Reading Slay the Princess: the Child, the Fascist and the Woman
Table of Contents
Prologue
Act 1: The Child
Slay the Princess is a 2023 horror adventure game developed and published by Black Tabby Games. It is a visual novel that plays heavily with themes of archetypes, and meta-narratives. One of the most prominent characters in the game is The Narrator, who not only narrates the actions you take and the world around you, but with whom you argue, and who gives and reminds you the titular task of the game: that you are here, to slay a princess. The game has a beautiful monochrome hand-drawn art style that is incredibly versatile, and lends itself excellently to all the different styles you might encounter, and the excellent music and voice acting really bring the game to life.
However, at its heart, Slay the Princess is a story about being a child in a world of adults. Though it is very much a game about adults, and is not in any way suited for children, Slay the Princess is a game where you are treated as if you were a child. The stakes and consequences are kept deliberately vague, and you soon get the idea that everyone involved is very uninterested in your understanding and agency within this story. Instead, they seem much more concerned with how to manipulate you to fit their goals. This begins early on with The Narrator. If you question him about why you're to slay the princess, he quickly becomes evasive. Look how his responses are phrased:
There is no explanation given, no reasoning, he just appeals to authority and character.
In the parlance of rhetorics, the Narrator is operating purely on Ethos at this point in the story. He is trying to position himself as a knowledgeable and trustworthy individual. Critically, however, he does so without providing any justification for that trust. He operates on a sort of ivory-tower model, portraying very much to us that there are good reasons for making us do this, but that they would be too complicated to explain. Only he knows what is best for us. He is not interested in what we want, despite being self-convinced he knows what we should want. In other words: a parental figure.
Phrases like these evoke the curious feelings of being a child asking questions about why the world is the way that it is, and the corresponding feelings of being met with annoyance and dismissal. It reminds me very much of conversations that myself and many others have had as children:
When these sorts of conversations inevitably fail to persuade us, we move into the Pathos mode of arguing, or appeals to emotion. Suddenly the world isn't just incomprehensible, but it is dangerous. Best not talk to anyone, best not stray from your path or terrible things will befall you. If we forgo the instructions of the narrator to bring a blade with us to exert violence on the princess, who is indeed, chained up in the basement of some forlorn cabin, we are chastised by him.
He tries to impress upon us, in no uncertain terms, the danger we are in.
If we progress further without doing as he says, his scolding becomes even more intense over time.
Going further forward, the scolding turns into vague threats of the future.
Ultimately no matter how much appeals to authority or emotion the narrator makes, not once does he use any logical explanation to try to convince us. In other words, the one thing he refuses to do is to provide context and detail, and then trust us to make the right decision ourselves. In simpler terms, he refuses to respect our agency.
Become disobedient enough, and he even takes matters into his own hands:
This eventually turns into:
The princess is not much better in this regard, though, perhaps less so of her own volition. If we choose to engage her in conversation, something expressly discouraged by the narrator, she is often similarly evasive on her intentions, refusing to tell us more about herself:
She even argues with us in a similar ethos-based mode as the narrator:
However, regardless of whether we invest more in the Narrator or in the Princess, our choices are always framed by either of their individual wants. At times, it feels like the Princess and the Narrator are almost having an indirect conversation with each other, mediated through the player. This is a deeply uncomfortable situation to be in. You know that you will ultimately have to make a decision on what to do, and yet both sides of the conflict are very open about the fact that they are withholding information from you. A situation very familiar to any child that remembers being caught between two authority figures with conflicting information, such as that between a teacher and a parent perhaps?
This evokes many unpleasant memories of being caught in the crossfire of two adults, debating the path forward for you to follow, and the feeling that you will inevitably have to disappoint one of them, no matter what you do. All this leads to feeling like you don't really have a good way to resolve the tension between the two. It is a masterful dance that the game executes very well, and, as is all too often the situation, both as a child and as an adult there are no perfect ways out of a bad situation. You were put here in this place by external forces, and you must find a way out. Despite your best efforts there are very few things you can do that will not end this tale of you with the words
Act 2: The Fascist
Slay the Princess is a 2023 horror adventure game developed and published by Black Tabby Games. It is a visual novel that plays heavily with themes of archetypes, and meta-narratives. One of the most prominent characters in the game is The Narrator, who not only narrates the actions you take and the world around you, but with whom you argue, and who gives and reminds you the titular task of the game: that you are here, to slay a princess. The game has a beautiful monochrome hand-drawn art style that is incredibly versatile, and lends itself excellently to all the different styles you might encounter, and the excellent music and voice acting really bring the game to life.
