Western Animation / Monster High (2022)

aka: Monster High

Monster High is a 2022 animated series based on the toy franchise of the same name, specifically its third incarnation. It began airing on Nickelodeon on October 6, 2022, following the premiere of Monster High: The Movie.

On her birthday, teenage monster enthusiast Clawdeen Wolf ends up stumbling upon Monster High, a boarding school built for monsters of all kind to attend, and discovering she's half-werewolf on her Missing Mom's side. Now, with the help of her new friends and roommates Draculaura and Frankie Stein, she must navigate the halls of her new school and learn to embrace all her freaky flaws, all while trying to figure out what happened to her mom.

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Tropes

• Adaptation Name Change: Frankie's pet is now called Watzie instead of Watzit.
• Adaptation Species Change:
  • In G1, Clawdeen's pet Crescent was a cat; here, she's a dog.
  • In G1, Count Fabulous was stated in guidebooks to be a vampire stuck in bat form. Here, there's no mention of him being a vampire himself, and instead is a shapeshifting bat that can turn into a bat/cat hybrid.
• Ambiguously Gay: "Horror Roll" reveals that Clawdeen, Draculaura, Frankie, Deuce, Lagoona, and Ghoulia are all members of the Monster High equivalent to a Gay-Straight Alliance club. While Frankie has already been confirmed to be nonbinary, it's unknown where the rest fall on the LGBTQ+ spectrum.
• Beach Episode: "The Haunted Sandcastle Caper", "Fangs for the Memories", and "Two-Riffic" all take place at Dracula's Bermuda Triangle beachside resort.
• The Bermuda Triangle: The location of multiple episodes in season 2; Dracula has a beach resort there, it occasionally opens up portals that warp monsters to other parts of it, and according to Draculaura her magic doesn't mix well with it.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • The monster world has a stand-in for TikTok named "EekTok".
  • Deuce mentions a delivery service called "Spooker Eats" in the season 2 premiere.
• The Bus Came Back: The series brings back several characters who were absent from the first live-action movie, such as Spectra and Toralei.
• The Chains of Commanding: Clawdeen starts to feel this in season two, as her duties as the new were-ruler prove to be difficult and interfere with her school life and relationships. Her solution to this is ultimately to Abdicate the Throne and switch out the Asskicking Leads to Leadership method of determining a new were-ruler for an election, an action which ultimately drives the plot of season 2.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • During the season 1 finale, Autumn Patch gives Twyla a pair of noise-canceling headphones so that she can stay at the dance without having to worry about her hypersensitivity to sound. Those same headphones make her immune to Catarina's new hypnotic powers, letting her help the Boo Crew out and giving Cleo the idea to grab more of them to protect themselves from the same fate.
  • These are also used in several episodes, including the very first episode of the series, “The Monstering.” The facts on onikuma monsters that Clawdeen was reading about at the start of the episode help her handle dealing with an actual onikuma at the end of it.
• Competition Freak:
  • A natural trait of most werebeasts is competitiveness — it's why so much of their society is built on Might Makes Right values, and it occasionally gets the better of Clawdeen and Clawd.
  • In "Vamps Just Want to Have Fun", Draculaura and her mother Fang Wei are this, especially with Medusa.
• Dark Horse Victory: In "The Haunted Sandcastle Caper", all the were-ruler candidates are vying for an endorsement from Dracula, with Selena and Romulus being particularly focused on. In the end, he decides to endorse...Foxford, who up until that point wasn't planning on running.
• Deliberate Under-Performance: In "Vamps Just Wanna Have Fun", after being lectured by Bloodgood on how their over-competitiveness tends to ruin the Family Day events for the other families, Draculaura, Deuce, and their respective moms agree to try and lose on purpose so this doesn't happen again. This only leads to their competitive natures flaring up again as they race for last place — which leads to the same results as their usual fights for first, as not only do their attempts at losing interfere with the other families, but Clawdeen and Frankie end up disheartened seeing them hold themselves back.
• Double Standard: In the past, yetis were banned from attending Monster High due to fears regarding their inability to control their powers, even though the same can be said for pretty much every teenage monster.
• Empathic Environment: In "Monster High-jinks", the school itself seems to respond to Toralei's bitterness over her mom's inability to join her for Family Day, ruining the bonding activities between the other families whenever she gets near them. Coach Thunderbird tells her this is a recurring problem with the school; previously, it responded to her own wishes that she could stay with her friends over break by trapping everyone in the building.
• Ensemble Cast: While Clawdeen is the main protagonist and the one driving the main plots of each season, every other major character — and several side or minor characters — gets at least one A Day in the Limelight episode dedicated to their own arcs.
• Episode Title Card: The show uses stylized title cards with imagery depending on which character is the central focus of the episode (e.g. bats and spider webs for Draculaura).
• Fantastic Racism: Besides the tensions between humans and monsters, there's also prejudice against witches and plenty of inter-monster prejudice (e.g. yetis were banned from attending Monster High in the past).
• Fountain of Youth: In "Fangs for the Memories", Draculaura and Heath get sent to another dimension where they're young kids again.
