Gwen is adopted
The most recent season ended with the other members of the CPC wondering why Gwen looks nothing like the rest of her family, suggesting that she might be cursed after all. There's a perfectly mundane explanation, however, in that maybe she was just adopted. Why would the Pastel King would do such a thing when he has three other children is a bit of a mystery, but this would be a perfectly good subversion of another expectation.
- Jossed. It is revealed that Gwen is the only child to have inherited her mother's looks.
Alternatively, Maria, Lorena, Jamie, and Gwen's mother is a witch
Or at least look like one. Another perfectly mundane explanation in which Gwen merely inherited her mother's looks while the rest of her siblings took after their father as Princess Syrah in #61 notes the father was pretty hot in the family painting.
If the mother was a witch, Gwen might be manifesting powers in form of showing a cracked reflection in the mirror.
- Jossed. Gwen’s mother is a native of a foreign island where all the inhabitants have green skin, scraggly hair and bony body structure.
Gwen is a Changeling child
A common legend about the Fair Folk has them steal mortal children and leave Changelings in their place. The typical description of a Changeling looks exactly like Gwen.
Oh, and Creator/Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic all had stories and characters inspired by this legend.
- Jossed. Gwen is the spitting image of her mother.
Which leads to ...
Gwen is a Deep One Hybrid
Gwen also, with her sallow skin, bulging eyes and sharp snaggle teeth, looks a lot like a pre-Change Human/Deep One Hybrid, right out of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
- Zig-Zagged. It turns out Gwen’s mother is a native from an island where everyone looks like a Downplayed Deep One, with scaly green skin, rough dark hair, and bony body structure.
Gwen and Jamie are twins
They're the same age, which is a dead giveaway. Jamie also seems closer to Gwen than to Maria or Lorena, and the two of them share more similar interests.
Princess Monika's Curse
When Princess Monika describes her curse to Gwen, she explains how she was kidnapped by an evil wizard and polymorphed into a bird. She's barely able to get through the explanation before her anxiety kicks in and she transforms:
- Princess Monika: When I was little, I was taken hostage by an evil wizard... and turned into his pet crow. He was eventually defeated and I was turned human again. But for some reason, I still transform into a crow when I get... um... um... Crap, I hate talking in front of people... Um... when I get...... ANXIOUS..!!poof!!
Aside from turning back into a crow whenever she's anxious/stressed/scared/embarrassed, Monika freely admits that she retains a lot of other crow-like habits. She can't help herself from collecting interesting pebbles, she compulsively steals "shiny" or "pretty" things from the other members of the CPC, and she hoards all her "treasures" in her room because they make her feel happy and safe.
Since incurable curses aren't unheard-of, what if Monika's kingdom was unable to break the turned-into-a-crow-curse put on her by the evil wizard? What if their only option was to find another magic user to re-curse Monika into human form? It's possible that the second curse isn't as strong as the first one, or that it can be weakened/ temporarily dispelled by sudden changes in Monika's emotional state. That could explain why she still transforms back into a crow, and has crow-like tendencies.
- Not entirely an impossible concept. As we know one of the other princesses was an animal princess (a lobster more specifically) cursed to become human. It stopped at her hands, retaining her lobster claws, but perhaps because Princess Monika was originally human it allowed her to fully regain a human form, with the downside of the curse being overridden by the crow curse on occasion.
- In Chapter 76
, Monika tells Gwen "The potion the doctors gave me was supposed to make me a normal girl again, not some mutant who turns into a crow whenever I'm stressed. But after a while, they all just gave up and said they didn't know how to help me anymore. And since then, I've just been... stuck." The theory isn't exactly jossed(?), as the potion Monica described could have been anything from a weak curse-reversal serum to a "turn into a human" potion. And since the nurses who treated Prince Whitney after he ingested a partial portion of a were-tiger curse potion deemed the curse "almost... impossible to dig out", it's still probable that Monica was treated with a secondary "transform into a human" curse/ potion to counteract the first "transform into a bird" curse/ spell.
The adventurer lady who inspired the Prez is Gwen's mom
Simply because the rules of good plotting demand that the reveal of Gwen's mom must be foreshadowed at the beginning of the arc leading up to it.- Also, she has Jamie's sparkles.
- Jossed by episode 103. It was actually Gwen's dad.
Gwen looks just like her mother
Combined with the above WMG, the Pastel Queen has Gwen's looks and Jamie's sparkly presence, so possibly nobody ever noticed if she was conventionally pretty or not (considering the sparkles are strong enough to temporarily blind people anyway). This could add to why the Pastel King is particularly protective of Gwen, because on top of being the youngest she also reminds him of her mother the most.- Confirmed.