At its heart, however, Slay the Princess is a story about violent fascist whispering in your ear who will stop at nothing to get you to impose his will on the world through violence.
The Narrator of the game is very insistent and consistent on his view of the world: if you don't slay the princess, the world will end. How or why, is left conveniently vague. It is repeatedly, and unconvincingly conveyed to us:
What exactly does the narrator mean with this "end of the world"? Well, somehow he manages to answer that, too, in the least helpful way possible:
Before we even meet the Princess the narrator is sure to impress upon us the danger of listening to her at all:
We are told that having any kind of dialogue with "the enemy", which, let's reiterate, at this point, we have never seen or met, much less have had any reason to believe would mean us harm. This is putting us directly onto the path towards destruction. This all reeks of propaganda and dogma designed to scare us into hateful actions before we can discover that the other side is a lot more human, and thus, perhaps deserving of empathy. It is explicitly told to us that it is better if we don't know too much:
This very much evokes the dehumanization of oppressed groups by fascist regimes. In his forward to psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl's book "Yes to life", Psychologist Daniel Goleman describes this very dynamic:
[Ervin] Staub [another survivor of the Nazis] studied cruelty and hatred, and he found one of the roots of such evil to be the turning away, choosing not to see or know, of bystanders. That not-knowing was read by perpetrators as a tacit approval. But if instead witnesses spoke up in protest of evil, Staub saw, it made such acts more difficult for the evildoers.
For Frankl, the "not-knowing" he encountered in postwar Vienna was regarding the Nazi death camps scattered throughout that short-lived empire, and the obliviousness of Viennese citizens to the fate of their own neighbors who were imprisoned and died in those camps. The underlying motive for not-knowing, he points out, is to escape any sense of responsibility or guilt for those crimes. People in general, he saw, had been encouraged by their authoritarian rulers not to know—a fact of life today as well.
Similarly, we are always told that knowing more will only be a liability:
As if trying to avoid being slain is somehow a dark and sinister conspiracy instead of simple self-preservation.
How exactly she will come to end the world is again left similarly vague:
Similarly, even listening to our own perceptions or trusting our own intuitions is framed as dangerous:
Of course, all the justifications are incredibly vapid if not outright absent. The narrator even goes as far as telling us to not consider morals in the same breath as he is making a moral assertion himself:
The narrator is essentially giving us a version of the Trolley Problem. Though he isn't saying it out loud, his implication is that it would be better for us to Slay the Princess than let all other life die (if we accept his premise), which is a moral assertion.
This derealization and encouragement of believing dogma over one's own deductive reasoning is a popular rhetoric tool in the induction of cults. A fact that makes this hit home even harder.
Any attempt at empathy or humanization of "the enemy" is met with scorn.
And similarly:
He even frames the Princess as being as manipulative as himself:
Eventually, the narrator starts telling us we are "the chosen one", the only that can save the world from certain doom:
This is very reminiscent of the siren call that fascism has been transmitting since its inception. Portraying one's own people as "the chosen people" by whatever power a regime wants to appeal to is a well-trodden path for authoritarians. From the Nazi ideal of the Aryan to the contemporary idea of "the great replacement", we can see that this narrative is alive and well on the very day that I write this.
The story has been and always will be the same according to the narrator: the world is about to end, and this conveniently underrepresented group of people is going to cause it if they are not stopped at all cost, preferably with violence. No matter how downtrodden and oppressed they are, such as being chained to the wall of an abandoned cabin in the middle of the woods, they are still dangerous to the world as we know it.
Not just that, but it isn't merely their actions that are deemed dangerous, but their very existence that poses a threat to all that we hold dear.
