Slay the Princess

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As a Fridge subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

Fridge Brilliance:

• The revelation that the Player's perception of things impacts the Princess and the world around him is neatly integrated by how the player progresses through their playthrough. His first route would be directed by his lack of information and understanding of the scenario, so he would be more susceptible to either the Narrator or the Princess and make choices accordingly. However, as you complete more routes and begin to make choices out of sheer curiosity, your actions mirror the actions of someone who has realized that the Princess changes depending on how you see her even before the game makes that explicitly clear.
• With one of the influences behind Slay the Princess revealed to be Taoism, one can see the themes behind the game in writing and visuals:
  • The Narrator mentions that when he tore the Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound into two, he made sure that the tear was rough, comparable to the symbol of Yin and Yang not being a perfect divide at the center. Before the reveal, The Wild and certain parts of The Princess and The Dragon both hinted that both characters used to be one, much like the concept of Tao that's both everything and nothing at the same time. And similarly to the concept of Yin and Yang, LQ & Shifty are alternating antithetical entities that contain a piece of each other, making them not total opposites.
    • While it is the Long Quiet who makes the choices in activating a lot of the chapters' events and the Shifting Mound is the one who passively waits for the vessels to be delivered to her (and her Heart defaults to being stuck in the basement every first chapter), it's Shifty who's the active force who pushes you, the main protagonist, to find out what you and she are and to free yourselves from the cabin and the Narrator. LQ is the one who's being advised by different characters what to do, reacting to the situations around him. And on a meta-level, he is the Player Character who’s being controlled by the player most of the time. The alterations are also highly evident in your "final battle" with the Shifting Mound; she remains static in her stance about both of your roles and it's up to you whether you accept them or not. If you aim for certain endings, it's the Long Quiet who causes the big changes in the scene.
    • Shifty expresses that "The tides do not dictate where they are pulled. The river does not dictate its outlets.", echoing the belief in that one should follow the flow of the Tao rather than resisting or trying to mold it.
  • Design-wise, the Shifting Mound and most of her vessels are white and light grey with dark grey irises. The Long Quiet is mostly obscured in shadow with all-white eyes. The Shifting Mound is feminine while the Long Quiet is masculine (which contrasts with the mostly-white Yang typically being associated with masculinity while the mostly-dark Yin being typically feminine, but the Shifting Mound is drawn with more round shapes while the Long Quiet has more pointy edges). And as expected of the "shifting" theme, certain vessels of hers like The Beast and the very beginning of The Stranger has them in inverse shades similar to the Long Quiet instead. While the Long Quiet's reflection is shown to go through the different stages of decay, he is largely the same compared to the Princess' highly varied forms. These are similar to Yin and Yang where the lit and shaded parts of a hill change throughout the day.
    • Speaking of Yin and Yang, one of the achievements, "She eats he eats she eats he eats...", has a picture of both the Long Quiet (black) and the Princess' Den incarnation (white) taking a bite out of each other, with both characters resembling a Yin-Yang symbol.
• The first time you meet the princess, and in several other iterations of her, the room she's in holds two chains, one shackling her to the room, and one that's not shackling anything. As revealed in The Prisoner, the other chain is meant for you. But you are not chained to the wall. While the Princess is bound to the narrative, you have free will.
  • The events leading to the Prisoner route need you to originally bring the blade to slay the princess, but then resist the Narrator's control. In short, the second chain only functions when both you and the princess are aware something is forcing you into that role in the narrative.
• The Princess changes depending on how you perceive her. In turn, the individual Voices are all based on how the Princess perceives you. Similarly, she acts to appeal to those Voices instead of the Hero or the Narrator. Unlike the Princess, who is entirely subject to the whims of your perception, you don't have to abide by the additional voices; after all, you are the embodiment of stasis and stability, staying the same no matter what happens.
  • The Broken: After being utterly defeated by her, the Princess sees you as nothing but dirt under her heel and completely subservient to her.
  • The Cheated: Tricked by the Princess despite seemingly certain victory, she sees you as a gullible fool who was given a seemingly easy task but failed and will fail again.
  • The Cold: Having killed her without hesitation, the Princess sees you as only a cold blooded killer with no sympathy towards the seemingly helpless damsel.
  • The Contrarian: Having defied the Narrator and all expectations saddled onto you, the Princess sees you as a contrarian who treats everything like a game instead of taking it seriously.
  • The Hunted: Having hunted you down like an animal, the Princess sees you as mere prey.
  • The Opportunist: The Princess sees your duplicitous behavior as one of a person who cares only for themselves and will say anything to get what they want.
  • The Paranoid: Having kept her locked in the basement, the Princess sees you as a paranoid and fearful person who breaks down when getting anywhere near her.
  • The Skeptic: The Princess recognizes your skepticism of the whole "slay the princess" thing and sees you as someone who does not take things at face value.
  • The Smitten: When you opted to save the Princess no matter what, she sees you as a love-struck Knight in Shining Armor who will side with her no matter what.
  • The Stubborn: Having fought her to your last breath, the Princess recognizes your fighting spirit and that you are into slaying her for the thrill of it.
  • The Hero: Despite all of the above, deep down the Princess views the Player as having a heart and the willingness to do the right thing above all else. Which is why out of all the Voices he's always at the forefront of their encounters.
    • If the Voices are the Princess' impression of you, then it makes perfect sense that the first Voice you ever get, before you even know there's a princess, is the one that will tell you that you're not supposed to slay princesses. At the same time, the Voice of the Hero is also the most malleable of the Voices, and will be more willing to slay the Princess if she presents herself as needing to be slain, reflecting the Princess' own nature.
  • The inherent contradiction of stability and change is reflected in the existence of the Voices. Instead of your experience with the Princess defining your personality, it instead creates a new personality while the previous ones remain. You changed, but you are also the same, resulting in a literal cacophony of contradicting voices and decisions.
    • Why is the Hero the first of the Voices? Because much like how the Player made the Shifting Mound a Princess, out of the subconscious desire to be reunited with his missing half. The Voice of the Hero is the Princess' subconscious impression of the Player (her missing half) coming to rescue her. Because much like her later variants, the chapter 1 version acts to appeal to a hero coming to the rescue.
• Why does the Narrator narrate your actions down to just walking in places? Well, fundamentally it's because the whole game occurs inside of the Construct, which given that it’s outside of the universe, could only have been made from the entity you and the princess were before you were split. So the setting is made of the same stuff as what makes you and the Princess. In a rather literal case of perception being a reality, the Narrator convinces you that you are moving within physical space. Thus "you are on a path in the woods" as well as all of the little tricks the Narrator does to tell you the cabin changes, locks on you, door moves away, objects appearing from nowhere, etc if you try to go against him.
  • Critically though all of these narrations only work if they get no pushback from the Player and on occasion the Princess. Amongst the routes such as the Razor has you literally decide you are already at the cabin, the Adversary route has you decide that you and the Princess don't die, and the Wraith has you talk back against an infinite distance being had between you and the door of the Cabin.Which makes sense, ultimately the Player and Princess are made up of the stuff as the rest of the Construct but the Narrator as he says is just an echo. He can only convince you about how to think about things, his own thoughts have no effect on the perception of the reality you and the Princess are imprisoned in.
  • It also actually explains rather neatly the "influence" of the Princess spreading as you progress in chapters. You and the Princess keep your memories, and so your worldview rather literally affects what the world is even if the narrative structure of you being in a space, and going to a given location remains intact for the most part. Essentially the game has a Narrator because from a Watsonian sense a narrative is needed to differentiate the god that was separated into parts that can kill each other.
