Extremely unwell on re-betrayed Thorn. She’s a prey animal. She’s a predator who has dropped her claws to please you. She appears more human, yes. The last time she appeared as a gangly creature, you used it as “evidence” that she ended in feral nature over conscious thought.
BUT. Appearing more human or not.
She is still an animal.
This self-loathing, exhausted, starving creature is still governed by instinct beneath the reservoir of pleasantries. Wild or tame, she permits you to choose. And if you choose wrong, it can and WILL cost you both.
And I don’t mean this in the weird “hehe nyaaah” way that folks seem to characterize Witch in, nor the weird elven seductress energy that I see happen a lot. This isn’t cute. This is mental illness, trauma, repression, masking. Because despite her >:3 front when she bests you again, she isn’t happy. She’s exhausted. And one way or another, she’s going to get the final say before her time.
Very saddened to see so little actual representation of her from a disability standpoint, be it physical or mental. She’s a really believable example of what betrayal trauma does to a person, and the concept of rebuilding back up from that just is… So completely unexplored in fic. Does she get worse? Better? More animalistic? It could go a multitude of ways. And personally, I wanna see em all.
i've seen a lot of takes (i am using the word 'take' absolutely neutrally here; and i'm specifying neutrality bc i have started to see that word as having inherently negative connotations in this context and i have no idea if that's just a Me Problem but i figured specificity couldn't hurt)
okay, that got away from me, let me start again
i've seen a lot of takes about The Damsel that have to do with idealization being another kind of dehumanization and how she's Like She Is because you/TLQ are projecting a fantasy onto her and sanding away any traits that don't fit into that fantasy and rendering her into little more than a vessel for your/TLQ's wish fulfillment
and i don't necessarily think that's *wrong* either-- but i think that's also not the complete picture, and that only looking that that half of the image does kind of tend to paint TLQ in an unfairly bad light
because the thing is, in The Damsel's route, TLQ is ALSO being reduced to an archetype just as much as The Damsel herself is! The Princess becomes the quintessential fairytale fair-maiden-in-distress that exists only to be rescued by a knight-in-shining-armor; and TLQ-- if you allow them to be guided entirely by The Smitten-- becomes that quintessential fairytale knight-in-shining-armor that only exists to rescue the fair-maiden-in-distress
The Damsel says over and over, explicitly, that "I just want to make you happy!" and The Smitten in this route is equally preoccupied with making HER happy-- he even says it directly if you start deconstructing her. every other part of his identity has been subsumed to revolve entirely around her just as much as the reverse is true for her.
(speaking of the Deconstructed Damsel, i've also seen Smitten's reaction to that touted as him not caring about her agency-- but again, i always read that as him being unable to see any flaws in her rather than being pleased with the idea of her being biddable, specifically. if you halt the deconstruction his reaction is "she's ALWAYS been perfect" -- he'd think that no matter what she did or said, because his identity revolves around her the exact way that hers revolves around him/TLQ)
even the actions that lead to HEA fit into this, i think-- i read that moment as less The Smitten lashing out at her because she didn't live up to his fantasy-- it still happens even after she's said "i guess we can stay, if that's what you want"-- she's giving The Smitten what he wants, but he's still distressed because SHE'S not happy
i think it's more The Smitten feeling that HE hadn't lived up to HIS half of their shared fantasy. if she's not happy with the idea of "all we need is each other" then it must be because HE failed somehow. if she needs or wants more than him, it must be because HE is not enough.
if he was just better at playing his part, if he just offered her more, if he was just clearer about his devotion--
"if we just showed her the contents of our heart, she'd be happy"
that's not to say that what The Smitten does in HEA isn't incredibly toxic for both of them-- it definitely is, and it clearly makes both the Princess and TLQ miserable. "everything she doesn't know she wants" is a bad mindset to approach a relationship with, whether that mindset is reached through controlling selfishness or a desperation to appease (and i definitely think Smitten is motivated by the latter-- it's no coincidence that we arrive at HEA through a literal and fatal act of self mutilation)
he's definitely the antagonist of HEA, in that he is what TLQ and the Princess and the player need to overcome, but he's not a VILLAIN (which i think is most clearly illustrated in the moment where the Princess admits she's unhappy, that she's never been happy here, and his reaction is to GIVE UP instead of lash out harder)
i never got the sense that The Smitten was ever putting any blame on The Damsel-- he always considered *himself* to be the problem-- he puppeteers TLQ just as much as he does the Princess, even if we can't hear him while she can, and he asks TLQ/the player through her "isn't this enough? isn't this what you wanted?"
which in and of itself is an unhealthy way to approach a relationship-- blaming oneself for every bit of conflict or lapse in synchronicity is just as harmful as laying all the blame on the other person. there IS no blame-- sometimes people disagree or have conflicting needs or desires, and that's not anybody's "fault" because that's just how people and relationships WORK.
...can you believe i wrote out all of this when my original intention was to lay out an entirely different point about a read on The Damsel/HEA routes that wasn't about relationships at all?
