Princess Innocence was never in the wrong. Sometimes, things happened all by themselves. Sometimes things happened because people made bad choices - but those people were never Princess Innocence.
For example, one day Princess Innocence went for a walk in the woods, and a crispy autumn leaf tumbled through the air and hit her right in the eye. It hurt really badly, and so Innocence set fire to the woods to burn up all the leaves so that it could never happen again. This meant that a lot of forest animals had to run headlong out of the trees and that the air was smoky for a few hours and that the royal firefighters had to work pretty hard to make sure that the fire didn't spread to the palace or the nearby villages. But of course it wasn't Princess Innocence's fault; she'd never have done something so drastic if the leaf hadn't hit her in the face. Everyone agreed that no one could have expected Innocence to just ignore something like that.
The next day, Princess Innocence's adults refused to make her pink petit-fours for breakfast. They said they had slept poorly, maybe because of the smoke (which was that autumn leaf's fault) or maybe for no reason at all (at any rate not Innocence's fault) and did not have the energy to make them. And furthermore they did not think that petit-fours of any color were a good breakfast food. It certainly wasn't Princess Innocence's fault that they thought that; she hadn't made them think it, and argued against at every opportunity. And it wasn't her fault that they were tired, either. She screamed and raged and threatened and howled, but for some reason, this did not get her petit-fours for breakfast. It wasn't her fault, though. She had done everything she could. Maybe her adults needed to go to bed earlier.
Then, after that, Princess Innocence was feeling quite hungry. She saw her little sister Princess Serenity sitting in the palace garden with a pomegranate. "Give me that," said Princess Innocence.
"No, it's mine!" said Serenity.
Now, it wasn't Princess Innocence's fault that she was hungry - if she'd gotten the pink petit-fours she'd asked for, she would have eaten them up. And it wasn't Princess Innocence's fault that Serenity refused to hand over the pomegranate, either. Serenity was completely free to do exactly as Innocence said and so it was her own decision not to do it. So it was in no way Innocence's fault that she took her decorative princess fan out of her sash and swatted Serenity with it as hard as she could.
Serenity dropped the pomegranate and ran away crying. And for a few minutes Innocence sat in the garden eating pomegranate seeds. But then out came her adults, demanding to know why Serenity was crying and hadn't gotten to eat the pomegranate!
Princess Innocence was very annoyed at this point. It was not her fault that her adults were interrupting her snack. They could have just not cared if Princess Serenity got smacked, the same as Innocence, and it was their decision to make a big deal about it. Serenity could have just not told them in the first place, and then Innocence would have finished her pomegranate with nobody else even knowing it had happened! All of this could have been avoided if other people had made different choices. So it wasn't Innocence's fault when she screamed and hit them all with her fan and demanded that they put Serenity to death by hot air balloon.
Eventually the adults left Innocence by herself in the garden. She finished the pomegranate. She felt a little better, but she didn't see any hot air balloons in the sky, so presumably they had decided of their own free will not to follow her royal command. She stormed into the palace with her princess gown trailing behind her, demanding to know where everyone was so she could find out who was responsible for this failure.
Princess Innocence couldn't find anyone. She looked in the bedrooms: nobody. She looked in the kitchens and the stables and the dungeon and the towers: nobody. But eventually she found a note, on the front gate at the palace entrance. It said:
Dear Princess Innocence, we are going to the Summer Palace with Serenity for a while. Love, your adults.
When she read this Princess Innocence was infuriated. How dare they! That was a completely different action from putting Serenity to death by hot air balloon. She stomped back inside.
Innocence did exactly what she usually did to get lunch made for her - stand in the middle of the kitchen and loudly announce that she wanted a scrambled dragon egg. This had always worked in the past and the fact that this time it did not work was not her fault. Usually there were plenty of people around to hear her; they had all left, but that wasn't Innocence's decision. She tried again in case that helped, very generously allowing the world around her a second chance to get her the food she wanted, but no one was home.
