Voice Of The Pillow

Sorry for double posting but APPARENTLY those commission scammers have showed up on Tumblr at least for the first time for me.

For those who don’t know what I am talking about, there were/are commission scams going on in Instagram and even places like Artstation where people would pretend to be interested in your work and try to commission a pet or portrait for the sake of trying to get your bank details. Here’s how to (somewhat) sniff them out:

1- They don’t seem to be an average customer/ person that would be involved in your fandom, or has a blank template for an account or don’t even follow you.

2- They ask you to draw a portrait or a pet picture either for themselves or their children/family.

3- They promise to overpay you (in the hundreds) and do not listen to you even if you firmly state the price is cheaper.

4- They are constantly asking for your email name, or private details regarding things like banking details or passwords or other private information others should not know.

5- They try and over reassure you they mean no harm, try to guilt you into giving them the info, or become aggressive over you not giving them what they want.

What should you do if you come across one of these guys? My best advice is to block and report. Sadly these people jump account to account so there isn’t really much to do other than spread this info to prevent artists from being scammed.

(repeated like a mantra while rubbing my temples) i will stay silly and not allow the world to make me bitter and cruel. i will stay silly and not allow the world to make me bitter and cruel. i wi

WAIT omg the Voice of the Smitten as an aromantic who overcompensates. He's not in love with the Princess. He's in love with the idea of loving the Princess, because that's what he's "supposed" to do. He wants so badly to make it work and be in a conventional romantic relationship, and he really does want her to be happy, but he holds the traditional idea that an important part of masculinity is protecting a woman and providing for her and being both her knight in shining armor and her devoted husband. He expresses love weirdly because that's his idea of what love is "supposed" to look like. He doesn't understand romance, but he's fixated on the storybook projection of it, allegory of the cave style, so he leans strongly into that archetype and gets it all wrong. I really think the Smitten just doesn't want to be alone. Poor boy, unlearning heteronormativity and embracing relationship anarchy would've saved you

I hope none of you disappear in the coming days. Seriously don't do anything that can't be undone.

The Marching Band collab comic I made :3

Found my fav STP route recently. Dragon my beloved. Your horrifying beak mouth was an impossible-to-refuse lip syncing challenge 💖

Shoutouts to @blacktabbygames for making such a cool game!

posting it here: my secret santa gift for @iamrealiswear !! act 5 sif, from the prompt “please torture siffrin”. I went thru like 50 different ideas but settled on “the act 5 scene where Siffrin holds themself is pretty tormenting I think”.

non-glitch version below the cut, + the stomach/period cramp Siffrin I drew as a warm up for this gift that also fit the prompt.

@isat-secretsanta-2024

Slay the princess is the exact kinda game where all of the fans should be making their own princesssonas and longquietsonas and self inserts and oc aus. this game is the kinda story meant to be reshaped and remolded and made into your own visage and we should be doing that. what is your version of the princess, what road do you take to get them, what does your long quiet look like, how perfectly do your ocs fit into the themes of this game? tell me, tell me, tell me!!!!

Something I made while dealing with my own stuff and hoping drawing this would pick me up somehow. Maybe it worked.

FT my cat. His name is Mischief

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!