windingnights

Latest Posts by windingnights

drew over something i wrote for a class and liked :] sorry the cars are lowkey ugly, its because I fucking hate cars and cant be bothered to learn what they look like beyond ominous hunks of metal

edit: transcript of the poem by itself under the cut

6 Tips for Crossing the Road

Look both ways

The road is for cars. 

Make sure to look for them before crossing. Even when you have the right of way, cars have a lot of safety features and you have none. 

Use designated crosswalks 

The road is for cars. 

So is the crosswalk but, under brief and temporary conditions, you can use it too! Never jaywalk, never walk in the road, just hope there is a clear and functional sidewalk. 

Cross at the light

The road is for cars. 

There are rules and signs for them, but that can only go so far. Walk quickly and hold your breath and hope that the light doesn't turn. Make eye contact with drivers as their cars teem with potential energy, rumbling with disdain at the inconvenience of your crossing. Try to ignore the cloud of exhaust that you are in and they are above. 

Leash your pets

The road is for cars. 

Obviously. 

To you, it may be natural to sacrifice so much space to them but to your dog, it is not. His instinct is to explore freely. You must curb it. Modern US car models have such high hoods that the average child, let alone dog, is obscured. Even on the sidewalk, hold the leash tight because the sidewalk (if you are so blessed) is next to the street and the threat still looms.

Look out for road kill

The road is for cars. 

And no one was there to leash the deer. 

Or the raccoon. 

Or the cat. 

Did you know that the most reliable sample method for wildlife in an area is looking at the roadkill? 

Remember these tips

The road is for cars. 

Cars are everywhere. In the city. In the suburbs. In the country. In the woods (the US Forest Service manages more roads than the entire Ministry of Transit in China.) Cars are everywhere because there are roads to bring them there, which is great if you are a car and want to get from place to place fast without worrying about the in-between. 

Unfortunately, you are not a car. 

You are an animal. 

You are in-between. 

So remember to look both ways. 

TODAY IT’S A GREAT DAY BECAUSE IT’S MARCH 15th THE DAY WHEN DENZEL CROCKER LOST HIS HAPPINESS AND IT’S ALSO ANNOY SQUIDWARD DAY

Princess, Routes and Voice concept,,,

And a lil context via discord:

Peak polycule

If narry doesnt want them then SCOOT OVER LEMME AT EM

my new emotional support bird dragon guy

hello!!! i havent been able to draw as much lately bc im working on an animation for school but i made this!

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

Can I throw rocks at her? (I like her design, very fun)

Rock is not very effective against steel... (Thank you for the request!)

do it you heard the guy

I should be sleeping

Pasta and Wine (ft. my favorite princesses)

The Narrator (I finally gave him a design)

*plus some sketches from The Wraith (with Cheated, my beloved)

A comic based on this poem

I present to you: The short quiet

insane and crazy to me that these were my first funy liveblog drawings because. glances to my isat art now.

my siffrins have changed perhaps a smidge.

should i redraw that first one…

The Soldier, The Beloved, The Detective, The Missus

Oh, and Hero is here. And LQ-

i missed the three of them

This has probably been done before but it came to me in a vision

Here's a version that's more properly integrated too

Piping plover chick

There's something so poetic about the Bleeding-Heart Dove

Love melted into skepticism, and you pulled back layer after layer after layer until all you were left with was the knowledge that you did not know me.

You sought the truth then. Will you hide from it now that it is within your grasp?

been too long since I drew them, The Demons were starting to emerge

and a bonus:

ngl, really proud of how much I progressed with drawing my Hero lol. Always envisioned him as a fat and buff guy, but only really got the skill to properly portray that more recently, and it just makes me so happy skmskdkdmdmd finally, can draw my boi the way he deserves <3

The Long Quiet one day tripped and fell on his back, but in this particular day, he heard... different noises in his head. Figured that it must be his little friends- eh- voices, he made a study by dropping each voices and apologizing to them later

The results:

Thinking about writing shenanigans with Smitten and Cold

Smitten would write the most sappy and fluffy romance stories with happy endings every time. Cold would say that it’s getting predictable of how the story ends every time.

Smitten gets peeved and told Cold to write a romance story himself. Cold takes the challenge.

Smitten reads what Cold has written and lo and behold it’s the most heart wrenching, most antsy love story with pinning and longing that can never be filled.

Smitten cried reading it. He hated admitting that.

Hear me out.... Skeptunist as two weird people who equally overrationalize social interactions to the point of loosing sense of what any social affection is really about try to act normally with each other's terms. But none of them have normal terms to begin with.

Because they both overcomplicate life to match their expectations. One always suspects secrets and the other awaits for tricks. Both end up acting against the morals, because they believed they were lied to. Like. They're similar in so many ways they wouldn't want to acknowledge.

And it was said before about how skeptic might like opportunist as a puzzle to solve and therefore be able to actually see through his facades. But. I think opportunist might give skeptic very helpful reality check too. He would try to mirror him to get on his side just to be met with devastated look. "Why would you think I thought that? Do I look like I think that? Do I act accordingly?" Skeptic might appear too straightforward and harsh, even though at his core he deeply cares about others, due to him trying to make everything as effective as possible. And he might ignore others feelings if he finds them unreasonable. And he might act wrongly if he sees he's actions as justifiable. And. And I think opportunist can help him notice that. Just by agreeing and reflecting.

Like I think many of their actions can be alike since they both very "goal over the means" type. It's just that skeptic falls into that unconsciously out of misunderstanding people and opportunist does that fully knowingly. So opportunist could help skeptic notice his wrongdoings and skeptic could actually explain why oppy's actions are wrong. Somehow.

I don't know. I don't know. Rotating them in my head.

FUCK YOU GIRLIKISSER TIME

Damsel x Adversary going of to start a war, HEA x Thorn bonding over trauma and healing arcs, and Tower with one of the tiny shiftys from the pile

also sobbing smitten cause screw him

close-ups under cut 👇

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!