Eventually Innocence scrambled her own egg. It wasn't as good as it was when her grownups made it, but that wasn't her fault, it was just because she was a kid. It was a little burny in some places and a little runny in other places and she'd put too much salt in it. But at least none of that was her fault at all.
When she was done eating she went looking for her pet unicorn, but couldn't find him. He usually lived in the woods, and when she walked into them now they smelled smoky and made her sneeze, and she didn't know which way he'd run after she burned them down. It wasn't her fault, though. He could have just run someplace really obvious where she could see him. Probably he was just a very stupid unicorn.
For her afternoon snack Princess Innocence wanted pink petit-fours, like the ones she'd wanted to have for breakfast, but those were too complicated for her to make by herself. So she didn't have a snack, and it made her grumpier, and she was already really grumpy.
Since it was boring and lonely in the palace with her grownups and her sister all gone to their summer home, Innocence decided to go visit her neighbor, Prince Perfect. He was at the time she arrived digging a hole in his castle's garden. He had dug up some little potatoes and chopped up a bunch of yellow flowers with his trowel and he was getting started on digging a little river from the fish pond all the way to the cactus bed. He was happy to see Princess Innocence and gave her a spare trowel so she could help.
After they had been digging together for a little while one of Prince Perfect's adults burst out of his castle. "What are you two doing?" she cried. "The prizewinning daffodils! The potatoes that were supposed to be for Thursday! You've nearly drowned those poor cacti! You're both in big trouble."
"It's not my fault," said Princess Innocence at the top of her lungs. "You never told me not to dig in the garden!" But the Prince's grownup took their trowels anyway and then made them both change clothes because they'd gotten dirty. Princess Innocence screamed and screamed that it wasn't her fault. And it wasn't! No one had ever told her "Princess Innocence, just like in your garden at home, it is against the rules in Prince Perfect's garden to dig without grownup permission". She hadn't decided to be dirty on purpose, it had happened all by itself when she got down in the mud for unrelated reasons. It wasn't her responsibility that Prince Perfect had given her a trowel, and so taking it away from her afterwards was really unfair. And on top of all that, none of this was a big deal anyway. Princess Innocence didn't care about the potatoes or the flowers or the cacti and that meant that Prince Perfect's grownups were just hassling her for something that wasn't even important on top of it not being her fault. If they just cared about the same things as her, like sensible people, everything would be fine.
Prince Perfect started crying when he realized his only clean clothes left were his least favorite color. It made a really annoying noise, so Princess Innocence smacked him with her fan. That made him cry louder, so she kept smacking him, and since he didn't seem to get it, she also yelled at him to be quiet and added that he was stupid, but that didn't help either. Prince Perfect's grownups picked up Princess Innocence and put her down outside the castle's fence and then locked it so she couldn't get back in, which wasn't her fault at all. No one, least of all Innocence, made them do that. They didn't even explain why they'd done it when she tried shrieking WHY at the top of her lungs 16 times (in case they didn't hear her the first 15). She had absolutely no idea what had caused them to make these choices, so she tried shrieking WHY a seventeenth time, but to no avail.
Innocence stomped home, until her feet started hurting, which wasn't her fault because it wouldn't have happened if the ground were softer. She did eventually get too tired to stomp and just walked the rest of the way, though that wasn't her fault either because if her grownups had made her petit-fours she would have had plenty of energy to do all the stomping and also if Prince Perfect's grownups hadn't thrown her out of their castle she wouldn't have needed to stomp at all.
She watched TV by herself for a while, but then she got bored. Then she read a book, but when it was over she was still lonely. She drew on all the walls because nobody was there to stop her, and it wasn't her fault that there wasn't anyone around to do that, but it didn't take very long. It was very hard to be such an innocent princess who had never done anything wrong in her entire life.
That night one of her grownups came home. "I'm here to fix you dinner," he said.
