Admiral
very well, i shall smoke this “bowl” with you. but take warning! henceforth i may become quite….. silly…
Is this anything?
The hanged man tarot card can often symbolize wisdom and enlightenment through sacrifice. Thought it was fitting for Barbie :)
“It’s literally impossible to be a woman.
You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow, we're always doing it wrong?
You have to be thin, but not too thin, and you can never say you wanna be thin. You have to say you wanna be healthy, but also, you have to BE THIN.
You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass.
You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean.
You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas.
You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the damn time.
You have to be a career woman, but also, always be looking out for other people.
You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is INSANE, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining!
You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood, but ALWAYS STAND OUT and ALWAYS BE GRATEFUL. But never forget that the system is rigged, so find a way to acknowledge that but ALSO, always be grateful!
You have to never get old. Never be rude. Never show off. Never be selfish. Never fall down. Never fail. Never show fear. Never get OUT OF LINE. It's too hard! It's too contradictory, and nobody gives you a medal or says 'thank you!' And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything wrong, but also, everything is your fault.
I'm just so tired of watching myself, and every single other woman tie herself into knots, so that people will like us.
And if all of that, is also true for a doll just representing a woman, then I don't even know." -Gloria the barbie movie
this is it. this is exactly it oh my god.
This is the speech. Write it on every goddamn wall out there.
Vampire Guillermo and "human" Nandor
So I've made a post about how the Hunter's Guild from Monster Hunter should be the series's antagonist that got a bit of traction. So I figured I'd write up a rundown of how this could look in a story for the mainline series.
So the setup is this:
In the past couple of years, the population of Monoblos have been slowly decreasing due to a mixture of poaching and over hunting due to their cultural significance as a right of passage for new hunters. They were rare before but not to the degree that entire generations of desert dwelling people have never seen one in the flesh. The Guild has thus far not addressed this rapid decline, and have made no plans to attempt at conserving them either. And every time someone comes forward with a proposal for a conservation effort it's declined with the excuse of limited resources, or lack of evidence, and even sometimes with no reasoning at all.
You the player, a new and upcoming hunter, are hired as an escort alongside a few other hunters to guide the cart of a passionate researcher couple to a nearby desert town. These two are researching the increasing decline of Monoblos and are gathering evidence to build a case for the guild to begin a conservation effort. They had heard of sightings of a large flying Wyvern with a crimson horn a few towns over and began their truck there.
On the way there, there's a boulder blocking the road. Upon going up to inspect it alongside one of the other hunters present you both note distinct scratch marks and massive horn shaped holes pierced into it. Immediately the researchers jump up and go to inspect themselves and then dart off in a direction to find more tracks. After following the for a bit you discover a small but healthy herd of Monoblos all living in this secluded and out of the way grassland. Immediately the researchers send for the guild to get funding for a conservation effort and, with no real argument against, it's accepted reluctantly. The funding is limited and very restrictive, but it's something! The Guild agrees to fund the conservation effort under the condition that there be a guild official present to supervise the operation and that if there's any violations of Guild guidelines, or accidents involving major property damage that it would be shut down.
And the the game would go one like a normal monster hunter game! You'd help around the village, hunt a few monsters to secure areas or get materials for tools all alongside the Hunter's and researchers you came here with. Every mission is this big victory and everyone's super excited at new discoveries. The guild official is being a real stick in the mud the whole game as is this one rich merchant in town who isn't super jazzed about these dirty hunters muddying up their vacation and closing one or two of their trade routes for their silly conservation effort.
But it's going really well! The groups learning all sorts of stuff and getting closer with one another and building this sort of found family thing. You learn at some point the herd is actually comprised pretty much entirely of females taking care of their young and begin searching for a nearby male to maybe keep track of. And you find one! A white Monoblos male! Heck! The guild official is even getting on board and being won over by all this infectious optimism!
And then something goes wrong. While on a quest to capture and get scent trackers onto the male Monoblos, it escapes the trap before you can use the tranq bombs and one of the hunters is gravely injured and you see it run into a few carts while fleeing away. Obviously the Guild official finds out and now there's this moment where you don't know what's going to happen. Throughout the entire story they're grumpy demeanor and pessimism had been slowly chipped away at to the point that they've become friends with the team and villagers. They've even grown attached to the Monoblos and is fully bought into saving them from extinction.
