#twst notes

Carolynn is the “Housewarden” of Ramshackle purely because she’s the only non-beast student in the dorm and because she ended up bringing up the fact that her dorm is never included in anything to Crowley because there’s no housewarden to help with events, so Crowley named her Housewarden. Grim is, of course, vice housewarden. Everyone was very confused the first time she showed up at a housewarden meeting.

She likes to stargaze and tends to talk to the moon at night. Malleus once ran into her while she was on a night walk and talking to the moon, and they bonded over enjoying the night.

She despises bland, boring things. They remind her of the past.

She hates fire because of past experiences, so she was very wary of Grim, Idia, and Ortho when they first met. She tends to step away from anyone casting fire spells from fear.

She tends to be very reserved, only speaking to others if they speak to her first.

She decorates her dorm with cute things the most.

She really likes talkative/animated people.

She loves biology, and spends hours on end studying the anatomy and physiology of different species that she’s never seen before, since they’re not in her original world.

Somehow, she never gets any lasting scars or anything. Whenever she’s injured, no matter how severe, she never gets scars or even bruises.

She can play the piano and violin. It’s really common for her to accidentally wake up Grim and/or the ghosts in the middle of the night while she’s playing.

She usually wears antique-style clothing, but she has a very diverse fashion sense. Her wardrobe has gyaru outfits, lolita outfits, suits, scene-style outfits, etc. She doesn’t have any “boring” clothing, though. Nothing minimalist, no “clean girl” clothing.

📖 When Kalim and Silver had to make a sleeping potion, one of their ingredients was “dawn-weed.” Princess Aurora’s name is Latin for “dawn.” Additionally, dawn-weed is said to grow in a far-off forest-- Aurora also lived in a far-off forest. (Silver Lab Coat)

📖 Chenya’s lines when he first appears at Heartslabyul are a close variation of the lyrics to ‘Twas Brillig sung by the Cheshire Cat. The EN dub’s lyrics are nonsensical, but they match the JP dub nearly exactly. (Main Story 1-18)

📖 Vil casts Silver to play the role of “The Headless Horseman” in one of the Film Studies Club’s independent films. There was also a Headless Horseman in Ichabod and Mr. Toad. (Silver PE Uniform)

📖 The Scarabia students who chase down Grim after he escapes in the night call him a “street rat,” just like the guards call Aladdin in One Jump Ahead. (Main Story 4-12)

📖 Jack brings up a story about a lion, hippo, giraffe, and monkey who could all talk with each other. In the I Just Can’t Wait to Be King song sequence, there’s a scene where Simba plays the telephone game with a hippo, giraffe, and monkey. (Jack Chat w/ Leona)

📖 Jade’s interest in raising terrariums is a reflection of Ursula’s garden of souls. She would turn anyone who didn’t hold up their end of the bargain into a polyp. However, she referred to them as “flowers in her little garden.” (← JP dub only). Sea anemones are also a type of polyp, and these sprouted on the heads of all students who didn’t fulfill their contract with Azul.

📖 According to Silver and Lilia, there’s a superstition in the Valley of Thorns that any clothes hung on trees will be stolen by animals. In the Once Upon a Dream scene, the forest animals steal the wet cloak, cap, and shoes Prince Philip had hung up to dry and dress themselves as a “prince” for Aurora. (Silver Chat w/ Lilia)

Notes from Yana

📖 The idea for the birthday sashes on each birthday card came from the sashes each princess is given when they get a makeover at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique. (x)

📖 “Growing boys are always hungry, so Western boarding schools have fruit bowls left out for anyone to eat from in the hallways and lounges.” This is what Yana used as a reference for putting fruit bowls in NRC’s cafeteria. (x)

📖 The green lighting around the concept illustration of Leona’s scale figure is supposed to resemble the lighting in Be Prepared. (x)

📖 When a student first joins Heartslabyul, the dorm leader decides their card suit and applies it with magic. After that, they use magic to paint it on or apply it themselves with makeup.

📖 Before deciding the setting of the game would be a school, the creators considered making it a “showbiz world” or a Makai-esque world. (I guess ‘demon realm’ could be used to describe that?) The title of the game was also almost “Villains School Story” (Villains Gakuen Monogatari) until Aniplex brought up the name “Twisted Wonderland” that was used in early drafts of the worldbuilding.

