Asking for permission

contender for funniest quote of all time

the idealized version of my tomorrow self will fix this

not again

Solar eclipse shadows

NO OTHER PLANET IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM GETS TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSES!! THE SIZE AND DISTANCE OF OUR MOON FROM EARTH AND THE SUN MAKE THE PERFECT CIRCUMSTANCES TO GET TOTALITY!!! THE EARTH AND MOON ARE SOOOO COOL AND OF COURSE OUR SUN!! I LOVE LIVING ON EARTH I LOVE YOU EARTH I LOVE YOUUUUU MOON I LOVE YOU SUN

wdym after step 3 proposal we DONT take naps on the poppy field every anniversary yes we do

(this the og vision for this btw)

+ the ORCA logo for the people in the back 😉🫶 i see you, and i got you

Path Through the Woods: The Presence

The Presence lingers, a creeping, cruel remnant of a shattered potential that gave nary a scream. He doesn't plan to give you the chance, either.

The Presence is the representation of the Voice of the Cold in Path Through the Woods. His foil is the Voice of the Drifter.

STP voices x princesses

Because I wanted a reason to draw them all >:D

Also lil bonus ✨

I've seen people talk about the Narrator and the Shifting Mound and debate who's right and in my personal opinion... neither. But I don't hate either of them despite that. They're just both wrong.

The Narrator is deluded by His fear of death, and the Shufting Mound is letting her godhood get to her head. That's why I like the "What Happens Next" ending the best. You prove them both wrong by reaching her much smaller heart and convincing her to just live a normal life.

And yet I always admit to missing the Narrator in that ending. And I never lash out at the Shifting Mound during the "fight".

Because I don't think either are evil. Even if I disagree with both of them.

Okay yeah basically my thoughts are more like this. It's badly worded on my part. What I meant was while yes Shifty's viewpoint as a whole I do agree with more, what I disagree with is that both of them are taking those viewpoints to extremes.

Like I agree with Shifty and understand Narrator, but I think both of them are taking it a bit too far. And I think if either of them had an option to meet halfway I would gladly take it. It's just that only Shifty has that option.

Wildly flailing my arms in the air.

What if the Long Quiet and The Shifting Mound have done this song and dance so many times that they haven’t just been The Hero and The Princess? What if they’ve been many things? The Bard and The Knight, The Prince and The Dragon, The Wizard and The Witch? What if they have been so many things, so many shapes? They’ve been the men, the women, the creatures, the feelings, they have been it all. And maybe it always ends up back at the cabin, too.

The Assassin and The Mark, The Writer and The Artist, The Priest and the Priestess, The Angel and The Demon, The Sun and The Moon, The Florist and The Exterminator,

got around to making concepts for the voices. i dont expect to draw these guys often though

I DIDN'T KNOW THERE WAS SLAY THE PRINCESS FANDOM HERE OMG!!!!!

Here's my stp designs art dump

And also an AU i made with my bestiesisfriend where the roles are switched and The PRINCESS makes the choices while The Hero is the one who changes n shit!!!!

+ modern era designs take

I have sum in the mspaint of my dad's laptop but i can hav it rn so have a wip

If ur wondering why Hero looks so damn .... twinky? In these takes

Its bc most of them i just made him into a self insert

But the digital take one were made later and uhhh idk my only inspo was "Hero uses he/they pronouns"

Voice Analysis time, but in like the strangest way possible.

I was looking at stuff on The Sims 4 because I'm a big fan of that game, and I remembered the traits you can get based on how you were raised in a certain expansion. The Empathy related traits, Compassionate (high empathy), and Insensitive (low empathy) are actually a good way of describing the difference between Hunted and not just Cold, but more importantly, Opportunist.

When Hunted is confronted with a version of the Princess rendered helpless and hurting, he feels bad for her and wants to help her. When Opportunist is confronted with a version of the Princess rendered helpless and hurting, he impulsively tries to use it to his advantage and stab her in the back. (That is, until you disagree with him)

Despite Hunted being based on a more physical form of survival and Opportunist being based on a more social form of survival, Hunted is actually very kind while Opportunist is more selfish and impulsive.

part two of fusing voices ! Smitten and Hero !

this guy couldnt fight someone if he wanted to. pathetic little sweetheart. will hug you. beware

im tired of pretending hero isnt a big softie and i AM pushing my agenda

Always fucking breaks me T^T

And he says it so flatly too, like “Why are we even doing this? Why are you making us go through all this hell? Is it even worth it?”

He’s so tired and worn out. If the Tower is us giving up on Hero—our agency—then The Moment of Clarity is us wearing him so thin that there’s simply no more choices to make anymore.