Will they tell the guild? Shut down the whole operation?
A day passes and nothing happens. Everyone's overjoyed! We can continue the conservation! You go out to run a quick errand and when you return there are guild knights everywhere. Funding is being pulled left and right, everything you've worked for is being confiscated or destroyed and their calling for this aggressive white monoblos' head. Everyone on the team is discharged and told to go back to the nearest guild city. You find out that the guild representative wasn't the one who actually told them and that they were actually fired. The culprit who informed the Guild was instead the grumpy rich merchant because the carts destroyed were theirs. They were still running their trade in secret and illegally.
The games sort of final quest would be an off the books repel quest where you, with the help of the now ex Guild worker, go behind the Guild's back to redirect the Monoblos away from the village before they have a chance to kill it.
The game could end a few ways. Like the guild learning of the merchant's illegal trading and arresting them and the conservation effort receiving the funding they need. Or it could end with the White Monoblos reuniting with the back and relocating away from civilization. Etc etc.
This is what I mean when I say they should antagonize the guild. I'm not asking for a grandiose story about the guild's corruption that paints us as the bad guys or paints hunting as this immoral thing that's solved by the end of the game. I just want small scale stories that play with the themes of environmentalism and colonialism that Monster Hunter has baked into its very core. I want character driven narratives that are about people and how they can achieve amazing things through cooperation.
And this is just one of them! They could do stories involving the tribe of Anjanath worshippers and mirror real life colonialism. They could do one where two central characters have completely different ideals about hunting and how that fractures their relationship. There are so many possibilities for multiple different games! You could even have recurring characters with arcs that span across multiple entries! Do it Capcom! Please!
I 100% sign off on this. Feel free to use it for that!
making up characters is so fun because you can be like “this is johnson he came from my mind” and all your friends will go “yippe!!! horray!!! we love johnson!!!”
very unfortunate but hilarious side effect of calling the example oc johnson in this post is now people are saying this in the tags
i don’t know where the notion that if you don’t give big bucks to an artist then you’re not really supporting them came from, but when people say even a tiny bit of monetary support saves an artist, it’s not for the aesthetic or the gesture of it all. i’ve been able to have actual drinking water on days i’ve been incredibly broke simply because someone bought a brush pack for 2 euros. in the most actual, literal way i could possibly convey this: the SMALLEST amount counts. in practice counts. people-get-to-eat-today counts. especially in this age of everyone and their mother being out to deplatform artists. there’s value in the tiniest of ways
So I've made a post about how the Hunter's Guild from Monster Hunter should be the series's antagonist that got a bit of traction. So I figured I'd write up a rundown of how this could look in a story for the mainline series.
So the setup is this:
In the past couple of years, the population of Monoblos have been slowly decreasing due to a mixture of poaching and over hunting due to their cultural significance as a right of passage for new hunters. They were rare before but not to the degree that entire generations of desert dwelling people have never seen one in the flesh. The Guild has thus far not addressed this rapid decline, and have made no plans to attempt at conserving them either. And every time someone comes forward with a proposal for a conservation effort it's declined with the excuse of limited resources, or lack of evidence, and even sometimes with no reasoning at all.
You the player, a new and upcoming hunter, are hired as an escort alongside a few other hunters to guide the cart of a passionate researcher couple to a nearby desert town. These two are researching the increasing decline of Monoblos and are gathering evidence to build a case for the guild to begin a conservation effort. They had heard of sightings of a large flying Wyvern with a crimson horn a few towns over and began their truck there.
On the way there, there's a boulder blocking the road. Upon going up to inspect it alongside one of the other hunters present you both note distinct scratch marks and massive horn shaped holes pierced into it. Immediately the researchers jump up and go to inspect themselves and then dart off in a direction to find more tracks. After following the for a bit you discover a small but healthy herd of Monoblos all living in this secluded and out of the way grassland. Immediately the researchers send for the guild to get funding for a conservation effort and, with no real argument against, it's accepted reluctantly. The funding is limited and very restrictive, but it's something! The Guild agrees to fund the conservation effort under the condition that there be a guild official present to supervise the operation and that if there's any violations of Guild guidelines, or accidents involving major property damage that it would be shut down.
