Slay the Princess

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Truthfully, you are the nascent form of the 'Long Quiet', the god of stability, put into an infinite pocket-dimension time-loop called the 'Construct' in order to infinitely stall the Princess, herself a nascent god, or to kill her for good. It is your actions that decide whether the Princess dies or escapes, whether or not she stays a god, and whether or not reality ends.

• Absurdly Sharp Claws: Subverted. If you fight the Adversary unarmed, the Narrator describes you tearing at her with your claws, but while you do scratch her up, she, the Narrator, and all the voices but the Stubborn immediately point out that your claws are not nearly as effective as the Pristine Blade. You also use claws ascending or descending the sheer cliff that takes the place of the stairs in the Eye of the Needle's route, but you fit them into cracks in the stone rather than stabbing into it.
• Act of True Love: You go through the loops so the Shifting Mound can be whole despite the great cost it entails on you in each route, including many a Cruel and Unusual Death.
• Action Survivor: You can, through your own volition or at the suggestion of the Voices, achieve or plan some truly badass feats.
  • Luring out the Eye of the Needle to the advantageous terrain outside the cabin to fight her.
  • Clearing your mind of distraction in order to duel the Razor efficiently.
  • Resisting the Tower's willpower long enough in order to land a successful blow to her heart.
  • Launching yourself at the Apotheosis during her ascension. The Pristine Cut expands this into stabbing her in the eye.
  • Overcoming your fear of the Nightmare and slaying her.
  • Slaying the Beast from within once she's eaten you by digging through her flesh and stabbing her heart.
  • Tricking the Den into trapping herself.
  • Throwing yourself into the Long Quiet to stop the Wraith.
  • In the Pristine Cut, powering through being repeatedly torn apart by the Fury to pierce her heart, all while you technically no longer exist.
• Admiring the Abomination: It's possible to agree to go with the Shifting Mound, and by all accounts, you and She enjoy a romantic trip through the cosmos.
• Amnesiac God: For most of the game, you are unaware of your status as a deity, due in no small part to the Narrator's manipulations keeping you in the dark. When you finally meet the Narrator face to face after delivering five vessels to the Shifting Mound, he finally fesses up that you are the Long Quiet, a truth that settles over the Player afterwards.
• Animal Motifs: Birds, or more specifically, corvids. You resemble a bird with feathers, bird-like arms, taloned fingers, and possibly even a beak. Some forms of the Princess call you "little bird" as a nickname. Appropriately, crows and ravens are associated with death, bad omens, transformation, and oncoming change.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: You are the Long Quiet, the embodiment of stasis and stability. You, the woods, and the cabin are all part of the same construct meant to hold the Princess, who as the Shifting Mound is the embodiment of change and among other things death itself.
• Apologetic Attacker: You can keep trying to warn the Princess when the Narrator forces you to kill her in the initial route.
• Back from the Dead: Due to the "Groundhog Day" Loop, you never stay dead. This is played more straight in "The Adversary" where you can choose to keep moving out of sheer spite and willpower, even after your brains have been dashed across the wall, and in one variant of "The Fury" where you keep coming back with a new body each time she makes you explode.
• Bad Liar: Zigzagged. Any time you pick a (Lie) option, and most of the time when you convince the Narrator that something that didn't happen happened, you will be immediately called out for it, especially during the Adversary route. If you make enough choices indicating a certain path of action (ie. not threating the princess, immediately trying to free the princess, knocking on the door, and then yelling at the person who locked you down there) where paths would branch, you will only get the option to continue down that path of action (saving the princess). However, you are often able to make the things you say retroactive lies (ie. by saying you'll kill the princess, and then not, or by promising to save the princess, and then not or not being able to). While characters will sometimes act as though you were lying instead of changing your mind, the game can't see all of your thoughts, leaving the intent behind lying often up in the air.
• Barrier Maiden: The Spectre and Drowned Grey routes make it explicit that even if you slay the Princess, it doesn't stick if you die as well.
• Benevolent Abomination: The Long Quiet is a Genius Loci with a dark, spooky-looking Bird Man avatar who represents the concept of stagnation. It was created to contain the Shifting Mound so as to stop her from destroying the world, and depending in your decisions, you can be a fairly heroic character who tries to make the right decisions and help others, and can convince the Shifting Mound not to destroy the world.
• Bird People: At several points in the game, it's shown that the Player Character is some sort of anthropomorphic bird-like entity.
  • During different portions of the game, your hands and feet are shown to heavily resemble bird feet, most times you are wounded by the princess you are shown with feathers flying off your body and each time you look in the route-end mirror you have what appears to be a wing on your outstretched forearm, and when the Adversary destroys your face and smears it across the walls you can see what appears to be part of a beak among the pieces.
  • If you try to examine your reflection in the mirror when it starts appearing, several of the various Voices will call you out on it, telling you that it's a bad time to preen yourself. The Voice of the Smitten will periodically state that you should check if your feathers are out of place.
  • While the Princess doesn't mention your appearance often, different forms make passing remarks about it. The Tower and the Eye of the Needle both refer to you as "little bird" along with the Tower mentioning your beak, the Beast calls you a fledgling (a young bird which has just begun developing wings), the Razor calls you a "silly little birdface", and the Prisoner tells you to "be a good bird."
  • In flashes the Shifting Mound shows of you from the Princess' perspective, you have the outlines of two ear-like feathery tufts.
  • One achievement you get for slaying the Tower!Fury is called "Quantum Beak" (which is actually one "r" short of a nod to a video game of the same name), again hinting at your birdlike nature.
  • In "The Princess and the Dragon" from the Pristine Cut, you get to see the body of the Hero in its entirety (if still largely shadowed), and can see that it is indeed some sort of bird. Albeit, one that stands upright with multiple wings and a Face Framed in Shadow, so you can still be horrified by your own appearance.
  • According to the creators, you have "Schrodinger's Beak"; sometimes you'll have a beak, while other times you won't have one (or a mouth at all), changing to fit the situation as a whole. This is also implied when you and the princess share a lengthy and passionate kiss in one scene, without any difficulty or oddness mentioned despite her human lips (indeed she states it was a enjoyable kiss), implying at least then you also had lips rather than a beak.
• Brought Down to Normal: In the "And? What happens next?" end, you can choose to leave the cabin with the princess, at the cost of forgoing ascension to godhood. That said, the Stranger version of the Princess doubts that they and you can truly stop being gods, though this doesn't change how the ending plays out.
• But Now I Must Go: In the "And? What happens next?" ending, the Player and the Princess leave the Construct and all the Voices to face the outside world as (presumably) mortals.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: In some routes, the Princess realizes that killing you will only reset the "Groundhog Day" Loop and will instead keep you alive to facilitate her escape. The Shifting Mound also needs you alive so you can build her a body.
• Carnivore Confusion: In the Happily Ever After route, you and the Princess are enjoying a feast consisting of what looks like a turkey with multiple wings. Given that you are a corvid-like creature in nature, this may feel a little confusing to some who play the game. But then again, birds really do eat other species of bird in nature, as a turkey and a possible corvid like you are as closely related to birds as a human being and a cow are as mammals, so at least eating some multi-winged turkey wouldn't actually make you a cannibal.
• Casting a Shadow: Shadows seem to warp and bend around the Player. In "The Princess and the Dragon" chapter, when you see the body of the Hero, light seems to fade around its body.
• Combat Pragmatist: If you're resolved to slay the Princess, there's no shortage of options to do so, and some are less than honorable. This includes stabbing her in the back after you've convinced her to trust you, stabbing her in the heart when she thinks she has the upper hand, and for one route, throwing yourself in an endless void when she has possessed your body.
• Complete Immortality: Of the Resurrective Immortality kind — being a god, while you can (and do) die, you can't stay dead. The closest you can get is eternal unconsciousness if you refuse to collect any vessels. The Narrator bitterly mocks this if you try to commiserate with his Mortality Phobia, telling you that you only play at death and have no idea what it's like for mortals who face genuine oblivion.
• Conditioned to Be Weak: While you're a being of incredible Reality Warping power, the Narrator has removed all memory of that, leaving you convinced you're only as powerful as a normal human. At various points in the game indications of your true power come through in ways both subtle and blatant, and at the end you become a being capable of creating or destroying worlds. That said, it's also possible for you to decide you prefer being a person to being an abstract deity, and probably end up becoming a normal being in truth.
• Create Your Own Villain: Your choices inform what the Princess becomes. How bad that might be is up to you. However, as is revealed later, you're literally creating her — the Shifting Mound needs vessels to become something more, which you provide for her in the form of the princesses.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: You're on the receiving end of one quite often, courtesy of the Princess, usually as the result of a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown. The only time that you can turn this back on her in Chapter I is if you just choose to instantly slay the princess with no hesitation and confirm she's dead without double checking; she'll have no chance to fight back.
  • You can deliver one to the Razor at the climax of her route if you didn't take the knife with you in Chapter II.
• Dark Is Not Evil: At least potentially. You're a horrifying, monstrous shadow-creature with blank, glowing eyes. However, you're under no obligation to live up to your appearance, and it's very possible for you to make choices befitting an Ideal Hero who's continuously compassionate towards the princess, the voices and the wider world.
• Death-Activated Superpower: When the Player dies, he and the Princess are taken to a new world, both remembering the last iteration and being affected by it. The Princess exploits this power in her attempts to escape the cabin, either by getting you to leave together or killing you on purpose to become more powerful the next time.
• Demonic Possession: You are a victim of this in "The Wraith". You can choose to submit to the Princess, who forces you to the door, or you can resist and throw yourself into the abyss along with her.
• Determinator: As opposed to the Princess who seems to Feel No Pain, you feel the pain and full damage from everything that is inflicted upon you. Yet you are given the choice to continue fighting to a supernatural extent. This can include manually operating your own organs while they shut down, cutting out of a giant beast while you dissolve in its stomach acid, successfully resisting mind control and walking forward to land a blow after stabbing yourself repeatedly, and forcing your body to get up after literally having your brains blown out of your skull. That last one is so extreme that even the Princess is shocked.
• Driven to Suicide: In instances where you become trapped in inescapable situations (such as the "good ending" or falling infinitely through an abyss), you can choose to stab yourself to restart the "Groundhog Day" Loop.
• Eaten Alive: Play your cards wrong, and The Beast can catch you, grab you, and swallow you into her stomach. The Narrator promptly describes you being digested as well.
• Eldritch Abomination: You are also revealed to be one, as the entity that counter-balances the Princess. You are the Long Quiet, an entity whose true body is an endless black void. The Shifting Mound — the true form of the Princess — is trapped within you.
• Eldritch Location: As is eventually revealed, The Long Quiet, the space in which the Construct exists, the Shifting Mound is sealed, and which serves as the setting of the game... is you. Essentially, this makes you a Genius Loci, walking through the realities with the Shifting Mound trapped inside of you.
• The Faceless: You only ever get to see about half your face in the mirror, shrouded in darkness. You have glowing white eyes, and that's about all you get to see, for the most part. Even in the Princess and the Dragon chapter, where you get to see your own body from the Princess' perspective, and part of your face, it's never a clear look though, as your wings are held obscuringly and your face is framed in shadow.

• Fighting from the Inside: You can choose to do this when the Narrator performs a Grand Theft Me or when the Princess performs a Demonic Possession.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Obviously, the hand alludes to you being something else other than a human, but it's not clear what until later.
  • In the 'Good Ending', where you become trapped in the Construct forever, the Narrator says "This is the beginning of eternity... your reward." While this initially appears to be a malicious taunt or show of true colors, you are later revealed to be the Long Quiet, the god of stability. Being in a single, unchanging location for all eternity is genuinely intended as a reward for you, though whether or not that actually is a good reward is debatable.
• Fourth-Wall Observer: In The Princess and The Dragon route, you can mention the title cards at the start of each chapter, heavily implying that you can see them on all routes.
• Fright Deathtrap: Just being around the Nightmare causes your organs to suddenly start shutting down. The Nightmare points out that it's not something she's doing intentionally; you're just that scared of her.
• Genius Loci: Implied, since the Long Quiet is your dormant god-body. When the Apotheosis tears a rift into the Long Quiet in an attempt to escape, you suffer excruciating pain and your hands unravel to ribbons.
• God Couple: You can potentially become one with the Shifting Mound at the end of the game, either travelling the universe together or by choosing to leave the cabin with her either as mortals or still as gods (it's never really made clear how much the two of them would retain their Eldritch Abomination abilities and forms as you're able to choose whether or not to). Princess in the latter ending questions if it even matters, and in the case of the Stranger Princess, encourages Long Quiet to embrace it as parts of who they are.
• God of Order: You represent stability as the Long Quiet, as opposed to the Princess/Shifting Mound embodying Chaos.
• Grand Theft Me: If you choose not to slay the Princess, the Narrator will override your body in an attempt to force you. You can try resisting him, but this only leads to the Princess performing a Mercy Kill on you.
• Hair Antennae: Well, technically more like Feather Antennae. The Hero has two prominent tufts of feathers on the sides of his head, like on a great horned owl. They are especially emphasized in the scenes seen from the Princess POV, where the Hero remains The Faceless, but his glowing white eyes and the silhouette of his tufts are clearly displayed.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: If you keep avoiding getting pounced upon by the Beast until you tire yourself out, she'll devour only your waistline, and you get to see her chewing on your innards before you die.
• Hearing Voices: You hear these, both of the 'Good' and 'Chaotic Neutral' variety, being the Narrator and Voices, respectively.
• Hidden Depths: If you get to the Den route and either win against the Princess, don't bring the knife or help her escape, you're able to look into her eyes to tell what she's thinking before the Shifting Mound claims her despite her being unable to talk in this form, suggesting that you have the ability to read people's facial expressions.
• Hitman with a Heart: You can choose to play as one, depending on your dialogue choices.
• Horrifying the Horror: When facing the Adversary without the pristine blade, the fight is a Curb-Stomp Battle in her favor, but thanks to the Determinator nature of the Voice of the Stubborn, you can simply get up when you die and stand up again regardless of how broken your body is. It gets a to a point where all that remains of you is a faceless mangled corpse flaying at her and she is visibly freaked out by it.
• I Am Who?: You are eventually revealed to be "The Long Quiet," a nascent undying god that personifies Stability that was created to act as a counter-balance to the real Princess, the avatar of Death and Change.
• I Die Free: In the 'good ending', you kill the Princess with no strings attached. Unfortunately, this traps you within the Construct forever. Your only way to escape is by suicide, which you can do if you don't accept what the Narrator's offering.
• Idiot Ball: Played for Laughs during "The Razor" route. While every route has a handful of questionable dialogue choices and actions the Player can pick, chapter 3 of the route sees you trying to deal with the Razor using many terrible options including flirting with her using The Look, killing yourself so she can't kill you, or even just trying to think of more options that are less terrible. And then it is shown that you eventually get desperate enough to try all of them.
• Immortality Hurts: Just because you can't die die doesn't mean you can't experience the pain of being punched, kicked, stabbed, crushed or otherwise victimized by the Princess in her many forms. It's a good thing you forget about each Route temporarily, or the sheer weight of pain and trauma might break you for good.
• Insane Troll Logic: At times, The Player can choose genuinely bizarre options such as flirting with the Razor or trying to jump off the stairs on the way to the Nightmare's basement.
• In-Series Nickname: The Player is referred with several nicknames by the Princess in multiple routes.
  • "Little Bird" by the Tower and Eye of the Needle.
  • "Birdface" by the Razor.
  • "Killer" by the Spectre.
  • "Fledgling" by the Beast.
  • "Wretched" by the Witch.
  • "Good Bird" by the Prisoner.
  • "Hero" or "Quiet" by the soft and the cynical variants of the heart of the Shifting Mound.
• Kick the Dog: Some of your options allow you to be needlessly cruel.
  • You can choose to gain the Princess' trust and then (sometimes literally) stab her in the back. This, in turn, usually makes the Princess' next incarnation even worse.
  • When you arrive at the mirror at the end of most routes (with some exceptions like The Moment of Clarity or The Razor), you have the option to callously tell the terrified Voice(s) accompanying you that the mirror is the end for them but not for you. If you go for the "A New and Unending Dawn" ending, most of them will turn on you for your betrayal, giving you the "And Everyone Hates You" variant.
• Kill the God: The "Your New World" ending involves you fighting the Shifting Mound in her godlike form and winning, creating a world without her, but unlike when you kill her heart, this new world is ever changing and completely within your control.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: The player character doesn't always remember every loop he's been on - each time he brings the Shifting Mound another Princess vessel, when he's ready she makes him forget and brings him back to a fresh Chapter One. He remembers the other loops again the next time he's brought her another Princess and sees the mirror. Exaggerated with the You're on a path in the woods ending, which the Shifting Mound believes they've chosen together many times, and which sees him starting over altogether.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Lying to and betraying the Princess often results in routes where she will get her revenge tenfold. Similarly, treating the Princess well results in the more positive and straight-up romantic routes. This trope applies both ways, however.
• Literal Split Personality: You and the Princess were once a single being that encompassed the totality of existence through their combined concepts. This entity, through unknown means, was separated by the Creator into two independent beings. The Princess, who embodied change and was imprisoned within the Cabin; and the Player, who embodied stability and was given the task of slaying her. This is one of the reasons the Shifting Mound is so desperate to be with you; in a very real way, you were always meant to be together. In the Pristine Cut DLC, some of the voices become this in several of the new routes.
• Love Confession: You can give one to the Princess at the end of the game after you're both Brought Down to Normal. The Princess will reciprocate with a blush on her face. She'll be somewhat embarrassed about saying that depending on what you chose, but she'll still admit it.
• Made of Iron: No matter where he stands on the scale of Strong as They Need to Be, the Player consistently exhibits the ability to take one hell of a beating before being put down. This can be Played for Horror on the Adversary route, as getting back up to fight again after the Princess dashes most of your head to bits unsettles her so much that she completely loses her lust for fighting, causing her to give you a Mercy Kill and have a crisis of identity so severe she devolves into the vengeful, self-loathing Fury.
• The Many Deaths of You: Every Chapter I and most Chapter II routes end with you being horribly killed. You can be stabbed to death, beaten up to the point of bleeding out from your organs rupturing, or die by organ failure, starvation or suicide, have your existence forcibly reset by an Eldritch Abomination, and the list goes on. (In fact, the only methods that put you on the brink of death are burning and attempted drowning, both of which you survive with help from the Shifting Mound, and the latter method can be described to the Drowned Grey in hostile red text when you tell her "when you flooded me with tears I did not drown.") However, thanks to Resurrective Immortality, you always bounce back, even if all these deaths are unpleasant.
• Morality Chain: To a point. With the possible exception of the Voice of the Hero, all of the Voices’ worst impulses are kept somewhat in check by their fundamental desire to act in what they see as your best interest. Granted, some of them have extremely warped ideas of what your “best interest” is, and that doesn’t mean you yourself can’t do some pretty messed up things, potentially with their approval. But The Pristine Cut adds a few new routes where some of the voices — the Smitten in the Happily Ever After route and the Opportunist in the Princess and The Dragon route — get to act completely free of the player’s influence, and prove themselves pretty horrifying: the former becomes a Domestic Abuser in all but name, dedicated to living a happy life with the Princess whether she wants to or not, while the latter attempts to take over the player's body permanently by killing the Princess while you're stuck in her mind, seemingly just because he saw the chance and decided to take it.
• Mutual Kill: Sometimes fighting the Princess results in this. With her dying breath, she acknowledges the futility of fighting against you.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Should you choose to just slay the princess right away, you'll comment on how you feel bad about killing her. The Narrator chimes in that even if it was for the greater good, you did just kill somebody, and it would be odd if you didn't feel at least a little bad about it.
• Mythical Motifs: Less common than the corvid motif, but you're intermittently described as draconic, fitting with the inversion of a standard fairy tale. In The Princess and the Dragon, a chapter named by the Princess, you can ask if the dragon means you and be psyched about being called that.
• The Needless: Whether this trope is played straight or averted depends on whether you acknowledge if it should. Killing the Princess on sight leaves him in the cabin until time loses all meaning and all that's left of the Princess' body is a skeleton, but he's fine. Similarly, if you get locked up with the Prisoner for long enough that the basement deteriorates around you, the Voice of the Skeptic considers the prospect of starving, but the Voice of the Hero notes that the Prisoner hasn't starved, and they're both fine. However, if you kill the Nightmare and are trapped in the basement or fall for eternity (and you don't end your life with the pristine blade), then you'll eventually perish from starvation once you remember that you're supposed to do that.
• No Name Given: The Player is often referred to with Second-Person Narration, "Hero", or by the title of "The Long Quiet" or several nicknames the Princess gives. The Pristine Cut reveals the Voices refer to you as "the decider." What your name is never comes up, but it's likely that based on the nature of what the Long Quiet is, you never had a name to begin with. In the "End of Everything" update to the game's "And? What happens next?" endings the soft Princess will call the Player "Quiet" and the cynical Princess will call the Player "Hero", which he'll end up accepting as his name. An April Fools prank has the Player say his name was "Gary", but the Princess refuses to call him that.
• Normally, I Would Be Dead Now: As opposed to the Princess who has immense strength and feels no pain at the cost of a glaring weak spot, you have normal levels of strength and feel every injury in full force, but - depending on the route - won't die easily. Sometimes one stab does it, sometimes nothing short of total bodily destruction or blood loss can kill you.
• Obviously Evil: In the Princess and the Dragon route, we are given what an encounter between the Player and the Princess is like from her POV. The Player to the Princess is a bird-like horror hunched over but still as tall as the ceiling, who is constantly in quiet but heated internal debate with himself while menacing her with a sharp dagger, alternating between just staring at her unsettlingly for minutes at a time and rapidly flitting between random personalities. When the Voice of the Hero's in control his body language is more hesitant, but the other two Voices are openly threatening and assert their intention to kill her for what seems like no reason at all. It's no wonder the Princess is often unwilling to cooperate to what she thinks is a deranged monster. It's a miracle that cooperation is even feasible between our plucky couple, let alone romance.
  And then a figure emerges, shrouded in a feathered darkness, the world trailing behind it, its shining blade gleaming against the wooden walls. It stares at you with wild, hollow eyes.
• Our Dragons Are Different: You're described as draconic occasionally, but you're humanoid, a god, and very birdlike.
• Painting the Medium: The list of dialogue choices you are given are heavily implied to be the player character literally thinking of that list, and then choosing from it. Any time the Player is forced to do or think something out of his control (because of the Princess, the Narrator, or even the thought popping into his head before they can stop it) this is reflected by options repeating, being greyed out, or even narration about what is going on being displayed in the list.
• The Power of Love: Arguably what drives you to save the Princess in several routes and endings. You're putting yourself through hell and back, even suffering pains and afflictions that should be fatal, all for the sake of saving the true form of the princess.
• Power of the Void: On the few occasions when you're in the Long Quiet during a chapter (as opposed to between chapters), you can manipulate it. Doing so is strong enough to bend the Razor's body into scrap metal with your sheer paradoxical non-existence, unravel the Apotheosis with "undulating fibers of nothingness", and even break through the Construct during the Wild and the finale.
  Voice of the Paranoid: Maybe...maybe if we feel all this nothing...maybe we can use it.
• Primal Stance: When his body is seen from the outside in The Princess and the Dragon it's hunched over menacingly, but is still huge.
• Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: Both the Player and Princess' perception of each other can heavily influence the outcomes of their encounters. This effectively places the pair in an arms race.
  • The Princess changing into different forms each route to match the Player's perception of her.
  • The Player's Voices and the supernatural abilities they grant him to combat the Princess' forms match the impression given to her in previous interactions.
• Sanity Slippage: When progressing from Chapter One to Two or Three, your dialogue options can end up more emotional and unhinged. You also gain an additional voice in your head, depending on the previous ending you get.
• Save the Princess:
  • You can make this your goal instead of slaying the princess in a few routes. The Narrator won't be happy with you, though.
  • Your ultimate goal, shown after the Cosmic Horror Reveal, is to get the Shifting Mound enough vessels in order for her to regain her true form. Which, in a way, is still saving the princess.
• Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: You can try leaving the path to the cabin, but the Narrator keeps railroading you towards the cabin. If you keep trying to leave, you'll either end up in "The Stranger" route (if done in Chapter 1) or end up completely destroying the world and the vessel within (if done in Chapter 2 or later). There are also several instances within a chapter where you can enter the basement and try to leave, and the Princess usually takes more offense to this than trying to kill her.
• Second-Person Narration: The Long Quiet — that is to say, the entity that is being controlled by the player — is only referred to as "you" by the Narrator. There's a little bit of Leaning on the Fourth Wall in this regard, but it's never outright broken.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: The Player can give this to the Narrator several times by defying his wishes, especially potent in the end where you can tell him that you plan on saving the Princess, or simply smash the mirror as your final act of defiance.
• Slashed Throat: There are times when you can end up with a slashed throat, such as when the proto-Prisoner notices the Narrator controlling you before taking your blade to perform a Mercy Kill on you; you take the blade and slit your throat after slaying the Nightmare; you watch the Prisoner decapitate herself with your blade but don't take her head with you, and then enjoy your reward before being pulled away by the Voice of the Skeptic and handing your blade to him; when you get Swallowed Whole by the Beast while you still have the blade with you; or when you are compelled to slit your own throat by the Tower.
• Strong as They Need to Be: While your ability to continue fighting while suffering even the most traumatic injuries is present in basically every scenario, your other physical abilities vary, ranging from human-level to almost on par with the Princess herself. This is even discussed in the Adversary route, where a powered-up Princess mentions how you have also become stronger to match her (otherwise it would have been a true curb-stomp battle). The Player also seems noticeably more capable against more powerful versions of the Princess, but can't match ALL of them. Given how the story implies you are in subtle ways influenced by the perception of the Princess just as you influence her form, this is likely caused by the Princess seeing you as strong or weak based on your prior actions. This reaches its superlative form in the "Your New World" route, where if you kill or deconstruct the Princess in every route you take, the Long Quiet can match and even overpower the Shifting Mound in her godlike form, before either destroying her or trying to offer her mercy.
• Swallowed Whole: Antagonize the Beast enough, and you'll be Eaten Alive. The Narrator even describes you being slowly digested.
• Taking You with Me: You can attempt this occasionally on the Princess, such as in "The Wraith" where you throw yourself into the Long Quiet to save the world from her.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Averted. Time doesn't seem to move when the Narrator and the Voices are having discussions, but that's because you're the only person there. If the Princess is with you, she'll comment that you're just standing around doing nothing or daydreaming and in rare cases rush forward to perform her next action on you.
• Tomato in the Mirror: In the "Princess and the Dragon" route, you'll be stuck inside the body of the princess, watching yourself walk down the stairs. It's only here that you'll get a glimpse as to what you actually look like. You are indeed some sort of bird, albeit with a Face Framed in Shadow and glowing white eyes with multiple giant wings covering the rest of your body. One of the dialogue options after seeing this is a horrified "What the hell am I?" to the Princess.
• Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth: Any of the Princesses that invade your mind will quickly make note of the other Voices and Narrator already occupying your mind, with reactions ranging from amusement to getting out of there as quickly as possible.
• Toothy Bird: You have a bird-like body and what looks like a beak. In the Princess and the Dragon route, you can see yourself from the Princess' perspective, and whenever the Voice of the Opportunist is in charge of your body, he gives a long, toothy grin. The teeth are flat and arranged in an equine fashion, with a gap between the molars and the incisors. Meanwhile, if you choose to "embrace instinct" in the Den and start biting, the Narrator will also comment on your teeth.
• Turn the Other Cheek: You have the option to do this to the Adversary by refusing to fight her. It doesn't work and she kills you anyways. But it gives her such an identity crisis that she becomes the Fury, since her whole reason for being is fighting you to the death.
• Willing Channeler: An option on "The Spectre" route, if you want to give her a ride to the outside or make her vulnerable again.
• Winged Humanoid: If your reflection in the mirror is lightened up, you can see two very large wings sprouting from your back, and another two at hip level. They're even more evident in The Princess and the Dragon, where they're held as if to partially conceal you. In a few endings, you are described as finally opening your wings and taking flight.
• Wings Do Nothing: In "The Princess and the Dragon" and while looking at yourself in the mirror, with contrast adjusted, it's shown that you have wings. Except for The Princess and the Dragon and in endings where you accept your godhood, they go completely unmentioned by anyone, though there are certainly several scenarios where flying and even flapping would have done you good.
• Wistful Amnesia: Implied to be the reason why the Princess is a princess and not something more appropriate for a fairy tale hero to slay. Because the player and the Princess are parts of the same unfathomable cosmic being split in two, the Player's subconscious desire to reunite with his other half moulds her into the Standard Hero Reward of a fair maiden.
• You Are Worth Hell: The Player goes through some of the most existential, surreal and downright esoteric horror seen in a game, just so he can save the Princess.