  • Choosing to empty your mind at the end of the razor route removes all the voices and resets the cabin back to its initial appearance; that is the cabin as the narrator wants you to see it without any other perceptions taking effect. Getting rid of the narrator goes further and reveals it as it truly is; the empty realm of the dormant Long Quiet.
  • Adding on to that, this also explains why the Narrator always says "everything goes black and you die". You aren't actually dying but basically being black screened back to the start. You get tricked into dying essentially. Notably, in the route to the Prisoner, you are able to kill the Princess and end the world without dying yourself, and in fact, you will never die until the Narrator is forced to announce as such when you stab yourself with the Pristine Blade. If he tried to insist that you weren't dead after that, it would be extremely suspicious.
• From the Narrator's perspective, his choice to keep the scenario as vague and ill-defined as possible for the Hero makes sense when you realize that the Princess' appearance changes based on perception. The Narrator concocts a very straightforward impression that makes sense one the surface, but is rife with plot holes the more you dig into it (how did the Princess get chained in the first place? Who sent the Hero here? Why must the Hero slay her specifically?). Not only that, but the Narrator's descriptions of the Princess involve a lot of Double Think to convince the Hero to slay her; she is simultaneously a world-ending threat that must be destroyed, but she's also a harmless Princess who the Hero can kill with one stab to the heart. The Narrator must portray her this way because it presents her as dangerous enough to justify murdering, but not so dangerous the she cannot be defeated or killed, and the danger she presents is one that affects the future but does not present her as a current threat. When the Hero begins questioning the Narrator, it becomes much harder to kill the Princess either due to sympathizing with her too much to go through with it, or her becoming too powerful to be defeated, both of which are propagated by the Hero's own feelings.
• If you decide to slay the Princess immediately, no negotiation or hesitation, the Princess will seemingly die. Despite this, she acts as if she won't die. The Narrator says that she believes that she can't. That's the Narrator's emphasis. This quirk in the dialogue foreshadows much of the game, namely:
  • The Narrator's deliberate choice in words to avoid changing your perception. When he says the Princess believes she can't die, He's trying to make you believe that she is only bluffing. The Narrator informs you the basic premise of "slay the Princess, save the world" and refuses to elaborate details because if you believe anything else, it'll make the Princess harder to kill.
  • The power of belief affecting the Princess is also foreshadowed here. Indeed, if you give into your paranoia and believe in the Princess' own belief in her survival, she will survive. However, if you take things at face value, she is well and truly dead.
• The Narrator dislikes usage of the word "kill", and prefers to describe "slaying" the Princess. This Insistent Terminology could stem from his potentially abandoned remorse, as those who (directly or indirectly) kill others often dislike describing the term of murder for what it is: many murderers or propagators of murderers dislike outright stating that they killed somebody, often using softer language, like "passed on" or "being gone" to remove themselves from the crime emotionally. Because the Narrator doesn't see the Princess as a person, he doesn't believe she can be "killed," only slain.
  • The term "slay" is also often used to describe the killing of monsters, specifically dragons. The Narrator sees the Princess as a monstrous entity, and therefore treats her in the same manner.
• The Nightmare renders you helpless but aware, unable to move your body or even regulate your organs. She's a Sleep Paralysis Creature.
• Sometimes when the Narrator is addressed in the third-person, "he" is capitalized (i.e., "What if He does hear you?"). When referring to the Abrahamic God or other deities, the pronouns are capitalized to signify religious reverence. The Narrator is an echo of the Creator, who was mortal but as the one who made the Construct is in some senses a "god" of this world.
• There are parallels between the Damsel and what the player character has been reduced to in the Moment of Clarity chapter.
  • The Damsel is sweet but doesn't have the agency she has in other routes and besides a vague sense of wanting to leave the cabin, her only desire is to please the player. Ask her too many questions about what she wants and she undergoes Art Shift, eventually into the Deconstructed Damsel, at which point the Voice of the Hero uneasily says that he feels like the player, the voices, and the narrator are "the only ones here". She's happy treated gently but also accepts even being stabbed with a smile. If any version of the Damsel is taken to the Shifting Mound, Shifty's opinion of the Damsel includes the line "You have molded this one to love you".
  • The Moment of Clarity is a monstrous version of the Princess, wounded when she tried to show the Player her innermost pain and was rejected. She's broken him and his full collection of Voices into losing their agency, with no choices left but to follow her will. The Player, like the Damsel, has become passive and harmless to his opposite number. When you give the Moment of Clarity your hand to take her out of the cabin her grip is gentle.
• In the "Tower" route, one of the changes to the cabin are the steps being massive, which takes the Player a longer time climbing down them, and are so hard to climb over that the Narrator even notes that, if you leave the Pristine Blade upstairs, it'll take you too long to climb back up and retrieve it. The environment, as well as the Princess, changes with the Player's perception, and because this route involves seeing the Princess as an unstoppable force, the cabin is transformed to prioritize her comfort over yours. Because she is much taller than you in this route, the stairs are likely built for her to walk up them more easily.
  • The stairs also serve as a subconscious effort by your perception to make getting away from the Princess more difficult, forcing the Player to engage with her directly.
• Why does the Moment of Clarity have eight arms? Because she is the apex of a route where the Player Character abandons the Princess and leaves her to loneliness, an absolutely clingy entity with a fanatical desperation for companionship. As the Nightmare she made a horribly misguided attempt at intimacy during her mask removal, despite the Player Character's rejection via losing his mind. She refuses to leave him alone as she desperately doesn't want to be abandoned by him again, for all she wants is to be loved and remembered.
  • Her body is fading with it leaving only her clothing and cracked mask that comes apart with every move until it leaves a hole where her face used to be, representing her unstable and broken self-image due to heartbreak and abandonment.
  • She can't fathom that her clingy and violent attempts at intimacy with the Player Character only further lead him to run away from her, which only leads to her becoming even more violent and cruel with her advances towards him.
• In the "Falling Forever" ending and the "Good Ending", the Narrator deals with the same issue in that he tries to keep the Player content in an abyss for eternity, while making the prospect of death unpleasant. In both, he struggles with justifying the Player's longevity without giving away his true intentions: If he tells the Player that he can't die and should simply stay where he is forever, it will raise suspicion over the Player's reality and likely push the Player into killing himself to start over, which starts the cycle all over again. If he tells the Player that he can die, then it puts into the Player's mind that death is a possibility (or in the "Falling Forever" ending's case, an inevitability) and die anyway, and then it starts the cycle all over again.
  • Notably in both, the Narrator does not mention dying until the Player or the Voices bring it up, and he's deeply reluctant to describe the Player killing himself. Notably, when he describes him slowly dying of thirst and starvation, he drags it out for as long as possible.
• Many of the Voices not only reflect the Player's in-game attitude, but also reflect the type of Real Life Players who go into the game and what intentions or expectations they carry for a route:
  • The Hero: The most basic type is a Player that displays general empathy towards the Princess and the world, even if it's unclear why. They will weigh up the risks and moral implications between freeing her and the supposed threat to the world the Narrator insists she is. They will also listen to counsel from the Narrator, the Princess, and other voices for general ideas of what to do and genuinely want to make the "correct" choices. Players who stick to this path will end up meeting the Princess in the Shifting Mound's heart, with the options of slaying her for good, finding the middle ground of the two of you resetting the loop and saving her.
  • The Smitten: Many players go into the game with the intention of explicitly romancing the Princess, and try to do all of the "good" options to do so (freeing her, resisting the Narrator, refusing to hurt her intentionally). This is why the game morphs her into the Princess Classic damsel in distress: Players going into the game with the hopes of romancing the Princess will need to do more than token gestures of heroism.
