[Girls of the Wilds/Monmusu Quest] Monsters of the Wilds

[Empyrean]

This is Gabriel Blessing's latest fic. A few people have given this one a shot so far and it's mostly getting panned. I figured I would start a thread about it rather than clutter up the What Are You Reading? thread, to explain what it's all about and why I actually like it. I've read up to the latest translated chapter of Girls of the Wilds (89) and played most of Monmusu Quest, with a plot synopsis to cover the rest. Spoilers for both stories follow, particularly for Monmusu Quest, which has a lot more territory to cover in terms of characters and backstory before Monsters of the Wilds makes sense.

Girls of the Wilds is a Korean webcomic about a hardworking wuss named Song Jae Gu who is trying to raise his two young siblings after his mother abandoned them all. He is lured with the promise of a full scholarship to join a newly co-ed high school full of girls who are crazy about martial arts. He is the only male student. He draws the romantic attention of the undisputed toughest fighter in the school, and her two friends who are also high ranked fighters. He's sort of resentful of women in general after his mother's stunt, and his classmates before he joined Wilds High tormented him mercilessly for his financial struggles. Most of the focus so far is him learning how to fight and stop being such a pushover. Nobody outside of the school is worth a damn in a fight; these schoolgirls effortlessly beat down grown men who have the advantage of numbers and weapons, but mostly they just fight each other. The webcomic is roughly equal parts comedy, fighting, and melodrama.

Monmusu Quest is a JRPG with lots and lots of very bizarre porn. Almost every fight is a race to defeat the opponent--monster girls with varying degrees of anthropomorphism--before she can subdue you and rape you to death. Despite the gameplay being what it is, the story is actually quite engaging and the characters are surprisingly complex. The story takes place in a world populated by humans and monsters. Monsters are universally female and reproduce by mating with humans, consent optional. The dominant human religion is dedicated to a goddess named Illias, who occasionally appears to Luka, the player character, and encourages him to become a hero and defeat the Monster Lord. Illias is very much opposed to the existence of monsters, to the point where monster genocide is pretty much the central tenet of her religion. The monsters are generally tough enough to handle themselves in the face of human heroes sent by Illias to kill them all.

Luka wants to be a hero, but he believes that human/monster coexistence is better than just wiping them all out, so he's an idealistic heretic from the start. Before he even properly begins his journey, he finds an aloof and devastatingly powerful lamia named Alice in the woods outside his house, who decides to accompany him on his quest. She can assume human form to pass unnoticed in human territory, and it is revealed early on that Alice is, in fact, the Monster Lord. She grills Luka constantly about his ideal of human/monster coexistence, often mocking him for his apparent naivete, but she does provide Luka with training and a nonlethal weapon with which to defend himself. She hides before other monsters attack, in order for Luka to make his own way, despite her being the most powerful of all monsters as well as their recognized sovereign: a title she earned via ritual combat, which marks her as the most powerful monster in the world.

Alice notices that Luka throws himself into fights to protect humans or monsters with a total disregard for his own safety. Rather than this just being standard hero behavior, it's revealed that Luka's father was a genocidal asshole who founded a human terrorist group that operates mostly against monsters who can't defend themselves, and Luka has something of a death wish out of the shame of his father's legacy. Alice helps him deal with this and realize that he needs to stop feeling guilty for his father's legacy and work to end it rather than dying in an ineffectual symbolic gesture against it.

The two of them travel all over the world, gradually making their way to Hellgondo, the continent at the heart of monster territory. Along the way there is a recurring pattern of human/monster conflict which is resolved by Luka hitting things with his nonlethal sword. Luka and Alice run into Alice's lieutenants along the way, the Four Heavenly Knights who were the second through fifth place finishers in the battle royale that made Alice the Monster Lord. There is character development as well; Luka becomes a bit wiser about getting involved in conflicts so that he isn't just a willing pawn, while Alice becomes less critical of Luka's ideals, and it's revealed that she also desires human/monster coexistence, but isn't sure if he can achieve it and expected him to give up or die already. Alice does her best to help Luka become as powerful as possible, and she seems to love him, or at least she manages some combination of respect, friendship, and lust that amounts to pretty much the same thing. Still, she's a tsundere love interest in a porn game that caters heavily to fans of female domination, so she keeps up a steady stream of lighthearted verbal abuse most of the time, and initiates sexual encounters that change as the story goes. At the start, it's basically just a matter of Alice being bored, hungry for 'precious bodily fluids,' and thinks it's funny to humiliate Luka and drive him into conflict with Illias' prohibition on human/monster relations. Later on there is actually mutual affection.

