Deciding to get healthier in 2025 came with no shortage of sacrifices I was prepared to make, but I did not anticipate one of them would be Call of Duty double XP.
It's been a good decade and change since I was last super into Call of Duty, but much like a churchgoer who only shows up for holidays, I still enjoy the little rituals: Scrolling past the campaign to play multiplayer with friends immediately, perusing the year's reconfigured perks, and accelerating the CoD relapse with double XP tokens extracted from a Monster Energy can.
I've been an energy drink fiend since high school—a fact that I'm neither proud nor ashamed of—but Monster was never a favorite. CoD season used to be the only time I'd pick up a can or two, but that changed this year when I switched to zero sugar drinks and discovered the Monster Zero Ultra line is one of the only bubbly energy options that doesn't taste like medicine. Lately I've been all about the watermelon flavor.
This couldn't be—I spun around not one, not two, but four other varieties of Monster Zero Ultra cans and found not one XP offer. This wasn't an updated stock issue. The regular old sugary Monster sitting one row above in the fridge? Overflowing with XP tokens.
Feeling emotionally manipulated, betrayed, and a little thirsty, I left my favorite corner store and walked another block to the Fastrip. Their fridge told a similar story. If I really wanted double XP this year, I'd either have to fall off the wagon or—oh wait, look at that, this store does stock zero-sugar Monsters with Blops 7 badges.
Two, to be exact: The Zero Ultra "White Monster" and Monster Zero Sugar (which is just the classic green flavor but diet, and had the lowest stock of them all). Unfortunately, I hate the taste of both.
I couldn't begin to tell you why the Monster Beverage Corporation, in its infinite wisdom, is excluding the majority of its zero sugar drinks from the Call of Duty promotion—just let me have my XP with a watermelon drink, come on man—but I can guess why the white flavor gets special privileges.
In addition to being the flagship Zero Ultra flavor, the drink was recently co-opted by women on TikTok, especially in goth and alt circles, as something of a carbonated accessory to their lifestyle. Thus, the "white Monster girl" trend was born. I won't begin to pretend I'm plugged in to the video-based social platforms enough to know if this is a particularly big deal over there or not, but I do know that this person made a suit of armor and bigass sword of out the flattened remains of white Monster cans (you can even see the orange Black Ops 7 logos). I hope they didn't drink more than one of those at a time, or at least pulled off the tabs and cashed in some of that double XP.
So I guess I won't be partaking in one of my little CoD rituals this year, which is kinda sad, but if it really mattered that much to me I could just steel myself against the overwhelming bubblegummy taste of a white Monster, or buy one and pour the contents down the sink. I won't be doing either.
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