OKAY!
THAT GOT AWAY FROM ME LET ME START AGAIN
so i don't think that looking at The Damsel/HEA through a lens of "what does this say about relationships and expectations and respecting other people's agency" is incorrect-- clearly i have a lot of thoughts about that lens!
but i wanted to offer another one that i haven't seen yet:
The Damsel/HEA route as a commentary on what makes a satisfying narrative
if you play out The Damsel route just single-mindedly taking actions to free her-- it's kinda dull, isn't it? like-- it's not without its charms! The Smitten is silly and entertaining and the Narrator's exaggerated pettiness is very funny! but ultimately, that's about it.
potential sources of conflict are brushed aside-- if you took the blade with you, you just drop it and it gets forgotten; the Damsel's hand slips right out of the manacle with no effort or harm; when the Narrator locks the basement door, every 'choice' you make just magically unlocks it right away. and then you're outside, what you wanted to do from the start. ...so what do we do now?
nothing, actually. the chapter ends, and there is no chapter 3. the game itself continues, but that ending feels about as substantial as the Narrator's "Good Ending" where you follow his instructions without question and accomplish his goal immediately.
if you DON'T take either of the actions that lead to one of Damsel's chapter 3's, there's very little variation in The Damsel's story-- pretty much all of it comes down to slight differences in dialogue. there's no "the princess kills you" outcome. the closest thing to an alternate end to The Damsel is if you deconstruct her-- and even then, it feels like less an "alternate route" and more like-- a cheeky acknowledgement of the lack of substance, because that isn't a bug, it's a feature!
but if you introduce conflict-- either in the more direct sense by slaying The Damsel or in the more interpersonal sense by highlighting a mis-match in her and TLQ's desires-- suddenly the story opens up! there are a bunch of new possibilities and a bunch of new outcomes, and all of them are more interesting than "you achieve your goal with trivial effort, hooray!"
Even if you wind up finishing HEA on a note that is superficially very similar to the easy end of The Damsel's route-- you leave hand in hand with her, the narrator conceding defeat, and the last image of her before TSM takes her is a warm, tender smile-- it FEELS so much more like a genuine happy ending-- even though the Princess' face is still streaked and stained from her tears. BECAUSE of that.
it's one of the most heartwarming moments in the game, and one that has made me misty eyed every time i've seen it, and it's BECAUSE of the conflict you had to go through to get there.
conflict is what drives a compelling narrative, is the takeaway. it precludes PERFECT endings, perhaps, but not happy endings-- it's what makes those imperfect happy endings feel substantial and earned.
even the dinner and the board game contribute to the idea-- the description of the food is some really lovely writing, to the point where i sat through and listened to it all again even though i knew nothing really happens during it-- but *nothing really happens during it*. it doesn't move the narrative forward-- you're just as hungry as you were when you started. it just stalls the story in place, and every time you go through it again it's less satisfying until it's outright unpleasant. the description of the meal also notably gets simpler each time, and less detailed-- there's only so much that you can say about it before you run out of things to describe.
the board game is similar-- the way that it's described the first time you play even sounds like the description of an exciting story! and then the board resets, and you do it all again just the same. and so on. the game/story stops being exciting and the wins or losses stop feeling like they mean anything-- because is conflict really conflict, is a challenge really a challenge, if you're always tracing the same path, always making moves where you already know the outcome? it becomes "a slog towards the end"
and this is how i tie the idea of "what Damsel/HEA has to say about relationships" and "what Damsel/HEA has to say about narratives" together:
ultimately, the statements can be summarized the same way "whether in a narrative or a relationship, 'perfection' is unattainable, but you wouldn't actually want it anyway"
conflict, substance, variety
in a relationship there will always be differences of opinion, differing goals etc-- variety between the members of the relationship, knowing and sharing this substantial and non-superficial information about one another, navigating the resultant conflict-- that's what allows the relationship to grow and deepen, and what allows the people in it to grow as individuals as well.
in a narrative, or in Narratives, as a whole, conflict is what makes things HAPPEN, substance makes them feel like what happens MATTERS, like something is being communicated, variety means that you're learning or considering something new-- and those are what make a narrative capable of impacting a person, of changing them, of being remembered
okay so i went a bit insane about the examination of agency in the nightmare's routes, and then this evolved into a deeper examination of the rest of nightmare's whole deal. i am not an analyst so please take everything i say with a grain of salt, but. you know. i find her whole character to be very interesting. rambles under the cut.
warning it is 5k words of me rambling so like. be aware of that
okay, so every route the princess begins by being chained to a wall. this is the first thing she knows. she appears to be the ideal of a damsel in distress - she can't move, can't fight on her own at first, can be easily stabbed if your perception of her stays as a damsel in distress. she has no agency in this. she is forced to wait in the cabin until you, an unknown monster-looking thing comes along explicitly to kill her. and if you're quick and doubtless, she ends her life just as it began - born in a chain in a cabin, died in a chain in a cabin. and that's how you get the spectre.
