YMMV / Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

• Epileptic Trees: There are indications that Emiko used to work for Monarch as a nurse. When Tim and Duvall went to her apartment to ask about Bill Randa's files, she hands Kentaro a photo of Lee Shaw so he could find him. In episode 9, Hiroshi talks to a nurse named Matsumoto, whom Lee nearly strangled and Hiroshi apologizes on his behalf. If Emiko didn't know about Lee, she wouldn't had given Kentaro his picture, since Lee was Hiroshi's Honorary Uncle.
• Fan Nickname: In lieu of official names, the Titans seen in the trailer have been given nicknames by some, continuing the MonsterVerse fan tradition of giving the lesser Titans human names:
  • “Stella” for the Ion Dragon.
    • "Titanus Bakunawa" or "Titanus Minokawa" after two dragons in Philippine myth, to keep with the Mythical Motifs naming system for Titans.
  • “Maurice” or “Edward” for the Frost-Vark.
    • Some people have also taken to dubbing the Frost-Vark "Titanus Indrik" after a monster from Russian folklore that it bears a passing resemblance to, to once again keep to the franchise’s Mythical Motifs naming system for Kaiju.
• Genius Bonus: The baseball cap that Bill Randa wears is for the Kansas City Monarchs.
  • But there's another layer to the bonus, too: Randa is shown to be pretty progressive for a white man in the 1950s (for example, having no problem believing that a Japanese woman could be a scientist). The Monarchs are best known for being Jackie Robinson's team before he broke the major leagues' color barrier, meaning that Randa was wearing a black team's baseball cap during the 50s and the 40s (the cap was seen in his luggage from his two tours during WWII).
• He's Just Hiding: A quite few number of fans think this is Keiko's fate, considering the flashback scenes of her after her supposed death fully develops her character, and goes what she's going through, and her romance with Bill Randa, even if Developing Doomed Characters was in play. Lo and behold, episode 9's ending shows that Keiko did survive her encounter from Enndoswarmers by saving her granddaughter.
• I Knew It!:
  • For such an important character who gets killed off in the first episode, many fans didn't believe Keiko Randa was actually dead. Episode 9 confirms that she did in fact survived her encounter with infant Endoswarmers.
  • Several fans think Lee Shaw is Older Than He Looks because of a mission that went wrong. Episode 9 also confirms this where a botched mission to Hollow Earth sends him back 20 years later in Japan, where he encounters an adult Hiroshi.
• Improved Second Attempt: While the previous Monsterverse installments all received generally favourable reviews a common criticism of all of them was their uninteresting, half-baked characters which distracted from the monster fights everyone was here to see. Legacy of Monsters, meanwhile, has earned praise for being able to take intriguing character drama and blend it with the big, spectacular monster action.
• Just Here for Godzilla: In an interesting twist on this trope, a sizable portion of viewers prefer to only watch not just the monster scenes, but also the 1950s scenes as well as any time Kurt Russell is on screen.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Godzilla's appearance in the final episode of Season One quickly began to be memed for a variety of factors. From Godzilla stepping out of the portal with a pose that looks like he has his hands on his hips ^note The pose has been compared to a sheriff sauntering into town to see who's causing some ruckus and when he effortlessly hurls the Ion Dragon into the portal, the last one even getting a few humorous edits like using Ed Eddn Eddy sound effects or the famous Super Mario 64 "So long gay bowser!"
  • High-on Dragon ^Explanation A close-up image of the Ion Dragon’s face, edited to give it the bloodshot eyes of someone who’s been smoking marijuana.
• Salvaged Story: As iconic as Dr. Serizawa's line "let them fight" in Godzilla (2014) was, his strategy has since been criticized out-of-universe as completely insane and ultimately hollow, especially since when they do fight in that movie, Godzilla almost loses to the hostile monsters until Ford Brody's human interference (which is the very thing that Serizawa was advocating against with that line) distracts the MUTOs long enough to turn the tide. Lee Shaw in this series is damningly critical of Serizawa's policy, and in "The Way Out", Shaw derisively parrots the line before rhetorically asking Verdugo what would have happened to the world if Godzilla had fought and lost to the MUTOs, although it should be noted that Shaw's alternatives towards the series' end themselves end up misguided and threaten to cause more problems than solutions for the world. The series further deconstructs Monarch's inaction when it comes to them leaving active Titans alone in favor of waiting for the Titans to sort themselves out, as Monarch's passiveness increasingly disillusions many people including their own operatives, and drives those people away to look for more radical solutions in the hopes of limiting casualties.
• Unexpected Character: While Godzilla was all over the advertising for the series, Kong's cameo in the final episode was completely out of left-field.
• Woobie Family: The Randa family, very much, with Cate even commenting that the family is cursed.
