Expedition 33: Clair Obscur, and Ableism
Warning! This is a long post and it won’t be positive! If you like the game but want to read on, take care of yourself first.
Thanks to @heartinhands for this original post.
I love writing essays on disability, OP. I’m not Cripplepunk ™ just yet, but I identify with so many of the sentiments in the community already.
I wanna start by sharing my experiences with Clair Obscur. I’m not French but I do read it and sort of speak it (out of practice), and I like steampunk and fantasy. As a budding Baldur’s Gate fan and history buff for the period the game is modeled after, I was really excited to see so many of my interests crossing over, and decided to give the game a shot. Now, the way I give games a shot is by going on Wikipedia and reading the plot over and over (I’m not in a family friendly to anyone who’s a dedicated gamer, you know the ones, so I gotta pick the games I’m into this way).
And when I tell you how horrified I was at nearly everything about this game. I gave the soundtrack a shot and the soundtrack is a mound of spoilers. I gave the game UI a look at it looks like the League of Legends UI and would be extremely inaccessible to me if it cannot be altered. I looked at the gameplay and realized that a lot of the story is bathed in single-color overlays with none of the opacity control and use of environment that the Souls-like games have, where it’s awash but you can still SEE what you’re doing. The animations are also very facial-oriented and shiny, which triggers the old uncanny valley that I thought we’d already left behind in games from five years ago.
That’s just the game. You touched on the main reason I won’t even get into this game: The end-game ableism. I’m going to break down your post into summarized chunks, reply to each one as if it were a text conversation, and then present my own larger arguments at the end. For those who use screen readers, there is a cut in this post because it will contain spoilers.
I think it’s so fucking unfair that Verso is was written to ‘not want his life’, and the internet goes along with this. But the internet does NOT go along when a real disabled person isn't allowed to have complex feelings about being disabled.
This was one of my main issues with the plot as I saw it. I chose to skip straight to the ending to see if the game was for me because I know RPG games can be one of three things: a great open ended setup for a sequel, a gut wrenching end to a linear story, or the writer’s barely disguised fan fiction. This complaint about Verso proves that Sandfall wanted the gut wrenching wrap up to a surprise narrative, but ended up with the last option.
You go on to say “she” in your arguments. Correct me if I’m wrong, since I’m the one editing the post for my own sake, but, did you switch arguments mid-sentence to talk about Maelle-Alicia? I’m gonna pretend like you did, because that’s so true. You said, “disabled people are allowed to want to be abled,” and referenced how Alicia actually wants to stay in the canvas. I agree entirely with the feeling that disabled people are allowed to want healing, want improvement, or even want their entirely healthy bodies back. Even those who have never been abled (I was born visually impaired) want what they’ve never had, and that should be allowed.
My problem is: Alicia’s longing isn’t realistic. It’s what an able-bodied person thinks a disabled person would grieve like.
Sandfall created a “tragically,” suddenly, newly, and severely disabled character, and asked the player to choose between the Matrix version, where she’s cured and sorta traumatized, and the limbo version, where she’s a visually disabled game boss. At no point are we allowed a look at Alicia—real Alicia, recovering Alicia, struggling Alicia, non-accommodated because it’s the 1910s Alicia. In a dark twist, the game makes her mute (and also glosses over Gustave being disabled with the perfect prosthetic trope, again). Our two majorly disabled characters don’t have a choice or literal say in how they want their disabilities to be handled.
Let’s get into why I said “real” Alicia.
People who act like the Canvas is equivalent to a VR world (Sharon translation: a world that doesn’t matter much because it’s a world you can leave at the end of the day) and that all of the playables aren't as "real" as the Dessendres are are genuinely starting to annoy the hell out of me. If you really think the Canvas Expedition characters aren’t real, then why did you play 30+ hours of the damn game?
As I put in my private notes, “None of Clair Obscur being real is really not satisfying.” I agree with you, the All A Dream ending is a stupid conclusion to an RPG, because roleplay games are about getting invested in the characters. Being pulled out of the game’s reality in any way is punishing the player for enjoying the genre. But, again from my notes, “ Asking Why the Canvas is not real is also important. The Canvas is not real because it's just left-over magic. The reason the paintings became a real society with feelings like loss and death is because this entire family is magical and took out their problems on their DND minis.”
I said “real” Alicia to make a distinction. Aline made a sentient fanfiction of what she wished her family could be. Alicia living unaware of her own disability for years, instead of Aline letting everyone adjust to what happened, is not a good way for anyone to move on. The consequences got realistic because there’s magic involved. Sandfall didn’t make a fun blorbo; they made a horrendous example of a parent coping with a newly disabled child. Lumiere feels like a real world because Aline had the power to make the paintings real. Renoir ending the simulation may not be good for the characters (OR THE DAMN PLAYERS), but it's what Aline needs.