"Finally!" said Princess Innocence, who had been kept waiting practically all day for no reason at all. "I want petit fours."
"I'm not making petit fours," said the grownup. "Dinner is seamonster slime."
"Seamonster slime! I HATE seamonster slime and I hate you!" said Innocence. This was not her fault because seamonster slime is green, and she had only had it once, more than a year ago the last time it was in season, and back then she had liked it a lot. Any reasonable person would react the same way under these conditions.
But the grownup scooped a big green spoonful of slime out onto a plate for her anyway. And then he just left! This wasn't Princess Innocence's fault. She hadn't told him to leave. She wasn't chasing him. It was all his own decision to leave her with this plate full of seamonster slime to eat. He could have ordered her pizza. He could have brought the whole rest of the family home with him to keep her company, including the members of the family who could make petit fours. He could have told her that nothing was ever her fault and then put Princess Serenity to death by hot air balloon. And he hadn't done any of those things at all!
Princess Innocence eventually tasted her seamonster slime and ate about a third of it and then noticed it was dark outside. And there was no one there to put her to bed. This was not her fault at all and it was the most unjust thing that had ever happened to anyone in the whole entire world. She wound up falling asleep in her laundry basket because she spent all evening looking for her special blanket and that was where she found it. That wasn't her fault at all either. She hadn't asked for it to be washed, because she didn't care if it was smelly to other people, and also she was sure that dire dust mites were imaginary because she'd never seen one. So there was no reason for anyone to have taken it upon themselves totally of their own accord to put it in the laundry. Whoever that was, the crick in her neck was their fault.
After she got up out of the laundry basket, and ate all of the candied charmberries from the box of Fairytale Crunch in the cupboard for breakfast, she decided to spend the morning at the beach. She went in her most princessy swimsuit, with the sapphires and the silken ruffles and the picture of a duckling that was also a princess on the front, and walked there since her grownups weren't there to take her on horseback and her unicorn was missing. It was a long walk, and it was a bright, sunny day - perfect beach weather. By the time she got to the beach she was hot and had gotten hungry again and she realized she hadn't packed a beach towel or a lunch or anything like that. It wasn't her fault, of course, because if her grownups had been there to go with her to the beach they would have taken care of that, and them not being there wasn't her fault.
So Innocence decided to grab another kid's towel and lunch. Since it would be totally unfair for her to not have those things just because her grownups had cruelly abandoned her all alone for no reason, and especially unfair if she had to make an extra trip all the long way back to her palace to get them, that was the most reasonable thing to do. The other kid's reaction of yelping and chasing her was totally out of line. And when he got close enough to grab the towel, and Innocence tripped and fell into the cold wet beach sand, that was definitely all his fault. He could have just let her get away with the towel and lunchbox and then she'd never have tripped. Unfortunately, because there was sand in her mouth - which she certainly hadn't put on the beach herself and definitely wasn't responsible for getting into her mouth - she was unable to properly yell at the boy when he grabbed his towel and lunch off the ground and ran back to his family.
Once she spat out all the sand, she tried again with an unattended towel and lunch. This time nobody chased her and she made it to a good picnic spot on the beach. She was pretty hungry and the sand hadn't helped at all, so she opened the lunch, but it was full of salad. Yuck! Now she was still hungry and it was the fault of whoever had packed salad. If they had just packed pizza and petit fours she'd be in great shape.
Princess Innocence dumped all the salad out onto the beach, but there was nothing else hiding under it. Gross. Whoever had brought a salad to the beach had totally ruined her outing.
She decided she'd go swimming before she tried taking another lunch. In she waded into the sea. It was chilly and salty and pushed and pulled at her legs while she went deeper and deeper. And then when she was up to her waist, it knocked her over completely! That wasn't her fault at all. Just like with the crunchy leaf that had hit her in the eye, Princess Innocence was not implicated in the behavior of the ocean at all.
