#SLAY I SAY!!!!

[trisarahtops-sketches]

Just dragon girl things <3

[aaronstveit]

okay i wanna play. what's the first song on your wrapped that has a color in the title?

[multongsisig]

She asks that I tell you to remember her. You won't.

[reinbouxsworld]

twisted wonderland × kimetsu no yaiba (au!)

based on this post here.

I this this on a a japanese song only playlist and a wave of hiperfixation. So heres the context: Yuno (Yuu) and Leona were newly married and lived on his family’s land. On the night after the Town Below festival, Yuno returned home to find not only her husband’s family dead but also her younger brother, Grimm. Leona was the only one still alive, but as she tried to lead him down the mountain, she discovered that he was no longer human.

Silver, a demon slayer, confronted Leona. However, after witnessing him protect Yuno, he chose to spare the newly turned demon’s life, and send the couple to his master, Lilia.

Vil and Rook are the Tamayo and Yuuchiro of this universe. Vil lived more than 300 years only on serving face and hate, nonetheless showed kindness by helping Yuno and Leona after their encounter with the Demon King.

Ace and deuce are both slayers, one ranking above yuu. The three met during a mission, and the two decided to stick by her side from that point on.

[chloesimaginationthings]

So that FNAF 2 movie teaser huh,,

[toxooz]

also been thinking abt pooki with his cunty scarf💅

if my next drawing post isnt the comic update take me out back and shoot me like a sick dog

[earthyorangeaid]

My brain as soon as I saw the Ithaca saga on Spotify…. Finally…

[emperor-princess]

I'm really enjoying Slay The Princess

[frogatz]

faaallen aaangels and faaatal attraaactioooon ... the end of an aaage and the end of affeectioooon

[welcometogrouchland]

I have a LOTT of sketches I could post rn but these 2 are recent and I'm fond of them <3 Steph costume ideas and Tim/Damian cringe bickering inspired by Batman: Brave and the Bold #18!

[thegreendiamondart]

Narinder’s April Fools prank on the bishops

Im slightly iffy on my design for Nari when he’s a god. I might tweak it so there can be a tiny bit more gold included.

Versions without text and blur!

[cheeseandcake-from-ao3]

[quicksilversnails]

It's so fun how the Princess and the Dragon acknowledges and plays with game mechanics that are assumed to be non-diegetic, and uses them to add insight to the story/characters.

The title card is a really obvious example, being something that TLQ actually sees and can comment on, and something that the Princess hadn't ever seen. What most would assume is just a framing device for the player is a real element of the world/construct.

I think it emphasizes how the story that the Narrator constructed is only "meant" to be told to TLQ. After all, The Narrator only appears in TLQ's mind, providing elaborate descriptions and attempting to contextualize the events of the game as a heroic task to save the world. Meanwhile the Princess is all alone, with no title cards or exposition, no context for why any of this is happening to her. The story revolves around her, but it doesn't care about her beyond her designated role, as something to be slain and hated. Her perspective is irrelevant to the Narrator's plan, so she doesn't get the fancy presentation or necessary context: she doesn't deserve it.

There's also those long stretches of dialogue where the voices talk to each other in TLQ's mind without progressing the story. They're occasionally acknowledged by the Princess elsewhere (Prisoner, Nightmare) but P&tD makes it very explicit and confirms that time is actively passing during these conversations, with TLQ staring in silence for who knows how long.

(Personally I don't think all of the voice dialogue is necessarily in real time, if only because some Princesses wouldn't have had the patience for it. Like if you had really stood still for that long, the Beast would've definitely eaten you... she's not waiting for you to finish thinking lol)

This one I think is more for humour, but it also draws attention to how much of the inner conversation the Princess is missing in normal chapters, when the voices aren't actively speaking to her through TLQ's body. Where we're having vibrant debates or key information revealed by the Narrator, she just sees a silent, staring figure. Speaking of the Narrator, He's completely absent from the Princess' POV, either because He doesn't want to speak to her or is somehow unable to (He does say in Tower that she's not supposed to be able to interact with Him...) Again, the story was not made to be told to her, so she isn't given His context, and because the player is usually so immersed in TLQ's perspective, they probably wouldn't realize just how much she's missing until they see things from her perspective.

One other example: if you choose to [Say nothing] immediately after you excise yourself, the Princess reacts to it:

I just find this so hilarious tbh, and the fact that she repeats back those exact words implies that she literally senses the text written in brackets. If you do it once you're back in the basement, she says this:

I wonder if it's the same for the Narrator/voices... do they also “feel” your actions while you’re choosing them? Do they hear you say (Lie) before you lie? When Skeptic said "Wink" out loud did he actually choose a dialogue option with [Wink] in brackets?? Ok that last one's a joke but there's lots of potential here

I just think it's cool because the average player wouldn't think twice about any of these things, because they seem like simple stylistic/game design choices. In a game where all player input is through dialogue options, the square brackets are an immediately understandable way to convey action, as opposed to plain text. In a game structured around repeating loops, it makes sense to make those loops distinguishable for players by separating each loop with a title card, and the chapter naming convention works as a nod to the fairytale storybook aesthetics the game draws from.

