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I'm basically going to copy this verbatim from a recent [http://gamedesignreviews.blogspot.com/2009/01/braid-understanding-difficulty.html blog post] I read, because it's the best theory of the meaning I've seen:
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Basically The Princess is a metaphor for the Absolute Truth, and thus unattainable, but something to strive for nonetheless.
== Tim is... ==
[[Doctor Who
* Alternatively...
* He... is [[Monty Python and
* Which means the [[Killer Rabbit|Killer Rabbits]] are...
* A time lord.
* A Scientist a Father a Man a Romantic a Madman a Doctor a Knight a Villain a Protagonist Insane in a Padded Room no he is Just Dreaming Having a Nightmare Trapped in a Strange World a- a- a- a- a-
* He doesn't know. So neither will we. He;s not sure what happened to the world- all he knows is he is Tim, and he is searching for the Princess. He thinks.
** Oh, And he can turn back time. But sadly, after all of his hard work he has been left as confused as he was when he started, and honestly much sadder. He was so sure he was the hero- and now he often wonders if that was ever true.
*** Is it too late to start now?
** Or maybe that much time travel would make ''anyones'' memory a bit screwy and overly metaphorical.
* The Knight in level 1-1. You aren't actually playing Tim, just some unnamed hero/villain (depending on your interpretation).
* Or, both are Tim, except that they're from different time periods. Take the beard away from the Knight, or add one to Tim, and they don't look too different.
== Tim is a descendant of [[The Time
As you'll recall, Henry had no control over his [[Involuntary Time Travel]]. However, his daughter appeared to be able to exert some will over it. It's possible that Tim is a future DeTamble who is fully able to manipulate time. And the thing is (this is what got me thinking along these lines in the first place), even when he can control the time-shifting, it ''still'' f*cks up his life beyond all reason.
== Tim is in Purgatory. ==
...what? It fits. Reliving every. Single. Last. Mistake. In his stalking of the princess. I have just one question for him... [[The
== ''[[
And the ending of Braid is Tim unlocking [[Sealed Evil in
== The Princess is.... ==
* Tim's Girlfriend/Wife (ex?)It's all actually a little straightforward. He had a girl, he loved his girl, girl decided he was a bit smothering and left. Possibly getting a new boyfriend. He went a titch coo-coo banana crackers, no matter how you look at it.
* Tim's Daughter- possibly estranged, and if so not much different then the above. Or possibly even dead, possibly in a manner Tim feels responsible for. Consider the cloud motif- perhaps she fell? Or the car you can spot in the last level- a road accident. Maybe she just grew up and went away and got married, and Tim is just nostalgic.
* An allegorical representation of The Bomb. Tim searched for it for so long, only for him to wish more than anything to go back after the fact.
* An allegorical Representation of Science. See above on page
* ALL OF THE ABOVE. Tim wanted to find the bomb, and neglected his wife- who left him, and took his daughter with her. He never got over it, and the day his daughter grew up hardly even having ever known him broke his heart. Still, perhaps it would all pay off the day his life's work was achieved... right? Wrong. In one staggering moment, he discovered the 'princess' he had left everything- everything- behind for was no more then a horror unleashed upon the world.
In one fell swoop, it was all gone. And he could never get it back. Or could he? Couldn't he? There must be some way to undo it all- no, even better, to undo it all, and make sure he never made those mistakes again. He just needed the time...
* The ideal woman. Tim goes off searching for her, neglecting the people who care about him in the process. Problem is, real people aren't perfect and he's basically searching for something that doesn't exist.
* Once complete, the constellation give some ideas of the princess. She has chains in her arms, one of them broken. She looks surprised about the broken chain. Maybe she was a captive and somehow broke free. Maybe Tim did?
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*** Perhaps; even so, that does not explain why the real world would take the form of a talking dinosaur.
*** That... Is a very good point. Maybe it's how he views the real world? Some childish, out-dated and boring viewpoint that doesn't understand him and his princess?
** [[Completely Missing the Point|It's]] [[Super Mario World (
== The game is actually Tim remembering his quest ==
* Each level is actually Tim going in to his room triggering memories. The time travel is Tim trying to put the strings together, messing with his sanity. When he actually go see level 1, he is just remembering is a perspective that may him look like a hero. Then he shuffle back to what actually hapened. This doesn't means that he is a villain, depeding of the back story.
* Tim doesn't have any actual TIME-based powers; since everything takes place in his memories, the time-based abilities actually represent him deluding himself as to what actually happened.
* From the troper that put the inital "remembering" guessing. Both ending in level 1 are correct. At first Tim was the princess' [[Knight in Shining Armour]]. Then he became a [[Stalker
== The "Villain" and the "Hero" are the same person. ==
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Tim has always been quite determined to get what he wants, the story from his childhood is just a memory of the first time he didn't get it. Eventually, he became very controlling too, and obsessed with having control over his fate, which is why he starts to experiment with time much unlike his girlfriend (the princess) wanted. Of course, these aforementioned characteristics became have also made him a pretty bad boyfriend at which point, the princess wanted to escape him, leading to the events of world 1.
