I love how there’s quite literally no character or route I genuinely don’t like in slay the princess. closest is probably drowned grey route and even then I don’t mind it that much, just find it to be a somewhat boring route + the cage is too peak + burned grey is better but I still like it! I literally *like* every single thing in this game, I’m not just neutral, I don’t even know how this is possible.
I like how the opportunist is all evil and backstabby and a piece of shit and then we hold patd’s hand and he’s like “oh wait that was nice :3” ugh I hate him so much /aff
Tai do you ever just think about the hubris of the Grey Brothers in their respective routes and how that ended up being their downfall? Because I sure do
I was thinking “hey, the fury breaks the pattern where every time the voice of the cold is a new voice you get for a chapter the princess is a ghost/already dead”
since you get him in the spectre, the grey(s) and the wraith
then I thought “I guess you could say she’s a ghost of who she once was because she lost everything that gave her meaning so now she’s a hollow shell” and made myself depressed. thanks brain
(ramblings of a madman upcoming. this is borderline nonsensical but I just gotta get this out there)
ugh, I LOVE the voices parallels so much. they make me insane. and I’ve been thinking about opportunist/hunted and skeptic/smitten the most rn.
for the first two, in their respective chapter 2s they are survival responses put in situations where said responses are entirely reasonable, but will end up reinforcing the “status quo” if entertained. this is somewhat the case with most of the voices, but I think it’s especially noticeable with them.
the opportunist has a “betray them before they ever get the chance to betray you” mentality, and would you look at that, the witch has the very same mentality! and he is CORRECT in thinking she will betray you. because she will. but by following him and what he thinks, you’re just making it impossible to break the cycle of violence (this is literally the point of the thorn).
the hunted behaves… well, like prey, and uh. the beast IS a predator. he IS prey. she is hunting them. but if you just follow your instincts you’ll never be able to free her, or defeat her, or leave together or learn about reconciliation or do anything else that isn’t survive.
so their situations are reinforcing their behaviour, then their behaviour in turn reinforces their situation; they are stuck in a cycle. at least with the hunted you can have the skeptic to make a plan later on in the den, I guess. but it’s still a fascinating thing.
I think the stubborn and the broken chapters are a bit similar to them in this regard, but those have more to do with giving meaning to the princess and choosing whether or not you should fight against it in the end. it’s a bit of a different situation. skeptic and smitten also don’t quite… doom themselves if you just follow them, even though they actively feed into the chapter’s “concepts”, because they’re sort of “tools” made to complement and help you towards your goal (free the princess through skepticism or blind devotion) as opposed to survival responses.
talking about them… oh boy, skeptic and smitten in their respective chapter 2s. you can just go through with whatever the plan was (leave with her), but if you don’t, they won’t ever get the only thing they sought and will hurt others (and themselves) in their desperation. you take away smitten’s happy ending, and you leave skeptic without answers, and to that they just. fucking lose it. going with the previous tool comparation, you could say that’s what happens when a “tool” isn’t useful in a specific situation any longer. it can’t do anything else except for its designated function. so
when the illusion that love makes everything possible and that all you and the princess needed was each other shattered, the smitten couldn’t believe it. this was everything he ever wanted and everything he knew; you are the hero. she is a damsel. you are in love. you save the damsel and live happily ever after. that’s what HAD to happen, and if it didn’t, then it will. he has to make it happen, because it can’t and shouldn’t work in any other way.
in the prisoner, if you don’t take her head, you are shoved into eternal nothingness while left with only questions. what is this place? who is the narrator? what is he hiding? who is the princess? why is she locked up? how could she end the world? is there a world? where is it? why are we the ones doing this? why did the princess cut off her head? not only could they not go through with saving the princess like they tried before, but there are SO many questions, and skeptic didn’t get any answers! they can’t be left unanswered, the truth HAS to be unraveled. that’s what he’s been trying to do all along. it’s the only thing that matters. they WILL keep going and they WILL figure it out.
they are too obsessed to care about anything else. they are too stuck in their tunnel vision to accept anything else. they are too far gone to do anything else.
