#putting this in the main tag. its so stupid.....

[nevadakincentral]

Deimos board with computers and guns for anon.

...jk but hey if you are that anon who asked for this a bit ago which type are you talking about? stim or moodboard?

Reminder to specify your requests or we may end up with... this fucking thing. 👍

[moeblob]

As an attempt at a polite "going forward" comment...

I do not plan to draw for Three Houses or Hopes for a long while. I know a lot of my followers are from the past four years and I appreciate that you followed me at all! But if you are only interested in the art of those characters I wanted to be clear and say you can unfollow me at any point if what i draw no longer aligns with what you want to see.

I might draw for other FEs (like Heroes or 13/14/17) but I do not want to get involved with 3H any more. I do have other interests and across tumblr, twitter (now inactive), and sometimes on discord I've heard enough "I thought it was (FE3H character)".

This is not one person doing it and it is not simply one character being mistaken. I simply want to distance myself from 3H and have unfollowed a few people that reblog art of it because it just leaves a lingering bad taste in my mouth.

Thank you very much for your time and I hope you can find artists who can provide art for topics you like.

[many-gay-magpies]

seeing all these posts talking about payneland as if its some tragic unrequited love drives me insane ngl. or i guess not TRAGIC but the posts that are like "man edwin really got every boy except the one he wanted" HE ALREADY HAD HIM. HE ALREADY FUCKING HAD HIM ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?? MAYBE NOT ROMANTICALLY BUT GOD HE HAD HIM. AND HE STILL HAS HIM.

[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.

[absurdumsid]

yall im sobbing ?? a girl asked me out to prom but i alr asked my crush please what the fuck wha thwyagbdbfnd

[hexcia]

so like. cross right

[naggingatlas]

last post ill make abt this today but saw somebody rb my keeping the rent low image w the tag #real and i scroll down and the very. next two posts. are what i was. talking. about.

[itty-bitty-sunshine]

I know this is random but reading your blog and seeing your art made me so motivated I made my 1st animation ever (not counting pixel art ones), after not drawing digitally in months and it looks kinda basic and it isn't colored but I made it and I'm really happy with it so I guess what I'm trying to say is thank you for motivating me to make digital art again! I hope you have a wonderful day/night :)

MKJSJWJW HI!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TELLING ME THATS GREAT!!! Animatics need time and patience so the fact you went straight for it is so cool!!!! I bet it looks lovely!

Hope you have the greatest day/night too!

[sundial-bee-scribbles]

"my education is my highest priority" everything returns to vocaloid

[sunspinecity]

50$ to print 10 of the same skin has always been so insane to me. you're telling me it's 50$ to print....only 10.....of a single skin....and that's normal. And not only is that normal, that's what's required for a skin shop. where ppl may not even sign up for 10 runs. and then you're left in the shitter with at minimum 1-4 skins nobody wanted (not to mention if some people decide not to pay afterward) that you have to just pray someone finds & buys on the auction house. And it's 50$. Uhuh. And then that's just the artist's issue and fault and we're gonna blame them instead of the fact that a 10 print run costs as much as groceries.

[cringesnail]

I love Baghera but it's almost painful to watch her streams because a lot of her RP is a direct consequence of purgatory and idk with time I've become such a hater of purg 1. It just kinda left a sour taste in my mouth that's gotten worse with time

[spotsupstuff]

I love NAE and I know he is a bit (well, more than a bit) of an antagonistic cretin, but it feels like his anti-social personality might be a coping mechanism for personal issues and insecurities he is struggling with. I could be completely wrong and he's just simply a bad person, but I feel like it's more than that. Either way I think he needs a therapy animal.

hoyly hell you've just given him characterization shots in so many directions that i don't know where to look first GJDSKLMCL

he's not exactly antisocial or anythin! antagonistic cretin he is, but that's just how he rolls, lil bit of a douche- have you seen that one vid with a guy walking his Emu hold on here- he embodies this in most situations

on one hand NAE is a lil shithead but he's a Fun shithead. cursin' up a storm is kinda just what some people do/how they interact. heavens know that when i bring out the curse n nasty words it means i'm havin a nice chill convo with someone

after this

he went and notified his own Admin/Mechanic about it so she could've go and help out Sparrows with things

if he was just Plain asshole stuff like this wouldn't happen

these two hang out, Euros gets a rise outta him by bringing up something painfully stupid, NAE calls him a fucking idiot with an apocalyptically low count of neurons and then they continue their hang out

he's neither a bad person or coping with his own issues/insecurities! he's just a tiny ball of rage who's rolling through life wishing he had one more finger so he could flip people off. bastard is prolly the best off outta the dramatic tragedies that are most of the Eo iterators

guy is guying 🤷‍♀️

n honestly he'd... probably kick an animal sooner than take one on for therapy reasons, he would Not have the patience

[horse-shit]

. so i usually uninstall om and redownload it about a year later or something. simeon, baby, I got some missed messages comin out the oiseau ♡

[sukutrauma]

some itafushi wips r on the way i have not died!

