found ways to make me feel special, even when I wasn't sure I deserved it—I started to believe her. Jey wasn't playing games with me. He never had been.

But then the text came through again. This time from Jey himself.

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My🩵: I'm putting you on Code Arrest. You're mine until I get back from tour, and I'm not letting you forget that mama.

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My stomach flipped, my heartbeat picking up as I read his words. It wasn't just a post on his story anymore—Jey had taken things to a whole new level.

I didn't even know how to respond. My hands were shaking a little as I typed back, trying to play it cool, but I knew I couldn't hide my feelings.

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MyRa💕: You're ridiculous.😳

---

I set my phone down, pacing around the living room, trying to figure out how to handle the mix of excitement and dread swirling inside me. Jey had just made it official. *Code Arrest.* I was his—no more playing around. But what did that mean for me?

My phone buzzed again, this time with a notification from the groupchat.

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joe 🩶: Jey really posted Kimaya? This is a whole new level.

cody 🩶: Bro, we've been waiting for this. Now the whole world knows you're wrapped up in her. Are you ready for that?

---

I could feel my face turning red. I didn't even have to check my messages to know the boys were all in their feelings, too. They were waiting for me to do something, but what was I supposed to do?

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Twin🩸🤍: Yo, Twin putting her on lockdown for real?

---

I read through the comments, smiling despite myself. I wasn't ready for this attention, but at the same time, it felt like the first time I wasn't hiding anymore. The first time I wasn't pretending that this thing with Jey wasn't real.

I picked my phone back up and quickly typed to Kaveri.

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ra💕: So, what now?

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Her reply came almost instantly.

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kaveri💛: You're gonna accept the fact that you're his and stop fighting it, sis.

---

I leaned back on the couch, staring at the screen for a long time, letting Kaveri's words sink in. I wasn't ready to admit how much I wanted this. But maybe, just maybe, I didn't have to be ready.

I was already in. There was no turning back now.

---

*Jey's POV (Later that Night)*

I was sitting on the edge of the bed, my bags half-packed, but my mind was on one thing—Kimaya. I couldn't stop thinking about her, couldn't stop worrying about how she was handling everything. I knew it was a lot to drop on her all at once.

I wanted her to know how serious I was. I didn't want to hide behind jokes anymore. Not with her.

I sent her one last message before I left.

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My 🩵: You're gonna be okay, right? Just know, you're mine. Don't let anyone else tell you different.

---

Her reply came almost immediately.

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MyRa 💕: I'll miss you.

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I smiled to myself, feeling that familiar rush of warmth in my chest. It wasn't just the words. It was the fact that she was starting to believe it, too.

I wasn't going anywhere. And neither was she.

---

A/N: Things are heating up between Kimaya and Jey! Can't wait to see how they handle the pressure of being so public. What do you think about Jey stepping up so bold with his feelings? Let me know your thoughts below!

[haedia]

I was gonna leave this in the tags but it was going to be too long for that, so here we go on a reblog.

*checks the tags as they were going to be*

Ah, okay. Yes! To start, your post is a great assessment of the ecology of Thedas! The griffons will definitely help balance things going forward.

They have the most anathema for beings twisted or made wrong by magic but I could see griffons getting annoyed by dragons settling in and being gluttonous when they shouldn't (plus the Taash and Bellara dialog during the Fangscorcher quest may be planting a lore seed that at least some dragons may be attracted to or have some effect on wild magic in an area, which by extension would make griffons more keen to keep an eye on them)

And I agree with you that there has to be more across the ocean.

I just don't think the writers would let the only griffons in the world become horribly inbred in the next generation after they'd returned from extinction. They invested enough resources of studio time and money to put out a book about their rediscovery and the history of how they actually went extinct. There's no way they just let that clutch of feathery children grow up and commit such a genetic sin. I shudder at the thought for many reasons but the genetic bottleneck that would create really gets to me.

Thankfully, the griffons are still kids and have several years left before they're grown. So hopefully the next game (and I'm refusing to give into doomerism about that right now, thank you) will be set at a time when they're not yet horned up for their siblings and we get to find other griffons across the ocean for them to become smitten with in time.