You fight so hard with the people in the Canvas for them to live in their fight against the Paintress. The Expedition gang gets hurt or separated or killed and you watch everyone grieve. And what? The two options at the end of the game are to just erase the entire world you spent the whole game believing in or to let Maelle just take over and become god and stick everyone in a world where they're essentially puppets for her?
Finally, someone gets it. Sticking people in the Canvas, no matter how real it is due to magic, is still a bad choice because it takes away disabled agency. Verso isn’t Verso Dessendre, he’s the whisper of a wish. Alicia isn’t Alicia; she’s a forced insistence that her life was better when she was able-bodied. Real Alicia is disabled, and Painted Alicia and Maelle represent her chance to not be, but look who made that choice for her. Her mother. Alicia did not seek out an alternate universe to cope in. Her sister threw her in there. My problem with the disabled agency in this game is something I always tell people: Disabled people are the only ones who get to choose how to grieve about disability. Do I grieve about being low vision? Yeah. But guess what? I grieve more often that I seem to be invited to the places with the most cracks and mislabelled steps in the sidewalk. Both situations make me wish I were abled, but able-bodied people don’t grieve their skill loss like me!
If the devs wanted this game to be about the Dessendres so bad, they should have just made it about the Dessendres instead of making me give a damn about Sophie and Gustave and Lune and Sciel and then say "actually it's 100% bad for them to exist no matter what, sorry".
Absolutely. This is why I say I’m disappointed by the It’s Not Real ending as well. It takes away the satisfaction from a good story, and—at least for me, but I’m a nerd who like disabled stories—raises a hell of a lot of questions about how Renoir’s doing on those medical bills since his house burned down. In the context of the story (Renoir and Aline having a grief-fulled divorce with their disabled child in the middle, and boy have I seen this one a few times), it IS bad for the Canvas characters to exist, but because the Painter magic made them sentient, players are now forced to check the Geneva Convention Guidelines so they can feel happy or sad about the ending of the game.
And let’s move on, cause you talked about this, too. Man this is a great analysis. You’re right, it is “trendy to do in media right now” to talk about cycles of grief. It’s a hot button topic that gets covered by comedy series like Bojack Horseman to drama films like Tuesday. It’s not a bad thing, but it does prove that grief has broken containment and now became part of my mortal enemy: pop psychology.
Chalking up Maelle’s motivations in her ending to "continuing the cycle of grief" that Aline started sucks. IMO, it boils her character down to nothing. The Maelle ending makes me ridiculously sad because I think that making her a controlling god who the devs write off as having the exact same motivations as her (kind of shit) mother, is uncharitable not only to the only disabled character but also to the characters of the Canvas.
You’re right to say “A lot of this is the devs' fault,” because it is. The devs are all ex-Ubisoft. And as an Assassin’s Creed fan, that was red flag number one. I also agree that it’s really unfair to make yet another disabled and facially different character a semi-villain. Alicia is the only disabled character and she’s not even allowed to choose how to process her brother’s death, let alone the consequences it had FOR HER. This game could’ve tried to be What Remains of Edith Finch, Lord of the Rings: Shadow of Mordor, Life Is Strange, Mouthwashing,—heck, even some Pokemon entries deal with ghosts and grief way better than this! Maelle / Alicia gets everything that Aline thinks she wanted, at the cost of being a hated Eldrich in a world that’s constantly in danger from the barely mentioned threat of the Writers across the street.
It’s obvious the devs had 0 interest in treating her as a nuanced character by the time Act 3 comes around because they just wanted the game to be about cycles and grief and they weaponized disability in doing that. Give me a break.
Louder for the people in the back. The game CAN be about grief cycles and CAN be good, but what they did was make a parent mourn their disabled child to a toxic degree. The Verso ending does make sense—Verso is DEAD and he’s being “brought back” kind of against his own will, which explains why he doesn’t want to exist Painted over and over. He understands that he should not be here for the sake of his own family. And parking on Verso, getting to actually hear him screaming in That One Cutscene was powerful, not gonna lie, but the thought here is that everyone in the Dessendre family experienced that, not just Aline. So did Renoir, so did Alicia, and their perspectives on Verso’s death are punished before we even get the chance to hear them out. Cycles of grief only work in a game if you get to see the cycle, not the just the really bad really ableist coping mechanism. Alicia has no nuance because I, a person who read the wikipedia article only, and chose to not play the game, immediately clocked that the process was this “Girl becomes disabled; family is sad about it; family is magic so they give her an alternative; alternative comes back to bite disabled girl; family keeps getting loudly divorced in the background.”
