Headfirst For Halos: Monster Train 2's Intersectionality and Reformed Angels

When the fight ends in Hell, we will take it to Heaven.

It’s the natural evolution that Monster Train would take with its sequel. The original was about a home frozen over, Hell’s many denizens being starved out by Heaven’s treacherous invasion, and taking a desperate train ride to get the last ember of hope, a literal final flame, to the heart of Hell. Seraph, Heaven’s leader, violated an ancient peace treaty to wage his war. So in the sequel, he deserves to be stopped forever, Hell’s forces sending the train the opposite way along the rails. What they also find is a Heaven even more twisted than they could imagine. Ancient Titans have escaped from a barrier between worlds and have swayed or corrupted Heaven’s denizens to their side.

There’s an easy path Monster Train 2 could have taken, where the Titans are just a new force. A more evil force. But that’s not what developer Shiny Shoe went with. Instead, the Titans split the angels. Heaven’s denizens will show their true colors. Many stay with the Titans, often those who benefit or seek to benefit from the enforced class system that Seraph created. The Titans shape them into entirely new forms, honed to specific purposes. Some soldiers take the power of Savagery to become intertwined by flesh with their weapons, while others bond with Entropy to lose signs of sentience, becoming bodies that jut out of crystals or vice versa. The rest, often meager clerics who signed up for the first game’s war for a chance at earning a seat among the angels, now grow extra limbs and eyeballs thanks to Dominion. For all of them, there is no imagining a better world than the modern.

But on the other hand, we have the Banished. Punk-rock styled angels that are one of the playable clans, led by Seraph’s own sister, Fel. While she was an enemy in Monster Train, her dialogue suggested regret. Misery. Fear of daring to oppose her brother. Now, it’s time for her to give that up and lead the charge against her old home. Not just to free it for herself, but also to bring peace back to the two factions. They end up being my favorite of the clans, not just because of their own mechanics and the utility they create with other teams, but because of their aesthetic. The Hot Topic style colored hair and ripped skinny jeans, reveling in horns and music and piercings. Each one looks like the OC in the notebook of a 2000’s middle-schooler, and as someone who was in middle-school in the 2000’s, I obviously mean this as a compliment.

Middle and high school weren’t just times to doodle the coolest swords and winged warriors, though. They were also times where I had my own sort of Fel journey, where a lot would shift. Same with the country and thus the world. I’d been raised to be a good conservative Christian. I laughed at Al Gore’s demands for a recount, and as the surveillance state increased in the wake of the September 11th attacks, I adopted the “if you have nothing to hide, it’s not a problem” stance. To only go back in time and tell that 6th grader that setting George W. into power was a wild thing for the Supreme Court to just get to do, and slap the 7th grader out of myself, outlining that “nothing to hide” certainly doesn’t preclude the state from using searches to target specific people. Of course, there’s a lot to tell younger me.

Maybe the best candidate to actually get the message across, though, was the music of the 2000’s. The type of edgy yet bright music, the bops that were structured to get in your head, and sure felt (and still feel) like putting words to my feelings, whether sincere or manipulative in their writing. Pop-punk as a perfect genre name; clarified by contradiction. It’s the perfect aesthetic for the Banished.

Take the high school cattiness of Paramore’s Misery Business, where Hayley Williams savors not just getting the boy she was going for, but also bringing down her “whore” adversary. “She’s got it out for me, but I wore the biggest smile.” The music video centers around the evil popular girl walking the school halls, terrorizing her classmates, before Paramore shows up and rips her fake breasts from her shirt, showing that this really hot girl is not actually as hot as she claims to be. We’re genuine, you’re fake. 

In that last bit is some obvious validation through contradiction. The band has straightened and dyed hair all around, with Hayley’s signature orange standing out in particular. All the bands in the era were doing similar. The dark eyeshadow and black hair was so obvious it became a target of parody. I was in both marching band and the drama club (shocker, I know), and each came alive through the scene. Panic! At The Disco embraced stage and musical aesthetics on A Fever You Can't Sweat Out; Baz Luhrman style theatrics defined their striking music videos. The whole album is framed as a show that you, the listener, are a part of (“sit tight, I’m gonna need you to keep time/come on, just snap, snap, snap your fingers for me”). And for the marching band side of high school dorks, My Chemical Romance refined their screaming style from throat-scratching howls on their debut album to the arena-ready projections of Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade. The latter told an out-of-sequence story of death, the cover featuring a skeletal drum major, and its most iconic song (the semi-titular Welcome To The Black Parade) maintaining a marching beat through its entire 5 minute 11 second runtime.

None of these are entirely genuine. Makeup is fake. Plays are performances. Marches are conformity. But by embracing the dramatic, the flair, the pop-punk bands were showing the maybe truth of how they felt and the absolute truth of how we felt. I’m just a kid, and life is a nightmare. This definitely had drawbacks as we look at history, with the genre reveling in incel-adjacent misogyny. Calls for violence against exes, lighthearted reveling in walks of shame, and even songs about abused girls who need saving came with an undertone of “and I, the boy, will be your hero for you”. Maybe actually embracing the cringe of the scene would have helped me back then, but those last bits might’ve only accentuated the worst parts of me from then, so who’s to say if it would have been good or bad.