Princess Innocence could swim a little bit but not very well, and was soon swept out by the tide, far from the beach. Floating on the waves, which tasted awful whenever they splashed her in the face, she started to get really scared. She was all alone and had been victimized for no cause by this dreadful bunch of water, which could have just held still like a pond or a pool but had instead yanked her right off her feet. She kicked and howled, but kicking didn't get her very far and whenever she opened her mouth she got seawater in it. It was worse than salad.
Then, a giant tentacle lifted itself out of the ocean, and felt around in the air for a moment, and then wrapped around Princess Innocence and dragged her below the waves. This, it should go without saying, was not her fault.
Down, down the giant octopus pulled, into the black depths, not that she could easily tell how dark it was because she could not open her eyes underwater. (That wasn't her fault, because practicing had been uncomfortable and she'd had no real option but to give up.)
Princess Innocence couldn't hold her breath for very long, but before she was in any serious danger, she felt the water shear away from her skin and she landed, perfectly dry, in a bubble of air with a sandy floor. Innocence shivered and opened her eyes.
There was a dim glowing coral in her bubble with her, so she could see her own hands and the white sand beneath. Outside the bubble everything was dark. But there was a resounding voice.
"Princess," intoned the voice. "I have brought you here to save the kingdom of the merfolk."
Innocence sat up. That was very exciting! She'd always wanted to be an amazing hero! "What's happening to the kingdom of the merfolk?" she asked.
"They are under attack by a dire shark, who can only be defeated by human hands," said the voice.
Innocence was about to enthusiastically agree to go defeat the dire shark, which sounded very easy and impressive at the same time, when she realized something important.
The dire shark was very, very definitely not, in any way, shape, or form, her fault.
Now, of course, this was true of everything. It was never the case that Princess Innocence was at fault for anything at any time. But if you looked very very closely, there could conceivably be things that were more or less not her fault. The dire shark was among the least her-fault things of all time. A completely ignorant outside party watching the proceedings without any information about Innocence and her comprehensive track record of never having anything be her fault would not even pause to consider the possibility that she had sent a dire shark to the kingdom of the mermaids. It was in fact so egregiously not her fault that she felt compelled to point out:
"That's not my fault."
There was a heavy pause, and then the voice said, "I didn't say it was."
"I just want to be very clear, here," Innocence said. "I didn't attack the mermaids with a shark. Even if I wanted to do that, I wouldn't know where to find the mermaids, and wouldn't be able to get the shark to do what I said. I didn't know any of this was happening. Nobody even tried to make it my chore to protect the mermaid kingdom from sharks until just now, so there was no job I wasn't working hard enough at. Things are never my fault but this is especially, extra, obviously not my fault."
There was another silence. Then, "So?" said the voice that must have belonged to the giant octopus.
"What do you mean, so?" said Princess Innocence.
"You can do something to make it better. Even if you didn't do anything to make it worse."
Innocence thought about that.
Usually the most important fact about any situation was whether it was her fault or not (and it was always not). So many things depended on whether things were Innocence's fault, like whether it was reasonable for people to be upset with her about them, or whether she had to do anything differently in future similar circumstances, or whether she still deserved all the turns on the flying carpet. Since nothing was ever her fault, those essential questions had clear and straightforward and satisfying answers.
"I can get another human," suggested the octopus.
"No!" said Innocence. "I want to be a hero. I can save the mermaids. Even though it's not my fault they need saving."
"If you pick up the glowing coral, it will bring your air bubble with you," said the octopus.
Princess Innocence scooped up the piece of coral and got to her feet. She still couldn't really see the octopus, but the tip of a tentacle drew a path in the sand, and she followed it.
"How do I use my hand to defeat the shark?" she asked.
"You will need to use both hands. The coral has a string, so you can wear it around your neck."
She did this, and held her hands out in front of her like she was worried about running into a wall. "Will it just let me touch it?"
"Yes. It will try to eat you."
