Making Monster Girls: For Science! (Making Monster Girls #1)

==UPDATE Amazon/Audible recently changed how they format their reviews. While you can put paragraph breaks into reviews when composing them, they will no longer be displayed on an audiobook\’s review screen. So now my reviews have retroactively become barely readable. The only answer I\’ve gotten from support is that this is just how Amazon wants it to be now, and they\’re sorry for the inconvenience. Since I\’m too lazy to abridge my reviews, and our benevolent Amazon overlords don\’t give a shit, please enjoy the following wall of text. END UPDATE== If you\’re looking for a run-of-the-mill harem book, you\’ll probably like this one. It is more or less consistent with the quality of most Eric Vall books. If you just want to know whether this stacks up with the rest of them, read no further—this book is probably for you. The premise is a reversal of the power imbalance between the sexes found in most stories and in our actual history. I\’ve seen a couple people (including one here) complain that this book has feminist overtones, which completely baffles me. If anything, the opposite is true—women are depicted as monsters who *shouldn\’t* be in power. I\’ll get more into that later, but I don\’t think the setting is intended to communicate a message about the sexes, and shouldn\’t be taken seriously. If it were, the book would actually be uncomfortably anti-feminist. Instead, I see the setting as a power fantasy where a singularly capable man succeeds with society stacked against him. The man, in this instance, being our protagonist. He\’s an aspiring male scientist, but his position is tenuous and his life at the mercy of his patron. His patron\’s wealth and political power make her dangerous enough, but like the other women in this universe, she is adept at magic, and is more powerful than most. If he displeases her, there isn\’t anything he could do or anywhere he could go for protection—women hold total power in their society, and men are culturally considered to be base, inferior creatures, who live and die at their pleasure. But though there is an established matriarchy, there aren\’t any organizations introduced so far that have special objectives, philosophies, or interesting ideals. There aren\’t any white towers from which women govern the affairs of nations, they don\’t have well defined factions undertaking elaborate plots, and while there may be individual rivalries between women, there\’s no bigger picture yet. They are pretty much all simple, power-hungry caricatures of greed, vanity, and lechery. But our protagonist doesn\’t quite stand alone in this world. His team includes a comic-relief sidekick that doesn\’t really add much to or take away from the rest of the book, though I appreciated the Young Frankenstein reference. And, of course, the beginnings of his harem. In this series, they are the MC\’s creations: products of his \”science\” that combines women and creatures to create air-headed, adoring monster-girl companions. The listening experience, overall, wasn\’t awesome. There were a number of places where I just had to take a break because either the narration or writing kept irritating me. First, if you are familiar with Alex Perone and Marissa Parness, their performance here is on par with their other projects. They are great at voice differentiation and their voices are dynamic. I think most people won\’t nit-pick the narration like I do, so take this with a grain of salt, but these are my honest impressions. Like in their other works, the narration quality is hampered by Alex\’s frequent tendency to overact. He cranks it up to eleven whenever there\’s supposed to be any kind of emotional inflection, so the characters he narrates come across as superlatively outraged when it seems like they should just express a tempered annoyance. Or whenever a character asks a question or has a realization, no matter how matter-of-course or banal, it sounds like their minds are being ****ing blown. The result is that when the writing has a character ask a stupid or obvious question, the narration makes the characters sound even less intelligent. With better writing, the issues I have with Alex\’s narration may not have stood out so much, so I feel like this is probably harsher than he deserves. Which is a shame because Marissa is a straight-up outstanding narrator, with great range and voice control. I\’ve never found myself rolling my eyes at her narration (though I still rolled my eyes at a lot of the dialogue). There are some real basic problems with the writing that don\’t require a literary degree or much writing experience to avoid. Like phrase repetition. While it might be fun to get properly soused by taking a shot every time the author wrote \”oceanic eyes,\” I mostly wanted to claw my ears off when I heard it for the dozenth time. Same with phrases like \”For Science!\” \”By the Science!\” etc. The MC isn\’t a macho douche like I\’ve seen in some recent books in the genre. But he has no self control and an annoying compulsion to repeatedly and smugly declare that he is a scientist. Yet he\’s more nervous than an isolated introvert whenever he is around his monster girls. So he is unnecessarily loud and careless when he should have himself under control, and he is cringe-worthily bashful when he should be assertive. I\’m not entirely sure the author knows what science is. I\’m not expecting a rigorous description of and adherence to the scientific method, but a huge part of the book, which gets repeated ad nauseum, is that the MC is not some pseudoscientist or alchemist. He is a bona fide scientist, with higher standards and credentials. But the author\’s description of the MC\’s work is literally just throwing mud at walls to see what sticks, while repeating the words \”science\” and \”variables\” like a mantra. I\’ve been spoiled by more intelligently written books, even in the harem genre (Daniel Black, Valens Legacy, Transcendental Misappropriation), so I\’d expect more from someone trying to come up with fun and consistent techno-magic-medical-babble. On the other hand, the author could be trying to intentionally avoid that kind of intelligent writing, but in that case, I would expect it to be witty and clever in order to be entertaining. I\’m unsure if the plot is trying to set the MC up as a good guy. He\’s too one-dimensional to feel like a compelling antihero, but there\’s a bizarre mix of exposition that sets him up as a righteous avenger, and his history of straight-up murdering droves of men for money, whom he never mourns nor shows any contrition for. Then he flirts with feeling guilty over murdering other murderers. It\’s hard to believe he cares about liberating his gender when he\’d sooner see a man barbecued for money than bother trying to help him. He\’s not a hero with a damaged moral compass. He\’s a guy that has a different moral compass depending on the scene the author wants to write, though chances are it\’ll be bent in some way regardless. As I mentioned above, the female antagonists are cartoonishly evil. They have no redeeming character qualities, so the whole world seems filled with Fantasy Lady-Hitlers that don\’t have any desires except keeping harems of cowed men and making sure to torture and murder a few every week to keep things lively. The MC also is inexplicably unaware of how men are treated at times. For example, despite presumably few men knowing who their mothers are, including himself, and knowing women in general give their male \”beasts\” to be raised at training facilities, he is completely surprised upon learning that the most evil woman he has met didn\’t lovingly raise her sons. And, with the narration, his mind was ****ing blown by this revelation, when there is no conceivable way he should be surprised by it. On top of that, the MC needlessly endangers himself because he can\’t help but antagonize women who are quite open about wanting to kill him. There is no reasonable explanation for why they would let the MC get away with his behavior. He thinks he is valued for his \”science,\” but it seems like that subject would just make them more likely to kill him since he never, ever delivers on his promises, only ever asking for more money and time. These frequent bouts of unexplainable stupidity, contrary to his self-declared intelligence, should stymie him, but the plot just accommodates him at every turn. It feels like the author is clumsily trying to force tension, when the plot should provide ample opportunity for it naturally. And that is one of the most frustrating things about the MC. Despite his patron\’s short temper and increasingly threatening demands, the MC faffs about and wastes nearly all of his free time he could be using to meet his deadlines and avoid his own execution (which is his declared fate should he not deliver the results he promises). I would have liked to see him cleverly find ways to pursue his new \”true\” project with the demands imposed upon him by the plot. Instead, he sprints toward his own demise, as he frequently thinks about, then ignores his life-or-death commitments. But as the reader, you know that the story will save him from his inaction. This makes any success he has feel unearned. He is unintelligent, loudmouthed, and rides in a carriage made of plot armor. It is so frustratingly stupid that I have a hard time believing there were any editors or beta readers. There is also an incredible amount of monologue and empty fluff writing. I\’d frequently find myself skipping through several minutes of monologues that the protagonist has already gone through to make this audiobook less of a slog—in general I shouldn\’t increase my enjoyment of a book by skipping through large swaths of it on the regular. I\’m stretching a bit to find an unreservedly positive comment, rather than just a neutral one. One positive thing about the writing, I suppose, are pop-culture references. For the most part, they are written well; the author doesn\’t spend two sentences after making the reference in order to draw attention to it and make explicitly sure that the reader got the reference. I\’ve seen too many indie authors ruin a good reference or inside joke by making it painfully obvious that, yes, they are in fact referencing gremlins/lord of the rings/star wars. In this book, the references are mostly there for you to enjoy if you know the work they are referencing, without getting in the way of the story. And they are sparse enough to not be too distracting. In the end, this is not an example of great world building, character development, or intelligent writing in a niche genre. But it delivers what you\’ve probably come to expect from this author label. If you just want to turn your brain off and listen to a harem story, you could do worse. But suspend your disbelief, and keep those \”oceanic eyes\” shots handy.