Music was the best way to represent the generation, so it makes sense The Banished would use music as their main motif. While the bigger Angels will hold the frontline, they get support from avian Hymnists bringing out instruments to grant buffs such as multiple or quick attacks. The Lead Songbird, Upbeat Warbler, Punk Shredder, and Deathmetal Hymnist all rally the forces together, not just during the fights on the train, but also back at base, putting together a concert through various cutscenes. Other Banished units include the tattooed Demonic Fledgling, the spiky Firebrand, and the pairing of Divine and Death’s Dancers. Crews I’ve seen in abandoned church basement concerts, whether on the stage or in the crowd.

The angels are not suddenly perfect representatives of Hell, though. They’re late to the party. They also have a lot to recover. Part of Seraph’s rule was clipping the wings of angels, including Fel, to keep them in line. Those who had proven their full loyalty and power would get to keep theirs, while others could vie to get new wings. Hell, though, has ways to give the angels what they lost. The aforementioned Demonic Fledgling has tiny wings growing out of his shoulders, while the Hostguard has a large mechanical apparatus. Fel’s wings have grown back, now batlike yet riddled with holes. Most of the army now sports devil horns. In downtime at the base, they compare their changing bodies and revel in their new, uninhibited lives.

It’s like a taste of a new world, even without fully leaving or processing the old one. For my sheltered self, that was what the music was. I could wonder how people would devote themselves to being goth or wear shirts that were outright attacking President Bush (the president! How dare you!). And then listen to one Linkin Park song and suddenly get it. I have, in fact, become so numb I can’t feel you there.

There was a deep sense in the pop-punk scene that something was wrong. Even if it was something you couldn’t quite put a finger on. A general complaint. I wasn’t quite into it in high school, but shortly thereafter it would really start to hit. Maybe it was cause when I was a teen, I at least though I had things figured out, even if I didn’t. I ignored my bad grades and depression, pushed suicidal thoughts down, and didn’t even know that questioning my gender, let alone changing it, was a thing. I buried my music taste in dad rock. And hey look, I still love some Journey and Bon Jovi, but that wasn’t me. The aforementioned Linkin Park pervaded AMV communities, a key way of listening to music. A crush introduced me to Something Corporate. Older punk and punk-adjacent groups like Patti Smith and The Goo-Goo Dolls made their way into my library by combining free streaming like young YouTube and Pandora with Audacity.

But easily the ones that stuck with me the most were My Chemical Romance and Paramore. Maybe a bit basic, but also each had their place. Welcome To The Black Parade’s evocative lyrics and length made me picture my own RPG where each line showed up throughout. And while I’d heard Fences, Crushcrushcrush, and Misery Business before, the way Hayley Williams was almost snarling through Ignorance was the most impactful bit for me.

It was way later where I learned of the drama that pervades Brand New Eyes, the album Ignorance is featured on. The way this super-Christian band was starting to clash with faith in a world where that faith was being abused. I’ll never forget the feeling of helpless confusion to be raised as a good Christian and American, and then seeing the country unapologetically go overseas to murder. And for my mom to say that Muslims “deserved it” for having a “violent religion.” And what does that make us, exactly?

It’s what it feels like for Fel and the other Banished. Whether by just believing the mandate of Heaven is right, or that Seraph’s society at least creates order, or just being terrified of leaving it, they’re not going to change things by just keeping silent and sticking with him. There has to be a switch. And in some ways, it will be a slow one. This is true narratively and mechanically; the Banished’s signature buff is called Valor, a slow ramp up that aids both offense and defense.

Basically, some Banished spells and abilities grant Valor stacks. A unit gains more attack power for each stack, and, if they’re at the front of the line, they also build their armor up to their stack count. With a little bit of time, any unit can turn into a shield. And thanks to the Banished also having tons of Shift spells (which move troops placement around), it’s easy to flip and flop to build armor on multiple units or have bulked up one guy to fling to the front at a critical time. And that’s not even getting into the real meat of Monster Train 2, where you pair two clans up and find the best synergies. A Valor-stacked unit with Reanimate from the Lazarus League take enough hits to die but then build that Valor armor back in an instant. The Underlegion’s Propagate increases all buffs on friendlies, including Valor. Flight and Shift make it easy to stack extra units on a floor to get bonus Conduit from a unique Luna Coven unit and room. I could go on.

That cooperation is then where Monster Train 2 and the Banished most reflect what we can do today. I wouldn’t argue that it’s some secret punk anarchist manifesto. But it is a reminder that people and groups shift and change. And that they all have their own benefits. I’ve seen videos now of ICE attempting to kidnap people, only for their suburban neighbors to rally and chase the fascists out. The same type of suburbs that were designed to separate communities. People who actually have money giving up what they can to aid the needy as their SNAP benefits get cut off. Strengths are meant to be shared.

Times change. People change. Fel changes sides to actually bring about a better world and renew the pact. My Chemical Romance comes from the wreckage of 9/11, Gerard Way overwhelmed by seeing the burning from across the river, and eventually the band’s last album is a big Fuck You to America and the destruction it tilts toward. Paramore’s albums are peppered with faith-fueled hymns of God’s great love, and it ends up with members out and disowned for their hate-fueled crusades, while embracing the queer and the non-white, antithetical to the vocal churches of the 90’s and 00’s yet true to the actual word. 

I’m still figuring out how best to fight. I imagine many of us are. And there are lots of people out there who have no idea they even can. Just know that sometimes, the anger? The expression? Sometimes that’s all someone needs to shift to our side. Maybe the only wings we can offer are tattered and broken, but sometimes that’s all anyone needs.

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