#e33 meta

[kiramessa]

the reacher is maelle at her worst and also her strongest. she lets alicia's weakness, a fear of heights, control any enjoyment she could have with the wonder of the place. she brushes off the gift of wings--wings!--with a shrug. maelle never had any problem with heights before. she loved traveling across rooftops, loved being up in the hanging gardens with gustave, and even had no problem sitting on a cliff's edge with sciel, watching the night sky. but it's only after she remembers she is alicia does she let that fear override her, a fear she mentions so blithely as to take it as a fact that cannot be denied or changed. she laughs as nevrons kill each other, so disconnected from the consequences of these creatures fighting each other. maelle, the one from the start of the game, wouldn't find that funny. she might be surprised, but not amused. not entertained.

she is strong enough to separate herself from painted alicia, strong enough to know where they connect and can understand each other; strong enough to know that painted alicia deserves her chance to speak (figuratively), deserves a chance to decide what to do now that her painted family is all but gone. she remembers her life as alicia, uses that to empathize with painted alicia, and through that assumes (rightly) what her painted self wants more than anything. she is able to look at painted alicia and not be afraid. maelle is able to look at painted alicia and know that she deserves freedom, she deserves what to say and do about her life. especially since she let go (literally) of her dream (the letter verso gave back to her).

but maelle is cruel. she doesn't even considering giving verso a chance to say goodbye, doesn't even look at him as she puts painted alicia through the gommage. she looks at painted alicia fade with an expression that is almost terrifying in its ambiguity--is she disgusted? does she feel anything? is she proud of what she did? does she feel better? worse? does she feel triumphant, that yes, finally, the last hurdle of aline's painted family has been stricken from the canvas? that yes, finally, the other sister is gone, and now verso is hers? verso, who introduces the expedition to the area by saying "my sister is at the top." his sister. his family.

when verso grieves and tries to explain to maelle that his whole family is gone, maelle insists that he has her now and that's where she is perhaps at her worst, which is so heartbreaking. verso means his family, the painted family, the replicas of the living, breathing dessendres. they're all gone. the family he's known for his century in the canvas are gone. but maelle doesn't see that. she sees that she has family now, finally--but she doesn't want the family waiting for her outside the canvas. she doesn't want the living, breathing family. the freedom of being in the world again, of changing her life, of growing and healing. she rejects the wings made for her. she wants the painted brother. she wants the little doll she can cling to in a world where nothing and no one can take him away.

it makes me wonder how maelle would feel--maelle without alicia's memories. maelle, who only knew gustave and emma as family. what would maelle say about this? we can't know. we'll never know. that maelle is gone, completely. and that's its own kind of death.

[asha-mage]

Clair Obscur Musing: Choice, Poetic Justice, and The 'Life To Paint' Ending

The thing about the ending choice of Clair Obscur is that it boils down to a very simple question: do you believe in the right of individual bodily autonomy or don’t you? You either think Maelle has the right to live her life in the manner of her choosing or you think Renoir and Painted Verso have the right to dictate her life to her.

Is Maelle sixteen? Absolutely. But if sixteen was old enough for her to decide to undertake a suicide mission to try and save Lumiere, then sixteen is old enough for her to decide that a few decades of life in Lumiere with the name and body she wants, and among the people of her choice, is preferable to many more decades on the outside with none of those things. Emma says it in the very beginning: she and Gustave are Maelle’s guardians, not her jailers. Their job isn’t to control her or to decide her fate, but to help her reach the fate she chooses. Maelle lived an entire life in the shadow of the destructive cycle her own parents caused. They're the reason she never thought she would live to see thirty. Of course she finds life fixing the world they ruined with the people they where ready to mass murder preferable to going back to live with them.

But none of the family cares about that, or what it says about them, anymore then they care about the fate of the people within the Canvas. All of the other Dessendre’s (and Painted Verso) care only about their own desires and are headless of the costs of enacting them. Aline wants to wallow in her grief and sorrow, Renoir wants Aline out of the Canvas, Clea wants Renoir to help her with her war against the Writers, Painted Verso wants to die, and not one of them gives any thought to the collateral damage that will be caused by their actions or takes any responsibility for their mistakes.

