NEVER LET YOURSELF BE STOPPED BY WHAT IT WOULD HAVE BEEN LIKE IF YOU STARTED EARLIER!!!!! THE ONLY TIME

Had a friend make a human design for The Bucket while I made Adventure Line™ and I think it turned out well :]

I did another Slay the Princess Fanart! This one is Happily Ever After

I got pretty lazy with the shading but I still like it! I might go back and make it better

There needs to be more exploration of the way Hero must’ve felt watching Quiet walk out that door with the Princess.

Doing the right thing even as it destroys you, watching someone you love walk into uncertainty alone- the fear of them needing you. The lost of meaning. The way you have to pick up all the pieces, rebuilding it and it’ll still never be the same. The intimacy of how there’s something missing and it hurts. Every jagged edge of you is missing something.

Some part of you resents it all, resents the way he doesn’t look back and the way you miss him so so deeply.

Hear me out.... Skeptunist as two weird people who equally overrationalize social interactions to the point of loosing sense of what any social affection is really about try to act normally with each other's terms. But none of them have normal terms to begin with.

Because they both overcomplicate life to match their expectations. One always suspects secrets and the other awaits for tricks. Both end up acting against the morals, because they believed they were lied to. Like. They're similar in so many ways they wouldn't want to acknowledge.

And it was said before about how skeptic might like opportunist as a puzzle to solve and therefore be able to actually see through his facades. But. I think opportunist might give skeptic very helpful reality check too. He would try to mirror him to get on his side just to be met with devastated look. "Why would you think I thought that? Do I look like I think that? Do I act accordingly?" Skeptic might appear too straightforward and harsh, even though at his core he deeply cares about others, due to him trying to make everything as effective as possible. And he might ignore others feelings if he finds them unreasonable. And he might act wrongly if he sees he's actions as justifiable. And. And I think opportunist can help him notice that. Just by agreeing and reflecting.

Like I think many of their actions can be alike since they both very "goal over the means" type. It's just that skeptic falls into that unconsciously out of misunderstanding people and opportunist does that fully knowingly. So opportunist could help skeptic notice his wrongdoings and skeptic could actually explain why oppy's actions are wrong. Somehow.

I don't know. I don't know. Rotating them in my head.

I'M DOING AN EXPERIMENT

To prove something to a friend, please

REBLOG IF YOU THINK ASEXUALS BELONG IN LGBTQ+ SPACES

LIKE IF YOU THINK ASEXUALS DON’T BELONG IN LGBTQ+ SPACES

I drew alignment chart for the princesses

It's so fun how the Princess and the Dragon acknowledges and plays with game mechanics that are assumed to be non-diegetic, and uses them to add insight to the story/characters.

The title card is a really obvious example, being something that TLQ actually sees and can comment on, and something that the Princess hadn't ever seen. What most would assume is just a framing device for the player is a real element of the world/construct.

I think it emphasizes how the story that the Narrator constructed is only "meant" to be told to TLQ. After all, The Narrator only appears in TLQ's mind, providing elaborate descriptions and attempting to contextualize the events of the game as a heroic task to save the world. Meanwhile the Princess is all alone, with no title cards or exposition, no context for why any of this is happening to her. The story revolves around her, but it doesn't care about her beyond her designated role, as something to be slain and hated. Her perspective is irrelevant to the Narrator's plan, so she doesn't get the fancy presentation or necessary context: she doesn't deserve it.

There's also those long stretches of dialogue where the voices talk to each other in TLQ's mind without progressing the story. They're occasionally acknowledged by the Princess elsewhere (Prisoner, Nightmare) but P&tD makes it very explicit and confirms that time is actively passing during these conversations, with TLQ staring in silence for who knows how long.

(Personally I don't think all of the voice dialogue is necessarily in real time, if only because some Princesses wouldn't have had the patience for it. Like if you had really stood still for that long, the Beast would've definitely eaten you... she's not waiting for you to finish thinking lol)

This one I think is more for humour, but it also draws attention to how much of the inner conversation the Princess is missing in normal chapters, when the voices aren't actively speaking to her through TLQ's body. Where we're having vibrant debates or key information revealed by the Narrator, she just sees a silent, staring figure. Speaking of the Narrator, He's completely absent from the Princess' POV, either because He doesn't want to speak to her or is somehow unable to (He does say in Tower that she's not supposed to be able to interact with Him...) Again, the story was not made to be told to her, so she isn't given His context, and because the player is usually so immersed in TLQ's perspective, they probably wouldn't realize just how much she's missing until they see things from her perspective.