And the the game would go one like a normal monster hunter game! You'd help around the village, hunt a few monsters to secure areas or get materials for tools all alongside the Hunter's and researchers you came here with. Every mission is this big victory and everyone's super excited at new discoveries. The guild official is being a real stick in the mud the whole game as is this one rich merchant in town who isn't super jazzed about these dirty hunters muddying up their vacation and closing one or two of their trade routes for their silly conservation effort.
But it's going really well! The groups learning all sorts of stuff and getting closer with one another and building this sort of found family thing. You learn at some point the herd is actually comprised pretty much entirely of females taking care of their young and begin searching for a nearby male to maybe keep track of. And you find one! A white Monoblos male! Heck! The guild official is even getting on board and being won over by all this infectious optimism!
And then something goes wrong. While on a quest to capture and get scent trackers onto the male Monoblos, it escapes the trap before you can use the tranq bombs and one of the hunters is gravely injured and you see it run into a few carts while fleeing away. Obviously the Guild official finds out and now there's this moment where you don't know what's going to happen. Throughout the entire story they're grumpy demeanor and pessimism had been slowly chipped away at to the point that they've become friends with the team and villagers. They've even grown attached to the Monoblos and is fully bought into saving them from extinction.
Will they tell the guild? Shut down the whole operation?
A day passes and nothing happens. Everyone's overjoyed! We can continue the conservation! You go out to run a quick errand and when you return there are guild knights everywhere. Funding is being pulled left and right, everything you've worked for is being confiscated or destroyed and their calling for this aggressive white monoblos' head. Everyone on the team is discharged and told to go back to the nearest guild city. You find out that the guild representative wasn't the one who actually told them and that they were actually fired. The culprit who informed the Guild was instead the grumpy rich merchant because the carts destroyed were theirs. They were still running their trade in secret and illegally.
The games sort of final quest would be an off the books repel quest where you, with the help of the now ex Guild worker, go behind the Guild's back to redirect the Monoblos away from the village before they have a chance to kill it.
The game could end a few ways. Like the guild learning of the merchant's illegal trading and arresting them and the conservation effort receiving the funding they need. Or it could end with the White Monoblos reuniting with the back and relocating away from civilization. Etc etc.
This is what I mean when I say they should antagonize the guild. I'm not asking for a grandiose story about the guild's corruption that paints us as the bad guys or paints hunting as this immoral thing that's solved by the end of the game. I just want small scale stories that play with the themes of environmentalism and colonialism that Monster Hunter has baked into its very core. I want character driven narratives that are about people and how they can achieve amazing things through cooperation.
And this is just one of them! They could do stories involving the tribe of Anjanath worshippers and mirror real life colonialism. They could do one where two central characters have completely different ideals about hunting and how that fractures their relationship. There are so many possibilities for multiple different games! You could even have recurring characters with arcs that span across multiple entries! Do it Capcom! Please!
If Capcom wants to make a compelling narrative for Monster Hunter, which they have shown they do, they really have to lean into portraying the guild as an antagonist.
The guild works closely with rich nobility, they have a set of rules for hunting that specifically hurt poor villages, and they frequently make catastrophic judgement calls when assessing threats that end up actively hurting the ecosystem. The guild has, so far, been correct once when taking out a potential problem monster with the magalas. In tri they thought that lagiacrus was MAYBE causing the earthquakes and then asked us to just kill it, no questions asked. In world they thought nergigante was MAYBE a threat to the new world and then asked us to just kill it, no questions asked. In rise they thought MAYBE that magnamalo was causing the rampage then asked us to just kill it, NO QUESTIONS ASKED.
That's not just some mistake that's the unnecessary death of an animal! Think about that in real life and how horrible that would sound!
"Oh we thought this pack of lions was killing livestock so we sent some people to kill them all. Turns out, we were wrong and it was this other completely different animal. We are conservationists!"