But by placing you into the Princess's head and acknowledging those design choices as diegetic elements that change depending on your perspective, it forces you to reevaluate your experiences: the things you didn't think were really "part of the game" and the experiences you didn't realize weren't universal. It exposes your hidden privileges, the luxuries and structural supports you have compared to the Princess that you don't even notice because you've never experienced the alternative.

It might make you realize how the way you perceive and conceptualize the world might be very different from how others conceptualize it (Tony's recent ask about the multicoloured glass in HEA could also play into this in a fascinating way, with the mismatch in perception between TLQ and the Narrator's script). It's all just very cool for a game that's based on perception.

It also makes me wonder... what other elements of this game are diegetic that we just haven't paid attention to?

Well, I think that the captions are probably also diegetic. TLQ occasionally refers to the voices by their complete titles despite them not ever referring to each other by those titles, instead opting for descriptors like "jumpy one" or "the worst one" or "rage boy" or "chilly little freak" lol. For a direct comparison, Paranoid exclusively calls Smitten "the lovesick one" or some variant in HEA, but TLQ refers to him by his full name using quotation marks, as if he's quoting something he's read:

The voices don't seem aware that these titles exist, while TLQ does, despite them sharing a mind. Also, when the Princess shares a body/mind with you, she never uses their titles either. In the Spectre/Princess and the Dragon, she calls Hero "the nice one", Cold "the quiet one" or "cold little freak", and the Narrator "the bossy one" or "that murder-happy know-it-all". Spectre describes the voices as shards of broken glass on the floor, so she likely perceives them completely differently to how we/TLQ see them.

Even The Narrator isn't aware of His title. If you call Him that in the mirror conversation, He says "'The Narrator'. I suppose that's my job, isn't it?", reacting to the title as if it's His first time hearing about it. There's also this question from the fourth Shifty encounter:

It seems like the titles are presented specifically for The Long Quiet/decider, and that they somehow reflect how TLQ perceives the voices/Narrator, since TLQ takes credit for "calling him" that. If the captions were specifically shown to TLQ in the same way that the title cards are, it'd explain how he has this information without it ever being verbally told to him, and why the Princess doesn't know their titles even when she's sharing your body.

But besides the captions, I think it could be fun to interpret the game as if most, if not all of its game mechanics exist in-universe. The choice menu, the music, the cursors, the save/load icons, saving/loading in general, the title screen, the Clown Princess living in the walls (game files), you name it. Let’s peel away these game mechanics cell by cell! Let's see what meaning we can find together, let's see what we're made of!

[phantasm-echo]

Echo with a laser canon arm capable of causing mass destruction??? Don’t mind if I do… (I rewatched young justice a while ago and mercy’s arm really inspired me lmao)

[automatisma]

It's so interesting to me that Slay the Princess is the kind of art that leaves little room for structured interpretation of the text because it's so good at exploring what is it about (almost everything you want to say about it is already in the text! just go play it again), while easily supporting a lot of derivative reimaginings, remixes and fanworks.

[sapphorror]

The Narrator's perspective only gets more horrifying the longer you think about it. Like, imagine being an Echo of yourself—one of many, all made to serve a very particular purpose and knowingly living on borrowed time, if 'living' is even the right word for your current state of pseudo-existence.

You've inherited the mission of a dead man—it's literally the only thing left that you can do before fading, so you sure as hell better believe in it; the alternative would be unbearable. Only you keep failing. With every loop that you don't remember, your lack of agency in this situation becomes starker—you can influence small things, sure, but it becomes increasingly clear that you have no real power, no matter how personally invested you are in the events unfolding in front of you. You are, after all, only an Echo. You've forfeited the right to meaningfully engage with the world.

Worse—every loop you're made aware of is another time you've failed, with unimaginable consequences, though you had no control over these previous iterations of yourself and can't even learn from their mistakes. Everyone around you is operating on a shared perception of reality that you are not part of, will never be part of. After a few repetitions, you are, ironically, the least informed person in the room. All you have left to go on is an evidently outdated script. At the same time, everyone else is experiencing a contiguous version of you, comprised of parts that are, in some sense, also you, while at the same time existing at a complete remove from your current perception of self. Whatever you don't know you did—that's you now. You are, after all, only an Echo. You've forfeited the right to define your own identity, never mind know what it is.

Even worse—this has trapped you within a stagnant hell of your own creation. Nothing you say or do really matters in terms of your own self (the rest of the world is a separate issue entirely). Anything you've come to believe—say, for totally hypothetical example, that you were wrong actually and your envisioned paradise is really a hell beyond any you had the capacity to envision—has about as much permanence as a drawing in the sand. 'You' will continue, exactly as you were, no matter how much you might like to change your behavior. Every possible future has already been set in stone. You are, after all, only an Echo. You've forfeited the right to say anything you haven't already said.

For some reason, no part of any of this has made you feel more comfortable and at peace with the general concept of finality.

The really, truly absolute worst part, though?

There is no one for you to blame but yourself. And that's exactly what turns your story into such a tragedy.