A study in identity & illusion

After my original set of blind playthroughs of Slay The Princess, The Fury was my favorite chapter. In hindsight, I am kind of shocked that this was the case. This chapter has four different entry points with three different combinations of voices you can experience for a total of between three and six different unique endings depending on how you're defining "unique". This chapter benefits highly from a couple replays, and before my achievement hunt began, I only played it once. I think the fact that I loved this chapter despite experiencing so little of it is just a testament to how fucking cool The Fury is. No matter which ending you experience, the way The Fury interacts with Quiet as well as the unique body horror elements at play in this chapter are extremely memorable. I have talked highly of other "sickos.png" moments in this game, and this is an entire chapter of them. It helps that I am a big fan of the gory aesthetics this chapter entirely relies on, but I can't imagine anyone watching The Fury pulling free from her chains by de-gloving herself, and not thinking "I am never going to forget that".

Okay, so this chapter fucking rules, and its made even better by replaying all of its endings. As a result, I have a LOT of thoughts on this chapter, and I have struggled a lot with organizing them. This is my second draft of this post after I scrapped the other half way through. Thankfully, between then and now, I wrote my updated thoughts on The Eye of the Needle, which made me heavily reconsider the way I look at chapter 3s in this game. I am going to use a more organized version of that structure here.

"Surely organizing it will make it shorter!" I thought when originally writing that. Oh how wrong I was. I was so very wrong.

Oh also for the, like, three of you that have read more than one of these, please tell me if you like this structured approach or if I should go back to the more Stream of Consciousness style I've used up to this point.

Part One - The "Good" Endings vs The "Bad" Ones

For starters, what is this chapter's most satisfying ending? The answer to that is not as cut and dry as it was on EotN. I personally think the answer is obvious, but if someone were to disagree with me, I'd respect it. If you disagree with me, please tell me. I like hearing other people's takes on things.

Personally I'd identify the two "A new leaf in a weathered book" endings as the most satisfying endings. They act as the two proper completions to the torture scene, which I would consider the "default" path of the chapter considering all four entry points can access it at least in part. There are technically three different slightly different endings you can get after reaching the end, but slaying The Fury or abandoning her definitely feel incomplete. They're the same kind of unsatisfying endings acting as rewards for making the "wrong" choices as I mentioned in Eye of the Needle. Not to say that that either of the two "wrong" endings are bad, of course. All three of these endings make me very emotional, and leaving without her is the only one that actually got me to tear up. However, saving The Princess in this moment is the only one that feels like the end of this version of The Fury's character arc.

Before I talk about that character arc, I want to quickly talk about the other three endings and the way they develop The Fury. If you reach the torture scene without the correct entry points to outlast her, you get The Weathered Heart, Held in Ribbons (aka The Rewound Fury). However, if you avoid the torture scene by not giving up and instead trying to slay the princess, you get either the "Going the distance" or "Quantum break" endings. I do not think any of these endings are actually unsatisfying, just less satisfying than the alternatives, which is why I 100% acknowledge that there's room to disagree with me.

For one, the way that Fury's fascination with what Quiet is overtakes her desire to torture him, leading to her fully embracing the unconscious desire to become one in the Rewound ending is very cool. It sorta feels like an end to a character arc, or at the very least its Some Kind of character development. This is the least satisfying ending to The Fury in my opinion, but it still manages to avoid being unsatisfying.

For the vast majority of quantum break, The Fury is too busy trying to stop Quiet from killing her to develop. However, in her dying moments she actually speedruns to the end of a very similar character arc to Eye of the Needle. She apologizes to Quiet and says that she didn't realize she was hurting him. This apology is, at first glance, is kind of ridiculous. Between The Tower and The Fury, The Princess both forces Quiet to stab himself in the chest over and over, and also spends several minutes exploding him in various creative ways in an attempt to render him completely useless without allowing him to die (which is one of my favorite body horror tropes btw. It's awful. I love it). So, she was very obviously interested in hurting him. However, as I mentioned, this ending comes after The Tower, and looking closer at The Tower may help explain what this apology actually means.

