Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2 featured the MonsterVerse’s biggest stars – King Kong and Godzilla – along with a blend of complicated family drama and mad science. But the real reason to watch was Titan X, an entirely new creature for the franchise, which has traditionally drawn on the mythology established by Toho, the storied Japanese studio behind the iconic giant lizard and his various kaiju friends.
Titan X is a Lovecraftian horror, with a toothy maw, tentacles, and bioluminescent spikes. Like Godzilla, she’s equally comfortable on land or at sea. Unlike Godzilla, who usually represents death and chaos, she’s revered as a divine figure across the Earth, where her migration path is said to bring the bounty of the ocean. Titan X can communicate through vibrations in water and is accompanied by a swarm of lesser monsters that build her nests.
Ahead of Monarch‘s season 2 finale, Polygon caught up with the show’s VFX supervisor Sean Konrad, to discuss the MonsterVerse’s best new creature. Konrad tells Polygon that Titan X’s design was inspired by nature and Aliens.
“I’ve always been fascinated by blue bottle jellyfish,” Konrad says, referring to the species also known as the Portuguese man-of-war and recognizable by their single long blue tentacle. “They’re not really jellyfish, they’re weird colony organisms. We took that spine as inspiration, and then some of the dangly bits. Then we started to figure out how to make this thing move. We knew we were going to have to give it more significant limbs, so we gave it squid-based limbs.”
With a jellyfish as the core inspiration, Konrad’s team went through multiple iterations where Titan X didn’t have a face. They eventually decided the monster needed one so audiences would connect with her.
“We ended up settling on a moray eel as the basis and then making that as creepy as possible by giving it crocodile teeth,” Konrad says. “In the Alien franchise, the alien queen has this vertical crown associated with her, so there’s spikes coming off of Titan X’s head that are meant to be a sign of female regalness without being too overt in the gender binary kind of stuff.”
To emulate the colony aspect of blue bottle jellyfish, Titan X is accompanied by a swarm of horseshoe crab-like creatures called scarabs. Titan X will fight to protect them, and they’re a threat by themselves, whether loose on a Monarch base or squirming around a pod with Colonel Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell). It creates a “big guy, little guy dynamic” Konrad compares to the flying insects around Megaguirus in the 2000 Toho film Godzilla vs. Megaguirus or the centipedes that surround Rodan in the eponymous 1956 film.
[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters season 2]
Titan X is both this season’s biggest threat and biggest victim. Woken from hibernation early when Cate Randa (Anna Sawai) rescues Shaw from Axis Mundi, Titan X is chased off Skull Island by Kong. She tries to go through her regular migratory route, visiting Santa Soledad, where she’s been worshiped as a god for generations. But instead of a reverent welcome, she gets attacked by Apex operatives, who try to mind control her. The attack disorients Titan X so she gets lost and comes ashore in Australia to lay her egg, where she is driven off by Godzilla.
“I was really happy to see the fan community feel like Godzilla is being a bit of a jerk there,” Konrad says, “but of course Godzilla doesn’t know the whole context of what’s going on.”
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters takes place between the events of Gareth Edwards’s 2014 film Godzilla and Michael Dougherty’s 2019 follow-up Godzilla: King of the Monsters, so a new creature allows the show to navigate the constraints of a midquel.
“We’re often trying to find ways to make the fight have some kind of consequence, even if the outcome for our hero Titans is kind of known,” Konrad says. “In the case of the Godzilla fight, it’s much more about the egg.”
While Titan X and Godzilla are fighting, the egg is stolen as part of a scheme to open a portal to Axis Mundi and get Titan X to kill Kong. The ape king was pummeled by Godzilla in Adam Wingard’s 2021 film Godzilla vs. Kong and seriously injured by Shimo in Wingard’s 2024 sequel Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. This battle continues Kong’s role as the MonsterVerse’s biggest loser.
“That’s so much the classic of great boxing movies,” Konrad says. “The best parts of Rocky are when [Sylvester] Stallone is getting the crap beaten out of him.”
Luckily, things turn out OK for Titan X through the combined efforts of the human heroes, who disable the neural implants making her aggressive. Titan X leaves behind a very bloody and battered Kong to return to Axis Mundi with her egg. The battle, and its happy results, prove a big bonding moment for Cate and her grandmother, Monarch founder Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto). It’s a perfect capstone for a show about a family trying to understand monsters.
“Cate and Keiko trying to help Titan X get her egg back is actually where the tension is and what the real stakes in the drama are,” Konrad says. “We’re a TV series and our human characters are always going to have so much more screen time. The audience needs to identify with them, and the stories need to be based around them, so we always try to give them something to do inside these big monster fights.”