But, even if they are adults next time we see them, it's been established that the griffons are very smart. Hopefully that means they'll know it's Not A Good Idea to look at their siblings that way and one of the main quests will be to investigate rumors of other griffons or something, after we're on those distant shores.

(An aside here, but how much you wanna bet that the next game has us, with the help of Bellara, use the Vi'Revas to connect to a very far flung eluvian to make contact with that other continent, thus bypassing the whole "leaving by boat is a death sentence in one form or another" thing?)

I wonder if the griffons returning signifies the beginning of the end of the Dragon Age.

This largely speculative on my part so bear with me. Thanks to @racoonmaster88 and @uchidachi for helping me coalesce this thought.

So one thing about the griffons is they seem to have a mongoose to cobra relationship with the dragons. Which means the dragons as they currently are have been unchecked. Even when the griffons were alive they were tapped to serve the Grey Wardens, probably dying in far greater numbers than they ever would have otherwise. So when dragons returned to Thedas, their natural competition was gone.

Thedas’ ecology is wildly out of whack. Dragons are a super apex predator. They are undoubtedly consuming far more food than can be reasonable for sustainability. Between the dragons and the darkspawn, the biodiversity of the continent has to be suffering.

I also just don’t believe Assan and his siblings are the only griffons out there. I’ve talked before about how the devs were purposely ducking the question during the AMA. My other piece of evidence here is the Qunari are not from Thedas which means there has to be more dragons across the sea (going off the theory the Qunari have dragon blood in their origin story) which very likely means there’s more griffons if my theory holds water.

[i-can-even-burn-salad]

Author Ask Tag

What is the main lesson of your story? Why did you choose it?

Even if I had a lesson in mind, and I'm not saying I had, I would probably bite my tongue off before stating it on this beautiful website. Also, the people who actually read my stuff are not the ones who would need said hypothetical lesson. But mainly, I don't choose the story, the story chooses me.

What did you use as inspiration for your worldbuilding?

All my stories are set in the same world, because a) I dislike worldbuilding so I'm only doing that once and b) I like having little cameos of other characters. Said world was hugely inspired by video games, especially guild wars 2. Some things fit video games more than novels - somehow carrying too many coins than reasonably possible, bandits as soon as you leave a town, a made-up reason for a common language, and a continent that's honestly way too small, to name a few.

What is your MC trying to achieve, and what are you, the writer, trying to achieve with them? Do you want to inspire others, teach forgiveness, or help the reader grow as a person?

Well, my MC(s) just want to live a normal, peaceful life, despite all the horrors I chuck at them, and I want to cry a bit about said horrors and then watch them achieve their dreams. The thing I want most is for someone who usually doesn't see some aspects of themselves in fiction to recognize themselves, and for someone who feels as lonely and out of place as I do to find a bit of comfort.

How many chapters is your story going to have?

All of our Lives has 32 chapters, one of which is the prologue. I do not expect this to change.

Is it fanfiction or original content? Where do you plan to post it?

It's original content, and I will put it as ebook and pdf on my website, elli-scribbles.net. I used to post on Tumblr, but I am not happy with the loss of control that came with the new post editor, and there is some content I am most definitely not comfortable posting on any place I do not have full control over.

When did you start writing?

I started this draft at the beginning of May 2024, and I finished it just over 6 months later in the middle of November 2024. Taking my time with this one and aiming to have it done for release in May. I'm not gonna add yet another 'oh, always!!' here, because I can't remember shit, hence project specific, though I could pinpoint a "new start" in September 2021 when I started writing in English.

Do you have any words of encouragement for fellow writers of writeblr? What other writers do you follow?

If I am fully honest, I am not particularly encouraged myself. I haven't been in a good place in months, at any given moment I am five seconds away from bursting into tears, and I feel like one big failure. So uh: The internet is a scary place. Find a friend who matches your freak, stick them in your pocket, and don't ever let them go. Write for yourself only got me so far, I needed someone to scream with me.

Not tagging you to do this, just tagging you because I love you @starlit-hopes-and-dreams @pleasestaywithmedarling @alittlewhump @sarandipitywrites @little-peril-stories @honeycollectswhump @writingphoenix

You should also look at @leahnardo-da-veggie @whumpyreader @thoughtsonhurtandcomfort @befuddled-calico-whump @whump-me @lovelizards whose stuff I enjoyed recently and also ofc @the-inkwell-variable who mentioned me and @winterandwords whose open tag I stole :)

[sirsagrell]

This is probably a very subjective and very personal gripe.

