Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-38887775-20200429004337/@comment-38887775-20200430123307

AngryLance wrote: Animegeek 313 wrote: to be honnest, i posted this because i was curious about the communitie's opinion of this article, i have read it even before joining, and through it found the site(the one i am on) and just think it has some very vaild critisisms of the author, it is ok to disagree on something, it is just that the point (the grimmdarkness) is very valid, and is probebly the only plot driveing some of the continuis fanfics and any long series. I for one don't see grimdarkness. And I don't feel like trying to search for it anyway.

this part:

(Unintentional) Grimdarkness
The original Chief God created humans, but was worried about overpopulation for reasons. So it created monsters to slaughter humans in sufficient numbers to cull them, before eventually creating the program of the Heroes and the Monster Lord: the Heroes get empowered when humans are too weak to disrupt the monsters' attack by killing their demigod leader, the Monster Lord, throwing monsterkind into disarray so that humanity has time to recover, and then eventually a new Monster Lord rises up and starts the same shit over again once humanity is waxing in strength. Said Chief God also forced the other gods to get in on this - Poseidon supports the new Monster Lord because she's sick of having to kill people with tidal waves, storms, and sea monster attacks.

Think the new Monster Lord is any better? Only if you don't mind the fact that she's bungling her job, and so mamono have swapped "kill and eat humans" for "kidnap and rape" humans. It would be a relatively tolerable subjugation were it not the fact her stated goal is to drive human women extinct so human men would have to marry monstergirls, and so she is actively seeking to convert (physically and mentally transform) all women into mamono.

Also, a lot of the time when KC writes profiles he focuses so goddamn much on the aspect of how the men that monsters catch react sexually and how women caught by monsters end up going "Oh noes, how embarrassing, everyone can see my sexual repression!" that he forgets to actually write the profile, causing several monsters to come across as significantly more horrible than he intended. Though this is still absolutely a rod this idiot has made for his own back, and he deserves your scorn rather than your pity for it. (Significant mentions include the matango, which as written was in everyone's "least favorite" category for years, thanks to, in a reference to a classic Japanese horror picture, seeming more like a plague of mindless fuckmushrooms than a fun monster, the mind flayer, where he got so wrapped up in masturbating over how the mind flayer can make a woman slutty that he forgot to clarify basic facts like a man's ability to go back and forth between squid-monster form and human form and that women don't actually turn into lobotomized corpses after being fed on, and the atlach-nacha, which, in addition to being a loli, and therefore heresy, also fails to clarify that the human being they turn into their spider body can turn back in favor of going on and on about random minutae. There are many other examples; these are merely the most infamous.)

Kenkou Cross has disagreed with observations on his setting's grimdarkness. According to him, the encyclopedia descriptions were exaggerating both the nymphomania of the monstergirls and the intentions of the Monster Lord - the unintended grimdarkness was in fact the product of shoddy translation work. As a result, he forced the most popular website supporting of his work to cease hosting translated versions of his material when a user for there haressed him personally, among other reasons.

He also supposedly likes to argue that the "blame" lies squarely on his Western fandom, since they don't get the overworked-Japanese-salaryman mindset (because apparently a love of pedophilia/body horror/mindrape is a side effect of stress now?) that apparently makes his setting such a paradise. So if he didn't want it to be grimdark, he shouldn't have written himself into a corner where grimdarkness was the only logical explanation for how everything was still working. Though, admittedly, his attitude wasn't helped by Western anti-fans sending him hate-mail and death threats.

Oh, a reminder by the way: if the Chief God wins, then all those sexy monstergirls? They immediately revert back to being hideous monsters, and the mamono mindset of "love humans" will be forced to return to "kill humans" and most monsters will not be able to resist it. So a Chief God victory means restarting the original cycle, and anyone who has a mamono lover, is going to wind up being killed and eaten by his wife. And this time it isn't hyperbole, that's plain and explicit fact, straight from KC, so that's one bit of grimdarkness he's actively promoting, to make the Monster Lord seem the better choice than the old status quo.

The paradox is perhaps best exemplified by the infamous "Fallen Maidens" series, from a side book about the human kingdom of Lescatier, and a selection of unhappy heroines who got turned into monsters by a lilim before all going after the boy they collectively like. KC's intent was to present a pallet of girls who were essentially incapable of finding happiness as humans... but, in the process, he made them deeply fucked-up people, and had them carry the scars of their fucked-up lives into their new existences as monsters. The tomboy soldier with a complex about her own womanhood thanks to her abusive mother that ran out on her family and caused her father to undergo a possibly-lethal breakdown becomes an obsessive pregnancy-fetishist who wants to force everyone to become like her and doesn't even think about her dad anymore. The half-elf with species-angst becomes a nearly-feral wolfgirl who leads "wild hunts" of forced transformation to feed her own sense of liberation-through-animalism. The two princesses, one a heroine put on an impossible pedestal and the other ignored and overlooked due to a weak constitution, find joy in almost literally screaming "fuck you got mine!" and abandoning all concern for the rest of humanity besides than her beau and in transforming into a massive tentacle-queen and turning the entire castle into her mind-controlled sex slaves, respectively. The list goes on. Rather than actually finding happiness and peace, or acknowledging the ways in which their problems were all in their heads, the Fallen Maidens continue to unhealthily project their issues onto the world rather than healing from them, and their trauma creates such extremist monstergirls that it makes them almost impossible to like or relate to.

This is probably why later stories, set in the same continuity, heavily tone down both the wild debauchery of post-lilim Lescatier and the severe mental issues of the post-conversion Maidens into something much more palatable.

"All The Tropes Wiki" (an uncensored fork of TvTropes that hosts all the PROMOTIONS the advertising companies threw a shitfit over) theorizes the grimdark is actually intentional after all, a sort of saccharine-flavored crapsack world where the glass is only half full (as opposed to Warhammer 40k, where the glass is half empty with holes drilled along the bottom). It's not a nice place to live, rape and kidnapping are so common on the frontiers almost everyone is desensitized to it, and roving packs of Amazons and Dark Elf slavers aren't sugarcoated at all... but there's plenty of people living decent lives and there's still plenty of ways things can get better.

Maybe.

...maybe not.

As an aside, many also criticize KC because his girls look like mundane cosplayers, but A) it's not necessarily exclusive to him, B) there's definitely plenty of more 'creative' monstergirl designs in his world too, and C) that's honestly like criticizing the Nazis for their fixation on leather and jackboots. It's valid, sure, but ultimately rings as a jaywalking charge amongst the arson-murder orgy that is everything else wrong with the setting.

Crossover fanfics with various other settings have always been popular. Take, for example, StaffSergeant's Bloodborne fic, The Good Hunter, which has inspired many others.