YMMV / Slay the Princess

• Accidental Aesop: Kindness pays dividends. Treating the Princess nicely or with respect results in a version of the Princess that is nicer to you in turn, and attempting to undo the damage you caused by betrayal or malfeasance usually works. Alternatively, act like a jerk to the Princess or stab her in the back, and you can expect to have your life made a living hell by whatever Humanoid Abomination that she becomes. For example, the only way to reach the Burning Grey is to murder The Damsel (your ally at this point), and what follows is one of the saddest chapters with the most gruesome mutual death in the game.
• Awesome Art: All of the character and background art were hand-drawn in pencil by one artist, co-creator Abby Howard, just like the studio's previous game Scarlet Hollow.
• Awesome Music:
  • The Princess is the first thing you hear as you start up the playthrough, and it's a simple piece that demonstrates the minimalist setting.
  • The Apotheosis starts as a One-Woman Wail but then escalates with added instruments and percussion to drive home the Apotheosis's divinity. Despite this, you can still attempt to slay her, and the track only makes this choice more badass. It's also a fantastic track to end on if you accept the Shifting Mound's offer to awaken as a god, as it now describes both of your ascensions into divinity.
  • Transformation is a haunting but powerful piece of music. Much like Apotheosis above, the One-Woman Wail and percussion showcase the grandiosity, but the melody is just subdued enough to evoke a marvelous melancholy. A fitting piece of music for the confrontation with the Shifting Mound, as she brings back the versions of the Princess you met in your journey as she tries to convince you to join her.
• Fanfic Fuel: The game presents only so many variations of the Princess, but this hasn't stopped players from writing up their own versions of the Princess, any Voices that manifest from encountering them, and any interactions between other Voices in these new situations. With interpretation and change being core pillars of the game's narrative, there's bound to be a lot of head cannon. Nichole Goodnight herself has lent her voice to several online parodies that are much crazier, e.g., "So You Want a Razor Girlfriend?"
• Fan Nickname: "Shifty" for the Shifting Mound. The devs like that nickname.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With Disco Elysium, as both games are New Weird narrative-driven stories, where the main form of player progression is the appearance of voices in the player character's head, which provide additional dialogue or force them to take certain actions. Tony Howard-Arias listed Disco Elysium as his main writing inspiration for both this game and Scarlet Hollow, and one of the memes crossing the games together hit an explosive popularity.
  • A good handful of Slay The Princess fans are also fans of The Magnus Archives given Jonathan Sims plays a major role in both.
• He Really Can Act: Compared to Jonathan Sims, Nichole Goodnight was relatively unknown going into this game, with all of her prior roles being relegated entirely to podcasts. Yet, she showcases a very impressive range with the various Princesses, making each one similar enough to register as the same entity yet distinct enough that no two of them sound alike. Moreover, she manages heartfelt performances from the individual Princesses as well. For example:
  • Giving a cutesy, bubbly performance as the Damsel that turns creepy if she gets Deconstructed.
  • Showcasing the playful creepiness of the Witch or the Specter.
  • Portraying the heartbreak and despair of the Thorn and managing to convey the exact moment when she begins to hope again if freed.
  • Switching back and forth between peaceful contentedness and unhinged anger of the Wild as well as the hopelessness of the Wounded Wild.
  • Capturing the Adversary and the Eye of the Needle's gleeful hunger for slaughter and relish in the heat of battle.
  • The complete and utter batshit insanity of the Nightmare or the Moment of Clarity.
  • The cynicism of the Prisoner and the Drowned Grey.
  • The regalness of The Tower
• Iron Woobie: The Player is placed through absolute hell in several of the routes, with plenty of those being so excruciatingly painful that permanent death would be a welcome escape for most people, but most of the dialogue given to you shows little serious concern for the results and more often he expresses a determination to keep going no matter what. Some of the darker forms of the Princess, will forcibly keep you alive in order to torment you further.
• Jerkass Woobie: Some versions of the Princess, such as the Tower, the Nightmare, and the Fury, are very antagonistic and actually do want to destroy the world, but that is because the world (and potentially the player) left her to her loathsome fate. Additionally, even the worst version of the Princess genuinely desires companionship with the player.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • I can fix her/I can make her worse^ExplanationWith the many facets of the Princess, there's bound to be one that players find attractive, even the more hostile ones like the Razor or Adversary, and some of them you can flirt with. Combine that with the fact that the player's actions can cause the Princess to become more or less evil, and players were quick to quote this existing meme.