lord help me I am going insane because of this game /pos
holy shitballs I think I just noticed why the opportunist is so willing to kill us during patd. it’s not just because he’s a piece of shit and an absolute bastard /pos so the moment he gets access to the driver’s seat he will backstab us immediately (or maybe it is that idk)
something to note is that despite the differences in each variation, opportunist is still a “survival” voice. this is a consistent trait of his across all routes. in the witch he straight up admits he’s a compulsive backstabber because “it’s how we survive”, during the wraith he is DESPERATE to get on the princess’ good side, and in a certain way in hea he doesn’t want the lights to go out and insists we’re happy, which you could see as a version of wanting to survive. in the wild everyone’s sort of the same though so idk much about that one. anyways, the point is… it seemed a little out of character for him, because he’s trying to get *us* to survive, not just him, since we’re technically one. so why the hell would he turn on us? then it hit me:
it’s because we were willing to kill ourselves if it meant killing the spectre too. our life was never a priority in our eyes. we took the chance we got and us dying alongside her wasn’t important at all.
holy shitballs I think I just noticed why the opportunist is so willing to kill us during patd. it’s not just because he’s a piece of shit and an absolute bastard /pos so the moment he gets access to the driver’s seat he will backstab us immediately (or maybe it is that idk)
something to note is that despite the differences in each variation, opportunist is still a “survival” voice. this is a consistent trait of his across all routes. in the witch he straight up admits he’s a compulsive backstabber because “it’s how we survive”, during the wraith he is DESPERATE to get on the princess’ good side, and in a certain way in hea he doesn’t want the lights to go out and insists we’re happy, which you could see as a version of wanting to survive. in the wild everyone’s sort of the same though so idk much about that one. anyways, the point is… it seemed a little out of character for him, because he’s trying to get *us* to survive, not just him, since we’re technically one. so why the hell would he turn on us? then it hit me:
it’s because we were willing to kill ourselves if it meant killing the spectre too. our life was never a priority in our eyes. we took the chance we got and us dying alongside her wasn’t important at all.
Ohhh that is so interesting, and something I haven’t even considered before!! But you’re right, the way we get Opportunist in TPATD is completely different from how we usually get him. Opportunist is our self-preservation at the expense of others, or at least, that’s what he usually is. I think we can look at the reasons behind his ‘betrayal’ in two ways.
We can confidently say that certain voices act differently depending on the route (Tower!Broken and Cage!Broken, HEA!Smitten and Thorn!Smitten, Cage!Skeptic and EOTN!Skeptic, etc.), and that can mean that A) a voice’s personality and role changes depending on the way it was formed, fundamentally changing the voice itself(as in, if you were to put Thorn!Smitten in HEA, he would act differently as to how he would normally), or B) a voice, much like a person, would behave differently in different circumstances(as in, If the Princess previously didn’t display how powerful she is over us, why would Broken have a reason to submit to her in The Cage? To him, we’re on the same level, so he leans more towards an empathetic reading of the situation, as opposed to his behavior in The Tower.)
And that brings us back to Oppy. In both of those readings, his behavior makes sense.
If we go with the first, then by killing ourself, we practically removed a part of him that cares for our survival. This very much creates an Opportunist at his very worst, Opportunist that would choose to hurt others over his own survival, that only knows how to hurt, that revels in hurting. Usually, he seeks power as a way to find safety, to make sure that no one can get to him. But in The Spectre, you aren’t in any danger. The Narrator is clearly not powerful enough to stop you, and you can just walk out completely fine, but you choose to slay yourself just to hurt her again, just to display your power over her. And so this Opportunist is a direct reflection of your actions.
And if we go with the 2nd reading, and think of Oppy as an individual entity with his own stable set of morals and a sense of personhood, well. He’s self-preservation that appeared in response to our lack there of. By slaying ourself, we effectively proved that we do not act in our best interest; and in this case, 'our’ includes all the voices as well.
Opportunist loves to think of himself, TLQ, and the voices as a 'team’. In The Wraith he goes out of his way to make sure that all of them get a good position, even though he doesn’t have to. It would be much easier to differentiate himself from the rest, but he doesn’t. This community-driven mindset exists as a safety feature. If you’re one of the little guys, you have much better chances to get what you want if you unite into one big group(His voice counterpart, Hunted, seems to operate on a similar mindset, though much more literal-survival-driven, and mayhaps more genuine, as opposed to Opportunist’s social and detached).
That’s why TLQ’s actions in 'The Spectre -> The Princess and The Dragon’ lead Opportunist to the 'natural’ conclusion that They’re no longer on the 'team’. First, they hurt themselves just to spite the Princess, then they completely disappear off the radar, and THEN it turns out they were just. Chilling. With said Princess. In Her head??? The Princess in that route is very much an 'other’, and anyone who is an 'other’ is defaulted as a potential threat in Oppy’s eyes. TLQ is aligning themselves(willingly or not) with an enemy. And said actions also make TLQ too unpredictable for Opportunist to confidently stand by them. It’s much safer to just get rid of this 'decider’ that constantly shifts the board and puts the whole team in danger.
