#tagging all players mentioned

[rodlaveraryna]

graf cup brainworms

we! deserve! a wta! laver! cup!

i mean, just look at the wta rankings. a wta laver cup would be a lot more competitive and balanced and fun than the atp version and it would also be grounds for a bunch of great player interactions that we deserve, so i'll be going over teams :)

graf cup is named after legend steffi graf, one of three singles players in the open era to win a calendar year grand slam. the other two are rod laver, who the laver cup is named for, and margaret court, a bigot. it will be held in berlin at uber arena, same location as the atp version. yk, if this was real.

also, i have no clue how teams are made for the actual laver cup. i just made these teams because i can. i'm the tournament director of this nonexistent tournament. what are you gonna do?

team europe

edit 4/23: i had no idea navratilova was such a piece of shit lord… alternative captain suggestions are much appreciated

team roster: ― iga swiatek ― aryna sabalenka ― daria kasatkina ― jasmine paolini ― mirra andreeva ― paula badosa

notes team europe:

― i NEED daria and natalia to give us some bomb ass graf cup vlogs. i just know they would give us the best interviews and behind the scenes look at how it all goes.

― aryna and jasmine are both great in singles and doubles so that's def something they can use to their advantage

― honestly seeing players i like interact with each other was like. a major part in selecting these teams. idk i just feel like everyone here is so lovely and amazing and that's only going to be heightened because of the not super competitive atmosphere

― i have a massive soft spot for mirra. i think everyone who knows her does. i would love to see the whole team just absolutely adoring her

― iga and aryna becoming friends??? maybe??? i like my rivalries sweet off court and fiery on court so it'll be nice seeing them interact

― can't forget the best friendship in tennis aka sabadosa!!! lowkey i don't ship them because they just remind me of me with my best friends but i think a really close platonic relationship like that is SO important and valuable and i'm really glad they have each other like that.

team world

team roster: ― coco gauff ― elena rybakina ― ons jabeur ― zheng qinwen ― emma navarro ― leylah fernandez

team world notes:

― emma and coco feel like they would be a great pair. they're both close with ben it seems so i feel like they would be friends. also they're professional american tennis players. to use some terminology from @fritzes, american idiot solidarity

― the difference in vibe between coco and elena will be absolutely hilarious. i think they'd get along don't get me wrong it's just funny they seem so opposite to me. would love to see them play some doubles together that would be so fun...

― honestly i feel like all doubles permutations in this team would be so funny. if any of these people actually played doubles together (besides coco/emma/leylah with each other) i would be like "what the fuck is she playing doubles with her????" and i think that's beautiful.

― not to make too many comparisons with the laver cup but team world here isn't just america ft. canada. that shouldn't be a super tall order because this is team WORLD but we've all seen the trends for teams in the mens version.

― everyone loves ons yall. including team europe. we all just love ons so much.

― i'm ngl i don't have too many ultra specific notes for this team i just think it'll be good vibes and good tennis. it'll also be very appealing for me personally because i love all of these players and i know most of tennisblr loves them too :)

[carlyraejepsans]

to summarize an unduly rambly post: our control over kris has been steadily growing more and more distressing for them throughout the story. the snowgrave route, possibly the most gut wrenching, violating imposition of our will on theirs AND Noelle's (*homer voice* so far!), explicitly, thematically, and visually represents possession and coercion through romantic imagery, specifically rings and weddings. it's nauseating. it forces both of them into an implied relationship that neither of them is comfortable in by leveraging noelle's desperate wish to reconnect with her childhood friend. it has exactly the horrible connotations you don't want it to have.

ralsei being presented as both a direct callback to asriel—both the undertale asriel we know, and y'know... kris' brother in deltarune—while also setting him and kris up in a clearly romantic context that kris does not seem to either share or be comfortable with, is not a coincidence. it's not an accident. "isn't that a little incestuous" that's the point! kris' agency being stripped away is one of deltarune's main thematic cores: the game is repeatedly setting up a pattern where that theme is reinforced by putting kris in upsetting, unwanted romantic relationships for OUR entertainment. nothing fits the bill better than pairing them with the nostalgia bait companion that literally looks like their brother.

[kimbapisnotsushi]

hinata needed kageyama as a player and kageyama needed hinata as a person

[wreckedhoney]

MASSIVE SPOILER for one of the endings.

it's been a while since i tried looking, but i did hear that something like this happens last year and over time started to think, "was it a fluke?" bc no one posted footage or caps of it then, and i aimed for a completionist run in my first playthrough. turns out it's real! and definitely shines a new light on a character that, for most other types of playthroughs, will not give this much emotion! EDIT: transcript now included, and some stillshots under the cut

[0:28] Marie: Henry, this is the man who kept you from doing the right thing tonight. Kill him. [0:15] Forrest: Henry, you don’t have to do this. If you’ve not killed anyone yet, there’s still time to make the right decision. [0:05] Out of shot: (Gunshots) Henderson Police! Freeze! Marie: No! Henry, get out of there!

