Part of the tragedy in Clair Obscur is that the 33rd expedition enters a situation on the continent where all the parties involved have been atrophied into their respective roles. They've been playing these parts for so long that they don't intend to deviate and they don't trust change.
Painted Verso doesn't trust enough to reveal his true intentions, so he keeps secrets. Painted Renoir doesn't trust enough to risk making new allies, so he doesn't negotiate. Painted Alicia doesn't trust enough to believe a better future is achievable through her own actions, so she offloads the duty to act onto others.
It's like joining a play where everyone else has the script, and you don't. Even though another story is possible, the people with knowledge are too blinded by their own history and tragedy to push for that alternative.
Painted Renoir is the most striking example of this. He could've tried every single year for 67 years to reach out to the Expeditioners. He could've spent decades guiding Lumiére directly towards knowing the truth and fighting their real enemy. He could have min-maxxed his way through the situation like he was in a litRPG trying to optimize his chances against the Artist Renoir.
But he does none of those things because he's an old man who loves his family, and he's scared of losing more than what he's already lost.
i know there's a lot of surface similarities between Gustave and Verso, because they fill the same role in the expedition and Verso literally takes his place within it (and of course, they are both brothers, kind of, to Maelle). but i think actually a better description for them would be "mirrors" and Verso's true parallel in characterization from among the Lumièrians, is actually Sophie.
i chattered a little before about how i think the major incompatibility between Gustave & Sophie was the fact that Gustave insisted on fighting against the fate of the Gommage, whereas Sophie was instead resigned to it. She didn't want to spend her life in a struggle against the (to that point in time) inevitable. She didn't want to have children and subject others to the same fate. She came to a kind of acceptance (if still somewhat bitter) about dying. She even had sympathy for the Paintress herself, who in her life had only ever been understood as an evil figure cursing all of Lumière. Whereas Gustave really struggles to accept that others aren't willing to keep fighting for any chance they can get to save everyone. He can't understand why they wouldn't, and truly believes there is a real chance they'll save everyone, and that it is a failure not to at least try.
And Verso--the one we meet in the game, who spent 67 years torn between two sides, seeing death after death and how inevitably not only would everyone in the Canvas eventually be gommaged, but Aline succumb as well--doesn't have the drive to keep fighting for the Canvas anymore. He has weighed the suffering and decided it is better to go out now rather than keep fighting and prolonging it, so that at least some of his family can survive. Like Sophie, who according to Sciel loved her children so much she refused to give birth to them. Sophie who tells another woman in the prologue she's "not selfish enough to bring others into our doomed world." Because Verso DOES understand how doomed they all truly are--that even if the Paintress keeps holding Renoir back, eventually Aline will also die, and then everything will collapse again when Renoir has no reason to leave the Canvas intact. Even when Maelle shows she can sustain the Lumièrians once Aline is ousted--it just is prolonigng the same cycle, where either eventually one of the Dessendres will come back to drag Maelle away after all, or she also will die inside the Canvas. So is it better to lose the world now, or later? When there's already so few people left in it, or only once everyone thinks they're safe and have nothing to fear? he is playing the long game, becuase he's spent one hundred years already playing it. he has a scale of perspective that no one else in the expedition can.
It's not that Verso doesn't care about those in the Canvas, or think their lives aren't worth anything--we can see in his journal entry that he does. He just thinks the fate is truly inescapable, and not worth putting off. And not worth subjecting even more to over time. Is it better to let everyone die slowly as their fate approaches rather than end it all at once? The truly dark potential of Clair Obscur is hinted at but never really stated outright, which is how much more terrible the situation would be a decade after the game's timeline had Verso not changed his mind when he did. In real life, we consider it more ethical to euthanize animals quickly and peacefully rather than watch them struggle. People sign DNRs becuase they don't want to be painfully kept alive as long as possible when they can't do anything but lay there and suffer. What happens if Verso had let things continue, and in another 15 years the gommage age falls below 18? What happens when it's only 10 & under year olds left, with no one to take care of the youngest children--would everyone REALLY give up having children for the last decade? Would teens with low impulse control and no adults around to stop them? Or are there going to be 5 year olds & younger slowly starving as a city breaks around them once everyone who might care for them is gone? it's GRIM. it's what Verso sees coming. And his answer was instead: let them all go at once, together, before they realize what's happening.
