YMMV / Princess: The Hopeful

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Since the Queen of Mirror's agenda is hidden, what it actually is (or if she even really has one) is up to interpretation.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: From the game's creator, of all people. Princess: the Hopeful was initially designed as a parody with no intent to be taken seriously. People ended up liking it so much it was developed into an actual fan line. Nowadays, it's considered one of the best fan-games in the community.
• Awesome Ego: Princesses of Mirrors, while they usually aren't, have the potential to be this if they become competent enough to back up their narcissism. Yes, they are self-absorbed childish brats whose Invocation literally forces them to act like this, but they do have some really impressive Charms and abilities that no other court is able to duplicate. And, really, you have to admire girls who stay transformed as long as they want by the sheer force of their ego.
• Broken Base:
  • Fans of the game don't necessarily agree on which between the Vocation and Dream versions is the best.
  • The Detroit supplement generated its own share of controversy in the community, particularly for using C.O.R.D., an African American community organization weaponizing hatred toward whites, as its primary Dark Cult. Some argued it was an interesting take about how resentment from being prejudiced against can turn you to atrocities, others that it spread horrible implications about a black group being portrayed as an evil-worshipping cult.
• Complete Monster: The Boogeyman is the most terrible of the Cataphractoi. A being who only cares about making children suffer, the Boogeyman once ran a kingdom where countless children were taken to be tortured, tormented and devoured by his monstrous subjects. Upon the kingdom's fall, the Boogeyman focuses on children personally, luring them in to be caught in his domains so he can torment them mentally before killing them.
• Crazy Is Cool: The Queen of Spades is a Reformed, but Not Tamed Rebel Leader who occasionally leaves her palace to walk around in her kingdom, pulling pranks on everyone, and is infamously responsible for half the graffiti in it. She tends to encourage her followers to try the craziest solutions possible, and when they protest insists they have to try before saying it's impossible. And her typical Princesses tend to be Lovable Rogues who are just as likely to pull pranks as she is. Oh, and there are even rumors about Princesses of Spades who managed to scam True Fae, of all people.
• Draco in Leather Pants: The Princesses of Mirrors; while they definitely are far less bad than the other two Twilight Courts and are very idealistic (a bit too much for their own sake in fact), their popularity has led many fans to see them as Loons with a Heart of Gold who qualify more as allies than enemies to the Radiant. Some of them indeed fit this interpretation, but this is blatantly ignoring some of their nastier aspects, such as the fact they often are Glory Seekers and textbook Alpha Bitches who actively ruin the work of their comrades to make themselves look better, the sheer danger a mad Tautological Templar with magical powers can be to those around them, or some of the darker Charms they use (One of them allows to peel someone's beauty off their face).
• Epileptic Trees: Some players consider the Darkness to be the reason the franchise is called "The World of Darkness", making it the Greater-Scope Villain for every other game line. Seeing how the world apparently was somewhat better back in the time of the Kingdom, it's fair to assume that them spreading played a big part in why the World of Darkness is such a Crapsack World, much like how the Exarchs are indirectly responsible for humans being so oblivious of the supernatural in all the gamelines.
• Evil Is Cool: Well-Intentioned Extremist is cool, at least. The Queen of Storms is essentially a storm of hatred and vengeance that constantly rages against Darkness. And she's winning. Little wonder that she's the most popular of the Queens.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • The supplement describing what the Twilight Queens were like as Radiant seems to have made it popular for fans to imagine What If? scenarios about what the present-day Radiant would have been like if they had become the Twilight Queens.
  • The Dark Queens were mentioned exactly once in the original book and it was a short mention. This hasn't stopped them becoming a popular topic of speculation among fans.
  • There is mention of other Queens (and Kings), resulting in the discussion and creation of other Queens and Invocations.
• Fridge Brilliance: Why do none of the stereotypes have anything good to say about Beasts? Even the most well-intentioned Beast is born of the Primordial Dream and embodies a primal fear of humankind. Princess: The Hopeful is a game about fighting fear.