    • With The Pristine Cut, he also shows the darker side of this kind of fan - throwing a tantrum when the game's story doesn't give them what they want. The Happily Ever After route exposits on why the game cannot be a fantasy, and how toxic that behavior can get if applied to real people - and how boring the game becomes if nothing is allowed to fail.
  • The Broken: Some players may go in hoping to defeat her, but if the Princess overpowers them will change their minds at the last minute to garner some mercy rather than have full confidence in their decisions. In this case, the Princess literally breaks the Player's resolve, resulting in the Tower route.
  • The Cold: Experienced Players who have played the game for a while and lack hesitation towards killing the Princess, now seeing it as just another variable to get certain paths, or simply those who are curious about the consequences of certain actions with less empathy towards the emotional struggles of the Princess or Narrator, or those who agree fully with the Narrator and give into him without a second thought or care for hearing the princess out. In doing so, they get the Specter, forcing them to literally face the consequences of their actions.
  • The Cheated: Many players may go into the game with the desire to "win" the game and feel spiteful that the story is a slow burn romance/horror Visual Novel rather than a more competitive experience. They will most likely find the Razor route first, exposing them to the game's combat and dark humor.
    • Alternatively, the Cheated represents a player who got screwed over by bad programming. They played the "Hero who goes to slay the Princess" role straight, and made the reasonable decision of checking if the Princess was really dead - but they ended up dying themselves thanks to an event (the Princess coming back to life and stabbing them with a knife) that came out of nowhere and was completely out of their control. Throughout the route, the player tries to play "legit", picking the various options in an attempt to find the right strategy to beat the Princess; but they get skewered each time. Eventually, the player decides to use an exploit and "break the game" in a way neither the Princess nor the Narrator expected, by erasing the Voices, the cabin, the entire story.
  • The Contrarian: Players who may know the Narrator's true intentions and go out of their way to press his buttons specifically to see what he does and to find more of the humour in the game. As such, they break the game, getting the surreal and meta Stranger, and find themselves forced back on the path.
  • The Hunted: Players who may start off inherently wary of the Princess specifically, likely due to the game's genre of horror or having been slain by her earlier. They get the Beast, exactly the predatory monster they anticipated, but also get a chance to see the most benevolent side of the Princess in the Wild.
  • The Opportunist: Indecisive players who don't actually know who to trust, or whether to follow the Narrator's words or the Princess', and will switch sides depending on whose giving the most compelling argument. They get their suspicions validated with the Witch, and must make a firm decision as to who trust. Even more so than the hunted above, the Witch's third chapter offshoots, the Thorn and the aforementioned Wild, will show the Princess in better lights, making it easier for the player to trust in her in the future.
  • The Paranoid: Players who know the game is a horror game and may be genuinely frightened of messing things up, thus opening themselves up to a frightening experience despite their caution. The Nightmare route is also the most explicitly traditional horror route the game gives and will push most of the players to take more risks in the future.
  • The Skeptic: Like the Opportunist, a player may be indecisive, but actively trying to "solve" the game by finding out the nature of the world they inhabit. Ironically, in the Prisoner, they find the dilemma of the game stripped down to its most basic form— there's no monsters or dark secrets, just a Princess who must either be released or slain.
  • The Stubborn: Players who see the Princess as an opponent to best only, unlike the Cheated, they understand the genre as a Visual Novel and act accordingly. They get a warrior princess to fight against in the Adversary, but in doing so are exposed to the more esoteric aspects of the game the most quickly.
• Adding to the above with the voices, with the Pristine Cut now out, each of these routes have route specific Chapter 3s that can't be accessed on any other route (I.E. while you can get the Wraith from both the Specter and the Nightmare, the Moment of Clarity can only be encountered after the Nightmare, and no other Princess). Each of these are either deconstructions or final tests against the negative sides of each voice that you failed to keep at bay in Chapter 2 (and sometimes Chapter 1).
  • The Razor constantly has the upper hand from the start to the end until the Player finally finds his own way to fight back. Either she'll be slain along with the Player, or she'll get to know what it's like to be unable to do anything while at the mercy of the other as she's torn apart. She basically becomes cheated from her initial role of the one who stabs you repeatedly, giving back your ability to actually solve problems that was taken away from you at the start of the route.
  • The Stranger deconstructs the Contrarian's mindset by showing how badly doing things for the sake of doing them can end. In this case, he causes everything to warp due to his desperate enjoyment of screwing with the Narrator and comes to regret it when the consequences become horrific.
  • Happily Ever After is basically an abusive relationship you're both forced into by the Smitten and functions as a test of what romantic love truly is after the Smitten is driven insane when the Damsel starts showing agency instead of just wanting him to be happy. In order to get the best outcome, you have to power through the illusion of happiness and find what about this relationship actually makes you and her happy. Only then does your romance with her become real, genuine love instead of just (mostly non-sexual) lust like the Smitten has.
  • The Moment of Clarity is what you get when you fail to truly outlast the fear that the Nightmare gives you. In this case, she scares you into making only the choice that she wants you to make. Her ability to literally scare you to death no longer works since you've been through too much to properly fear her anymore despite giving in to her desires.
  • The Thorn is just as therapeutic to the Player as it is to the Thorn herself. The worst outcome is her going back into being the Witch. The best outcome is tuning out the Opportunist and actively building back her trust so that you can escape with her. In doing so, you break the betrayal loop that you were both stuck in for the past 2 chapters prior, no longer caring about who's "on top".
  • The Cage is gotten by not being skeptical enough about the Princess' apparent suicide to deduce her plan. Not only that, but the Skeptic makes it harder for you to break out of your chains if you try to cut yourself loose by being too skeptical of the ability to change the world based on perception, forcing the other voices to come up with a logical enough reason to get him to go along with it. Essentially, to get the best outcome and escape with the Princess, you have to balance your skepticism so that you question the world but don't brush things off. Your predicament also foils the Cage's fatalism.
  • The Eye of the Needle is gotten by running from the Adversary instead of fighting her, meaning you weren't stubborn enough to face her head on. Now, you need to strengthen your determination in order to best this mightier foe.
  • The Princess and the Dragon, which is gotten by being so set on killing the Princess with no remorse that you'll kill yourself after she possesses you as the Specter, is basically a chapter dedicated to teaching you to have empathy for her by giving you a front row seat to what this entire thing looks like in her perspective. The best outcome is when you finally stop mindlessly treating her like a walking doomsday machine and help her escape this time.
  • The Den is what happens if you fail to keep yourself from becoming prey to her, even if she doesn't succeed at swallowing you whole. The worst version comes in when you give into your instincts and become completely mindless in your pursuit for survival. The best one is when you find a way to help her out of the cave even as it collapses, causing her to come back for you and prove that you both aren't just rabid animals.
  • The Apotheosis is what happens when your will is strong enough to get keep from freeing the Tower, but too weak to stop her from forcing you to slit your own throat. The Apotheosis is even more powerful, and in order to get the closest thing to the best ending, you need to strengthen and show off your will, as well as allow her to do something to you. Basically, you aren't broken, but you're not a rebel for the sake of it either.
  • The Shifting Mound's heart is finally fulfilling the Player's heroic role of saving the world from ending or saving a Princess, this is achieved by seeing out all the routes and returning to the chapter 1 cabin with newfound perspective. The worst case is staying true to the "heroic role" of slaying the heart by bringing the pristine blade. The middle ground is bringing the pristine blade but unable to bring the Player to slay her and, the pair reseting the loop in order to figure out a better solution. The best solution is not bringing the pristine blade and using the Hero's Personality Power to simply talk to the Shifting Mound's heart, convincing her to just leave with the Player.
