#i want to rant but i wont

[akai-anna]

Hello there, dear @itsokaytomakemosstakes!

I was your assigned gift maker for the @dcmk-exchange event!

Ever since you shared your lovely mugs with me, the thought that Ran would get them as a matching kitty set for herself and Conan, wouldn't leave me alone. So I decided to embrace the idea; for both the headcanon and the personal touch.

Originally I planned something more silly, but the soothing vibes of my first sketch were just so lovely, I went with this instead (especially since I thought you might appreciate a bit of peace).

I hope you'll like this, and I really have enjoyed chatting with you, Moss!

[risetherivermoon]

I usually wouldn't make a post like this, but I'll preface this by saying I'm happy for Zar, that he's decided to repost his works and that he feels comfortable in doing so. He is an amazing writer, and this fandom does not deserve the stuff he has done for it.

What I don't want to be seeing is people saying shit along the lines of "I have to download all the works now in case they get deleted again!" It's just downright disrespectful, the works are made by a person. Remember that, with any fanfic in general, Zar is a person. He made those works for free, and it's all within his right to take them away again. You are not entitled to being able to see these works and Zar does not owe you anything.

Zar deleted his stuff for a reason, just because they are back up doesn't mean you get to ignore that it happened, learn a lesson from this. The initial reactions I saw to him deleting the works were downright disgusting, you are consuming these works for free, you aren't allowed to complain.

If I hear anyone who follows me or who I am following making disrespectful comments about this entire situation I won't hesitate to block or unfollow, please think before you post something. There are people behind the text on your screen. This is basic human decency. Cyber harassment is real, and it is damaging.

We don't deserve the writers in this fandom if all we will do is treat them like machines. Learn from this.

[lerrryyyyy]

Villain!Izuku AU but his villain aesthetic is still his iconic shirts

Tomura hates those shirts because when people see Izuku, they tend to take their group less seriously, and that pisses him off.

Izuku finds it kind of funny how worked up Tomura gets. Sometimes he purposely makes the shirts as silly as possible just to see Tomura rage about it.

But aside from Izuku just genuinely liking the shirts, they also serve the purpose of making people drop their guards around him - giving him better opportunities to observe and gather information w/o their suspicion.

Doesn't mean Tomura hates the shirts less though.

°°°°°°

Tomura: You're coming on this raid. At least wear a fucking costume

Izuku: Ok

Izuku:

Tomura, seeing the jacket in front: Fcking finally! It was time you upgraded your equipment!

Tomura, seeing the jacket's back: *makes incoherent angry noises while attempting to decay Izuku, who happily dodges his hands*

°°°

Do not edit or repost my art.

[heartsgettingwiser62]

So when are we as a fandom going to stop pretending that jonathan byers isn't one of the best written and most interesting characters in st

[devine-fem]

No because Damian angst could be so much more interesting if it wasn’t “Oh, thank GOD, Damian’s white saviors took him away from that awful, cruel and wicked pseudo mom Talia, oh thank god that he has Selina Kyle now!” and instead talked about how Damian was proned to violence since the moment he could walk and make noises with his mouth and was taught never to feel emotions THEN it goes to oh, son, you’ve made the choice to be with me so let me show you how to cope with that… with more violence as a pattern of unhealthy coping mechanisms instilled in you and me at a young age and you can show emotions! buuuut you have to wear this suit and take on a whole other identity then when out of the suit you have to wear a facade so no one truly knows about the suit in the first place and this won’t be confusing for a child at all! … Bruce Wayne.. what? And oh, this guy who thinks you’re a responsibility and generally vexing is going to take you under his wing because he thinks no one else can deal with you otherwise and you get a little close but eventually he hurts and abandoneds you as well but now you’re on good terms because the narrative has decided that no one can wrong you except the only person who loved you at first (Talia, the only person who thought it’d be a good idea to take you out of their lives in order to keep you away from this exhausting path of violence and masking) but it’s fine! … Okay, Dick… and then you’re fighting with your brother because he’s jealous of you taking his place and he calls you worthless, unworthy of love and your mantle and unworthy of your fathers trust… Okay, Tim…? Does anyone wanna love Damian for Damian and not love him only when its convenient to their own personal mission please? No?

NO ONE REALIZES THAT ITS NOT ABOUT DAMIAN NOT BEING AN AL GHUL! BEING AN AL GHUL DOESNT MAKE HIM EVIL! ITS NOT ABOUT HOW HE’S TREATED BY HIS FAMILY. ITS THAT CHOICE!! Damian needs to make more choices for himself instead of living by some destiny and going by whatever everyone else expects of him! His heart is good and worthy and he doesn’t need to be an Al Ghul or a Bat to figure that out! He needs to make more choices to be the best version of himself he can be but we’re too busy demonizing the Al Ghuls in fandom and in comics to realize that!!!

