Here we are kiddos. The final frontier. Hope you got your big boy booties on, cause they’re gonna be full of big boy tears.
This is the grand ole grand finale of not only Monster reviews, but Where I Stand in its entirety. So in honor of this thing I do every month where I write something that vaguely resembles an obscure opinion of sorts on this nationally awarded student publication website and then you, my dear sweet dearly sweet reader read it, I wrangled up five more Monsters, and they ran around in my bloodstream like a pack of feral toddlers. Since writing the very first Monster review monster energy has incorporated itself into my public persona. This has become quite enjoyable as I’ll get mysterious texts from numbers saying “i’m buying monster rn. what flavor should I get?” To which my all powerful god complex immediately replies, “mango loco my child” and all is well. I believe that since monster review numero uno released, Monster abuse in the SPA community has more than quadrupled. I walk down these halls and I see children jonesing for that monster juice. Their eyes are sunken, their faces are grey due to a lack of taurine, and they stayed up till like three in the morning doing homework but straight up didn’t get any of it done and now they’ve got an English presentation but they never rehearsed it and all those symbols on the board look completely foreign. Oh hold up. I think that’s actually stress culture doing that. In fact, perhaps Monster is the force tearing down the culture of stress in this community, cause who has time to be stressed when their veins are throwing them around the room like a loose marionette.

I certainly wasn’t stressed during my most recent encounter with the intrepid force we call Monster Energy. I’ve been training for this. It’s my duty to look Monster dead in the eyes, say something like “there’s not enough room in this town for the both of us” and then drink the electrified juice till my cells go brr. And then drink some more. This time I brought back my time worn and grizzled Monster drinking companion to go on this journey with me as we once again faced the beasts. But not only did I have my old pal, but three new compatriots who had their buttocks tightened and were ready to challenge the creature. For the day’s tasting pleasure I selected a collection of drinks that would bring us on a riveting flavor journey, and once again seek to answer the question, What is the superior flavor of Monster Energy? To start the gauntlet I selected the more recent and fan favorite Papillon energy juice blend. Next in line the Monster Mule, a recommendation from the VOX in the comments of the last article. To really make us question our sanity I brought forth Monster Irish Blend, a coffee and Monster fusion. Since we deserve some rest in the sweet summer sun after all that, next came the reigning champion of all monsters, mango loco. Finally, the boss, the big behemoth, the killer of men and clogger of arteries, battery acid. Unfortunately we did not drink straight battery acid as that went outside of my budget, but we did drink an internet popularized Monster concoction brewed by these very hands. It contained a bed of sour gummy worms, buried in a soil of nerds, froliced upon by sour patch children, overseen by rainbow sour candy belts, in a tall glass all drowned in the purest classic monster. Enough jibjab, let’s get into it.

Aesthetics: 
Papillon is a lil beauty queen. She’s got a lovely peachy can covered in nice lil outdated butterfly illustrations. Decent colors. Good on the eyes. And when you pop her cute orange tab out flows her smooth peachy nectar. She kind of glows in a glass. She’s translucent and definitely pretty, but she lacks the level of sophistication that we all require in our Monster Energy. She is one of a trio of butterfly honoring monster juices, also including monarch and mariposa. Papillon is French for butterfly, and she reminds me a bit of an American French student who has forgotten that they themself are not French. They’re adorable and charming and very good at what they do, but they haven’t quite stepped into reality

Monster Mule is Monster’s take on ginger beer. To really make one feel like they’re in a setting where one would drink ginger beer, which I guess to the monster minds is like Hephaestus’s blacksmithery if it was also in a German beer garden, the Monster Mule can is black and all of its decorative elements are in shiny bronze. It’s clean, sleek , fairly attractive, but subdued compared to other energy cans. On the shelf it’s easy to pass over. My companions compared the can aesthetic to a Greek pot. I’m not quite sure if they truly connected with the can there but I support and value their opinions, so in it goes into this article. One of my associates also believed that all of the Monsters when poured out in glasses looked like various bodily fluids. She might have a point there. Papillon was assigned stale urine and Monster Mule… well Monster Mule is a white pearlescent fluid. It appears a little viscous but has a slippery smoothness. In a glass it could be pointed at in a childish manner and be closely associated with the mysterious liquid that expels from the male center of sensitivity. If you wanted to look at Monster Mule through rose colored glasses you could say it resembles liquid opal and then drink a nice tall can of it feeling like royalty.