I'm trying to do a second playthrough, for reasons.

And Veilguard's incessant motivational hand-holding of "You're doing great Rook, you got a great team Rook, small steps, Rook, do your best, Rook, it'll be enough", and how then, of course, doing your best really is enough?

That feels like being slapped in the face, somehow.

The highest level of worry I can feel these people experience is, idk, doctoral thesis defense level of worry. Maybe doctoral thesis defense while dealing with a personal tragedy at the same time. They act like they are going through a kind of trial, where it's difficult, but if you do everything right, you're expected to succeed.

They are supposedly opposing an overwhelming force, and the whole way through they are acting like they know they will succeed if they do everything right.

I don't know. I come from a part of the world where so many people did their best so much, so many fought and sacrificed, and died. And it wasn't. It wasn't enough. There was an overwhelming force and there wasn't some right way to do everything and succeed against it. Spoiler warning, there never is, actually, against an overwhelming force. And you have to live knowing that and do your best anyway.

Veilguard knows shit all about resilience and being stubbornly positive in the face of overwhelming odds, is what I'm saying. That's not what that feels like.

It's not about peddling false promises that you can win if you just do everything right.

And you might say, isn't this a video game you can beat and get your good ending? Isn't that promise inherent in the medium?

To which I say, first of all, no, it's not actually inherent, but also video games can convey that experience of opposing an overwhelming force truthfully despite that.

This one did not.

[egophiliac]

LEON

LEON YOUR EYEBALLS

[svtskneecaps]

i also just want to point out the qsmp members' commitment to like never letting the inactive members die. like dantdm logged on twice and is canonically dead and everyone continues to blame mysterious happenstance on him. spreen is canonically dead and yet people are still like namedropping him even tho the house façade he built has been demolished and also probably consumed by a mountain. they meme on kameto who's barely been on except that time he was a fed spy that was iconic as hell. they just immortalize their members and they're always so happy to see old faces come back and it lowkey makes me emotional lmfaoo like missa barely logged on for a while but goddamn nobody forgot his name bc philza can't go one day without mentioning him and mariana barely logs on but every time fit saw the homeless mariana in roier's city no matter what he'd stop dead and tell it "come home" and when slime came back to the server for elections after having logged off for the last like two months everyone was still excited to meet him bc the others had kept his memories on the server fresh and alive, maxo died canonically in the nuke and pierre pasted his face all over the server, luzu vanished for months and we never forgot him either thanks to the computers and foolish's wack ass family tree. like when purgatory teams were chosen and team red constantly joked about how it would be so over for the other teams once germán logged on despite the fact that germán had only ever logged on ONCE, the way they cheered when they snatched rubius in the split of green despite the fact that rubius hadn't logged on more than twice since march. they just keep the names alive all the time and it's like

it just makes me really happy to see. like it makes me really happy. like the admin team and the members alike are like 'no way in HELL are we letting your memory go' like damn once ur on isla quesadilla you really are stuck as an islander forever :D

[tapestryundone]

i have a crossover that appeals to me and me ALONE. have art of it that lacks any context because i just made art of it and left it at that and didnt feel like adding dialogue to almost any of it

elaboration under the cut

first img is an approximation at the long quiets mind :] its empty but i think there WOULD be more layers if you dug around. maybe if you walked further into it. but thats the main area! shards of glass bc of that one spectre line hehe. the center area is wood panelled but the resolution in the img makes it a tad hard to see at the size the img is.

in the main area the voices come up to the center area as needed! or just to talk. i think in the event that anyone ever entered tlqs mind they would become EXTREMELY talkative bc itll be their first time really being Perceived without unpleasant circumstances which is VERY exciting for them

most things in tlqs mind would be verrrry very similar to the spaces in between, mostly because thats the truest location hes ever truly known. i have been thinking about different layers that could contain the cabin, though. because the woods and the cabin were both very important locations for him, even if they sucked Majorly

second img is the inner version of tlq :D which like. technically theyre all parts of tlq. but also they can function as separate entities from tlq so i dont think itd be that out there that tlq exists somewhat separately from them all in his own mind. gotta think on some of the logistics more though

