| Stray Dog and the Lying Princess | |
| |
| Found with | N/A |
| Find Target | N/A |
| Location | Filth Room |
| Chapter | Stray Dog and the Lying Princess |
| Purpose | Plot |
| “ | The tale of a girl's lie coming true. | ” |
Stray Dog and the Lying Princess, shorted in the inventory to Stray Dog, is a storybook which can be found at the very beginning of chapter ten. It is located on the bed in the Filth Room.
Like most of the storybooks in Rule of Rose, it foreshadows the upcoming events of the chapter.
Transcript
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who told lies.
She liked to scare the other girls by screaming, "Stray Dog is coming, Stray Dog is coming!"
But soon, everyone stopped being scared.
They hated the way that she lied.
One day, the girl came home screaming, "Stray Dog is coming, really!"
Everyone thought it was just another lie.
Except this time, it was no lie at all, and so they were all gobbled up.
The End.
Analysis
The story seems to be adapted from one of Aesop’s fables, The Shepherd’s Boy and the Wolf (or The Boy Who Cried Wolf.) In the fable, a shepherd boy constantly tricks nearby villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his flock. In some versions of the tale, he does this out of boredom, or for attention. He repeats this lie so many times that when the sheep are actually confronted by a wolf, the villagers do not believe his cries for help and the flock is slaughtered. The moral at the end of the Greek version is that "this is how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them". In Stray Dog and the Lying Princess, the shepherd and the wolf can be replaced by the princess and Stray Dog, respectively, and “the other girls” can be both the villagers and the flock.
In comparison to the plot of Rule of Rose, the Lying Princess could be Wendy, who was known for telling stories about Stray Dog to the Red Crayon Aristocrat Club (the other girls). The Aristocrats believed her stories, until Jennifer confronted them all during The Funeral, and they stopped believing Wendy all together. To support the link, in the book there are illustrations of the Lying Princess in a bed; Wendy was often bed-ridden due to sickness. The girls in the story all live in the same house, just like all the Aristocrats live together at Rose Garden Orphanage.
However, there is a major difference between the story told in the book, and the events seen in Rule of Rose. In the book, the Lying Princess tries to warn the others of Stray Dog before it arrived, but as they didn't believe her, they were left defenseless and were killed by Stray Dog. In the game, Wendy doesn't is never shown warning the other children, but rather takes Gregory M. Wilson (as Stray Dog) to them, which resulted in a massacre.
Trivia
- On the front cover of the book, Stray Dog is shown to be taller than the princess, and looks more like a shadowy figure of a man with a dog's head, rather than a canine on all fours, which is the form it takes throughout the rest of the book. The cover could be a hint to player, telling them that Stray Dog is actually a man; Gregory.
- In the storybook, the “other girls” are made up from a group of six children. This number matches the number of girls there are in the Aristocrat Club, excluding Wendy and Jennifer: Diana, Meg, Eleanor, Amanda, Susan, and Olivia.
External links
 Chapter Storybooks
| |
|---|---|
| March | The Little Princess |
| April | The Clover Field |
| May | Sir Peter |
| July | The Bird of Happiness |
| August | The Mermaid Princess |
| September | The Goat Sisters |
| October | Rag Princess |
| November | The Funeral |
| December | Stray Dog and the Lying Princess |
| January | Once Upon a Time |