#and not being condescending as fuck

[saaraofthesand]

I was so caught up in bungo stray dogs that I forgot to talk about world trigger’s new chapter. I’ve been waiting for those flashbacks for ages 👌🏻

[clannfearrunt]

A guy walked in wearing a kickass BEWD shirt and I told him that’s an awesome shirt and he goes “thanks! *smug voice* do you know what it’s from though?” Is Yugioh: Duel Monsters fucking niche enough to use that tone of voice on me? Is what is essentially the Pikachu of Yugioh: Duel Monsters a niche anime creature? Her name is written right there on your shirt also. Shall I name 5 other cards while I’m at it? Can you describe me 5 non-Duelmonsters shadow games from the OG?? I should have summoned Pillroach Credit Card. You have no idea just how much I know what your shirt is from.

[autisticaradiamegido]

day 169

this is it, the dynamic

[lesbianchemicalplant]

I get that “you can just not wear makeup, it's okay to not wear makeup” can sometimes be the exact thing that someone needs to hear, or to be reassured about. but some people are really condescending about when and how they pull that out and who they say it to

like, there is a social reality of misogyny that women are punished for not appearing a certain way, with all the more severity as a function of class, racism, transmisogyny, etc.

that punishment can be the difference between employed and unemployed. having food and not having food. being treated as less competent and less worthy as a person not only by men, but also by other women and people of any gender in general

and tbh, it's especially fucked how some transmisogyny-exempt people say this to trans women, particularly toward those of us with facial hair / stubble that stands out very visibly from our skin. like a trans woman wearing makeup is obviously just too dumb, shallow, misogynistic, and femininity-obsessed to know better, so they take it upon themselves to remind her that “you can be a woman without wearing makeup! :)” in the same voice they use to tell a toddler that the mushy peas are good

do you think trans women wearing makeup while going to job interviews or working customer service positions (or even, yes, trying to exist in public life in general) are all just stuck-up assimilationists with Bad Ideas about gender? do you think it's only trans women with pointedly transmisogynistic values about “passing” who would ever wear makeup or dress a certain way to try to be treated less horribly by the world around us?

especially if you're vividly aware of how you yourself are punished for not wearing makeup—how do you not extend that awareness to other women? including other women who would pretty fucking obviously be treated even worse for it than you are? (how seriously have you considered that some women might be treated worse for it than you are? treated worse by someone like you, even?)

“you can just not wear makeup” “you don't need makeup, there's nothing about your face that needs fixing” okay well hiring managers will absolutely discriminate against me for not wearing makeup to job interviews, but thanks for enlightening me I guess

[txttletale]

ive been awake for like two hours today and if i took a shot for every time a he/they told me or my mutuals to shut up about transmisogyny in my notes today i would be seeing double right now

[seriousbrat]

This is so insidious. "Be aware of your language because you might unknowingly be spreading Evil ideology!!" basically just means "don't talk about this at all because it bothers me". It's so so transparent. If I'm constantly having to be careful about what I say about female characters (regardless of my actual intended meaning) because this Supreme Arbiter of Truth might randomly decide it's Terf Rhetoric Actually how can I ever have any sort of meaningful discussion at all? Notice how it's framed as "unknowingly"– if I have no possible way of knowing HOW I'm using Evil Language, how can I possibly avoid it? By shutting up is the answer.

It's based on NOTHING. It's a strawman. There is not a single Lily fan that thinks that Lily is just a mother and nothing else. Seeing Lily as more than a mother and recognising motherhood is important to her story are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, in what world is pointing out that women are sidelined in fandom terf rhetoric? This person is just deliberately conflating discussions about misogyny in fandom with hate groups because they know that's an easy way to get people riled. They're pretending the main argument against Lily's exclusion in fandom is about motherhood (it's not) and then doing a further mental backflip to stir up moral outrage about people defending female characters.