now, the nightmare you can get on either harsh or soft princess. she's unique in this - as far as i remember, the only other princess like this is the stranger, where you don't meet her at all. (please correct me if i'm wrong though, i'm new to this fandom). and - as pointed out in another analysis, though i can't find it now - she's like this because she speaks to the foundational fear that all princesses have, which is going unperceived. she adapts based on what you are, and while she'll treat you differently if you try to kill her or save her at first, she will always revert to the nightmare when you meet her and then refuse to engage with her at all.
by refusing to perceive her you take away her agency. when you fight her she at least has the chance to fight back. if you manage to stab her in the heart she can at least provoke you into wondering if she's actually dead. but she has so little agency here, fighting for scraps to keep herself alive in the face of a construct that desperately wants her dead, and you leaving her alone says that you don't even see her as someone who's a threat. while slaying her means seeing her as an apocalypse in the making, and freeing her means seeing her as a pitiful thing locked up in a harsh cabin, leaving her alone means seeing her as absolutely nothing at all.
so she fights back. she slips her chains to try and escape from the cabin on her own terms. i genuinely don't think the shutting-down-the-organs thing is a lie on her part - she doesn't really lie, not unless you think she can, and she doesn't want to kill you at all, as evidenced in her chapter II. she knew you were the key to her escape, and then (in her eyes) you have the spite and sheer audacity to kill yourself just when her freedom is in view, just before she can leave for good. you kill yourself just to make sure she can't have the option of leaving at all.
so, to recap: she's locked up, you abandon her, she tries to escape, you die, she dies.
when we come back to her, the cabin bends to her will. her chains are nowhere in sight - whether they existed in the first place is a mystery. what i find interesting is the sort of prelude to her appearance - when you descend into the basement, you're given a choice between staying, running for the stairs, turning left, or turning right.
no matter which way you go, she always finds you.
she gives you the false choice this time. while before you'd spoken to her, tempted her with freedom and autonomy and agency, you'd snatched it away and left her with the worst fate she can imagine. now she's giving it to you - she tempts you with freedom and agency, and then she snatches it away by showing up no matter where you turn. no one ever talks about it but it's just. she'd said so many things to try and coerce/persuade you into helping her leave, and no matter what she'd said you'd left her anyway. you try and go any way to avoid meeting her and facing the princess again, but no matter which way you go she'll always find you.
anyway.
you pass out a few times as paranoid begins his chant, she reacts with mild curiosity and annoyance, and then you're free to question her. someone else pointed out that her mask never changes - it's frozen in this teasing smile, almost like she's smiling over the pain. (which she definitely is, considering what happens in the leadup to MoC.) she repeatedly reinstates her desire to leave and now gleefully talks about the world ending. what has it ever done for her, anyway? she also teases lq with death, just like he teased her with freedom. an eye for an eye.
a few highlights of her dialogue:
when told that she's a lunatic, she responds, "I am what I am. And right now, what I am is in control." she also then teases him with death again. how the tables have turned.
if you've got the knife, you can tell her you might just kill her instead, to which she warns the player and then says, "This place is mine. And I'm not giving you the stairs unless I'm leaving with you." she then demonstrates you by trapping you in the cabin if you decide to slay her right then and there.
everything else is pretty standard - talking about her plans when she's free, talking about what happened after she died. these are interesting in their own right, but not for this analysis.
then, once you've exhausted all dialogue options, you have a few more options, three of which lead to chapter IIIs which have interesting takes on agency as well. you can remain with her, run, leave with her, or (if you have the knife) stab her.
both running and remaining - seemingly opposing actions - lead to the same outcome: the moment of clarity. this happens when you've finally exhausted all other possible outcomes, and all that's left for you to do is to let. her. out. you have no other choice - they're all grayed out. whether it's a broken hero or your own amnesia-blocked trauma doing this is anyone's guess, but the fact remains.
in the leadup to the moment of clarity, she takes off her mask, the thing that's kept her seeming morbidly cheerful and playful throughout the rest of the route despite her multiple open threats and gleeful hatred of the world. the narrator describes, in detail, a horrific existence which she is baring to you in an attempt to get you to help her to leave. she takes off her mask, stops playing nice with you, and tries to get you to see her side of the story, tries to get you to at least pity her and leave.
it's so bad the narrator stops narrating and refuses to go on.
think about this. this is the guy who narrates the entirety of the fury sequence, cool and calm. he describes the nightmarish cabin matter-of-factly a few minutes before, which hero points out. he isn't bothered by you getting killed except that it means his plans are ruined and the world is doomed, and he tells you about various gruesome deaths such as being crushed by vines or watching the prisoner chop her own head off. the only other times i can think of that he despairs like this is when you fail your mission (by freeing or dying to the princess) or when he himself is in danger (getting burned up by apotheosis, getting controlled by the tower). but in nightmare, the vision is so horrible that he cannot stand going on. (paranoid also stops chanting at this time, but he does that before when his concentration is broken. narry is notably VERY DEAD SET on his goal of slaying the princess. he's not like this!)