• In the Wild Route, if you break from the Princess and bring the Wounded Wild into existence, you'll find her with her chest torn open. Why? Because you two were joined at the heart and you ripped her chest open when you separated from her.
• The Princess appears supernaturally strong, easily capable of shattering the Player's bones with her bare hands, but this is given new context once we find out the Player is some kind of avian creature: since birds have hollow bones to help them fly, the Player's bones are much more brittle than a human's, so of course it's easy for the Princess to break them.
  • That also explains why the Player can’t break the chains binding the Princess to the far wall of the basement. It would be a lot harder for an avian creature to break chains than for a humanoid.
• The Player is a bird-like creature and is thematically associated with birds. He is trapped in the Construct, which would make it a bird cage.
• The Voices are, well, voiced, but they're not your voice. When the Player speaks, or when there is narration not by the Narrator, it's unvoiced. The Player is, after all, the Long Quiet.
• The Narrator's plan involves creating a story where the Player kills a Princess and then remains forever in the void; this will lead to the Shifting Mound dying by proxy, and the concept of change and death dying with her. The Mound can capture a Princess only after the first chapter has "failed" (specifically when the Player dies), therefore transforming the first Princess into something else - something that doesn't fit into the Narrator's plan.
  • Even then, the Mound can claim a Princess only when the latter is either out of her cabin, or when the scenario ends in a way that will not lead to another transformation. In the first case, the Princess gets out of her cabin and enters the void of the Long Quiet, aka the Mound's own "cabin"; in the latter case, the Princess has stopped changing in a meaningful way, and has entered a stable phase... And the Long Quiet is the embodiment of stability.
  • This also provides an explanation for why the Shifting Mound cannot claim a vessel if you refuse to enter the cabin: instead of taking the Princess out of the cabin, transforming her or stabilizing her, you just left the story hanging. This doesn't apply to Chapter I because when you try to leave, the Narrator responds by creating infinite cabins, which destabilizes the world so badly that it ends up turning the Princess(es) into the Stranger.
• The whole game is a scenario set up by the Creator of the Construct, who created the Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound so that the former can kill the latter and bring the end to death and change in the universe. The Creator, however, is dead, and despite his echo, the Narrator's attempts to railroad the Player into that outcome, he does not have to pursue it at all. Due to the Death of the Author, the story he wrote doesn't have to end the way he wanted it.
• Why would the Prisoner refuse to communicate with you when you two get shackled together for an incredibly long passage of time, after the shackle you investigate ends up latching around your neck? Other than the fact that she Hates Small Talk, if you do follow the Prisoner's instructions correctly, you'll learn that she had her own plan to escape the cabin and flee, with you coming to visit her with a knife being a crucial part of her plan. However, when you get yourself shackled and the knife gets repelled away from you? Her plan gets sabotaged by your carelessness, so of course she'd be very frustrated by how you screwed her whole plan over and got you two locked away for seeming eternity, even if she's very calm and collected about it.
• When you run into the Drowned Grey in Chapter III, she locks the door on you as soon as you examine her drowned corpse, and unleashes a flood on you while you're talking to her. If you try to escape, water rushes in through the door, ripping it off of its hinge and pushing you further into the basement. And while you're trying to surface for air, she commands the corpse to drag you further into the bottom of the ocean (according to her, her filling your lungs with water is a symbolic punishment for you filling hers with blood). Just when you're about to drown, the Shifting Mound appears to prevent the water from filling your lungs, thereby saving you from a watery grave and taking the Drowned Grey with her (as the narration text afterward says "your lungs don't fill [with water], nor will they ever"). Yet there's more symbolism to the Drowned Grey route than meets the eye, according to one Reddit comment:
  Drowned Grey's water is also symbolic of her repressed emotions, namely sorrow. The Prisoner line of vessels are notable for how they keep their feelings close to their chest and struggle to openly express themselves.
  Both Grey's [sic] are in anguish over the cycle of violence preventing you two from having a positive relationship after the glimmer of something good, both taking it upon themselves to end the cycle. Burnt is wearing a wedding dress because she's committed herself to you in death while drowned wears a mourning gown to mourn what could have been.
  Thus Drowned Grey keeps her distance from you at all times (unlike Burnt who stays close as the cabin burns), symbolising her emotional distance maintained from Prisoner. And the water is a play on the words "drowning my sorrows" only she is drowning her sorrow in her sorrows.
  The water is her sorrows (her tears, symbolically) drowning her sorrow (you, the source of the turmoil within her).
  It's why Shifty commends Drowned Grey for having the courage to share her feelings with another in the end. Her drowning you was externalising truly how much pain she was in, drowning in her own feelings, though she herself struggles to show it. Otherwise she'd just silently glare at you from a distance forever.
  • And another bit of symbolism: If you recall, when you slew the Prisoner, she cried because you broke her trust in you when she said, "None of this was ever very fair, was it? But I did kill you last time. I should have expected you might want some petty revenge. Unfortunately for you, that means you've dug your own grave. You can forget about me ever helping you again. Even if it damns us both." That is why the Drowned Grey appears to drown you with her sorrow, to mourn broken trust and all that could have been. Also, when she appears as part of the Shifting Mound for her final confrontation, you can tell her that "when you flooded me with tears I did not drown"; that line means that you simply don't care about the sorrows of the Drowned Grey, for that matter. And you trying to escape the flooding basement and then holding your breath and struggling futilely against the corpse pulling you under while you're submerged means that you try hard to keep your feelings bottled up inside and escape or ignore your misdeeds of the past coming back to haunt you, even though they can be overwhelming at times and the sorrows are weighing you down. And by finally letting go of your breath as you allow yourself to (symbolically) run out of air and drown, you are letting go of the bad air between you and the Princess and come to share in her feelings and an overwhelming love that not even death can be able to undo. In other words, you're getting overwhelmed by her sorrows.
  • Seeing the Drowned Grey and her flood of tears brings to mind the Swamp of Sadness in The NeverEnding Story (1984), in which the swamp amplifies a person's sorrow just by being in it, followed by drowning (just like rain and the Drowned Grey's ocean of tears), and Artax is drowning in the swamp because he is very good at sensing human emotions like all other horses and animals, and the sorrow is weighing him down until he can't handle it anymore; this is kinda similar to The Long Quiet's fate when the drowned corpse is pulling him down, which symbolizes the sorrows weighing him down because he senses the Drowned Grey's emotions and he can't handle it anymore. Hence, why he's drowning in sorrow like Artax (although said horse didn't have some force like Shifty to intervene at the last second and save him from completely drowning like TLQ did).
• Why does the Voice of the Hero's Personality Power only active in finale? Because it's specifically his route, and his Personality Power activates because after various loops, he was able to forge a perspective that enabled both the Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound to talk one on one.
  • He played the role of relationship counselor for the pair's lover quarrel.
  • Notably, while all of the other voices have a specific Personality Power, the Voice of the Hero's is the player's agency. The only moments in the game where the Hero is not present or detaches from us are scenarios where we haven't or unable to make our own choices. At the beginning of every Chapter 1 of a route, the Narrator and the Hero are alone as they talk to each other, and the Voice of the Hero only spawns after we make an active choice (either going to the cabin or leaving down the path). When the Player obeys the other Voices in their routes, the Hero takes a backseat, usually with some degree of annoyance, confusion, or reluctant acceptance (such as the Damsel route where he sits back when Smitten takes the reigns).
