Monthly Archives: November 2021

I did it all for Tanuki!

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Dungeons & Dragons has a terrific variety of creatures for players to use when creating their next great adventurer. Even classic fantasy beings like humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings can be tweaked with variant options or distinctive subclasses, and there are plenty of oddball options for players too! Cat-people, magic robots, centaurs, fairies, shapeshifters, bird-people, devil-people–there’s something for just about everybody, and it’s a list that keeps expanding! (I’m super psyched for the Owlin coming up in Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos). But there’s one roly-poly folklore trickster spirit that I think would make a terrific player character: TANUKI!

Yeah, my obsession with Japanese monsters absolutely does not end with the gigantic radioactive kind! Tanuki are yokai, and yokai are a “class of supernatural entities and spirits in Japanese folklore.” Yokai include a vast array of ghosts, monsters, demons, spirits, goblins, demoted gods, and people, animals and even inanimate objects transformed by magic, long life or other strange, unknowable forces. There are HUNDREDS of different Yokai, and they range from terrifying, paranormal killing machines to harmless goofball pranksters. Yokai don’t fit neatly into a single category of ghoul or ghost, but I think it’d be pretty fitting to think of them as equivalent to The Fey. The Fey which includes nice-guy Disney fairies like Tinkerbell… but also includes baby-stealing gremlins, undead curse-mongers, tricksters that spoil milk while you sleep, and all kinds of unknowable freakazoids. Tanuki tend to land on the “oafish jokester” end of the yokai spectrum… but if you push these jolly goofers too far they’ll retaliate spectacularly! Sounds like a kick-ass Bard to me! Keep reading to see how I’d use D&D’s existing rules to “homebrew” a playable Tanuki, complete with a Level 1 character sheet!

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Seaward!

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Get it? “Seaward”?

Hey look! It’s my first non-kaiju post!

First things first! If Jess, Rachel, Julie, Megan, or Shawn are reading this, STOP. Please?! C’mon, be cool!

OKAY GOOD (I hope). I don’t think they read this or even know it exists, but ya never know! Seaward is my first on-going, homebrew Dungeons & Dragons campaign! I’ve written and run a couple one-shots and even ran several sessions of a campaign I was writing, but that sputtered out. A lot of D&D does, in my experience!

Seaward is an adventure designed for players with little-to-no D&D experience, but it’s also intended to be engaging and exciting for more experienced players too. This first post will be a sort of “Session Zero”: an origin story for this campaign, a brief look at my own D&D experience, a rundown of the choices I made and why, plus a slate of cool pre-generated player characters! If that sounds cool to you, and again, you aren’t Julie, Shawn, Megan, Rachel, or Jess, read on, brave adventurer!

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MONSTERS HAVE CONQUERED THE WORLD

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[Like I mentioned in my previous post, here’s my incomplete Godzilla vs Kong review! The further along it gets, the more unfinished it is, but I wanted to share what I had before signing off.  After the review I’ll cap it off with a  mess of closing thoughts. Enjoy!]

Godzilla vs. Kong is the movie I have been waiting for since I was a little boy.  Not necessarily this version of the movie, but a big budget, high-profile rematch between my two favorite monsters of all time.  I love these two big mean fuckers on their own, but together?  That’s pure movie magic. Totally audacious, unhinged imagination let loose and exploding on screens all over the planet.  

The more I learned about filmmaking and the more I paid attention to the film industry growing up, the more I came to believe that Godzilla and King Kong would never meet again on the big screen. Even when Legendary announced their plans to build towards this movie, I had my doubts.  A single MonsterVerse flop could easily kill the plan, a global plague could even more easily kill the plan.  And yet!!  And yet here I am, reviewing the movie I’ve hoped for and daydreamed for my whole life and spent over half my life convinced I would never get to see. Not only that, but the rest of the world at large (not just the kaiju fan community!) seems genuinely stoked! True randos were cooking up funny tweets and fan art and speculating about plot details in the lead-up to its release! I told a friend that the release of Godzilla vs. Kong felt like Monster Christmas, he agreed!

w9mn06r6gan61Godzilla vs. Kong, currently the capstone on Legendary Pictures’ ambitious MonsterVerse cinematic universe, has its problems, large and small… but it also delivers all the big, crazy, colorful, joyful, thrilling, scary, gross, and awe-inspiring fun you could ask for in the greatest monster prize fight rematch in history. Just the fact that there’s now a mega-budget, (relative) smash-hit Hollywood blockbuster that has a title starting with “Godzilla vs.” is incredibly exciting. The fact that said title ends with “Kong”?! I’m freaking the fuck out over here, gang. I will be for a long time 🤣