what this vision is exactly, i cannot tell, but for the sake of this analysis i'm going to interpret it as what she is, behind the mask, behind the facade of a vessel. shifty offloads the nature of her existence, the purest distillation of change - a lifetime, the circle of life, bloom and decay and burgeoning rot over and over and over again, success and fame turning into scandals and dishonor and poverty, humans living and changing into monsters or saints, every choice you make irreversibly altering the tapestry of time you are a part of. she represents the future and its unpredictable nature, and people trying to adapt to changing societal pressures and failing to evolve fast enough, and each unlucky twist of fate that leads to ruin and despair. she is survival of the fittest, and she is testing you.
this is what the nightmare is, under the mask. a monster, a murderer, the essence of death and destruction. this is what you are denying agency.
in this light, refusing shifty's offer of godhood seems almost reasonable. maybe she's trapped here for a reason. death is... pretty bad, isn't it? if our cool-headed narrator doesn't want her out, maybe there's a reason for that. maybe he's loved and lost - maybe he's seeing reflections of himself, in the princess' experiences, and the reason why he's so set on you slaying her is to prevent this nightmare from happening to anyone else.
you die, of course. you have the audacity to die. and when you wake again - we don't know whether she's hopeful you've learned the error of your ways, or whether she's still as forceful as in chapter II, but one thing's for certain - she doesn't win. you still act as the prison guard. you still keep her away from her only goal, and you become determined to keep it that way.
so you guard the door. you slay her. you romance her and question her and murder her and you end up with different voices, each time, different fragments of change that help you evolve to fight her but you always end up with the same princess with the same goal and nothing's getting better and you keep on denying her freedom because she's clearly awful and you're clearly the guard to an irredeemable prisoner.
from her perspective, mind you, she's been locked in a room for no reason, teased with escape, accidentally killed you while trying to leave, entertained your faints and questions, bared her soul to you in order to get you to understand why leaving her alone is such a bad idea, and then you died and promptly doubled down on your decision.
it's hell for her! she doesn't know why you're doing this! she's forced to react to your actions, because you're the one who can take the knife and you're the one who can leave! she lashes out! how dare you! how dare you keep her trapped here! why can't she leave! why can't she be the one in control of her fate! why do you hate her so much, that you are willing to die over and over just to keep her trapped?
so she lashes out at you. she takes vengeance on her captor, and she hunts you again and again, eroding away your defiance loop by painstaking loop. we don't know exactly what she did. we probably don't want to. but it's bad enough to break the voices, shatter many of them beyond recognition, and outright deny us our autonomy in a way that's only otherwise seen in tower.
and i'm not saying she's a saint! i know this whole analysis i've been on her side but that's because most people aren't! she's undeniably cruel to lq, but the thing most people forget is he was cruel first! she is a creature of perception and he denies her even that basic privilege! and she reacts violently! she lashes out and tries to threaten him into staying! has no qualms with sacrificing the world if she can get out! the nightmare cranks the abandonment anxiety of all the princesses up and adds a vicious vengeance to her as well!
but also. this route shows how hero isn't quite so perfect as he appears to be. you get this route by taking hero's third option, which satisfies no one. (it's also worth noting that HEA is also hero's call.) you abandon her, she who literally never has met anyone beside yourself, and that breaks her. so she tries to cling onto you. she possesses you and shatters you and threatens you and wants you there because she knows nothing else and she's already fractured from shifty's splintering, she can't fracture further, so she'll squeeze and claw for any bit of companionship she can get. she'll hunt you down for sport if it means she can spend a few minutes with you perceiving her. she's lonely is what she is. and she's reacting in the worst way possible.
where were we? oh, right. moment of clarity.
eventually, though, after untold numbers of loops where you keep doggedly trying to keep her locked away, she breaks through. she exhausts your options, traumatizes you, forces you to let her out. she will not be defeated. she will have her way. she makes sure of it.
what i also find interesting is that you're not scared of her anymore. paranoia isn't chanting away in the background. there's no more fear - just resignation. no one's happy with your third option, just as the narrator said back when you made it in the first cabin - everyone just wants it to end, and the only voice of dissent is the narrator, who doesn't even remember what's happened and doesn't know how awful it is to keep on trudging through the same, unchanging story over and over and over again. it's not new, or exciting, or changing anymore. it's just painful. you should really just let her out.
ah, but you might be wise enough not to try and pick that third option, and instead choose the more traditional two options - leaving or slaying.
leaving with the nightmare, like most chapter II endings, is pretty straightforward - you comply with her wishes and let. her. out. if you have the knife, there's a fun moment where paranoid says 'fuck you' to the narrator, but otherwise you give her her agency again. you allow her out. you've learned the error of your ways - now you'll let her free.