[the-kipsabian]

why are so many people so mad about the all in card tho

like i understand the complaint of only one womens match in a five hour show cause yeah same but other than that???

[hirokiyuu]

i mentioned on the dys>sol/nomi i was gonna be posting more of my fic backlog on here and then Did Not Do That..... until now! have some dys>sol>cal. 'you sure write a lot of dys>sol where sol likes other people' yeah. yeah. i won't lie to you guys tho this run does eventually end w/dys/sol but. u kno. takes a bit :)

aaaaanyways please enjoy this Unrequited Teen Angst WWWWWWW set during early year 16!

is that the sun i see (or am i just being greedy); 700 words

Sol’s weirdly moody on the transport. Usually even if he’s quiet, he’ll be fiddling with his holopalm or listening to music or something, but today he’s in the very back, just staring out at the scenery, and when their eyes meet for half a second he doesn’t even smile. Sol always smiles when he sees Dys, which honestly used to kind of weird him out but these days… does not do that.

Still, as the team files out of the transport and breaks off into pairs, Dys keeps an eye on him instead of scouting ahead like normal -- which ends up being a good thing, because after about fives minutes out by themselves Sol suddenly lets out an enormous groan and slumps over, hunched in over himself. And Dys can’t feel fear but his heart’s pounding anyways as he runs over, careful to keep an eye on their surroundings as he leans over and says, urgently, “Sol, what --”

The moment his hand touches Sol’s back Sol jumps, enough to send himself falling back on his ass in the dirt, eyes wide with surprise like he hadn’t heard Dys sprinting towards him. “Dys?” he sputters, before glancing around. “I thought -- I mean, don’t you normally go on ahead…?”

He doesn't look hurt at all, though on closer inspection there’s bags under his eyes Dys’s never seen on his face before. “I mean,” says Dys, who can’t bring himself to say I was worried about you, “you were acting weird, so….”

“Oh,” says Sol, before managing a tiny grin up at him. “That’s… that’s really nice of you. Thanks.”

“Whatever.” Ugh. He can feel his stupid face going red. The worst part is that he can’t even leave, not with how Sol’s smile is still wobbling at the edges. “...Are you okay?”

“Oh, well, um… I mean, that’s….” The smile slides off Sol’s face piece by piece, until he gives up on it all at once and sighs miserably, pulling his knees in close until he’s curled up on himself in the dirt. “No.”

Dys… can’t even pretend to be surprised. Slowly he sits down next to Sol, watching as Sol leans forward to rest his chin on his arms, for once not even fidgeting. “...It’s stupid,” says Sol, finally. “It’s really stupid, and you’re gonna think it’s stupid too. But… if I tell you… can you pretend you don’t think it is? Just for like, ten minutes.”

This already sounds like it’s going to suck. “...Okay. I won’t… say anything, I guess.”

“Thanks.”

The moment drags out. Dys picks a little at a hangnail, waiting. Finally, Sol sighs again, and doesn’t quite look at Dys as he says, “Cal and Tammy are dating.”

“...Oh.”

“He told me on my birthday.” Sol tilts even further forward, until his face is buried in his arms, and with a muffled voice says, “Like, he knocked on the door and she was there and he had his hand on her back. And she’d made me a cake, which was like, nice or whatever, but it was so unbearable just seeing them together and I just -- I just had to sit there and pretend I was happy for them….

“Apparently she asked him out during Glow? Like, after the attack? And I saw them together in the lounge but I didn’t even realize….” There is, horrifyingly, a sniffing noise. “Stupid… stupid Fennec Face. She’s not… she’s not even that cute, and she’s afraid of everything, and I… I….”

Another sniff. Dys is probably the person least equipped to deal with this in the entire colony, not in the least because he heard Cal was dating someone else and his first reaction was gratitude. “...Sorry,” he offers up, finally. “That… that sucks.”

“Yeah,” says Sol, as he burrows deeper into his arms. “I… I just… I really like him. Y’know?”

Quietly, Dys answers, “I know.”

In response Sol just lets out this big shuddering sigh, somehow burrowing even deeper. “Sorry,” he says. “I know it’s stupid. I… Sorry.”

Dys can’t think of anything to say to that, can’t think of a single thing that might make Sol feel a little better. Instead of trying anyways he just sits there like an idiot, keeping half an eye on the planet around them to make sure they don’t get eaten by anything, and next to him Sol doesn’t move for a long, long time.