Be absolutely clear about this- this person KNOWS, deep down, that there is a reason why they only engage with male characters, and this bothers them. Instead of being honest with themselves about it they are inventing a bullshit faux progressive reason to silence any and all criticism and convince their own conscience that they're in the right.

There are no laws, obviously, saying you can't change lily's story or make her a side character if you want. I myself once made her a side character in a prongsfoot fic. The problem is when this is an overwhelming tendency in fandom, which IS significant and IS, in my opinion at least, worth pointing out. When arguably the most important character in the Marauders Era is routinely sidelined in favour of male characters who are literally irrelevant, that does actually say something about what sorts of characters fandom likes to engage with and why. When she's routinely bashed and hated for not really doing anything wrong while male characters who range from bullies to murderers are excused and idealised, that does say something.

It's never pleasant to have to critically examine your own interactions with fiction and accept that your preferences might be rooted in deeper-held beliefs about the world. But it is important, and one way to do this is to facilitate open conversations between different points of view. One way to NOT do this is claiming that everyone else but you is "accidentally" "unknowingly" using evil language so they might as well shut up about their opinions and about women in general.

[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.

[skittlewaffle]

I brought Sun and Moon to the gym and everyone seemed to go bonkers for them

[zerodaryls]

it's so funny (read: sad) that if bigoted fuckheads didn't insist i was a woman simply by virtue of my body at birth, i'd probably be chill with she/her pronouns in addition to he/they. if my mom didn't insist i was her daughter, i'd probably let her call me that, and we could still have a relationship.

i'm nonbinary and 'gendered' words are hypothetically meaningless, but because there are so many people who are more interested in telling me who i am rather than lovingly and curiously letting me express my own sense of self, those words carry trauma.

there's no reason a nonbinary person like myself can't be a son and a child and a daughter. there's no reason a nonbinary person like me can't go by he, they, and she.

'she' is not a slur. 'daughter' is not derogatory. 'beautiful' 'pretty' 'gorgeous' 'feminine' are not insults.

to the contrary, they're parts of language that express certain facets of a multi-faceted human existence, like mine.

and i have this sad, mournful feeling that if it weren't for unloving, condescending people, i'd probably be down to be called any of those things alongside my usual masculine/neutral terminology.

but i'd rather die than let anyone tell me what i have to be called.

[sn0wp1anets]

the thing is if 'jimmy is an adult playing a block game with his friends you dont know him' is something that can be brought into an argument against scott the character being abusive you are implying that jimmy the character has some kind of transcendent knowledge that his true form in real life has acknowledged that he and scott are friends and nothing that happens to his character is real and everything is happy and consensual. and like. if you want to have this interpretation of the life series thats completely fine but itd be pretty fucking boring . imagine if after jimmy permadied in 3rd life scott the character went 'hey its ok that jimmys just died because im having coffee with him next week' and we all just accepted this as part of the storyline. to acknowledge jimmy and scotts irl friendship and consent position you also have to acknowledge every single other cc irl factor and you would then be left with zero storyline other than 'so these people are roleplaying in minecraft but it doesnt matter because none of it is real' which imo is a pretty fucking boring way of analysing/interpreting roleplay.

[bunnihearted]

wishing death on your abusers is never "too much" or "too extreme" ._.

[vermillioncrown]

snippet of tpac ch 11

who wants to see bruce being bullied? doesn't matter, here you go

...

“—per my last missive, Sir: if you want this equation to exist, then the principles of linear algebra must necessarily exist.” Korvin waves a thin stack of ruled paper—covered with sprawling formulas, symbols, bullet lists, and patchwork paragraphs on both sides—like he’s trying to banish a demon. That demon, in this instance, is “Batman being stubborn.”

Bruce looks taken aback, like something is happening outside of his set parameters. From how Dick tried to explain it: apparently, Bruce and Korvin have a whole “pen pals” routine going on, and it’s still thriving despite them sharing the same living quarters for the past few months?

Do they actually waste stamps on this? Where do they hide the envelopes?

(Dick raised his hands in surrender at that line of questioning.)