and, granted, she does wish death onto the world, but - as detailed above - she does kinda deserve it. i'd let her. she should kill people. i want to watch it happen :3
but if you choose to slay her, she reacts not with indignance but with gleeful wickedness. she can't believe you - a paranoid, helpless thing that she'd decided was barely a person at all, just a key that kept getting stuck in the lock, just a helpless little birdie who couldn't even stay alive in the face of her beauty and power - actually killed her! she's too surprised to be angry, i think. and then that surprise turns into realization - she's already figured out that you were always going to keep coming back until you let. her. out, and she can feel herself changing as a result of your changing perception.
and thus we meet the wraith.
while she has the same dialogue no matter where you kill her, you get different voices depending on where you do it - oppy on the stairs/in the cabin, cold if you do it in the basement. you're also forced to kill yourself either way - she tosses you into the void if you betray her, and you're stuck in the basement if you kill her in the basement since, as mentioned before, she won't give you the stairs. you die either from biology or suicide, and then you go into the wraith.
the wraith is a vengeful creature, and for good reason. she tried being nice to you! she tried talking to you, then tried threatening you, then tried forcing you. but you keep refusing! you keep dying, stubbornly, before you can reach her... you keep killing her before she can reach the outside... you keep teasing her with freedom! you keep her away from freedom, so tantalizingly close yet far.
and she's done being nice. she's seen where that's gotten her - a paranoid corpse and a knife through her heart. it's not her fault you keep dying! you just can't help being so afraid of a shackled princess that you're willing to kill yourself to be rid of her! so she's going to take it by force. she'll be evil. that's the only way things get done around here.
so she transforms into the wraith, a half-dead thing with a skeletal grin and grasping claws. you're introduced to her when she twists your ankle and drags you down to her level. she also explains that she was so, so close to freedom last time, but then you locked her away, killed her, and took her body away from her. so she's going to take your body away and march out that door, and you're going to be completely helpless during all of this, just like she was.
interestingly, she also limits your freedom, just like she did last time - if you ask her questions twice, she'll cut you off and take over your body then and there. she's done entertaining your frivolous questions. she wants to leave. let. her. out. she also goes ahead and possesses you without a second thought if you try to struggle or give up
a few interesting highlights from these explore options:
you can claim that you were a victim in all of this, and she says, "Just because someone hurt you doesn't mean you get a free pass to hurt anyone else." some delicious hypocrisy there, wraith, as the voices point out. but perhaps she doesn't even see you as someone who can hurt, thus justifying her possession and torture of you. someone who can hurt would have sympathy for the poor locked up princess in the dark basement, and they certainly wouldn't lock her away and stab her to death. only heartless people do that, and heartless people can't be hurt.
if you tell her that possessing you is evil, she says, "After all you've done, why would I ever care what you think of me?" she's past the point of evil and not-evil. to her, you're evil - you hurt her first, after all. whether a villain sees a hero as evil is irrelevant; to her, you're means to an end, an end that is always dancing just out of reach. possessing you is a necessary step to her goal.
she then possesses you.
now that she's in your head, she realizes that you also have voices in your head. oppy is immediately on wraith's side, because of course he is, and cold's a bit ambivalent about the whole ordeal (as he often is), though he's leaning toward your side. narry and hero are mortified, as they are wont.
if you struggle as she possesses you, paranoid's able to save up a bit of will and uses it to help you defy her one last time. first you lock her away in the basement, then you stab her, then you are literally willing to kill yourself and fall forever to be rid of her. she's sadistic as she tries to force you to move, but if you want to - because you're the one with agency here, still, even as she forces you to shamble toward the door on a broken ankle, even as she usurps your body and forces you to watch - you can throw yourself out the window.
as you fall, she asks you why you hate her. why you've always hated her. why you didn't trust her when you locked her away, why you decided to stab a knife through someone who didn't even want to kill you, why you defied her even with a shattered ankle and her voice in your head. why you decided your autonomy was more worthy than hers, way back at the start, back when she didn't even want to kill you. why you hated her into the nightmare, and then the wraith. why you decided she was better off alone and abandoned.
and honestly? you might have a valid reason at this point. she did break your ankle, after all. she did shut down your organs and act gleeful about the end of the world. she's a monster. she's sadistic and cruel and horrible and she possessed you, for goodness' sake! you've been trying to defend yourself against a threat! you're literally dying all the time near nightmare, and wraith greets you by breaking your ankle! like, i understand why people hate her! i'm not saying she's a good person! no one is, in this series! that's part of the appeal!!!
but she never even tried to kill you. (to those who are going to say well what about the organs-shutting-down-thing, think about it rationally: she needs you to get out. you fainting and dying isn't helping her. it's an active detriment. if she could control it, she probably wouldn't do it, because you being dead just shunts you back into the same hellvoid again.) she never locked you away forever. that was you. you keep taunting her with freedom and then shutting her away. you killed her and trapped her and, to her, you forced her into this. you forced her to hurt you and possess you and make you fear her. this isn't her fault. this is yours. for locking her away, for killing her, for denying her her one wish. she tried, in that first chapter. and you decided she wasn't worth the time of day.