The Voices are entities that reside within the Player's mind, being spawned from certain routes or events, usually after the Player is killed. They provide commentary about what the Player does and also interact with the Hero, The Narrator, and each other.

Unlike the Player, the Narrator, or the Princess, the true nature of the Voices is never revealed, however, it is stated they are not the same type of entity as the Narrator. It's heavily speculated the Voices are either the Player's split personalities or the Princess' perception of the Player himself.

• Ambiguously Human: They're voices with no physical form but have very human ideas about how the world should work, try suggesting the hypothetical use of various items that do not appear in the game, and are awed or baffled when the Player and the Princess show much more than a normal human's capacity for strength and survival.
• Ambiguous Situation: What are the Voices, exactly?
  • Are they you?: The Voices are ostensibly an extension of the Player's own personality, each embodying a particular emotion or aspect, but they themselves flip-flop between being you and being different people altogether, and have an ambiguous connection to the Narrator.
    • The Voice of the Hero is the only Voice there from the start. The rest only just come into existence in the chapter they appear in, but they share your memories and the other Voices aren't surprised by their appearance. Which Voice appears depends on the choices you make towards the Princess, implying that they are her impression(s) of you.
    • The Voices name the Player "the decider", leaving the decision making to you. Despite this, it is possible in many routes that they completely take control from the Player and limit the choices you make, a power that is only replicated by the Narrator (when you are not aware of what he is really doing) and the Princess, and only when she gains godlike power.
    • The Narrator and the Princess (in the Spectre and Wraith routes) acknowledges them as being separate from the Player. The Voices are surprised to hear from the Princess that she does not have voices in her own head.
    • They're voiced by the same actor as the Narrator, while the Player's lines and any rare non-Narrator narration are unvoiced. It is made explicit that the Narrator is an entirely separate entity that exists as an "echo" in the Construct.^NoteAlthough it might be more accurate to say the Narrator is the one voiced by the same actor, given that his nature as an echo might mean that he can only exist in relation to the ones hearing him.
    • When the Princess is claimed by the Shifting Mound, the Voices outlive the Narrator, but will disappear when the Player approaches the mirror, aware of their impending "death." In the ending where you slay the heart of the Shifting Mound, they return to you, but if you slay the Shifting Mound herself, they do not.
  • Where are they?: They are the Voices in your head, but they also seem to exist in a separate physical plane.
    • In two variants of the "And? What happens next?" ending, the other Voices are mentioned as being "around but scattered" within the multitudes of the Shifting Mound. The Hero is always with you, but only the Contrarian appears with you to the true cabin if the Stranger was the first vessel you collected. It's implied that their very existence is tied to the Princess and her various forms.
    • When the Spectre possesses you, she describes the place she's in as having "shards of broken glass on the floor", and asks if the Voice of the Hero is one of them. He objects to it, but he can't actually say what exactly he is.
    • Several scenes imply that the Voices exist in some kind of actual physical space: the Paranoid and Skeptic can physically overpower the Hero in the Cage route, the Paranoid can go hide in a corner and demand that no-one come in, the Spectre mentions a floor, and the Narrator (who isn't a Voice but is established as being wherever they are) can go make himself a drink.
    • In the Razor route, "clearing your mind" and silencing the voices makes the background revert from a cracked mess into the Chapter I basement. Immediately after that the Narrator is silenced too and the Chapter I basement vanishes. So, they have some degree of Fisher King ability, and perhaps have something to do with the changing environment. Their personalities are strong enough to influence the player far beyond the choices you make and can even affect the world without him.
  • The new routes introduced in The Pristine Cut raise further questions, but seems to imply that the Voices have far more independence than previously indicated.
    • In the Princess and the Dragon route, the Player is torn from his body and is able to see the events of a chapter through the Princess' perspective. The Voices still inhabit the Player's body and are able to make choices on their own, speaking through the body with their own voices. The Narrator still narrates from within the body, apparently unaware that the Player is not in his own body, despite also being aware that he is not the same as the Voices^note It should be noted that while the Player can almost always choose to be silent, in this very chapter, the Princess herself can tell that you are in her body even if you say nothing to her. It's also worth noting that it's your body that influences how the Princess looks, not your consciousness; this and the Cage route both imply that the Player's body is its own entity.
    • In the Cage route, the Player can be decapitated by the Cage and thus lose his body, the Voices, and the Narrator, but the body continues to move and fight the Cage's body.
    • In the Happily Ever After route, the Voice of the Smitten, after forcing the Player to rip his own heart out, jumps from his head to become a voice in the Princess'. Unlike all of the Voices, he becomes visible, existing as a violent shadow looming over the Princess, "whispering sweet nothings" in her ear, and he is still able to exert control over the cabin. However, he still needs the Player to make choices that guarantee him and the Princess a "happily ever after."
• Anti-Hero Team: Mainly of the Nominal Hero variety. Barring the Voice of The Hero, most of the Voices don't actually take the assigned goal of "saving the world" very seriously. Anytime they end up helping the Player slay the Princess it is usually just because they have to for their own survival. Likewise, while (most of) the voices are not above helping the Princess out of sympathy for her, they are just as likely to do it because it is the easiest option, or even just because they know it will upset the Narrator.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: The Voices in their own way genuinely care about the Player's wellbeing.
• Birds of a Feather: While several of the Voices find several versions of the Princess attractive, almost all of them are attracted to the version of the Princess that spawns or is most closely associated with them, though some of them express it in unhealthy or belligerent ways.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: It would appear that the Voices are born from a mix of the Player Character's choices and the Princess' impression of him from those choices. The Voices can pick up on how the Princess and even the rules of the construct can change based on the Player's perception and use it to devastating effect.
• The Dog Bites Back: If you're unkind to the Voices when you arrive at the mirror at the end of every route (i.e., say that it's the end for them but not for you), they'll hate you when you kill the Shifting Mound and turn on you in the new universe. Only the Hero and Contrarian will still be okay with you.
• Excellent Judge of Character: Most of the Voices will accurately point out the Narrator's shady nature regarding the Player Character's quest and willing obtuseness for life and death scenarios.
• Expy: Voices that embody an aspect of the player's personality and influence the player and the world through that personality? This sounds incredibly similar to the Detective's Skill Tree. Word of God confirms that it isn't a coincidence.invoked
• Foil:
  • Each of the Voices contrast a specific version of the Princess that appears in chapter II, likely being each a literal manifestation of how she views the Player at that point. This leads to their thoughts and suggestions usually playing into her existing perception of the Player for better or worse. Interestingly, this also leads to some cases (such as the Opportunist and the Stubborn to the Witch and Adversary respectively) where the Voice and the Princess end up having almost the exact same personality.
  • Similar to the different forms of the Princess being foils to each other, so too are the Voices foils to each other.
    • "Consumption and betrayal": The Hunted and the Opportunist occur if you didn't take the Pristine Blade, only to turn on the Princess later. The Hunted is reactive and cautious, watching the Princess for a chance to escape. Meanwhile the Opportunist is active and confrontative, watching the Princess for a chance to attack. They both try to turn bad situations in your favor in different ways: the Hunted tries to outpace the Princess by thinking ahead, while the Opportunist goes with the flow and uses underhanded tactics when the opportunity presents itself.
    • "Skepticism and blind devotion": The Skeptic and the Smitten occur if the PC take the Princess' side no matter what, even when the Narrator tries to make him kill her. The Skeptic questions the Narrator and the nature of the quest, trying to unravel its rules but finding only contradictions. Meanwhile, the Smitten doesn't question the Narrator but instead creates his own rules, dedicating himself to a Rescue Romance that contradicts the nature of PC's quest but nonetheless ascribes meaning that is absent in the Skeptic's presence.
    • "Rivalry and submission": The Stubborn and the Broken occur if you hesitate before trying to kill the Princess, allowing her the chance to retaliate. The Stubborn is a Blood Knight who loves to fight and enjoys hurting and being hurt in turn. Meanwhile, the Broken is The Eeyore who hates being hurt and so, avoids confrontation. They are both obsessed with the Princess in different ways: the Stubborn sees her as an equal while the Broken sees her as an indomitable goddess.
    • "Terror and longing": The Paranoid and the Cold occur if you try to avoid choosing between freeing the Princess and slaying her or go all in and slay her without hesitation. The Paranoid is emotional to the point his furtive panic tip-toes right up to the edge of hysteria, he's afraid of the Princess and the Narrator as he sees them both as untrustworthy, omnipresent threats, and actively tries to come up with strategies to keep the Player alive. Meanwhile, the Cold is emotionless, consistently underestimates the danger the Princess presents, can't relate to anything that's happening to anyone, and is ultimately uncaring as to whether you succeed or die. Both get a peek behind the curtain, both meet dramatically abnormal variations of the Princess and both are given even less reason to trust the Narrator than many other Chapter II voices.
    • "Pain and unfamiliarity": The Cheated and the Contrarian occur if you pursue options the Narrator tries to dissuade you of. The Cheated is a bitter and angry Sir Swears-a-Lot who feels the whole situation he's in is unfair and wants to find a way to brute force a win out of things despite this, arguably out of pure spite and lack of other options. The Contrarian also has little to no respect for the rules and confines of the Construct, but seeks to mess around with things as much as he can through more indirect and playful means, citing "fun" as his primary motivation more than once. While the Cheated never feels sympathy for the Razor and is, from the start, laser focused on overcoming the challenge she poses, not only is the Contrarian never confrontational with the Stranger, he is taken aback by her final form, feels responsible for it, and ultimately suggests before she is taken by the Shifting Mound that the three of you should try to help her.
    • "And at the heart of it all, an emotion that can only be described as...": The Hero occurs when you take the agency and choose to either go to the cabin or walk in the other direction. He always sticks to the Player's agency where the rest of the Voices force or coerce you to follow their whims, whenever you pick an option where you have the most agency in he always responds with a suggestion. Where the rest of the Voice's Personality Powers are heavily noticeable during their routes and other routes they may appear, along with enabling supernatural feats when the situation requires. The Hero's Personality Power is subtle and easily missed during chapters, but ends up being the most reality warping ability of the voices. Unlike the rest of the voices he isn't born from the Princess' perception of the Player, but he is born from your perception of the situation as a whole.
• Hearing Voices: The Chaotic Neutral variety. It's not clear what the origin of the Voices is, however, judging how they persist even after the Construct has ended, whereas the Narrator does not, it is safe to assume that they are not the same kind of entity as he is. Even the voices themselves appear not to know what they are, or where they came from.
• I Choose to Stay: In the "And? What happens next?" ending the Voices stay behind, while the Player and the Princess venture to the world beyond the Cabin.
• Insane Troll Logic: The Voices at times will suggest utterly insane options either out of desperation or because they think it's funny to do so.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: If you return to the cabin in the endgame and take the blade, a Voice will comment that taking it usually gives you more (dialogue) options.
• Mind Hive: All of the Voices inhabit the Player's body (alongside the Narrator). Although how much sway in what the Player does varies, to giving advice about what they think the Player should being acting to taking control of his body. Sometimes they give the Player options he wouldn't have had before, though, such as the Stubborn granting the Player the option to revive.
• Misfit Mobilization Moment: Either the Player Character can tell them or the Voices will do this to themselves during some of the game's most dire moments.
• No Name Given:
  • The subtitles refer to them as the Voice of the Hero etc, but they don't refer to each other or themselves as having names, generally referring to themselves with descriptors like "the jumpy one" or "the brave one". The Narrator may or may not be aware of those labels - when fighting the Tower, the Narrator demands that the "'heroic' one" do something about the Voice of the Broken obediently stabbing the player in the chest.
  • In Happily Ever After, when the Voice of the Smitten has gained independent existence, the Player can explicitly call him the Smitten (in which case the other voices will use the name), but if you don't they'll just call him "the lovesick one".
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • While the Voices themselves essentially never break character, the Player has one moment where he is able to "empty his mind", clearing his head of the Voices so that he can concentrate on defeating the Princess in a blade duel.
  • The only time the Voices aren't terrified of the mirror that appears at the end of a route is "The Moment of Clarity". In fact, they welcome it. Either the countless loops that got you to this point were so bad that the mirror seemed less terrifying by comparison, or the countless loops gave them enough knowledge to no longer fear it. Either way, they don't want to be here anymore.
• Personality Powers: Each corresponding Voice seems to give you abilities related to whatever they personify.
  • The Hero: The Heart, which is the What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway? variety until we learn in the finale that his true ability is Heart Is an Awesome Power, which allows the Player to get to the heart of the Shifting Mound. This is proves to be the most reality warping ability of any of the Player's Voices, as it allows the Player to settle the situation for good but this only activates in the finale.
  • The Broken: Despair Event Horizon, which provides no value until we learn his true power is Too Broken to Break and Empathy. Because he is broken, he is able to better understand and reach versions of the Princess that are themselves broken and hurting creatures.
  • The Cheated: Sore Loser and Smash Cut, which allow the Player to skip parts of the game's narrative.
  • The Cold: Straw Vulcan and Feel No Pain, which allow the Player to outlast horrors like the Moment of Clarity or the Fury's unwinding simply by not caring about them.
  • The Contrarian: Commander Contrarian, which initially enables the Player to chose options that are Insane Troll Logic, but as shown in the Fury route, when combined with the Stubborn's determination, they allow the Player to brute force through the fight as muscle and bones to slay the Fury.
  • The Hunted: Animalistic Abilities and Super-Senses. In the Den route, this can evolve into Cannibalism Superpower.
  • The Opportunist: Opportunistic Bastard, which allows the Player to take cunning and devious actions such as trumping the Witch's vigilance with a lie by omission.
  • The Paranoid: Properly Paranoid, which allows the Player to pick up on things he wouldn't have noticed before out of sheer paranoia, such as the nature of the Construct. He also manages the Madness Mantra that allows the Player to counter The Nightmare's Killing Intent. He also displays Cowardly Lion abilities which are pushed to the extreme during the Apotheosis route where he allows the Player, through Power Born of Madness, to stand against the might of a Physical God, at least for a time.
  • The Smitten: The Power of Love, which allows the Player to bend the laws of the Construct to facilitate his escape with the Princess. This can evolve into darker abilities as seen in the Happily Ever After route, such as Entitled to Have You which works against the Player.
  • The Skeptic: Seeker Archetype and super-intelligence, which allow the Player to make more clever and obscure choices. Works against the player when his Arbitrary Skepticism stops him from believing in the reality bending nature of perception within the Construct and imposes natural laws where there shouldn't exist.
  • The Stubborn: Determinator and Super-Strength, which allow the Player to fight back against stronger variants of the Princess.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: They're essentially a pile of sentient maladaptive coping mechanisms, each working for their own often contradictory goals while often expressing their distaste for each other. Still, they're (probably) stuck with you, and in the end they're trying to look out for the group's best interest in their own way. All of them have at least one moment where they manage to help out, and if you choose to slay the princess, they'll join you in the new world (or team up against you).
• Reality Warper: They are all this to a certain degree, given the nature of both the Player and the Princess. However, of the ten, the Smitten, the Cheated and the Hero stand out as having exerted the most control during their respective routes. With the Hero's being the most prominent as his Heart Is an Awesome Power allows the Player character to reach the cabin where the Shifting Mound's heart is.
• Seinfeldian Conversation: They constantly trail off onto other topics that are (vaguely) related to the situation at hand. After "The Razor" reaches her final form, every voice begins arguing with each other and the Narrator, to the point that the Player has to shut them all out of his head to focus.
• Split Personality: The Voices are reminiscent of split personalities, it's speculated they're born from the Princess' perception of the Player.
• Split-Personality Team: The Voices work like this for the Player.
• Split-Personality Takeover: The Voices will occasionally take control of the Player's body if he's in mortal danger, or in less than hospitable circumstances. Or just because they think it's what they should do. This becomes very potent in the Pristine Cut, where the Voices will try to to a hostile take over from the Player.
  Voice of the Paranoid: Oh. Is this how things are going to be now? All of us vying over a single body? Fine. See this corner? It's mine. And I'd better not see any of you trying to invade my personal space.
• Strong as They Need to Be: Specific Voices are able to grant the Player supernatural abilities, usually relevant to whatever form of the Princess he is fighting, such as the Stubborn enabling the Player to revive from the dead, or the Paranoid enabling the Player to manually re-activate his organs.
• Uncertain Doom: It's unclear what exactly happens to the Voices when you lose them at the mirror; if you ask the Voice of the Hero about it he isn't sure if he died or not and says that everyone else is stuck in parts of the Shifting Mound, and in the ending where the Voices are angry they call you out for assuming they'd be gone for good. However, there are several instances where you can lose a Voice mid-route, and in some of them they really do disappear for good and won't appear in any ending, assuming you don't meet them in any other route:
  • Any time you abandon a route completely.
  • When the Apotheosis incinerates your soul alongside your Voices and the Narrator, or when your Voices leave you to unravel her.
  • When the Fury tortures you and causes your Voices to break one by one, or when the Stubborn starts kicking out Voices every time you're reborn.
  • When the Cage decapitates you and forces you to watch your bodies fighting.
  • Happily Ever After, where the Smitten never rejoins you regardless of ending.^note In release builds, he reappeared at the mirror without explanation if you kept the final torch lit, but this was later patched out.
• The Voice: They are all voices in your head, and you never physically see them. Though they might exist in some physical space, they and the Narrator only describe them in terms of their personality and not any physical characteristics. There are two exceptions, however:
  • In "The Princess and the Dragon", the Voice of the Hero, Cold, and Opportunist share the Player's body and speak through him, speaking with their voice and giving the body unique expressions. The Hero has a worried look, the Cold has Dreary Half-Lidded Eyes, and the Opportunist has a Slasher Smile.
  • In "Happily Ever After," the Voice of the Smitten jumps out of your body and becomes a Living Shadow resembling the Player who whispers to the Princess.