Should he technically make that choice for everyone? No, no one should have that much power over the lives of others. But I can see the path that brought him there, along with the obvious stated desires of seeing his mother survive, and freeing the tired, captive shred of true-Verso's soul from the Canvas. Verso is resigned to the death of everyone including himself, the same way Sophie was. And at the point in the game's timeline has chosen to embrace it.
Which I think really makes the ending of the game fantastic, because it mimics the ending of the prologue--Sophie and Gustave facing each other, and then Verso and Maelle. Because Maelle is the one here who is truly the most like Gustave--they are both convinced that they CAN fix everything and make it okay. Maelle believes she can save the Canvas and not get sucked in, the way Gustave believed he could help defeat the Paintress and end the Gommage. They are both stubborn, and struggle to accept that others don't feel the same way about things they do, and argue that they know better. Whereas Sophie and Verso have said that it's not worth the potential cost any longer--that the price eventually will come, and it's better to avoid that now than pay even more dearly in a handful of years.
And i think THAT really is what the choice at the end of the game is about: optimism vs pessimism. The first time you play it, you don't KNOW how either option will end up. By siding with Verso, what you know is that the Canvas will end but that Maelle and the Dessendres outside will survive. By siding with Maelle, the only thing you know is that she MIGHT have a chance--she MIGHT not succumb to the lure of staying inside the painting forever, she MIGHT leave and live her own life, her family MIGHT not eventually come back in AGAIN and start another war to save her and drag her out. The first time you play it blind--you are betting on a chance, not an outcome. Choosing between certainty vs potential. Heavy suffering but on a short scale with finality vs EITHER a peaceful existence forever or simply prolonging the existing conundrum.
the fact that Maelle's ending is not perfectly happy (and doesn't guarantee long term stability) is to provide balance once you do know the outcomes, and keep them equivalent, since the developers at Sandfall clearly want this story to be a discussion and choice you actively engage with rather than a simple "good ending" and "bad ending". And I do think this is where a lot of discourse about the ending choices looses me, because they forgets that you don't know the first time you play. Once you have played both endings, then it can be a matter of which outcome you prefer--but ONLY one you've seen them.
The REAL choice is about certainty vs uncertainty, pessimism vs optimism, resignation vs hope. Which is why it plays out between Verso and Maelle, the same way it played out with Sophie and Gustave at the very start of the game, telling us how the story would go.
It's interesting to see how differently the Dessendres paint.
Aline is obviously the most talented. She recreated Lumière and literally created lives as she painted all the humans on the continent, all tens of thousands (perhaps even hundreds of thousands to a million if this is based on the real Paris). She managed to create accurate portraits of her family, and to sustain life to her creations through an enormous stretch of time. (We don't know how long Lumière existed before the Gommage, but from what we know from the game she sustained for close to a hundred years; Verso's age).
But her art style is also the least unique: she paints in a very academic style, if I may use the word. The humans are real people, the city inspired by the truth. Her biggest folly would be this giant paintress, but as it is more a reflection of herself, it is also quite devoid of imagination.
Then we have Renoir. While a talented painter in his own right, he is clearly much less strong than his wife. His creations however are much more imaginative, though still centered on reality: the Axons are fantastical beasts but retain this hold on real life as they are, in a way, each a "lesson" for one of his family members. His creations are certainly imaginative but still not detached from reality.
Clea is absolutely brilliant. She manages to hold qualities from both of her parents, while still creating something new and uniquely herself.