Tim knows Bruce is a creature of habit and standards of operation—of which he completely respects because it’s efficient—but his staunch adherence to routine is next-level neurotic. Normally, he'd be furious about being sidetracked.

Yet, Korvin’s thrown caution to the wind and got so mad over math, like the fussy nerd that he tries to hide being, that he’s directly confronting Bruce—full “David vs Goliath” vibes here. And he's winning.

“I trust your work,” Bruce finally says, holding his hand out for the papers.

That only makes Korvin’s face twitch harder. “Sure. Why not. Everyone needs a bit of make-believe. Escapism in these trying times and shitass economy.”

“‘Shitass economy,’” Cass murmurs, of course latching onto the bit that everyone reacts to.

Babs sighs in disgust.

...

[spocks-kaathyra]

going from my cool transgender college dorm to the Weird Old White Men Convention is soooo freaky like why am I experiencing misogyny for the first time

[daisyachain]

The nature of time is that (culturally) Christian Euro/Anglo colonial consumers (hereafter white ‘people’) fetishize the idea of being ‘close to nature’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘savage’ and latch on to the idea that there are groups of people in the world who are somehow bestial or who have some kind of special powers from holding animist beliefs/beliefs that acknowledge the body as opposed to the Christian belief that the body is a kind of useless appendage to a person. We see this across decades from the 19thC to today in the racist fetishization of indigenous people across the globe, particularly residents of the Americas, Australasia, and southern/eastern Africa.

White consumers use a warped conception of other cultures to live out the fantasies that the Christian soul/body stuff engenders. You keep getting told that your emotions and physical sensations are the devil’s work? You want to get in touch with those physical sensations, but you don’t want it to interfere with your worldview? Simply project them on to a convenient group of people with slightly different conventions from you. Imagine how cool it would be to be 100% physical sensation (especially those pesky violent and/or sexual urges) and no mental burden, then unleash that in a way that causes millions of deaths worldwide via the dehumanization of entire nations of people just trying to live their lives. White consumers love a Proud Warrior Race Guy.

Flash forward to the 2010s, it’s generally considered impolite to spread the same propaganda that justified the genocide and dispossession of many different groups of people. However white culture hasn’t changed that much and normal human activities still need to be explained away to maintain the veneer of white intellectualism that has been used to justify white violence for years and years. You can’t just stomp around and clap your hands and dance badly, you’ve got to project it somewhere else.

But wait! There’s a community of people considered ‘tribal’ and ‘savage’, considered violent and bestial, who were never colonized! It’s…the Norse. Fetishizing early medieval North Sea raiders can’t be cultural appropriation, see, they’re white! It’s not offensive to replace an entire culture with white (male) ideas of what’s cool if that culture is totally unassociated with colonizer stereotypes and is in fact a culture of colonizers!

And that’s my theory on why there are so many Norse-inspired folk bands/video games/tv shows/memes/literally anything in the 2010s. VSaga not counted because that manga has been running since 2003 and is actually well-researched and comes out of a culture with a similar but distinct tradition of racism. The Euro storytelling tendencies of needing some kind of violent avatar have taken on ye anciente Norseman now that people care a little bit about the gallons of blood used to sketch other ethnic stereotypes. Done and dusted. Except the other side is that the fetishization of early medieval Norse culture is literally just white supremacist 101 and a lot of artists don’t step around that nearly as carefully as they should

[forestfan69]

You fill the room with sun, hold me close and let me breathe. I am foreign to that kindness.

.

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Some soft moicy, featuring my latest obsession which is to cover everything in flowers. I hope you all enjoy this as much as I enjoyed drawing it!!

Closeups:

This piece is also available on my INPRNT, if anyone wants to buy this for themselves!

[etdraconis]

( finally stopped crying after getting off the phone with the finance company of my car, and was basically treated like a child then told i should have been in regular contact with them so they can help me, while in the same breath they were doing their best not to help me. how's everyone else's day going? 🙃 )