Painted Verso’s whole problem is really put on perfect display in The Reacher quest line. Painted Verso says he will accept what Painted Alicia wants when they go to see her, but when push comes to shove he dosen’t. He rails at Maelle for not giving him a chance to talk Painted Alicia out of her choice, and refuses to acknowledged that he didn’t have that chance (or the chance to say goodbye) because of his own actions. Painted Alicia chooses to turn her back on him as a result of his decision to keep her letter secret, but rather then acknowledge his own failings or how his actions affected his sister, Painted Verso lashes out. He also refuses to acknowledge his hypocrisy: he says he wants Painted Alicia to live, but his betrayal earlier would have ended in her death as much as anyone else’s, meaning what he actually wanted was is to avoid the grief of loosing her. This self-centered world view isn’t necessarily his fault (it’s all he’s ever known and in many ways he is at the center of all this titanic struggle between the Painters) but it’s emblematic of the flaws of his creators and the circumstances that gave birth to him and the rest of the Painted Family. Aline’s treatment of the Canvas as a place to work out her grief is fundamentally self centered and done with no care for those she is creating (which is why Painted Alicia has her burn scars) in exactly the same way as Renoir’s desire to destroy the Canvas and it is done for largely the same reasons. The difference is their approach: Aline creates thoughtlessly, while Renoir destroys thoughtlessly, but it's the same thing driving both, and the same carelessness that enables them.

But Maelle, alone in her family, acts selflessly. She doesn't want to bring Gustave and the others back purely for her own amusement: she wants to honor their legacy and their wishes, in the same way she honors Painted Alicia’s wishes at The Reacher. They wanted tomorrow to come for Lumiere, so Maelle fights to make that a reality. That’s why she keeps writing in Gustave’s journal even after his death, and even still after Verso’s betrayal destroys Lumiere. It’s why she brings back Lune and Sciel and why she gathers the spirits of the fallen Expeditioniers to drive out Renoir. Maelle has had sixteen years to live away from the rest of the Dessendre’s and their selfishness, sixteen years to internalize Gustave and Emma’s idealism, sixteen years in the cycle of the Gommage to show her that life is precious and how people choose to spend what time is allotted to them is their own decision.

And yet Renoir and Painted Verso refuse to take responsibility for how their actions affect Maelle, and refuse to respect her wishes. They each have this nebulous idea of some perfect ‘life outside’ that she is denying herself by staying in the Canvas, refusing to acknowledged that her friends lives have worth, and that her identity as Maelle and her desire to stay in Lumiere has value. Renoir is the cause of the Gommage! The reason his daughter had to watch a mass slaughter ever year of her life and grew up thinking she wouldn’t make it out of her twenties! He literally just murdered all her closest friends and family in front of her eyes! And does he apologize? No. Does he express regret? No. He immediately gets ready to erase Painted Verso, drag her out of the Canvas, and destroy it and then has the audacity to act hurt when she refuses to accept this outcome! Maelle crossed a world, defeated Aline without the power to paint (something Renior couldn’t do even with painting!), and has lived a whole other life beset by tragedy Renoir caused and he still refuses to see her as a person with her own agency and right to make her own choices, even when that choice is to mend the damage he has done. Instead all he cares about is forcing Maelle to live a life he approves of.

And this is the sin Painted Verso repeats in the finale: placing what he wants for Maelle above her own wishes and above the well being of the world. He accepts Renoir’s premise that his life (and the lives of those in the Canvas) are secondary to Maelle’s happiness refusing to see instead their vital to it, and in so doing he seals his fate.

Because if Painted Verso hadn’t betrayed her then it’s likely she would have honored his request the way she did Painted Alicia’s. Instead he repeated his father’s sins and tried again to destroy everything Maelle loved…so Maelle does to him what he and Renoir tried to do to her: takes away his choices and his agency. He is forced to live out a life he dose not want, in a world he abandoned, for no more then the joy of those that surround him.