Not to mention legends of the guild is an entire ass movie about how the guild fundamentally failed this small poor village on a systemic level that Aidan, a CHILD btw, was throwing himself into life or death situations just so his community wouldn't be wiped off the map. When Julius calls Aidan out on the fact that he's supposedly poaching and not hunting, that wasn't a fun opportunity to give an exposition about the world. It was pointing out the guild's hypocrisy! Aidan's reactive anger at Julius calling him a poacher was the correct response! They shouldn't HAVE to make a three day journey to dundorma every time a velociprey takes a chicken. That kind of thing should be handled by the guild. The guild doesn't allocate resources to helping these villages while giving an incentive to not help them to individual Hunters. Then when these villages finally decide they aren't going to wait around for help or go through the multiple day travel to register a quest with what little money they have and actually SOLVE their problem. ITS ILLEGAL TO DO SO!!!
And you know what's super cool about poaching? How the punishment is the guild sending assassins to take you out. For the multitude of Monster hunter fans who seem to think that's a reasonable response to that, lemme just tell ya it isn't. That sounds an awful lot like fascism! ESPECIALLY because we now know what qualifies as poaching! It can be as small as taking out a few small monsters who have been proven to be a threat to your village without a license. Aidan literally could have been assassinated for helping his village. A CHILD!
Quit trying and failing to get me invested in the villainous schemes of some fuckin dragon that's just acting on instincts, Capcom. You already HAVE a perfect antagonist right there!
while the idea is good i doubt they'll do it cus while I'd love a fascist hunter game if you turn the monsters into victims then it's not really monster hunter anymore, a story like that doesn't really fit the gameplay of monster hunter, monster hunter stories is the series where you could do that because there monsters are mostly your friends. personally I think what they're doing with mh rn is fine, I'm way more interested in the game play than the story and I'd rather the story change to fit the gameplay than otherwise
I explained this in a different post so the tldr is that this wouldn't be a single game story and would be series spanning. It's easily accepted that most*** hunting is fine and as ethical as it can be. There's a certain amount of necessity especially when it comes to well established monsters.
The cases where it's not ethical is when the guild is like "new monster! Scary!" And we just kill it instead of researching it which is a thing that happens once per game. The guild would essentially be the antagonist for the series but each game would have a different villain each time that's under the umbrella of the guild as an organisation. Maybe one time it's an explicitly corrupt bureaucrat, another time it's a misinformed high up hunter.
Basically having them be the antagonist can lead to more character driven stories that focus on the interpersonal relationships with the monsters being more so obstacles. The gameplay loop wouldn't change, we'd just have a few moments where someone's like "hey we shouldn't kill this one this time" and then someones like "but we gotta!!!" As dramatic music begins to play and it's like used as a metaphor for those two characters relationships.
I read the other post and im not sure, still seems not too fitting, it could be tackled but if the guild is the main antagonist how would you have a final boss fight? something like primordial malzeno would work but it can't be like that every game, focusing on this guy being a dick for wanting to kill a monster and then being like "anyway this monster is an issue let's kill it" feels even more disconnected to the gameplay especially if its in addition to the already shaky "part of the balance of nature" while we out here killing 50 rathians for a skirt.
it feels more like this could be just a side thing with some monsters having some specific reason why they can't be hunted like being endangered, to me focusing on the conflict with this dude that's a dick while the gameplay is going completely elsewhere just doesnt feel right, if we're gonna have a plot point be the main conflict then i wanna play with it not just read it, like yes you can have this sort of story in an mh game but if its disconnected from the gameplay what's the point?
idk I think there's probs better ways to handle the story, I think this kind of story should be played through in mh stories where it just fits like a glove rather than being spent in the main series.
They could very easily do final bosses as a monster that's mostly unrelated to the mains story monster. Like say monoblos are endangered and are the main focus. What if there was this elder dragon that's been pushed out of its main home because of maybe a quest we did earlier in the game and encroaching on their territory and preying on them unnecessarily. Then you finally run into it and there's a few quests spent trying to figure out why it's preying on monoblos and why it's even there to begin with. And then you discover that it's kind of your fault so now that's the big final boss fight.