[(Quick note to the author, I lay into your work pretty heavily in this review, but I am not aiming it at you in an attempt to make you stop writing or anything. Keep writing and getting better, but I feel like my complaints would do better here than in the nebulous cloud of barely sapient thought my skull contains. I love that you chose to write and I hope writing makes you happy.)]… But stop yelling about being a doctor and a scientist. I get that the Charles has been in this society his whole life and might want to tell everyone about what he thinks, but I feel like he gets away with it a lot more than he should be for someone in his situation. Throughout the story, we are told that our protagonist is a doctor and a scientist, not the \”Alchemist\” that everyone calls him, but he has done nothing to actually earn the ability to call himself that. 90% of his experiments end in wasted electricity and piles of male ash(this is probably important) . He is angry that no one respects him in a world where men have never received respect, he is angry no one respects his \”genius\” without ever showing anyone any genius ideas or workarounds, and he gets away with threatening people out in the open because he\’s the protagonist and no one would ever hurt him for his ideas. We are rushed through most of the story under the pretense that his deadline is coming up and his support from the Duchess is running dry, but never does he even make a show of getting more prisoners to even act like he\’s working toward anything but fucking around. Belief can only be suspended so much, even for a magic-harem power fantasy. Why does Val randomly spout off Ayn Rand quotes? Where did this month old cat girl learn this? Why does the sex feel like it was put there just to be there? Why does Charles feel like he isn\’t a murdered despite the fact that he has put many male prisoners to literal and very gruesome death in his shocky-shocky doom box? He openly states that it isn\’t him killing them if his machine did the work, and we are just supposed to accept that the newborn cat and a brain with no agency assure him he\’s a \”good man\” for reasons we will never learn. You want to liberate men, good. Liberate men, but not everyone will be happy in this weird wanna-be Chad science-magic power fantasy where all the women love you exclusively. Back to the sex scenes, my issue is that it isn\’t at all attractive. None of the language evokes eroticism is any way and just leaves you questioning why you\’re here at all. I actually came here for the sex scenes and monster girls, but I left feeling that the main character is an irredeemable villain despite his ideals and weirdly third-act desires to change the world. Also, I feel like the \”Born sexy yesterday\” trope is abused to hell here and it only happens twice for now. If enough people in this town feel like he\’s just a dangerous lunatic, why haven\’t they actually killed him yet? What\’s stopping the Duchess from just frying his well-endowed body until he\’s nothing but a vaguely human shaped dot burned in the retinas of those that witnessed it? No one would punish her, because he\’s a man and provides no service to society at all as it currently stands.