Wait, actually–

This might just literally be Hero blocking our choices. After all–

The Tower isn’t a route I personally like all that much (the dommy attitude is so overblown it wraps back around into being kinda boring to me, I’m sorry; Nightmare’s more my kinda dom) but it’s got such fascinating bits and pieces of lore and characterization in it.

The Narrator straight-up saying something along the lines of “you’ll always be able to slay her as long as you believe in yourself”, and the Tower complimenting it by saying you can break her chains as long as you believe it can be done

The Tower being able to directly interact with the Narrator and take over the narration (Spectre and Wraith also can interact with him when possessing us, but they don’t take over him like Tower does), and accurately reading his nature as an Echo

I also find it incredibly fascinating that the one route with explicit Church symbolism is about power imbalance and believing in the ultimate power of a god you can never hope to reach (and as someone who was raised Christian, I just look at that and go– ‘hmmmmm’); and yet, despite that, and despite going through her own apotheosis, she’s not the one described as closest to the Shifting Mound; Wild is. The Shifting Mound may have her own divine arrogance, and will undermine your attempts at another option, but she never denies you the ability to debate her on level ground. Tower may be her divine arrogance, but it’s Wild—the one that, through a conflict that tangled you both so tightly, became one with you—that got closest to her real form.

And also– this moment right here:

Not only is it hilarious but it also emphasizes Hero’s role: Agency.

Since the start, he’s offering us new options to explore, opening up the ability to question our situation. When we try to resist Tower’s influence, Hero is the one that help us through it. And when in the final battle with the Shifting Mound, it seems like we’re stuck between two choices, Hero’s the one that appears to offer a third option.

And when we give up our agency, he’s the one we’re giving up and putting in a corner.

So what the hell do yall think was up with Cold when he saw the Razor’s final form? Everyone else shows a different reaction that we could easily understand; most of them were a mixture of confusion, terror, infatuation, and rage at how insane things were, but also very in character. Cold’s response is… interesting.

Cold basically is always emotionally and physically detached from everything, but one consistent trait of his is his odd relationship with pain. He finds pain to not be a detriment, but outright fascinating if it’s something he hasn’t experienced before. Cold in general seems to treat positive and negative stimuli as equal outcomes, which makes sense; he doesn’t care about what happens to himself, so he doesn’t have a preference one way or the other. Nearly all of the other Voices regard pain as a bad thing, or at least an obstacle to overcome, but Cold is the only one who doesn’t actually care.

But Cold does find pain he hasn’t experienced before interesting, such as in both Grey routes where he finds interest in burning to death or drowning just because it’s a novelty.

His tone during this line in the Razor route is fascinating because Johnny Sims takes a very neutral tone to his voice for Cold, and because of that it’s a bit hard to read what type of reaction Cold is giving here.

Is it a positive one, where Cold is in fascinated awe at a Princess experiencing something that would undoubtedly be excruciatingly painful if it was happening to anyone else? Or is it a negative one, where the Razor is so bizarre as an entity that even Cold, the voice that cares the least about pain in general, is put off by her existence?

What do you think?

I've always took it as positive, myself! It sounds to me almost like a more extreme but similar tone to the ones he takes in the Grey route; personally, listening to those three specific voice lines, I feel like he sounds intrigued by all of them but least intrigued by Burned Grey, then more by Drowned Grey, then most by the Razor.

I think this is because in the Burned Grey, Cold has never experienced burning to death, but from how he talks while it's happening he obviously somehow knows intellectually what happens during it. He explains to the others how eventually your nerves will be gone and it will stop hurting, after all. He can conceptualize that pain even if it's a novelty.

In the Drowned Grey, Cold has never experienced drowning and also has no such words of wisdom during the event. He says nothing about what drowning is like, what any part of the process entails. It's something he can't conceptualize as easily, but it's still a very "normal" sort of experience -- anyone can drown, people do that all the time.

But in the Razor, when she explodes like that... That's obviously nothing he's ever experienced before either, and on top of that it's nothing that anyone could experience. It's not just a thing no person could survive, but while they've all been stabbed a lot and it's probably not impossible to sort of imagine "okay, being sliced open from the inside-out probably feels a lot like being sliced open from the outside-in," the Razor just completely exploding from the inside, every part of her being torn apart by blades and being conscious, aware, and alive through all of it, and after all of it... That's a lot. That's not just a novelty, it's so much an impossibility that Cold probably can't come anywhere near even conceptualizing it.

Experiencing that isn't on the table, of course, but I think he'd be powerfully intrigued to if he could.