personally, i would've made this choice also branch off into MoC. this game doesn't do fourth chapters - and i understand why - but i feel like it would've been fulfilling. she finally gets her freedom after you kill her and kill yourself and lock her away and keep her from getting out. you wouldn't even have to change much - you've already proven you're not going to let her out again. who's to say that the wraith wasn't one of MoC's iterations, and that the voices leading the charge then were also able to store some will and kill themselves before she could escape?
and maybe they were right. we don't know what happened between the nightmare and MoC, and we never will. maybe she was horrifically cruel, an unfeeling maniac. maybe she was pleading to be let out, and you weren't having that. maybe she was doing both. what we know is she never left the cabin.
finally, i want to draw attention to what, exactly, shifty says about each vessel. she gives us our best glimpse into each vessel's psyche, as someone who is part of them. her little speech often endears me to the princess i delivered, even if i wasn't very fond of her.
for the nightmare, she states, "This one is filled with sadness. A doll abandoned to the company of her darkest impulses. She desires only companionship, but the only thing she knows is how to hurt. She will make for a tender heart."
this reinforces what i've been saying throughout the whole analysis - most of the nightmare's nightmarish qualities come from her desperate need to be perceived by someone else. to be known. you doom her to a life of eternal loneliness, so she gives into her darkest urges and hurts you, over and over again, to try and win you over. she doesn't know how to do otherwise.
for the moment of clarity she states, "This one is a waiting maw. An inevitable destination where all roads end. She will make for a wise heart."
she chased you over and over until you broke, waiting for you to shatter and let her out. no matter what you tried to do, no matter which choices you made or roads you took, she awaited you, and you awaited her. she was made wise through your attempts to defy her, and eventually she won the long game. it was inevitable, really. you did your best. there's just a pecking order, and you'll always be at the bottom.
and about the wraith she states: "This one is loneliness turned to seething. She could not find her strength in others, so she found it in herself. She will make for a driven heart."
when you refused to save her, when you defied her over and over, she realized she couldn't rely on you to save her. you took everything she had away from her. so she took everything you had - a pristine blade, a free body - away from you instead. she used to be lonely, scared - but now she is powerful, hateful, laughing even as you throw her out a window in a spiteful act of defiance. you monster.
but eventually, inevitably, finally, she rejoins the shifting mound as one of her many perspectives. she finds peace, finally, in the eternal choir of the vessels.
do not mourn her. she is not alone anymore.
...
this analysis is not in defense of her actions - she does do some pretty fucked up things in this! pro tip: do not break people's ankles and then possess them, and also do not torture someone and break their will. just a suggestion.
but the reason i'm making this analysis is that so many people will say that nightmare/MoC (and tower, though this analysis isn't about her (but i love her very much and she was so valid for mind controlling the narrator)) is a horrible irredeemable bitch, and then they'll turn around and praise smitten/oppy/cold.
and that feels... more than a little hypocritical to me. oppy is literally a backstabbing bastard who allies with the person who has the most power - he literally tries to stab you in patd! he is born out of the decision to betray the princess when she's finally thought she could trust you, similarly to the nightmare, except this time you're killing her instead of locking her away. in HEA, he decides that free food is worth more than the princess' happiness, and in thorn he wants to stab the princess because of her newfound vulnerability.
and yet i've seen so many analyses of his behavior! so many people excusing him as a sopping wet cat who just doesn't want to die. and it's like, well, okay, i'm not going to stop you from liking oppy. i'm not a cop. i can get why you might like a morally gray kinda sneaky character. but it just feels a little misogynistic when you hate the nightmare, who also resorts to desperate measures in order to not die, don'tcha think?
or cold! i'm gonna be honest i'm a bit more favorable of cold, but he still advocates for killing the princess when he thinks it'll be interesting. he is literally born when you don't even try to hear the princess out in the first place, coldly stabbing her without a second thought. he values novelty over pain. and yet people will praise him and then turn around and criticize the tower for not caring about you at all!
ugh. i just... hate the shifty neg, you know? so many ppl hate her for being 'manipulative' and 'self-centered' while completely ignoring your own hand in shaping her! she is a creature of perception, after all - the damsel and the tower are wildly different, and they both change based on how you act. each princess is a reflection of your own thoughts toward her. and people hate on the nightmare for *checks script* trying to leave the basement she was locked into, and then reacting violently when the only person she's ever known decides to keep her trapped, possibly for forever. like, you all see why she'd do that, right.
...also, like. god forbid women do anything. even if she did do all that organ-shutting-down stuff of her own volition, good for her. she should do it more. she should kill everyone who disagrees with her. she was locked in a basement and abandoned by the first person she met i think she deserves to kill and slaughter.
andddd end of post! again i am NOT, like, a practiced analyst. there are almost certainly things i got wrong during this, and feel free to bring those up in the comments! i will admit this got a bit out of hand and turned halfway into a gushing-about-nightmare post.
also i just want to reiterate that this analysis explores her motives and explains why she's Like That, and again i am not trying to say she's a precious cinnamon roll. just that she's got some reasons for doing what she does.