This won’t be one of my usual reviews. Partly because I’m probably incapable of being objective about this movie (I have pretty bad recency bias on a good day, let alone for a movie I’ve daydreamed about since I was 6), but also because I want to talk about where I’ve been lately, the new kaiju boom we’re living in, and how I’m thinking about some major changes when it comes to my writing and this website. I’ve also been jonesing for an excuse to look back on what this site, the kaiju fandom, and the monsters themselves have really meant to me all this time–MONSTERS CONQUER THE WORLD was always a deeply personal project, and these last couple years especially have taught me a lot about myself and why these big stompy bastards matter so much to me.  

So this might be a sort-of kind-of a farewell post? Or at least saying farewell to the super in-depth kaiju reviews?  Who knows, I might feel completely differently in the near future and find myself re-inspired to get back to the big meaty reviews!  I’m not in a position to guarantee anything right now–so instead I want to just go with the flow and see where it takes me. Deep down I’ve been itching to pivot away from writing about other peoples’ creations and start writing my own stuff (I’ve threatened friends and family with fan-fic for years), and that’s at least some part of why I’ve had such a hard time getting out reviews the last couple years. Of course I can’t just WALK AWAY when there’s so much kaiju kontent to review, so for this big funky mega-post I will also do micro-reviews of every “Main Monster’s” filmography. For me that means Godzilla, Kong, Gamera, and Ultraman, and probably a few other odds and ends in there too [Had to ditch this, sorry. Maybe someday!]. This is a weird one and a big one and a personal one, so hoist up your glowing nuke-ax, buckle into your H.E.A.V. and grab a barf bag because we’re atomic breath-ing all the way down to the Hollow fuckin’ Earth!

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Villain Monster Flies Away, Human Heroes Reflect on What They’ve Learned, Good Monster Wades off into the Sunset… Until Next Time

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“I AM OFFICIALLY STOPPING MY BLOG”, he said, stupidly.  

“For sure nobody cares and it’s way weirder that you’re talking about it,” everyone said, correctly but also kind of meanly.  

I don’t know, how else do I open this? I’m stepping away from the blog, but I don’t want to leave it on a cliffhanger. I am okay. I’m not trying to be dramatic or anything weird.  I’m just ready to move on. 

Not from kaiju, of course.  I’m still fucking obsessed.  I’m currently watching Zyuranger, Mirrorman and Ultraman Trigger. Zyuranger is my favorite of the three, and I like it a fartload more than I ever liked Power Rangers.  I know that’s spicy, but I could never get into PR’s Saved by the Bell-ish stories.  And their re-contextualizations of the monsters were lame.  There’s a micro review for ya! Zyuranger FUCKIN’ SHREDDDDS, MAN.

Hahaha okay, so yeah, I’m not moving on from kaiju, but I am moving on from writing reviews of kaiju media (beyond the occasional tweet).  I don’t feel that burning drive to do it anymore, and there are a ton of folks out there covering it faster and more in-depth than I ever could (looking atchoo, Gormaru Island). It’s time to close up shop.  I fell hilariously short of my preposterous goals, but I feel good about it anyway.  It was fun, I made some friends, and I found even more big beautiful beasts to go batty for.  OH HEY A NEW GODZILLA SHORT FILM CAME OUT TODAY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaDfDKIQY5k

As an out-and-proud Final Wars Fanatic and a Hedorah-ing Hedonist, I am of course overwhelmed with joy. It’s a fun, silly little blast.  I made sure to calmly and maturely let Toho know how I felt about the short:

Capture

So I’m stopping the blog, but I’ve got some unfinished writing I want to share. Just for fun, I guess.  My notes for the Ultraman episode “My Home is Earth” are a scant few interesting nuggets I mined from IMDB and Wikipedia (and other ‘pedias), but they capture the harrowing, somber spirit of the episode.  After that is my partial intro for a Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla (1974) review.  I’ve got one more post in me that will be coming soon–the first 75% of a Godzilla vs Kong review plus some closing thoughts.  This stuff’s all incomplete–broken links, missing images, unfinished thoughts, placeholder text, all the blood n’ guts–but I’m a bit of a gorehound, so maybe you are too.  No matter what, thanks for reading.  

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