  • Keiko Randa-Miura is a female doctor and scientist who, despite being one of Monarch's key founding members, struggles for recognition due to being a Japanese woman (and an ex-Imperial Navy one during WWII despite being pardoned), in the 1950s United States. The casual day-to-day bigotry she faces gets worse when the coworker and friend that Keiko falls in love with (Lee Shaw) impulsively flakes out on an important meeting because of his feelings for her, which leads to the openly-bigoted Lieutenant Hatch being put in charge of Monarch, and trying to destroy the very organization that Keiko helped get off the ground — which also kills any chance Keiko and Lee had of getting together. Later, it's revealed that Keiko has already been married once in her home country and is a widower, and she struggled even with her mother's help to get herself and her son by her first husband, Hiroshi, into the States. Keiko falls in love with and marries her and Lee's other co-founder and friend Bill Randa, but in less than half a decade, Keiko apparently falls to an unpleasant death in Kazakhstan while being attacked by Endoswarmers. Except, Keiko survived the attack, falling into the Hollow Earth. Completely alone and fighting for survival against the native monsters, Keiko thinks she's only been trapped in the Hollow Earth for two months, until she's hit by a massive Trauma Conga Line from finding out the truth: she's actually been down there for more than 55 years in the surface world's time due to time dilation, and Lee is now an old man who mourned her for decades, Bill is long dead along with nearly everyone else she knew, and Hiroshi has grown up alone without either of his parents. And less than twenty-four hours after being hit with all of that, Keiko watches Lee at best trap himself in the Hollow Earth in her place, or at worst sacrifice his life, to save her. Peter Parker would be impressed.
  • Young Bill Randa in the 1950s is a far cry from the ruthless, jaded old Manipulative Bastard that we know he's destined to become. He watches his wife of a few years and close friend Keiko falls to her death in front of him on a mission while he was trying to get her to safety. Three years later, Bill incorrectly believes he's lost his and Keiko's other closest friend and co-founder, Lee Shaw, when the latter disappears on a disastrously-botched Hollow Earth mission, leaving Bill all alone. The compounded trauma and loss tragically causes Bill to become obsessed with proving his and Keiko's theory about the Hollow Earth and preventing Monarch's shutdown, leading into his actions and death in Kong: Skull Island. This also causes Bill to become increasingly distant from and neglectful to his and Keiko's son Hiroshi, so much so that in the distant prologue, Bill in his final days regretfully thinks that Hiroshi won't be too badly affected by his death. Even more tragic, neither Keiko nor Lee were dead — both were still alive inside the Axis Mundi's time-dilating effect, but Bill died without ever knowing any of this.
  • Cate had a really bad couple of days during the destruction of San Francisco, to put it mildly. Her relationship with her loving girlfriend ended amid the panic and chaos of the attack (though by her own admission, that was her own fault); she was at ground zero when Godzilla's clash with the U.S. military destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge, which also caused all but two of her beloved school students whose safety she was charged with to fall screaming to their deaths right in front of her eyes while she was helpless to save them; and the next morning, her estranged father approached her at the refugee camp for no other reason than to hand her tickets that would get her and her mother out of the quarantine zone, before he left her effective very immediately on an enigmatic job, which he subsequently never came back from before he was declared killed in a plane crash for a year. All this left Cate with significant PTSD, and caused her to shut off and become inconsolable for a year.
  • Cate's own mother Caroline lost their home in San Francisco on G-Day, and they've been living in a refugee camp-trailer park hybrid ever since. Although Caroline is more of a stepford smiler than Cate, she's just as emotionally frazzled as her daughter. Caroline reveals that she was helpless to console Cate while the latter locked herself up and started wasting away during the year after G-Day and after Caroline's husband is reported dead, and sending Cate to Tokyo was her desperate last attempt at helping her daughter. When Cate comes back from Tokyo, Caroline finds out that her husband wasn't just having an affair overseas, he had a secret other family including another kid.
  • Though he's initially not half as traumatized as most of the other Randas, Kentaro doesn't exactly experience sunshine and rainbows. In his backstory, he was studying under an art celebrity, but he blew off his own art viewing to hang out with May when they met, and he subsequently got dropped by his idol, causing him to become a jaded washout in a white-collar job — plus his relationship with the girl that he blew off his art viewing for ended up subsequently souring anyway. Although all of this is ultimately Kentaro's own fault, what isn't his own fault is the further angst he experiences in the present, from finding out about his AWOL father's secret other family onwards. At the series' end, Kentaro spends a whole episode-and-a-half believing he's the sole survivor of the main 2015 cast after a Vile Vortex collapses on them, and he's completely devastated at the supposed deaths of his friends including the half-sister who he'd only just started growing close to. Even when he finds out that they're actually alive, Kentaro still needs to wait two whole years before he sees them again, thanks to Axis Mundi.

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