• Frame-Up: Done in "The Haunted Sandcastle Caper"; Foxford frames Selena for accidentally destroying Romulus' sand castle so that he can get Dracula's fang.
• Framing Device: Episodes typically begin and/or end with the focus character talking to a recording eyeball about the events of the story in past tense. This is part of an assignment for O'Shriek's class introduced in the first episode "Food Fight".
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: In “Case of the Missing Squeak,” observant viewers can find the clue that helps solve the titular case before the cast does: the second time the inside of Lagoona’s backpack is shown, right as Señor Squeaky is found to be missing, an empty bottle of Essence of Life can be seen inside, which wasn’t there previously.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: "Play It Again, Clawd" sees Clawd get stuck in one. The cause turns out to be a bug from Beheme that feeds on "bitter blood" and traps its victims in a time loop to create more bitterness — in this case, it latched onto Clawd's bitterness about not being able to do his usual Friday the 13th traditions with Selena anymore.
• Hard Work Hardly Works: Ghoulia faces this in “Growing Ghoulia”, where her efforts to achieve top student on Monster High’s Horror Roll keep getting undermined by Draculaura, who finishes all the extracurricular activities Ghoulia had planned on doing immediately before she gets a chance to even start on them. Played with as it turns out Draculaura was using her witchcraft to give her the extra time needed to do all of those activities so quickly. Ghoulia is understandably very angry on finding this out, and tries to utilize Draculaura’s ritual herself to even the playing field… with disastrous results.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: In “Spell The Beans,” Toralei’s plot to expose Draculaura as a witch ends up implicating herself instead.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: Zig-zagged; while there's plenty of worry about what humans could do if they learned about the existence of monsters, it's repeatedly shown that monsters have a lot of the same flaws (namely issues with prejudice). It gets focused on heavily in "Moonlit Fieldtrip"; while Clawdeen is right to worry about some humans reacting badly to the existence of monsters, she comes to realize that not every human will automatically turn on them. The first season finale reveals that human are a kind of monster, which raises further questions.
• Literal Bookworm: One gets loose in the library during "Creepover Party", growing bigger with every book it consumes. Twyla traps it with her shadow powers, and Headmistress Bloodgood sends it to the book graveyard, which is apparently where Monster High buries its outdated textbooks.
• Literal Split Personality: In "Two-Riffic", Clawdeen splits into two clones of herself so she can attend two different events she's interested in. One clone represents her logical and intelligent side, while the other represents her emotional and impulsive side.
• Lost Voice Plot: Mrs. O'Shriek loses her voice — and her banshee shriek — in "How to Scare a Banshee"; if someone doesn't scare it back into her before the end of the week, there's a chance she'll lose it permanently.
• Lying to Protect Your Feelings:
  • In “Crushed”, Frankie doesn’t tell Draculaura and Clawdeen how they really feel about not making the Fear Squad because they don’t want to be a killjoy in light of Clawdeen’s success.
  • In “Monster Movie”, Lagoona becomes increasingly distressed as her friends keep suggesting more and more changes to make to her movie, but maintains that she is fine with everything they suggest because she doesn’t want to cause a fight that could escalate and break their friendship (like how a similar incident over dinner food choice caused a rift between members of her family).
• MacGuffin: Clawdeen's moon claw necklace, which turns out to be one of six talismans needed to open the portal to Beheme and rescue her mother. The search for the other talismans make up the Myth Arc of season 1.
• Magic Mirror: In "Mummy in the Mirror", Cleo discovers a mirror with a sentient reflection that offers to help her boost her popularity online by switching places with her; unfortunately, it promptly tries to take over her life.
• Might Makes Right: Seems to be a tradition among the various werebeast species; the title of were-ruler is only earned by beating the previous leader in combat, and disputes are commonly settled with fights between the quarreling parties. It's shown to be an incredibly flawed method (as seen when Clawdeen becomes the new were-ruler simply by stopping Catarina's plan to take over the world, even though she's still in high school and has no experience in politics), but the werebeasts swear by it strongly enough that Clawdeen's plan to switch to a voting-based system proves controversial.
• Myth Arc:
  • There's an overarching plot in season 1 surrounding Clawdeen's search for her mother.
  • Season 2's is Clawdeen's election plans for finding a new were-ruler.
• Mythology Gag:
  • One of the holographic Frankies in "Portrait of a Monster" wears their default outfit from G1.
  • In "Out of Step", the Giggle Grove dance that Clawd, Draculaura and many other students do towards the end is the same dance Claire's friend Chad did in the G1 special "Ghouls Rule".
  • In "Monster Midterms", Skunkrates mentions he believes in a conspiracy theory about something called the "Humanati" led by someone named Van Hellscream. Van Hellscream was a major antagonist in the G1 special "Fright On!", being a human who tried to worsen the divide between different monster species and shut down the school.
  • In "Mummy in the Mirror", Draculaura mentions that her hair was black and pink striped two semesters ago. This is exactly what her hair looked like in G1 and 2.