Or you have a moment where the guild is asking us to kill something that poses no threat so instead we go behind their backs and repel or capture the monster (probably repel cause it's basically a hunt quest without the carving). The fight is still brutal and a real test, but it's not explicitly a violent conclusion. Or! It is a violent conclusion by accident and the game ends on a bittersweet note that leads into a character arc for Aidan or someone else in a later game.
The whole "here's the final fight! PSYCH!!! Here's a bigger one that's completely unrelated!" Surprise thing they keep doing needs to be shelved. You can still have a big "final" monster as an online siege quest or something. But having it be directly tied to the story and meant to be big and important just never works because it's a poorly done twist villain.
It absolutely could be done and I think it should be. Monster hunter is so tied to environmentalism and nature preservation with its themes and using that to explore stories about overcoming the odds and actually helping nature would be so freaking cool. Especially now what with ecosystems still recovering from what humans have done to them. And having a recurring cast of characters that go through a variety of arcs would be just so dang fun to watch! Imagine Julius being so deep in guild politics that he fails to realize what they're doing isn't good and has to have some sense knocked into him by Aidan and Nadia. It would make my heart sing.
meh idk, I can see this being nice but I don't think I like the disconnect from gameplay much, I don't feel like we're really in the position to call out a guy for wanting to kill monsters while we're killing thousands of them to get a snazzy fit
That's very fair. I think the main thing I'm operating under is that main story quests happen once canonically and optional quests are just there for gameplay purposes. Like in world we only killed that one tobi kadachi and the optional quest ones are either non canon or were also genuinely registered as threats y'know? It's a real copium mindset to be fair but it helps me sleep at night lol
If Capcom wants to make a compelling narrative for Monster Hunter, which they have shown they do, they really have to lean into portraying the guild as an antagonist.
The guild works closely with rich nobility, they have a set of rules for hunting that specifically hurt poor villages, and they frequently make catastrophic judgement calls when assessing threats that end up actively hurting the ecosystem. The guild has, so far, been correct once when taking out a potential problem monster with the magalas. In tri they thought that lagiacrus was MAYBE causing the earthquakes and then asked us to just kill it, no questions asked. In world they thought nergigante was MAYBE a threat to the new world and then asked us to just kill it, no questions asked. In rise they thought MAYBE that magnamalo was causing the rampage then asked us to just kill it, NO QUESTIONS ASKED.
That's not just some mistake that's the unnecessary death of an animal! Think about that in real life and how horrible that would sound!
"Oh we thought this pack of lions was killing livestock so we sent some people to kill them all. Turns out, we were wrong and it was this other completely different animal. We are conservationists!"
Not to mention legends of the guild is an entire ass movie about how the guild fundamentally failed this small poor village on a systemic level that Aidan, a CHILD btw, was throwing himself into life or death situations just so his community wouldn't be wiped off the map. When Julius calls Aidan out on the fact that he's supposedly poaching and not hunting, that wasn't a fun opportunity to give an exposition about the world. It was pointing out the guild's hypocrisy! Aidan's reactive anger at Julius calling him a poacher was the correct response! They shouldn't HAVE to make a three day journey to dundorma every time a velociprey takes a chicken. That kind of thing should be handled by the guild. The guild doesn't allocate resources to helping these villages while giving an incentive to not help them to individual Hunters. Then when these villages finally decide they aren't going to wait around for help or go through the multiple day travel to register a quest with what little money they have and actually SOLVE their problem. ITS ILLEGAL TO DO SO!!!
And you know what's super cool about poaching? How the punishment is the guild sending assassins to take you out. For the multitude of Monster hunter fans who seem to think that's a reasonable response to that, lemme just tell ya it isn't. That sounds an awful lot like fascism! ESPECIALLY because we now know what qualifies as poaching! It can be as small as taking out a few small monsters who have been proven to be a threat to your village without a license. Aidan literally could have been assassinated for helping his village. A CHILD!