Going into The Tower, the relationship we establish with The Princess is that we are afraid of her, and she is stronger than us. Additionally, The Princess instinctively understands that she and Quiet are opposites. These two feelings combine with the fact that deep down she still understands that she's supposed to be a God, and create the belief that she is divine, and Quiet is the opposite of that, so that must mean he is an inherently lesser being. He is barely even an animal to her. She knows she is divine, and she believes that the only thing Quiet should be able to do is worship her. This belief is so strong that she freaks the fuck out and has an existential crisis when Quiet proves her wrong by managing to kill her. This is what causes her to become The Fury in the first place. It isn't until he proves her wrong a second time that she realizes she was wrong. It's not that she didn't realize she was hurting Quiet. In fact, she was doing it very intentionally. Instead, her realization is that she wasn't supposed to be hurting him. She realizes that Quiet is her equal, and can feel pain the same way she does.

I love that this ending gives me enough room to interpret it to this degree, but its subtlety means that the satisfaction of it is a bit blurry. However, the fact that the fight scene in this route is extremely satisfying in the sense that its awesome watching Stubborn figure out how to outsmart her makes up for a lot of that, leaving this as an obvious second place best ending.

This finally leaves Going The Distance. For one, this one gets a ton of points from me for how awesome the path here is. The Adversary ending that gets you here is by far my favorite of the chapter, but I won't get into that since I already did in my original Thoughts on The Adversary post. This is another path that ends with character development that somewhat resembles Eye of the Needle, just combined with the underlying sadistic fascination she has with Quiet inherent to this chapter. This leads to the same "I want you to want to kill me" motivation as Adversary, but without the mutual violence. Fury doesn't exactly fight back, at least not in the traditional sense. She just keeps stripping away layers of Quiet in order to see how much she can destroy him before he kills her. The ending also has a similar feeling of respect and equality that Needle has, with The Fury's declaration that "In the end, you're nothing. Just like me". This doesn't feel quite as constructive as The Eye of the Needle but hey, a character getting worse is still character development. This chapter also gets similar bonus points for having a climactic moment of slaying The Princess.

Part Two - Torturing The Voices and Finding Common Ground

One interesting part of the New Leaf ending is that you can start the route to it in every version of The Fury. She wants to torture you in every timeline. That's kind of her brand. However, in order to get to the best ending, in order to reach the choice where you can save her, you have to bring a Voice with you.

Unfortunately, not every voice can manage to do this in every timeline.

Every single version of the torture scene includes The Hero and The Stubborn, both of which are not strong enough to put up with the eternity of torture The Fury inflicts upon them. Which, is definitely shocking the first time it happens. The Stubborn of all characters tapping out. Terrifying. That leaves The Contrarian, The Broken, and The Cold. The Contrarian is here for a good time not a long time, and it takes very little torture before he checks out. Unsurprisingly, Cold is very capable of putting up with the torture. Being unfeeling is his entire thing. In fact, it seems like he kind of likes the torture. It feels like he is just as curious as The Princess is to see whether or not she can break you beyond repair. The Broken is capable of putting up with it too. He's already, well, broken, but whether or not he gets to the end depends on whether or not he has a reason to.

Coming from The Tower, he is already a fully lost cause. He tried to give himself to The Princess and you did not let him, so it does not take much for him to give up. He gave up a long time ago. There's a reason why this version of The Broken comes into the chapter Literally Sobbing. However, coming from The Adversary, The Broken has yet to lose the will he always starts with. The will to try and make The Princess happy. When he hears her speak, he recognizes that she is broken just like he is, and he dedicates himself to be there for her as long as she needs him to be. Which, btw, is a fucking crazy thing to say while being tortured. That line gave me chills the first time I heard it. I love it so much. It's so very romantic in such a horrifying way.