The Nevrons all come from her imagination, are pure product of fiction. And through this "life" breathed into them they retain a semblance of "consciousness" (or perhaps awareness) that make them a twisted parallel to all of Aline's little expeditioners. It's both a pity and a miracle to see Clea this erased from the narrative by her parents, when she represents so well the legacy of painting and family both Aline and Renoir hold onto.
We know that Verso only ever painted one canvas, but what a masterpiece of imagination and inventivity! The gestrals are of course the twin counterparts to the Nevrons, especially since Clea had a hand in designing the canvas as well when they were children. I will note though that from the beginning there are elements that prove that clearly, Clea was always the one who enjoyed painting while poor Verso preferred the piano and attempting to become a musician (until his family put a rather... definitive, end to his plans...): he, like his father, paints what he knows. And though it's not as hyper-centered on reality as his mother's creations, it's still tied to reality, to what's familiar, to what's comforting, like an extension of reality more than a desire to create something truly new. I am referring here to Esquie and Monoco, respectively his favourite toy and his dog.
While the gestrals, marvelous creations that they are, could have predicted a brilliant painting career for Verso, it is also abundantly clear throughout the entire game that music has always been his one true love, especially the piano. Talent without passion does not breed the joy and willpower needed for beautiful canvases.
And lastly, Alicia/Maelle. The truly most interesting case.
Her rooms at the Manor show us that like her brother, her own interests lie elsewhere. It is absolutely covered in books. Does she read? Does she write? Was she a writer herself? It's interesting to note that all journals in the game are audio recordings, safe for Gustave's journal- in which only him and Maelle ever write. Do her words hold such power, even in a painted world? Have her words shaped her ending and helped twist her vision of the world?
The rare times we see her paint, even after regaining her memories, prove how talented she is (much like her entire family)- but how, through her youth or perhaps natural character- she is missing the inventivity that betrayed the rest of her family's work;
Because nothing of what she paints is fictional to her. Maelle only ever paints what she sees as the truth.
The Dessendres paint and shape new worlds, all fictional, all fantastical too varying degrees: but not Maelle.
She paints their creations anew (Sciel and Lune), she paints the natural continuation of the canvas others had created (giving Aline's creations a happy ending)
I think here lies her true approach to painting, as compared to the others.
Painters are grounded in reality, and through art expresses it on a new canvas to reveal its secrets and the way they feel inside. (Rage through the nevrons, fear and anxiety when erasing the canvas, a new bigger playground to play with favourite toys, a mirror of reality to escape grief).
But Maelle does not see this world as fictional. And not wanting to break the hold this reality has, she does not create anything new: at worse she erases, at best she recreates previous creations.
Heavy spoilers to the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 below
After reading numerous theories about the color of chroma and its belonging to one of the Painters, and after much thought, I came up with a theory. Chroma means color or saturation of color, and color in art is often associated with emotions and expresses them. We perceive some of them on a subconscious level; green is life, red is passion, blue is tranquility and all that... Any artist or designer is familiar with color theory. So what if chroma represents not a person, but a feeling/emotion?
Please bear with me...
Red is love.
Everyone in Lumiere gommages in red petals - both times - they are all full of love - and so is Renoir when erases them - "Gommage, an act of love".
Curator has red chroma around him - Renoir loves his family and is doing everything from the feeling of love.
Fading boy - red - loves his Canvas and everything in it.
p!Renoir gommages in red - he loves his family too.
When Alicia becomes Maelle - red - love of her lumierian parents.
When Renoir is trying to erase everything including Verso - red.
p!Alicia - red.
R!Renoir gommages in red - love to his family and daughter again.
In Verso's ending everyone gommages in red - him and fading boy included - they are full of love too or doing everything out of love.
there are many more examples...
White is grief/sorrow.
Everything related to Aline is white, like it's just impossible for her to experience any other emotion.
Monolith where The Big Woman is sitting has white petals in the air.