Quit trying and failing to get me invested in the villainous schemes of some fuckin dragon that's just acting on instincts, Capcom. You already HAVE a perfect antagonist right there!
while the idea is good i doubt they'll do it cus while I'd love a fascist hunter game if you turn the monsters into victims then it's not really monster hunter anymore, a story like that doesn't really fit the gameplay of monster hunter, monster hunter stories is the series where you could do that because there monsters are mostly your friends. personally I think what they're doing with mh rn is fine, I'm way more interested in the game play than the story and I'd rather the story change to fit the gameplay than otherwise
I explained this in a different post so the tldr is that this wouldn't be a single game story and would be series spanning. It's easily accepted that most*** hunting is fine and as ethical as it can be. There's a certain amount of necessity especially when it comes to well established monsters.
The cases where it's not ethical is when the guild is like "new monster! Scary!" And we just kill it instead of researching it which is a thing that happens once per game. The guild would essentially be the antagonist for the series but each game would have a different villain each time that's under the umbrella of the guild as an organisation. Maybe one time it's an explicitly corrupt bureaucrat, another time it's a misinformed high up hunter.
Basically having them be the antagonist can lead to more character driven stories that focus on the interpersonal relationships with the monsters being more so obstacles. The gameplay loop wouldn't change, we'd just have a few moments where someone's like "hey we shouldn't kill this one this time" and then someones like "but we gotta!!!" As dramatic music begins to play and it's like used as a metaphor for those two characters relationships.
I read the other post and im not sure, still seems not too fitting, it could be tackled but if the guild is the main antagonist how would you have a final boss fight? something like primordial malzeno would work but it can't be like that every game, focusing on this guy being a dick for wanting to kill a monster and then being like "anyway this monster is an issue let's kill it" feels even more disconnected to the gameplay especially if its in addition to the already shaky "part of the balance of nature" while we out here killing 50 rathians for a skirt.
it feels more like this could be just a side thing with some monsters having some specific reason why they can't be hunted like being endangered, to me focusing on the conflict with this dude that's a dick while the gameplay is going completely elsewhere just doesnt feel right, if we're gonna have a plot point be the main conflict then i wanna play with it not just read it, like yes you can have this sort of story in an mh game but if its disconnected from the gameplay what's the point?
idk I think there's probs better ways to handle the story, I think this kind of story should be played through in mh stories where it just fits like a glove rather than being spent in the main series.
They could very easily do final bosses as a monster that's mostly unrelated to the mains story monster. Like say monoblos are endangered and are the main focus. What if there was this elder dragon that's been pushed out of its main home because of maybe a quest we did earlier in the game and encroaching on their territory and preying on them unnecessarily. Then you finally run into it and there's a few quests spent trying to figure out why it's preying on monoblos and why it's even there to begin with. And then you discover that it's kind of your fault so now that's the big final boss fight.
Or you have a moment where the guild is asking us to kill something that poses no threat so instead we go behind their backs and repel or capture the monster (probably repel cause it's basically a hunt quest without the carving). The fight is still brutal and a real test, but it's not explicitly a violent conclusion. Or! It is a violent conclusion by accident and the game ends on a bittersweet note that leads into a character arc for Aidan or someone else in a later game.
The whole "here's the final fight! PSYCH!!! Here's a bigger one that's completely unrelated!" Surprise thing they keep doing needs to be shelved. You can still have a big "final" monster as an online siege quest or something. But having it be directly tied to the story and meant to be big and important just never works because it's a poorly done twist villain.
It absolutely could be done and I think it should be. Monster hunter is so tied to environmentalism and nature preservation with its themes and using that to explore stories about overcoming the odds and actually helping nature would be so freaking cool. Especially now what with ecosystems still recovering from what humans have done to them. And having a recurring cast of characters that go through a variety of arcs would be just so dang fun to watch! Imagine Julius being so deep in guild politics that he fails to realize what they're doing isn't good and has to have some sense knocked into him by Aidan and Nadia. It would make my heart sing.
If Capcom wants to make a compelling narrative for Monster Hunter, which they have shown they do, they really have to lean into portraying the guild as an antagonist.