One other example: if you choose to [Say nothing] immediately after you excise yourself, the Princess reacts to it:

I just find this so hilarious tbh, and the fact that she repeats back those exact words implies that she literally senses the text written in brackets. If you do it once you're back in the basement, she says this:

I wonder if it's the same for the Narrator/voices... do they also “feel” your actions while you’re choosing them? Do they hear you say (Lie) before you lie? When Skeptic said "Wink" out loud did he actually choose a dialogue option with [Wink] in brackets?? Ok that last one's a joke but there's lots of potential here

I just think it's cool because the average player wouldn't think twice about any of these things, because they seem like simple stylistic/game design choices. In a game where all player input is through dialogue options, the square brackets are an immediately understandable way to convey action, as opposed to plain text. In a game structured around repeating loops, it makes sense to make those loops distinguishable for players by separating each loop with a title card, and the chapter naming convention works as a nod to the fairytale storybook aesthetics the game draws from.

But by placing you into the Princess's head and acknowledging those design choices as diegetic elements that change depending on your perspective, it forces you to reevaluate your experiences: the things you didn't think were really "part of the game" and the experiences you didn't realize weren't universal. It exposes your hidden privileges, the luxuries and structural supports you have compared to the Princess that you don't even notice because you've never experienced the alternative.

It might make you realize how the way you perceive and conceptualize the world might be very different from how others conceptualize it (Tony's recent ask about the multicoloured glass in HEA could also play into this in a fascinating way, with the mismatch in perception between TLQ and the Narrator's script). It's all just very cool for a game that's based on perception.

It also makes me wonder... what other elements of this game are diegetic that we just haven't paid attention to?

Well, I think that the captions are probably also diegetic. TLQ occasionally refers to the voices by their complete titles despite them not ever referring to each other by those titles, instead opting for descriptors like "jumpy one" or "the worst one" or "rage boy" or "chilly little freak" lol. For a direct comparison, Paranoid exclusively calls Smitten "the lovesick one" or some variant in HEA, but TLQ refers to him by his full name using quotation marks, as if he's quoting something he's read:

The voices don't seem aware that these titles exist, while TLQ does, despite them sharing a mind. Also, when the Princess shares a body/mind with you, she never uses their titles either. In the Spectre/Princess and the Dragon, she calls Hero "the nice one", Cold "the quiet one" or "cold little freak", and the Narrator "the bossy one" or "that murder-happy know-it-all". Spectre describes the voices as shards of broken glass on the floor, so she likely perceives them completely differently to how we/TLQ see them.

Even The Narrator isn't aware of His title. If you call Him that in the mirror conversation, He says "'The Narrator'. I suppose that's my job, isn't it?", reacting to the title as if it's His first time hearing about it. There's also this question from the fourth Shifty encounter:

It seems like the titles are presented specifically for The Long Quiet/decider, and that they somehow reflect how TLQ perceives the voices/Narrator, since TLQ takes credit for "calling him" that. If the captions were specifically shown to TLQ in the same way that the title cards are, it'd explain how he has this information without it ever being verbally told to him, and why the Princess doesn't know their titles even when she's sharing your body.

But besides the captions, I think it could be fun to interpret the game as if most, if not all of its game mechanics exist in-universe. The choice menu, the music, the cursors, the save/load icons, saving/loading in general, the title screen, the Clown Princess living in the walls (game files), you name it. Let’s peel away these game mechanics cell by cell! Let's see what meaning we can find together, let's see what we're made of!

Cosplay of The Long Quiet from @blacktabbygames Slay the Princess

Holy shit I worked on this since at least august! And it's DONE!!!!! Let me tell you I feel both so vindicated and mildly infuriated with how close I got to the design we see in-game, but it's ok. Cosplay is what ya make of it! And I made a damn fine costume If I Do Say So Myself!

I know I don't ask for reblogs like ever, but I worked really hard on this project and I'd like for the fandom to see it. That'd be so cool. So like, yknow, reblog it if you like having bones or something.

ALSO THANK MY MOM FOR TAKING THE PHOTOS SHE'S AWESOME

I should be sleeping

Reblog to kill it faster