📖 Timewise, personal stories and events are considered spin-offs from the main story, but they dig deeper into each character + their daily lives + how they react when trouble occurs. They’re meant to be written from individual characters’ perspectives rather than MC’s, and so the way a character is depicted changes depending on their relationships.

📖 The characters were specifically designed to look like fans of the Disney villains. “I’m sure everyone has at least once bought something that a celebrity they idolized liked, or dressed in a character’s signature colors”—similarly, the Twst characters style themselves after the Great Seven & their sidekicks that they respect so much.

📖 In order to reflect the very different tones, themes, and settings shown in each of the original Disney films, Yana wanted each dorm to look “mismatched” when lined up together. The difficult part was the creating the characters, since they are supposed to only be 3-4 years apart in age (for the most part) and their original films take place in scattered time periods. This was solved by replacing the “time period gaps” with differences in values and customs, depending on their dorm, homeland, and species. The different themes for each dorm are:

Heartslabyul - Card soldiers serving the Queen of Hearts

Savanaclaw - Beasts racing through the wilds

Octavinelle - Employees of a jazz lounge

Scarabia - Arabian and dancing

Pomefiore - Traditions and poison

Ignihyde - Lifeless and high-tech

Unique Magic: ??? Card Buddies: Rook, Ruggie, Ace, Vil, Ortho

Background/Family

🍎 He’s very close with his grandma. He gets visibly happy whenever he talks about her, and affectionately calls her “Baccha,” but then will quickly snap up and correct it to “Obaasama.” At one point he sent her a picture of him in his ceremony robes, and she said he looked very smart. She also sends him lots of apples from home. (Ceremony Robe Homescreen Dialogues)

🍎 His village seems tight-knit as well. When the black coach came to pick him up, he happily shared that all his family members and the villagers came to congratulate him. (Ceremony Robe Homescreen Dialogues)

🍎 Neither of his parents could use magic, but his grandma and great-grandma were both witches. (Homescreen Dialogues)

🍎 He mentions that apples wouldn’t sell if they were bruised or if the stem was broken, even if they were delicious, so he picked up apple carving to make apples more beautiful to eat. When he finished the first apple carving he was proud of, he went around to show his entire village. (School Uniform Story)

🍎 He’s thought about making a magic potion that could strengthen weak apple trees, saying that would make his grandpa happy. (Lab Coat Homescreen Dialogues)

Personal

🍎 He’s very talented in apple carving. He has practiced carving rabbits the most since those were the designs on the beds of the 7 dwarfs, but he says he’s also good at making flowers and birds. (Rook Chat #5) He’s been shown to carve roses, castles, and poison apples too. (School Uniform Story)

🍎 In his Lab Coat story, he mentions to Cater that he’s familiar with working in a field, but then cuts himself off and corrects it to “gardening.”

🍎 He’s planning to study hard and become strong. In one of his Magic Lv Up dialogues, he even says he’ll challenge the dorm leader with his power. He mentions again in his Lab Coat story that if he does his best in magical pharmacy, he might even surpass Vil.

🍎 He hates being made fun of, and also hates being mistaken for a girl.

🍎 He really likes the NRC PE uniform, because it’s casual and sporty and simple enough that he’d want to add embroidery to it. Deuce suggested maybe he’d want to embroider roses on his uniform, but Epel insisted he didn’t like floral patterns and would prefer a tougher-looking design instead. Both of them could relate to that, and thought having a tiger or dragon embroidered on their uniforms would make them look cool. (PE Uniform Story)

School/Relationships

🍎 Vil is the one that forces him to wear that frilly blouse for his uniform; he hates it though. (School Uniform Homescreen Dialogues)

🍎 He doesn’t fit in at Pomefiore much, but his upperclassmen are very nice to him and brush off much of his shyness as just him being gentle/elegant, which is ‘perfect for Pomefiore’! Epel doesn’t like this atmosphere and wishes he could’ve gotten into the wilder/tougher Savanaclaw instead. (Ceremony Robes Story)

🍎 When Rook first called him “Monsieur Little Apple,” Epel got offended and asked that, if at all, to at least use a bigger, imposing-sounding apple. He’s very particular about apples. But Rook ignored him and happily continued using the nickname. (Ceremony Robes Story)

🍎 He’s commented that Rook is very good at both athletics and his studies, but a little weird. (Lab Coat Homescreen Dialogues) 

🍎 This one is just a conclusion and may turn out not to be related, but in Epel’s Ceremony Robes story, he has very hostile feelings about Vil and huffs to himself about how he can’t believe he got into the dorm led by someone who would say “those kinds of things.” In Vil’s Ceremony story, when Vil first greets his new students, he gets all horrified and says “Did I just walk down the vegetable aisle?! Everywhere I look, all I see are country bumpkins.” Given Epel’s background of coming from Harvest Village, it’d make sense he’d get offended over this. But again, this isn’t confirmed to be the line Epel was referring to, as he never made an appearance in Vil’s story.