Paintress herself - white.
p!Renoir is healed by white - I assume Aline's grief or she herself is what feeds his power?
Simon gommages in white (AND red). *screaming*
Verso in the "limbo" - white - bc of Aline's influence and also bc he is full of sorrows too in that moment...
And gold(yellow)...
I honestly don't know. anger? fear? duty? something else?
Examples that we have( there are more beside these):
Clea's spirit self - gold - she's angry and determinated to put an end to it all.
When Maelle is piercing the barrier - gold - just look at her face.
In the Monolith cutscene with Renoir - gold petals in the air- I don't even know who is angrier at that moment.
Maelle gommages in gold - fear?
Maellicia is trying to save Verso from gommage - gold - fear and anger.
When Verso starts to gommage in limbo and Maellicia enters it - there are also some gold petals among the white - he is also angry and scared - honestly I can't even imagine everything he is feeling.
Maellicia is gommaging into gold - the fear in her eyes is self-explanatory...
When I'm applying this theory to every event in the game - this immediately makes a lot more sense to me than just person-related theory. Or maybe I'm just crazy lunatic and this don't make sense at all?
So if anyone has any suggestions about the gold or any other comments or if someone already did that - please let me know, I'll be happy to discuss!!!
Thank you for listening to my ted talk.
And we still don't know what happened in The White Sands...
There's many points in Clair Obscur when the character has a noble front reason and a selfish backup reason. It's particularly on display in act 3.
Verso in the ending:
Noble - Save his sister, save his mother, stop the cycle.
Selfish - Wants his own death.
Maellicia in the ending:
Noble - Save the canvas residents and Gustave, save Verso’s only work of soul art.
Selfish - Have a playground to escape into without pain, where she is loved and no one challenges her.
You can even go into earlier decisions...
Maellicia gommaging Painted Alicia:
Noble - Give Alicia peace, honor her wishes.
Selfish - Erase the reminder of Maellicia's own pain and the life she rejects, maybe jealously since Verso only needs one Alicia to roleplay as his sister.
Verso letting Gustave die:
Noble - Best odds to get his mother out of the canvas and save her.
Selfish - Convenience, and maybe jealousy that Alicia was so close to a painted older brother.
Clair Obscur is packed with examples of narrative duality, the most dramatic of which are embodied by Verso and Maelle. Over and over again, they trace the same patterns as mirrors of each other. As protagonists they both selfish and self-sacrificing. How you calculate that ratio may differ depending on how sympathetically or critically you interpret their motivations. Yet what's incredible to me about the story is how it gives us the honorable and the dishonorable reasons for why characters make the choices they do.
The noble reason makes them sympathetic and admirable, but the selfish reason makes them feel human and realistic.
And importantly: both are true.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, like its artistic namesake, celebrates dissonance. Two things can be true at once, and beauty is found in the contrast.
Verso infiltrates Expedition 33 in the most self-destructive way possible. He's not a cold secret agent archetype or a mustache twirling villain. His methods are frighteningly effective but it's because he fanatically turns himself over to it:
be the thing they need at the critical time
be charming to distract from how little information you share
repeatedly and relentlessly demonstrate your value
self-sacrifice to prove you're serious
be a good listener and let people unburden themselves with you
if you have to share, share something that is real and personal, but don't go too deep with it
make them laugh
And the thing is... I think Verso was sincere. The game UI isn't lying when he gets a relationship upgrade. Monoco calls him out on getting too attached.
Verso's act 2 plan: I'll just be friends with you for real, and I'll let myself love you guys and then at the end I'll just kill that part of myself to do what needs to be done.
So there's a popular headcanon that Aline was pushing Verso to be a painter instead of a musician, and some people talk about it in a way as if it was a huge divider in their relationship.
I have to say that... I think this approach is a little sexist (see below: he mentions pressure from both his parents but people only ever blame Aline), and it shows a lack of deeper reflection on the content of the game itself. The dynamics around that relationships appear a lot more nuanced when you look at all the different times his mother and music are shown together in the game.