The guild works closely with rich nobility, they have a set of rules for hunting that specifically hurt poor villages, and they frequently make catastrophic judgement calls when assessing threats that end up actively hurting the ecosystem. The guild has, so far, been correct once when taking out a potential problem monster with the magalas. In tri they thought that lagiacrus was MAYBE causing the earthquakes and then asked us to just kill it, no questions asked. In world they thought nergigante was MAYBE a threat to the new world and then asked us to just kill it, no questions asked. In rise they thought MAYBE that magnamalo was causing the rampage then asked us to just kill it, NO QUESTIONS ASKED.
That's not just some mistake that's the unnecessary death of an animal! Think about that in real life and how horrible that would sound!
"Oh we thought this pack of lions was killing livestock so we sent some people to kill them all. Turns out, we were wrong and it was this other completely different animal. We are conservationists!"
Not to mention legends of the guild is an entire ass movie about how the guild fundamentally failed this small poor village on a systemic level that Aidan, a CHILD btw, was throwing himself into life or death situations just so his community wouldn't be wiped off the map. When Julius calls Aidan out on the fact that he's supposedly poaching and not hunting, that wasn't a fun opportunity to give an exposition about the world. It was pointing out the guild's hypocrisy! Aidan's reactive anger at Julius calling him a poacher was the correct response! They shouldn't HAVE to make a three day journey to dundorma every time a velociprey takes a chicken. That kind of thing should be handled by the guild. The guild doesn't allocate resources to helping these villages while giving an incentive to not help them to individual Hunters. Then when these villages finally decide they aren't going to wait around for help or go through the multiple day travel to register a quest with what little money they have and actually SOLVE their problem. ITS ILLEGAL TO DO SO!!!
And you know what's super cool about poaching? How the punishment is the guild sending assassins to take you out. For the multitude of Monster hunter fans who seem to think that's a reasonable response to that, lemme just tell ya it isn't. That sounds an awful lot like fascism! ESPECIALLY because we now know what qualifies as poaching! It can be as small as taking out a few small monsters who have been proven to be a threat to your village without a license. Aidan literally could have been assassinated for helping his village. A CHILD!
Quit trying and failing to get me invested in the villainous schemes of some fuckin dragon that's just acting on instincts, Capcom. You already HAVE a perfect antagonist right there!
while the idea is good i doubt they'll do it cus while I'd love a fascist hunter game if you turn the monsters into victims then it's not really monster hunter anymore, a story like that doesn't really fit the gameplay of monster hunter, monster hunter stories is the series where you could do that because there monsters are mostly your friends. personally I think what they're doing with mh rn is fine, I'm way more interested in the game play than the story and I'd rather the story change to fit the gameplay than otherwise
I explained this in a different post so the tldr is that this wouldn't be a single game story and would be series spanning. It's easily accepted that most*** hunting is fine and as ethical as it can be. There's a certain amount of necessity especially when it comes to well established monsters.
The cases where it's not ethical is when the guild is like "new monster! Scary!" And we just kill it instead of researching it which is a thing that happens once per game. The guild would essentially be the antagonist for the series but each game would have a different villain each time that's under the umbrella of the guild as an organisation. Maybe one time it's an explicitly corrupt bureaucrat, another time it's a misinformed high up hunter.
Basically having them be the antagonist can lead to more character driven stories that focus on the interpersonal relationships with the monsters being more so obstacles. The gameplay loop wouldn't change, we'd just have a few moments where someone's like "hey we shouldn't kill this one this time" and then someones like "but we gotta!!!" As dramatic music begins to play and it's like used as a metaphor for those two characters relationships.
I've been looking around so I figure I should post a thing here. I've been wanting to get into dnd but just need a group to join first. I'm looking for a LGBTQ+ friendly group who leans more on the roleplaying side of things ideally but less roleplay is also fine by me. My schedule is really flexible but I'm most free after 8:30pm PST most days though that's only if you're needing to chat.
I already have a pretty good idea for a character but can change or scrap them to fit in with the setting as needed.
Discord: .turtleboy
Game type: online
Time zone: PST
Just shoot me a message on here or send me a request on discord if you have any spots open for a campaign!
trans people i’m happy you’re alive!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i’m so glad you’re here!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! keep doing your best!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i love you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Bosco's mom Bosa! First half of the power couple