Eventually, Luka defeats the Four Heavenly Knights and is then challenged by Alice. Alice's mother and predecessor (the title of Monster Lord is awarded via battle royale, but it's always been in her line because Alice's family is just naturally that badass) had gambled on getting herself killed by a group of humans, including Luka's father, as part of a plan to diminish the apparent threat that monsters posed. Alice stumbled in on this as it was happening and basically screwed up the heroic sacrifice plan by freaking out and killing some of the humans in retaliation. So now it's her turn to try to make it happen, and she fights Luka seriously in order to force him to kill her, and had been training him the entire time so that he would be strong enough to manage it. He defeats her but refuses to kill her because that goes against everything he believes in, and because he has Stockholm Syndrome loves her. Monsters have this thing about the losers swearing obedience once defeated, so that puts an end to her Heroic Sacrifice plan. Luka gives up any pretense of being what Illias wants him to be. Illias is pissed about this, and can't tolerate all of this tolerance flying around. She's especially pissed about Luka hooking up with the Monster Lord instead of murdering her when he had the chance, so she dumps a bunch of murder angels and stuff into the world, so Luka and Alice start fighting for their lives. That's the end of the second part of the game, and I think there are supposed to be three parts, but the third part isn't finished/translated yet.

Ok, so with all of that out of the way, I can start talking about what Monsters of the Wilds is and why I like it. First and foremost it's using GotW as a canvas to paint MMQ stuff on. GotW has only human characters, is heavily tilted female in cast composition, and the setting is basically an excuse for fighting tournaments. MotW takes Alice and her Four Heavenly Knights and re-imagines them as humans. They've got the same personalities and values, and there are a lot of backstory parallels, like the Hellgondo High tournament and the fight to become Monster Lord, as well as Luka beating everybody and establishing a new set of rules for everyone. The character dynamics between Alice and the Knights are the same. Jae Gu's story in the Hellgondo tournament and Luka's reasons for fighting have some similarities to MMQ as well. Jae Gu in MotW is roughly equal parts of the protagonists in GotW and MMQ; the wimpy and misogynistic traits of GotW's Jae Gu are replaced with endgame Luka's badassery and close relationship with Alice. Jae Gu keeps his unassuming demeanor and concern for his siblings. The Knights are interesting in how they were converted; Alma Elma was a succubus in MMQ, but in MotW she is instead the pinnacle of human slut technology. Granberia is still an honorable blood knight, and Erubite is primarily concerned with the damage humans are causing to the environment, much like before. Tamamo is a lot older than she looks, and she's the smart one who likes teasing people.

In GotW, Jae Gu is such a pushover in the beginning that it's hard to read. Some punk from his old school tells him to drop his pants and kneel on the ground just for kicks, and he does it because he doesn't want to fight. This same asshole gives Jae Gu's kindergarten aged siblings spoiled food so they'll get food poisoning, and Jae Gu gets pissed off but still can't do anything about it. GotW Jae Gu starts out so damn pathetic that Shinji Ikari at his most depressed looks like he's got more will to fight. Even after he learns to fight, he's having a match with an utter bastard and makes a naive gesture of good sportsmanship to a freaking gang leader, who knees him in the crotch (ending the match) for his troubles. I don't know what the deal is with Korean media doing this, but the ones I've read tend to launch themselves into fucking space with melodrama. People can't just be mean; they have to be nut kicking, child poisoning villains. Gabriel Blessing typically replaces characters with ones that are much more capable, and this sadsack loser Jae Gu was a prime candidate for it. Even after almost 90 chapters, he's still a bottom tier fighter who mostly just gets cruelly shat upon in some way to show how mean other people are before the girls beat them up for him, but at least he's not willingly cooperating in others' attempts to abuse and humiliate him (now they just do it without his cooperation).

The power structure in GotW was pretty simple: people in Wilds High were better than everyone else. A few schoolgirls beat up a ton of armed, grown men. In MotW, Jae Gu moves from bottom tier to top tier, and his fighting reminds others of the best fighter in Wilds High. Alice is about on the same level as those two. The Four Heavenly Knights are about on par with the really good fighters from Wilds High; Granberia was the toughest of the Knights, and she has a pretty even boxing match with Moon Young, who is a boxer but also considerably lighter than Granberia. Importing them into the setting advances the two major things that GB wanted to do with this fic: envision MMQ characters as humans (which was a success) and have a big fightan' tournament (which has ground work laid for it, but hasn't happened yet).

If you liked GotW but don't know much about MMQ, MotW probably won't appeal because major plot points from GotW have been replaced, and all of these characters from MMQ might as well be OCs, which loses all of the appeal of seeing a different take on the familiar characters. I can understand why other people wouldn't really like it; it's heavily dependent on plot knowledge about a game that is like a pinata made of bizarre pornography that's secretly full of good story prizes on the inside.

[lolipettanko]

Pretty much my main gripe with GoW was that. If he'd manned up earlier, it would've been less of a pain to read. I will say though that the recent chapters have been really good.

I'm really interested in MGQ. It seems like a good time to pick it up. Chapter 3's been released, and there's a fic about it as well. :D

I'm cautiously optimistic about MotW. If he's able to keep up the fast pace, then it'll be better than In Flight.

[Dracos]

hmm, anyone know what happened to Blessing?  Been a while and some.

[thepanda]

RL stuff, iirc.