• Audience Surrogate: Of all the Voices, he's the one most likely to say what the average player is probably thinking, and tries to find a middle ground between trusting a Narrator who isn't being straightforward, and trusting a Princess who may or may not end the world. He's often in favor of playing it safe and staying near the middle at first—take the blade to be on the safe side, but don't go in swinging without at least hearing her out; don't take the Narrator's words at face value, but hear him out; etc.
• Badass Normal: For most of the game, the Voice of the Hero can't grant the Player Character any extra abilities like his peers can. Despite this, he can serve a valuable purpose as the Player's conscience and voice of reason, with his insistence on at least hearing the Princess out before killing her starting a chain of events that can lead to you slaying or freeing her for real.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Despite the multitude of personas the Voices cause the Princess to view him as throughout the game, deep down she views the Player Character as being a hero who has the willingness to do the right thing above all else.
• Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: He's this to the other Voices. When every other voice is distracted, the Voice of the Hero will try to ground everybody in what's happening right now. When the Hero takes over for the Paranoid in repeating the Survival Mantra so that the Paranoid can argue with the Narrator, the Hero wonders how in the world the Paranoid kept that up for as long as he did.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: During The Princess and the Dragon Route his dialogue is indicated by being a light blue hue.
• The Conscience: He's the one who clashes with the Narrator and questions why you're killing the Princess instead of saving her, and advises you to at least hear her out before making a decision.
• Deadpan Snarker: He has his moments since he's generally the reasonable one among the Narrator and the other Voices.
• Deuteragonist: He's the only Voice who appears during Chapter 1, thus being the only one who can show up in all the routes, making him the "main" Voice. He's also the only Voice who appears during the confrontation with The Shifting Mound, allowing you to reach at least 3 additional endings.
• Fatal Flaw: The Voice of the Hero's status as The Heart also means he is prone to indecision when faced with an ambiguous or unclear situation, which makes him easy to push into violent action or be overpowered by the stronger and more defined wills of the other Voices. In addition, his attempts to compromise or just leave the scene tend to satisfy no-one, leading to the horror of The Nightmare and the false happiness of Happily Ever After.
  • It's heavily implied that the Voice of the Hero can only act on the Player's agency, as he first appears when the Player first chooses either to walk towards or away from the cabin.
  • It would also explain why his Personality Power is What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway? for most of the game, the other Voices' abilities are so overwhelming that it leaves him to the sidelines.
• Foil: To the Narrator. The Voice of the Hero is the only Voice that stays with you in every route and in every situation, and generally contrasts the Narrator's direct and cold-hearted insistence in slaying the Princess with a willingness to reason with her and question what is going on. He's also one to the Heart of the Shifting Mound.
• Golden Mean Fallacy: If he's in an unhelpful role, it's for this reason - he's very prone to trying to come up with compromises between incompatible positions that ultimately benefit no-one. In particular, he frequently suggests keeping the Princess in the Cabin as a compromise between slaying and freeing her, despite both the Princess and the Narrator seeing it as unacceptable. If you try to push it anyway, it ends terribly every single time.
  The Narrator: [The Damsel]'s not "wooed" by you because "staying here and building a life together" isn't a solution. It isn't anything. It's a non-answer. It can't be done.
• The Heart: The Voice of the Hero's primary purpose is keeping everyone together and on the same page through his supporting presence. Several of the routes extend this to facilitating your relationship with the Princess.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: The Voice of the Hero's Personality Power. He might not grant the Player character various super natural abilities like the other voices can, but his ability to serve as The Heart in several endings proves immensely useful as it allows the PC to permanently Slay The Princess, restart the loop again, or just convince the Shifting Mound to leave the cabin with the Player character.
• Helpless Good Side: In the Princess and the Dragon route, the Voice of the Opportunist takes control of the Hero's vacant body and tries to kill the Princess despite the Hero being in there too. The Voice of the Hero takes control for a moment... to protest that this wasn't a unanimous decision, before the Opportunist takes it back and stabbing commences.
• The Hero: It's in his name.
• Heroic Willpower: Is able to make himself heard even while you and the Shifting Mound, both awakened to your full power and divinity, are entangled in a furious contest of wills that has shunted all the other voices off the battlefield.
• How Do I Shot Web?: Played with. During the Nightmare route, when he offers to run your body in order for the Voice of the Paranoid to have a say on whether to trust the Narrator's words in slaying the Princess, the Hero has trouble at first, asking, "Brain?" The Paranoid teaches him the Survival Mantra, then listens as the Hero struggles to learn it... with a lot more trouble before your body starts shutting down again. The Paranoid chides him for being terrible, saying that "it's very hard to stay focused on running things when other people are talking to you". Downplayed, though, as the Hero tries again... and becomes much better at the survival mantra than before, leaving the Paranoid able to chat with the Narrator.
• I Choose to Stay: In the "And? What happens next?" ending, the Voice of the Hero declines the Player's offer to come with him and the Princess beyond the cabin and chooses to stay behind with the other Voices, stating that this journey is just for the two of them alone.
• The Idealist Was Right: The Voice of the Hero's idealism of resolving the situation between the Player and Princess diplomatically ends giving you the most useful Personality Power. That can lead you to the "And? What happens next?" ending, which has the Player and the Shifting Mound's heart leave the cabin peacefully without any further bloodshed or tears.
• Insistent Terminology: He gets on the Narrator's case for telling the PC to "kill" the Princess instead of "slay". Despite insisting that there's a difference between "slaying" and "killing" earlier, he waves the Hero off by saying the distinction is negligible.
• Magikarp Power: Despite being the most supportive of the Voices of the Player Character from the very start. The Voice of the Hero's Personality Power never activates until the end game.
• Nice Guy: He genuinely just wants to do what's right, for you, the world, and the Princess. This ends up proving incredibly useful in the finale of the game.
• Not So Above It All:
  • Despite his levelheadedness compared to the other Voices, deep down he thinks of himself and himself specifically as a capital-H Hero. He occasionally displays a measure of self-importance and is surprisingly susceptible to flattery. The other voices call him out on it should his ego make a fool of himself or offend them.
    The Damsel: It's you! My dashing hero. I was so worried you wouldn't come back.
    Voice of the Smitten: Did you hear that? She called us "dashing"!
    Voice of the Hero: And she called us a hero!
    The Narrator: Flattery really does go a long way with the two of you, doesn't it?
  • If you hold the Pristine Blade in a Reverse Grip at the urging of Contrarian, Hero will admit that it does look cooler.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: If you tried to investigate the Princess' arm without locking the door, leaving her to lock you in the basement in Chapter I, then let the Witch walk up the stairs while you follow her without stabbing her in Chapter II, she will close the door behind you and lock you again in the basement. The Voice of the Hero realizes that you fell for the oldest trick in the book, again.
  Voice of the Hero: No! Not again!
• Only Sane Man: He's the first to suggest talking to the Princess and finding information rather than immediately killing her like the Narrator wants you to do. Although, considering the setting, being reasonable can actually make things worse, depending. He also comes across as this when with the wackier Voices.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: While the Hero isn't afraid to question things, he's generally accommodating and tries to keep an open mind. So if he's gotten to the point where he's directly confrontational with the Narrator or any of the other Voices, you know things have gotten bad.
• Rapid-Fire "No!": If the Player succeeds in slitting his own throat via Psychic-Assisted Suicide after the Tower hijacks the Narrator, the Hero becomes shocked at the Player dropping the blade to the floor with a clang and breaks down into a "No no no no no no no!", as he discovers that the Player has completed the suicide ritual and is now dying.
  • Also happens in the Prisoner route, after she cuts off her own head with the blade you gave her:
    Voice of the Hero: [horrified] Oh no oh no oh no what did we do? Can[-can] we put it back? Please tell me we can put it back.
  • Also happens in the Nightmare route, where you slay the titular Princess before learning from the Narrator that you've trapped yourself in the void, possibly forever.
    Voice of the Hero: Oh no. Oh no no no no no no [no no no no no]. Oh no I hate this!
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: In the path where the Player chooses to have the Hero pledge their loyalty to the Tower, he gets increasingly exasperated with how willing the Voice of the Broken is to go along with it, until he finally declares that he has had enough and grumbles that he just going to sit in the corner until the Hero's agency returns.
• The Shrink: His Heart Is an Awesome Power can enable the Player and the Princess to simply talk things out peacefully, after both parties were having a monumentous argument during the finale.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The Happily Ever After route is triggered by him suggesting that the Player and the Damsel could spend their lives together in the cabin, which causes the Damsel to finally refuse the Player, and the Smitten goes through Sanity Slippage. He also suggests that maybe taking eating chunks from the Den might help heal the Player's body mangled by the Den's attacks. This causes the Voice of the Hunted to give in to his primal instincts and go Drunk with Power by indulging in Horror Hunger. This leads to what perhaps is one of the worst and shameful displays of violence in the game, and the Hero deeply regrets even saying anything.
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: At first The Voice of the Hero's status as The Heart for the entire collective is overshadowed by the other voices' Personality Powers. The most obviously useful thing he does for most of the game is in the Tower, where he can keep the Broken from repeatedly stabbing your body but can't keep him from flailing the knife at you and causing more incidental damage. It isn't until the finale, that we learn that the Voice of the Hero has the most reality warping ability of the Voices Personality Powers.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: If his reaction to the Spectre appearing is any indication, the Voice of the Hero is apparently scared of ghosts.
  "A g-g-g-ghost!"

Spawned from "The Tower", the Broken is utterly defeated and sees no point in opposing the Princess. He may also spawn in Chapter III if you chose to give up when confronting the Princess.

• Angst Dissonance: Discussed. He spends the game being morose, passive and grim, usually advocating that you surrender to the princess and do whatever it takes to stop her hurting you. When Skeptic calls him out for this in the Cage Route, he angrily points out that trauma is actually a very normal response to undergoing constant series of horrifying and painful deaths, and it's everyone else who's having a weird reaction. invoked
• Apologetic Attacker: Mildly. He says he's sorry in the Tower route when turning the Pristine Blade back on you. It's what the Princess wants.
• Big "NO!": Shouts this out in horror if, after the Tower offers you mercy in exchange for servitude, you decide to attack her instead.
• Broken Tears: Puns aside, his response to killing the Tower is to fall into miserable, Inelegant Blubbering. He's so upset about it that he cries on loop, meaning if you don't progress the dialogue he'll just keep crying.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: After the humiliating and crushing defeat the Player Character suffers at the hands of the Princess during Chapter I, possibly because he flinched or hesitated to give her the opening, she views him as a cowardly and weak-willed individual.
• Comfort the Dying: More like "Comfort the Fading". If you got him through the Adversary, he will be at the side of the Voice of the Hero as he and the Stubborn are being tortured by the Fury; and just when the Voice of the Hero is giving up and fading through the torture, the Broken consoles him by telling him it's okay to let go. This seems to be the result of the Cooldown Hug described below.
• Conditioned to Accept Horror: Openly defies this in certain routes, particularly in the Cage Route, in response to the Skeptic telling him to toughen up. He emphatically states that trauma and terror is an absolutely reasonable response to traumatic events such as dying, and natural predeliction to violence to where holding a weapon feels natural is a huge sign that the other Voices have become desensitized. It's worth noting that his defeatism means he's accepting of a horrible fate, just not that a horrible fate should be normal.
• Cooldown Hug: Implied. During the scene in the Fury route when your body is packed into the shape of a ball, the Voice of the Hero starts freaking out and shouts out repeatedly to "please make it stop". The Voice of the Stubborn shouts that they must resist the pain, or all this torture will be for nothing. If you got the Broken from the Adversary, he tells both Voices that they must accept the pain and torture they will endure, all the while being close to the Hero's side and trying to calm him down as best as he can. By the time the ball is reformed into the shape of your body, your organs ruptured, the Broken senses that the Hero's time is almost up, so he comforts the latter with these parting words as the Hero is giving up.
  Voice of the Broken: It's okay to let go.
  Voice of the Hero: [relieved] Then I'll just go. [vanishes]
• Despair Event Horizon: Embodies this as his Personality Power, as he sees any resistance against the Princess as futile and encourages the player's submission so she won't hurt them. If you successfully kill The Tower, or if the Apotheosis is claimed by the Shifting Mound, he's reduced to broken sobbing now that his goddess is gone.
• Dirty Coward: Partially because of his adoration for the Tower and his fear of further punishment, he advocates for immediately surrendering to her will, and if you choose to defy her, he obeys her command to stab yourself in the chest over and over. His fear of pain is understandable, but throwing his own body under the bus to escape from it puts him in this territory.
• The Dog Bites Back: In the Apotheosis, with the right combination of voices and dialogue options, you can convince him that the Princess has been using him this whole time. If you do, he'll turn against her and help the rest of the voices overpower and unwind her, all while snarling about how she'll suffer like he did for her.
• The Dragon: He's effectively this to the Tower, sabotaging your attempts to resist her from the inside as she attacks from the outside. He's less active at the role, but still on her side over yours in Apotheosis and Fury.
• The Eeyore: Has a fatalistic outlook and demeanor of learned helplessness. The other Voices, who usually want to do something, tend to get ticked off at him.
• The Empath: Because of his brokeness and learned helplessness, he is able to sense the emotions of some troubled Princess incarnations, even those who are believed to be hostile, such as the Adversary-Fury and the Cage, and connect to how both the Player and the Princess feel. Because of his endurance of being tortured, he is able to reach out to her and console her when she is broken herself.
• Face–Heel Turn: In the Tower, he turns against the rest of the voices in her servitude, and spends his time actively sabotaging your attempts to escape her control and set her free. In Apotheosis, if you point out how cruel and uncaring his love really is, he'll turn back and join the voices once more.
• Forced to Feel Empathy: Where many of the other Voices are more focused on how to approach either the Princess or the Narrator as problems to be solved, the Broken specifically connects to how both the Player and the Princess feel, acknowledging the pain and horror of their existence, which can provide a check against more overtly antagonistic or paranoid voices.
• Foil:
  • The Voice of the Broken is a weak and pitiful being, in comparison to the powerful and dominating Tower.
  • While the Broken is more explicitly a foil to the Stubborn as pointed out above, he could easily be seen as one to the Cold as well. The Cold numbs their emotions to do what has to be done, while the Broken is overwhelmed by them, often to the point of inaction. What this results in is that both can manage to get to the same destination from completely opposite ends of the spectrum, such as the Fury route: they both help the player survive by either simply not caring about the agony (The Cold) or caring enough to endure so the princess can see her own agony (The Broken).
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Like the Opportunist, in the routes where he shows up, the Broken isn't well liked by the other Voices. Especially after trying to slit your throat at the Tower's behest.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: Believe it or not, but if is he present in the Adversary-Fury chapter, his despair and apathy turns out to be ultimately quite helpful in spinning the situation into a sort of happy ending. Because he is as utterly beaten down as he is, he is also capable of empathizing with the Fury Princess, recognizing that beneath all her anger their pain is similar, thus allowing for a peaceful solution (though only after she has torn the Player apart again). And when the Narrator then tries to get his plan back on track, the Broken is capable of talking him down too, simply by pointing out that the Player has at this point already experienced three horrible deaths, up to and including getting eviscerated, so he has nothing left to threaten him with.
• Hidden Depths: Away from the Tower, who brings out the worst in him, he's surprisingly empathetic, easily able to recognize the pain under the Cage's apathy and will push the Player towards peacefully working together rather than fighting her, which is the only way to free her. When the Skeptic derides his emotions, the Broken is surprisingly steadfast in believing they have value. He also empathizes with the Fury once she’s done unwinding you and helps free her, and even before the Pristine Cut he expresses sympathy over the Wounded Wild, commenting that she's just like him.
  Voice of the Broken: [about the Cage] The poor thing... she thinks it's easier to be detached. But buried pain is still pain, whether she knows it or not.
• Inelegant Blubbering: If you choose to kill the Tower, he spends the beginning of the next chapter sobbing and moaning. He even preempts the Narrator, which irritates the latter. He'll also start crying after the Apotheosis is claimed by the Shifting Mound.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: It's implied this is the part of the Player's psyche he represents - the ability to recognise when further struggle is only going to hurt you, and it's better to just let what's about to happen happen. Sometimes this is actually very useful, and especially in the Pristine Cut we see instances where following his advice is best for everyone. His issue is, he can't tell when you shouldn't fold 'em.
• Like a God to Me: He eagerly, willingly worships the Tower/Apotheosis as a radiant goddess worthy of absolute obedience.
• Love Martyr: Is extremely and unhealthily devoted to the Tower, to the point where he immediately tries to slit his own throat when she orders that the Player do so. The only thing that slows his suicidal crusade down is the Voice of the Hero fighting him every step of the way. The fact her spelling out that her love for you is unequal at best doesn't shake his faith in her at all reinforces the unhealthy dynamic of his love for her. He can, however, realize how badly he's been used in the Apotheosis with the right prompting from the Hero, the Paranoid and the Narrator, and will immediately and vigourously throw himself behind the plan of revenge.
• The Millstone:
  • While how beneficial any of the voices are changes depending on the form the princess takes and how the Player plans to help or oppose her, the Broken is often the least useful of the voices, usually annoyingly useless at best and borderline hostile to the Player and other voices at worst. This is exemplified when the Player opposes the Tower, where fighting her turns into having to fight both her and the Broken due to his obsession with her.
  • This is downplayed as of the Pristine Cut update, which introduces new and updated routes that better showcase the areas where the Broken can be helpful or even critical. His ability to recognize pain and suffering in another, and the ability to accept and move past it.
• Never My Fault: On the Fury route when coming from the Tower, he weeps and gnashes his teeth that the Player and Hero are monsters for killing the Tower, dismissing out of hand that she tried to force you to kill yourself, and that he wanted to help her do it. The Hero and the Stubborn both respond to this by calling him a Dirty Coward who doesn't get to lecture them about right and wrong after willingly screwing them all over.
• Only Sane by Comparison: If you get the Broken in The Cage, he comes off as much more rational when compared to the Hero and the Skeptic; he argues that it's normal to be traumatized by dying (and witnessing the Princess' self-inflicted gruesome decapitation) when faced with the Skeptic's nonchalance, and when the Voice of the Hero remarks that holding the blade is starting to feel natural, the Broken retorts out that it shouldn't be. He's also the prime advocate for the decision of simply throwing the blade away and talking to the Cage, a decision that leads to the route's happiest outcome and allows you to free the Princess, as opposed to the Skeptic's overzealous obsession with finding out the "truth".
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • The Broken normally doesn't do anything — most of his contributions are just bleak statements of hopelessness, and he never really gets out of depressed helplessness as an emotional state. In the Tower route, however, he becomes disturbingly passionate in his devotion to the Tower, even actively turning against the Player and trying to force you to kill yourself. This is noted by the Hero, who nervously asks if the group should be worried when the Broken starts enthusiastically emoting and loses his spineless demeanor once he hears the Tower's voice on the Cabin stairs.
  • On a more positive note, if you get the Broken in The Cage, he's less pessimistic than usual - he's still The Eeyore, sure, but unlike most routes, he doesn't view the Princess as an unstoppable force who we have no chance of beating - he simply sees her as a person, and is the one to suggest throwing away the blade and talking to her, rightfully pointing out that she's not likely to talk to you at knife-point. Considering that The Broken isn't brought about by the Princess killing you gruesomely here, it makes sense that his defeatist outlook isn't so prominent.
  • Played for Laughs in the Razor route, if you attempt to flirt with the Razor by shooting her "The Look". When the baffled Narrator tries to clarify what on earth "the Look" is, the Broken comments, in his normal depressed monotone, that even he knows about The Look.
  • In the Adversary version of the Fury the Voice of the Broken, while facing the mirror at the end of the route, will give the Player genuine encouragement to steel himself and see it through.
    ''So the world's gone, and she's gone with it. There's only one thing left for you to do here. You need to look at yourself. Whatever you see, it's going to be okay.
• Personality Power: Surrendering and empathy. It might not be the most useful approach when dealing with the Tower, granted, but not all princesses are so malicious. In the Cage, realising that fighting isn't helping anyone and someone has to stop first is essential to getting past her nihilism, and in the Fury he endures where the Stubborn fails and gets the Narrator to realize that there's no point trying to control the Player anymore. In cases where struggling makes the situation worse and acceptance is the best path forward the Broken can be critical.
• Self-Serving Memory: On the Tower-to-Fury route, the Broken wails about how horrible you are for killing the Tower and denying him a say in the running of your body. The Voices of the Hero and the Stubborn are not impressed, and quick to remind him of his betrayal.
  Voice of the Hero: I can't say I have much sympathy for you. She was bad for us, and you almost got us killed.
  Voice of the Stubborn: You're being too generous. He did get us killed.
  [a little later]
  The Player: It feels like I'm being pulled in a hundred different directions. You'd better all listen to me when the time comes to make a choice.
  Voice of the Broken: So what if I'm speaking my mind? It's not like I've ever really gotten a say in things...
  Voice of the Stubborn: What a crock of shit!
  Voice of the Hero: Yeah! You stabbed us last time. Repeatedly!
  Voice of the Broken: It didn't even work. It doesn't count.
  Voice of the Stubborn: We died!
  Voice of the Hero: If you didn't submit to her, for all we know, that wouldn't have happened.
  Voice of the Broken: It's the punishment you all deserved for not listening to me. To her.
• Silly Rabbit, Cynicism Is for Losers!: If he is present during the Cage route and proposes talking to the princess, the Skeptic mocks his suggestion. Contrary to his usual passivity, the Broken actually pushes back against the Skeptic, and following the route with his suggestion is actually the path to freedom for both you and the princess.
  Voice of the Skeptic: Oh, should we talk about our feelings? That'll get us nowhere, trust me. They're too easy for her to manipulate, too illogical. We can't puzzle our way out of things if we listen to our heart.
  Voice of the Broken: I don't think I even need to comment on that. What a sorry, sorry voice you are.
• Stating the Simple Solution: Is often the first to suggest submitting to the Princess or talking with her. A liability when facing the Tower, but essential when encountering the Cage.
• Sycophantic Servant: He's entirely too excited to spend eternity as the Tower/Apotheosis' willing bootlicker.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: The Broken's tendency towards submitting to the Princess is often a liability. But in the Cage route, it's necessary to overcome the Skeptic's insistence on holding on to the knife to protect themselves. Getting rid of the knife and following his suggestion to actually talk to the princess is the only way to overcome her fatalistic view and free her.
• Too Broken to Break: When he appears on the Fury route in The Pristine Cut, it suggested that this is his true Personality Power. Where even the Stubborn is unable to endure the Fury viscerally deconstructing and reconstructing the Player, the Broken is able to withstand the pain by simply accepting it rather than resisting and furthermore is able to actually reach out and empathise with the Fury. If the player goes on to choose to leave the Cabin with the Fury, the Narrator gears up to find some way to try and stop them, but the Broken quickly and effectively shushes him by pointing that the Hero is already quite traumatized and desenitized from having his body and identity utterly destroyed more than once at this point, so the Narrator really has nothing left to scare him with. The Narrator, now sounding very resigned, agrees with this as he admits that the whole thing just seems pointless and that he is feeling very tired.
• Took a Level in Badass: In the Adversary version of the Fury, while facing the Fury's ability to unwind the Player the Voice of the Broken's true Personality Power activates. This causes him to outlast the Player's body being forced into an unending line with the Fury giving up. He also causes the Narrator to give up trying to stop the Player and Fury from leaving the Cabin by simply telling him that he can no longer say anything that could break them any further.
• Victory by Endurance: In one possible route of the Fury, he manages to win against the Princess by outlasting her sadism (which neither the Hero nor the Stubborn could outlast), with his sincere belief that he couldn't be broken further, and that enduring the Princess' wrath would help her accept that she is just as broken, allowing both her and the Player to undo the cycle of wrath.
• Weak-Willed: He is spawned by the Hero doubting himself when facing the Princess for the first time in Chapter I and being at the receiving hand of a Curb-Stomp Battle, which results in him feeling utterly dominated by the Princess which allows her to easily command the Hero during the Tower route.
• Woman Scorned: Gender inverted. If you can convince him that the Apotheosis never really cared for him and was only ever using him as a method to escape, he'll quickly become the voice most eagerly advocating for her destruction.

Spawned from "The Razor", the Cheated is very fed up with the nature of the story and is determined to stick it to the Narrator. He may also spawn in Chapter III if you chose to disregard the Narrator and he forces you to do something you didn't choose to do, or when listening to the Narrator ends badly for you. Replaces the Voice of the Flinching from the demo.

• Berserk Button: Getting screwed over by things he can't control. He spawns on the Razor route, where the Princess is either concealing a weapon despite the Narrator's insistence that she's unarmed, or is revealed to be Not Quite Dead after stabbing her in the heart, and during Chapter III he gets mad enough to perform a Smash Cut after getting fed up with constantly spawning on the path to the woods. Also, if you reach the Cage after the Voice of the Skeptic forces you to kill yourself after getting the Narrator's "good ending", the Voice of the Cheated makes his presence in the route known with an absolutely furious "are you fucking kidding me?!"
• Brutal Honesty: The Cheated pulls no punches when telling the Narrator, the other voices, the Princess and the world at large how much they all suck.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: After being cheated from certain victory by the Princess during Chapter 1, she views the Player Character as a plaything whose growing frustration and desperate attempts to avoid his inevitable death at her hands amuse her.
• Deadpan Snarker: He responds to most of the Narrator's lines with bitter sarcasm.
• Determinator: After dying to the Razor the first time, he becomes insistent on finding a way to defeat her. So much so that he overrides the Narrator and wills you to revive in the cabin rather than going through the "You're on a path in the woods" intro every time you die. In fact, he may be purposefully getting you killed repeatedly to see if you'll be able to overcome her once you've gained enough Voices. But even he throws in the towel, when he sees the Razor's final form.
• Dissonant Laughter: Will do this in the Cage while being trapped in chains, and again after escaping with the Princess's head.
• Everyone Has Standards: After having freed the Princess from her from the prison and proving to her that their choices do have a meaning, you have the option to drop the head of The Cage down the pit. Though the Cheated at first encourages you to do this, he immediately regrets it and states that "dishing it out" to her feels very bad in a tone that sounds like he's flat-out ashamed with you for your choice.
• Foil: The Voice of the Cheated is a frustrated Sore Loser who is sick of being one step behind the cheerful Ax-Crazy Razor who is constantly tricking the Player by being one step ahead.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: The Cheated very quickly gets annoyed at even minor inconveniences. This is likely due to his perception that he's being treated unfairly, and so any further problems are adding insult to injury. During the few times that the Cheated feels that he's actually won, he's much kinder and less quick to anger.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: The Cheated is irritable, sarcastic, foul-mouthed and prone to complaining when he doesn't get his way. However, he also has a strong sense of justice and is unwilling to harm the Princess when she's trapped and helpless. He's also been known to treat the other voices kindly on occasion, suggesting that his abrasive exterior is just that.
• Mixed Metaphor: He's fond of using the phrase "flip the table", which is seemingly a combination of "turn the tables" and the concept of Flipping the Table.
• Never My Fault: The Cheated tends to blame everyone but him for his suffering while completely ignoring any part he had in causing it. A notable example occurs in The Arms Race, where the Cheated forces you to attack the Princess, despite the Hunted warning you that she's leading you into a trap. This predictably leads to your death, which Cheated then blames the Princess for despite it being entirely avoidable.
• Only One Finds It Fun: Surprisingly enough, the Cheated actually likes the Narrator's "Good Ending" and is extremely annoyed in the Cage at having it forcibly taken away from him.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: His accent varies in strength. He mostly drops 'h's and 't's but sometimes pronounces them, and sometimes pronounces words like "down" and "sound" with an "ow" sound when it should be closer to an "ah" sound (so "sound" would be said more like "sand").
• Pet the Dog: During the "New and Unending Dawn" ending, the Smitten is devastated at the Princess' death. The Voice of the Cheated comforts him and tells him that he'll feel better with time.
• Properly Paranoid: He's suspicious of the Narrator and the Princess, and refuses to believe either of them are harmless or helpful. Regardless of his reasoning, he's generally correct.
• Rage Breaking Point: He can be seen as one. Of all the voices in your head, the Cheated is the most likely to go on a rant at the slightest inconvenience. As a manifestation of your indignation upon being... well, cheated, he is very vocal about the unfairness of the game.
• Rage Quit: Upon seeing the Razor's final form, a body that is nothing but blades and a heart, the Cheated metaphorically throws up his hands and gives up whining that they're screwed.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Notable for being more foul-mouthed than the other Voices.
  "No, fuck that! If we're going to have to keep doing this over and over and over again, we're not starting in the goddamn woods every time. We're starting in the fucking cabin."
• Smash Cut: See the quote above. Is the Voice of the Cheated's Personality Power and this is outright enforced by the Cheated on The Narrator to skip the repetitive description of the forest and immediately cuts to you and all the voices inside of the cabin already; the Hero even gets dizzy, as if it causes motion sickness. It comes with him taking advantage of a lot of the narrative through meta devices to cut to the chase, and it brings to mind players who make use of bugs and glitches in the system when confronted with tedious obstacles, or readers that are already too familiar with a story formula to resist poking holes in it.
• Sore Loser: Another Personality Power as the Voice of the Cheated is such a sore loser that, he out of sheer spite would rather break the game than lose it.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: It's downplayed, but the Cheated admits to feeling anxious or stressed on a couple of occasions, suggesting that this may be the reason for his snarkiness and irritability.
• "Success Through Cheating" Accusation: In the Razor, he frequently accuses the Princess of "cheating" after dying to her, despite the fact that you're both trying to murder each other and so there are no rules in the first place.
• Sympathy for the Devil: In the Thorn route, upon seeing her encased in a painful prison, the Cheated still has the capacity to empathize with the Princess, commenting that she's a victim in all of this, too. Similarly, in the confrontation with the Wounded Wild, like all the other voices that accompany you on this route, the Cheated is extremely resistant to slaying her.
• Unexplained Accent: Uniquely among the voices, he speaks with a Cockney accent, while most of the other voices speak with Received Pronunciation. As a working-class accent, this makes the Cheated seem more irreverent and crass than the other voices.
• Who Writes This Crap!?: If he's there for The Cage, he complains about the Narrator not seeing the mirror. "'What mirror? There is no mirror. Why would I lie about there being a mirror?' Whose fucking idea was this? It's awful." According to the devs the Voice of the Cheated was cathartic, and he skips the woods in The Razor because it had become tedious writing Chapter III scenes in the woods.

