Friendship Test

By looking up we found out that initially Dreamer was written with the intention of being a maladaptive daydreamer, but the dev understood how the plural reading could come about and tried to fully lean into it in Exe Holiday.

Generally, we aren't one to want to care much authorial intent and word of god. We believe important information needs to be present in the source material, and we are also capable of just disagreeing with a writers perspective on their own characters and story.

But Dreamer initially being meant to be a maladaptive daydreamer was such an interesting thing to discover because the narrative of Friendship Test, even entirely divorced from the DLC, unabashedly humanizes Pixels.

Many systems will disagree with the idea of there being an "original" part but as with anything, different people will have different perceptions, understandings, and explanations of their experiences. As far as Dreamer and Pixels are concerned, Dreamer was there first and created Pixels. And as far as most programs are concerned, this makes Pixels less "real" than Dreamer.

Act 2 concerns itself a lot with the meaning and subjectivity of reality. The whole area runs on realistic simulations created by Dreamer, which become distorted and malfunction as she wakes up from dormancy.

When she awakes, she puts FriendProgram and Waterbottle in replications of their past, while an issue of hers that's been reoccuring in the past comes up: Is anything that is felt and experienced by programs real? How can programs know they aren't still just the same as mindless computers, and are just good at lying to themselves? How are they any different from the instruments of destruction they were made to be? Surely, she can't be the only one who feels like this. Surely, there are other programs who understand they aren't real lifeforms.

She proceeds to express envy towards FriendProgram while her resentment towards their attempt at killing Tori surfaces. FriendProgram's connection with Waterbottle isn't real, because there is no emotion. She wishes she could not care, and that she had certainty in not being real like how FP isn't real. How they could be so detached as to not care about killing Tori, when she was only concerned for them?

It's ironic, considering Dreamer themself, as well as Pixels, suffered mistreatment from Tori, because she was only concerned about them.

Waterbottle's response to all this is that it doesn't matter if ones internal life makes them real or not. Waterbottle doesn't know if they're real, but they've made the choice to put down their weapons for good, and that is real to them. It doesn't matter if FriendProgram doesn't feel love, because their choices and actions are real.

It doesn't matter wether or not Pixels is "real", because it clearly had a meaningful impact on Dreamer and Waterbottle, and the game twists the knife of its death everytime you see a couple of emulation software cables in a random area, or a program comments on how silly and endearing it is that Waterbottle feels affection towards an emulation.

When we first played through the game, we made it through a chunk of the mid-late game in one day so it was getting late and we were pretty tired and slow to process everything by the time we reached the end of Act 6, so we decided to stop there for the day and keep the remainder of the game for the next day. Still, we couldn't help but take a peek at Act 7. So we ended that session by meeting Dreamer again, who laments that the reboot they're recovering from was a pretty bad one, and that they can't reach out to Pixels.

They can't reach her, but what really got to us in that moment was that this time, they remembered her.

Pixels does resurface towards the climax of the act, and after FriendProgram sorts things out with Tori, Dreamer forgives her, but Pixels doesn't. Only choosing to stick around to support Dreamer, and making subtle digs at Tori when they're in the same room in the DLC.

Pixels glitching out when Exe deactivates the programs is also treated with the same weight as every other main character being deactivated.

The biggest difference in Pixels' writing between games, as far as I see it, is really just that in Friendship Test, it states that it doesn't care too much about wether its real or not, while in Exe Holidays, she reaffirms that she knows she is real.

Even when the written intention of Friendship Test only considered Pixels an imaginary friend, it still makes a point that the impact they have is very real and that, by extension, makes them real as well.