[no-light-left-on]

I often wonder about the quote-unquote logistics of Corvo the Black/Emily the Butcher endings. Emily makes more sense to me, in a way, carving her way through the empire only to come back with blood caked under her fingernails and realising that she did everything her father refused to do 15 years ago. but why did Corvo have a similar choice?

what happens to the statues later? does Emily keep her father trapped in stone? does Corvo look at his daughter, frozen in the moment and considers freeing her? is he at his deathbed when he finally reaches out and cups Emily's cheek, freeing her into a carcass of an empire that he gutted for her, in her name, in the name of her mother?

when I first heard of the endings I thought that if you reach very high chaos, you are locked into this choice - Corvo or Emily tries to free the other and the stone just doesn't budge. they are trapped. the quest is over but the world knows that the bloodshed was extreme and this is the punishment they have to face

[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.

[hiis-theme]

i've noticed there's a slight problem on ao3 of people tagging undertale fanfics as deltarune when there's. literally no deltarune aspects. or only a couple here and there. i feel like that should probably be reserved for undertale fanfics that prominently feature deltarune characters/are a full-on crossover-

[the-toybox-general]

I forgot how hard lobotomy corporation is . But also maybe you shouldn't take Mountain of Smiling Bodies, Big Bird, and Army in Black all in one facility (⁠´⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠.̫⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠`⁠)

[chompe-diem]

pick a thing that i want so badly a normal amount and am never going to get

[gumbuk9]

i was thinking about the classic concept of having a disconnect between the player and hero (player character) in a videogame, particularly of the possession flavor; and i thought of like, a Lugaru inspired thing, where you control some beast thing while it's fully conscious and reacts to your actions and is initially Very Distressed over losing control of most of it's body.

i thought of some goofy like half lore where the diegetic explanation is that there's some extra dimensional parasite in the creature that's taking your player input and interpreting it into control of the creature's body. the end goal of the game is figuring out how to rid your animal buddy of this extra-dimensional-nuisance for good thereby destroying the bridge between you, while trying to keep the beast alive by hunting for food and whatnot.

during gameplay you could hear the creature you're controlling breathe and vocalize in response to physical exertion and threats, it would still have limited control of it's body and whatnot and buddy would shake it's head if you were approaching something it didn't like. when you quit out of the game and come back an unknown amount of time would pass and you'd come back to the thing like conked out on some surface just resting, or hugging it's family (that you wake up beside and have to just walk away from at the start of the game), before you invariably retake control of it's body again. maybe there could be a mechanic where you can manage the stress levels of your fuzzy buddy by treating it with respect and doing things it likes, visiting it's family while you're in control and hugging them before you leave, taking breaks and letting your pal catch it's breath once in a while, just showing that while you're in control you don't want to make it's life miserable.

idk i might just be weird

[brynnmclean]

I have been daydreaming recently about getting five of my female friends + maybe my sister (if I can lure her out of her apartment) to play D&D with me. We could play monthly. I could brave running base 5e so people can play spellcasters. We could make the setting together via Ex Novo and/or the Session 0 System. Or, I SWEAR, I'll read and run Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Or... I could enlist them to help me figure out the starter box for The One Ring 2e which I think starts out with hobbit pregen PCs. It could be fun. Trouble is... I HAVE to wrap up AKB first. I have tried to run multiple campaigns at once and it is Too Much for me (not to mention I have other hobbies)! So. I have to sit on my hands until Spring anyway. Alas.

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

Not yet going to elaborate, especially since we have yet to see the mini series release in full

But I am skeptical that the scene we saw in the preview for the shadow short series is actually a memory

[ladsofsorrow24]

love how studio orange made vash go super saiyan mode to explain him getting the trimax hairstyle lmao

[depravedangelbaby]

ohmyg-d i absolutely love firbolgs too!! i’m basically a firbolg honestly

-feral lesbian anon

I've only played a firbolg once before, so I'm very excited to play another!! I recently played a half orc too n that was sooo much fun. I like playing tall PCs lol I'm a lil halfling irl!!

[robotwrangler]

Does anyone have any experience getting CRT televisions repaired? Like, how easy or hard it might be to find someone willing to do it & how expensive it might be?

[atticcreationz]

We've reached the point in the season where I don't want to watch the Adventuring Party episodes until AFTER the ending, but good lord the physical restraint I will have to exhibit if any of the last few APs have even a whiff zoom energy...