The other worlds are simply the story as he tells us. He also knows how to twist the story to make the actual hero sound like a monster (hence the boss we fought with the chandeliers who bears a resemblance to the person we saw saving her). The stars, however, are symbolic of his obsession, some of the stars require extreme patience to get (symbolic of Tim's persistence), the last one in particular requires you to capture the princess beforehand.
After you collected all the stars, you can go and see the constallation of the captured princess in the sky and see the story from her point of view. This is because, once Tim got all the stars and went through all the world, he found a time mechanic that allowed him to go back in time and finally, recapture the princess. Nice job breaking it player!
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== Jonathan Blow has been listening to Cher ==
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''If I could find a way''
''I'd take back all the words that have hurt you''
''And you'd stay''
''[[Guide Dang It|If I could reach the stars]]''<br />
''I'd give them all to you''<br />
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That is to say, Tim's fantasy of himself "saving the Princess", when neither the quest nor the "Princess" existed in the first place. Tim's whole mission revolved around finding this imaginary "Princess": it may be his picture of the ideal woman, the memory of some past relationship before it went horribly wrong, maybe both. Whatever it is, in reality it doesn't exist now or never has existed, and Tim for all the world refuses to let go of it.
Now consider World 1-1. Throughout the whole stage, notice that Tim and the princess always stay on opposite sides of the stage; they're never together. What happens if you get seven stars, get the ability to race ahead of her by way of time-proof switches, and take the chandelier up to her side? Well, she explodes out of existence. Why? Because Tim's fantasy and reality could never be reconciled, and once [[Reality Ensues]], the fantasy could only be thoroughly exploded.
Also consider that, as mentioned before, those stars are symbolic of Tim's obsession. By the time he's finished those horribly difficult puzzles to get seven of them, he's at the height of this obsession. The final star is in the Princess's empty room; maybe it's become clear that this Princess had become nothing but pure obsession?
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Okay, bear with me on this one. Tim and the Princess may or may not have been in an actual relationship before the event's of World 1 took place -- to make it a little easier on ourselves (and to make the theory fit the pre-level texts a little better), let's say that they have been. But the problem is, they don't understand one another at all, and their lack of understanding leads to them interpreting events quite differently. Their fights get worse; he thinks she's unreasonable and shrewish, she thinks he's thoughtless and insensitive.
The entire thing gets even worse when Tim discovers/develops his time-altering powers -- or alternately, he becomes increasingly delusional and ''thinks'' he's developing time-altering powers, but the result is the same: the relationship goes completely to hell, and Tim blames the "villain," i.e. the knight (who in reality is a genuinely nice guy concerned for the Princess). It all leads up to the big "fight," where he thinks he's rescuing her from the big, bad knight... but she only sees that he's gone mad and, scared out of her wits, rushes to seek the knight's protection, all the while lashing out at him, trying to slow him down (which he, from his point of view, interprets as her trying to help him because she wants him to rescue her).
When the dust settles, Tim isn't sure what happened back there, but he knows this much: His girl is gone, and he's made some huge mistake in order to drive her away. Problem is, he has no idea what this mistake ''is'' -- he's behaved in a perfectly reasonable way all this time, hasn't he? Damn it, he even lurked outside her window to watch her sleep, just like that sparkling vampire in that book, you know, the one that all the girls thought was so romantic. If only he knew what his mistake was, he could go back and fix it...
And so, the surreal landscape he goes through gathering clues isn't ''his'' mindscape, it's ''hers'' -- or at least a representation of it. He's simultaneously digging through the past ''and'' through her mindscape, looking for answers, trying to find out just where she's coming from and why she hates him all of a sudden. At first, this mindscape doesn't make much sense to him, populated as it is by weird hedgehogs and killer rabbits that meow like cats... but he sees there is ''some'' kind of logic there, and through solving the various puzzles in front of him he begins to learn the workings of her mind and gain some insight in how she perceives the world (and him).
But the Princess is, on some level, aware of his sudden intrusion in her innermost thoughts... and she doesn't like it. She feels he's violating her privacy, she wants him gone, and so various parts of her mindscape turn hostile, just wanting to be rid of him -- the bosses (who take on the appearance of the knight, the guy who saved her) are the strongest representations of her anger and panic... unfortunately, he misunderstands it and sees them as representations of the guy who kidnapped her, the monster who must be defeated at all costs.