ALSO ALSO PLEASE DO NOT MAKE THIS POST ABOUT THE VOICES THIS POST IS ABOUT THE NIGHTMARE AND HER ITERATIONS!!! MAKE YOUR OWN POST!!!
sighs, Nightmare as an allegory for mentally ill people and how they're treated by society my beloved…………
All she wanted was to be understood and helped, companionship and compassion, but instead what she got was fear and untrustworthiness because of something she can't help. The only other person that could've helped turned their back on her, saw her as less than nothing. So she did the only thing she could've to wrestle any kinda control for her situation and lashed out, only cementing in others head that she's a monster and deserves to be treated with fear and contained.
And, well, if the only things others see on her is a monster, then she'll show the monster
I've finally met Hunted during his main chapter The Beast (I'd only met him during The Eye of the Needle and the chapters where they're all here) AND OMG I LOVE HIM SM??
Not judging or anything (/gen), but I'd only seen him be characterized in fics with this sort of "overwhelmed and animalistic anxiety" in fics, instead of what I would describe as a "hypervigilant and quick-thinking survival-driven fear" during the Eye of the Needle. And it just kinda confused me bc like, how could he act so different in Eye of needle compared to the Beast and Den?? But that's the thing, he doesn't, the fic just weren't accurate /nm (i still loved those fics btw /gen)
it just reminds me of this post about Paranoid i reposted not long ago about how fandom tends to stick to one character trait of a character and overly exaggerate it to the point it's almost mischaracterizing said character.
and it also reminds me of another character from another fandom who's a bird-like creature too, and they both get mischaracterized in that similar sort of dehumanizing way?
I'm not sure how to explain but i'll try
Basically, It's just so obvious that the author loves the fact that the character is bird-like, that they do not realise that they're kinda 'feti$hising' them??
And like, i've got nothing about letting a half-human half-animal character lean into their animal instincts, but I find it strange how many people do not realise the way they write it is just not believable at all. You can have a character lean into their bird side without having them be dehumanized and infantilized by the narrative. They're not an animal, they're part animal.
Idk, maybe it's because I grew up being dehumanised and infantilised, but if I was part animal/part human, and that i needed to let myself lean into my instincts, I wouldn't take well being treated by my friends as if I'm only an animal???? Or called 'birdie' or shit like that??? Like, i know i don't like pet names in general, but i can't be the only one who find calling a half bird half human character 'birdie' kinda weird?? I'm sure most mean it in a very sweet way btw, but i always think that if i was a half cat half human, and i was called 'catgirl' or 'kitty', i wouldn't take it well lmao?? even as teasing???
Kinda reminds me of how dehumanized and infantilized disabled people are. Having "animalistic behaviors" does not make one less human. idk how else to say it.
I'm not sure I'm making any sense, i've seen nobody talk about this and it makes me feel kinda lonely ngl x,)
I just needed to ramble a bit about it, it's not an "issue" only related to STP btw, which is why im talking about it actually xP it's weird how many fandoms i've seen this phenomenon in. I know many people only create art for fun and simply do not care about believability, and they have every right to do so, but sometimes i think that some people just genuinely do not think about it because nobody talks about it!! I'm only sharing this in hope that I can make authors self-reflect a bit so they can write "better" :)
Just, remember please. You're writing characters with consciousness. They're not animals, they're not birds, they're not just their instincts, they're not just their wings. Even while being chased, Hunted isn't nothing more than his instincts, he's clever, a quick-thinker, observant, worried, has good reflexes, takes risks, his voice is soft, maybe he'd even be delicate if he wasn't being chased! and many others! He's more than his name, than his title, than his instincts. He's not just a prey, he's a Voice, created to help us survive and out of fear of the Princess.
(btw im not using examples i've seen in fics bc i think it'd be rude af to do that.)(i've still mostly enjoyed the fics i've read that had this problems btw <3, i just couldn't get it out of my head and i hate that i see nobody speaking about it so, here i am ig!)
saw something about the damsel being fake and her love for you is entirely scripted and for some inexplicable reason this made me mad even though I am the firmest advocator of what said person said with a sea of friends who say she does love you. so.
Yes, the damsel was molded to love you. Yes, it was scripted. It wasn't actually real. And the Deconstructed Damsel is there to prove that. It's a commentary on the creator's part- they're pointing out the one dimensionality of your classic fairy tale princess, how she isn't a real person and we're romanticizing poorly sketched out plot devices.
However.
While the Deconstructed Damsel is an illustration of how our actions shaping the princess can invalidate her traits and identity when viewed from the right angle, that doesn't only apply to the damsel. Sure, it was given to her to make a point about the kinds of stories they're drawing themes from, for contrast and stuff, but our actions mold every single princess, not just her.