Spawned from "The Spectre", the Cold is a hardened killer who expresses no joy and no sadness at your situation. He may also spawn in Chapter III if you chose the merciless options or otherwise strike down the Princess with no hesitation.

• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: The Voice of the Cold, despite having a Lack of Empathy, does genuinely care about the Player's wellbeing in his own surprising way, as shown when he coldly tells the Narrator he intends to kill him during the Spectre route for harming the Player.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: While other voices may lean amoral or malicious, the Cold dismisses conventional ideas of good and bad completely. He's focused entirely on finding new experiences, with no regard for whether they're positive or negative, and doesn't see pain or death as fundamentally different from joy and life. They're all just neutral states you can be in. This often leads to baffled confusion when discussing with the other Voices, who would like to avoid painful deaths if possible - about the only point of moral agreement they have is his hatred for and dislike of the Narrator.
  Voice of the Hero: Do...do you really need me to explain why pain is bad?
• Brutal Honesty: Due to his Lack of Empathy, he doesn't sugarcoat anything he says; this exchange between him and the Smitten in the Burned Grey route is a perfect example.
  Voice of the Cold: [The Princess] won't be alive and well when we return to that cabin… because she's dead. We killed her.
  Voice of the Smitten: You killed her. And so I killed you.
  Voice of the Cold: And you clearly didn't do a good enough job. I'm still here.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Having the Player Character slay the Princess without hesitation during Chapter I will cause her to view him as a ruthless, cold-blooded killer. Argues this sometimes during the Spectre route, expressing Existentialist beliefs about the nature of existence and death.
  Voice of the Cold: Death — at least as a form of permanence — is just a concept, and clearly it's not a very useful one anymore. Maybe we should just throw it out entirely.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: During The Princess and the Dragon route his dialogue is indicated by being a gray hue.
• Creepy Monotone: With very few exceptions, he constantly talks in a cold, emotionless monotone, with at most a slight hint of amusement.
• Deadpan Snarker: He leans much heavier on the "deadpan" side since he doesn't really care, but he still has pretty good snarky lines.
• Double Meaning: On the face of it, one would assume his name refers to him being emotionally cold, i.e. a callous asshole. But some remarks by the Princess or the other voices imply that he has a literal cold presence about him, e.g. the Voice of the Stubborn calling him a "chilly little freak ".
• Dreary Half-Lidded Eyes: In "the Princess and the Dragon", when the Voice of the Cold speaks through your body, this is the expression he makes.
• Determinator: Not as blatant as the Stubborn, but it's still there. He's able to endure pain near indefinitely, which comes in very handy in the Fury route.
• Emotion Suppression: Part of his Personality Powers is to allow you to endure severe duress by downplaying or removing your emotional responses.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Because they're ghosts, the Cold believes that the Spectre and the Greys are incapable of doing the Player any harm. On this, he's proven to be deeply incorrect.
• Everyone Has Standards: Despite being so cold-blooded, he genuinely finds the Narrator to be abhorrent, and is quite bitter about the fact that he tries to lock you away in an empty void for eternity and expects you to be grateful. He also notably expresses contempt towards the Voice of the Opportunist when in a route with him, and in the Pristine Cut he gives multiple jabs. He also admits to having felt something if you break the Fury's spirit and then stab her anyway.
• Feel No Pain: He appears to be capable of forcing the body to stop feeling pain as an extension of him being "unfeeling", since on the Razor route, he pops up after the Player attempts to deliberately force himself to stop feeling the pain of his body, with the Cold confirming his lack of pain response after being murdered by Razor again. This ends up proving extremely useful in the Fury route.
  Voice of the Hero: And? Does it hurt?
  Voice of the Cold: No.
• Foil: The Voice of the Cold is an apathetic figure who longs for nothing except new experiences, counters the sweet Spectre who longs for something meaningful.
• Ham and Deadpan Duo: The deadpan to the Smitten's ham during the "Burned Grey" route. He also becomes the deadpan to the Opportunist's ham during the Princess and the Dragon route.
• Hidden Depths:
  • He can be surprisingly philosophical about the nature of existence at times. Some of it is just rambling, but at other times, it serves as Foreshadowing for the game's ending.
    Voice of the Hero: Wait. If she has a home to get back to, doesn't that mean that her leaving won't end the world?
    Voice of the Cold: It doesn't mean that at all. It could mean that wherever her home is, it's outside of the world.
    Voice of the Hero: Yeah, but it has to be somewhere, doesn't it? And if it's somewhere, then it's part of the world.
    Voice of the Cold: I suppose it's all a matter of perspective — where does the world end and something else begin? Does the destruction of one open a door to another, or is it the same world, reborn?
  • His Personality Powers of Emotion Suppression, Feel No Pain and The Power of Apathy have a deeper meaning if you look at it. He is the Player's defense mechanism against pain and emotional trauma much like the Voice of the Broken is, but unlike the Broken he steels himself through not caring and just doing instead of empathizing.
  • Despite being spawned from an act of murder, on the Princess and the Dragon route he notably doesn't "vote" to try to kill you or the Princess. Presumably, this is because, having already killed the Princess, killed himself, and both at the same time, it's no longer a novel experience for him and he's thus disinterested in it. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite cross over into actually trying to stop the Opportunist from doing it like the Hero.
• Immune to Fire: Because of his apathy and Emotion Suppression, he is interested in being burned to death by the Grey to experience what happens, and he never feels very hot or pained because of it.
• Implied Death Threat: On the Spectre's route, if the Player asks the Narrator what's the point of listening to him or doing anything, after the Narrator's explanation, the Cold states that he won't mind slaying the Princess again... but then adds that he intends to slay the Narrator as well for what he did to the Player in the previous loop, in a thinly-veiled threat.
  Voice of the Cold: But after that nasty trick you pulled on us, maybe she's not the only one around here in need of slaying.
• Insanity Immunity: Completely No-Sells the Fury's attempts at physical and emotional torture by virtue of how much he genuinely just doesn't care.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: As apathetic as the Cold is, and as little as he cares about the harm he inflicts, he does seem to care in his own way, encouraging the others to numb themselves to pain to help them in his own way, and, in the Spectre route, threatening the Narrator for trapping the Slayer in an endless void. Notably, in spite of his disregard towards any actions The Player might take, he abstains from voting in favor of slaying The Princess in the Dragon route knowing The Player is sharing a body with her and is genuinely glad you returned to your body in case you manage to leave with her, unlike the Opportunist who tries to play it off as always planning to give control back to you.
• Lack of Empathy: He is extremely detached, and doesn't care about any harm or suffering inflicted on the Princess, the Player, the other voices, or even himself.
• Living Is More than Surviving: Inverted. To him, mere existence is the only thing worth caring about. The only things he absolutely will not put up with are boredom and complacency; besides that, he just takes things as they come with a few snarky comments at most.
  The Spectre: All these shards of broken glass on the floor... are they also supposed to be you?
  Voice of the Hero: Hey! I'm not a shard of broken glass, I'm...
  The Spectre: It's okay. You can finish your thought. / Yeah? Go on. Finish the thought. What are you?
  Voice of the Hero: I'm... a voice? I'm me, is what I am.
  Voice of the Cold: Who cares what we are? We exist. That's all that matters.
  
  Voice of the Smitten: Are you even alive? What's the point of doing anything if you're not going to feel a single emotion?
  Voice of the Cold: I don't know. I just exist, and that's fine with me.
• Not So Above It All: The Voice of the Cold strongly values not caring about anything that happens unless it's particularly interesting, but even he will put a stop to your groveling to the Spectre out of sheer embarrassment.
• Not So Stoic: There will be times in the game when even the Voice of the Cold is flabbergasted by the bizarre situations the Player and Voices find themselves in, especially during the Moment of Clarity and The Razor routes. The Voice of the Cold also did not enjoy the Narrator trapping the Player in the Long Quiet as a "reward" and is coldly bitter towards the Narrator during the Spectre route.
• Odd Friendship: He and the Voice of the Skeptic are shockingly civil towards each other, possibly due to the latter being more objectively minded than most of the other voices.
• Power Limiter: An odd case, where the Voice of the Cold is specifically this to the Princess' Resurrective Immortality. During the Spectre and Grey routes, his complete confidence in the Princess being dead seemingly does keep her from reviving fully like in other routes, but doesn't stop her from returning as a spirit.
• The Power of Apathy: His Emotion Suppression ability, when evolved to its absolute extent. His response to the Adversary!Fury turning the Player into an infinite line that is longer than the entirety of the Earth is to flatly, and boredly, shut her down.
  Voice of the Cold: Do I have to keep answering?
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Is the Blue Oni to the Stubborn's Red Oni, if he appears during the Adversary branch of the Fury route. This happens again in the Fury route (specifically the Tower), when he provides the advantage you need to finally slay her.
• Seen It All: The Voice of the Cold sounds extremely bored, expressing no reaction whatsoever when the Princess shows up as a ghost. He will go along with almost anything the player chooses just to see what happens.
• Sense Freak: The Voice of the Cold wants little more than stimulation and new experiences. Whether they are pleasurable or painful is irrelevant; what matters is that they're new. On a meta level, this reflects that he's unlikely to show up on most players' first go-through, and therefore is a probable result of them poking around and trying out dangerous things to see what will happen.
  Voice of the Cold: I like this one [the Fury]. Let's see her do her worst. Let's see if she can make us actually feel something.
  Voice of the Hero: Uh...whatever she wants to make us feel, I think it's going to be bad.
  Voice of the Cold: But bad is so much more interesting than numb.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: In one variation of the Fury route he gives a cold but direct one to the Narrator when he tries to stop the Player and Fury from leaving.
  Voice of the Cold: You are nothing but a witness.
• Skewed Priorities: He's interested in the experience of burning or drowning to death because it's never happened to him before.
• The Spock: Averted. While the Cold will shut down panic, and dismiss any emotional reactions he finds unhelpful, this is not because he disdains emotions or panic. It is because he disdains anything he's already felt before, and he feels that panic and emotion will not help him reach his goals. The feelings that he seeks out are not logical or reasonable, and they are not always for the greater good, but rather to allow him a wider range of experiences.
• The Stoic: His voice is almost always deadpan, taking on a tone of mild interest at most. Even being burned alive or having his heart ripped out aren't enough to elicit any strong emotion. He isn't completely unemotional, though, with Moment of Clarity in particular showing him irritated with their situation.
• Stopped Caring: He embodies this, appearing as a response to the uselessness of the Princess' death and his own suicide.
• Straw Vulcan: He devotes himself to pure logic and reason, because he sees emotions as inherently unhelpful and unproductive and prefers to have a hardened heart and decide that whatever happens, happens. The other voices often find him unnerving or unpleasant as a result, but this attitude has its perks for the player. It's heavily implied that his Personality Power is why the Player keeps himself sane when dealing with the Moment of Clarity's torment. In fact, his endurance surpasses the Voice of the Stubborn's in the Adversary branch of the Fury because he's so apathetic to the Fury disintegrating the player. After a million years of torture, the Fury ends up throwing in the towel.
  Voice of the Cold: [in the Burned Grey route] Yes, having all those feelings isn't very productive, is it?
• Surrounded by Idiots: He takes this stance whenever another voice is being particularly emotional, arguing that you should ignore them and listen to him more.
• Tempting Fate: He does a spectacular job of underestimating both the Spectre and the Greys.
• Took a Level in Kindness: The Voice of the Cold in the Moment of Clarity route is in his own way actively encouraging the Player character to not lose himself and see things through. In the Fury route he is shockingly empathetic towards the defeated Fury, seeing aspects of himself in her.
  The Fury: You left me. And there's nothing I can do to bring you back.
  Voice of the Cold: Oh...she's been like me this whole time. She's just been hiding it.
• Undying Loyalty: Surprisingly, the Voice of the Cold is one of the most loyal Voices to the Player throughout the game. The Cold never actively harms or betrays the player, always stays by his side in every route the Cold appears in, and abstains from a vote to kill the Princess solely because it'd harm the Player. That said, he does little to actively save the Player when he's in trouble; he's willing to let the Princess put the Player through torturous experiences just for the sake of novelty and expects him to just tough it out.
• Victory by Endurance: In the Adversary version of the Fury, the Voice of the Cold outlasts the Fury's torture through sheer apathy.
• Wasn't That Fun?: While being burned alive, as the Voice of the Hero talks about how awful the experience was before their nerves finally lost feeling, the Cold replies that the ordeal didn't hurt, even having expressed interest at the idea.
  Voice of the Cold: See? That wasn't so bad.
  Voice of the Hero: It was so bad! But somehow, the nothing is so much worse.
  Voice of the Cold: You'll get used to it.

Spawned from "The Stranger" route, the Contrarian wants to do the opposite of anything the Narrator says, just to spite him. He may also spawn in Chapter III if you Take a Third Option or otherwise chose options that are contrary to expectations.

• Actually Pretty Funny: He'll be amused and proud if you do throw the blade out the window during the endgame-Stranger's cabin, finding himself to be wrong when he said that suggesting it again wouldn't be as funny. He'll also be one of the only Voices still on your side in the "And Everyone Hates You" ending variant, having found your condemning him to oblivion funny.
• Audience Surrogate: He's basically the embodiment of players who avoid doing what the game wants them to do and mess around just to see what happens. Unfortunately for the Contrarian, he realizes his willingness to futz with reality has consequences.
• Back for the Finale: If you started the game with the Stranger Route and got him as your first voice, he comes back during the endgame when you enter the Stranger's cabin once again. Noticeable since he's the only voice other than the Hero who can appear in that scene.
• Beware the Silly Ones: He's a Commander Contrarian through and through who makes it his mission to piss off pretty much everyone through his antics. That being said, The Pristine Cut shows that his love of defying powerful beings can be shockingly effective, mainly with Apotheosis and The Fury; the former has him come up with the idea of throwing the Pristine Blade… directly into the godlike Princess' eye, and the latter having him combine his defiance with the Stubborn's determination to land a killing blow on the Princess, after getting reduced to nothingness.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Interestingly, he doesn't seem to be formed from the Princesses' perception of the player, but the Narrator. Having defied any expectations placed upon him by walking away from the cabin during Chapter I causes Him to view the Player Character as an irresponsible gadfly who's only interested in amusing himself at the expense of others.
• Commander Contrarian: Embodies this archetype as his Personality Power, in a manner different from the Skeptic, who's a Seeker Archetype. His presence usually enables more absurd choices for the player to take. He just wants to piss off the Narrator by questioning and refusing everything the latter says.
• Determinator: To a lesser extent than the Stubborn, but he can be shockingly determined to get his way when everything seems against him, especially when both he and the Stubborn team up in the Fury route. With his help, the Player is able to power through being Stripped to the Bone and even erased entirely, on the grounds that it would be really neat.
  Voice of the Hero: But we need that! We can't do anything if we don't have muscle.
  Voice of the Contrarian: Okay, Mr. Anatomy, I hear you, but have you considered how neat it would be if we still kept walking towards her… without it?
• Foil: The Voice of the Contrarian wants to contradict the situation by choice, contrasts the Stranger who contradicts the situation by no choice of her own.
• The Gadfly: Consistently wants to ruin things for the Narrator because it's funny. This includes doing the opposite of what he's told or suggesting chaotic or destructive actions. That said, he's not malicious, just in over his head because he thinks his actions are without consequences.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Surprisingly (or maybe not), he's the only voice who's able to give up on his archetype. While other voices might change how they express their drive or direct it at other things, he's the only one with scenes where he's able to see that chaotically doing whatever springs into his mind is often harmful and work to become a more serious person.
  • The "Strange Beginnings" ending implies that, in spite of his flippantness, the Contrarian sees himself as "the worst part" of you and is surprised when the Stranger finds his willingness to go against the grain courageous.
• I Choose to Stay: In the Stranger version "And? What happens next?" the Voice of the Contrarian decides to stay with the Voice of the Hero in the Cabin, to either wait or track down the other Voices. He also states that they've done their job to help the Player on his Journey.
  Voice of the Contrarian: Our job here is done.
• Insane Troll Logic: His personality power manifests as this at its most extreme. In "The Fury", working together with the Stubborn, he can convince you that you can slay the Princess even when you are reduced to literal nothingness, and you can succeed.
• It Amused Me: The reason why he screws around at all with anyone and anything.
• My God, What Have I Done?: His reaction to causing five princesses to merge into The Stranger because he wanted to have fun at the Narrator's expanse.
• Nice Guy: He not only coaxes the Voice of the Hero through something akin to a panic attack when they enter the Stranger's cabin and see how wrong it is, but as pointed out below, when he sees the result of the Stranger's uncomfortable merger he immediately suggests that the three of you try to help her. Should the Stranger be the first Princess you visit, he's there for you both at the end, just as much a figure of gentle support as the Voice of the Hero. He's even unambiguous in how he feels about the Narrator being gone: he's sad about it, if only because he considered him to be a good nemesis. He's also the only Voice who doesn't turn against you in the "A new and unending dawn, and everyone hates you" ending, mainly because he found the concept of you damning him to oblivion Actually Pretty Funny.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Once the five alternate versions of the princess got fused in "The Stranger" route, he completely drops his contrarian attitude.
  Voice of the Contrarian: We should help her. I think… we did this.
  Voice of the Hero: How surprisingly sincere.
  Voice of the Contrarian: I didn't actually think our actions had consequences.
• Plucky Comic Relief: He loves pissing off the Narrator and the Princess with amusing antics. When he's not this trope, you know things have gotten real.
• Reality Warping Is Not a Toy: Learns this the hard way in The Stranger, when his attempts to abuse your ability to influence reality ends up terrifying him with the Surreal Horror of a collapsing reality.
• Reverse Grip: Insists that you hold the Pristine Blade this way, because it looks cooler. If you choose to do so, your mouse icon will change to reflect this.
• Running Gag: Suggesting that you throw the Pristine Blade out the window, to the point of suggesting that you throw the Razor out the window depending on your choices. During the Apotheosis route, he weaponizes this by throwing the blade directly into the Apotheosis' eye, which shockingly works extremely well.
• Running Gagged: If "The Stranger" was the first route completed, then during the endgame, he won't suggest throwing the blade out the window again because the Narrator isn't present to annoy and it wouldn't be as funny a second/third time. You can still go through with it. He'll be thoroughly proud of you if you do.
• Rule of Cool: A hidden Personality Power that the Voice of the Contrarian has for the Player. As much as he enjoys being Commander Contrarian to piss off the Narrator, the other half of it is because for him, it would be cool for the Player to do or achieve. This plays out in both minor and useless things like telling the player to hold the Pristine Blade in a Reverse Grip, to extremely useful things like mustering the courage to throw the Pristine Blade into Apotheosis' eye or slay the Fury after she destroys your physical body.
• Sad Clown: He's the wacky, inconvenient jokester of the group...who also describes himself as "the worst part" of the Long Quiet.
• Sanity Slippage: Becomes noticeably more distressed once the world starts breaking down in "The Stranger" route.
• Sarcasm Failure: During "The Stranger" route, he drops his usual snark, even as the Voice of the Hero outright asks him to say something funny to help deal with the horror unfolding before them.
• Sincerity Mode: Genuinely regrets doing what he did to the stranger, which the Hero lampshades.
• So Proud of You: Will be proud if you if you throw the pristine blade out the window on you're way to the Stranger version of the Heart.
• Those Two Guys: Can become this with the Voice of the Stubborn, if he is present during the Adversary branch of the Fury route.
• Took a Level in Badass: In the Fury route it turns out that his Commander Contrarian power can brute force through being turned into atomic particles, muscle and bones.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In the Fury route, the Voice of the Contrarian is notably ruder and more openly malicious than in the other routes, antagonizing and insulting the Voice of the Stubborn for the heck of it, joking about how it was funny to make the Adversary uncomfortable, and even poking fun at the Voice of the Hero's comment that he saw trying to reason with the Adversary as an attempt to break the cycle of violence. When the Player comes into the cabin and points out that the door is blocked by the mirror (provided that the Narrator didn't comment on the mirror on the previous loop), the Contrarian straight-up states in an unorthodox way that he doesn't like or respect anyone present.
  "Oh, are we playing a game where we lie to people about things? That sounds fun! I respect and admire all of you, and I'm so happy to be here."
• Troll: His main goal is to annoy the Narrator and he enables the player to make idiotic choices just to mess with Him. He's also usually spawned during other routes by the player taking absurd options such as Playing Possum before the Beast, fighting the Adversary unarmed and getting up each time, forcefully obeying the Tower's command for you to either slit your throat or plunge the blade into your heart, or choosing to commit a Spiteful Suicide when facing the Razor.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: He's on the receiving end of this from the Stranger version of the Shifting Mound's heart, though indirectly.
  The Princess: It took courage for you to make your way down here, away from the paths others would have had you walk. We find that courage beautiful.
  Voice of the Contrarian: But that's... the worst part of us. That's me she's talking about.
  Voice of the Hero: I think that's the point. There is no worst part of us.

Spawned from "The Beast", the Hunted is terrified of the Princess the same way that prey fears its predator. He may also spawn in Chapter III if you chose options to fight and lose to the Princess. Replaces the Voice of the Obsessed from the 2022 Demo.

