It’s been kind of a hot mess since the beginning? I don’t wanna blame it all on the judges but like it’s clear none of them have experience running shit like this, and the whole premise is sort of muddied. Is it modeling? Is it fashion? If it’s modeling, why say art skills don’t matter? If it’s fashion, why restrict body types?
It sort of came to a head this week bc this round is based on bands the judges assigned to people (apparently arbitrarily?) to make an outfit for. Except the prompt was like.... not great. The way they worded it was like “make an outfit this band would wear on stage” which is cool for like, Wock Til You Drop, but
Well. Not so much for others. Doesn’t help that the judges took like, Jazzmosis and shit and assigned random bands to each contestant. Hollis wound up with the Neopian Philharmonic, which is Just Tuxedos but more of a pussy out look.
Hollis unfortunately can’t listen to classical music without like, crawling anxiety, but they were like “yes okay power through it” and started brainstorming. Discussing their process, posting cool ref images, going apeshit. And their design fucking slapped. But the judges pointed out that it wasn’t something the band members would wear, so hollis took down their wips and went back to the drawing board disheartened but determined
Except people were kiiiiinda pissed about it. The whole point of NNTM is ostensibly making cool outfits for your characters, but here the judges were like “actually, make an outfit for this other character. and make it less creative, it needs to be a tuxedo.” Like it’d be one thing if they’d prompted people to like, draw some formal wear! But giving people bands in the way they did meant they lost a lot of space for the artists to explore.
Anyway the board blew up a bit. People started voicing complaints about the way the contest is run, about the secret crits-on-request & the often conflicting words from the judges. & the judges.... did not handle it well. Eish was the first on scene, and was immediately defensive & basically told people if they didn’t like it they should go make their own contest, eventually disengaging and telling people like “if you need to think of this as a victory feel free” as if that’s like. A cutting thing to say & not a hilarious deflection.
Shoy, judge 2, was actually hella chill. They listened to people, addressed their concerns, and explained the reasoning behind some of the more mystifying policies. Shoy is the only motherfucker in this house I respect.
Judge 3 (Krystal? I want to say Krystal) showed up, and talked for a long time without saying much substantial. She was sort of a middle ground between the two, defensive but trying to listen. She basically said she’s really busy & doesn’t have time to dedicate much of herself to NNTM, which would be cool if they didn’t warn every person signing up that it’s a HUGE COMMITMENT and you can’t back out now!!
Oh, and all their prompts seem to be stolen from an earlier competition called Runway Rumble, which Eish initially denied knowledge of until the judge of RR showed up with Eish’s entry for the very same prompt NNTM is now working on.
So things weren’t really getting anywhere—the judges needed to talk, Hollis was working on a new concept—when out of the blue in comes our old buddy Alyson, calling everyone who voiced a complaint a bully. Which, yeah, tracks for her, but didn’t really match up with what happened. She talked for a while about hollis being like, despicable or something & didn’t address any of the concerns that had been raised, so I’m thinking either she didn’t read replies that weren’t from Hollis or she got laser-focused on continuing her abandoned tirade.
She fucked off after that though & things calmed back down a bit. Seems like the current state of things is making the remaining contestants feel iffy about their future participation.
The thing about neopets drama is if you’re not already embroiled in it, it feels like jumping into a soap opera in season 8. A lot of “who’s this bitch? What happened?” and missing context. Me, I just want to see my friends get excited about designing, you know? It’s no fun to fight on neo, you can’t even swear
