Expedition 33, theme, and allegory
I'm really surprised people are as accepting as they are of the game's ending. I know there are people like me that didn't like it at all, but it seems to be a minority opinion.
I guess most people don't feel as much cognitive dissonance as I do between loving the world of Lumiere, the gestrals, and the deeply tragic characters of Gustave, Lune, Sciel and Monoco - and accepting the choice that the game presents in its finale.
The vast majority of the game's required story content occurs before the twist. More context is provided for the story of the Dessendre family, and the unhealthy bond the family has with the canvas, in optional areas in Act III. But the fact remains that the goal for the entire game, up through the end of Act II and until the final moments of Act III, for every character (save, secretly, for Verso), is to save Lumiere. To provide a safe world "for those that come after". In spite of this, Renoir insists to Alicia that the canvas world is not real, and in a move that utterly blindsided me, the game expects you to accept this at face value. The final choice is presented *entirely* as a choice between giving Alicia an easier, more peaceful life in a fantasy world, or a harsh reality in which she will have to do healing. Truly, it does not even broach for a second the possibility that the canvas deserves to exist for the sake of the people that already exist there. Renoir tells you they are not real, and that is the last word. In Verso's ending, Lune appears to be disapproving of his choice, but it's hard to overstate how forcefully the framing shifts the perspective away from the lives of everyone in Lumiere. In both endings, the focus is entirely on Alicia and her ability to be happy with her fate.
So, what does it mean that the value of Lumiere becomes entirely dependent on its meaning to Alicia? In one way or another, the story wants us to accept that Lumiere is not "real"; that it is a coping mechanism of Alicia's that deprives her of reality. As an allegory, sure, it is easy enough to understand that the canvas represents one's work or obsessions. But the problem is - and I'm sorry to be blunt - but what the fuck is up with Gustave? And Sciel, and Lune, and Monoco, and Esquie? Why do we see that these characters have authentic trauma, and drive, and history? Why do they fight for those that come after?
At first, one presumes that Lumiere is the story of the survival of a people, and that "for those that come after" means that their sacrifice has an eternal consequence, and that their people will benefit. Instead, those that "come after" turn out to be the people who were there from the very beginning, the Dessendres. More than that - none of the actions of anyone in Lumiere, quite literally, mean anything. Their work amounts to nothing. Less than nothing, actually, as killing the Paintress accelerates their own destruction. They did not do anything "for" those that came after. They simply existed, and their erasure benefited those that came after. Alicia would have struggled just as much to erase Lumiere at the beginning of the game, and accepting the story's own premises, would have benefitted just as much from it. The majority of the game - genuinely, its first two acts, and an amount that could total as much as 39 out of 40 hours of gameplay - seemingly serve no purpose toward the game's ultimate message except to make you feel sad to accept the erasure of Lumiere.
I'm left with literal questions about the worldbuilding. Are the people of Lumiere "not real" in the sense that they do not have real motivations, drives, fears, or autonomy? If so, the majority of the game becomes an extremely cheap sleight of hand, and your attachment to the world is artificially cheapened. Gustave, Lune and Sciel's desire to fight for their people's survival is an artifice, and the game can provide no meaningful differences between them and the "real" characters. For Maelle to mourn Gustave is foolish, for her to care about keeping the world alive is childish. It conforms to the framing of the game's ending, but it feels disingenuous. All of these characters are equally fictional; how can the game tell me I am wrong for relating more to the trauma of Sciel or Lune than to Alicia? The narrative spends far more time making the painted characters consistent with their world and ensuring their struggles are human and true to life, and I believe that is one of the aspects of the story people find most compelling.
So, fine. They aren't "not real" in that sense. They are independent people. Then, what are we left with? They aren't real in the sense that... well... there's the rub; there really is no other way to interpret it, is there? They are "not real" in the sense that... they exist in a lower-order reality, a universe created with Verso's soul that exists within a greater reality that the Dessendres refer to as the "real world"? Is that the manner in which the painted characters are "not real"? Obviously, ethically, this means nothing to us as an audience. It would be interesting to see the characters question this aspect of their reality, and indeed I viewed this as a compelling characterization for Renoir as a villain before I realized the narrative expected me to sympathize with his worldview. But if we accept this definition, it does nothing to make the people of Lumiere less human, and therefore it does nothing to make them less worthy of being alive than Alicia or the Dessendres.
And that's it! Those are the options. Either the characters in the game mean nothing, their fight for survival meant nothing, and when their existence is a problem for Alicia, they can be erased. Or they mean something, and the narrative is genuinely making the batshit insane claim that all these people are worthy of being killed for the sake of Alicia's healing.
It's a difficult spot to be in. It's easy to critique this analysis by arguing that, well, it's just allegorical. I guess my point is... if that's the defense, then it's a bad allegory! Allegory is meant to provide me a fictional situation that evokes a feeling, and then through analysis, I understand the real thing being evoked by the fiction through the lens of that feeling. Instead, I feel like I am being asked to work backwards, taking my understanding of real-world grief and applying it to the story as a way of making sense of its muddied themes.
I am sorry to say, I do genuinely just view this as the game tripping over its worldbuilding. The harm of escapism and the all-consuming nature of grief, and the spiral that can put you into - these are genuinely really compelling themes. But their emergence at the end of an almost entirely unrelated story about the very human struggle of Lumiere puts them at odds with what was already built up about the characters that the focus shifts away from. The fantasy story that Guillaume Broche imagined and the personal one that Jennifer Svedberg-Yen did have superficial similarities, but the way they were combined created an incredible narrative tension that does not resolve.
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