The distinction I think is that the top characters are mostly designed to be monstrous with sexual undertones, whereas the bottom ones are mostly designed to be sexual with monstrous undertones. In other words, the guys up top were built as primarily monstrous and then people sexualized them (the Shape of Water guy not really, but he’s based on one that worked that way), whereas the Monster Musume cast and most “monstergirls” generally are designed as sexy cheesecake type characters first and then the monstrous elements are like the Miscellaneous Forehead Putty on Star Trek aliens.
If you look around art sites, though, you can totally find the counterparts to each pattern: monstrous female monsters being sexualized, and beefcakey sexpot guys with some monstrous elements. And definitely nobody would ever accuse guys of having trouble sexualizing female characters, so it’s clearly not a lack of imaginination. I think what’s actually reflected here is patterns of media creation rather than consumption.
In the media, primarily-sexual characters default to female because being sexual is coded female. But being female is marked while being male is unmarked, so if a character’s point is mainly to be a monster without being overtly hypersexualized, they’ll almost never be made female. Conversely, given a female monster creators will often sexualize her to an excessive degree just out of habit. There’s an underlying assumption here in content creation that sex sells, but only to men, and that there’s no other reason for a monster to be female except for that. And maybe that’s true to some extent in the sense that it probably shows up in raw sales numbers. But I’m pretty sure that if there were more female-coded monsters that were seriously monstrous, you’d see a comparable amount of Tumblr thirst, if only because Tumblr is that way. (And, comparably, if they made Monster Musume but all cutesy hypersexualized monsterguys, it might not move mountains in Akihabara but it’d do pretty okay.)
There is a specific and terrifying difference between “never were” monsters and “are not anymore” monsters
“The thing that was not a deer” implies a creature which mimics a deer but imperfectly and the details which are wrong are what makes it terrifying
“The thing that was not a deer anymore” on the other hand implies a thing that USED to be a deer before it was somehow mutated, possessed, parasitically controlled or reanimated improperly and what makes THAT terrifying is the details that are still right and recognizable poking out of all the wrong and horrible malformations.
hey I totally fucked up and forgot the 3rd type, which is “Is Not Anymore And Maybe Never Was” monsters
“The thing which was no longer a deer and maybe never was” implies a creature that, at first glance, completely appears to be a deer, but over time degrades very slowly until you realize (probably too late) that it is not a deer anymore, and had you seen it in this state first, you wouldn’t have recognized it as a deer at all, and there’s a decent chance that it was never actually a deer to begin with but only a very good mimic, and what makes this one scary is the slow change from everything being right to everything being wrong, happening slowly enough that you don’t even notice it until its too late, as well as the fact that something now so clearly not a deer could have fooled you to begin with.
And the fourth type, which is, “I dunno, but it sure ain’t a deer.” Which implies complete confusion about what the creature could be, to the point that even a person as comfortable in this world as someone who would use the word ain’t unironically is uncertain, which should horrify you to the deepest depths of your soul.
just moving along like everyone else 