  • This is also why in the Nightmare route, he's so downtrodden; he's allowed you to make as many choices as possible but none of them meant anything in the long run.
  • Aside from the very beginning of Chapter 1s, the only other times when Hero disappears are when the Long Quiet confronts the Narrator or the Shifting Mound. Both of these are scripted events that happen regardless of Player input. But what happens if you start to question the Shifting Mound and engage in a fight? Hero appears, and offers you the chance to go to her heart and end it differently.
  • This also plays into his power against Smitten and Broken in their respective routes. Hero can't stop Smitten from killing us because it requires for us to have gotten up to the point of devoting to the Princess' escape, as well as Hero regretting killing her deep down. The Tower usurps our agency unwillingly, which automatically opposes Hero and Broken and allows him to fight back more meaningfully.
  • It also explains why the Voice of the Hero opted to stay behind in the "And? What happens next?" ending, the Player ultimately has full control of his agency and chooses to leave the construct with the Princess of his own accord.
  • The Player no longer needs his Voices or their Personality Powers as he has full control of his personality.
• The Narrator actively prevented the Voice of the Hero's Personality Power from activating as He was preventing the Player from having true agency thus blocking the Voice of the Hero's Heart Is an Awesome Power ability.
• The Voice of the Hero was able to finish his route by either slaying a world ending threat or saving the Princess.
• Why is the concept of Life and Death being the Hero and a Princess respectively? It's because in fairy tales the hero always saves the princess, it's the right thing to do, afterwards the Hero falls in love with the princess he saved. With love, especially in fairy tales the two then live like soulmates, if one dies then the other has no reason to live, just like the concept of life meaning nothing without death.
• The reason the Player character is a bird like monster? Because he views himself as one for going to kill a Princess.
• A subtle hint as the Narrator's true origin as an echo of The Creator? His pronouns are always capitalized, as He and Him.
• The Damsel appears to be a Flat Character designed mostly for Wish Fulfillment, with no desires apart from leaving the cabin and making the player happy. However, she still has enough volition to want to leave the cabin, the Voice of the Smitten wants to free her from the cabin, and the Voice of the Hero is open to anything except slaying her. But if the player continually asks the Damsel what she really wants, she'll slowly break down, the Voice of the Hero is more unnerved by her Dissonant Serenity than before, and the Voice of the Smitten freaks out when the Shifting Mound takes her, saying she was their "perfect match". Ironically, insisting the Damsel must have more agency than she actually does and trying to "make" her a Round Character removes what little agency she does have, making her even flatter and satisfying no-one. By contrast, simply taking her at her word and helping her fulfill her Humble Goal satisfies everyone (except the Narrator) with a Happy Ending.
  • With the Pristine Cut, this goes even further. The princess' deconstruction into Stylistic Suck can be reverted instantly if you ask her to stay with you in the cabin. Her goal to leave being something she doesn't want to give up shatters the idea that she's just a flat stereotype. Now you must wrestle with what that means in the Happily Ever After Route.
• Even when you go along with His plan and kill the Princess, most of the Narrator's congratulations seem faintly sarcastic — He doesn't like you very much, after all. But in the Spectre route, He gives a genuinely respectful, understated "you're a hero" if you kill yourself to destroy the princess. What's different? His Mortality Phobia. For Him, death is the worst thing that can happen to someone. He might not like you, but He can't not respect someone who's willing to make that great a sacrifice for the good of the world.
  • Adding to this: Giving up your life for a chance to stop the Princess is what the Narrator (or rather, the Creator he's spawned from) himself did. Of course he'd respect you doing the same thing.
• A lot of her lines in chapter one in particular make a lot of sense if the Princess is knowingly trying to exploit her perceptual nature. She gloats that she'll soon escape the chains if you try to leave her down here — and sure enough, she then casually breaks free from manacles she otherwise has to cut her arm off to escape. She mockingly asks you if you really think stabbing her will kill her, and sure enough, it doesn't. Even her harmlessly cutting off her arm occurs after she conspicuously shows apathy to cutting to her arm off, planting the idea it won't do much to her. The only way to kill her is to just stab her before she speaks, not letting her plant any ideas in your head. No wonder the Narrator is so desperate to avoid you talking to her — it's not just that it might warp her, it's that she's trying to control how she warps.
• So, the mirror appears on the wall of the cabin in chapter 2, and in front of the door to the basement in chapter 3, but it disappears when you interact with it. Mirrors show only what is. You're making a choice by interacting with the mirror, and so because you made a choice, a change, the mirror would no longer show the same thing as before. You're changing what is, and what was the before, in the mirror, no longer is.
• The mirror also represents you as the Long Quiet - you, and your voices, can see the mirror, because as the scenarios progress, you're awakening to your true nature, but because, again, you're choosing, you're *changing*, you're setting aside your role as Stability and taking up the torch of the Shifting Mound - your other half. Despite the Creator's efforts, He couldn't fully, cleanly, split the being you were before into you and the Princess. You, despite being Stability, can still make changes, and the Shifting Mound, is always changing- a *constant*. As the Voice of the Contrarian says, everything happening at the same time is the same thing as nothing happening.
• Why do the Hero and the Princess end up loving each other in many routes despite them being opposites, one a being of pure stability and the other a being of pure change? It’s precisely because they’re opposites that they fall for each other. Without the Shifting Mound, the Long Quiet quickly grows bored of his happy eternity of silence. And without the Long Quiet, the Shifting Mound changes so much, it might as well be doing nothing. The Hero loves the Princess because the Princess brings change and excitement to his life and the Princess loves the Hero because he keeps her grounded and stable enough to not be constantly changing.
  • It's another reason why the Narrator doesn't want the player to speak to the Princess and resolve things diplomatically, as both parties would figure a way out of the construct as seen in the Wild route and the finale.
• The Princess' voice never really changes in any of her forms. While the range and emotions of the voice changes, the actual voice itself never does. Well, as the Voice of the Hero said when the Hero hears the Princess for the first time, the Princess has a beautiful voice one would never forget. So no matter what happens, no matter how the Princess changes depending on your perception of her, the Hero will always perceive her with that voice (if she’s capable of speaking).
• The Narrator's plan is to make the Hero kill the Princess, and then keep the former alive inside the cabin forever. In theory, this plan could work even after the first Chapter. In practice, however, this never happens: in most scenarios, either the Princess survives, or the Hero slays her and then dies (either through suicide or Mutual Kill). The Eye of the Needle and the Wild are the only Princesses that can be slain without dying... but only after they managed to escape the cabin, making the entire thing moot.^note The Eye of the Needle must be lured out of the cabin before you can kill her. Meanwhile, in the Wild's chapter, both you and the Princess start out fused with the woods, meaning that you're technically already outside of the cabin - which doesn't even exist in that chapter.
• What is at the heart of it all? It's love. At the core of it all, the game is about love.
• As mentioned on the Main Page the game is a deconstruction of video game narratives in the vein of BioShock 1, Spec Ops: The Line and Undertale, it also expands on their criticisms:
  • In Spec Ops: The Line, the tragedies that occur in the game ostensibly would never have occurred if the player / Walker just stopped / turned off the game. Here, not entering the not playing the game nets the definitively worst ending because the shifting mound is unable to claim a vessel / progress the story. So while SpecOps implicates the player for continuing on through the tragic events despite the games warnings, in this story the player is always rewarded for continuing through the loops despite the horror and tragedy with almost every ending being a different variant of sweet as opposed to SpecOps's different flavors of downer.
