Probably Procrastinating

Currently can't shut up about Slay The Princess

[perpetuallyscreamingbird]

I think the voice of the cold intrests me as a character so much because he's such a real and visceral response to their circumstances. Which is true for all the voices and each is intriguing to dig into in a different way, but this post is about cold the others will get their turn (probably)

Imagine with me, for a second, you've only just learned what it means to exist and you've already been discarded.

You've done everything you were told without question. This is your purpose and you were promised Good at the end of it and you do it and you do it well. Your guide, and authority figure you should be able to trust who is seemingly so much more experienced in this world than you even seems happy with you. You must be doing it right

Then you're abandoned. The only Good for you is an eternity of nothing. The only way you can be Good is to hurt others and to not exist at all.

Wouldn't that leave you empty? Hurt, clawing for something, anything to fill that void. You had Purpose and it turned out to mean nothing, you had a vague promise of Good and it turned out to be nothing.

You can't be Good, can't fulfil that Purpose when all of it means nothing, when you've been lied to and led to be locked in a box for the rest of time. And rather than feel that hurt, you claw it out of yourself with your own two hands, and the same implement you'd used to fulfil your Purpose.

All he wants is that Good he was promised, and to him that's the opposite of that box. It's the opposite of Nothing. It doesn't matter if it hurts him, if it hurts somebody else, if it feels good or feels bad, he just craves something that will make him feel. That will make everything worth it in the end, that will free him from the monotony and inherent stagnation of the situation he's in. What use does he have for morality in pursuit of this? What use is morality in this situation anyway? Where everything is being presented with such grand consequences, where everything is both right and wrong, where these consequences never seem to quite stick for him regardless? So he simply encourages action, in whatever form that may take.

Because it's so much more intresting if it's an active choice. Something is always better than that empty cabin surrounded by nothingness all around he's subconsciously running from. Because cold is most aware of their godly nature, and so is most aware of whats always missing no matter what they do. Who tries to fill that emptiness, first with Purpose then with Action.

For a voice that claims to feel nothing at all a lot of his drive is purely emotional. He wants to be intrested, he wants to be engaged, he wants to feel something even if it hurts. He wants to feel connection to this body the same way the other voices do, and yet criticises them for feeling in that way.

At the core of it all, he wants back what he's lost. And by his very nature he cannot have it.

[perpetuallyscreamingbird]

Love love love the way the voices are all their own distinct personalities but there's those little ways they bleed into each other that show they all come from the same person. Or god in this case.

Each voice is its own unique captured experience shaped by the circumstances that created them as much as the vessels are, they just manifest differently because The Long Quiet is not built to change and to grow, so instead of adapting himself he takes the old parts of him and tucks them away in his subconscious, listens to them and the new insights on the world they give his otherwise stationary perspective. He learns, but he is not bound by who he was before.

The voices all capture distinct reactions to the situations, but theres moments where you can see them bleed together, moments where the person they belong to shines through because they're not quite so different as they initially appear. Cold and Stubborn with their disregard for the body as an entity that needs to function the way a normal body should, Skeptic and Opportunist both analysing a situation to find the perfect time to strike back, Broken and Smitten both desperate for The Princess to see them and to make them whole even when she hurts them, Paranoid and Cheated in their suspicion and their manipulation of the construct, the list goes on.

Somewhere in the middle, all these unique perspectives bleed together in a way that makes it believable they came from the same source and I just think that's neat. I can believe Cold and Smitten are both faces of the same god because, well. Human nature is complicated, and both Cold and Smitten have that same single minded contempt for The Narrator that binds them together even when their existence seems to contradict each other.

A mind is a fascinating, spiralling thing, and nobody is able to be described in just a few sentences. The Long Quiet is opportunistic and loving, enduring in the face of hardship and broken by circumstance, the god created to kill death and just the unlucky guy who happens to be stuck on a path in the woods.

And at the center of it all, they're The Hero. The voice to which all other voices lend a piece, however small, one of the only voices who will never directly oppose The Long Quiet's decisions because within him is the capacity to make all those choices and more.

There's something beautiful about the way The Long Quiets mind unfurles throughout the routes, how it helps you understand what's going on both more and less

[perpetuallyscreamingbird]

Going feral over "this is a love story" because it so is.

How could the Narrator tear a god in two and expect them not to love each other? Not to love the first thing they knew that wasn't them, not to love that lost part of themself? Maybe it's because hating yourself is such a human thing, it's impossible to imagine a being torn in two loving its lost parts. Even when they're not perfect. Especially when they're not perfect.

Even when you get the worst outcome on a route, or one of the vessels with so many reasons to be angry, The Shifting Mound still loves The Long Quiet because they're gods, and death is to them what a paper cut is to us and this too shall pass and she loves him through all of it.

They are everything. They can be as good as they can be bad. They can love each other and hurt each other and those things are rarely mutually exclusive. They can meet afterwards and talk with kindness. There isn't a single part of them that doesn't have the potential to be something better. There isn't a single part of them that doesn't have the potential to be something worse. They're the same entity. Theyre the only different being the other has ever known. This is a love story.

[perpetuallyscreamingbird]

Today on ideas that have been rattling around my brain, there's something in The Moment Of Clarity and Happily Ever After being parallels of each other.

Okay hear me out, I know they're fundamentally two very different routes but like. Think about it. Both of them are results of choosing to stay in the cabin with your chapter 2 Princess- and there's very different reasons to stay with The Nightmare vs staying with The Damsel, but ultimately it's the same. You refuse to move it forward, and you stay in the cabin.

Both very much explore why what The Narrators doing is... well intention but kinda sucks. I mean that's explicitly stated in Happily Ever After, but it's also still there in MOC.

Happily Ever After is the idea that if change and decay were to stop entirely in a perfect world, eventually everybody would be miserable because there would be no growth, no change, no challenge. Even if its nice, even if it's comfortable, it's not real. Not in the way The Narrator wants it to be.

The Moment Of Clarity is an idea I've seen floated about a lot in the fandom - the fact that perfect, eternal now wouldn't be the reality for a lot of people. Not everyone would be in a good situation when change dies. And without change, when you're in an awful situation, how do you get out?

You dont. You stay trapped with Your Nightmare. Forever. And like, The Narrator doesn't recognise this as another consequence of his actions because it's not what he wanted. Why would he see this and see his own decisions playing out in real time? But its another path of the same choice: stay with your Nightmare, stay with your Damsel.

Stay in the cabin.