• Jerkass Woobie: All three Twilight Queens qualify, each for different reasons:
  • The Queen of Tears might be a Well-Intentioned Extremist whose actions only make the situation worse on Earth and who treats the other Queens with disdain at best, but she is constantly fighting an endless war to protect her beloved city from its constant siege by the Darkness, and all the things she has gone through have taken a toll on her, to the point she tends to fall to pieces and turn into a hysterical crying mess whenever she is in private with Nobles. Some Radiant Princesses have ended up defecting to Alhambra out of sympathy for her, either because they felt guilty for her situation or because they see a chance of redemption for her.
  • The Court of Storms: many of the Stormites had been treated badly by existence before Blossoming and after which, the Court offers a home to such people and gives them a way to lash out back at the people who've wronged them. Not to mention a huge amount of defectors from the Radiant are those who've lost everything to the Darkness. The Queen of Storms herself could be one, as in the Vocation Version's story, she was the last queen alive during the Fall and upon seeing her comrades (definitely her Court of Wands) dead, the last human thing in her died and she screamed, cried, roared and thundered into becoming the living natural disaster she is today. If her Avatar Charm is of any indication, she also can't conceive anything but fighting and killing the Darkness anymore.
  • Despite her enigmatic nature, the Queen of Mirrors may count as well. To wit, she isn't very helpful to her Princesses beyond telling them to become the True Heir and whenever asked anything, she tells what the asker already knows/suspects or simply doesn't answer at all. However, one of her epithets is "The Child Queen", and her story (if it's true) shows she was a child who wasn't able to bear the weight of the crown of Pentacles, much less the Fall itself and decided to run away instead. A bit of speculation about the "Somebody Else's Problem" Charm (which deletes the user's memories) gives the idea that the Queen of Mirrors created the charm because she couldn't bear the amount of failed True Heirs. This gets even worse if the story for her is true, as it states she was taken away from her own mundane parents, and when she ran away the first place she went back to is her parents' house... which was already overrun by the Darkness when she got there.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Assuming they didn't do anything worse in-between, the Pongamia Coven most likely crossed it when they adopted the custom of breaking down their own children to remake them into Mnemosyne.
  • In-universe, Stormites believe the Queen of Tears crossed it when she closed Alhambra's doors and moved the city to the Dark World, dooming the entire Court of Wands in the process. Of course, Alhambrans beg to disagree.
• Narm Charm: You would expect a concept like trying to make Magical Girls fit in a Gothic Horror Crapsack World filled with Creatures of the Night to be a completely ridiculous idea, but this game somehow manages to make it work.
• Paranoia Fuel:
  • Any place where something remotely evil, tragic or vicious happened, from small evil like bullying and cheating on a loved one to bigger crimes like rape or serial murder, can potentially become a Tainted Place if abandoned for too long. That includes any sort of place: street, house, closet... the sample Tainted Areas offered by the rulebook even include a bathtub that became Tainted because someone committed suicide inside it. And if left unchecked, the Darkness will fester in these places, eventually turning them into Darkspawn nests where people will become Darkened just by standing inside it. Worse, the New World of Darkness is one hell of a Crapsack World where places like this are even more common than in the real world.
  • Pentacles Stereotypes are filled with this. With their scrying charms, they're capable of looking into what man was not meant to know. This includes things like the True Fae, Leviathans, or even the The Shadow. The only good things about these is that they're capable of deleting their own memories of these occurrences, or stopping them from coming to pass by taking actions to stop them from making moves due to their foresight.
  • The Dreamlands. If you stay for too long in it, it will start altering your dream body and your mind, progressively making you closer to a Dreamlander, integrating you to the place and giving you Fake Memories of a past here while gradually making the actual memory of your waking life blurrier and harder to remember. Eventually, you will no longer even try returning to your life on Earth because you won't even remember having one. And to make things worse, the Wardens can actually modify your fake memories again if they get their hands on you.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: Actively defied; a huge part of this game's appeal comes from how it rejects this trope in a setting where it should pretty much be played straight. The setting puts traditional Magical Girls in an infamously dark universe where evil typically wins, throws everything horrible at them, has them at their weakest... and then has them getting back up, refusing to give up and fighting back the Darkness, with a strong implication that yes, even if it won't be easy, they actually have a chance to win.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Princesses of Mirrors are very disliked in-universe for being immature, egomaniac brats, but a lot of fans absolutely love them for the very same reasons, because it makes them fun to roleplay as and their powers are impressive enough that they can actually back up their ego. The fact they are the only Twilight Princesses actually trying to improve the world helps.

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