• Animalistic Abilities: Due to being spawned when the Princess takes the form of the Beast, his presence seems to grant the PC traits usually found in prey animals such as heightened senses and quick reflexes.
• Animalistic Abomination: when he gives into his instincts, he causes the Player to become this.
• Bash Brothers: Is one with the Voice of the Stubborn if they choose to lure the Eye of the Needle into a fight outside, if you get them whilst attempting to fight the Razor, and against the Den if you die fighting the Beast. With the Hunted's finesse and survival instinct and the Stubborn's brute strength and determination, they manage to use your Fragile Speedster ability to dodge around and inflict a Death of a Thousand Cuts.
• Batman Gambit: In "The Eye of the Needle", he advises you to bait the Princess into following you out into the woods so you'll have more room to fight her, accurately predicting her reactions based on her Blood Knight tendencies.
• The Berserker: If convinced to fully give into his instincts to face the Den. The Voice of the Hunted becomes a berserk animal who loses all reason other than the desire to eat the Princess.
• Blunt "Yes": Gives one to the Narrator after he asks if the Den getting trapped in the tunnel and giving a terrified look at the viewer has changed her at all.
  Yes. She's a victim of her own nature. Just like we are.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": He refers to the Pristine Blade as the "steel claw", to enforce his more animalistic viewpoint.
• Cannibalism Superpower: In "The Den", he can be convinced to let his instincts take over and relinquishing his role of prey to become a predator, making him able to eat away at the Princess in order to heal your wounds and become stronger. This comes at the cost of the Player becoming an Animalistic Abomination, who loses all sense of himself save for his Horror Hunger.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The Player Character getting hunted down and horrifically mauled to death by the Princess during Chapter I results in her viewing him as meek prey.
• Cornered Rattlesnake: He'll choose to run for the most part, but if forced to, he proves himself to be a force to be reckoned with.
• Cowardly Lion: He might be apprehensive and unwilling to fight, but if there's no other choice, he'll give it his all. If you spawn him during the Eye of the Needle encounter, he'll suggest luring her into an advantageous position right off the bat. And if you do, he'll guide you in dodging and timing your strikes to wear the behemoth down. With help from the Stubborn's determination, you will end the encounter victorious.
• Drunk with Power: Upon "succumbing to his instincts" in the Den route, he quickly embraces the power boost the Cannibalism Superpower is providing him, gleefully boasting that he has become a predator instead of prey as he indulges in Horror Hunger.
• Feral Villain: An interesting example where he doesn't become feral until he becomes a "villain". While normally the Hunted is unrefined but clearly intelligent, in the Den Route he can "succumb to his instincts". Doing so causes him to quickly reduce to a feral beast tearing apart the Den with his bare hands and teeth, with him almost outright losing the capacity for speech towards when the Shifting Mound stops the fight.
• Foil: The Voice of the Hunted is a timid prey animal compared to the bold and predatory Beast.
• Fragile Speedster: The Personality Power he bestows when he's present. As an extension of your survival instincts, his enhances your agility to dodge and strike at opportune moments. That said, you're still facing off against the Princess, who can easily turn you into a paste if she gets a good hit in. In the Eye Of The Needle, with The Voice Of The Stubborn's help, he manages to upgrade to a full-on Lightning Bruiser.
• Horror Hunger: Gains this this if convinced by the Voice of the Hero to give in to his instincts, gleefully ranting about how he's now the predator rather than prey while devouring the Den.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: If you get buried alive in the Den's tunnel, he becomes even quieter than usual and (unsuccessfully) suggests you let yourself die faster before you starve. When the Hero calls him out on how he doesn't sound like himself, the Hunted solemnly says survival isn't possible anymore and all that's left is suffering — and indeed, thanks to your Voices' defeatism and the Narrator's spite, you get a very long and painful death.
  Voice of the Hunted: I can smell the end all around us. Sweet, and empty. This is where we die. I'm going to lie down now.
• The Quiet One: His voice is notably lower than the other Voices, and he doesn't talk as much.
• Reluctant Warrior: Despite being one of the most savage voices, he doesn't like violence. While some of this is admittedly self-preservation, he does show some genuine moral distaste. He'll express disapproval if you slay the Princess when she's incapacitated or otherwise not a threat, as well as if you're actively cruel to her. In the Beast route, if you go for a mutual kill when she swallows you, he angrily comments that this is just naked spite.
  • Which makes his feral state if convinced to give in to his instincts all the more tragic, as he becomes so wild and violently crazed that even the Stubborn is genuinely put off by the depravity.
• Smarter Than You Look: He's an animalistic voice who prefers to rely on instinct over reasoning, but he's far from stupid. He's able to come up with a very effective plan to beat the Eye of the Needle, deduce that the Mirror isn't real (or least, not a physical object), and give some suprisingly philosophical lines at various points.
• Super-Senses: The only Voice that realizes that the Narrator is telling the truth and that the mirror isn't real based on the fact that he can feel the wind coming from the other side. These are another Personality Power he grants the Player.
• Sympathy for the Devil: If you choose to lure the Den into the entrance tunnel, he'll become sympathetic when she gets stuck, feeling bad for her and wanting to help.
  The Narrator: How ridiculous. She was about to kill you, do you really think getting stuck in a tunnel for less than a minute has fundamentally changed her?
  Voice of the Hunted: Yes. She's a victim of her own nature. Just like we are.
• Terse Talker: By his own admission he doesn't value words very much, and generally keeps to brief, short sentences when talking.
• Took a Level in Badass: The Den route can see him go from acting like a frightened prey animal to thinking more like a formidable predator. This is not necessarily a good thing.

• Arc Villain: He tries to murder and usurp both the Princess and you during the Princess and the Dragon chapter, although this instead eventually puts things back in their proper places in the end.
• Bad Liar: He's very bad at pretending to be a loyal ally, although to be fair it's less due to a lack of skill and more due to the fact he'll regularly change allegiance mid-conversation and try to pretend he's been on his current side the whole time.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: To absurdly comical levels. The Opportunist will switch sides between The Princess, The Narrator and the other Voices during a single sentence if he believes supporting one side might be more advantageous to him. And while he will mostly act like a Professional Butt-Kisser towards The Player, even he isn't safe from being throw aside in favor of himself such as in "The Wraith" where he starts trying to flirt with her in a attempt to get on her good graces right as she's breaking your legs, or in "The Princess and the Dragon" where he outright tries to murder The Player while he's stuck inside her in order to get permanent control over his body.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: The Player Character betraying the Princess during Chapter I results in her viewing him as a duplicitous backstabber.
• Colour-Coded for Your Convenience: During The Princess and the Dragon route his dialogue is indicated by being a dark orange hue.
• Didn't Think This Through: If you let the Witch follow you up the stairs, and thus you get your back broken by her dragging the both of you down, the Voice of the Opportunist laments not walking up the stairs behind her, because he planned to use the Pristine Blade on her when they made it to the cabin. The Voice of the Hero points out that, since she was planning to betray you first, she would have also gotten to the blade first. Indeed, if you follow the Witch up the stairs, you don't even get the chance to use the blade, because the Witch locks the door in front of you.
• Dirty Coward: In "The Princess and the Dragon", he takes pleasure in holding the Princess' life in his hands provided that he believes that she is defenseless, but he is noticeably intimidated by the harsh Princess' threats and admits he has to pretend she's bluffing to work the nerve to stab her.
• Epic Fail: Although he certainly proves just how much of a menace he is in the Princess and the Dragon route with him being fully willing to turn on against you, his actual attempt to slay you and the Princess leaves much to be desired, as all he achieves is landing a non-lethal stab in the shoulder and bring you back into your body as a result. And to add insult to injury, if you're stuck with the 'harsh' princess, then after the stab, she'll immediately turn the tables against him by punching him across the room. More than that, the Princess has the clear x-shaped scar over where her heart is in that route, meaning that the Opportunist somehow landed a non-lethal stab when he clearly should've seen where exactly he should stab.
• Everyone Has Standards: The Voice of the Opportunist is genuinely disgusted with the Voice of the Smitten over his actions during the Happily Ever After route. When the Smitten is out of the way he even says they don't have to waste our time slaying the Princess, and if you do so anyway he sounds uncharacteristically sober and sad as he says "They always say it's Lonely at the Top. I didn't think they actually meant it."
• The Farmer and the Viper: Help the Witch without giving her the blade and the Opportunist will make you stab her in the back, or she will betray you. The achievement you get for these outcomes are called "The Scorpion" and "The Frog" respectively, in reference to the fable The Scorpion and the Frog which is a variation on this trope, indicating that it was in your natures to betray each other.
• Faux Affably Evil: He's constantly polite to the point of obsequiousness, complimenting and fawning over whoever he thinks best soothes his interests. But it doesn't cover his malicious selfishness, and he'll keep up the smarmy charm even as he backstabs his former allies.
• Foil: While both he and the Witch are similarly conniving backstabbers, there's one area in which they're polar opposites; the Opportunist is driven solely by his own self-interest, whereas the Witch will gleefully ignore hers in the name of hurting you.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: The other Voices, including the Hero, find his brown-nosing and backstabbing distasteful, and mostly resort to Teeth-Clenched Teamwork since it's not like they can be rid of him. The only Voice who is willing to accept him is the Smitten, and even then it's only because the Smitten is willing to accept anyone who sides with the Princess. According to Jonathan Sims, the Voice of the Opportunist genuinely thinks the other Voices view him as a friend when they can't stand him, period.
• Harmless Villain: He's one of the most ruthless and amoral voices, but he's so obviously malicious that he's unlikely to convince you to act on any of his suggestions. Of course, if you do, or if he no longer has to care about what you have to say, the Long Quiet can quickly become very nasty.
• Ham and Deadpan Duo: The Ham to the Cold's deadpan during the Princess and the Dragon route.
• Has a Type: Some of his admiration for the Wraith makes it sound like he has a thing for strong women or women who are willing to be just as opportunistic as he is.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door:
  • From the Voice of the Smitten's perspective, as in the romancing-the-Thorn route he agrees with the Narrator about killing the Princess, then agrees with his fellow voices about freeing her, then suggests to slay her while pointing out how easy to backstab she is, and as the Thorn and the Player leave the cabin together he says he's been on their side the whole time. The Smitten forgives him with a bit of pompous drama.
  • He also goes through this during The Princess and the Dragon, especially with the gentle version of the Princess. Even if you make him aware you're in her body, he'll stab her anyway while talking about getting two birds with one stone, and when you end up back in your own body he'll claim that getting you back was his real plan all along. If you then try to cut the Princess' arm off yourself, you leap back into her body and the Opportunist immediately stabs you both again. The result of this is a blending of perspectives across both people and both bodies in which you and the Princess realize the pointlessness of trying to harm each other, and the Opportunist pitches in a cheerful "To new beginnings!"
• Hidden Depths:
  • He's apparently really good at board games. If brought along for Happily Ever After, once you get to the board game portion he's able to net the Player a win against the Princess.
  • Likewise for all the hell he puts you through in Princess and the Dragon, if you actually end up leaving with the Princess, Opportunist insists that the narrator explain if it feels nice to hold the Princess' hand. He then immediately "clarifies" that you can tell a lot about a person by their handshake except you continue to hold her hand all the way to the top of the stairs.
• I Fight for the Strongest Side!: The reason why he wants to side with the Wraith. Why would he side with the Narrator when he's powerless against her? In his words, the Wraith has "gumption" and is "going places", so it would be best for their survival if the player works for her. She's going to need someone to help her manage what comes after destroying the world, right? He's so set in this that, unlike in the Witch and Thorn routes, he doesn't so much as entertain the idea of resisting her. Even when the Voice of the Paranoid saves up enough willpower to fling everyone into the void, the Voice of the Opportunist just protests that he doesn't think he'll be able to smooth this over.
• Implausible Deniability: As the resident Starscream who constantly flip flops sides, he's prone to doing this.
• I Meant to Do That: In The Princess and the Dragon, his failed attempt to kill both you and the Princess ends up returning you back to your body. The moment he realizes that you're back, he immediately claims that bringing you back was what he always intended all along.
• I Told You So: He's apprehensive about trusting the Witch. When she does invariably stab you in the back, he makes sure to point out that he was ignored.
• It's All About Me: He's very openly only looking out for his own skin, and only really values you and the other voices insofar as your dying would kill him.
• It Has Been an Honor: Sincerely states this at the end of the Moment of Clarity route when in front of the mirror.
• Jerkass Has a Point: While there's certainly no shortage of slights you could make against the Opportunist's character, he's not wrong that the Witch can't be trusted, nor that many of the Vessels are indeed dangerous and powerful beings its probably worth staying on the good side of.
• Laughably Evil: He's a deceitful, amoral backstabber who'll turn on any of his allies the first chance he gets, but he's so shamelessly blatant about it that it's hard not to laugh.
  "I'd betray us if I were her. Look at me right now, advocating betrayal!''
• Major Injury Underreaction: Upon ending up in a body with a broken spine, he whines that it sucks and he doesn't like having a broken back.
• Mirror Character: The Voice of the Opportunist and The Witch's are both looking for opportunities to betray.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: In The Princess and the Dragon, his attempt to kill both you and the Princess in order to take full control of your body actually ends up being one of the ways to "peacefully" resolve the route, as it starts a chain of events that ends with you and the Princess back in your original bodies and both realizing how pointless their cycle of violence is.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: While normally his scheming and backstabbing is pretty impotent due to him not really being able to force the issue, in "The Princess and the Dragon", he can get control of the Player's body and he promptly tries to kill not just the Princess but the Long Quiet so he can become the dominant mind in the system.
• Odd Friendship: On the Thorn route, he gets along surprisingly well with the Voice of the Smitten, with the two capable of holding a decent conversation and the Opportunist being willing to hear out the Smitten's point of view. The Smitten, in turn, is remarkably patient with the Voice of the Opportunist's antics, and is very quick to forgive him and his two-faced nature whenever the Opportunist makes siding with the Princess his final decision.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: During the Wraith route, he won't even bother hiding his distrust and contempt towards the Narrator, openly stating that submitting to the Princess is the only option. In the Moment of Clarity route, he completely drops his opportunistic behavior and suggests surrender to end the Moment of Clarity's torment. And in Happily Ever After, he'll eventually stop trying to find an angle on everything and bluntly admit that everything's awful and there's nothing of use to gain here.
• Opinion Flip-Flop: On the Wraith route he's dead set on pleasing her, but in any other case he will change his opinion depending on what you choose on a dime. For example, when you retrieve the Pristine Blade from the Thorn, he'll insist on slaying her, but if you choose to cut her free, he'll say that he wanted to do that first. The Hero is not impressed. When he threatens a "harsh" Princess in The Princess and the Dragon, she'll threaten him right back and say she can take him. Characteristically he waffles, but says he's overcommitted by now so he can't back down and is just going to say she's bluffing.
• Opportunistic Bastard: The Voice of the Opportunist's Personality Power. He refuses to have an opinion unless he's sure he agrees with the right side. If he turns out to be wrong, he'll backpedal and say he always agreed with the other. If he does turn out to be right, he'll make sure everyone knows.
  Voice of the Hero: You... you do see [the mirror], right? I don't know how to read you.
  Voice of the Opportunist: I see all sorts of things.
  Voice of the Hero: But do you see the mirror? It's a simple yes or no question.
  Voice of the Opportunist: Uh... I... (turns to the Narrator) Help me out here, will you?
• Professional Butt-Kisser: His general mode of speech at all times. It even reaches the point that he compliments the Wraith extensively to try to get her to accept the player. It doesn't work but she finds it funny.*
• The Scorpion and the Frog: Help the Witch without giving her the blade and you either stab her in the back or she will betray you. The achievement you get for these outcomes are called "The Scorpion" and "The Frog" respectively, in reference to the fable The Scorpion and the Frog, indicating that within your natures to betray each other.
• Slasher Smile: The Voice of the Opportunist gives the Player's body one when he is in control in the Princess and the Dragon route, which explains a lot about the Princess' reactions to the Player's when he's acting on the Opportunist's instructions.
• Slimeball: He's a manipulative, selfish, amoral voice who'll happily suck up to whoever's most powerful and immediately stab them in the back once he finds a better option. He's very bad at hiding it though, so most of the other Voices usually just treat him as a minor annoyance.
• Smug Snake:
  • He thinks of himself as a cunning Manipulative Bastard who's skillfully playing the Long Quiet, the Narrator, the Princess and the others Voices for his own gain. He might even have managed it if he was just able to hide it for five minutes.
    Voice of the Hero: That one's not the smooth talker he thinks he is.
  • In "The Princess and the Dragon", the Opportunist can gain control of the Player's body and you can see how he acts; he has a cocky animation where he dangles the Pristine Blade in front of the Princess, and another animation where he gives a Slasher Smile, which paints him as particularly smug and full of himself.
• The Starscream: The Voice of the Opportunist will take every opportunity to nudge you into doing what he wants, but if you refuse, he relents. However, in the Princess and the Dragon route, where you're separated from your body, leaving the Voices alone to move it, the Voice of the Opportunist tries to corral the other Voices into making him in charge. If the Princess tells them that the Player is alive as a Voice in her head, the Voice of the Opportunist revels in the opportunity to kill both you and the Princess and permanently become the dominant personality.
• Token Evil Teammate: While many of the voices have moments where they come off as unhelpful or destructive, the Opportunist is easily the most unrelentingly malicious, spending almost all his voice lines openly advocating for cruel and treacherous acts with no remorse. When you say "if you're like someone I know, you'll stab me to death now" to the Witch, he'll gleefully admit that he's that someone, and you're right! He's also one of two voices (other than The Smitten) who can become an outright Arc Villain in a Route, but unlike the Smitten, he didn't need to undergo Sanity Slippage to play the role; he just needed an opportunity.
• Victory Is Boring: In Happily Ever After, he gets everything he's schemed for all game - he's powerful, he's in a mansion, he's got all the wealth and luxury he could ever want and a shadowy servant who will give him anything he asks for. And after a short while he hates it, stuck with nothing left to strive for and the numbness of eternal instant gratification stripping any joy away from what he does have. He eventually gives up the whole backstabbing thing in a desperate attempt to just escape.

• Being Watched: Faint silhouettes with staring eyes manifest in the Nightmare cabin, enforcing the feeling the Paranoid describes.
• Brutal Honesty: He's extremely blunt to people he mistrusts, which is everyone, but especially the Narrator. He'll frequently doubt and criticise the Narrator directly to his face without an ounce of subtlety.
• BFS: In the Pristine Cut's version of the Apotheosis route, if present he will transform the Pristine Blade into the Pristine Sword, which proves so powerful that it shatters the Apotheosis' force-shield, which earns the Apotheosis' respect.
• Cluster F-Bomb: He sometimes mutters "shit, shit, shit" to himself when he's panicking.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Having the Player Character resolve to lock the Princess in the basement results in her viewing him as a paranoid coward that breaks down at the very sight of her.
• Cloudcuckoolander: The combination of the Paranoid's neuroticism and his strange beliefs about the nature of reality can make him come across as a bit odd. The other voices clearly see him this way too. In the Apotheosis, the Hero worries for the Paranoid's sanity, while in the Cage, the Skeptic clearly thinks he's nuts.
• Cowardly Lion: Another Personality Power he grants, despite being deeply afraid of the Nightmare or other horrifying variants of the Princess. He'll enable the Player to face his fears long enough to take action. In the updated Apotheosis route he, through sheer bravery, helps the Player create a Pristine sword to face the Apotheosis.
• Crazy Sane: Even though paranoia is literally in his name, given how insane the world he's in it, it often works out to his benefit. Some standout examples being surviving the presence of the Nightmare or managing to cut free from the chains in the Cage simply by rejecting the notion of it being impossible.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: His frequent ranting about how the world isn't real and is shaped by the player's own thoughts makes him come off as more than a little unstable. However, it turns out that he's absolutely correct.
• Cuckoosnarker: Despite behaving a little strangely at times, the Paranoid is more than capable of trading insults with the Narrator and other Voices.
• Deadpan Snarker: He will remember when he's being doubted and make appropriate jabs when the others are confronted with the things he has to deal with.
• Easy to Scare: The Paranoid is constantly on edge and so tends to jump at the slightest provocation. During the Moment of Clarity he's startled by the Narrator's voice, and the Opportunist even describes him as being "the jumpy one".
• Enemy Mine: In the Cage, he forms an "alliance of convenience" with the Skeptic to stop the Player from throwing away the blade.
• Fear-Induced Idiocy: During the Arms Race/No Way Out routes, he'll panic when faced with the Razor and get the player killed. Afterwards he admits that giving in to his fear probably wasn't the most helpful thing he could have done.
• Fear Is the Appropriate Response: The Paranoid's default response to danger is to run away from it. If you instead choose to approach the situation, he'll call you out for what he sees as willingly walking to your death.
• Foil: The Voice of the Paranoid is a deeply cowardly figure who contrasts the terrifying Nightmare.
• Heroic Willpower: Somehow prevents the Player Character's body from shutting down against the Nightmare by merely willing it to keep functioning. During the Apotheosis route, he's also the Voice that spawns specifically to counter the Voice of the Broken's enabling the Apotheosis' mind control.
• Hyper-Awareness: It's suggested that this might be his true Personality Power, as his paranoia enables him to be the most aware of your voices.
• Laughing Mad: He will occasionally burst into laughing fits during intense situations, like in the Apotheosis when he convinces himself that nothing is real, or in the Cage if he starts believing in the Princess' philosophy.
• Lovable Coward: Although he's constantly afraid, the Paranoid is still observant, insightful, witty and determined. The fact that he saves your life multiple times cements him as an asset to you, and that he does so while fighting through his own terror makes him all the more endearing.
• Mortality Phobia: Zigzagged. On one hand, the Paranoid is clearly traumatised from being killed by the Nightmare, and when you go to encounter her for a second time he whimpers that he doesn't want to die again. However, when you're stuck in the basement with no way out, the Paranoid is quick to suggest killing yourself as a way of escape. This suggests that he's afraid of dying to the Princess specifically rather than fearing death itself.
• Motivated by Fear: The Paranoid is so afraid of the Princess that he'll do anything to prevent you from dying to her, even up to warping reality itself.
• Nervous Tics: He has a tendency to repeat phrases over and over whenever he's anxious, such as "mind over matter, mind over matter" in the Razor and "this is fine, this is fine" in the Wraith. As of the Pristine Cut, he seems to have also developed the habit of bursting into deranged laughter when he's highly stressed.
• Nervous Wreck: The combination of the Paranoid's neurotic nature and the threats he has to face turn him into a jittery bundle of nerves.
• Performance Anxiety: Several times he gets close to Reality Warping, but lets his own self-doubt get in the way. Even during the middle of fighting the Apotheosis, he suddenly loses confidence in himself.
• Precision F-Strike: In the Nightmare route, the Voice of the Hero asks him if he thinks they should trust the Narrator. His response, after having to take a about a minute to teach the Voice of the Hero to take over the Survival Mantra for him?
  Voice of the Paranoid: Finally, I can talk. Now, what were you asking me?
  The Narrator: They were asking you for your blessing to trust me.
  Voice of the Paranoid: Oh, that's right! Yeah, fuck this guy. Don't trust him.
• Properly Paranoid: The Voice of the Paranoid's Personality Power, for as much as the Narrator tries to brush him off as Improperly Paranoid, he has very good reasons to be wary of the Princess. He's also suspicious of the Narrator and will become aggressive when the Narrator lets slip that he knows more than he's telling.
• Power Born of Madness: In the Apotheosis, he realizes the subjective nature of the Construct which, combined with his dubious grasp on reality, leads to him gleefully turning his delusions into outright Reality Warping. He even quotes the title, saying that he "needed to never be okay" to be able to stand against a goddess.
• Quaking with Fear: His voice becomes noticeably shaky when he's afraid, especially in the Nightmare and Wraith routes.
• Reality Warper: The Paranoid is able to use his thoughts to change reality on multiple occasions. While this is more due to the nature of the Construct than a power inherent to the Paranoid himself, he's the only voice to fully grasp this concept and to intentionally use it to his advantage.
• Sanity Slippage: He loses his grip on reality somewhat in both the Cage and the Apotheosis. Both times he starts ranting about the true nature of the world while randomly breaking into laughing fits.
  Voice of the Paranoid: Hahahaaaahaaha... You still don't get it, do you? We can be whatever we want to be! Nothing is real! It all might as well just be a dream!
  Voice of the Hero: Are... you okay?
  Voice of the Paranoid: Of course I'm not okay! I've never been okay! But maybe I needed to never be okay for us to make this happen!
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: In any threatening situation, the Paranoid's advice is usually to get as far away from it as possible. You spawn him this way too, as most of his routes can only be entered if you run away from something or otherwise drop your responsibilities out of fear.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: He's one of the most likely voices to swear, especially when he's stressed, and is notably the only character other than the Cheated to ever say the word "fuck".
• Survival Mantra: "Heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves." He does this to stop the player from literally dying of fright. You can still hear him in the background while the dialogue continues.