Of all the members of the family, Aline is the primary one associated with his love of music.
In the monolith, we see her memories of teaching him to play as a boy.
In the act 2 epilogue, Alicia comments on their mother's piano as the place where Verso wrote songs for her.
In the DLC, this is how he commemorates Aline:
There she is, smiling at her son on his piano. Repeatedly the game has shown us that this was an important part of how they bonded in his childhood. She instilled in Verso a love of music, and they played the same instrument.
Here is the conversation (Lune, level 5) where Painted Verso mentions parental expectations:
Verso: My parents were both artists. Widely respected, very prominent artists. So. There was a great deal of pressure to follow in their path.
Lune: You’re an artist then?
Verso: Not the kind they wanted me to be.
Lune: Meaning?
Verso: Music is my passion.
I'm going to take it at face value that both Versos had the same memories of their parent relationships growing up. Now what do we get from this conversation?
Both parents were artists and there was "a great deal of pressure" on him. He doesn't actually say if the pressure comes from the family, from himself, from other members in society, or who. I think if there is going to be a parent who pressured Verso more, it was likely Renoir. Canonically the "controlling" parent and husband, for starters. The real version started this whole war, and the painted version seems to be regularly telling painted Alicia what she should or shouldn't be doing, despite her being like 90 years old. BUT, in the sake of fairness and good spirit we could say that maybe Renoir and Aline were both giving equal pressure. Or maybe the council painters was giving pressure for all we know.
So you have Verso as an adult remembering feeling like he was pressured to follow in his parents' path. Aline in her memories, has visions of teaching him the piano and associates that as an activity they did together. Child Verso also loved her for that, and painted it in his cabin.
So the narrative here might be that Aline taught Verso to play piano, but when he became a teenager and was more serious about it, both parents pushed back and pressured him to be a painter instead. Yet Verso, as far as we know, successfully became a musician. He lived away from the Manor (reasonable for an adult), in the city center close to the Opera House where he performed. There doesn't appear to be any active negativity around that aspect of his life, and he talked about the presssure in past tense. Aline seems to have repainted him diligently with both his love of music and the memories of his parents pushing against it, for him to find independence and happiness with his artistic passion.
My read on this whole thing is that Verso probably told them as a teenager that he didn't want to paint anymore and wanted devote himself to music. They probably pressured him and tried to talk him out of it, but he was insistent. So, like a lot of parents, as he became an adult and pursued this track they accepted it and moved on.
We don't get any indication in the game that this was an active conflict in Verso's adult life. He is posing with them in a fairly recent portrait. That and the fact that he was at the manor when the Writers attacked Alicia tells me that he was at least in communication with his family and does not seem to have been estranged from them.
There's one more interesting thing from the DLC that I want to point out. Osquio says something like "You'll never be good enough as a musician, you'll have to paint forever."
To me, this speaks so strongly to young Verso's insecurities. He put all of that into an imaginary opponent that he could fight and defeat with his best friends. The fact that it's present in his drafts introduces more nuance about what the sources of pressure were on him growing up.
How much of this was really pressure from his parents, and how much was pressure that he put on himself? When I was a teenager there was a lot of things that I assumed about my own parents, and convinced myself that they believed something of me, and then when I actually talk to them over time I realized that some of these ideas I put in my own head. I would later find out that they didn't necessarily judge me in the ways that I thought they were.
That's only my personal experience, but knowing that and then looking at what the game gives us: (Aline + piano = happy memory, Verso having insecurities about choosing music, Verso verbally recounting that he was pressured) all of it makes a pretty soft gray area for me.
I look at all that and I think yeah, some of it was probably pressure from them initially, a lot of it was probably pressure from himself, and at the end of the day everyone moved on. He became a musician and the family still dearly loved him. If you didn't get it from the game itself then it should be obvious from the DLC that for all the Dessendres flaws as a family, they did fiercely love each other. So much of the story conflict is motivated by love.