That is his punishment: to live knowing he failed completely in his goal and watch the world he tried to destroy prosper, a prisoner of the girl he tried to jail.

[lev-1athan]

(Big Expedition 33 spoilers ahead, skip if you think you might ever want to play the game at some point!!)

--

So, I know everyone and their mother has a different opinion on the endings for Expedition 33, but here are some of my thoughts:

I really love how there are pros and cons to each ending and that this game is FILLED with gray areas, and it’s sparked so many different thoughts and discussions.

Verso’s ending is so intriguing to me. I’ve seen some people (mostly on reddit. Reddit seems to have a HUGE hate boner for Verso) say you're committing genocide in that route, but… no? Everyone in the canvas, except for your party, has already been erased by Renoir. You aren’t killing off humanity* in the canvas; you’re erasing the opportunity for them to be repainted, which is something entirely different.

My theory is, if you are repainting someone who has been gommaged, they can only come back as the same person if you knew them completely, inside and out. Compare Maelle’s paintings of Lune and Sciel vs the reanimated shades of Expedition 33: Lune and Sciel are fully realized versions of themselves (one could argue if they ARE technically the same people they were before being gommaged, but I like to think they are.** Kind of a Theseus's ship situation), but the members of the expedition are ghostly apparitions who are “alive” to fulfill one purpose.

Anyway, I really like how much of the game is left to interpretation, because it leads to so much fun discussion and lots of theorizing. Not everything needs to be wrapped up in a nice bow!

*Though, what about the Gestrals and Grandis and even the Nevrons (we’ve seen that some Nevrons have wills of their own, beyond what they were painted to be)? There's another gray area to consider.

** On a similar note, is the Maelle we knew at the beginning of the game the same as post-Act-2 Alicia-Maelle? I think she is a third person entirely. Maelle sans-Alicia is gone, and it breaks my heart, but so is Alicia sans-Maelle. They are inextricably intertwined, both within the Canvas and without.

[kiramessa]

maelle was right: this renoir is nicer than the one he knew. he's offering verso a chance to die, yet there's nothing even approaching relief in verso's expression.

and then, as he's slowly fading, maelle uses her chroma to hold him together and he turns gold. he doesn't say anything. he doesn't try to stop her. but he certainly doesn't look happy about it either.

you could easily call him a coward for being so passive, for keeping his secrets, for being unsure of what truths to reveal. but that's just it: he's full of doubts. do doubts make someone a coward? if they aren't sure what to do, if they aren't sure if they should do what they want to do, are they a coward?

it's the hamlet conundrum all over again. is hamlet a coward for not simply killing his uncle and avenging his father? is verso a coward for not telling the expedition everything--his mother is the paintress and he wants to get her out of the canvas, doing so will risk the lives of the expedition and everyone in lumiere and oh yeah, his soul is at the heart of this world and he wants it to stop beating? is hamlet a coward for not wanting to participate in the violence of a revenge play, but also wanting his father's murderer to be punished? is verso a coward for wanting his mother to be free and safe, but not trusting the expedition to set him free once they get what they want?

[kiramessa]

so sciel tells us sophie once told her that she loved her (potential) children so much that she would never give birth to them and bring them into a world as cursed as theirs. we hear from gustave in the prologue that sophie once told him "legacy can take many forms." she calls his expedition uniform, and by extension his presence in the expedition, his legacy. it's also implied that she views his apprentices as the same.

we know they broke up with the heavy implication that he wanted to have kids and she did not. we see that gustave became the professor to apprentice inventors, who are probably barely older than nine-years-old. he and his sister ended up adopting maelle, an orphan. that all happened after he and sophie broke up.

so let's break it down.

sophie did not want kids. she believed that a legacy was not just about having your own family. gustave, after they broke up, took on not one but two father/older brother roles for his apprentices and maelle. this shows he wanted to have that role in some way, and so settled on an alternative since he and sophie did not have children (and he did not find someone else to date and have children with). this leads me to conclude that gustave being the one who wanted kids and the possibility of him leaving sophie for her not wanting to, is... kinda shitty. for me personally, this makes me like gustave a little less.