• Adaptational Dumbass: Slightly. In the original game, he realizes that the Prisoner is decapitating herself to escape and suggests taking her head with you, playing into her plan. In the Pristine Cut, he doesn’t say this out loud (if he even realizes this at all), leaving the realization of what's going on or not up to the Player - it makes it easier to get The Cage route, but doing so will make him more irrational.
• Agent Scully: He's this, with the other voices being the Agent Mulder, since he refuses to believe that the Construct works on Clap Your Hands If You Believe, despite the Princess changing every cycle.
• Apologetic Attacker: In the Prisoner route, if you refuse to give up your "reward" of the Construct, he will apologize before stopping your heart and killing you, which will lead you to either the Drowned Grey with the Voice of the Cold (if you slew the Prisoner), or the Cage with the (ticked-off) Voice of the Cheated (if you didn't take her head with you).
• Arbitrary Skepticism: In both the Den and the Cage he refuses to accept that the Construct works on Clap Your Hands If You Believe, despite the very blatant supernatural phenomena and Reality Warping that's occuring around him at all times and, indeed, the fact that you're able to alter reality by believing it really hard.
• Authority Sounds Deep: He seems to have a deeper voice than all of the other Voices combined, almost sounding like Batman.
• But Thou Must!: The Skeptic will flat out refuse to face the Princess unarmed. If the player attempts to just have the Hero walk past the blade, he will take direct control over the Hero in the moment he walks past it and make him swipe it in a quick motion. If the player protests, the Skeptic insists he isn't planning on using it, but he believes it is safer to always have a weapon to defend yourself with, just in case things end up going south.
  • Defied in the Cage if, in the previous chapter, you refused to kill yourself or gave the blade to the Skeptic so he could do it. This will pair you up with either the Cheated or the Broken, who will allow you to throw away the blade for the first time in this particular Princess' route. Otherwise, you get the Paranoid, who teams up with the Skeptic to force you to hold onto the blade.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Having the Player Character bring the blade but converse with the Princess before deciding to free her during Chapter I results in the Princess viewing him as one willing to question what they're told.
• The Comically Serious: He has a gruff voice and a serious demeanor when it comes to finding the truth, which makes his funny lines like saying "wink" out loud and then completely denying it after getting questioned or calling the Princess "the missus" during "The Cage" even more amusing.
• Commander Contrarian: In a manner different from the Contrarian, who's The Gadfly. He recognizes that the Narrator isn't being entirely honest, and is quick to question his directions and motivations. To gather more information, the Skeptic is generally against complying with the Narrator.
• Complexity Addiction: From the opposite side to most - he refuses to accept anything at face value and instead sees everything as signs of some elaborate malicious scheme. And to be fair, when he's right, he's very helpful to have around. But when he's wrong, he can become extremely detrimental.
• The Cynic: His skepticism stems from his pessimism. He (justifiably) assumes the worst of the Narrator and doubts that the Princess will end the world or that slaying her will save it if a "world" exists at all (which serves as Foreshadowing for the game's ending). That said, he doesn't trust the Princess either; he notes that while he does find her a bit more believable and certainly a good deal more sympathetic than the Narrator in this whole mess, he isn't willing to accept what she says unquestionably and cautions the player to stay on their guard around her.
  Voice of the Skeptic: For all we know, "the world" you're talking about isn't even real.
  The Narrator: Of course it's real! Where do you think you are, somewhere else?
  Voice of the Skeptic: Maybe we are.
  
  [If you walk away instead of going to the cabin in the Prisoner and the world fades...]
  Voice of the Skeptic: Did we do this? Is this the end of the world? Was there ever a world to end?
• Deadpan Snarker: Very deadpan, particularly when the Narrator is being obvious about his deception or being a Hypocrite.
• Enemy Mine: Though he clearly thinks the Paranoid is crazy, he briefly teams up with him in the Cage in order to prevent the player from throwing the blade away.
• Has a Type: His "it's time to check in with the missus" line in the Cage surprisingly suggests that he's attracted to the Prisoner/Cage.
• Hardboiled Detective: Gives off this vibe, due to his cynical and practical personality and his drive to try to solve everything. The Voice of the Hero even calls him gruff.
• Hypocrite: In the Happily Ever After route, if you ask about how no one is going to talk about the mirror, he states that he's just been preoccupied with brooding over "the fact that [you] can rip [your] own heart out without deciding that's what [you're] gonna do" (in reference to the Smitten's actions in the Damsel route). A bitter irony, considering that the Skeptic himself is the one who can stop your heart without you deciding to do it if you refuse to reject the Narrator's reward in the Prisoner route.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: Since you can't see him doing so, he says "wink" when he suggests following the Narrator's directions.
  The Narrator: Did you just say "wink" out loud?
  Voice of the Skeptic: No, I didn't. Wink.
• Secret Message Wink: See Saying Sound Effects Out Loud for details.
• Seeker Archetype: The Voice of the Skeptic's Personality Power, he knows the Narrator has more information than he's sharing, so he tries to use context clues and the Narrator's reactions to uncover whatever secrets are being kept from you. Highlighted more in the revised version of the Happily Ever After path where he is present, where he becomes determined to snuff out the lights and expose the truth.
• The Smart Guy: Another Personality Power he grants the Player is the options for for more intelligent or logical dialogue options.
• Spotting the Thread: In the Happily Ever After variant where he replaces the Voice of the Smitten, he immediately catches on that being in the cabin without the path and without the Voice of the Smitten is a really bad sign.
• Stopped Caring: In "The Moment of Clarity", where all the Voices remember every route. Knowing what he does now, he sees no point in doing anything because regardless of your decision, it just goes on and on.
• Straw Vulcan: At his worst. He's ultimately willing to sacrifice himself and others as many times as it takes to learn the truth, and dismisses any other plans as overly sentimental and irrational.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: He sees himself as the protagonist of some kind of Fair Play Mystery where progressing is just a matter of putting the clues together. He's actually in a New Weird psychological horror where the world changes on belief, and as he'll quite often end up reasoning his way to active unhelpfulness. Perhaps most notable in The Cage, where following his conviction there must be some complex plan you can make to outsmart and escape the Princess will lead to your death. You need to give up on the idea that the Princess can be "solved" to survive her, and he'll admit at the end that he might have been wrong.

• Ambiguous Situation: It's unclear if he's dead or just gone once all the torches go out in the HEA route.
• Always Save the Girl: Always on the Princess' side, no matter which version of her you're engaged with.
  The Narrator: Whatever you do, just be sure to ignore him, specifically. It sounds like he's the sort who'd sacrifice the whole world for a peck on the cheek.
• Arch-Enemy: While none of the Voices can be said to like the Narrator, the Smitten hates him with a passion, seeing him as a malicious and sadistic villain and working towards his defeat constantly. The Narrator reciprocates, seeing the Smitten's devotion to the Princess as both dangerous and abhorrent, and having him as one of the only voices he won't even try to find common ground with. That said, the Smitten does appreciate the Narrator's ability to spice up love scenes with his narration... and the Narrator will begrudgingly take the complement.
  Voice of the Smitten: But he is a villain. He made our beloved brutally take our life last time. He's trying to keep us apart, but He won't be able to withstand the power of our love!
• Arc Villain: Becomes this in Happily Ever After, where he separates from the Long Quiet and traps the Princess in the cabin in order to be with her forever despite her wish to leave. The route basically becomes the Long Quiet trying to rescue the Princess from him.
• Beware the Silly Ones:
  • He may be a love-drunk fop, but Smitten is the voice most likely to overpower the Narrator and the player's control over the situation should he be moved to do so for love or revenge. He's also the only one of the voices to say anything about what you look like, as he knows you have feathers.
  • Really driven home in Happily Ever After, where he breaks free from the Long Quiet to become a separate entity who traps the Princess in a controlling false relationship after she rejects his offer to live with him in the cabin. It's terrifying to realize the monstrous, towering shadow lashing out whenever the Princess expresses sorrow or regret is the poetry-spewing dandy we see earlier in the game.
    Voice of the Hero: I'd listen to him, if I were you. He has a lot of strong feelings.
• Black-and-White Morality: His view of the world is extremely straightforward. The Princess is good, effectively flawless, and everything that goes wrong or gets in the way of you being with her forever is the eeeeeevil Narrator's fault. And if you choose to go along with His wishes, then you're just as bad as he is. "Happily Ever After" causes a him to dive into Black-and-White Insanity, considering he can't comprehend a scenario where the Damsel doesn't agree with him; it must be the Narrator's fault!
• The Corruptible: In The Pristine Cut, it's possible to convince him that keeping the Princess captive with you is a good idea. This does not go good places.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Having the Player Character save the Princess without hesitation during Chapter I results in her viewing him as a lovestruck romantic hero.
• The Dandy: He's very intent on looking into the mirror to primp and often worries that you're not looking your best.
• Decomposite Character: In the 2022 Demo, the Hero was the one who fell in love with the Princess. Here, that Smitten behavior has been separated into a different voice.
• Deconstruction: His entire personality gets deconstructed hard in the Happily Ever After route. Normally, he's a perpetually lovestruck Knight in Shining Armor whose power of love is so powerful that it somehow overpowers the Narrator ... but what happens if the love of his life says no? The answer? The Smitten becomes a terrifying shadow who warps reality to keep his beloved "happy" in a Gilded Cage, which he does in such a way that it terrifies the Narrator (or, one version of him, anyway) into completely dropping his plan of a world without death.
• Driven to Suicide: If you choose to kill the Princess, he forces you to turn the blade on yourself. Both out of grief, because there's nothing left for him without his beloved, and to spite both you and the Narrator.
• Enemy Without: Somehow manages to dislodge himself from you in the Happily Ever After route, appearing as a massive shadow on the wall, determined to keep the Player and the Princess in the cabin no matter what.
• Epic Fail: A deeply unfunny example. The Smitten is the only entity in the game that can convince the Narrator that his supposed eternal paradise isn't worth it... by fucking up so hard in trying to make the Princess and the Long Quiet happy in the Happily Ever After route that he essentially locks them in a miserable, monotonous hell.
• Evil Makes You Monstrous: In Happily Ever After, when he's become an embodiment of the worst aspects of romantic love, he's degraded into a monstrous, silent shadow who shows no emotion except a brief Slasher Smile. It's driven home by the tapestries around him, which still depict the noble, gallant Knight In Shining Armour he presents as in the rest of the game.
• Fallen Hero: In the Happily Ever After route, being rejected by the Damsel causes him to go completely insane, becoming a Living Shadow and a massive Control Freak who exists to keep the Princess and you together - at any cost.
• Fatal Flaw: He'll never give up on the Princess, no matter what. While this is sweet with the more positive and enthusiastic incarnations of her, it both leaves him vulnerable to abuse when dealing with her more malicious incarnations (such as the Moment of Clarity) and potentially dangerous when she's less reciprocal (such as in Happily Ever After).
• The Friend Nobody Likes: All of the other Voices who get to interact with him tend to find his over-the-top theatrics and fawning over the Princess to at least be somewhat off-putting. The Voice of the Cold is particularly belligerent towards him. The only Voice he is able to find any kind of rapport with is the Opportunist, mostly because the latter is a Professional Butt-Kisser and the Smitten is quite susceptible to flattery.
• Ham and Deadpan Duo: The ham to the Cold's deadpan during the "Burned Grey" route.
• The Idealist Was Right: While even the more realistic Voices tend to find him and his fawning behavior annoying, following his advice during the Damsel route gets you one of the few unambiguously positive endings (if only temporarily), leaves you with the least blood on your hands (figuratively and literally) and actually resonates with the wider Myth Arc in which you (the Long Quiet) and the Princess (the Shifting Mound) are genuinely soulmates. Likewise, in the Thorn route, he appears to have a much better understanding of the Princess' plight, knowing that it was your act of treachery (even if it was against your will on your part) that made her bitter as the Witch, and that giving her the blade gives you both an opportunity to mend things. Following his advice would lead to you and Thorn reconciling, thus netting you a genuinely positive ending (even if it's also temporary). Even in his darkest moment, Happily Ever After, he can cause a genuine romantic connection to blossom between the player and the Princess as a result of his actions... just in the most destructive and backwards possible way.
• Inexplicably Awesome: Should you choose to free the Damsel, the chain will just slip right off of her wrist, and the locked door will become magically unlocked. Even the Narrator has no explanation for how this is possible. The Smitten chalks it up to The Power of Love, which just makes the Narrator even angrier.
• In Love with the Mark: His whole schtick is that he's so in love with the Princess that any attempt to hurt her in any way is seen as a step too far.
• I Reject Your Reality: His will to act out his "Knight in Shining Armor rescuing a Damsel in Distress" fantasy is so strong that he gains narrative influence, to the confusion and aggravation of the Narrator. This becomes much darker in Happily Ever After, when he ends up trapping the Damsel and the Player in the illusion of a happy marriage due to his sheer desire to live a romantic fantasy and refusal to admit that the Princess might value her freedom more than him.
• Irony:
  • Despite being the voice most against the Narrator, he ultimately changes the Construct into everything he wanted to do to the world by killing the Princess in the Happily Ever After route.
  • Adding to this, he's also the only one to make him regret his treatment of the Hero and the Princess...again, by giving them the Fate Worse than Death he thought would be best for everyone.
• Killed Off for Real: At least insofar as a Voice can be killed. If you get "Happily Ever After" as the final route (or at least the final route which would contain Smitten), then he doesn't appear in the New Dawn ending, implying that whatever occured when the Shadow was snuffed got rid of him for good.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Embodies this archetype as the highly romanticized version of The Hero. Even the Hero is weirded out by him.
• Large Ham: He describes his passion and his love for the Princess in grandiose, overtly flowery terms, even complete with some Purple Prose. When the Narrator points out that the Princess can't hear him, the Smitten voice replies that sure she can hear his spirit. Both the Narrator and the Voice of the Hero think the Smitten is way too into it as a result.
• Literal-Minded: In the route to "Happily Ever After", the Smitten wants to please the Princess by bearing his heart and innermost feelings for her... which he does by literally digging into the Player's chest and exposing his heart.
• Love Makes You Crazy: Played to a dramatic degree in "Happily Ever After", where he creates an eternal and boring paradise for you and the Princess under the assumption that it is what both of you want, no matter how uncomfortable it makes either of you.
• Love Makes You Stupid: The Smitten's acceptance of anything the Princess does or is falls into Implausible Deniability levels of delusional, like insisting that the Burned Grey is alive and not a ghost despite floating and phasing through the cabin walls.
• Loving a Shadow: The dark side of the Smitten’s devotion is that he fundamentally doesn’t actually know the object of his affections that well. On the Happily Ever After route, this quickly turns into a disturbing and abusive obsession, especially without you around to hold him back.
• Mirror Character:
  • Serves as one to the Burned Grey in the Happily Ever After route - both are hopelessly devoted to the object of their affection, and, unable to comprehend that their love wasn't enough, blame external forces and turn to drastic action to try and preserve that love. The difference, of course, is that the Burned Grey was unable to comprehend that her loving you wasn't enough to stop you from killing her, making the Burned Grey inherently more tragic, whereas the Smitten was unable to comprehend that the Damsel isn't as devoted to making him happy as he is to making her happy, which causes his turn to take more obsessive and disturbing undertones.
  • He can also be considered one to the Nightmare/Moment of Clarity in the Happily Ever After route - both of them are Not Good with Rejection and try to share their heart with the person they love, but hurting them in the process.
• Nightmare Fetishist: In the route where you meet the Razor, the Smitten is just as in love with the Princess as ever, breathlessly calling her beautiful even as her whole body turns to blades. He's still like this in The Moment of Clarity, calling the Princess a cruel and beautiful goddess who is above you where she belongs, and again in The Fury where his one and only action is repeating his line from the Razor moments before the flayed, angry goddess explodes you with her mind.
• Not Good with Rejection: The Happily Ever After chapter comes about from the Damsel's visible unhappiness at his suggestion to stay in the Cabin with the Player forever. The Smitten, taking this as a wholesale rejection, snaps at this, assumes full control of the Hero's body, and forces him to commit a gory suicide where he tears his own heart out in the hope of changing her mind. As the world restarts with the Hero's death, the Smitten somehow finds a way to separate himself entirely from the Hero, becoming an Enemy Without who traps the Princess in a Lotus-Eater Machine.
• The One Thing I Don't Hate About You: The one thing he likes about the Narrator is the fact that he can describe the kiss you share with the Thorn really well.
• The Power of Love: The Voice of the Smitten's Personality Power. It's so powerful in fact, that the Voice of the Smitten ignores the Narrator's words and wills an ending where he and his beloved princess leave the cabin!
• Save the Princess: His core motivation as an archetypal Knight in Shining Armor is doing whatever he can to rescue and protect the Princess, to the point it overrides the Narrator.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Going along with his suggestions to free the Princess results in the Narrator gagging from the overly romantic way they're acting. His egging on the Narrator to describe you kissing the Thorn Princess causes the Narrator to go full Purple Prose out of spite.
• Sitcom Arch-Nemesis: The highly passionate Smitten and utterly apathetic Voice of the Cold get on very badly at the best of times, and often end up at each others throat when they're both in the same route. This escalates to far more real hatred in the Burned Grey route, with Smitten blaming Cold for the Damsel's death.
• Skewed Priorities:
  • During the Burned Grey route, he wonders if the player looks dazzling surrounded by flames, even though they're burning to death.
  • When the Princess remarks that she feels cold, the Voice of the Smitten wants the player to pluck out all his feathers and make them into a coat for her.
• Slasher Smile: He briefly gives one in Happily Ever After if you figure out that he's the Shadow, showing how far he's Jumped Off The Slippery Slope
• Spiteful Suicide: If you kill the Damsel, he forces you to kill yourself to fob off you and the Narrator, starting the Burned Grey route.
• Thinks Like a Romance Novel: He sees the world as a love story, with the Princess being a Damsel in Distress and himself as the Knight in Shining Armor, and believing the Princess to be his destined soulmate no matter how short of a time she and the Player have spent together. It does work to his advantage, however, as his beliefs are so powerful that he can even gain enough of the narrative influence to override the Narrator to will a happy ending for her and the Player. And since the Princess is the Shifting Mound while the Player is the Long Quiet and the two were once one being before the Narrator had them separated and tried to get the Long Quiet to kill the Princess, the Voice of the Smitten is right in thinking of the Long Quiet and the Princess as soulmates. This, however, ends up getting HEAVILY deconstructed in the Happily Ever After route - left to his own devices, the Smitten's fantasies include the freedom of both yourself and the Princess, as he initially dismisses the idea of simply staying in the cabin with the Princess forever when the Hero first brings it up. Bring him around to the idea, however, and both his fantasies and the Smitten himself take a drastic turn for the worst...
• Villainous Breakdown: In Happily Ever After, if you successfully convince the Princess to admit she hates her Gilded Cage then, as the last torch goes out, the Shadow that the Smitten has become tries to grab at the Princess' arms in a furious final attempt to not be parted from her.
• You Must Be Cold: When the Damsel is freed but feeling the cold of her true self approaching, The Smitten immediately suggests making a coat out of the Player's feathers but never gets the chance to follow through.

• Amazon Chaser: He's very into the more physically imposing and combative Princesses — his obsession with the Adversary only barely holds back from being explicitly sexual, and he refers to the Razor's knife form as "the perfect woman!"
  Voice of the Hero: Her voice sounds different. More... threatening.
  Voice of the Stubborn: [chuckles] Good. Sounds like my kind of Princess.
• Baritone of Strength: His voice is rougher than the others, to demonstrate his aggressive nature.
• Bash Brothers: Is one with the Voice of the Hunted if they choose to lure the Eye of the Needle into a fight outside and against the Den if you die fighting the Beast. With the Hunted's finesse and survival instinct and the former's brute strength and determination, they manage to use your Fragile Speedster ability to dodge around and inflict a Death of a Thousand Cuts.
• Big "YES!": In Chapter IV of the Razor, when the Razor shows her true form as a skeleton of blades with her heart exposed, he sees her as a Nightmare Fetishist and gets the same joyous reaction as the Smitten.
  Voice of the Stubborn: Yes! Behold, the perfect woman!
  • In the Fury route, while you are being tortured by the unwinding, and the Fury keeps asking if you are "still there", he shouts out a strong "YES!" after the Voice of the Hero vanishes from giving up. As you get stretched into a line that gets longer and longer, his response gets weaker and weaker, and he is being reduced to silence. When you get stretched into sixty-four miles, he concedes with a Little "No" as he vanishes.
• Blood Knight: Itching for a rematch, and constantly talks about breaking and smashing things. He's such a Blood Knight that the fact that Princess keeps getting up after apparently slaying her delights the Stubborn to no end. The Narrator can chime in that he "appreciates the enthusiasm" but tries to keep the Stubborn focused on slaying the princess, not just fighting her. No dice.
• Clap Your Hands If You Believe: Having the Player Character fight the Princess to the death in the first chapter results in her viewing him as a stubborn and strong-willed Worthy Opponent.
• Combat Sadomasochist: Every bit as much as the Adversary. He's positively gleeful if he traps you and the princess in an eternal knife-fight.
  Voice of the Stubborn: Oh, stop bickering over nothing. Our destiny is right in front of us! Pick up your blade and go to her!
• Determinator: The Voice of the Stubborn's Personality Power, taken to the absurd point of straight up Resurrective Immortality. If you receive fatal wounds while fighting the Princess, he'll order you to get back up and keep fighting, even if your brain matter is splattered on a wall. Even the Princess can become disturbed by the pulverization the Player can endure at his behest. In the updated Fury route in the Pristine Cut, he forces his Personality Power to its limit. If she is reached through the Tower, then he's pushed to resist the Fury's constant unwinding of the Player's existence; the Stubborn does eventually give in after the Player is forced into being an infinite line. But this breaks the Fury into giving up ultimately. Alternatively, if you immediately fight her and don't give up then the Stubborn will help you will yourself to die despite her efforts to keep you alive, allowing you to throw one body after another at her as you try to ambush her. If she is reached through the Adversary, then he and the Contrarian can push beyond the Fury stripping them of skin, muscle, organs and bones to reach the Fury's heart and stab it.
• Discard and Draw: If you get to Fury via Tower and don't give up on fighting the Princess, the Stubborn essentially hijacks the route from the Broken by booting him out of your mind when you die and come back in a new body. He does this to each new Voice gained as he keeps trying to attack her, settling on the Cold when he gives them the advantage they need.
• Hidden Depths: He's usually very straight and to the point, yet he can be moved to tears by overwrought poetical speeches... provided they are about violence.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: Or romance and violence, that works too.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: A downplayed version in The Fury route where she is created from the Adversary getting an unsatisfactory fight because you refused to take the blade. He's still ready to face off with her again but is willing to concede that you need the blade to stand any chance. However, if the Contrarian is present, he'll goad the Stubborn out of it.
• Mirror Character: The Stubborn and the Adversary are both eager for a fight.
• Nightmare Fetishist: When fighting The Razor's final form, he gleefully declares her "The perfect woman."
• Nobody Calls Me "Chicken"!: When the Voice of the Contrarian appears on the Adversary/Fury route, attempting to take the blade will result in him making fun of the Stubborn, claiming that he implies that he can't beat the Princess fair and square out of cowardice. This convinces the Stubborn to do as the Contrarian says and throw the blade out the window.
• Odd Friendship: During the Adversary/Fury route, he works shockingly well with the Voice of the Contrarian, with them more or less being on the same page when it comes to slaying the monstrosity of a princess, combining their respective loves of pushing through any obstacle and defying those of a higher power to kill the Fury without having a living body.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: If he appears in the Wild route when you fight The Witch head on and get crushed or when you decide to kill yourself after getting eaten in an act of defiance against the Beast, he is as willing to let go of your past grievances as all the other voices. For a Blood Knight, this should be a sign there is merit to The Wild's words that you are both meant to be one. A bigger red flag is when the Narrator tries to make you recall your anger or fear to get you to separate. The Stubborn pushes back and tells you to ignore those thoughts. Following his advice allows you and The Wild to make a crack in the construct.
  • If he appears in the Den route, the Voice of the Stubborn will be quite reluctant to the Voice of the Hero's suggestion to sink to eating the Den. He even expresses some shame and disgust, at what the brawl has become.
  • If the Fury Princess slowly unwinds you cell by cell, not even the Voice of the Stubborn is able to endure the torture forever and will inevitably break; if he's your final Voice then this locks you into just one ending.
• Rage Breaking Point: During the Tower-Fury route, if you keep pushing on fighting the Fury, then after she explodes you and scatters you all over the place, leaving you helpless to do anything, this becomes the last straw for Stubborn, who decides that he won't have it and hijacks the Voice of the Broken's position from that point forward, telling you to die and then resurrect in the same place (in spite of the Narrator's protestations) and commanding the Narrator to get to the confrontation part with each new body and new Voice.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: The Red Oni to the Cold's Blue Oni, if the Cold is present during the Adversary branch of the Fury route. This happens again in the Fury route (specifically the Tower), when the Cold provides the advantage you need to finally slay her.
• Super-Strength: Another Personality Power he grants the Player is heightened strength.
• Those Two Guys: Can become this with the Voice of the Contrarian, if the Contrarian is present during the Adversary branch of the Fury route.
• Worthy Opponent: Considers the Princess to be one if she's the Adversary or the Fury, as he desperately wants to fight her.