Misc Things

🍎 He drank the water from the finger bowl at the Pomefiore first-years welcome dinner, thinking it was a fancy cup. (Ceremony Robes Story)

🍎 He teared up after realizing Professor Crewel had purposely given him an impossible task as a punishment, thinking he was being bullied. He had considered this his chance to make up for a mistake he’d made in class… but then decided he’d figure out a way to outwit everybody who doubted him. (Lab Coat Story)

🍎 He spent 2 months collecting food waste and horse **** everyday in order to make a fertilizer that would cause his glowing flowers to bloom at an explosive speed. (Lab Coat story)

Data compiled from:

Epel School Uniform

Epel PE Uniform

Epel Lab Coat

Epel Ceremony Robes

Vil Ceremony Robes

Carolynn is the “Housewarden” of Ramshackle purely because she’s the only non-beast student in the dorm and because she ended up bringing up the fact that her dorm is never included in anything to Crowley because there’s no housewarden to help with events, so Crowley named her Housewarden. Grim is, of course, vice housewarden. Everyone was very confused the first time she showed up at a housewarden meeting.

She likes to stargaze and tends to talk to the moon at night. Malleus once ran into her while she was on a night walk and talking to the moon, and they bonded over enjoying the night.

She despises bland, boring things. They remind her of the past.

She hates fire because of past experiences, so she was very wary of Grim, Idia, and Ortho when they first met. She tends to step away from anyone casting fire spells from fear.

She tends to be very reserved, only speaking to others if they speak to her first.

She decorates her dorm with cute things the most.

She really likes talkative/animated people.

She loves biology, and spends hours on end studying the anatomy and physiology of different species that she’s never seen before, since they’re not in her original world.

Somehow, she never gets any lasting scars or anything. Whenever she’s injured, no matter how severe, she never gets scars or even bruises.

Each grade has about 200 students, around 30 from each dorm.¹

It’s possible to transfer to a different dorm, but the procedure is difficult and requires a ceremony.²

Every year, there are always dropouts or students who have to repeat a year in every dorm. However, there haven’t been any cases in Heartslabyul ever since Riddle became dorm leader.

1. Ace Ceremony Robes PS 2. Main Story 1-20

Enrollment

A black coach is sent to personally pick up first-year students from their homes. This carriage can travel anywhere to get them, even underwater.¹ Students are kept unconscious inside coffin-shaped “Gates” until they arrive at NRC. Generally they can only be awoken when their Gate is unlocked with a special key.²

The coffins’ design is supposed to signify “parting from the other world and being reborn anew.”²

New students are given a magical pen that holds their unique magic gemstone. This functions as a wand, regular pen, and student ID.

1. Floyd Ceremony Robes voice lines 2. Main Story 0-1

Academics

[List of school subjects]

1st-years’ classes focus more on classroom-based learning rather than actually training their magic.¹ Fourth-year students take long-term internships all over the world which begin early in the year, and they don’t come back to campus until the cultural festival in February.²

1. Main Story 1-9 2. Main Story 5-1

School Regulations

It’s against the rules to have an untrained familiar with you.¹

You can’t use magic in fights, unless supervised by a teacher.²

You can’t use your Unique Magic during class.³

1. Main Story 0-1 2. Main Story 1-20 3. Cater PE Uniform PS

Events

Entrance Ceremony This occurs in September. Each dorm usually throws a welcome party for the freshmen the same night as the ceremony. NRC’s club fair is the day after the entrance ceremony.¹

Halloween Halloween is on October 31st; the week leading up to it is called Halloween Week. During Halloween Week the school hosts a stamp rally, where visitors can go on a scavenger hunt to gather 7 stamps from each of the 7 dorms’ designated stations in order to win a treat. The night of the 31st, they hold a giant party for all the students, which has been described as “fancy as prom.”