clearly this is speculation on my part; it's me putting together the pieces the game gives us, and the pattern that it's given to me makes me see gustave as the sort of guy who thought that having his own family was more real than adoption or being a mentor. if this wasn't a problem for him, i don't see why he and sophie would have broken up in the first place since he was ok with becoming a mentor and foster father after. sophie would not have had a problem with this because she is the one who believes legacy isn't just about creating your own family, so i highly doubt she would have ended the relationship considering what she believes. it's far more likely that gustave left.

i based this on gustave's own behavior. we see how he behaves when he's emotional and acting on conviction: he's impulsive, dismissive. look at how he treats and talks to lune before they find maelle. yes, his heart is on his sleeve and that makes him act quickly and think after, so yes he does feel guilty and apologize in the aftermath. that's nice at least. but this does paint the picture of a man who had one strongly held belief (have his own kids), did not share a belief with someone he loved, could not reach a middle ground about it so they broke up, and then he established himself as the father figure to other children. considering his personality--the sort of person who acts impulsively only to calm down and reflect on his behavior--i can see him learning from sophie's perspective only after it was too late to get back together. by that point it was perhaps too awkward or too inappropriate to reenter her life. i can see her not wanting that either, since ? wtf, he wants kids, she doesn't, they break up, and then he becomes the surrogate dad anyway? so what was the point of the break up?? unless, again, the main point of contention was him wanting his own biological children. which, again, i think is shitty.

you know why i think he has that impulsive to contrite pipeline of behavior? because i'm like that. or at least i was when i was younger. my emotions ran high, i couldn't keep them in check, so i had a kneejerk reaction only to realize sometimes moments later how wrong i was. sometimes it took minutes, days. years. i learned from it but by then i couldn't apologize to anyone who was a target of my impulse, or show them how i was different. and sometimes that realization, the shame of it, would lead to further impulsive behavior. rinse, repeat.

this all might sound like i'm dogging on gustave without any consideration to things that are positive about him, but i'm not. he's complex and layered and since he's positioned as a counterpoint to verso i think it's worth exploring the parts of him--suggested or subtly shown--that make him a rounded character beyond the woobification. he's a character full of heart and sometimes the heart can be a cruel thing.

[kiramessa]

So even if you don't hook up with Sciel, Verso STILL asks if he could "compete" with Pierre in a relationship with her. And if you turn her down a second time, it says they spend some time talking about past loves.

I really like how no matter your choice, Verso is attracted to Sciel and is very soft on her, and even though Sciel wants casual sex with him, she's understanding and also immediately attentive to his pain. She's like that with the whole Expedition, but moreso with him. Even more than Maelle.

I think she sees a part of herself in Verso (hah), and is tender with him because of it. Obviously she finds him physically attractive, and she also doesn't let his gentle rejection of her stop her from looking after him when he needs that support. It's such a lovely way to... love. Sciel is truly a wonderful woman and I admire her so much.

[kiramessa]

more verso word vomit because i won't stop being emotional

clair obscur spoilers

verso insisting he isn't the "real" verso is so painful because in an objective sense, yeah he isn't the "real" verso. he's neither flesh nor blood nor mortal. but when you look at it from a less rigid perspective, he is absolutely a real verso. aline might have forged him from memory (i THINK that's what it is, i'm still sussing it out), but he still has his own experiences, his own memories, his own emotions, his own relationships that are unique entirely to himself; the fact that he can even rebel against renoir at all and make his own decisions is proof enough that he is a verso all unto himself! neither aline's nor renoir's but his own, based on experience and his decisions and his feelings. he thinks therefore he goddamn fuckin well is !!!

and he'll certainly speak and act as if he fully believes he is verso--calling alicia his sister, acknowledging renoir is his family (even if it's... complicated), reminisce about his life in lumiere--but when it's convenient for him to put some distance between his goals and its consequence, he'll insist he isn't the real verso. he puts no value on his life because he doesn't see it as a life at all, just a facsimile created by someone else, so being erased shouldn't matter! the world in the painting wasn't his choice, and it wasn't his choice to be created/painted, so who cares, right?