4minPreiwiew 10/10 Masterfully Deceptive VoiceActing 9/10 Story3/10 Hard to swallow world/setting The reader is to dumb and everything is exsplained out in monolouges even if covered 10 min before chances i recommend this to anyone 2/10 chances i pick up book 2 in this series? 2/10 listend though the whole thing usualy enjoy monstergirl/harem/polyamorous stories too some degree. i have picked up 3 diffrent EricVall bookSeries and i find them sadly hard to enjoy might that it be its aimed for listeners atleast half my age or for those that are hope full and gullible, like i was ~M30

I hope the authors other works are better and I\’m missing a joke, because it is hard to point at something that he didn\’t butcher. The world where women because they can do magic are on top and men are subservient as a flip of our world is interesting. The task that the main character has accidentally making monster girls is also amusing. The issue is the author took his 2 good ideas and ran them through a filter of just terrible writing. The main character is a Gary Stu only because everyone else is an idiot. Main character is Nazi levels of evil, murdering people (For SCIENCE!) justifying it that it is okay since they are inferior beings(also men). When he has any problem, his solution is always murder and monologues to the victims when they are captured. He is a rapist. His assistants are the definition of the \”born sexy yesterday\” trope in that they are sexy, have the minds of children, and are born with fanatical devotion to the protagonist. While he (and only he) says he is a scientist he doesn\’t understand what he is doing, and makes no effort to figure it out. The narrators were great, I can only guess that they must have really needed a paycheck.

TO THE DUMPSTER THAT\’S ON FIRE. OH DEAR LORD. where do I begin? the idea and premise have alot of promise even for the generic power fantasy. Nothing is believable, the characters are living contradiction. and nothing is believable. on top of that, voice acting skill aside, THE VOICES THAT ARE CHOSEN FOR THE MC AND HIS WOMEN ARE ABSOLUTE CANCER. I WOULD LITTERALY wrather listen to a child with cancer read me their last rights. not exaggerating, legit would choose that over hearing a single word they say ever again. ESPECIALLY THE FUCKING BEAR.

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