Yui Does Monster Reviews 2020

[yui 577]

Well, we're here once again.

I'll be doing my utmost to keep my negativity levels in this thread to a minimum, but bringing it all the way to zero would simply be too difficult. In short, despite our good singular monster this year, I'm firmly of the mind the event should have stayed canceled. Because it wasn't though, I have no choice but to accept it, and to carry on with monster reviews as I normally would. Especially since I've heard at least two different people say this could be the end of the Halloween Masquerade as an event. I sure hope it isn't.

As I have done in 2019 and 2018's review threads, I'll be starting with the reviews of the monsters themselves. I'll save the bulk of this year's applicants my bitter snark, and only review the monsters that had any level of extended activity this year. The rest of you get no score, positive or negative. Except you. You know which one you are, yeah?

Jigsaw: The potential was certainly there! I only quickly scanned the AMA and what misc threads I could find, but this was a monster that very clearly had a lot of research and/or passion behind it. I won't be shaving off points for ghosting the latter half of this event either, since it simply seems unfair in Masquerade 2020's climate. It is definitely a shame you couldn't stick to the act, though.
8/10

Chuck Tingle: More or less the sole monster of 2020, but my did you hold the fort. Having little familiarity with Chuck, I can't say for sure how well of a job you did nailing his character, but since it's you, I'm confident in the accuracy. Your constant drive to be a source of activity in the event, reminding everyone that this year's Masquerade was in fact not canceled, is admirable. Ending your run by posting a mini-tingler of your own was a plot twist I didn't see coming, and I even took the time to read it. You also deserve a special commendation, for your efforts have inspired me with ideas to counteract the likely impending death of the Halloween Masquerade as an annual event, in such a way that as long as this forum persists, so should the event. It's just a shame you had to pick this failure of a year to Chuck it up.
10/10!

Halloween Masquerade 2020: Buckle up, kids, this one's gonna be a doozy.

The short version is that, albeit in very different ways and for different reasons from 2018, this year's Halloween Masquerade was a catastrophic failure. Let's start as I tend to start, at the beginning. The beginning of my knowledge of this year's proceedings was in May, when Blake announced the event. The showcase/schedule system proposed was met with some understandable backlash, and the system was adjusted according to provided criticisms. The event was mostly left alone after said adjustments were made, up until the beginning of September. At this point, similarly to last year, management of the event was left in my hands, and I spent the next month or so agonizing over what this year's host monster should be, because I wanted it to gel with the spotlight system. In the end I chose The Necrodancer, since I could pass the shifting days off as a rhythm thing, but this ultimately did not matter.

Once recruitment opened up, Chuck Tingle and Jigsaw immediately joined the fray, and I eagerly awaited to see what would come next. Some more monsters trickled in, but we simply weren't getting enough monsters to make the event feasible with this system. So, even though I was initially against the idea, I implemented a point reward for doing your part as a monster. This did not help. With mere days up until the event, I re-assessed the length of it and did some math on how many monsters I could make it work with at the absolute bare minimum. The number I had drawn up was 8, and I still lowered my recruitment floor from 10 all the way down to a measly 6 for this year's quota. With literally one more monster required and some 3-5 days left for recruitment, still no further applications were made. Deciding that it would be better to have no Masquerade at all than another disaster like 2018, I shut the gates on the event, and declared it canceled.

This did not matter.

When I woke up on the afternoon of October 19th, I saw that the festivities had in fact begun all the same, and that one of the applicants had simply decided "I don't care," went to CowCow to get the monster accounts enabled and set up, then declared everything underway and threw away the system I wanted to discard but on a professional level couldn't. I was livid, nearly out for blood, even. Simply recalling the events angers me, so let's move on instead of lingering. Over the course of the event, I'd shifted to the stance of accepting that this was happening, but heavily disagreeing that it was the right choice to make in any capacity. On an overall scale, I like to think I was correct; three out of five monsters immediately ghosted the event entirely. A fourth soon followed. While the one we were left with was a real gem, one good monster does not a Masquerade make.

While this does beg the question of if 2020 was simply an unlucky flop or if this event truly is dying, and what to do if it is, those are questions we yet have a whole year to figure out. The better questions that can be answered now are what went wrong this year. And frankly, I don't know what it was. All that leaves is the score. 3/10.

[MetalSonic 86]

I’ll admit that there were some missed opportunities between Jigsaw and Chuck. I could’ve said something to the effect of “How many people have vowed to reshape their lives after meeting death?” or something like that. However, after Thar dropped, I didn’t really have any ideas after that. I had a game wrote out for Himiko, but since she never came back on, I never did it.

As for my portrayal, I actually binged the entire Saw series just to portray the character.

[Thar 502]

3 hours ago, MetalSonic said:

I’ll admit that there were some missed opportunities between Jigsaw and Chuck. I could’ve said something to the effect of “How many people have vowed to reshape their lives after meeting death?” or something like that. However, after Thar dropped, I didn’t really have any ideas after that. I had a game wrote out for Himiko, but since she never came back on, I never did it.

As for my portrayal, I actually binged the entire Saw series just to portray the character.

Yeah, sorry, but my enthusiasm for the event was about matched with Yui. I was kind of excited at first, but then as the event got closer and people kept shrugging it off, it just started to wither. Then by the time it would've started, it just did. However, considering there wasn't that much attention being put towards it, whatever hope I had went away again and I got bored.

For anyone wondering, I was Sir Cophagus. Literally only made the monster cause I imagined a sarcophagus with a mustache, monocle, and top hat speaking like a posh Englishman... and he coughed a lot because "sar-cough-agus." Heh.

[LordCowCow 842]

5 hours ago, Thar said:

Yeah, sorry, but my enthusiasm for the event was about matched with Yui. I was kind of excited at first, but then as the event got closer and people kept shrugging it off, it just started to wither. Then by the time it would've started, it just did. However, considering there wasn't that much attention being put towards it, whatever hope I had went away again and I got bored.

For anyone wondering, I was Sir Cophagus. Literally only made the monster cause I imagined a sarcophagus with a mustache, monocle, and top hat speaking like a posh Englishman... and he coughed a lot because "sar-cough-agus." Heh.

If it means anything I liked the idea

[Thar 502]

1 hour ago, LordCowCow said:

If it means anything I liked the idea

I appreciate it, bud.

[radio414 911]

Oh is this the demasking thread now too? I liked the idea of keeping it a secret forever, especially since, like, half the active userbase of the site already knew, but if everyone else is doing it, I was Chuck Tingle. Preparation was pretty easy, you just have to skim his twitter feed or his four rebbit AMAs (and one hilarious post in the Dead by Daylight subreddit) and you can get a pretty good sense his personality and personal mythos. There are things I didn't touch on, though. I didn't mention the entirety of the Tingleverse outside of one AMA question, nor did I ever really mention Void Crabs or Reverse Twins. Chuck -- the real Chuck Tingle -- really is a great person to follow, and every Amazon link I posted is because I do want more people to actually read some of this stuff.

I guess I should talk briefly about Rammed by the Realization... too. I don't think it's to the standard of most of Chuck's tinglers, but it does follow the same sort of formula. I wasn't able to completely break from my personal writing style, but I did manage enough for it to feel actually kind of freeing to write, so I'm glad that people enjoyed it.