After Finn and Jake regain consciousness only to faint due to Princess Monster Wife's hideousness, she beings to doubt her normality, leading the Ice King to throw a fashion show. All of the kingdom's penguins are in attendance, but one of them vomits due to Princess Monster Wife's ugliness. Distraught, Princess Monster Wife locks herself in her room. The Ice King desperately tries to show her that she is beautiful by revealing that he made her out of the parts of the princesses he found most attractive. Princess Monster Wife is disturbed by this notion and eventually decides to return the stolen body parts, until she herself does not exist. However, the Ice King is not moved, and angrily bemoans that she "gave away all [his] stuff." The story for "Princess Monster Wife" was developed by Patrick McHale, Kent Osborne, and series creator Pendleton Ward. In the DVD commentary for the episode, Ward revealed that with "Princess Monster Wife" he was hoping to craft a story that was both "super sad and intense, [but] tickles your funny bone at the same time." Ward further explained that the eponymous character was analogous to himself, noting, "I'm made out of broken parts … but you can turn [those parts] into something worth displaying." To voice Princess Monster Wife, Ward, Walch, and Little had to record each of their lines in tandem, mimicking the tones of one another. The storyboard for "Princess Monster Wife" was created by Somvilay Xayaphone and Bert Youn, and the episode was directed by Larry Leichliter. According to Ward, Youn's storyboarding idiosyncrasies are especially noticeable in this episode; several times, he drew Finn with gums, something that most storyboard artists do not do. During the episode's DVD commentary, fellow storyboard artist Jesse Moynihan argued that Youn employed "visual vocabulary [borrowed] from anime", which informed how he drew the characters. The song that the Ice King sings to Princess Monster Wife is called "Something Special". According to McHale, the song's writer, the main inspiration for it was the 1992 song "A Whole New World", from the animated feature film "Aladdin". McHale recorded a demo track of the song, featuring himself accompanied on guitar; during the recording of this demo, however, his cat kept meowing loudly. The crew found this funny, and so, in the finished episode, Gunter the penguin's cat offspring can be heard meowing several times.