• Noodle Incident: At the beginning of season 2, both Romulus and Skunkrates have announced their intentions to become the new were-ruler. By "The Haunted Sandcastle Caper", Skunkrates has dropped out — apparently, Romulus did something to him, but it's never stated what.
• Obviously Not Fine: In “Monster Movie”, despite saying otherwise to avoid a potential argument, Lagoona is clearly not okay with the direction her friends are causing her movie to go in. Still, she’s able to (mostly) maintain the facade, partly by venting her rage through chomping on props backstage out of sight, and partly because (almost) everyone else is too excited making the movie to notice.
• Pass the Popcorn: In "How to Scare a Banshee", as Clawd and Draculaura argue over who's better at scaring, Deuce pulls out a box of popcorn and offers some to Manny as they both watch.
• Power Incontinence: Most of the teenage monsters don't quite have control over their powers yet; it's normally played for laughs, but said incontinence is the reason that yetis were banned from attending Monster High at one point.
• Related Differently in the Adaptation: In Classical Mythology and Generation 1, Stheno and Euryale are Medusa's sisters. In the show, they are her oldest daughters and Deuce's sisters.
• Remake Cameo: Salli Saffioti, who played Clawdeen Wolf and Cleo de Nile in the previous generations, gets to make an appearance here as recurring character O'Shriek. Debi Derryberry and America Young (the former played Draculaura; the latter played Toralei Stripe, Howleen Wolf, Purrsephone and Meowlody) also get to guest star in an episode as Deuce's sisters.
• Repression Never Ends Well:
  • "Crushed" has Frankie trying to deal with their feelings over not making the Fear Squad by literally bottling them up as bolts of lightning. The bottle eventually breaks and causes a power outage, after which Cleo talks them into just letting it out in a safe place.
  • In "So Chill" Abbey isn't willing to tell her friends that she's feeling walked over because she's determined to remain chill. It leads to her exploding at and freezing Clawdeen when she forgets the presentation, then freezing more people as it gets out of control. Her mother talks her through her feelings in a snow-ga session and she agrees to be more honest from that point on.
  • In "Monster High-jinks", Toralei tries to push down her negative feelings about her mother's arrest in order to assist everyone during Family Day, only for the school to pick up on her turmoil and ruin everyone else's good time in response. The school only calms down when she lets out her feelings in a song, and she ultimately chooses not to rejoin the event rather than force herself to be happy.
• Serious Business: In "The Haunted Sandcastle Caper", sandcastle-building competitions are this to Dracula — to the point that after one is seemingly destroyed in a case of sabotage, he declares that the results will effect which were-ruler candidate he'll endorse.
• Shout-Out: In "The Haunted Sand Castle Caper" we learn that Dracula has his own hotel, albeit in the Bermuda Triangle.
• Stock Scream: The school bell at Monster High makes the Wilhelm scream when it rings.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted. Heath casually mentions that he went to a therapist for anger issues, and Cleo tells Frankie that it's an option if they're having trouble dealing with their new emotions.
• 13 Is Unlucky: Zig-zagged; though it's a celebration that involves various unlucky things and is even acknowledged as an unlucky day, Friday the 13th is a day of celebration for Clawd and Selena — they made a holiday out of it back in Beheme.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The teaser for the season 1 finale that showrunner Shea Fontana posted on social media not only revealed that Selena Wolf would come back, but showed a clip of Catarina Stripe wielding her all-monsters talisman.
• Wham Episode:
  • "Paw-zzle Pieces" sets up the main story arc going forward: Clawdeen discovers her mom is trapped in a dimension known as the Beheme and inadvertently releases her brother Clawd from it. She then learns that the portal to Beheme requires six talismans to open it; otherwise it will be destroyed and take everything with it.
  • The season 1 finale "The Monster Way" massively shakes up the status quo for the next season. By the end, Selena Wolf has been rescued from Beheme and reunited with her family, Catarina Stripe turns out to have been the one to trap her there in the first place in order to keep her from spreading her more tolerant ideals, defeating her ends up making Clawdeen the new were-ruler, Bloodgood has discovered Draculaura is a witch but opted not to expel her (and she promises to try and help witches become more accepted at Monster High), and a seventh talisman ends up discovered — a human talisman, meaning a human helped found Monster High.
• Wham Line:
  • At the end of "Monster Midterms", as Ms. Ziz and Mr. Klopman are discussing how midterms went:
    Klopman: Midterms went well, huh? Even Clawdeen and Toralei seemed to be getting along!
    Ziz: Yeah, of course, but for how long? If all goes well on the Blood Moon Eclipse and Clawdeen brings her mom back, it's gonna be all-out war for the werecreatures! Dot...dot...dot...
  • In "Horsin' Around", after catching the talisman thief, Draculaura asks him how he got to Monster High from Beheme, and he replies that he got sucked through a portal. When Bloodgood asks if it was the same portal Clawd came through, however, he has a simple answer: "No". This prompts the reveal that someone else has been messing with the portal to Beheme behind everyone else's backs — and they don't even know who, since the description the thief gives (ears, a little furry, has a tail) matches about half the student body.
• You Mean X Mas: "Nightmore", the longest night of the year, where monsters band together and celebrate until the sun comes back. It even has its own version of mistletoe for couples to kiss under: a bundle of missing toes.

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