Anyway, the Broken has always been a voice I've thought was pretty funny, but I never particularly liked him. His sopping wet personality can get pretty old pretty quickly, so each piece of his dialogue felt like a coin flip between funny and annoying. However, the way this ending characterizes The Broken is absolutely amazing, and it a characterizes The Cold in a very similar way. Both versions of the ending include parts where both voices recognize themselves in The Fury, who, by the time she gives up torturing you, is very much cold and broken. Seeing The Cold express like, half an emotion for the first time, is so fascinating. Maybe all he really needs is someone like him. It's very cool, very emotional, etc. but something about The Broken just, well, breaks me. Just thinking about it too hard makes me tear up a little bit. Which is happening actively. Because I'm writing about it.

Part Four - What The "Good" Endings Mean

Now that we've established that The Fury is cold and broken, let's look at why that is, why that starts to change, and what her arc means.

As I talked about in my previous post on my updated thoughts on EotN, I think chapter 3s are best defined by the way we break the status quo we establish in chapter 1. The Adversary happens because The Quiet views The Princess as violent, and The Princess views the mutual expression of violence that she and Quiet shared as an expression of love and respect. She gets quite upset in Eye of The Needle when you do not live up to her standards, leaving her with the belief that the kindred spirit she found is no longer her equal. So, when you make her question not just you, but the entire belief system she's using, she does not take it well, and as I mentioned in Part One, the exact same internal crisis happens when The Tower becomes The Fury. This violent, hateful crisis is represented in Extremely Subtle ways that are only noticeable by an Expert Analyzer, such as her looking like she's been graphically mutilated, the way she says things like "come look what YOU did to me", and her trying to torture you Forever.

So, she recognizes that something about the way she viewed the world was wrong. This is paired with an interest in finding new ways to understand things. This is why gore and anatomy are the main theme of the chapter. She is no longer sure how the quiet and her are supposed to work, and she wants to look past surface level to understand things more. She wants to see if she can do something to bring their old relationship back. Conveniently, this aligns quite well with her primary motivation of making Quiet just as broken as she is by torturing him for eternity.

In the "failed" torture routes, you prove her right. She tortures you until you break, and it leads to her wanting to find out even more by fusing into one body. (This is another example of The Princess expressing her instinctual understanding that she and Quiet are two halves of the same broken thing)

By extension, you reach the good ending by proving her wrong yet again. She tortures you for an eternity but for one reason or another she cannot break you, and she has not gotten any closer to understanding why you changed or why she can't fix it. Over the course of the scene, her repeated question of "are you still there? are you still you?" turn from angry to upset to exhausted. Despite her best efforts, "you" are still here, and "you" are still the same Quiet that refused to fight her. She can't make it go back to how it was. "You're gone and I can't do anything to bring you back".

It's in this state that you can choose to take some revenge. You can either abandon her, leaving her truly alone forever, or kill her, giving her the mercy of feeling something new for the first time in an eternity.

However, the voice by Quiet's side recognizes themselves in The Fury. They see themselves in her desperate yearning to be happy again. In her numb pursuit to feel anything at all. They don't want revenge. They're her for her for a reason.

You can choose for Quiet to forgive her, take her hand, and lead her to the outside world. This doesn't fix things. She's still numb and Quiet's still probably more than a little traumatized. But, they can both recognize that even though things can't go back to the way things used to be, they can still find a new way to respect and love each other. One without all the violence and suffering.

That's what I think this chapter is "trying" to tell you, and why I think this is the "good" ending. You can't heal by stubbornly insisting that things should go back to the way things used to be. I think that's especially highlighted by the fact that even The Stubborn can't put up with her torture. You can only save her if you come bearing a perspective that knows what she's been through and is actually capable of helping her.

Final Thoughts

Okay! That got a little artsy at the end there. If you couldn't tell by the way I repeated it over and over, this chapter makes me a bit emotional. Sorry or you're welcome, whichever you prefer.

This style of analysis is honestly what I've been trying to get at the whole time I've been writing these, I just haven't quite figured out the proper way to go about it until now. I hope I am able to replicate this, but I also really hope that the future ones are shorter!

This chapter is still definitely my favorite in the game, and I don't really see that changing. I hope I'm wrong. Maybe I'll fall hopelessly in love with the story and themes of one of the other chapter 2s and there will be another contender for the top spot, but I honestly doubt it. This chapter is so great it's not even fair.