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.
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tw; right wing dudes saying right wing stuff in links,rant
I really want to know. Does anyone else hate the completionist drama, not bc of what the completionist did/did not do, but bc of the guys who started making videos abt it
Karl jobst had some drama like 2 years ago u can still see on reddit regarding him saying some racist shit and hanging around in nazi circles.
(Links are to karl accusations with receipts)
Someordinarygamer, at a glance, has not done anything that bad. But he's a centrist who operates a bit like moistcritcal, Aka responding to drama of the week. Also, If u don't know, american centrism is basically diet right wing, with some being waywayway more nazisish (I don't think he's as bad as jobst, but I don't trust people who say the left and the right are two sides of the same coin, links to reddit proof below). He was the kind of person to talk abt the hogwarts legacy backlash in a '""""balanced"""" way🙄
(SomeOrdinaryGamer being a centrist proof)
(Reddit is not the end of research obviously. Karls vibes are bad but I only felt it after a few vids. Someordinarygamer is easier to see red flags. So watch their vids if u don't trust reddit, I wouldnt blame u lmao)
Idk. Like i understand fucking holding charity money for 10 years is immoral, the company was absolutely mismanaged, and the completionist had no right claiming they were donating to various charities actively. BUT how am i supposed to trust those guys' analysis and the million other inflammatory drama channels covering it???
Has a legit lefty person talked about this in in depth, with their own research, since the completionists apology???
I know bad people can have correct takes, but I just cannot bring myself to trust their analysis. As silly as it seems, even I, when I watched half of one of their videos, noticed the e-signature issue. How much research are these guys actually doing, and are their conclusions truly reflective of all the information available?
Not trying to start shit, its just been on my mind, i guess.
EDIT: Literally like 5 hours I posted this Moon Channel said he would be covering this and I trust him a hell of a lot more. He's made major mistakes on one video that I know of, but he's owned up to them w/ links on correct resources, and hes not a fucking centrist wow. Hes also a lawyer so hes at least slightly more qualified to discuss this topic. I will update if the video seems solid
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I WATCHED NIMONA!!! As someone who read the original nimona webcomic when it was updating (roughly a decade ago??) and was rly impacted by it, I was so excited to watch the film and... they did a really good job!!! it was so beautiful i cried omg... it's def worth a watch!! (long ramble under the cut BWAHA spoiler warning)
...and it was rly completely diff from the original comic but im not complaining?? like its a v loose movie adaptation and the plot/setup was v diff but still v well done... like the comic and movie r both good in their own right... & i laughed and cried a lot... i was surprised at the extent of some of the changes but the emotional parts hit hard(my eyes r swollen from crying) and it was written v well... and visually it's just gorgeous... my jaw kept dropping at the beautiful lighting, and they brought the futuristic medieval setting to life so well i could cry😭
it's funny bc one of the main things i was afraid of was them changing nimona's backstory from the comic, bc even after a decade that's one of the things that stuck w me the most... i love nimona as a chara sm... I was so worried abt them changing it and... they ended up changing it completely... but it was actually really good?! like i cried so hard, it was well done... so I'm glad I didn't have to worry after all jdjfjd🥺 like they Did change it but both ver r good in their own right...
I understand that they had to rewrite the plot completely to fit within the time length of a single movie while still being a contained story, as is always the case w movie adaptations of books, graphic novels, etc which r much longer... Series have a chance to follow the source more closely but that just isnt the case w movies... and as far as movie adaptations go they did an amazing job!! I can rly appreciate both the comic and the movie as their own thing... and I rly liked some parts that were added to the movie, like ballister(blackheart)'s backstory in the beginning, and the addition of gloreth (and her relationship w nimona) was surprisingly compelling... And I really really love that they made Ballister and Goldenloin canon POC 😭😭😭 like that made me so happy!!!❤️🔥 When i first saw the casting of riz ahmed and eugene lee i was sooo happy, i was like YAYY IDC IF THEY LOOK WHITE IM GONNA HC THEM AS POC🥰 but the fact that i dont even have to hc bc its canon now... 🥹 SOUTH ASIAN/EAST ASIAN KINGS🛐... and they also didn't hold back with showing them openly as a gay couple... Even tho their dynamic changed a lot from the comic I rly appreciate that...
And there were things that I did miss from the webcomic, like the original setup with goldenloin and blackheart as staged nemesis, them being exes (and some time having passed since their graduation, so they're older, unlike in the movie when it just happened), etc. but the whole setup and plot and everything I completely understand why they had to change it to make it work/fit as a movie, so I get it... so not complaining there tbh bc they did what they had to do... But tbh... TBH... my one(1) complaint(/lh) w the movie... IS I REALLY MISS GOLDENLOIN'S BEAUTIFUL LONG HAIR😭😭😭💔 He would've looked so pretty with long golden locks in the movie artstyle, esp w the gorgeous lighting... glowing gold and flowing in the wind... And I think it would've fit perfectly well with the movie ver of his chara/lore too?? like the new lore of him being a descendant of Gloreth... I could imagine him growing out his hair and bleaching it blonde to fit the image/pressure of being a descendant of gloreth, and to look more flashy and heroic to the public (They did tone down his vanity a lot but im sure he still retains some of it... like he still has that pretty popular celebrity image)... And him having long hair doesnt contradict with him being asian too or the modern setting... modern asian men can and do have pretty long hair😭 Like he couldve still been Asian, just w long blonde hair... It doesn't contradict w his new personality either... And I wish they kept the golden color bc the white/silver makes him look less like a "goldenloin"... (i also love black/gold color combos personally lol)... And i just aldjskd can u imagine movie Ballister stroking Ambrosious's long hair affectionately... pls🥲 WE COULD'VE HAD IT ALL... canon asian madeleine cookie qkjdksdj... I also do miss his original stupid vain arrogant himbo personality from the comic, but I understand why they changed it (for one, charas like that might start out obnoxious but then slowly develop and gain depth over the course of the story, but in a movie's short length, there's less time to slowly grow on ppl so it'd be easier to make them more likeable from the start... so like i get it.) but I think it would've been perfect if they just kept his long hair even w his new personality😭😭 LIKE IT WOULDVE BEEN 100000% PERFECT THEN!!! So that's literally my one lighthearted complaint/dissatisfaction w the movie LMFAO... I'd be happy if ppl draw fanart of movie ambrosious w long hair... TTwTT i miss it sm DKDJZ /end rant OVERALL I HAD A GOOD time ^^ LMFAO
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