4, 5, and 6 are just interactions cus i think its fun. i think its ill advised for visitors to leave that little center area. going past it is putting oneself at risk to become lost in the unending walls of the (mental) long quiet. i dont imagine the voices knew that before so much as it is instinct. the "real" location wasnt something mortals were ever meant to really Be In, so it carries over and makes leaving the center instinctively feel like a very bad idea to just Let Someone Do That

the voice in 4 is hero and the voice in 5 is contrarian

last two are the most stand alone and self explanatory. second to last is the opportunist and paranoid, and last is quiet and opportunist :]

[eyepatchdate]

okay... was flipping through my copy of the smtiv strategy book. i FORGOT they tell you a NAME for the hill Issachar and Flynn are on at the beginning of the game. 'Yascony Hill'

every place in Mikado is a badly anglicized place in Japan. Some of them are obvious (Shene Duque) and others less clear. I'm actually working on making a list of all places referenced and making a post with pictures of all of them when I'm done with the game.

but like. i do NOT know what 'Yascony Hill' is referencing i am LOSING it right now. what is that anglicized from. oh my god.

[oldmanyaoi-jpeg]

i haven't played this game, don't plan to, and am not part of the fandom, but from the secondhand fandom poisoning i'm getting it just seems like everyone is doing this i guess

[thegreatyin]

How did you manage to handle not one, but FOUR separate accounts in fl? I recently made the account for my HD little guy but having to do the tutorial again just seems miserable

there's... weirdly several answers to that question, actually??

a HUGE part of it is due to the way FL is structured. the 10-minute action timer is a core part of the game on a fundamental level, and the fact that i can very easily run out of stuff to do on one character and thus have an excuse to quickly and easily swap to another is just... convenient? satisfying? i'm not entirely sure how to explain it. the fact that i can make progress even while i am fundamentally simultaneously Not Making Progress is like pure dopamine for my freak insane awful little brain. there's just something really pleasing about spending all of my actions pursuing The Goal Of The Day™ on one account before casually swapping to another and doing the same without feeling like i'm wasting time or acting to the first account's explicit detriment. the downtime helps! the recharge time helps! the structure really really works!!

i'm technically only actively playing three, maybe two accounts minimum. the only reason the fourth (the one that'll be my future BaL playthrough) currently exists at all is so i can get his earlygame completely out of the way now and not have to waste time running through it all later, when what i actually want to do is play the ambition i've made myself wait a full year to play. and also getting free goodies as seasonal stuff happens,, something something surprise tools to help us later. the only two accounts i'd say i'm really "actively playing" at the moment are caeru and lark- and of the two, lark takes the most priority, since his ambition is the one i'm currently pursuing in earnest. for a couple months now- despite being My Main FL Character- the scoundrel has actually been pretty inactive on a gameplay front outside of the occasional progression in TLC and discordance content. purely by virtue of having Very little left to do outside of Very long-term grinds and vanities. they're in their "now what?" "now you can start playing the game" era. they've graduated to previous protagonist background cameo in a sequel anime series. they're like the yin FLPC equivalent of red at the top of mount silver. they're Literally just vibing rn. i only keep posting about them regardless because i'm insane and i will never ever ever ever ever let that bat go. but yeah, big TLDR, outside of doing the bare minimum to keep making waves/notability up every week, i'm not actually spending that much time on accounts i'm not currently actively interested in playing. and that accounts for way more gaming spoons than you might think.

