I'd like this thread to be centered around personal ratings and discussion of monster girls. For this purpose, I made a tier list with characters originating from various media and franchises. https://tiermaker.com/create/monster-girl-general-1586980If a character is popular and qualifies as a monster girl, she should be on the list. Of course, there are also many relatively obscure characters included.There were some personal preferences involved when picking out characters for the list, which I hope you'll forgive given the size of it. I'll explain most choices in more detail later.Most importantly, I tried not to "duplicate roles." What I mean is that there generally shouldn't be two characters with extremely similar designs. If a role was already filled, I discarded others that overlapped but were either less popular or less to my liking.I'd love for other anons to post relatively obscure yet appealing characters with unique and interesting designs. Discussions on personal taste, what makes monster girls appealing and why, good design choices, biological aspects, what characters introduced you to monster girls and made you like them, and such are all very welcome.
>>49993397The first thing I should address is the monster girl vs furry debate. I assume most here know the general distinction, but I'll clarify how I approached it for this list.The main difference is the face. Monster girls, despite having many animal features, still retain a relatively human-looking face. Furries (and scalies, anthros, etc.) instead have snouts, muzzles, or their equivalents. So it would be even more precise to say that it's the noses that separate monster girls from furries.So, where is the line exactly? For this, I used Polt as a baseline. She has a mostly human face, but with a wolf-like nose. Given her inclusion in Monster Musume, I take her design as the final step before crossing into furry territory. To put it into words: "A mostly human face with only minimal, human-adjacent alterations, specifically at most a flat 'snout' for the nose."All characters up to and including that step are fine to include. Some liminal cases on the list are Vex, Nanachi, Blossom, and Argemia. I tried my best not to include too many anthroish characters. There are only a few such cases.
>>49993398Now that I've covered what counts as "too much", let's consider what might be "too little".A controversial inclusion is elves. To me, elves have the same exotic, not-quite-human aura that monster girls do. They're a near-human species that fits many of the same scenarios and tropes. They're also massively popular, and their trademark pointed ears appear in many monster girl designs. For these reasons, I consider elves a valid lower bound.A similar case can be made for some of the "basic" kemonomimi. Again, they fit similar roles and tropes, they're popular, and their designs overlap with monster girls, with animal ears as a recurring feature.As an additional note, I don't recall any standard "alien girl" designs across Monster Musume, Encyclopedia, Quest, Doctor, Island, etc., but I see no issue including them. Given the huge overlap in features, I think it's a reasonable addition.I'm sure a lot of such characters were a sort of "entry" to many people's infatuation with monster girls.There are also some "human" characters like the MHA girls, but they all have non-human traits at a level where I think they fit the list.
>>49993402I will talk about some of my personal biases that crept into the tier list.For me, a big part of monster girl design is biological exploration. Thinking about how such a being could exist, move, function, interact, and such. In my opinion, just as a monster girl should have some external humanity, she should also have some internal humanity.Because of this, I excluded characters with "human shape but completely non-human interiors". That means slimes, robots, ghosts, and similar cases. Some magical beings like demons, fae, and spirits, are included, but as a rule of thumb, they could, in theory, exist even without magic while keeping a human-like interior.I'm also not particularly fond of monster girls with completely non-human torsos and/or massive size differences. All in all, this only cut a small portion of characters.
>>49993406A few words about OCs. It doesn't make sense to treat random one-off characters the same as those from established franchises. They can be inconsistent, and in the monster girl genre, especially, many feel "all over the place."I tried to include only OCs with high-quality, distinctive designs and a fair amount of art or other media. They should stand comfortably alongside established characters and add something meaningful to the list. You'll notice quite a few of my own top picks are OCs.
>>49993413I also avoided including "non-established, derivative characters" like monster girls based on Pokémon, Monster Hunter, Godzilla, etc.I think originality matters. Monster girls can, of course, derive from real animals, myths, or folklore, but such modes of inspiration use concepts that, to me, feel more natural than drawing from the mentioned franchises. Another issue is the lack of a fixed look.For example, Miia from Monster Musume is based on lamias from Greek myth, but her specific look is unique and consistent. By contrast, a "monster girl Pikachu" has no single official design. There are endless variations, and it's not clear which one should be used for judging and placing the character on the tier list.For similar reasons, I tried not to include "alternate versions" of characters, or "transformations" and such (especially if such a form only makes up for a small portion of that character's appearances).On the topic of characters that are hard to rate, I didn't include ones where the majority of the features and/or the face are obscured, hidden, covered, etc., at all times.I also didn't include any genderbends. There are some characters with undisclosed genders (Nanachi, Neferpitou), but they are quite feminine (and monstrous), and I assume most people peg them as female when seeing them for the first time.
>>49993422This should cover the rules I set for myself in making this tier list.I haven't actually put too much focus on the MG series characters. They've been discussed at length in these threads, and there are many tier lists specifically for them floating around already. Of course, there's still a good chunk of them on the list, at the very least to serve as a background for rating the rest in relation.I tried to make the names of the character origins actually readable in this format, so they're sometimes shortened.A large number of characters requires a large number of tiers. I didn't like the idea of including anything below D, because even being included on the tier list means that I like the character to some extent.So I opted for the SS and SSS tiers for the top instead.I'm not really sure whether this can be a separate thread from the general Monster Girl one or not. I think it can serve as a general on top of the discussion, but I don't want to feel like I'm hijacking the theme too much.Either way, like I said, feel free to have some more in-depth discussions about monster girls, share your personal ratings, talk about what made you like monster girls, what makes them appealing, and so on.
