31 Plays in 31 Days, #3 - “Made Wrong”

[breakinglight11]

So as much as I enjoy my large-scale, highly collaborative projects, they are huge amounts of work and rely on working on other people’s schedules in order to get their support. That’s of course fine and the nature of the beast, but I often find myself wanting to make stuff that I can just do whenever I have the time on my own.

One such project for that purpose, and for experimenting a little with other art forms, is “Little Monsters”— an idea I’ve had for funny stop-motion shorts using Monster High dolls. The dolls are adorable and doing these gives me an excuse to own and play with them, and lets me play around with stop-motion (or a very crude, abbreviated version of it) in a low-stakes way. I’m mostly going for jokes capturing how they are simultaneously teens and monsters at the same time. I did one episode already and am in the process of making more, and hoping now that the latest round of Hawking filming has wrapped I’ll have time to get back to it.

Also, as I work on drafting Mrs. Hawking part 7, sometimes there are more climactic scenes I write but don’t want to post so as not to spoil, so it’s good for this challenge to have something else to post instead.

Plus, hey! I managed to make the punchline of this one something other than cannibalism! For some reason, that seems to be the direction I always want to take these.



Day #3 - “Made Wrong”
From Little Monsters by Phoebe Roberts

FRANKIE STEIN, a nonbinary Frankenstein monster, mid teens
CLAWDEEN WOLF, their werewolf friend, mid teens
LAGOONA BLUE, their sea monster friend, mid teens
~~~

In the Coffin Bean coffee shop, Frankie and Clawdeen look at their friend Lagoona from across the cafe.

FRANKIE: Ugh. Lagoona is so pretty it makes me hate myself.

CLAWDEEN: She so is.

FRANKIE: I wish I had gills and scales.

CLAWDEEN: You are as God made you.

Frankie turns to look at her.

FRANKIE: But I was made out of corpses by a mad scientist who married his own sister.

CLAWDEEN: Oh. Well, it’s still not your fault you’re ugly.

Clawdeen sips her coffee as Frankie contemplates their life.