To wrap this up, I'll say that the game gives us subtle nuances about how being a musician affected Verso's relationship with his family. It's a mixture of positive and negative (mostly positive) and Aline is intrinsically part of Verso's story of becoming a musician.
So I understand if you're writing a fanfic and you need one of the parents to be the bad guy so Verso has someone to rebel against, but if you find yourself dabbling in those headcanons then I will say only this: Renoir is right there. Let my girl Aline off the hook for this one.
This post is me looking at part of the game from a metaphorical lens. Not just styles of painting (a topic many have discussed), but following that line of thinking to its inevitable conclusion with the end of the story.
I like to see Clair Obscur's painter family as a showcase of the different ways that people can be artists, especially fine arts as a visual medium.
1 ) Aline
Aline creates photorealistic art. Her painted family are portraits so close to accuracy that they even feel and behave like the originals. Our Verso is not actually Verso Dessendre any more than René Magritte's painting of a pipe could be a literal pipe. But Verso is so close that it feels real to Aline. Beyond the family, her primary creations are the city of Lumiére and its human citizens. They think, feel and live like humans. Art that is striving for clarity and truth through mimicry.
2) Renoir
Renoir strikes me as an abstract artist. His creations are giant weird titans... they have some level of thought and sentience, but don't seem to exist like the humans in Lumiére do. They are metaphorical and symbolic. They don't go about regular lives with jobs; they hang out on islands and sway with the wind or gradually transform the landscape. The ultimate meaning of their existence is subjective and their form is inscrutable. Alicia/Maelle speculates on the metaphorical intent behind them, but ultimately that's just her observation. The artwork is abstracted from concrete definitions. Yet they loom over their islands the same way Renoir's presence invisibly looms over the canvas.
3) Clea
Clea's art in this canvas is functional... it serves a purpose and has an end goal. She painted the Nevrons to do particular tasks, not to be beautiful or metaphorical. She likely painted more whimsical things like Francoise as a child, but her mature adult Painter style is functionality first. Any creations that don't fulfill their function (equivalent to a badly painted street sign) are seen as failures. They can't exist just to be art--they must have purpose or the result is wasted effort.
4) Verso
Young Verso Painted cute toy-like creatures in a whimsical world. He has talent and imagination, but his art reflects a child's fixations. In contrast, Adult Verso abandons the medium and never develops a mature style as a painter. He picks a new craft entirely, develops that, and tragically dies before his artistic prime.
And then we have...
5) Maelle/Alicia
We don't know what Alicia's mature painting style is, and there's a chance she never develops one.
While she's in this canvas, she'll just try to mimic what her mother did with the citizens. If she never leaves the canvas, then she'll never create her own worlds in her own style. Maybe she could eventually paint something unique like the axons--original designs in someone else's painting--but the game does not show us that far into the future.
It's poetic and tragic: Alicia's potential as an artist is stifled by the recurring cycle of tragedy that now defines her existence as Maelle.
She is overshadowed by her family's artistic legacy. The only way to create her own identity as an artist would be to change her whole approach and abandon their artistic philosophies to create her own art. In the story of the video game, that means making her own canvases. Unlike the other Dessendres, Maelle seems unable to define her own style unless and until she moves past her artistic influences. By choice or by force.
Alicia also serves as an archetype of the artist obsessed with using a medium she will only be proficient in, but not excellent.
To be fair: she is young and has years to develop the same level of skill as the others. The wall painting we see by her in the Manor looks like poorer craft than the rest. Maybe she could get better over time... But she cannot do that in this canvas. She may never flourish as an artist unless she confronts her weaknesses and strengths: either by discovering her own way of doing painting that suits her better, or picking another medium entirely like Verso. Tragically, her fate in A Life to Paint depicts artistic stagnation.
As long as she remains subservient to her artistic influences, the art she creates will be hollow.