• All for Nothing: Depending on the ending you choose, this can be the case. While it's likely but not discernible that the "And? What Happens Next?" ending returns death to the world, the "Through Conflict" ending unambiguously releases the Shifting Mound and all that she embodies back into reality despite all the Narrator's efforts to seal her, all the pain he inflicted on both her and the Long Quiet in the process, and his own many, many deaths. To add insult to injury, it appears that The Shifting Mound doesn't actually (or at least proactively) destroy reality when she is freed, unless the Long Quiet, the Narrator's own creation, wants her to.
• Alternate Self: Instead of the Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory that the Player and Princess have, which allows them to accurately remember their previous lives, the Narrator instead has one version of himself in each and every Construct that the Player and Princess interact in.
• Ambiguous Situation: There are a few suggestions that he may have some physical presence or be in a location not available to the Player. There are a few times where he steps out for a drink, and in "The Cage", where the Player starts out holding the Pristine Blade, he protests that "it says right here" that the blade is in the cabin, as if he's got a script. He also describes what the Player's body is feeling but only feels anything, himself, in the Apotheosis route, which gets him panicked.
• Angrish: Sort of; sometimes, when it's clear that he cannot do anything to prevent the Player and the Voices from doing what they want, nor can he offer a decent rebuttal to change their minds, he's left to respond only with quiet illegible grumbling.
• Anti-Villain: His goal to end death and suffering in the universe is admirable, but his methods involve trapping you and the Princess in a Construct designed to slay her and imprison you in a blissful but stagnant nothingness, which is reprehensible.
• Author Avatar: Literally the in-universe case. The Narrator is an 'Echo', a figment of the Creator's essence. The Creator made him to continue his work, even after his own passing. Filling the Creator's shoes, the Narrator is the closest thing to 'the' God that the world has anymore.
• Author Powers: With his narration he can change the Construct in clearly unnatural ways, doing things like taking control of your body, making objects appear and warping space. However, it's implied that it’s largely a bluff based on the perception-based nature of the Construct — if the Player or Princess actually try to resist his changes, they can almost always do so.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Gets hit with this hard when a version of his plan is sent in motion during HEA.
• Beleaguered Boss: At times he falls into this, with the Player being given free reign to defy him, question his carefully-crafted narrative and talk back to him every step of the way, and the Voices doing their part to make his life a living hell. The Voices of the Contrarian, the Cold, the Skeptic and the Smitten especially enjoy driving him up the wall and prodding him for reactions.
• Berserk Button: During the final conversation with him, he'll start off friendly, and normally only becomes hostile slowly if you keep being insulting or dismissive towards him. But if you bring up the Happily Ever After route (where a version of him abandoned the plan to side with the Princess), he'll go on a furious rant about how that doesn't change anything and immediately gets locked into his hostile mode no matter what other options you choose.
• Big Bad Ensemble: He wants to stop the Princess/Shifting Mound from destroying the world, but he is also the one who created her, thus accelerating the coming end, so as to destroy the very concept of change she represents, and in the process will turn the world into a blissful stagnant nothingness and trap you in it for eternity.
• Big "NO!": Releases one after the Adversary gets back up after you seemingly slew her.
• Bird People: On the final route, the Narrator is revealed to be a corvid-like being, similar to the Player. It's unclear, however, if this is truly the appearance the Creator had during his life or if this is merely the last echo using the Long Quiet's own reflection to talk to him. You are looking at a broken mirror after all.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: And "killing" is such a gauche phrasing for what he's asking you to do to the Princess. He prefers "slay" because he thinks she has it coming. The only exception is with the Nightmare, when you're about to let her out of the Cabin:
  The Narrator: Shit. The Princess moves past you and into the cabin. This is it. This is your final moment to make things right. KILL HER.
  Voice of the Hero: I thought you wanted us to 'slay' her.
  The Narrator: It's the same thing! Do it! Do it now! Do it now or everything is OVER.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Not to the extent of the Shifting Mound, but he definitely veers towards it — his moral worldview is almost exclusively focused on avoiding death at all costs, with anything else secondary concerns at best. When he gives you what most would consider an And I Must Scream fate in the “Good” Ending, he seems genuinely baffled when you're not grateful for being granted immortality at the cost of being stuck in nothingness forever.
• But Thou Must!: You must slay the Princess, even if the Narrator needs to take matters into his own hands.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • If you pester him into giving you more information he will eventually tell you that revealing information would actually work against you and make your task harder, which after the reveal of your and the Princess' nature is entirely correct. The easiest end is where you rush to kill the princess without question. The only reason it doesn't stick is the player and hero are understandably not satisfied with their "reward" of an eternity in limbo.
  • In the Prisoner route, the Narrator warns you away from the empty manacle that hangs beside the Princess. Given how the last go around went, the Skeptic isn't inclined to listen to him.
• Catchphrase: Two unintentional ones, given that it is technically his first time saying them each time he does. At the start of every chapter he attempts to give his same opening monologue, though by chapter 3 it is almost always shortened to "You are on a path in the woods-" before he is interrupted by one of the voices. Similarly, almost every chapter that ends with the Player's death is given the exact same ending narration:
  The Narrator: Everything goes dark, and you die.
• Catchphrase Interruptus: Occurs in any Chapter III, but tends to be exaggerated in the Tower-Fury route, where after every repeated undwinding/death/resurrection bit, the Narrator starts the usual "path in the woods" part before either stopping himself or getting interrupted by each Voice. By the final time the Fury unwinds you and starts scattering you to atoms, as soon as the wind of the Shifting Mound starts blowing, he starts the first half of the usual "Everything goes dark, and you die" part, but gets faded out mid-sentence before he can finish.
• Climax Boss: For a given meaning of "boss", but he is the last obstacle before meeting the complete form of the Shifting Mound. All of the answers he gives you are extremely plot- and setting-significant.
• Cloning Gambit: There is an infinite amount of Narrators, with one per Construct. Every time the Princess is freed, or the Player dies, that world's Narrator ceases to be. The Narrator is fully aware of this, and while some are extremely stressed at the idea of "their world" ending, others are rather nonchalant, one version even spending his last moments to describe in detail how it works, knowing that there's an infinite amount of Narrators left to continue his work.
• The Constant: Is with you in every single loop.
• Control Freak: He is hell bent on eradicating death for the sake of the world without the world so much as knowing what he's up to, let alone having a say in the matter. And to do so, he's going to make sure you slay the Princess and then sit in your personal little corner of eternity forever, no matter how many times you both have to die to make it happen. He does this by bossing you around, refusing to give you any more information than he deems necessary, and the more you deviate from his plan, the more irritated he gets and the more hell-bent he is on forcing you in any way possible. Essentially his entire character is driven by attempting to control forces he cannot even fully understand, something which various forms of the Princess note.
• Create Your Own Villain:
  • The Narrator's function is to ensure that the Player slays the Princess. However, in every ending except for one, the Player's direct actions either enable the Shifting Mound to escape and/or cause reality to end/be remade.
  • Ensuring that the Princess, at the very least, stays sealed inside the Construct has not done wonders for her temperament or sanity; one has to wonder if keeping her locked up is only making her more of a danger than she would've had the potential to be.
  • It's possible for him to do this to you, driving you to such depths of misanthropy (or at least hatred of him) that you'll choose to leave the Construct with the Mound and willingly bring about a multiversal apocalypse just to get back at him for constantly tormenting you.
• Deadpan Snarker: He will be thoroughly unimpressed by any decisions you make that run counter to his advice, as well as the antics of whatever Voices are present.
• Determinator: If you free the Princess with the Pristine Blade without any incident, he will stop at nothing to possess you and make you slay her. Also, if you decide to free the Den from the narrow tunnel in her route, he will resort to fighting dirty by using his Author Powers to cause a cave-in and asphyxiate you both, unaware that the Den has enough strength to hold off the tunnel from closing in on you. And if that wasn't enough, he throws in obstacle after obstacle to make sure that both you and the Den stay down to prevent your escape from happening. It takes a lot of effort from the both of you (and the other Voices) to get him to shut up for good.
  Voice of the Skeptic: How many times do you have to be wrong before you stop talking?
• Devious Daggers: He insists on supplying you with a Pristine Blade to slay the princess, even when the other Voices comment that something bigger than a dagger might be more useful. Unfortunately for him, you can choose not to fulfill the pragmatic imagery that wielding such a weapon implies.
• Dirty Coward: Some versions of the Princess argue he's this, that he and the Creator he's spun off from are trying to box the Shifting Mound away in the Construct purely because they fear things they can't understand or control and would rather not deal with them. Given how terrified he is of death, they might have a good point.
• Divide and Conquer: Ostensibly, the Princess is locked away because she can end the entire world, and you are supposed to slay her to make sure she never escapes and makes that happen. Unfortunately for you, this is only half of the Narrator's plan. In order to keep the Princess from ending the entire world, not only must she be slain, but her slayer must stay locked in the Construct in her place, undying, forever. While the Narrator may play it like it's you and him against her, it's really him against the two of you ever getting out of the Construct that was made to cage you both.
• Doublethink: He tries to inflict this on you; since the Princess changes depending on the perception of the observer, he tries to portray her as simultaneously a world-ending threat that you must slay and a harmless, easily-killable Princess.
• Duplicate Divergence: While all pretty close, the different Narrators you come across in different chapters aren't actually identical in personality, with subtle variations in things like how much they'll work with you vs try to force control, how willing they are to give up and how good they are at hiding secrets. A few make more blatant deviations, such as the Nightmare's Narrator pulling a Screw This, I'm Out of Here!, the Wraith's narrator hating you to the point he's willing to throw the world under the bus to spite you, the Cage's Narrator being resigned that "This was doomed from the start" and narrating the Princess' escape without any argument, and the Happily Ever After Narrator pulling a full Heel–Face Turn and helping the Princess escape.
• Eat the Rich: If you show reprehension in killing the Princess because she is a princess, the Narrator insists that killing a princess is actually less problematic than killing a miller or seamstress because the latter two at least contribute something to society.
• Everyone Has Standards: As much as he may hate the Princess with a passion, even he's shown to be uncomfortable with what the Voice of the Smitten is putting her through in Happily Ever After. So much so that the experience breaks him and he just gives up on his plan entirely - if you decide to kill her instead of setting her free, he's sad even as he tries to convince himself that this is a good thing after all.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • In the Happily Ever After route, both the Narrator and the Hero can see the Gilded Cage that the Princess is trapped in, as well as how the Smitten is manipulating things so that Happiness Is Mandatory in a way that's eerily reminiscent of Domestic Abuse. Even the Narrator is horrified; he starts calling the whole situation "awful" with a soft voice, and puts up no resistance should you choose to leave with the Princess to the outside world, even though the Narrator thinks that this will mean the end of the world. After seeing what eternal stagnation would really be like, the Narrator starts having second thoughts about his plan and wishes you both the best. But sadly for everyone involved, it doesn't stick after the Shifting Mound grabs Happily Ever After and resets everything once again, meaning the Narrator forgets all about it.
  • In the Spectre route (which you get by slaying the Princess as soon as possible without even trying to talk to her), you can express regret at what you've just done. The Narrator will attempt to comfort you, saying that you did just kill someone, even if it was for the greater good. So it's not surprising that you feel at least a little bad. It's one of the few times that the Narrator actively tries to be nice to you.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: The Narrator doesn't seem to comprehend why you might be hesitant to kill a supposedly normal woman locked away in a basement based on the unproven pretense that doing so will save the world. He's also so fearful of death that he can't fathom why you're averse to an eternity of boring stagnation to the point that you kill yourself to get out of it. He certainly can't fathom why the Player in the finale has no desire to kill the woman he loves and will damn his vision to escape with her.
  • The only explanation he can muster for why you would oppose his vision is more or less to accuse YOU of this trope, arguing that because you cannot die, you cannot understand the horror of dying.
  • He also can't fathom why the Player can be absolutely resentful of the fact the Narrator forced him and the Princess to be in an endless loop of constant suffering. With the full knowledge that the pair could be and in some routes are in an eternity of torment.
  • Though this trope goes out the window in the Happily Ever After route, where he gets a front row seat of what eternity of stagnation without thoughtless bliss is really like. It gets so bad that he doesn't offer any resistance to the idea of leaving with the Princess, and starts to think he made a terrible mistake in wanting you to slay her, outright asking you to reconsider if you pick that option after all. It doesn't stick once everything is reset, of course, but it shows that even he has his limits.
• Evil Is Petty: "Evil" is debatable; "petty" is not. If it becomes clear that you're on the Princess' side, the Narrator is prone to spitefully throwing petty obstacles in the way with a smug voice ("oh no, you're tired! Thorns are in the way! The door is locked!") and going out of his way to describe you and the princesses' happiness in the most insulting and mocking way possible. He's also prone to using his Author Powers to get petty revenge, delighting into going into great detail with how much pain you feel when the Proto-Damsel stabs you or you're buried alive with the Den, and at one point stops narrating entirely in the Razor when people don't appreciate him enough. Only in the Cage's route is he different, deciding that this whole endeavor was never going to work and feeling that it's his duty to narrate the Hero helping the Princess escape.
• The Evils of Free Will: In certain situations where the Player does something that goes against his aims for them or gets them into trouble or danger, he'll grouse about how unfortunate or problematic it is that they have free will that they're capable of exercising.
• Explain, Explain... Oh, Crap!: The "Happily Ever After" route has him narrating about how a game between the Player and the Princess soon grows old and boring, unable to sustain them. When the Princess comments how it's not fun anymore, the Narrator blithely replies about how obvious it would be that the same game repeatedly would get not-fun... before the penny drops and he realizes that this applies entirely to his own master plan.
  The Princess: This isn't fun anymore, is it?
  Voice of the Skeptic: It's never going to stay fun.
  The Narrator: You don't need me to tell you that it isn't... oh...
  • In the Tower route, if you decide to do anything in her favor (like "slay yourself" for example), he uses his Author Powers to try to stop you from going too far. But then the Tower notices something...
    Voice of the Hero: Is... is she talking about you?
    The Narrator: That's impossible. She's not supposed to be able to interact with me, she—
    [She hears him talking, and the Narrator realizes that he's screwed]
  • Another one occurs at the end of the Apotheosis, where, after you stabbed her in the eye, she uses her holy light to incinerate you.
    The Narrator: The inferno incinerates everything that is you, and with it... no. No, that's not right! Why is it hot? I'm not supposed to be able to feel anything oh no, oh no no no no no... [fades away]
  • After your "song we write in our blood" poem line, if you slew the Adversary after goading her into giving you One Free Hit, and then watched over her body, she eventualy gets up to the Voice of the Hero pointing it out, but the Narrator is still too busy arguing to even notice.
    The Narrator: No, and I'm telling you for the millionth time, she's— [one look at her and a voice from her later] Aliiiiiiiiiive...
• The Extremist Was Right: While the game generally frames the Narrator as well meaning but ultimately too extreme in his actions and ignorant of their consequences, the Player doesn't have to agree. There are two endings (A New and Unending Dawn and Your New World) where you ultimately decide the Narrator was right all along and follow his plans through to the end, bringing about the world without death he dreamed of. The Good Ending is arguably a third, although that assumes the Player doesn't actually know what slaying the Princess does.
• Fatal Flaw: Appropriately enough for someone who wants to create a static, undying world, it's his inability to change or learn. The Construct's set up in such a way that there's a duplicate of the Narrator in every possible iteration of the world. While this allows him to be a constant presence over the Player's shoulder, it ultimately bites him quite badly because none of the versions can share their experiences with the others, while the Princess and Player remember the previous loops. This allows both the Princess and the Quiet to outsmart him as they come to understand their world better than he does, and is likely to be what ultimately leads to his failure. On a perhaps more tragic note, he can't change himself meaningfully either. At several points he does seem to be developing more nuance or understanding of his enemies, most notably in the "Happily Ever After" loop where he sees a world pretty much exactly like the one he wanted and really doesn't like it, to the point that he has a Heel Realization and happily lets you leave with the Princess... but then that loop ends, and he's replaced by another Narrator who's the same old obsessive Manipulative Bastard he always is at the beginning.
• Feel No Pain: The Narrator insists he cannot feel physical pain anymore as a consequence of being an Echo, not even as the mirror he's in shatters and ends his existence. He's very alarmed when he feels heat as the Apotheosis incinerates you, shortly before he and all the Voices are burned away.
• Foil: To the Princess, or more specifically, the Shifting Mound.
  • The Narrator knows far more than you do about the situation but is helpless to impact events; the Princess is as in the dark as you are but a single choice can result in a drastically different outcome than expected.
  • The Narrator is an invisible but consistent voice; the Princess is physical, but everything from her appearance to her voice can change.
  • There are infinite versions of the Narrator and the Princess, but while the Narrator's echoes all have the same personality and rarely change despite the circumstances, the infinite variations of the Princess only share a fundamental desire to leave the cabin and memories between worlds.
  • The Narrator and the Shifting Mound are dead-set in their beliefs, but while the Narrator will stick to his until his last breath, it is possible, in an unorthodox way, to convince the Shifting Mound of a different solution.
  • The Narrator insists that you follow his script and slay the Princess, reacting very badly if you disobey him or if something unexpected happens; the Shifting Mound is generally accepting of whatever you choose and embraces the ever-changing nature and uncertainty of reality.
• Foreshadowing:
  • You can ask if the Narrator you're talking to is the same as the Narrator who was with you in the previous loop. His answer: yes and no. Yes, because every Narrator is the same collection of experiences that make them who they are. No, because each Narrator becomes different the moment the player says or does anything. This is a hint that you and the Princess are something entirely different from the Narrator. The two of you have ripple effect proof memories to an extent; he very much does not.
  • Choosing certain dialogue options in Chapter II can have the Narrator suggest parallel worlds himself and ask if leaving the previous world is what lets the Princess destroy it, thereby making it all the more important that you slay her. Technically, he's not wrong.
  • If you allow the Spectre to possess you, she says the Narrator is "more like a memory than a person," and the Tower straight up calls him an "echo" once she detects his presence. Both also compare him to a ghost: the Spectre by declaring that "[He's] kind of like me, actually," and the Tower by describing him as someone who "used to be a person." It's later revealed that this is exactly what the Narrator is: an echo of his dead Creator's essence. Essentially, his ghost.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: The Mind Rape sequence in "The Nightmare" breaks him, causing him to abandon the Player with a strained apology.
• Graceful Loser: Usually averted, as he will take the control of the player's body in Chapter 1 if you attempt to free the Princess, but in subsequent chapters, when things don't go according to his plan, he often ends up admiring that there's not much else he can do and goes on narrating the events of his defeat, though often he's quite angry and petulant as he does so. In The Cage he realizes glumly that his efforts were doomed from the start, and if the Player and the Cage reconcile and work together he narrates their escape with resignation. The epitome of this is in the Happily Ever After route, where he sees that his vision of an undying world of bliss won't work. He doesn't object to the Princess being released, and as he fades away the Narrator wishes the best for you and the princess with sincerity.
• Have We Met?: Because he lacks the same Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory as the Player or the Princess, this is what the Narrator says if he's confronted after the Player's first death. However, even though he doesn't directly remember any previous encounters with the Player, he is aware of the possibility that you died at least once before interacting with him. In the Prisoner route, he admits this is a "failsafe" against you potentially failing to slay the Princess.
• Heel Realization:
  • He arguably has one when narrating what the Nightmare shows the Hero. Having to explain her experience of being trapped in the Construct, lonely, forgetting, devolving and becoming worse, shakes him to the point of abandoning his post.
  • In Happily Ever After, the Princess' cabin has become something very like his vision of a world without the Shifting Mound's influrence — an eternal "happy boredom" where there's fine food, fun games and the people you love forever. But over time the meals become bland, the games become repetitive, the conversation runs dry and the crushing realisation that there is literally nothing left to do but pointlessly kill time forever sinks in. As the Narrator describes this, he slowly starts to suspect that he might have made a terrible mistake. In the end, he doesn't resist you freeing the Princess, and even asks you if you're sure that you want to slay her. You can bring this up to the Narrator at the finale, but he dismisses it on the grounds that "The fact that you managed to find one reality among trillions where I was delusional proves nothing" (although it does seem to throw him more than any other argument you can make).
    This is... awful.
• Hypocrite:
  • Does exactly what he accuses the Princess of trying to do throughout the whole playthrough:
    The Narrator: A warning, before you go any further... She will lie, she will cheat, and she will do everything in her power to stop you from slaying her. Don't believe a word she says.
  • He will use the Princess' lack of detail (like not giving you her name) as proof that she can't be trusted, even though he refuses to give you any details on why you would need to slay her in the first place.
  • The Narrator will call out the Hero and Smitten for being flattered by the Damsel, but he will also tell the player that they have to kill the princess because they're special.
    Voice of the Hero: Oh. I didn't know we were special.
    Voice of the Smitten: Calling us special isn't going to make us friends, even if it did feel nice.
  • He's very passionate in his opinion that death is the most horrifying thing there is - which is why he's also completely unapologetic about subjecting The Long Quiet and The Shifting Mound to a possibly endless loop of dying and/or getting killed in the most horrific ways imaginable over and over again. This one is a bit played with though, as if you call him out on this and point out how often you've died, he'll mock you for thinking it's at all comparable, as you have Resurrective Immortality, while mortals don't.
    The Narrator: You've flirted with dying. You've played pretend, but your consciousness is an unbroken stream.
• Ignored Epiphany:
  • Of a sort. As the Nightmare, the Princess takes her mask off to bare her heart, so that the player character can understand her. The Narrator recounts what he sees - living a painfully lonely cycle of living, growing old, dying, and coming back alone in the cabin, becoming worse and lonelier - and falters, saying that it's too much. This might be his awareness of the terrible situation he's trapped the Shifting Mound in, causing him to feel guilt and horror. But, since every chapter has a unique version of the Narrator who's perfectly ignorant of what happened in every other chapter, just what the impact was on him and what, if anything, he might have done is unknown.
  • A more explicit one in Happily Ever After, where that chapter's Narrator comes to the conclusion that the world of eternal unchanging life is actually worse then the apocalypse, having seen you and the Princess go through a simulacrum of it and end up utterly miserable, and ends up helping the Princess escape. Alas, again, this version of the Narrator ceases to exist, and if you bring it up with other versions, they simply dismiss the whole idea.
• Immortality Immorality: His entire end goal is to eradicate the very concept of death. In the process, he turns change and death into a physical entity, creates the Player to slay it, and turns the two against each other. His ultimate plan will trap the Player (and possibly everyone in the outside world) in an eternal, stagnant, amnesiac nothingness, which he sees as preferable to death.
• Immortality Seeker: One of the most extreme examples in fiction. The "end of the world" he's worried about? Well, if the princess leaves, everyone will die — eventually. The princess is the abstract concept of death, and by slaying her, you remove the capacity of anything to ever die again. That's what he set this whole thing up to allow. However, unusually, the immortality he seeks isn't for him, as he's already dead by the time the game starts. He simply wants to prevent anyone else from ever dying again.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: At several points, if he thinks the Player has really screwed something up, he decides to take a brief time-out to fetch a stiff drink, as he cannot stand watching what is going to happen sober.
• Infernal Paradise: His description of the post-Princess world is an eternal loop of people forgetting and re-learning the same things endlessly, and the glimpse of it we see in the Good Ending is an "eternal happy blur" of staring at a cabin wall forever. Maybe not the worst fate possible, but it's pretty far from what most would consider paradise.
• Interactive Narrator: He's a very major character, being the origin of the Construct you're in. He's able to communicate with you and the voices and alter the construct with his narrations, as well as having a very biased viewpoint in his descriptions. He's also not fully immune to the horrors of the game - the Wraith can override his narration, the Tower can use her Compelling Voice on him and the Apotheosis can straight up set him on fire.
• Insistent Terminology: He always calls the dagger the Pristine Blade, even when other Voices call it a dagger or a knife. He also insists that the task is "slaying" the Princess, and not "killing" or "murdering" her, although he does slip up sometimes.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: He will begin to employ this when he is feeling particularly spiteful towards one of the Voices. Most prominently about the Voice of the Hero, when he suggests suicide to escape the "reward" the Narrator gives you for slaying the Princess.
• Jerkass Has a Point: His persistent refusal to discuss the Princess more than necessary and constantly discouraging you from thinking about it serves his practical purpose, but it also is, to some extent, in your interest: since your beliefs about and opinions of the Princess shape her, starting to see her as something powerful and evil tends to end very poorly for you.
• Jerkass to One: Even when you disobey him, the Narrator will try to be cordial and affable to the Player and the Voices, at least at first. He does not extend the Princess this kindness, and if she can hear him, he will be very blunt about how much he hates her. This is because she is the representation of his greatest fear: the eventual death and end of all things.
• Kick the Dog: His complete apathy for any pain inflicted on the Princess very easily comes off as this, especially in the routes where the Princess hasn't actually shown herself to be malevolent in any way, shape, or form. At its worst it borders on comedically absurd, such as when he makes a point of noting how the Damsel pathetically collapses to the ground after being stabbed by the Player with no provocation or resistance on her part.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: Happens during certain endings in the Chapter lll's.
• Lemony Narrator: The Narrator is very talkative and is the one who directs you on your quest. He displays varying levels of irritation and enthusiasm depending on how much you obey him. When you start openly defying him, the consequences of your actions have him narrate your death in a manner that suggests the Narrator thinks you have it coming.
• Let Them Die Happy: In the finale, once he's down to the last mirror shard, you can tell him that you intend to slay the Shifting Mound and erase death from the world, even if you don't actually plan to go through with it, granting him a measure of peace before he fades away.
• Living Lie Detector: He's always able to tell whether you're lying or not, represented in game by deceptive comments having a "lie" tag. In the finale, as he fades away, you can tell him you'll slay the Princess. Whether you lie or not, he'll sadly note that this time, he can't tell.
• Lying by Omission: Tells you the basics of the set up of the game, but doesn't tell the why's due to his plan inherently hinging on this.
• Manipulative Bastard: The Narrator wants you to slay the princess, and he's willing to use any means necessary to ensure that you do so. Including lies by omission, giving you information that is only Metaphorically True, and keeping you in the dark as best he can through gaslighting, guilt-tripping, flattery, snark and insults in equal measure. In the Chapter I scenarios where you free the Princess from her chains and try to leave with her, he will even take control of your body to physically force you to kill her.
• Marked to Die: There is an infinite amount of Narrators, one for each of the infinite amount of Constructs. If the Princess escapes the Cabin in any of these Construct, he dies. Additionally, if the Shifting Mound is unsealed, he dies in every Construct. Unless the Player manages to get the 'Good Ending' in which he kills the Princess with no strings attached on the first route, at least a single Narrator will die no matter what.
• Metaphorically True: Everything he tells you about the Princess and the world has a kernel of truth in it, but he intentionally omits details and context. For example, the Princess will end the world if she gets freed—only in so much that she allows the capacity for the world to end, but he phrases it as if her freedom means the absolute and instant death of all things. On one hand, he must be vague because letting you know too much would alter your perception of the Princess and make it harder to slay her. On the other hand, this is only the Narrator's concern because he refuses to accept an outcome where the Princess is dealt with peacefully.
• Mortality Phobia: The entire game happened because he feared death and the possible end of the world so much that he turned change and death into a physical vessel so he could get the Hero to destroy the very concept of death. Maybe most exemplified in the Spectre route, where he warns you about Fates That Are Almost As Bad As Death. When the Cold asks why he didn't use the more common phrase of "fates worse than death", he goes on a passionate rant about how there are no fates worse than death.
• My God, What Have I Done?: The Happily Ever After route shows him an idea of the world he dreamed of. A world without death, where you spend time with those you love. A world that initially seems pleasant, but descends into a dull hell of repetition. It shakes him from his Mortality Phobia so badly that he raises no objections and gives no spite when you and the Princess break free of it and leave the cabin regardless of it meaning the end of that world. Unfortunately, this is one narrator out of countless many, so this realization doesn't stick.
• Never My Fault: Despite sending the Player to kill a freakishly strong princess who can live through almost any injury with just a dagger and expecting complete compliance without any question as to why said princess needs to die, any failure on the Player's part to complete the task is almost always attributed to him simply not following his directions well enough. Not that he's entirely wrong; a Player who follows his instructions and kills her immediately and without pause and doesn't so much as inspect her body afterwards has little difficulty. He also doesn’t seem to even recognize that he might have been wrong in the first place to separate the original divine being into the Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound and ordering the former to destroy the latter, even if the Long Quiet tells him upfront that he’s not going to destroy the Shifting Mound; in something that's particularly damning if this happens, he'll briefly lament over being unable to "[...] reason with a god, even one you've woven into existence yourself [...]", seemingly disregarding the fact that he initially created the Long Quiet with a mortal's humbler and closer-to-earth mindset and perspective of things with the expectation that it would be easier to manipulate them into doing what he wanted, and thus, they were essentially always challenging, questioning, and most importantly disobeying him as a mortal, at least in spirit.
• No Name Given: He's subtitled "The Narrator" but doesn't exactly introduce himself. When you bring the fourth vessel to the Shifting Mound, you can tell her, "When you send me back, I'm not alone. There are voices that speak to me. Some of them are me, but one of them is something else. I call him The Narrator, and he wants me to kill you. Do you have a Narrator? Have the vessels had one?" If you call him the Narrator when you meet face to face he admits the title fits, but doesn't seem to consider it his name.
• No Place for Me There: The Narrator has permanently sealed himself within the Construct to see the Shifting Mound's death through. If she dies, the Narrator is trapped in the Construct forever and fades into nothingness. If she is freed, the Narrator dies via the Construct ending. No matter what happens, he will never get to leave the Construct alive.
• Non-Standard Character Design: Even at their most horrifying, the Princess and Player will fit the game's artstyle, and often look more appealing for it. The Narrator, however? When he finally (presumably) shows his true face, he is a near photo-realistic corvid with nothing cartoonish or stylised about it, and uncomfortably smooth animation on his talking and blinking.
• No Sympathy: Is never sympathetic to those who side with the Princess outside of HEA.
• Not So Omniscient After All: Assuming he's telling the truth when he says he can't see the mirror, his actual range of knowledge is limited. This is further reinforced by each Narrator being a separate being, meaning that he always starts assuming he's the first one you encounter. Should the scenario he's laid out for you ever go seriously Off the Rails, e.g. the Wild route, he starts having a full-on Villainous Breakdown.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: In his own mind, he really does mean well, but many forms of the Princess beg to differ. The Spectre, if angered but still allowed to possess you, will yell at him to shut up and stop trying to manipulate everyone. The Tower derides him for stretching himself beyond his limits trying to control great cosmic forces out of fear of something he can't understand. The Shifting Mound flat-out calls him hopelessly delusional. Even outside of this, his petty and spiteful tendencies and unwillingness to accept criticism or fault or be open to entirely viable alternatives other than his envisioned eternity of "forgetting and re-learning" in regards to his Immortality Seeker plan (alternatives that the Player themselves can actively seek out, but which require at least building up the Shifting Mound beforehand, something that the Narrator refuses to entertain at any point), even at his most beneficent and least manipulative — and indeed, the fact that he knowingly built the Construct in such a way that his very mindset that prompted him to create it in the first place would never meaningfully be changed or altered as a result of anything that he observed happening within it (as well as the fact that, if you played through the Happily Ever After route, he reacts far worse to the notion that another version of him came to realize that he was wrong and how truly horrific what he had done and what he sought for all of reality was than anything else you could possibly say) — calls into question just how much his plan to rid the world of death was really about "saving the world and his loved ones" and how much of it was him just being a Control Freak and trying to impose his Mortality Phobia and other neurosises onto everything in reality.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When he starts freaking out, you know something has gone terribly wrong. For instance, when he realizes that the Tower can not only hear him but is attempting to use her Compelling Voice on him, the Narrator will scream in fright.
  • The Nightmare is so frightful and such a departure from how the Princess usually appears that she actually cracks the Narrator's blasé façade. If she removes her mask to show you the endless cycle of death and rebirth she's forced to endure as a prisoner of the Construct, the Narrator is so disturbed by it he just quits and leaves.
    Narrator: What did you do? Pull yourself together, she isn't supposed to be like this.
  • His usual detachment gives way in the Adversary route when he realizes the player character and the Princess are just going to fight on forever.
    Narrator: No, she's dead. She has to be— [The seemingly dead Princess raises her head with a grin] NO. [Beat] Great. We're all shit out of luck, aren't we?
  • Should you search inward to find your freedom during the Wild Route, he drops absolutely all of his cordiality and snark to directly order and even threaten you away from seeking an escape from his Construct with the aid of the Princess.
  • During the Stranger Route, things get so screwed up that he outright says "Lucky for all of us" when he thinks the world is ending.
  • At the end of the Happily Ever After route, he doesn't make any attempts to stop you and the Princess from escaping, or even complain about it, genuinely wishing you luck. When the Hero asks what changed, he bleakly notes that after having seen what an eternity of repeating happiness really looks like, he thinks that there might be worse things than the end of the world.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Bringing up how the Echo in Happily Ever After wondered if this whole plan was wrong has the Echo you meet at the mirror quickly dismiss the former as delusional. This is still enough to anger him twice as much as any other comment that can upset him.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: He's an intangible and invisible echo of a now-dead person, bent on pursuing his unfinished business at all costs by manipulating the living. The similarity isn't lost on people in-universe - the Specter notes that he's a lot like her when they meet, and in the Princess and the Dragon, the more omniscient narration dismisses his statements as "the ranting of a ghost".
• Passive-Aggressive Kombat: While he's never outright rude to you, he's not above resorting to Gaslighting, Reverse Psychology, sarcasm, underhanded comments, or just straight-up complaining to try getting you to do what he wants.
• People Puppets: Is, to a point, capable of puppeteering the Player's body. Most notably, if you help the Princess out of her chains and then try to leave the cabin with her in Chapter I, he'll use this ability to try to force you to stab her in the back.
• Pet the Dog: Despite how devious he tends to usually be, at some points, he can actually be empathetic to you and the Voices.
  • In the Tower route, if you point out the existence of the mirror, he'll deny that it's there as usual, and the Voice of the Broken insists that you shouldn't look, so as to not see anything "sad and miserable" in it. The Narrator actually tries to reassure you and the Broken that you wouldn't look "sad and miserable" in the mirror.
  • Also, in the Tower route, if you succeed in slaying the Princess, she'll also inflict fatal injuries on you in turn. After the Voice of the Hero gets upset about the fact that they'll never get their happy ending, the Narrator comforts him by pointing out that you did save the world, even if it cost you your life.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Doesn't tell you much about the princess due to any thought on her shifting her.
• Pronoun Trouble: In a conversation through a broken mirror, the Narrator switches repeatedly between "I" and "the one who created" while discussing The Creator, who he is an echo of.
• Psychological Projection: Once you get to know him a bit, a lot of the things he says—the warning he gives you before you enter the cabin, in particular—can come across as this in hindsight.
  Narrator: A warning, before you go any further... She will lie, she will cheat, and she will do everything in her power to stop you from slaying her. Don't believe a word she says.
• Pyrrhic Victory: You can choose an ending where you truly slay the Princess and thus remove death entirely, but it's only after the Narrator fades out forever, meaning he'll never get to see the outcome he set up the entire game for.
• Railroading: The Narrator will consistently try to force you into slaying the Princess. Besides just reminding you that your mission is to slay her, attempts to deviate from this course of action will often have the Narrator trying to force your hand. Sometimes figuratively, and sometimes literally by pulling a Grand Theft Me.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: The only character to avert this, as he never remembers the previous loop. This is because each new Narrator is, technically, a different Narrator, since he was presumably made from a mortal creature while you and the Princess were made from something else entirely. However, the Narrator is aware that there are other "echoes" like him and can catch on what this being your third "time" means quite quickly, and obviously knows it's nothing good.
• Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies: If you continually avoid entering the cabin, the screen goes black as the Narrator comments that the world has ended and killed every living person, including you, because you didn't slay the Princess.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: Will do this several times to both the Voices and Player, whenever they question or defy his wishes of Slaying the Princess. The Narrator will also also deliver one final jab towards the Player, if the Player tells the Narrator that he's saving the Princess no matter what in the finale.
• Static Character: Justified. Since the Narrator dies every loop and a new one takes his place every time, he can't meaningfully change. This is clearest when the Narrator changes his mind about his plan in HEA and dies by the end of the loop, losing that growth forever.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: Veers into this when trying to manipulate the Player's perception of the Princess. For example, if you successfully slay the Princess in Chapter One and then consider that it was too easy, the Narrator will sternly warn you against checking for a pulse because the Princess is so obviously dead, right?. During the Razor route, he will repeatedly assert that the Princess is unarmed despite how suspicious she's acting.
• Talking Down the Suicidal: If you choose to "slay yourself" in the Tower route, he will get shocked, put his foot down, and try to talk you out of a Psychic-Assisted Suicide by using his Author Powers to lock your Pristine Blade "and the hand that wields it" in place until you decide not to slit your own throat. Unfortunately, the Tower catches him in the middle of saving your life and uses her Compelling Voice to take control of him... and you can tell where this is going...
• Terse Talker: At the beginning of the Apotheosis, the Narrator explains that whatever you did last time gave her far too much power and the situation is dire, leading to the realization that belief affects the Princess (if the Voice of the Paranoid is present), leading him to talk with just three short words, "You. Cabin. Now." If you got the Voice of the Contrarian, though, he cuts everyone off, and derides that she is not a god, and the more times you fail, the harder it will be to succeed, finally ending with the terse statement, "Princess. Dangerous. Cabin. Slay. Now!"
• This Is Gonna Suck: Comments on how we're out of luck once the Adversary gets back up after a seeming death.
• Toothy Bird: In a scene where the Player talks to him through the broken mirror, he appears to have the head of a corvid, but with white teeth in his beak. But it's possible that this is the Narrator speaking through the Player's reflection.
• The Unapologetic: Right up until the end, he expresses no regret for anything he's done or even any doubt that he was ever anything other than right to do so.
  The Player: If you made us, then I want you to know that this has been torture.
  The Narrator: The inevitability of death is torture. I would gladly put two infinite beings through what you've been through to spare infinite lives from oblivion.
• The Unfettered: By his own admission, there's no line he wouldn't cross to erase death from the universe — not lying, not murder, not torture, nothing. Interestingly, in the Nightmare route, he's forced to experience what he did to the princess firsthand, and does have a My God, What Have I Done? reaction. Of course, that version of the Narrator soon ceases to exist, and the other incarnations keep their callousness.
• Unreliable Narrator: Multiple facets.
  • Dishonesty: It's almost immediately made clear he's not being completely honest with the Player about himself, the true nature of his mission, the Princess, the cabin, the woods, or even himself. It's largely through Lying by Omission, but sometimes he will simply refuse to answer your questions or address what's happening if it's inconvenient for him.
  • Ignorance: The Narrator is not omniscient, and he can overlook quite a few details. Unlike you, he is unable to remember the previous loop, he seems genuinely unaware of the mirror that appears in Chapter II and Chapter III, and doesn't seem to consider the basement becoming an endless void or the woods becoming a mass of meat to be at all out of the ordinary. Because of all this, the Narrator can flat-out give you an incorrect impression of what is happening and become blindsided by the Player or the Princess' actions. Despite his attempts to function as a guide, he can end up far less informed about what's going on than you become just by exploring various options.
  • Bias: The Narrator chooses what and how he narrates, which inevitably results in some bias. He can be extremely petty with his word choice and descriptions, and he will always insist that the Princess is lying or manipulating you and must be slain, even when she isn't and doesn't have to be. In the endgame, when you can speak to him through the broken mirror, he gives several reasons why other Narrators deny the possibility of looping: denial, different assumptions of how the Construct works, existential dread, and the general belief (or hope) that they were the first version the Long Quiet encountered.
  • Even his ability to narrate is unreliable. While he has some direct influence over events through his narration, (in that do things like make the Player's body freeze or move awkwardly, cause the Pristine Blade to reappear in Chapter I, or even make a hallway stretch on indefinitely) it's implied that he is only capable of this if the Player or the Princess aren't aware of what he's really doing (tying into the Player's ability to alter reality based on your perception). If they are aware, he is completely helpless to stop or manipulate what they're doing. In a few cases, they can even step in to do the job for him.
• Unknown Rival: The Narrator sees the Shifting Mound as his Arch-Enemy who he's laser-focused on slaying at any cost, having killed himself, created an artificial god and torn apart the structure of the universe to destroy her. On her part, though, the Shifting Mound is only vaguely aware that the Narrator even exists, and even when she finds out the details, she offhandedly dismisses him as a minor annoyance when she bothers to bring him up at all. As her main focus has and always will be the Player.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • In the version of the Wild route where you and the Princess work together with your fused strength to try and escape, the Narrator descends into absolute panic and alternates between orders and outright threats to get the Princess and Player to stop.
  • This also occurs if you almost achieve the "Happy Ending" of slaying the Princess but decide to turn away from the Narrator's reward of a blissful but stagnant eternity. He snaps at you, and describes your escape via suicide petulantly. This is likely because it directly spits on his goal of giving this kind of existence to the whole universe.
    Narrator: I made this happy little place for you! Is this not a good enough reward for saving the world? An eternity of bliss? You...you ingrate!
  • While he's always spitefully bitter if you free the Princess, he takes The Princess and the Dragon particularly badly, spending his dying moments hatefully ranting about how he hopes you'll "feel all the regret in the world" when you realize what releasing the Princess has done.
  • Subverted in the finale, when you talk to him across a broken mirror. His plans are in shambles, the Shifting Mound is awakening to return death to the universe, and he is about to fade away for good. Though he laments his failure to keep you in the dark, the Narrator is willing to explain himself calmly. Even if you repeatedly pick responses that anger him, at worst all he does is sound annoyed with you for the rest of the conversation, but he'll still let you ask questions.
  • An understated one happens in the Happily Ever After ending. For a brief moment, The Narrator is confronted with a taste of the world he was attempting to create and suffers a Heel Realization so severe that he stops fighting the player and willingly allows the Princess to leave.
• Voice of the Legion: If possessed by the Tower in her Chapter II, he speaks nonchalantly in both his drone and her Compelling Voice, and continues narrating the story like nothing happened, which is very unsettling despite the fact that you being compelled to slit your own throat via Psychic-Assisted Suicide is very frightful and nerve-racking enough.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The Narrator has the ultimate goal of creating a world where no one has to fear death because death as a concept no longer exists. To this end, he created the Shifting Mound/Princess as a physical embodiment of change and death and sealed it away within the Construct, and whole-heartedly believes that the Shifting Mound escaping will destroy reality, so he also created the protagonist to slay the Mound. This is only true in some endings, meaning for the endings where it doesn't happen, he's basically just torturing the Player and Princess for no good reason. And should the player succeed, he reveals his planned world is a world of eternal nothingness and stagnation where there is nothing to do but be mindlessly happy for eternity. He also never considers the possibility of a diplomatic solution instead of resorting to murder, despite you being perfectly capable of working things out with the Princess this way. Moreover, it’s debatable how much of his intentions are genuinely good and how much of it is just him trying to force his Mortality Phobia and Control Freak tendencies on the Long Quiet and everyone else in reality.
• What the Hell, Hero?: He'll call you out for not listening to him and guilt-trip you for choosing your own curiosity over the fate of the world. If he pulled a Grand Theft Me to force you to kill the Princess in Chapter I, you can start Chapter II by calling him out on it.^note The "hero" part of this is only in effect if you're still early enough in the game to not realize the Narrator's goals aren't entirely on the level

