#much like donkeyskin finds excuses not to marry her father because that would be incest

[runespoor7]

sleep deprived and struck by a revelation

Qin Su and her mother are reverse Donkeyskin

[traumendesmadchen]

Spotlight: The magical dresses

Remember Kionna’s abusive and creepy father in Chronotopia? Well, unsurprisingly, she’d rather not marry him 8). And that’s when the magical dresses come to play!

They are merely excuses made by the princess to gain time and avoid the dreaded wedding but the king does manage to provide them. Which gives her a perfect reason to have extraordinarily beautiful clothes. In the original Donkeyskin, the heroine brings the dresses with her in her exile and just wears them from time to time to feel like a princess again (and make the prince fall for her). In Chronotopia, this is also very much the case but they also embody Kionna’s vanity. After all, those dresses are cursed gifts from a mad father!

The discrepancy is right here between the title and the notes X).

Each dress portrays a theme and I should mention first that Anako did a stellar job at coming up with a vision for all of them! Sadly, the first one is also the result of a little disagreement. In Donkeyskin, the princess asks for a gown the color of weather, which basically means the sky. But I always found a blue dress a bit boring compared to the other two; it did not feel magical enough. That’s why I wanted to subtly subvert the tale based on a pun: weather and time are the same word in French. So I asked for a dress the color of time, which I thought would be much more interesting and challenging. Unfortunately Anako really wanted to do a weather dress and she got the last word. The result is very pretty…however this is my least favourite dress because of that missed opportunity. In the end, it doesn’t really change a lot for the player so I bet you didn’t really notice the discrepancy X'D.

The moon dress is the most incredible one, no question!

The second one, the dress the color of the moon, is probably the one I like the most though. Anako’s idea was to mix French medieval fashion with other countries’ fashion to create unique and mystical outfits. If the previous dress was European in design, this one takes inspiration from China. She did tons of research on the different dynasties of that time to find the right feeling, with transparent veils being associated with the moon. It was incredibly hard to choose one outfit as Kionna looks lovely in all of those and the result is breathtaking. Yet that little disagreement from earlier did have an impact on the moon dress too as I originally wanted to switch their colors and we ended up with two blue dresses instead.

Shield your eyes: Kionna is simply dazzling!

And finally, the third one, the dress the color of the sun, is the most dazzling of them all. In Perrault’s version it is implied that this is the nicest gown as it’s the one Donkeyskin wears when she first meets the prince. While the moon dress was inspired by China, this one is inspired by Arabia. This choice was more obvious because it was the most elegant combination, the one that looked most regal to me. And I think it’s interesting how Anako managed to find the right balance between westernizing the outfit and keeping the original foreign influence.

In a way, those two updates perfectly reflect each other: if Donkeyskin’s greatest flaw is the incest subplot, then the magical dresses are surely its best asset. After all, instead of one pretty but vague dress for the ball, you get three thematical ones that look almost magical! 

One more reason to give Donkeyskin a try, I’d say. Or you can just read Chronotopia: Second Skin directly and learn more about this forgotten tale 8). Works too~