but the world is bigger than him now! it has a city with people, however limited and dwindling their population is! and they have lives and hopes and dreams and loves and fears, and none of them should have to pay the price of verso's own existential struggle that ultimately leads to a body count.

but the only reason this struggle exists at all is because his family just couldn't let go. his mother couldn't let go of her rage and grief-driven perfectionism. his father couldn't let go of his grief not just for a lost son but a wife he was losing, too--he couldn't let go of his family as they fell apart, completely ignoring his two daughters who were themselves in need of love and care btw!!

verso didn't have the chance to be born and grow up in his own new life the way alicia did as maelle. but he still grew into his own person, he still has his own experiences! he's lived long enough to have made someone of himself that isn't bound just to renoir's memories or hopes for his son. he's real! he matters! he should get a chance to live this life because it's his life. it might not be one he likes or even chose to have, but none of us choose to be born! none of us ask to be alive, but we are and our parents can make demands of us all they want, but it's what we feel and what we do and what those experiences do to us and what we do with them that matters!

verso is fucking real and he matters and it's so painful to think his utter disregard and hatred for himself not only exists, but that he could either make peace with or just completely rationalize the body count that would follow in the wake of him being unmade.

it's giving big neon genesis goddamn evangelion vibes, ok!

[kiramessa]

clair obscur spoilers

OH MY GOD, VISAGE AND MASK KEEPER ARE WEAK TO FIRE BECAUSE VERSO DIED IN THE MANOR FIRE

GOD I WANT TO SCREAM

and what hurts is that his sisters didn't have such heavyhanded art-based names! clea's is simple, beautiful; similar to cleopatra but with no demand or expectation placed on her name. alicia's is almost bizarrely common, considering the names of her siblings and parents, and considering how much younger she is than her brother and sister, i wonder if she was even wanted/expected at all? but like

his parents named him after the idea of something behind a painting, behind what can be seen, the 'truth' behind an image or a mask, but verso never wanted to have anything to do with that kind of creativity. he loved music, which doesn't need masks at all; music just IS. it can soothe and make someone happy and just be a simple, lovely thing without the need for deception. MUSIC WAS HIS DREAM!! HE COULD CONNECT TO IT, FLOW THROUGH IT, JUST BE A PART OF IT WITHOUT HIDING HIMSELF AT ALL.

painting was a struggle for him because it was done under the demands and commands of his parents, not his own desires--just like the world we all have to live in! our lives are only ours because they were forced on us by our parents, and the world is as it is because of how others made and make it!

all that aside

verso also clearly has issues with such extreme passivity, of endurance as indolence, acceptance as apathy. he has plans and secrets and goals and he means no harm, he simply has a vision of what he wants, what he wants, and will use any means to achieve it because for so fucking long nothing he wanted mattered. not to anyone! and depending on how the last act and final battle goes, it doesn't matter even to the sister that loves him the most!!

but which is worse!! making him live in a world he made under absolute duress, a world hijacked by his selfish grieving parents, a world that is also full of so many other people who had nothing to do with his suffering, people he can get to know and live with--or doing what he wants and getting rid of the painting! destroying the world and everyone within it! because he's so tired of the life he has that he never wanted at all!

which is worse!!! doing what he wants or doing what alicia wants for him! but for the whole game, for verso's whole fucking life, he's had to live for what everyone else wanted for him. and alicia's suffering the same. her act of defiance would be an act of love: saving the brother she lost and loved, the only one in her family to be kind to her. but it would still be an act based on what SHE wants for HIM, which is the same thing his parents are doing by being in the fucking painting at all and i just

i just

want to scream and pull my hair out because this is hitting WAY TOO FUCKING CLOSE TO HOME FOR ME and idek what i'd choose! i couldn't condemn so many innocent people to die just because he's suffering, but i couldn't bear to be the one to make him suffer just like everyone else has done!! but his life can only change and have new meaning if he's around to live it!!!

i just!!!!!