>>49993413Is goat-chan_(enarane) on that chart?
>>49993608She wasn't, but I guess she's a good fit, so I added her in.She should be in the TierMaker template now.All the characters are sorted alphabetically by (origin/artist name) -> (character name), so you can look for them easily when making your own tier list.
>>49993397So to start off, my own tier list is a mix of personal preference and a set of somewhat more objective criteria. I tried to give extra credit for originality and uniqueness.There were characters I liked a lot, but that felt too basic or not "monstergirlish" enough for a high placement. Conversely, a few I'm not fond of still earned good marks for creative, distinctive design.There weren't many placements where that clashed too strongly, though. As a matter of fact, I don't think there were any like that in the top two or bottom two tiers.Visual appeal is primary, but the sensory experience of interacting with a monster girl interests me just as much. Of course, you can't really know what that would feel like most of the time, but quite frankly, that act of imagination matters to me more than even auditory presentation.Behavior and personality are important, too. I especially like it when a monster girl occasionally behaves like a wild animal, or at least in semi-human ways that hint at alternative modes of thought.Of course, this is just the way I rated my own characters. Any alternative approaches are very much welcome as well.
Added a few more characters to the template.If anyone has any other recommendations for extending the list that fit the criteria, that would be pretty cool too.
>>49993397Man, I've been at this for an hour, and I've barely made a dent in the well of monstergirls listed here. Wish there was a way to implement quick descriptions or bigger images / full body art, since googling everything I don't know is a hassle. Learning a lot about my own tastes doing this, though. Props for including so much different stuff, OP.I have a nomination, but I can't remember the game she's from for the life of me. She's a dark-skinned, black-furred catgirl witch, with one massive, glowing green magic paw. Her main gimmick is smell, IIRC it's something to do with her aromatic tea (or it was her stockings that smell like the tea). Her level is a top-down trap labyrinth, where she'll catch you if you step on a trapped tile (or just suck at planning ahead and straight up get got). I believe it was a Ren'Py game, "Monster Girl" something. That game had an amazing minotauress as well.
>>49993402>For these reasons, I consider elves a valid lower bound.Monster girls are funny because it's 33% barely non-human, 33% extremely furry, and 33% for everything else.It feels like a dead classification sometimes.
>>49995950It's like how furries used to say every slightly anthropomorphic cartoon animal was a furry, every non human female is a monstergirl. I think kemonomimi and humanoid races should be separate from them unless they're either treated as non-human adjacent or from the encyclopedia where they are monsters in spite of being just elves or kemonomimi. Monstergirls are on the side of either human sex or bestiality with no in-between. I have a different opinion than >>49993398 however as I don't like girls covered in hair. For me if they have paws or paw pads, and especially non-human feet, it's furry. If their back is covered in hair, it's borderline furry. Their noses don't matter unless their whole head is animal shaped. Having a human face but a weird hybrid nose and jaw isn't full on furry for me. Two measures are if you can just erase the bit at the tip of their nose and they look like a normal human face and whether they would look dumb drinking from a glass or kissing. So the girl in that pic in >>49993398 is just a human who needs to shave her shoulders. Related to that, I also dislike when characters have face/shoulder ruffled fur lines but they look like they have shiny skin so it's unclear whether they are covered in hair or if you're seeing some really long but sparse hair from a lighted angle.As the opposite of what I said, if it has a human body but an animal head like a minotaur, I don't consider it a furry but a monster. If it's hairy and has hooves, it's a furry.
>>49996174>. If their back is covered in hair, it's borderline furry.C'mon, even human women are gonna struggle with this.
>>49996208If it's hairy enough that you can make out a fur pattern then a human woman is borderline furry too. I mean of the type where the girl has a hairless front torso and face despite being mostly hairy.
>>49995765I'm happy someone took their time to fill out even a part of the list.I didn't want people to have to zoom in, so I thought the front face views would be best. But I guess I might have to reconsider that.The issue with adding full-body art is that quite a few characters don't have it at all, and an even larger chunk only have NSFW versions. That makes them a bad fit for both TierMaker and this board. I could censor the latter, but it seems a little iffy. I kind of like how streamlined the list looks now.TierMaker doesn't really support descriptions like that either, though I agree it'd be useful.One idea I had was adding small colored icons in the corner to mark monster girl types (I'd have to make a new tier list for that, though). Does that make sense?
>>49997395>>49995765I don't know why, but for some reason, when you said "quick description", I immediately thought of something that lets you hover over the character and then display a wall of text, so I said that's not supported.But, yeah, if it's just something on the image, then that's doable, but I don't know if there's a way to make it look good visually while also providing valuable information.I'd be happy to see any other ideas on how to improve the list.
Ok, after thinking it over, another idea I had was making a companion doc I could link on pastebin or something similar. It would list all the characters with their names and origins, plus short descriptions and maybe some links to relevant pages.As for the little icons, pic related is a quick mockup of a few variations of how that could look. Thoughts?
>>49999606Here are icons for a few more types: bats, felines, canines, and demons. The middle two are more generic since I wanted something broader than just cats and dogs.I flipped the color format from my previous post. When I tried the same style I used on the bat icon from before for the others, it ended up looking like the eyes were bulging out. I think this should be better.Also, I'm still considering multiple versions for a mixed icon.