This is even mentioned explicitly by the narrator If we later argue with him that she doesn't seem particularly motivated to end the world, or even sure how to do it.
What exactly makes these people so dangerous is left deliberately vague, because it is "plain for all to see." (again, according to him). It is clear that the narrator will accept nothing but violence being exerted on the princess. As he envisions it, only her total annihilation is acceptable to the world order.
Regardless of how much we try to empathize with the princess, the narrator is always there, whispering in our ear about the possible dangers. Which, often expressly through the consequences of the narrators meddling, always end with the words:
Act 3: The Woman
Slay the Princess is a 2023 horror adventure game developed and published by Black Tabby Games. It is a visual novel that plays heavily with themes of archetypes, and meta-narratives. One of the most prominent characters in the game is The Narrator, who not only narrates the actions you take and the world around you, but with whom you argue, and who gives and reminds you the titular task of the game: that you are here, to slay a princess. The game has a beautiful monochrome hand-drawn art style that is incredibly versatile, and lends itself excellently to all the different styles you might encounter, and the excellent music and voice acting really bring the game to life.
You awaken to the game in a situation that is all too familiar for many trans women. You are in a nondescript place and are told to do something that makes no sense to you. Who tells you these things? The world itself around you, here personified by a literal Narrator. This Narrator tells you that somewhere, tucked away deeply in the crevices of some damp and forsaken place is a woman that you must slay, and if you don't, it will mean the end of the world.
Why any of this is the way that it is seems very illogical to you, but you don't remember the rest of your life being any different. In fact, thinking about it, you remember very little of your life before this point at all. It is all just a gray blur of meaningless actions. You don't have goals so much as you just go places and do things. But most importantly, you know that it is dangerous to listen to your own intuition and senses. They are easily mislead by "honeyed words" and can lead to dangerous outcomes.
Like you have done so many times before, you steel your resolve and go to the cabin, to do what you are supposed to, to fulfill your destiny, to do what the world asks of you, to be what the world asks you to be. But throughout all of this there is something that gnaws at the back of your mind, that this is somehow wrong. You have been instructed not to heed these thoughts, but you can't help it, they will not leave you alone.
You can feel that you are connected to this woman in some way, though exactly how is unclear to you. Even before you lay eyes on her, it becomes clear that there is something special about her:
But the world does not want for you to recognize in her an ally:
Something about all of this feels off to you, in more way than one. Why does the narrator have so much hatred towards the princess? When you engage her in conversation you discover that she has been chained up and stuffed in a damp and dark basement for so long that she no longer remembers the outside world:
You talk to her. Slowly you come to realize that this woman is part of you. It is the part of you that was taken from you at your birth: your femininity. Ripped from you by the world. Though you long to be reunited with her, trust returns as slowly as the roots of an uprooted tree take to regrow.
Was it really the world that imprisoned her here? Or was it you yourself? Has the voice of hatred seeped into your very soul over time? Perhaps it was the world that taught you to hate her yes, but you wonder if it was not still by your hand that she ended up there.
In return, she has also resorted to desperate deeds from time to time. This cycle of bitterness and struggles for control serve neither of you, and breaking it demands great bravery from you both.
The willingness to heal together doesn't always come easy. Old habits have to be unlearnt, and old expectations have to be ignored until they leave by themselves,
Along the way there are also painful realizations to be made about yourself.
Though the work is slow and grueling at times, with time comes understanding,
And eventually with understanding comes healing.
All the while the narrator is loathed to witness what is happening between you two:
he tries again and again to regain his hold on you, his whisperings turning into darker and darker growls as time limps forward
But he is wrong. Dead wrong. Rather than fall apart you grow ever closer together. You begin to find in her a loyal confidant
As you begin to trust her, yourself, you realize that all that you have internalized is not you.
It becomes hard to describe your being, and yet, it feels right. Nobody is owed justification for your being.
As you are able to fight back the narrator's influence more and more with each passing moment, realizations about your past, present and future bring you their gifts again: first understanding, then healing.
Until you are finally ready to show the world your true self.