I guess the head honchos over at Monster HQ one day thought “Monster is too artificial. We need to seem more natural, less fake. Let’s team up with nature’s energy drink. The ol’ cup o’ Joe.” So Monster Java line was born and it has been bringing gas station drink aisle perusers to states of feudal confusion ever since. Fun story from my own life: Once someone told me that if you mix RedBull and milk it’s really good. So of course as a sheep of a person I executed this direction. Very cool science fact: butter is made when acid is added to milk and the curd separates from the buttermilk. When I poured milk like a grade-A barista into this glass of RedBull that fateful night the milk began undergoing a chemical change. A chemical change I did not see because I was already busy getting my tongue on this crazy new drink I’d made. Unfortunately I did not see that the RedBull had curdled the milk and this thing I was drinking tasted so weird because it was curdling in my mouth as I slurped it. I still did not seem to understand after I had taken my first sip and set down the glass that it was curdled milk. Something not recommended to drink. So I took a few more glugs and lived my life in blissful oblivion. What I’m getting at here is that milk and energy drinks do not mix, and to my horror I discovered on the ingredient list of Monster Java is both condensed skim milk and heavy cream. Strangely enough before consuming Monster Irish Blend I had already in my lifetime partaken in a Monster coffee-chocolate-milk-whatever on another similarly chaotic night last summer. Monster Swiss Chocolate is not a coffee drink I do believe, but it is a fluid that if consumed will put you through full body confusion. Irish Blend sounded like it had to be worse than that. By calling it Irish blend there is a strange allusion to Irish coffee, a traditional mixture of alcohol and coffee that is not child appropriate for various reasons. Monster Irish Blend has no alcohol, in fact it has nothing in it that would suggest alcohol or Ireland. It’s a kind of BYOB. ( bring your own bagpipes ) The only connection I can find to the Irish drink is that perhaps it intends to screw up your innards in a manner harking back to the traditional breakfast brew. The can itself does try to call forth some sense of Irishness, primarily just in that it’s completely green and has little Nordic sigil designs on it. The font is straight ugly, and they made the poor decision of choosing to do accents in brown on the can, supposedly to warn you about the coffee, but it’s just ugly. The ugliest thing of all though is when you pour this Ireland forsaken brew into a glass. It… it.. I’m speechless. To steal my friend’s thoughts while I can’t seem to make my own. It looks like slippery diarrhea. I wont get to graphic for all you readers currently clutching your darling monsters to your breasts as you read this right now, but it looks like if an old Irish man was forced to eat copious amounts of dirt, crouch over this poor can, and go on with his business. I’m very sorry if that was too much for you, so to cleanse your mind but still keep us on track I’ll just recite this classical playground sonnet. Milk. Milk. Lemonade. Round the corner fudge is made. Or in our case lemonade came first, but the rhythm isn’t right that way so we leave it. As you swirl around the perverse coffee liquid in a glass it leaves residue on the walls. The residue was so difficult to get off we had to get new glasses for the next drink. All in all Monster Irish Blend is the most aesthetically revolting drink in Where I Stand history and for that it will live in infamy.

Ahhh but here we are again. You know the face of our old loving friend Mango Loco. She rattles our bones with her questionable Cinco de Mayo skeleton graphics, and then shines down upon us her glorious smile as she perches in her glass glowing in the sunlight, dappled with what we assume to be pulp and a congenial mango color. She’s like Mary Poppins, positively perfect in every way, except for her approach to the subject of cultural appropriation.

Let’s revisit the visual I dropped in your head earlier. Not the old man pooping, but the earthly haven-like landscape of sour gummy worms digging in the sweet nerd soil as carefree sour patch children frolic and giggle under a sour rainbow stripe donning sky. Creating battery acid almost encroaches on one of the ten commandments as you create this genesis style world in your tall glass. I felt godly as I layered my candy in this vessel and flooded them with classic Monster, Noah’s arc style. For a finishing touch and a bit of interactivity I placed a sour straw in there to luxuriously sip the holy liquid. Gazing upon the sight in the sunlight it looks like a terrarium donning a thriving ecosystem. The electricity of Monster keeps everything in the glass from drooping so it can be observed like a prismatic ant farm. Now not to spoil the taste, as that will be disclosed later, but after sipping on these faux monster cocktails we decided the candy really needed to be incorporated into the drink. Wine is said to increase in flavor and complexity if you blend it, and I treat my Monsters like fine wine, so I whipped out my brand new nutribullet I received as a loving birthday present for my eighteenth birthday and plugged that baby in. I threw a couple more kids into the blender along with the original chalice of battery acid we had not been drinking from and got to chopping. When Monster is blended the air whips into it quite quickly, and similar to cream or meringue, it becomes frothy. Our collection of monster energy and candy acquired a zombie grey color, which was extra disconcerting with the froth it accumulated. On the bottom of the mixer cup was a mound of tiny chopped gummy candy that if swirled around could almost look like fun confetti against the purplish grey of the drink. Poured into a cup it was completely opaque. No light got through that glass, which is almost beautiful but only for the poetic sense of metaphor in the grim foreshadowing.