  • In Undertale, you are condemned for cruel and murderous acts committed on non-pacifist routes, with a genocide run tainting all playthroughs after. Here, the beginning explicitly states that there are no wrong paths to take and in practice you cannot just replay the damsel route forever.
  • In BioShock 1, Jack / and an unspoiled player by extension implicitly have complete trust in Atlas until the big reveal with the game subtly mocking how much trust we put in a character that we knew very little about and how players would blindly follow the objectives given by their "mission control". Here, the voice of the Hero, the closest thing that the narrative presents to the player characters default thought process distrusts the Narrator (the closest thing to "mission control ") to some extent from the start. Without the knowledge to understand the greater context, however, he doesn't know if he can necessarily trust the princess either and / or find a way to successfully defy the narrator regardless. So while Bioshock implies that the player is a mindless slave for following their every objective given by them, in this story the Player character does not want to be a "slave" from the outset but he doesn't have the necessary plan to become free until he learns more and more about himself, the construct, the Princess and the Narrator through the loops .
• The Moment of Clarity's chapter title shows up as black text on a white background (formed by the overlapping chapter numbers) rather than white text on a black background like every other chapter. Considering the color motifs of the Princess (white) and the Hero (black), this makes sense as the title "Moment of Clarity" is not referring to the Princess having a moment of clarity, but is actually describing the Hero himself, who is becoming lucid for the first time after a seemingly endless loop of insanity-inducing chapters full of torment at the hands of the Nightmare.
• The first time you look in the mirror, the game simply says: "It's you." The times after that, you grow, then you wither and then you decay; and finally, in the last instance, you see the Narrator. Birth, growth, senescence, death/decomposition, and finally something beyond death - an Echo of an already-deceased person.
• The reason the Voices disappear at the mirror is because, much like the Shifting Mound's vessels, they are beings born of perception (the Princess' of the Player) and return to him, granting him more knowledge of himself, which is also why the Player sees himself change in the mirror.
• The Princess of each chapter is stronger than her previous form. While this rule is evident for most Princesses, it becomes less obvious for the Damsel and the Spectre:
  • The proto-Damsel is forced to cut off her hand to escape the chains, and has no influence on the player. The Damsel can easily slip her hand out of the chain, and she created the Voice of the Smitten, who is an unwavering ally to her. The Happily Ever After isn't even chained to begin with, and she empowered the Smitten to the point that he can detach himself from the player and hijack the narrative.
  • The proto-Spectre is killed quickly without any chance to resist. The Spectre cannot be physically harmed, and she can possess the player as long as he consents; but she can still be stopped if you choose to let her possess you and then stab yourself. In "The Princess and the Dragon", the Princess' nature makes it so that the two automatically swap and mix personalities/souls every time one attacks the other.
• In "Happily Ever After", the Player bares his heart to the Princess, showing her his idea what love and happiness is: an eternity of the same surface romantic gestures over and over. Is it any wonder that the Princess, the avatar for change and transformation, becomes very unhappy with the Player, a nascent god of stasis, and his idea of love?
  • And when does the Princess actually become happy with the Hero? When he and the Princess actually go out and do something different. Which shows more of why these two are soulmates. The Hero is a stable rock the Princess can rely on to always love and support her while the Princess can pull the Hero out of his comfort zone and get him to do something different for once, showing him how wonderful the world can be outside his home.
• Each ending has a distinct astronomical and color motif.
  • "There Are No Endings", as well as certain portions of The Wild and The Apotheosis, reveal an abstract kaleidoscopic green background. The constant motion and out-of-this-world appearance fit the Shifting Mound's nature as a God of Chaos, and the more you align with her, the more of the background you see.
  • "And? What Happens Next?", which involves both you and the Princess simply leaving the cabin as relatively mundane beings, takes place under the same Deliberately Monochrome starry night sky that you have seen through the entire game. For all you know, you might still be trapped in the Construct. It's impossible to know for certain if anything has changed on a cosmological scale, but you and the Princess are OK with that and just want to see what happens next.
  • "A New and Unending Dawn", caused by slaying the Shifting Mound's heart, ends with you and the Voices seeing what appears to be a red dwarf star outside the Construct. Red dwarfs are extremely stable, burning far longer than larger stars, but with little evolution or change. By both the Narrator and the player's admission, there's just enough of the Shifting Mound's nature within the Long Quiet to potentially allow some form of change, and the Voices are still there to influence your decisions. Capital-C Change is dead, but change may not be.
  • "Your New World" shows a calm blue sea with a supermassive black hole in the background. Supermassive black holes are the most stable objects in the universe; according to prevailing theories, they will be the last big things in the universe, with only stray subatomic particles remaining. They are, from a human standpoint, eternal, unchanging, and alone—and since you completely erased the Shifting Mound, the Narrator, and seemingly the Voices, from existence, so are you. With no-one left to tell you what you're supposed to do or how you're supposed to feel, you can finally sit back and enjoy the quiet.
• The Chapter 1 Princess looks odder than the other human-looking vessels such as the Prisoner, the Damsel, and the Thorn because she hasn't settled on her form yet. As Chapter 1 progresses, not only does the Princess' expression change with your actions, but so does her stance, abilities, and overall behavior, steadily changing into a "prototypical" version of the next chapter's vessel. She needs to be able to change to the sweet proto-Damsel, bestial proto-Witch and proto-Beast, or freakish proto-Nightmare from a single starting point in a matter of moments. This flexibility comes at the expense of baseline approachability, resulting in her Uncanny Valley Girl appearance. By contrast, subsequent vessels have settled on a course of action and a corresponding form, only changing between Chapters 2 and 3 offscreen should the player go "off-script".
• Why does the Voice of the Hero have the ability to bring you to the Shifting Mound's heart? Because that's the role the Narrator gave you. He created the Construct and the initial scenario - the woods, the cabin etc. - and then gave you the role of a hero on a mission to save the world. The Voice of the Hero has the power to restart the scenario one last time:
  • "You're on a path in the woods." - At the end of the game, you find yourself in a shifting "forest" of Princesses.
  • "And at the end of that path is a cabin." - The Hero can bring you to the final cabin.
  • "And in the basement of that cabin is a princess." - The final cabin contains the last Princess - the heart of the Shifting Mound.
  • "You're here to slay her." - Note the way this part is worded. Your mission is to slay the Princess, but it's not treated as an inevitability because the Narrator needed you to willingly choose to slay the princess. In the endgame, you have the possibility of slaying the Princess, but you aren't obligated to do so.
  • "If you don't, it will be the end of the world." - Slaying the final Princess will kill the Shifting Mound, and therefore remove death from the universe. Vice-versa, it's implied that allowing the Princess to live means that death will keep on existing.
• If "The Princess and the Dragon" ends with you and the Princess fusing for good, she becomes "stenciled", color-inverted and drawn in chalk. The Princess is drawn the same way when the Nightmare removes her mask and bares her heart, and the Networked Wild is also drawn in this style. In each chapter, the Princess tries to make you understand her situation and her feelings by seeing things through her perspective; her becoming "stenciled", then, is her own view of herself.
• As pointed out by this reddit post, the "Happily Ever After" chapter can also be interpreted as a metaphor for the visual novel itself: eventually you'll explore every possible option and play every possible dialogue, so your only options will be to either keep playing the game again and again; or move on to something else. What was the chapter about? You, the Princess and the Narrator being stuck doing the same "happy ending" over and over, with your ultimate choice being to either remain in this boring and repetitive life, or move on and leave the cabin.