None of this is to necessarily excuse the little rat’s actions, by the way. He’s literally the worst person ever in TPATD(and in most of the routes he’s in tbh,,) but his actions do have explanations and I do genuinely think he has a potential for growth. Everyone has.
i’ve seen a lot of takes (i am using the word ‘take’ absolutely neutrally here; and i’m specifying neutrality bc i have started to see that word as having inherently negative connotations in this context and i have no idea if that’s just a Me Problem but i figured specificity couldn’t hurt)
okay, that got away from me, let me start again
i’ve seen a lot of takes about The Damsel that have to do with idealization being another kind of dehumanization and how she’s Like She Is because you/TLQ are projecting a fantasy onto her and sanding away any traits that don’t fit into that fantasy and rendering her into little more than a vessel for your/TLQ’s wish fulfillment
and i don’t necessarily think that’s *wrong* either– but i think that’s also not the complete picture, and that only looking that that half of the image does kind of tend to paint TLQ in an unfairly bad light
because the thing is, in The Damsel’s route, TLQ is ALSO being reduced to an archetype just as much as The Damsel herself is! The Princess becomes the quintessential fairytale fair-maiden-in-distress that exists only to be rescued by a knight-in-shining-armor; and TLQ– if you allow them to be guided entirely by The Smitten– becomes that quintessential fairytale knight-in-shining-armor that only exists to rescue the fair-maiden-in-distress
The Damsel says over and over, explicitly, that “I just want to make you happy!” and The Smitten in this route is equally preoccupied with making HER happy– he even says it directly if you start deconstructing her. every other part of his identity has been subsumed to revolve entirely around her just as much as the reverse is true for her.
(speaking of the Deconstructed Damsel, i’ve also seen Smitten’s reaction to that touted as him not caring about her agency– but again, i always read that as him being unable to see any flaws in her rather than being pleased with the idea of her being biddable, specifically. if you halt the deconstruction his reaction is “she’s ALWAYS been perfect” – he’d think that no matter what she did or said, because his identity revolves around her the exact way that hers revolves around him/TLQ)
even the actions that lead to HEA fit into this, i think– i read that moment as less The Smitten lashing out at her because she didn’t live up to his fantasy– it still happens even after she’s said “i guess we can stay, if that’s what you want”– she’s giving The Smitten what he wants, but he’s still distressed because SHE’S not happy
i think it’s more The Smitten feeling that HE hadn’t lived up to HIS half of their shared fantasy. if she’s not happy with the idea of “all we need is each other” then it must be because HE failed somehow. if she needs or wants more than him, it must be because HE is not enough.
if he was just better at playing his part, if he just offered her more, if he was just clearer about his devotion–
“if we just showed her the contents of our heart, she’d be happy”
that’s not to say that what The Smitten does in HEA isn’t incredibly toxic for both of them– it definitely is, and it clearly makes both the Princess and TLQ miserable. “everything she doesn’t know she wants” is a bad mindset to approach a relationship with, whether that mindset is reached through controlling selfishness or a desperation to appease (and i definitely think Smitten is motivated by the latter– it’s no coincidence that we arrive at HEA through a literal and fatal act of self mutilation)
he’s definitely the antagonist of HEA, in that he is what TLQ and the Princess and the player need to overcome, but he’s not a VILLAIN (which i think is most clearly illustrated in the moment where the Princess admits she’s unhappy, that she’s never been happy here, and his reaction is to GIVE UP instead of lash out harder)
i never got the sense that The Smitten was ever putting any blame on The Damsel– he always considered *himself* to be the problem– he puppeteers TLQ just as much as he does the Princess, even if we can’t hear him while she can, and he asks TLQ/the player through her “isn’t this enough? isn’t this what you wanted?”
which in and of itself is an unhealthy way to approach a relationship– blaming oneself for every bit of conflict or lapse in synchronicity is just as harmful as laying all the blame on the other person. there IS no blame– sometimes people disagree or have conflicting needs or desires, and that’s not anybody’s “fault” because that’s just how people and relationships WORK.
…can you believe i wrote out all of this when my original intention was to lay out an entirely different point about a read on The Damsel/HEA routes that wasn’t about relationships at all?
ALT
ALT