i have a virtually lifelong history of playing MMOs, especially and specifically world of warcraft. i was born in the endless grind for useless video game pixel vanities and/or bragging rights. molded by it. you all have merely adapted to doing the same piece of content a pointlessly excessive amount of times for literally no reason besides whimsy and folly. me? i've done my time. i've served my sentence. i've spent weeks doing the original burning crusade netherwing dailies. i've devoted days to running praetorium over and over and over again, back-to-back, nonstop, long before square enix cut it in half and made it NOT take at minimum an hour and a half per run. i've perfected my silverwastes + auric basin goldfarming strategies. i've (almost) crafted dragonwrath tarecgosa's rest. i've killed the sha of anger so many times its dying scream of agony is embedded into the very fabric of my being. ""only"" doing making your name content four times over? that is nothing to me. it means nothing to me. it is so infinitesimal i can do the persuasive seduction quests in my sleep. it's not a matter of handling misery, or having the capacity, or even sighing as i remember the brass embassy raid segment of the watchful questline seriously i don't know why i keep forgetting that exists or what even is my problem with it i just am so consistently mildly inconvenienced by it and its highly specific resource requirements and it is the worst thing ever. maybe i'm just so used to the scoundrel's near-infinite money and troves of disposable items that i've completely forgotten what being poor is like. despite having done that step 3 fucking times now. ahem. anyway. i have transcended the feeble mortal bindings of my resistant-to-grinding flesh and ascended to a higher plane of enlightenment, they may call me insane but they will be the ones left laughing when they see what that "insanity" has wrought, i've usurped them, i've usurped them all-

hacks and coughs and awkwardly clears my throat. i mean. uh. um. Ahem.

the empress' court artistry + tales of the university nerfs helped too.

[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.

[vee-lociraptor]

so mad that im being this unwell about the malevolent cowboy au

[corpocyborg]

(⊙ˍ⊙)

[inevitablestars]

Fic authors self rec!

thank you sm for the tag @pretentiouswreckingball

When you get tagged, post your favorite five fics that you’ve written, then pass on to at least five other writers. Spread the self-love

(summaries below, me rambling in the tags)

bite the hand | wolfstar, nonbinary sirius, exes to lovers | 120k

It’s them and Remus, it’s always going to be them and Remus. Nothing can break that. Except for themselves. Which evidently they are very good at doing… So hope is what they cling to. More than love, more than history, more than anything. - or - Sirius and Remus have gotten into a cycle of breaking up and making up, except this time is going to be different.

i regret you all the time | jegulus, death eater james | 80k

What happens when James falls for Regulus and his friends lose their trust in him?

take care of you and yours | jegulus, wolfstar, dorlily, sirius centric | currently 100k soon to be 200k

Sirius plans a fun summer at the lake with all of their friends, but it doesn't go quite to plan. Friends become more, hatred becomes love, and people unravel until there is nothing left.

the stars that bind us | jegulus, wolfstar, black family centric | currently 99k dont ask how long it will be

Regulus is an author of four, soon to be five, books all written under a pen name. They tell the stories of each of his cousins, brother, and himself, and how they left home and each other. He has done his best to keep them from finding out about his books, but what happens when they do? How do the five of them fit back together after so many years?

you had to go (i know, i know, i know) | black brothers | 3.6k

He saw it coming. At least there’s that, right? At least Sirius told him before he left. At least Regulus got to say goodbye to his brother.

no pressure tagging: @calamitoustide @itsjaywalkers @magswrite @starsworth @aurorboros @galaxostars @sugarsnappeases @quillkiller <333333

[speci-society]

I got new glasses a couple weeks ago :) disregard the rest of the pic this is just how my evening's been going. This art is purely to show off my new glasses

[scopophobia-polaris]

first female loz director and the gerudo seem to be written fine enough? wow... there ain't no way I thought we were in the worst timeline after totk

Yeah got through the main quest with the gerudo, it wasn't painful! It wasn't even bad! Still got them outfits but for the most part it was like oh cool!

I would say a lot of that oh cool is from the fact they didn't do a lot to even fuck it up to begin with, I'm gonna be real with yall this game is NOT worth $60USD

Edit: lemme say one thing, you know when people were being like damn totk story wasn't dark or mature at all why was this compared to Majora's mask again? And then all the zeldatwt people came out and said zelda is just a kid series domt expect good writing uH

This one feels like a kid's game. That ain't to say it's terrible I would say, hell I'm not far in it if I get something crazy that's like OH FUCK I'll reblog this post and say something but uh.....game for babies I'm gonna be shocked if anyone struggles with any puzzles cuz you CAN CHEESE THEM EASY ITS 🫢🤭

EDIT EDIT: I SWEAR IM NOT EVEN TRYING TO BE A DOWNER..... @ezlo-x HAS BEEN THERE THE WHOLE TIME IVE BEEN PLAYING....THEY KNOW I HAVENT BEEN A PARTY POOPER.....