• Why does the Long Quiet never use his wings until the godhood ending despite the fact that they would be so useful for getting out of multiple unfavorable scenarios? In mythology and symbolism, wings often represent divinity and freedom. Despite the fact that his wings are vaguely visible in the mirror, and he might at least have felt them on his body, no one in the story ever seems to mention or describe them. This is because the characters are either ignorant of their true nature (player and princess) or trying to hide information regarding their true nature to control them/metaphorically clipping their wings (narrator). So, when the Long Quiet unfurls his wings and takes flight, he breaks free of a construct that tried to cage him with knowledge of his divinity restored.
• The incomplete Shifting Mound has different lines of dialogue depending on what vessels you bring to her and how you treated them (for example freeing a Princess versus slaying her). However, the complete Shifting Mound lacks this mechanic, and her lines remain pretty much the same. Why? As she herself explains, her personality and perspective change every time you bring her a new vessel - but after you collect five vessels, she becomes strong enough to recall all the others without your help. The final form of the Shifting Mound is always composed of all the possible vessels, and therefore she will always have the same personality.
• The Wild describes the Narrator as an entity outside of you both, looking at the woods from the inside. However, the Spectre and the Wraith can hear him from within the Player's mind. How do they reconcile? Simple: you are the Long Quiet, which means you are both an individual and the endless space around the construct. The Narrator is outside of the construct, but he is also seeing the events through you. This is also why he dies when the world unravels: there is nothing to echo off of anymore.
• If the Player goes through with killing the princess and leaving her dead, the Narrator's "reward" is an eternity of foggy, boring bliss. Of course it is - that's exactly the fate he wants to give to the rest of the world, and he can't think of a better ending for anyone. He's always genuinely baffled if the Player chooses to end their life over staying in his heaven.
  • On a related note, at the end of Happily Ever After, the Narrator begins to sound almost depressed as the Player realizes they can't just stay here and be happy forever. To the Narrator, this is an existential realization: the idea that an eternity of bliss is torturous, and the only way for life and love to have meaning is for things to change.
• When the Narrator described creating the Shifting Mound and the Long Quiet, he says that he left a part of her in the Long Quiet so that even when he kills her and the concept of death and change, the result won't be an entirely still existence. This piece of the Shifting Mound may be the reason why the Player is able to make the choices they can, and more importantly may be the reason why the Voices exist. Note that the Voices do not appear in "There Are No Endings" and "Your New World"; the former because the Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound are together at last, and the latter because the Long Quiet rejects the Shifting Mound entirely.
  • Likewise, the Shifting Mound having a fragment of the Long Quiet may be the reason why she's so obstinate towards you during your debate. It's not just because she wants to be free, not die, and/or ascend with you. She's literally got a fragment of stasis, effectively disallowing her a choice and making her very inflexible with her beliefs.
• In Happily Ever After, we learn that the Opportunist is better at board games than the Skeptic: you can take a win off the Princess with the former, but not the latter - and it makes sense, because while both are focused on testing boundaries, the Skeptic is more focused on understanding, while the Opportunist wants to use his knowledge. The Skeptic noticing an exploitable part of the rule will flag it and maybe take advantage if it comes up, but will be focused on understanding the ruleset; the Opportunist will actively try to make it a factor whenever possible. Over a long enough time, the Skeptic would probably end up better at a given game, or possibly come up with House Rules to fix it - but you're not playing it to mastery, you're playing it until you're bored, so the timescale favours the Opportunist.
• Out of all of the Voices, the Cheated is the one that's the most accepting of the Narrator's end goal and reward for the player, to the point of butting heads with the Skeptic over it when they’re both in "The Cage". Considering the contexts in which the Cheated comes into the picture, especially how you get the Cheated on the Cage route to begin with, this makes sense: he hates nothing more than to get screwed over by things he can't control, and he tends to be the Voice the least on the Princess' side. So when he gets a genuine victory over the Princess and is offered an opportunity to live an existence free of any kind of uncontrollable inconveniences, only for the Skeptic to force the player to kill themself because they still haven't found "the truth" yet, he gets angry and shows up.
• The Contrarian has that minor Running Gag about throwing the blade out of the window, which not only occurs in the Stranger and her associated ending, but also the Razor (including suggesting throwing her out of the window) and the Fury. Once you get to the Apotheosis, he's the one who enables you to instead throw the knife directly into her eye. After all, what are eyes if not Windows of the Soul?

Fridge Horror:

• While the Princess and the Player's existences are rather tragic, the Narrator, from a meta perspective, is also living an incredibly pitiful existence. He kills himself in order to guide the Long Quiet to kill the Shifting Mound, meaning he will never experience the eternal life he’s trying to achieve for the rest of the universe. Not only that, but the Narrator is, by the game's nature, doomed to fail in nearly any possible scenario the Player makes; the only possible avenue for the Player to fulfill the Narrator's wishes involve always taking the blade, limiting interactions with the Princess, killing her right away, and then being completely satisfied with sitting in a void for all of eternity. He has grossly underestimated the Shifting Mound's ability to work around his plan, as she only needs to claim one vessel to make the player commit to her completion. He also underestimates the potential good that the player (and potentially princess') ascension can do for life in the current (dying) or subsequent universe. Considering the caveats and the Player's natural curiosity towards the Princess, nearly all of these steps will be screwed up in one way or another, leaving each iteration of the Narrator to either witness their world be damned to oblivion or know that the Player's mind will merely be shunted to another reality, so death is still not permanently gone. And, to add insult to injury, the Narrator does not have the Ripple-Proof Memory of the the Player or the Princess, meaning he will never learn from past routes or grow beyond his initial knowledge from the very first Chapter 1 the Player achieves.
  • The Narrator is also incredibly held back by his Never My Fault attitude, in that he never once questions if his entire plan is morally wrong or even poorly thought out until the Happily Ever After route, and every version of the Narrator except the one for that one route will assert that they are completely in the right with any issues being solely the fault of the Player's lack of effort. This attitude will inevitably be the unmaking of every Narrator, who won't even have the experience to recognize that the Player can try out every option and it still won't stop the Princess forever. It almost feels symbolic to the inevitability of death itself, which is very fitting. As fans of Harry Potter can attest, the best option regarding death is to accept it — and the Narrator won’t ever do so.
  • His arrogance and impatience really undermine the entire plan. He just assumes the Player will do whatever he says and trust him blindly, and hasn't bothered to come up with even a halfway convincing lie about how the Princess will end the world, just saying that it totally will happen for sure. He dismisses your Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory on entering a new loop in Chapter 2 even though he intentionally set it up for that to be possible, because he doesn't want it to be true, so it obviously can't be - up until it becomes impossible to ignore. His Heel–Face Turn in Happily Ever After, while his most redeeming moment as an echo, is also a damning judgment on the original Creator of the construct, because it means that he took possibly the most drastic action of all time, basically tore a god in half and tried to redefine all of reality, for convictions that can't even survive boredom. (As it was put by Susan Ertz: "Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.")
• Likewise, several of the Voices have miserable existences too when you look deep at them, especially more traumatised ones such as the Hunted, Paranoid and Broken. Their entire existence is being traumatised and hurt, and because you are the Long Quiet, the god of stasis, they are doomed to never heal from their pain. In a way, the “A new and unending dawn” ending is actually more of a happier ending than it really is, since despite killing the Shifting Mound for good, you can see the voices slowly start to heal from their traumas, finally hopeful for the first time.
• The Narrator can alter the reality of the world in very minute ways, and will sometimes nudge the Player in certain directions to push him to slay the Princess (such as locking the door behind the Player and not opening it until the deed is done, or teleporting the Pristine Blade to the basement when the Player does not take it with him). In the Damsel route, which is one of the routes the Player is the kindest to the Princess and most antagonistic to the Narrator as a result, one gets the impression that the Narrator is purposely and spitefully dragging out the Player's death at the Princess' hands as a form of punishment for defying him so much.