Every child of the Pastel King except Gwen is cursed
...with inhuman beauty. Tinfoil hats on, please. So we've seen Jack's reactions during Gwen's dinner betray an workable knowledge of cursesnote . He is also too quick to dismiss the possibility of his children succumbing to one, yet he shows no indication that Gwen may be cursed, as everyone would assume from her (deceptive) looks. Building on the theories about Gwen's mom above, she has been a witch or a fairy with Gwen's goblin-like appearances, so all of her four children with Jack had been born conventionally ugly. However, at some point — most likely before Gwen's birth, — a curse was placed upon her that would render her three daughters inhumanly beautiful (because everything in fairy tales follows the Rule of Three). Then, however, she bore twins, and the curse settled for Jamie (in addition to Maria and Lorena), but has not affected Gwen — hence why she looks like her mother.I also believe that Gwen's mom isn't dead, like Jack says, but rather dumped him and left the Pastel Kingdom to pursue a life of adventure, since the Prez isn't old enough to have met her before her supposed death. The Pastel King has been covering up their breakup and destroying images of her so no one would recognize his wayward queen. At the same time, he has been preventing any contact between his children and the outside world, anxious about how their curse and magical ancestry would react to it and vice versa.
- Jossed: The superior beauty of the Pastel Royal Family has been shown to be attributed to a treatise written centuries ago by their ancestors to obtain everlasting beauty for their descendants. Each member seeks the most physically beautiful partner they can find to pass genes onto the children. Each child is a combination of their beauty, and since each generation mates with the most beautiful partner they can find, each generation after them becomes more and more beautiful. Centuries of this has led Jack, in his youth, to be so beautiful with multicolored hair, bright eyes, flawless skin and smooth features, he sparkled and attracted birds and flowers, and many people mistook him for a girl, including Prez as a child, as Jack was the “strong woman in a pantsuit” that she saw at the ball. His taking presents now is also a consequence of his earlier beauty, as he was so stunning strangers would stop him to give him presents out of nowhere, so now whenever he sees one, he just automatically assumes it’s for him.
Other things about Jack’s current behavior regarding his wife’s memory and his overprotection of their children can also be traced back to the treatise. Because the unwritten rule was that the family could only marry and have children with the prettiest partner, Jack’s parents disapproved of him marrying Lilyth, who looked very much like Gwen, with green skin, scraggly hair and bad bone structure. They dissuaded Lilyth from marrying Jack by telling her that any children she has with him will be ugly like her, and thus doomed to a life of hatred and rejection. Naturally, something must have changed her mind, since she ended up marrying Jack and having his kids anyway. But it’s clear she still took her in-laws’ cruel words to heart, as her Last Request to Jack on her deathbed was that he “hide their daughter’s beauty from the outside world” and keep all portraits of her hidden away. Her motives make more sense of hearing her backstory, as it’s clear that she is trying to protect Gwen from others’ scorn and cruelty over their shared looks from beyond the grave.
Aurelia will be the Prez's long-term Lancer, not Saffron
Unlike Saffron, Aurelia has already openly challenged the Prez over the direction of the group/club — and been expelled for it. And now the dinner arc has established Aurelia as an almost-equal to the Prez, between the former leading the charge while the latter was indisposed, to the Prez delegating to Aurelia to speak on the (cursed) princesses' behalf. While Saffron has been established as a fighter on par with the Prez, that makes him more of The Big Guy whom the Prez puts in charge in absence of a better deputy, and his cursed hand has turned him into more of a Comedic Relief so far. Finally, in terms of personality dynamics, a lancer to someone as heroic and inspirational as the Preznote must inevitably be "dark" in some way — and Aurelia's proneness to jealousy and angernote , combined with the destructive potential of her curse, makes her a much better foil.Gwen’s Mom is cursed
- Jossed She's actually from a far away island populated by people who look just like Gwen.
Leland is in love with Jack
This is based on Isolde's line from episode 121, about how Leland's gaze is "always elsewhere". Leland is incredibly friendly with Jack, which almost seems out of character given how he normally acts. He may be married to Isolde, but we know from an earlier episode that homophobia exists in this world, so their marriage could be purely political (he might also be bi, we don't know).The marriage between the Pastel Princesses and the Plaid Princes would be more than just a political movement, it'd be the closest thing Leland could get to having Jack all to himself. And that would explain why Isolde is so cold towards her future daughters-in-law, she thinks her sons will be stuck in loveless marriages just like hers.- Confirmed.
Gwen is the serpent and she will do something to hurt Frederick
The melusine turned into a serpent after being called ugly by her lover, Frederick called his love Gwen ugly. The Little Prince (costume that Frederick is wearing) gets bitten by a snake at the end of his story to return to his love, the rose. The prince did so willingly, maybe Frederick allows Gwen to hurt him? Although Frederick still has to defeat the serpent.- Most likely jossed, the latest panels imply the serpent is the bullies from Frederick's school, who show up at the costume party.
- Jossed. Leland is the serpent Frederick ends up defeating with the help of Blaine and Gwen.
The current story arc is really a plot by the pastel king to take over the plaid kingdom.
The pastel kingdom is smaller and likely (given the king's interests) probably poorer than the plaid kingdom. But now the plaid kingdom's army is out of the country and probably about to have something horrible happen to it between the Princels, Lorena's project, and whatever the CPC, individually and collectively, are about to do, meaning that there is no no one is left to guard the plaid kingdom and a small contingent of the pastel guard can just march in and take it over. Plus, the plaid king wants the omniscient clam, but the pastel king had it and knows its current location. Maybe on one of those trips he made, he asked it how he might take over the plaid kingdom.- Jossed. It was in fact the Plaid King that wanted to take over the Pastel Kingdom because he felt jilted over no longer being the most important person in Jack's life when Lilyth/Leelathea came into the picture.