Happy Beans Day A schoolwide sports tournament in February. All students are divided between the Monsters and the Peasants teams. The team you’re placed on is randomized, but dorm leaders and vice dorm leaders are not allowed to be on the same one. The goal is to obtain the Golden Harp; the Monsters must protect it while the Peasants try to steal it from them. (Happy Beans Day event)

Magift Tournaments The inter-dorm tournament takes place in October, and it’s large-scale enough that people from all over the world come to see it. It’s also broadcasted on live television.

The inter-school tournament is in May. For the past 99 years, Royal Sword Academy has beaten NRC in this tournament.²

Star Send-Off Based off the legend of “Wish Upon A Star.” Every year, the Headmaster selects three students via astrological reading to be Stargazers. The Stargazers’ job is to collect Wishing Stars from all the students, decorate a tree with them, and then on the day of the Star Send-Off they’ll perform a dance and drum ritual in front of the whole school. (Wish Upon A Star event)

Other events that students from NRC participate in:

National Mage-Training Schools Cultural Festival

Vocal & Dance Championship (VDC)

National High School Track & Field Competition

Twisted Wonderland Animal Languages Speech Contest

1. Riddle Ceremony Robes PS 2. Main Story 3-15

Uniforms

Students have 5 uniforms: the school uniform, PE outfit, lab coat, ceremony robes, and dorm uniform

Ceremony robes are worn at ceremonies, unofficial magift tournaments, and by student representatives when appearing in public.

The ceremony robes are supposed to give off the image of the Beautiful Queen when she turned into an old woman.¹

Dorm uniforms are worn inside the dorm, for dorm events, and the inter-dorm magift tournament. Octavinelle students working at the Mostro Lounge must wear it during their shifts as well.²

1. Epel Felmier Ceremony Robes voice lines 2. Magical Archives p.73

Location

The campus is located on a remote island called the Isle of Sages. It’s very difficult to get to the island if not using the Mirror of Darkness; according to Ace, you have to board a train once you get out of the airport, transfer to a bus, get on a boat, switch to a different boat, and then get on another bus.¹

There’s a town at the bottom of the hill NRC is on; the locals there often help out the school.

1. Scary Monsters 1-15

Notable Areas in Main Building

Cafeteria

Cafeteria’s Kitchen

Courtyard

Headmaster’s Office

Laboratory

Lecture Hall

Mirror Chamber

2000 Jul 27 - Leona

2001 Oct 25 - Trey Dec 2 - Rook Dec 18 - Idia

2002 Feb 4 - Cater Apr 9 - Vil Sept 12 - Jamil Nov 5 - Jade/Floyd

2003 Feb 24 - Azul Apr 18 - Ruggie May 15 - Silver June 25 - Kalim Aug 24 - Riddle Sept 23 - Ace Oct 11 - Jack

Personality

Able to stay calm in situations that frighten even the Headmaster

Several characters have expressed concern/commented about how Yuu is “soft” and “too nice” for this academy

Sometimes, Yuu’s dialogue options feel like a choice between taking a more analytical approach or a more empathetic approach? Or sometimes one will sound more assertive and the other’s a little meeker/more daydreamy, like they’re just speaking out their thoughts to themself (at least imo)

+ Blunt at times & playfully bullies Grim

Idia called Yuu “an introvert like me” (Idia voice lines)

Silver thinks they’d be good at using a sword (Silver voice lines)

Crowley said they have the makings of a beast tamer (0-19)

He also called them “a very, utterly ordinary human” (0-19)

In that line from the prologue where he’s muttering to himself, you can hear him say “they seem a little feminine” (0-7)

“Sometimes it’s hard to tell what you’re thinking” (Cater voice lines)

“Absent-minded and reckless” (by Jack, 3-8)

Tone deaf, doesn’t have a beautiful voice (Azul voice lines + 3-10)

Vil said their school uniform looks too big on them (Vil voice lines)

Sebek noted that they have slender arms (Sebek ceremony robes PS)

Their “fur color” (hair color) is unusual according to Crewel (1-5)

A popular hc is that they’re under 180cm given that they weren’t chosen to be a prospective suitor for Eliza in GM (that was one of her requirements, so everyone 180+cm had to participate), and when they first met Vil, Grim made a comment like “wow his legs are like a whole meter longer than Yuu’s” (5-7)

Backstory(?)

They were already wearing the ceremony robes when they arrived at NRC

Remembers passing through a forest and seeing frightening horses