• During the lead up to the Moment of Clarity route, the Narrator is uncharacteristically horrified by the events during the unmasking. One might think is this just due to the Nightmare's ability to induce terror, but his tone during his abandonment of the Player sounds almost like guilt ridden sadness. This is because he is finally seeing the damage his construct has caused the Princess and Player, his conscience is finally getting a hold of him and he can bare it no longer to see it.
  • However, because each cabin and chapter has a different Narrator, he can't learn from this, or change, or try to make up for it. In the endgame, the Narrator who speaks to the Long Quiet across a broken mirror blithely says he'd happily commit two eternal beings like the Shifting Mound and the Long Quiet to endless torment to spare people the torment of oblivion. He's not seen any inkling of what that's like.
• The Moment of Clarity torments the Player character into being in a relationship with her and the abuse only stops when he stops fighting back against it.
• The life the Narrator envisions for people outside of the Construct if the Long Quiet kills the Shifting Mound and is then content to exist alone eternally sounds... not great. No pain or fear, surrounded by their loved ones, forgetting and joyfully rediscovering? This sounds tremendously static. But one of the endings is worse - in "Just as you once were nothing", the Long Quiet refuses to bring the Shifting Mound any vessels or allow a single Princess to escape the cabin. Both of them wither away and fade. What happens in the outside world, if both are functionally dead?
  • The scariest answer; because the Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound represent stability/life and change/death, the pair of them fading likely means both if these concepts disappear with them. In that case, the universe is both deathless and lifeless, and lacking change and stability, meaning that all of the universe could be stuck in a paradoxical limbo where they simultaneously cannot be dead or alive... which is an even worse fate than death.
  • Alternatively, the universe could also settle into a sort of endless loop. Nothing can ever change meaningfully but the lack of stability means that SOMETHING still has to keep happening. Thus the universe could experience what the players experience: a never-ending loop, going through the same day over and over again with the only differences being up to whatever individual agency is achievable in that time frame, only for it all to start from the beginning with all memories of past events wiped away, allowing people to continue to make the same discoveries and experiences for the first time repeatedly. Which in some ways can actually be worse.
• The endings you get when you slay the princess reveal a solar system with a red dwarf star. While this is near the end of the life cycle of a star like Earth's, this is notably not even close to the point of time regarding the universe's heat death. Unless this world's universe operates differently somehow, the horror kicks in to realize both how the Narrator mis-framed the urgency of the world ending again, but also how many other options could have been had with beings of infinite permutation over reality. It wasn’t a selfless sacrifice but an incredibly selfish tragedy.
• ""Good Ending": At first, slaying the Princess and walking up the stairs may seem like a form of closure. The Narrator describes your feelings, and as you go to step outside, there's nothing—a vast, dark void surrounding the cabin. If you look closely, the textures in this void resemble feathers, an eerie detail that only starts to make sense later when you learn that this space is actually The Long Quiet, folded to form the Construct you're trapped in. Following the Grey’s route reveals an even more unsettling truth: the cabin is a nexus of potential futures for you and the Princess, but now, by slaying her, you've cut yourself off from all those possibilities. You've become the embodiment of stasis, locked in place, while the Narrator continues to narrate your reality, unchallenged. The real horror seeps in gradually. As you listen to the Narrator, you realize that you are unwittingly allowing him to craft this bleak, stagnant world around you—his words shape your reality as long as you don’t push back. The Narrator has finally created his ideal state: a static, isolated space where nothing can change or challenge his vision. But the deeper realization is far more chilling: this "Good Ending" resolves nothing.
  • If you go down the other routes, retroactively you come to see that all the suffering you will have endured in every other route, all of the desperate attempts by the Narrarator to mitigate your leaving, was for a result that doesn’t solve any of the problems the Narrator claimed to care about. Keeping you in the cabin with a "dead" Princess affects no one outside the construct just as no one outside the construct may affect whats happening inside it. Thus in outcome the good ending doesn't actually solve anything, no one outside the narrator is actually affected by it. His grand promises of saving the world, defeating death, or ending suffering are all hollow. In reality, he has constructed this meaningless void to indulge his own desire for stasis—his refusal to deal with the uncomfortable nature of change and continuity (including death, of course). He has removed you from the universe itself, trapping you in a space where no one can be harmed, but where nothing can ever improve or grow either.
  • The horror deepens as you reflect on how shallow and self-serving his plan truly was. The Narrator divided reality itself—splitting it between change and stasis—not to save anyone or alleviate suffering, but because he couldn’t cope with the complexity and uncertainty of the world. This void is his ideal solution, and yet, it helps no one. The protagonist remains stuck, and the suffering outside the cabin continues but the Narrator won’t or can’t see the truth. The sheer scale of the Narrator’s selfish desires and how little they actually achieve is where the real dread lies. That with the power of infinite beings his choice of optimal action was this. He fractured reality itself for a stagnant, hollow dream that solves nothing and leaves everything else untouched.
  • And worst of all, the Narrator might not be aware of just how self-serving and shallow his plan really is. He might genuinely believe that his plan would alleviate suffering and save lots of lives but in reality his plan is just to avoid dealing with change and transformation, not just death!
  • Though considering the one in the mirror explicitly knows you cant affect anything outside of the Construct, its quite likely if not certain that every single Narrarator knows the "Good Ending" helps no one. Far worse than simple delusion is willing banal evil to find a hollow comfort.
• In Happily Ever After, the Princess has taken the Pristine Blade and wears it around her neck, the blade directly over her heart where anyone could press down and kill her. Given the themes of how eternal life sucks the meaning from existence and how relieved and unresistant she is if you slay her...well, it's easy to suppose why she'd do that. She can't say it out loud, with the Smitten around, but she's the only incarnation of the Princess who's hoping you'll slay her.
• In the Princess and the Dragon, you learn that the Princess also has a narrative script. You end up in a cabin and see this: "You are seated in a room that is empty. A chain digs into your wrist, binding one arm to the wall. It is quiet, and you are alone. This is what you deserve. This is what you deserve. This is what you deserve (this continues until it goes past the screen)." This gives us some context to what the Beast says in her route about the cabin talking to her, as well as what you see in the Moment of Clarity. This is the script she gets to hear from her side of things trapped in the cabin. The Princess has a script, and it hates her. As you go down some of the other routes like the Cage you understand that the Narrator explicitly has a script for how things go all the way up to the "happy end" that is meant to shape how things are. She is kept alone, isolated, and told she deserves to suffer before hearing the footsteps of a stranger wielding a knife. Is it any wonder she is willing to suffer almost anything to escape?
  • This also gives a bit of fridge horror and fridge sadness context for The Moment of Clarity. The perspective describing her is not us, we are seeing what the Narrator has described her as being and her suffering that alone for millennia because that's what the script is. Combining that with the Burned Grey calling the Cabin a point of frozen futures and exactly how the Narrator’s previous self made Shifty into her current form becomes more apparent. After all, there are infinite cabins all spread across the Long Quiet, and every one of them has a script with a narrator, essentially describing her into submission... or trying to at least.
    • But since she is pretty much an embodiment of Chaos... well it's clear it just made her want to rebel against her own script... similar to the Long Quiet in that regard. Seems like the Long Quiet and the Princess aren't that different in that regard. Probably another reason why belong to each other, despite being 2 different aspects... they managed to overlap with each other in that regard because of the Narrator being a complete and total asshole.