Taste: 
Papillon oh Papillon. Yet another Monster Juice blend with tropical flavors, which always seem to slap. On the can she says she’s meant to taste of peach and nectarine, but on the nose she smells like straight dollar store peach rings. A personal favorite. Quite artificial. She looks like a vivacious gal and she tastes like one too. She’s light and fruity, kinda dances on your tongue in a fizzy fairy-like way. There are hints of guava and whatever else one imagines that brand of fruits might contain. She may be delicious, but she seems like she’s trying too hard and not being genuine. She ticks all the boxes, but she doesn’t yet know how to have the heart of a truly spectacular Monster Energy. I give her my blessing, and until she discovers who she is in her soul I’ll continue pleasantly sipping Papillon out of unnecessarily nice crystal.
Some people would sell their arm and leg for a can of sauerkraut, others would cut off their arms and legs if they got sauerkraut on them. Certain foods bring people to far ends of the spectrum, Monster Mule is one of them. It almost lacks a smell, but as soon as you take your first sip you go on a flavor journey. As it travels down your palette it morphs into new strange flavors, each second shedding a layer of its skin like an onion. Don’t let it just sit on your tongue. Treat it well. Form a relationship. Monster Mule will do to you what you do to it. Also it doesn’t taste like ginger.

The stench a cup of Monster Irish Blend secretes is deplorable. It’s sour and wretched. There are these wisps of milky creaminess that fling up into your nostrils and try to sooth your nose but they collide with the putrid spice radiating from the Monster and rot in your olfactory. Do not smell Irish Blend if you can avoid it. By soaking up fat whiffs of this drink my companions and I were far from excited to batten our hatches and head off to sea with the Monster brew. We closed our eyes and took a shaking sip… I sat there… I took a another sip… a tear flew from my eye. Monster Irish Blend tasted GOOD. I’m not sure I could believe in a higher power, for how could a creature craft this concoction and then gift it with the boon of adequate taste??? HOW. It was not bad. It tasted acceptable. If someone handed me a can of it and said “drink” I would, no complaints. Everything about this drink leading up to the first fateful sip prepares one for a lifetime of pain, and then instead of slapping you in the face it gives you a pat on the cheek and an awkward smile. I don’t like coffee, but this tastes fine to me because it tasted exactly like a latte that’s almost entirely cream and sugar. There wasn’t any weird Monster trying to crawl through and pinch me in the drink. It just tasted like a latte in a can. Don’t judge a book by its cover? I don’t know. It was a tumultuous experience that makes me feel like there’s some sort of lesson, but I’m not sure there is.

This Monster gauntlet was a strange comparison to the first one. I reached higher highs on the metaphorical Monster roller coaster than before ( or perhaps they’re lower lows ) but I didn’t experience the same long drudging Monster hangover as I had previously. This is likely because the first time I not only drank more total Monster, but it was spread out along an entire five to seven hours during which I was regularly consuming a new monster and starting the whole journey over again. This was exhilarating and hilariously incapacitating as it was during an online school day and I had both a test and my senior speech dress rehearsal. This time I felt like an aged veteran. I consumed fewer fluid ounces of Monster, but due to the unearthly debauchery of the blended battery acid my mind, body, and soul pioneered frontiers previously unbeknownst to man. Perhaps the battery acid was guiding me. Maybe I never had a crash similar to the first Monster mayhem because the battery acid was leading me like a benevolent god to new horizons and then set me down gently instead of letting me crash in a flaming blaze back down to earth. There was no better way I could imagine wrapping up the final instatement of Where I Stand than going back to the beginning in a fiery ball. So where do I stand?

I stand inside the body of mother Monster. She has welcomed me into her universe and it is warm and devoid of sleep. My body has been replaced with cans of monster. When I am tired I sleep on a bed of monster. When I am hungry I suckle from a monster can. When I am lonely I look to my fellow beasts of the monster kingdom. The most radiant of all being Mango Loco.

Monster is not a drink, it is everything. From the buds on the trees to the bumps you get on your arms when you’re cold or scared. I’d like to thank you for coming with me as I’ve expanded my mind and where I stand. Instead of a parting kiss I will leave you with this: another monster rank list that doesn’t include battery acid because battery acid is everywhere and I fear its wrath.

1. Mango Loco
2. Papillon
3. Monster Mule
4. Irish Blend
93. Pacific Punch