Only the dinosaurs at the end of the levels (based on the stuffed dinosaur toy he saw in her bedroom while playing Edward Cullen) try to reason with him, because they represent the tiny part of her mind that hopes he can be made to understand. The flags, all nautical flags symbolizing, in different ways, "No," "turn back" "stop doing what you're doing," are parts of her attempts to tell him she doesn't want him there, and the dinosaurs all try to tell him that this entire thing won't bring him closer to what he wants ("The Princess is in another castle"). But they're all speaking ''her'' language, not his... so what she thinks are clear messages to him he either completely misses or misunderstands.
So he perseveres, completely unaware how much he's hurting her in the process, and finally, he thinks he's gathered enough insight that he's able to re-visit the events of that fateful last fight... and in a way, he ''has'' gained a greater understanding, because now he realizes to his horror just how ''she'' experienced that entire event and what a monster he appeared as in her eyes.
But he refuses to give up. He doesn't know how he can explain himself to her so that she'll understand him, but he ''has'' to try finding a way to make her see his point of view, show her that he's not the bad guy she thinks he is. So he returns to her mindscape, searching for an even deeper understanding, and this is where the stars come in. The stars are ''hard'' to find and to collect, and successfully doing it demands either a very deep understanding of the workings of the game (i.e. the Princess's point of view) or that you cheat and look up a walkthrough/ask someone else how to do it -- the stars in this case represent the levels of understanding.
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Finally, he gets the last star, which means he finally understands something he didn't before: Just what all this probing around in her mindscape actually did to her and how he in his search for understanding completely destroyed any chance he might have had of working things out. He's only tried to understand her on his own terms, not on hers, which meant he missed the signals -- because she made a similar mistake; she gave him signals and messages that made sense to ''her'' and thought he would understand them.
The final clue lies in the books with the random texts about a man/boy that may or may not have been Tim --whether it is or not is actually irrelevant; the important part is that they're all written from a ''male'' perspective with a male protagonist. This is what's obvious to Tim, it's the story he understands and identifies with, which is why this is the obvious text. However, if he ''hides,'' making himself completely invisible (i.e. for the first time viewing the princess on her terms and not trying to interpret him through his own) the text changes to a ''female'' perspective, with a female protagonist, and this is all underlined by the female voice that's singing whenever these texts are visible.
And now we see just how differently the women of the stories experienced the same situations, and it's shocking how differently they saw it -- because both parties are ultimately convinced ''they'' are the ones in the right. The man leading his girl through the crowded city wiews himself as taking charge and giving her directions; she views it as him dragging her in a direction she doesn't want to go, hurting her in the process. The boy wanting candy at the candy store thinks the woman is mean for not letting him have any; she's merely keeping him away for his own good.
But what's revealing here is that in neither story does anyone see the other's point of view. The men tend to ignore the possibility that the women even ''have'' a point of view, the women do realize that the men see things differently but find their reasoning to be inferior and don't think it's necessary to lower themselves to that level. And so, they talk ''past'' each other, not ''to'' each other. All the stories reflect the problems in Tim's and the Princess's relationship.
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...
So, did anyone actually read all this nonsense, or did I completely fail to communicate here? ^_^
* That's... brilliant. I applaud you.
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K: You should stop, I have something important to communicate''
The warnings directed towards a man intent on bringing an indescribable power into being. Think about the ending. A purging wall of flame chases Tim and the princess, all the way up to the point of Tim is found lurking outside a bedroom window. At this point everything reverses; Tim is now chasing her, not following. She is now trying to trap and block Tim from ever reaching her, not aid his progression. Instead of trying to escape the hands of an aggressive knight, he is now the one figure that takes her away from Tim’s ‘ridiculous need’, his obsession with control.
To remind you of this. After you touch the princess, if you manage, she '''explodes'''. LIKE A BOMB.
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The time-rewind ability only feeds into the deception because it provides the player with the tools to undo mistakes and never die. The theme is the same in all the texts -- it's about an obsession with something or someone. From finding the princess, to protecting the girl, to science, the desire for candy to the atomic bomb -- all about trying to achieve an obsession. In each case, the person with the obsession is blind to the truth. The princess is purely abstract and represents the object of the obsession (which is why saying Braid is a metaphor for the atomic bomb is not correct but not entirely wrong; the bomb is an example of obsession but not the only one).
And the segregation between game play and story disappears when you realize that the game is entirely about obsession -- collecting all the puzzle pieces is very difficult, but collecting all the stars is insane. It's the very reason why there's a cloud that takes almost two hours just to move to a position you need, it's the reason why the third world's star can be lost forever, it's the reason why star collection is insanely difficult.
In the final challenge, the game rewinds to show how one may be blind to the actual situation due obsession by altering the normal point of view. Break this demonstration by collecting all the stars, {{spoiler|and the game again defies you from reaching the princess by having her burst in a flash of light should you ever touch her, and placing her in the sky so she's forever out of your reach}}.
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[[Category:Braid]]
[[Category:WMG]]
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