The posthumous creator of the Narrator (along with everything else in reality), and the indirect creator of the Player and the Princess. He created the 'Construct', an infinite pocket-dimension time-loop, in order to seal away the Shifting Mound to prevent the end of everything.

• Badass Normal: By his own admission, he's only a mortal. He still somehow managed to rend the cycle of life and death into two, shape the results, and imprison them in a separate plane. Whether his plan ultimately succeeds or fails is up to the player character.
• Create Your Own Villain: The Shifting Mound is a natural part of reality, and would not have been a problem if the Creator didn't try to seal her away. Because he did, the Narrator had to create the Player, who in turn is able to convince the Shifting Mound to end reality upon being released.
• Driven to Suicide: The Narrator claims this is how he died. Given his crusade against death, it's possible he saw it as Better to Die than Be Killed. He also says that it was a countermeasure to the Shifting Mound, who becomes what others perceive her to be — and an echo can't perceive things the way people can.
• The End of the World as We Know It: In a conversation with the Narrator through a broken mirror, the Narrator calls himself (as an echo of the Creator) a witness to the end of days. The universe is old and dying, and people are consumed with that knowledge. Something would come after the end — "when the patterns are wiped from the sand when the board is reset" — but no one would even remember the people who lived at that end, and the point of the construct is to let people live outside of the "shadow of the end".
• Fate Worse than Death: Despite the Narrator's claim that he died, the fact that he still persists as an echo in the form of, well, the Narrator has shades of this trope. His Mortality Phobia was such that he found that shattering himself into countless shards to forever torment the gods he'd created was a better option than simply dying.
• The Ghost: The Creator is mentioned, but never seen. The only thing even remotely left of him is the Narrator, continuing his wishes and speaking as him.
• A God I Am Not: For all his power and the feat of creating two gods from universal concepts, the Narrator rejects the idea that The Creator himself was a god and admits he was a mere mortal. Considering there isn't much of an advantage to allowing his creation and mouthpiece to think this independently of him, it could be surmised the Creator saw himself this way.
• God Is Dead: The Narrator says he was no god, but painfully mortal. Long before the start of the game, the Creator has already died.
• God Is Flawed: Textually not a god. The Creator tore the multiversal concept of life and death, transformation and stasis, in two and pitted them against each other within the Construct, trying to protect people from death and change. What effects does having both in the Construct have on reality? What effect will killing the embodiment of death and rebirth have? The Creator, or his echo, claims that the enough of the Shifting Mound exists in the Long Quiet that life and meaning will continue if the Player kills her, but his vision of what the lives of people will be like at that point, a gentle existence of forgetting and rediscovering without pain or fear, sounds quite static.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The Creator's plan to stop death by sealing away the Shifting Mound potentially causes the death of all of reality, depending on the Player's actions.
• Graceful Loser: Downplayed. In a conversation through a broken mirror, the Narrator speaking as the Creator is much calmer and more forthcoming than the Narrator usually is, but if the Player tells him that his efforts were all futile and the Player will release the Princess, he just says with resignation that there's no reasoning with a god, even one he made himself. He'll admit without the Narrator's usual anger or desperation that he failed in what he set out to do, but he won't even acknowledge the possibility he was in the wrong to try.
• Greater-Scope Villain: While not deliberately malicious, or even alive during the game's events, he indirectly causes the untold suffering of the Player, the Princess, and the Narrator. He even could be considered responsible for the Player deciding to end reality, as he created the Narrator, who in turn created the Player.
• Ignored Aesop: Of sorts. He can't exactly remember it because it was another echo of himself, but during the final meeting with him, you can bring out his Heel Realization during the Happily Ever After Epilogue, but he will dismiss it as just an echo among trillion being delusional. The tone of his voice does imply that he's a bit shaken by the information though.
• Immortality Immorality: To his credit, he wasn't seeking immortality for himself, but for the people who lived in his dying era, and for other people across the universes. Unfortunately in order to have it for others, he tore the concept of life and death, of transformation and stability, in two, personified them, and set them up in the Construct with an echo of himself to pit them against each other. As you can see through the game, rarely are any of those characters happy.
• Irony: The Narrator describes his Creator's ideal world as a pattern of forgetfulness that leads to the joys of discovery... which sounds an awful lot like what the Narrator goes through every time you die. Which he never enjoys. It can't help that neither the Player nor the Princess are his loved ones.
• Kill the God: Downplayed. He didn't want to fully kill the original divine being that the Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound were made from. Only the part of it that governed the aspect of Death, and for whatever reason, he couldn't do this himself. His entire scheme was pulling that being apart into two Literal Split Personalities, isolate its Mortality/Chaos and Stasis/Order aspects into each of the halves, entrap both of them in a pocket dimension with no memories, and then influence the Order half to kill the Chaos half.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: His vision for the world if the Shifting Mound is killed.
  "Light. Burdenless. An eternal pattern of forgetfulness leading to the joys of discovery. Everyone will be with the ones they love. No more fear, no more howling chaos. Just life. Forever."
• Mortality Phobia: The harshest he gets in the conversation across the broken mirror is when you question him about if death is really that bad — you can't meaningfully die, he says, and clearly don't understand the desperation of it.
• No Name Given: As with the other characters, if he has or had a name it doesn't come up, but we have to call him something and capitalizing "creator" makes it look more like a name.
• Pronoun Trouble: The closest he gets to appearing is in a conversation with the Narrator across a broken mirror. The Narrator admits to being just an echo of the Creator, but answers questions calmly and frankly and mostly refers to the Creator as "I".
• Tailor-Made Prison: The Creator created the Construct, his own echo, and then sealed said echo, the Long Quiet, and the Princess in it for all eternity.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: He seems to genuinely believe that all the pain and suffering he causes the two imprisoned deities, and whatever damage he could've potentially caused to reality by removing them from it, was all worth the chance to create a world without death.
  Player: If you made us, then I want you to know that this has been torture.
  Narrator: The inevitability of death is torture. I would gladly put two infinite beings through what you've been through to spare infinite lives from oblivion.