#ofc i like emotional characters too

[let-roman-bite-someone]

there’s something to be said about the fact that janus is the most professional out of all the sides. i genuinely think that he’s the only side playing his part because it’s his job, and not because he has any personal feelings attached.

virgil showed signs of genuinely wanting to be accepted and loved by thomas and the other sides. logan definitely values thomas’s validation a lot and becomes sad when he doesn’t get that validation. remus.. might actually be the second most professional side. but since he seems to work under janus (janus sending him over to thomas and telling him what to do), i guess a lot of that professionalism comes from janus himself. remus isn’t as stupid as he seems obviously, but he doesn’t have a clear-cut agenda like janus does.

i just think it’s interesting to see a side who is only concerned with thomas’s well-being because it’s their job and they want to do a good job. even janus’s frustration at thomas not taking his advice and later his excitement about thomas acknowledging his points came off to me as someone dealing with their kinda shitty boss (no offense to c!thomas, i just imagine that’s how janus views him lol). of course, janus has some fun at his job but i mean, i would too if no one ever listened to me and i’m automatically labelled as the bad guy.

all of this is slowly beginning to change since janus seems to be getting closer to patton but i guess we’ll have to wait and see if they actually become friends or if they’re more like coworkers on friendly terms.

[yuridovewing]

what i will always, alwaysss hate about the crowfeather discourse is how it got several people, even some people who i thought would know better than to spread such harmful rhetoric, to get up on their soapbox and say with their whole chest "child neglect is not abusive, breezepelt should get the fuck over it"

[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.

[zhongrin]

*taps mic* yes hi hello is this working. ahem ahem. testing one two three.

ah yes. we're back to normal now lol

..... were yall surprised ( •̀ ᗜ •́ )

long story short, i just wanted to do something for april fools… last year albedo made an appearance, so i thought of doing the same this year... but i felt like it would be repetitive. so given the recent developments and future events, this idea came up lol

in any case, it's the truth that i've been warming up to neuvillette.... i've been writing more for him, and if you saw my 2023 wrapped post you probably saw him as a 'runner-up'... and i really do mean it when i say he's been kinda occupying the back of my brain since last year hskdljfklsd at the end of his story quest... his tone when talking to kiara.... sobsob ueueue

however, i'm honestly still unsure if i can/want to have an actual selfship with him (ó﹏��｡) i can't figure out how it'll work out yet... it just feels like with neuvillette's canon personality, he wouldn't even think of glancing my way in the first place, given the circumstances…. and zhongli... what do i do about him.... ough....

maybe he'll be a separate ship (e.g. zhongwrinth is one au, wrinlette in one au) on his own… maybe rinvillette will be a 'pining but not actually dating' kind of selfship.... idk..... on that note, i really should be making a selfship post huh lol

also, he's rerunning in less than 24 hours (like. 19 hours-ish for me) and i hoped this would be a sufficient offering for the hydro dragon to come home early… i'll play him twinkle twinkle little star on my guzheng while pulling or something, since it should arrive tomorrow afternoon lmao… i hope he likes the instrument that 'sounds like flowing water' hdlshdls

in any case, thank you for interacting in the short little event! it was more of a spontaneous decision on my part, but i hope you all had fun and i didn't butcher neuvillette's character too much, he's so hard to muse orz <3

lil doodle bonus of what could have been:

[honeysulani]

reimagined scene where Oak gets to describe Astarions features to him

[littencloud9]

//

[doodlboy]

Demon El doodle dump!🩷✨️

[s4ndg3m]

i found a picture of a great diving beetle larva and thought... wow that guys eyes look like an angry face. how cool would it be if a characters eyes were actually just little emotes faces. so here i am, exploring said idea. calling him Eustice Shrimpbug or something like that

[queen0fm0nsterz]

Reading my fave thin man and lady fic. Kicking my feet a lot because tbh. Sometimes a sad man really is just a weird woman's science project in a way that is so homoerotic

[redstrewn]

Part of me is team "leander is like that to everyone" bc he also plans to recruit MC into his Bloodhounds in the future ("not yet"). Despite knowing the Bloodhounds for years he isn't close to them. Makes me think he ups the charm and seduction to anyone who may be of use to him to get them to pledge their allegiance.

[gorkaya-trava]

staying alive just because humanity still doesn't know much about gender sexuality autism and artificial intelligence and there are new mind-boggling researches coming in the next ten years at least

[springs-hurts]

Lmao I hate these fics(little things, single sentences, I'm so overwhelmed that I start crying ffs...) And yet I want to read them all the time

[istherewifiinhell]

ohh smth else i can say quickly abt the good tf show. absolutely wild for this to be the third time/iteration im seeing wind.blade (all in a row infact) and its like. OH! oh wait! shes good. everyone else just sucked at writing her. okay. cool.

