“the end was never the end” as the title for the track that plays when the narrator *says* he’s going to retire stanley after one more run but never follows through… augh
feel like it’s genuinely very unusual, the way the stanley parable is about the necessity of leaving people behind. people in real pain who really do need you! people who won’t move on.
there’s no real moment of closure, it’s always either stanley or the narrator hanging on, and you need to just leave. they need to just leave each other.
in this genre of self-aware games you’ve got undertale saying you can go now, everything’s good! everyone’s happy, leave them be. and you’ve got inscryption saying you can go now, everything’s gone, we did what we needed to do. and you’ve got ddlc going you’ve done what you could, you can go now, everyone’s accepted that this can’t go on. and you’ve got the stanley parable saying every part of this game is right where you left it and wants you back and probably will forever. you can go now
hot tip for stanley parable analyzers (especially of the stanely-narrator relationship): look up “bicameral mentality” and just. sit with it.
for people who don’t want to bother reading a full article or just don’t get it (which is totally fair), take these lines:
“Bicameral mentality is a hypothesis in psychology and neuroscience which argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking”, and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind.“
"Rather than making conscious evaluations in novel or unexpected situations, the person would hallucinate a voice or "god” giving admonitory advice or commands and obey without question".
then consider how one could map this onto:
The Narrator - Stanley dynamic (and what Stanley’s disobedience could mean/imply)
The Player - Stanley dynamic (especially re: the Not Stanley / Real Person / Incorrect Ending, where we’re separated from Stanley and see that he seemingly cannot make or act on a choice without us directing him)
the reader keeps a character in a time loop by telling their story over and over again. icarus flys. icarus falls. we tell the story again. nothing changes.
i think settings person (stanley parable: ultra deluxe) and monika (ddlc, post-deletion) should get to meet each other and have a nice chat. maybe write some poems together.
I like to imagine the Employee 432 - Stanley dynamic as being the Kaycee Hobbes - Luke Carder dynamic, except you take the one encounter Kaycee and Luke had at that card game convention and expand it out to 8.8 years of working almost next door to each other
The only way I can explain it is with these tags of mine from when I first learned of the new “Kaycee and Luke met before she died” lore:
I hereby present to you, the colored versions of Stanley and the invisible narrator. I didn’t want the narrator to wear a protective waistcoat all the time (he would complain about feeling “not artsy enough” anyways) and that’s why I decided to give him something else. The warm colours fit to his voice and the white gloves help him seem like a professional, hahah.
(Oh, I gave the narrator five fingers and Stanley four to make it more obvious that Stanley is basically just a puppet / creation by the narrator.)
I just uploaded the first art to my side blog if anyone’s interested. ;-)
Btw, next time I’ll upload my The Stanley Parable stuff (and my drawings with the invisible narrator) on a side-blog to prevent my main-blog from becoming too cluttered, hahah.
Interesting details and rare moments I found while playing The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe
The narrator doing a victory dance while scream-singing “I won!” repeatedly after realizing that the players like his new content. (I sadly have no screenshots of that.)
The printed texts being hidden and hard to see jokes.
Stanley’s video game controller???
Cat-Dog being canon in that universe.
“I am a yellow mug. I will never follow the red + teal + grey color scheme of this area of the game.” And all the other mugs with funny prints.
The laptop that sings at you and then starts a weird food clicker game.
Cute fanart of the narrator being an one-eyed object-head.
Has anyone ever thought about The Stanley Parable crossover ideas like “The Narrator is an SCP” or “Everything is part of the Twilight Zone”? It would fit perfectly, hahah.
Even though I highly doubt that the Narrator would be fond of the Twilight Zone narrator telling the story.
Narrator: “What do you mean ‘nightmare’??? Stanley, is my story a nightmare???”
Stanley: *nervous shrugging*
And I don’t even want to think about what the SCP foundation would do to the poor Narrator.
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