  • Heart. Lungs. Liver. Nerves.^ExplanationThe Survival Mantra of the Voice of the Paranoid that keeps the player from dying in the Nightmare route. He's constantly chanting it in the background for most of the route, giving it ample opportunity to worm its way into players' heads.
  • Lay the Princess^ExplanationA common gag among the fandom is to jokingly refer to the game's title without the first 'S', referring to how the players are more likely to disobey the Narrator's instructions and strike up a romance with the Princess (or "lay" her), as opposed to slaying her as the Narrator had intended.
  • While the Player has a heavy amount of crow aspects to his anthropomorphic appearance, plenty of fans naturally found it funny to joke about him going about the game as a full-on bird.
  • "lol" said the Princess, "lmao".^ExplanationAttempting to free the Witch always results in her betraying you and mocking you for ever having trusted her, with some of the route's achievement names directly comparing your situation to the fable of the Scorpion and the Frog. Since that fable was already the source of a popular meme in the early 2020s, fans started quoting it in reference to the Witch.
  • "Mr. Narrator is helping me find my Pristine Blade".^ExplanationThe Friendly Fandoms between this game and Disco Elysium led to one fan cracking this joke for both the Narrator and Mr. Evrart (the original focus of the meme) are obviously-untrustworthy "allies" that are often working against you. This meme briefly overtook the whole of Black Tabby Games discord server, with even the creators joining in.
• Narm:
  • In the original release, the Narrator's scream when the Tower hijacks his mind was...a quiet, basically monotone "aaaaa", making him sound more mildly upset then anything. The creators acknowledged that it didn't quite fit the tone of an otherwise terrifying route, and the End of Everything Update included a rerecording which is "more tonally appropriate".
  • The start of the game warns you that it may not be for everyone and informs you of a full content warning available on the Black Tabby Games website. While not intended to be humorous as it gives a concise summary of the game's content, the full warning's amount and variety of listed horrors comes off as a gag in its own right, especially as there are multiple duplicates.
    General CWs: mild nudity; realistic depictions of mutilation; disembowelment; realistic depictions of knife wounds; loss of self; cosmic horror; existential horror; being eaten alive; disembowelment; suffocation; realistic depiction of acid burns; realistic gore; jumpscares; derealisation; forced suicide; loss of bodily autonomy; starvation; unreality; body horror; forced self-mutilation; forced suicide; realistic depictions of graphic violence; self-degloving; realistic flaying; self-immolation; realistic depiction of a bloated corpse; drowning; realistic depiction of burning to death; auditory gore; murder; death; loss of control; verbal abuse; gaslighting; dismemberment; graphic self-decapitation; realistic severed head.
• The Scrappy: The Voice of the Broken is easily the most hated of all the Voices for being an annoying, pessimistic downer who tends to contribute nothing towards helping the player or give a major Personality Power that would be useful for you. It doesn’t help that in his associated route (The Tower), he willingly devotes himself to the Princess and does whatever she commands you to, even when it starts being harmful to you (such as killing yourself). Unsurprisingly, when Black Tabby Games held a poll for players to rank the Voices from favorite to least favorite, the Broken came in dead last by a significant margin.
• Unpopular Popular Character: The Voice of the Smitten is a Large Ham who's devoted to the Knight in Shining Armor role. He tends to irritate the other Voices (his love for the Princess grosses out the Narrator, and the Hero sometimes thinks the Smitten is too loony for love) and in one route, if you kill the Princess he'll turn the knife on you. Despite this, players have found his hamminess entertaining, especially when in contrast to more dire situations, or when the situation warrants such sentimentality.
• The Woobie:
  • The Princess. She's been trapped all her life in the basement, everything she does to you is for the goal of being free or to ease the loneliness and pain.
    • Out of all of her possible incarnations, The Thorn is probably the most downtrodden version of the Princess. Utterly broken by the string of mutual betrayals/poor communication between you and her (and horrified at the realization that she’s about as bad as the one who hurt her), she is a nihilistic depressive with little hope of anything changing for the better. Luckily, you have the option of making this one of the more heartwarming endings, rebuilding her trust enough to have you both escape the cabin.
  • The Hero as well, forced into a continuous loop of hard moral choices, violent deaths and sheer terror at the behest of forces beyond his control. Even in the routes where he does the 'right' thing, he's usually rewarded with some form of suffering.

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