[vasito-de-leche]

also, also —

I wrote out so many quotes 'cause your language is beautiful and you manipulate it to express complicated figures with simple words so easily is breathtaking. SO I took many quotes and one seriously got on my mind

"would you forgive him just as readily if he were to kill someone in front of you?" I feel like I'd need you elaborate on that one. The thought looks curious as an idea for a situation but at the same time I understand how easily forgiving reader would be borderline ignoring severance of the situation(maybe??? Im still not sure how this works since we got fans already knowing he unalives ppl easily in the first place + the whole setting does collocate with high death rate so...) and on the other hand, abandoning him is just gameover. So I thought the closest to actually getting through this situation without being too unrealistic would be two options

First one is probably classical "y/n already knew it before and them getting close to FMN was with that fact taken into account" and the second one is (mourning the loss of life then) turning to him to adress the issue and try to figure some other ways to "win" without killing anybody(paralyze potion??? More mind games? idk). As if it's _our_ problem and not just his. tldr: jokes on him we are not getting off of that ship.

sorry for this getting too big. you've awakened a dog and it's rabid

NEVER APOLOGIZE FOR SHARING YOUR THOUGHTS, I LOVE LOVE LOVE DISCUSSING THINGS IN-DEPTH WITH PEOPLE! this is us right now, we're sitting and talking about FMN's unstable mental health together and we're holding hands and we're having fun

when I wrote that oneshot, I wanted to keep everything as vague as possible when it came to the reader - this includes their involvement with FMN's and how they tackle the ticking bomb that is his personality and moral compass!

the only thing regarding the reader that I wanted to come across is that the reader cares about him to some degree - the depths of those feelings are pretty much up to you and how you feel about FMN

the SECOND thing I wanted to come across is the fact that FMN lives in his own head, so everything HE perceives about the reader is either projection or wishful thinking, like. you CANNOT take him at face value because everything he thinks and says is a contradiction. he's obsessed with you but both denies it and revels in it, he spends so much time observing you but also misses INCREDIBLY OBVIOUS things about you. he loves you and he hates you. etc etc.

so when FMN starts thinking all that shit about how would you react if he were to kill someone in front of you, that's all intrusive thoughts. they make no sense and are fueled by impulse and things he doesn't actually want to engage in (but might, just because he's one hair away from constantly ruining his own life in one way or another, FMN is self-destructive above all else)

the message underneath is that he simply just wants to keep being awful and irredeemable because he wants to show you that he's ugly inside and outside because he's STILL pretending to be a smooth and very hinged person. it wasn't meant to establish that the reader NEVER saw him kill or commit any other atrocities, or that they're willingly blind or anything else - again, those aspects are left vague for whoever reads this to fill in the blanks AND FMN cannot be trusted in here, especially when reading his POV

ultimately, I can't start elaborating on how the reader would react if they saw FMN kill people fireworks style after this oneshot - because YOU are the reader, I don't control your thoughts or perception. in this oneshot, the character of the "reader" lacks any sort of backstory, motivations, or any solid info to even start thinking if they'd forgive FMN or abandon him or whatever, if that makes sense. I didn't establish if they're an arcanist or human, if they're mixed or infected, if they're willingly siding with Manus or are blind to FMN's affiliations with them, etc. it's all up to you in the end! you get to pick how you'd react in the aftermath!

if we were talking about more specifics like, "how about a reader who rejects the foundation and believes in manus?" or "can you write about a human reader caught up in the crossfire?". those things I can deffo work with because there's context for me to start from

hope this made sense, and ty for the asks!! always a treat to see more FMN fans <3

[phoenix-before-the-flame]

So if you beta for flames desire whats the part you like most or something youre looking forward to in it? Thinking of reading it but was worried about the first chapter rating

Ah yes my favourite job, advertising Flame's Desire :]

That's totally understandable where you're coming from though chapter 1 as it stands is a lil dark with the events that take place in it but i promise! It's not graphic or gratuitous!

Rougie's description of the events don't go overboard or take it too far so if what you're fearing is super graphic descriptions of the bad stuff then you're all good! And so far chapter 1 is the darkest of the uploaded chapters so it starts off heavy but the tone lightens up in the following chapters.

As for what I like most about FD there is the general of me liking Rougie's writing a lot. And this is not just cause rougie's my good comrade, i think they got a really good handle of writing character interactions and setting up plot points. Plus i deeply enjoy how Natsu's written in FD.

But if we are talking specifics that i love then we might be here the whole night😅 because there is something in each chapter that i enjoy no joke. I really could talk on and on about each of em. But i am particularly attached to chapters 4&5 respectively with the long journey of the story kicking off and i am such a sucker for travel sequences plus lore drop and a development in Natsu and Lucy's friendship. And chapter 8 has a fight scene that i am really dying to draw.

And for what im looking forward to, i technically got one in the chapter im beta-ing now being a fire dance scene at the spring festival that Rougie teased me with from last year so im over the moon about finally getting it now.

The other is actually an upcoming scene in the chapter rougie's writing right now! A fight scene that i really can't spoil bcus its too important (im serious. They held this scene to their chest and almost didnt wanna tell me when i figured it out. If i spoil i lose beta privileges) but it's something that really has me on the edge of my seat due to the build up towards it (@kiliinstinct rougie if ur out there blease drop a crumb of spoilers in my DMs)

And aaaaaaaa man, i would drop in some screenshots of my fave bits but they don't hit as hard without the context yknow? You just, gotta trust me on this one here.

Trust this Phoenix.

There are heavy themes and stuff in the story but it's not overbearing or too in your face. It's a really fuckin good fic.

Go read FD, wont disappoint you. Pinky swear

[egoarc4de]

purging this thought so i can actually get some shut eye