[d1sc01nf3rn0]

I'm seeing a lot of people with neurodivergency, specially under the autism spectrum say that "Laios is annoying, never shuts up, is insensitive, and I can't stand him"; and the irony is not lost on me lmao.

[ganondoodle]

im quite tired of talking about totk, like im sure you all know by know just how frustrated i am, but something i still strongly believe was the logical, and best thing to do in a sequel.. -

while botw was about you feeling lost in a strange world with neither you nor link knowing anything and both discovering it as you go, the theme of lonelyness and isolation, freeing the spirits of dead friends you need toremember again, in the end finally reuniting with one of the only friends still alive, after a 100 years

totk should have been about community, about working together with zelda at your side, as a companion, after having been seperated for so long, and seeing nothing of the time between titles, this should have been her travelling alongside you, after botw you'd WANT to spend time with her and get to know her more, her being the diplomat, the archtitect, the scientist, the translator of old texts, a historian trying to find out the truth about what her fathers kingdom was built on, to right old wrongs perhaps, for a better future- theres so much that she should have been, so much of her character was primed to go into this direction- and instead she is a pretty prize with no personality you get at the end like this is an 80s cartoon still

(this is disregarding the whole fact that ganondorf, AS WELL, should have been a giant factor in all this, in the history of it all, to explore his character and his actions, to have zelda research and find out about histroy clearly written by the victors- theres so much potential depth here that it dirves me crazy, botw was such a set up for more that was wasted, utterly wasted, for something i wouldnt even want to call paper thin bc even paper has more depth than anything in totk)

[jamiesgotchu]

remembering that in order to be tickled I have to let someone tickle me

[mayxo-hxh]

I personally think that Kikyo would absolutely be thrilled that Illumi found himself a man he wants to marry as strong, handsome and fit to be Zoldyck as Hisoka.

Hisoka is strong enough to be considered an equal to a zoldyck, which means strength is no problem for him. And I don't know about you but the way he assassinated that terradin man that was threatening to reveal illumis identity at the end of the election arc? CHEFS. KISS. THATS A WHOLE ZOLDYCK WIFE RIGHT THERE. And Hisoka is a certain type of fucked up enough to be a Zoldyck, even if he is... mmm.. self aware. Even if he himself thinks zoldycks are a special kind of fucked up. He'd fit.

I always see people make silva and kikyo disagree with illumi marrying hisoka but i soooo heavily disagree. Like what is there NOT to be proud of in Illumi's marriage choice. There is not a single other character IN THE ENTIRE ANIME fit to be Zoldyck than Hisoka Morow and I will fight people on that.

Something a lot of people also don't realize is that the Zoldycks are not a family that discriminates in the slightest (this is a whole discussion on its own but examples are how Kikyo is from meteor city, the butlers are taken from anywhere as long as they have the skill to work and one of the people who attacked kukuroo mountain to hunt the zoldycks now works for them instead. The zoldycks didnt hesitate to hire that mf they fr dont gaf lmfao)

there are soooooooo many misconceptions about the zoldycks in general and i think thats what aids the whole "the zoldycks would HATE hisoka" thing but like. nah. they wouldnt.

I also think about how Kikyo found Silva at such a young age. I bet she was constantly nagging Illumi and asking when he'd get a partner himself. Now he's got it, Millukiiii ITS YOOOURRR TURRNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!

[vessel-full-of-stories]

Kid.

[baeshijima]

bitches will still be crying over the high-cloud quintet at 2 am months later and never get over them

its me. im bitches.

[ickyguts]

fucked up edgy ass fanart for a concept I have (I want to do a comic for it at some point!)

CW DRUG USE:

 The idea is that on days where Flippy is particularly on edge (losing his grip on fliqpy and afraid he's gunna hurt someone), Flippy resorts to taking a bunch of his sleep aid/painkillers to sedate him.

 Fliqpy sits like this for the next few hours, confused, fucked up, and out of it.

[scatterpatter]

HEY YOU SHOULD WATCH THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER

Oh nooooo if only there were an easy way to find it tho... if only... oh man... if only- oh oops sorry I tripped-

Oh man if only it were easy to watch... oh man...................

[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.

[deoidesign]

"Is Adam ever going to face racism because like… that seems extremely relevant for some of these time periods lol"

I won't be saying this twice.

No.

I think it's inappropriate for me as a white writer to put him through racism that I am incapable of writing from a personal point of view.

I also find it gratuitous at best to depict "historical accuracy" for racism, when suspension of disbelief is had for homophobia, magic, time travel, and historical accuracy in general.

I don't care about historical accuracy. Sorry. Read a different comic.

[cringefail-clown]

The fact that no one has asked about kankri is surprising

So kankri for bingo