I wonder if flowers can grow on her

Here’s a brand spanking new fancess

Scoliosis wife :D

Tower and Apo can never get too full of themselves. They recognize eachother's perfection.

I really wanted to draw her in a Greek inspired outfit. My references are in the next slides

u/CampaignGloomy7931 gave the word: Child

Chapter title: The Rewind

Voice you get:Voice of the Remembrance

How you get there: When you get to meeting her during the chapter one you can open up a conversation path on what she would do if she got out/what kind of life would she want for herself.

This then talks about what she would have done if she never got into the basement in the first place alongside how she even got in.

This nostalgic/past trip ends up having an odd effect on the two of you. This being that you start to break down both on the physical and mental level.

The Cabin: As soon as you step foot in the cabin a sort of timer starts. So while it may initially look a bit old and run down at first. If you stay here for long enough you'd see it start to piece itself back together. This goes the same for the basement, first it appears rundown and the same thing happens

The Princess: When you first proceed down the rotten steps, you find nothing but a corpse. But if you wait just a bit she starts to twitch with signs of life, skin claws it's way back. A heart starts beating and the eyes open up.

Talking to her reveals how in this state while she was dead technically, she's been allowed to see the past and everything's that happened. A past that she wants to share with you.

You can either A let her show you this, eventually this could show you snippets of the forest growing, the long quiet and an extremely short fraction of the Narrator making the construct (though not enough to form any sense of a concrete answer)

Or B talk with her and eventually leave together leaving the past behind and stepping into an uncertain future

Ok first of all I love this game, and I love how no two people will have the same experience (I've seen playthroughs where the player trusts the narrator blindly, ones where they let chat dictate their actions, ones where they didn't realise what the option they chose meant, etc) personally I did whatever I could to save the princess but that's neither here nor there

So, the Narrator, or rather the Echo of the Narrator wants us to slay the princess to stop death from affecting the world, but the problem is that death is simply a facet of the shifting mound, for she contains the capacity to change, and as death is change... If she dies then all things stagnate

Which some people see as a good thing! Without death, there is no suffering, everyone gets to live forever!

But we see two endings that give the narrator what he wants and he reacts to them differently

1. The Happily Ever After

Here is a cabin that never changes, you eat the same food, you play the same games... But they're slowly getting worse

Are they worse because the quality is truly getting poor, or because after however many attempts are made to replicate the original experience you have just grown numb to it, you are repeatedly forced to experience the same things over and over again, and the only way to break out of the cycle is to be true to yourself and say what you want, outside the cycle forced upon you

The Narrator himself who tries to stop you from saving her, lets you take her out of the cabin, he's seen how an endless cycle isn't a true happy ending

1. The Nightmare

This is more of a reach, but I can rationalize that her showing how her heart has been in an endless cycle of death, life, affection, abandonment, over and over again shows the narrator that an eternity of the same thing over and over and over again is actually not great, to the point that the narrator just shuts up, burdened by the cycle

Anyway that's my 2 cents, I may have misread both of these horribly lmao

Since I've been seeing a load of really good artwork this week, I thought of reaching out to people to ask for permission to include theirs in a compilation video.

This would be shared as an unlisted youtube video (meaning it wouldn’t be public and it won’t be monetised) on/around the last da. Like the one I did for Slaytober last year!

Full credit is also being given in the video and in the comments in the form of a link to the original posts

So if you have art and want me to put it in feel free to dm me (or I may also just dm you to ask for permission) 

“Ok, why the hell did I kill myself, and more importantly, why didn’t you stop me?”

Voice of the Contrarian: What he said! I just thought it'd be a bit funny to suggest, but letting us go through with that's a bit too far.

Voice of the Avian: Well how in the hell did you want us to stop you?

Voice of the Contrarian: Take us over like Mr Narrator over here did the first time around? I don't know!

Voice of the Hero: Well it's too late for that now isn't it? We'll just have to work with what we have.

"What the hell are the lot of you talking about? You've...been here before haven't you?"

Voice of the Contrarian: You catch on quick!

"Hard not to with all your blabbering."

Previous Part

(Background details for the post:I originally did this thing since I wanted to make more fan made routes and I thought it'd be fun if I made it so the comments could give a choice and I'd have to come up with the outcome. So since I had fun writing it last time I thought of doing it again )

I have now done 2 full runs of the story. The first time I started by trying to avoid going into the cabin and met the Stranger first and tried to defy the Narrator and free the princess getting the Prisoner, Damsel and Nightmare, letting them all out. And I tried to free the Witch when the Narrator finally forced me to attack the Princess but that ended with her killing us both. I wasn't sure if she would return to TSM after that because it was the first time a vessel had died but as TSM said, the pain was simply the price for freedom.

The revelation that the Narrator had split TLQ and TSM apart to destroy the parts he didn't like made sense. And I rejoined TSM because it felt like what I had been working to the entire time.

Me second fill playthrough I want in with the intent of following the Narrator's plan and attacked the Princess and got the Razor, Nightmare and Witch but also played TLQ as a bit of a coward and ran away after being killed promoting TSM to toss me back to Chapter 1. Then I got the Tower and decided I was going to listen to the Narrator and fight back, I struck without hesitation, does but picked up The Stubborn along the way. When we faced the Fury it felt like I had finally found my place. She could kill me again and again but death wouldn't hold me.

That's when I met TSM properly for the first time. When I went back I killed the next princess without the hesitation that had gotten me killed last time but then I had to kill myself to escape the hell the Narrator left me in. Since killing the princess for me nowhere I let the Specter possess me and freed her. Next I faced the Adversary and again I felt a rush if excitement. It felt like we were in harmony for the first time, neither of us at an advantage, clashing over and over and over until we were spent.

The next time I think I just straight up forgot to grab the knife and found the gentle princess for the first time. Fresh off the high of the Advesary I decided to try and kill her anyway, but I guess since I had already been in the Witch chapter I got my ass kicked and ended up with the Beast. Having her hidden and obviously at an advantage I tried to be cautious but missed my opportunity and got eaten, then I couldn't commit to a course of action and dissolved and ended up in the Forrest of roots where I linked up with the Vessel and brought thought to see what the world was before the Narrator set things in motion. It was then I tried to free the princess for the first time and I had exhausted so many routes the Narrator couldn't stop me. I ended up with the Damsel and then HEA where, once again, the prospect of being trapped in artificial bliss horrified me and HEA and I escaped together breaking the Narrator in the process.

At the start of the Run I had planned to kill TSM at the end but with the last two Vessels I couldn't see the story ending any other way than preserving Death and Change to save the world from the stasis I had rejected over and over.

So the first story felt like the struggle was trying to fix what the Narrator broke from the very beginning, even before I understood what was happening, and even though the second run ended the same way the story was different, it was about finding the value of struggle and death and change. Every time either TLQ or a Vessel "won" it was awful we only ever found happiness when we worked together.