Innocence reflected that it was a good thing that shark mouths were on the bottoms of their heads. If a shark came close to her, while she was walking on the sea floor, she would be easily able to bop it in the nose.
The coral wasn't bright enough for her to see much of the merfolk kingdom, but after she got out of the sand and through the seaweed farms, it had pretty tiled roads, which the octopus directed her through. Everything was quiet apart from the octopus's voice. All the mermaids must be hiding to avoid the shark coming to their homes.
"Dead ahead," said the octopus, and Innocence, who'd been resting her arms, flung her hands out palm-first. An instant later, a big rough gray impact knocked her to the ground. Her hands were scraped by the sharkskin and smarted pretty badly. But the shark recoiled immediately, and she could see a faint ripple in the distance as it fled from her. She had defeated the dire shark with her human hands! She'd saved the entire mermaid kingdom! And the mermaids saw it, too: she heard a tremendous cheer of a thousand burbles all around her, as they rejoiced that they had been rescued!
A mermaid swam up to her air-bubble and gave Princess Innocence a great big backpack full of jewels and artifacts and sunken treasures, burbling with joy and applauding. Innocence couldn't speak Mermaid, but she could smile while she put the backpack on and give a big friendly wave with her stinging hand.
Followed by the crooning of the mermaids, and accompanied by the octopus which prevented her from getting lost, Princess Innocence walked in her air bubble all the way back to the beach, which turned out not to be that far away on foot. She was tired and hungry and she really didn't like having scraped hands, but she was a hero! She'd saved the day! It felt amazing, even better than not being tired and hungry and scraped felt. Even though her feet were sore by the time she walked up out of the ocean, she twirled and danced with pride.
On the beach, she noticed that one family's carriage had been caught by the high tide. Its back wheels were sinking into the muck, and it was making it very hard for the grownups to pull it out so they could ride home. That wasn't Innocence's fault at all.
But she could make it better anyway.
She ran over with her water-repelling coral charm, and when she was close enough, the sand was dry and released the wheels no problem. The carriage came free with a great creak, and the family were so grateful, they offered Innocence a ride home. She was very grateful for this, since it meant she didn't have to walk any farther on her tired feet. The bag of treasure clinked as the carriage bounced along the beach and up the road to her palace.
Once she was home again, one of her adults was waiting for her there. Princess Innocence got a great big hug and a kiss on the head. "I'm so sorry!" he said. "We left in kind of a hurry and didn't realize nobody had stayed home with you. I thought the royal butler had you and he thought the royal cook was still here and everybody else was expecting your aunt but she got pulled over for a missing horseshoe and couldn't make it. We never meant to leave you alone."
"I've been okay," said Innocence, generously. "And, I got to be a hero."
"Oh! I'd like to hear all about that," said the grownup, and while he fixed Princess Innocence a pot of pasta she told him of her adventures.
"It sounds like you learned something important," he remarked.
"Yes," said Princess Innocence. "Nothing is ever my fault."
"- well, you already knew that," he said. "So you didn't learn it today."
"But even though nothing is ever my fault," said Princess Innocence, "I can make things better anyway, and save the day."
"Does that mean that if we replant the forest and catch your pet unicorn, you won't set it on fire again, even if a leaf hits you in the eye and it hurts and it isn't your fault that it blew into your face?" he asked.
"Yes."
"And does it mean that you will try to guess if digging in somebody's garden is probably against the rules, even without being told first and even when it is not your fault no one told you?"
"Yes."
"Does it also mean it would be okay if we brought Princess Serenity back here?" asked her grownup.
"I think it would make things better if you put her to death by hot air balloon," said Innocence. "Have you considered doing that? It would be heroic."
"I see," said her grownup. "I guess I'll ask about that again tomorrow."
"I will have the same opinions forever," Innocence assured him.
They ate their pasta together, and he put Innocence to bed, and she dreamed of the ocean and of heroism.