We molded the Witch to hate us. We molded the Adversary to fight us. We molded the Prisoner to distrust us. And we molded the Damsel to love us. It's part of what makes chapter three so interesting- we let our creation out in the wild, and then the environment and the choices she makes helps us to fill in the finer details, as well. It's why I personally believe the Thorn is the only one capable of loving you- we didn't make her to love us. We just made her to experience complexity, like all the other chapter threes, except this one involved compassion.
Yeah. The Damsel is a computer program we encrypted with affection. But if we're gonna be real about that sort of thing, we also have to look into our beloved Tower's domination, our Stranger's mystery, our Spectre's grief.
None of it was ever real. Just a choice we made and a role she played.
Seriously these are very, very major spoilers. Think before you click. You could not possibly get more spoilery here.
Last warning.
Okay. Ramble time.
I just think we as a fandom don’t talk enough about the abject horror of the nature of the Construct itself. Like, I’m 99.9% sure the lack of color in this game was said to be intentional design, and we know why that is.
It’s made very clear that the majority of the Construct is made up of The Long Quiet, and there’s a heavy implication that follows suit, then, that anything white or light colored is also made up of the Shifting Mound, and that’s partly why TLQ can change the look of the Cabin Interiors/the later chapters forests (when “her influence” — AKA her being — is slowly spreading): because she is a being of perception.
And I think a lot of us as players do probably see and acknowledge that (or at least the TLQ part).
But I don’t think we actually conceive enough of what it could mean.
The Narrator (the original version of him that made the Construct, at least) is actually quite violent to begin with, when you think about it — in his desperation to evade Death for humanity and all living beings, however noble, he tore these two beings apart from one another and made them separate.
We know this much.
But it goes so much farther than that. Yes, he locked the Princess/TSM up and put them both in this big murder simulator with several different layers to it, but he’s also cruel to TLQ, and not just because he’s trying to get TLQ to kill TSM.
In the Happily Ever After route for the Damsel, when Smitten splits TLQ’s ribs open to show the Damsel their heart, we see the threads of his being come out and surround the room — threads, which, I’ll remind you, look exactly like the rest of the Construct when it is not taking on any particular Chapter shape — like when we visit TSM every time we bring a vessel.
This world — the Construct — is literally made up of TLQ’s innards.
Let that sink in for a minute.
What in the everloving FUCK did the Narrator’s original self do to TLQ when he first made him??? Just think about it for awhile.
We’ve seen that TLQ can be “unwound” within that space and returned to his mortal form without much trouble or harm coming to him other than suffering (unless he believes otherwise), so….did he actually gut TLQ and pull out the material he needed before putting him back together?
Even this being that the Narrator claims to feel so positively towards and wants to save, He most likely quite literally tortured and ripped apart to achieve His goals. :/
IDK, I just think we need to talk a Hell of a lot more about the implications here.
I’ve heard people talk about different voices as if they hold their own individual personalities. And I agree, they sort of do. But also, I think they sort of represent feelings that the Long Quiet would have had anyway.
Like, there’s a lovely meta post on here about how the Voice of the Stubborn loves the Princess more than he gets credit for, because there’s a route where all the Voices in it end up being okay with having to kill her and going along with the Narrator after all, except for him. Stubborn wants to keep pushing at the fabric of this construct, and furthermore refuses to let the Princess go.
There’s also many routes where, without the Voice of the Smitten hanging around, the Voice of the Broken is basically in love with the Princess in his stead. He’s afraid of her, but he also speaks of her with a worshipful kind of awe. To the point where other Voices comment on it, Paranoid even claiming his job is to keep Broken in check.
What I think is that all these Voices are influenced by the urges of the Long Quiet. They’re extensions of his thoughts. And the Long Quiet has a drive to doubt the Construct, to fear the Princess, and to love the Princess. And depending on what route he takes and what Voices he gets, different Voices end up having the job of embodying these desires.
If Skeptic doesn’t show up, one or more of the Voices, even Hero, will still embody the urge to doubt the Construct, and will be more stubborn about it depending on the situation. If Smitten isn’t there, at least one of the voices has to embody the part of the Long Quiet that loves the Princess. And there’s also a part of the Long Quiet that fears and doubts the Princess, and depending on the route, someone will feel this the strongest. Even if it’s not that strongly, like in the Thorn path, where the Hero feels it.
Do you see. The Voices do have their own personalities, but they’re also part of the Long Quiet, and depending on the route and the situation, one or more of them will be the most strongly influenced by these different parts of the Long Quiet.
When the Stubborn or the Broken loves the Princess, it’s not necessarily unique to them, or that they don’t really feel it because the Long Quiet makes them. It’s because … no matter what the situation, someone would have to feel this part. Because the Long Quiet can’t help feeling it in some way, always. And depending on what Voice you get and what personality they have, someone does feel it, to varying levels of strength.
And the same goes for everything and everyone else. Just like how the Shifting Mound sees each vessel as a part of herself. Maybe it’s not exactly the same. Maybe the Long Quiet’s relationship to the Voices is a little different than the Shifting Mound’s and her Vessels. But they’re all still extensions of the Long Quiet, and the way they feel is influenced by things he feels, in different ways.