Minus the magic element, I’ve seen this in the hella ableist book genre that is sicklit. If you don’t know what sicklit is, it’s short for sick litreature. It’s a modernized version of stories in the Victorian Era centered around making someone angelic because they’re terminally or chronically ill. The tropes of modern sicklit include “the world falls apart as the disabled character remains ethereal” or “the woefully sidelined sibling” (known in the disabled community as the very real “glass child”). Romance and drama, as well as young adult slice of life, are the most common book types to cross over with sicklit. But why the blazes am I forced to talk about sicklit in what is supposedly a well-plotted video game?!
We are expressly shown the Dessendres don’t care about Alicia or catering to her needs even LONG before the fire.
Fun fact, Dessendre means “to descend,” so the moment I read that last name I knew exactly what we were in for. Descent into madness or grief or divorce or incidental ableism. More on this right after your words…
She’s forced into the Canvas by Clea and gets a chance to have, what we are told and led to believe by the devs, is a REAL LIFE. “Real life” isn’t able bodied Alicia, what I mean is that Maelle is actually surrounded by 1) supporting and loving people like Gustave who aren't callous to her and 2) disabled people, once again citing Gustave, who actually can live fulfilling and happy lives.
I’m honestly kind of tired of games handling historical disability who don’t do their research. As you said, as I believe, disabled people should be allowed to mourn their bodies. But able bodied people are not good at showing how we do that at all. We’ve been here forever, not since the 1980s attempt to get disability law into worldwide attention in the United States. Back to Assassin’s Creed—I’ve had to research my way around quite a few things for the games, and my interest in cripple punk has unveiled so much more around past disability culture that I never would’ve found out if I wasn’t a sucker for an afternoon hypnotized by wikipedia. We can have solid disabled stories in media that is set in the past, and we don’t have to stretch our imaginations too much. Sure we’ve heard ableist takes over and over again in media, but I’d like to see developers use knowledge like this for once:
France was the first country to have an established sign language school, and here's the Wikipedia article
The first typewriter was invented in 1874 and the first Brailler (a typewriter with the keys optimized for the Braille writing system, also invented in France) was patented (though not mass produced) in 1892.
France was also the first to make systematic Deaf and Blind schools—ignore the stupid AI overview and look at the sheer amount of sources I got with this Google Search
There is official US and European information on the history of burn treatment around the time this game is set.
National Library of Medicine - History of burns: the past, present, and future
PubMed - Burn care in the 1800s
MDPI - The History of Skin Grafting
A general timeline of Victorian health (Edwardian mainly focuses on the World Wars, which is why I tend to treat anything Belle Epoque as the 1890s rather than 1910s) that is a British generalization that France could’ve easily followed.
Anything and everything on Louis Pasteur. This is just what the Science History Institute says about him.
This is a United States source about the history of pediatrics, but also a specified, medically sourced summary of the timeframe the game is set in.
Moving on to what actually happened...
Maelle-Alicia s just expected to give up the love she had and has in the Canvas for the sake of helping a family that offers her zero support move on. If she doesn't want to do that it's not "good for her,” and if she stays behind in the Canvas the devs doom her to being a horror villain who is also just throwing her "real" life away.
The Maelle ending is so goddamn MEAN to her and so unfair when contrasted with Verso, because we spent 2 whole acts learning about his problems. Alicia gets one tiny fake epilogue of her in the “real world” and the rest of what we know is filtered through her Painted Alicia or fading boy’s recollections. Naturally, people favor Verso over Alicia because they know more. Like in-game, the devs just don't seem to give a damn about personality and motivations beyond having characters usually tell her what she wants (which btw is ableist in of itself). After that she only says "no!" or "you're right!" Like, COME ON.
I really hadn’t given much thought to that other aspect. I knew it was ableist but hadn’t hit on why. This bit shows why. The player is choosing to throw Alicia back to a family that doesn’t like her anyhow, to a world where she gets spoken for, and to a fanbase that, unless the player is disabled, doesn’t really care that this was a disabled story all along.
As a result of all this blasé treatment from the devs clearly favoring the Dessendres over the Canvas in Act 3, the fanbase gets to justify their ableist decisions about which ending they pick. If they pick the Maelle ending, the ableist rhetoric goes: “her life is basically over in real life anyways now that she's horribly disfigured”, which i cant even begin to elaborate about how this is the most offensive take in the world. If they pick the Verso ending, the ableist rhetoric goes again, “It’s not ok to have a disabled person live in VR and it's basically approving euthanasia" as if the Canvas isn’t a real world, and both takes are pissing me off.
I’m not going to respond to this line because there’s nothing to respond to. This is gorgeous, this is true, and this opens up so many cans of worms the developers were not ready for. Disabled self-advocacy in a time where disabled advocacy was to shove them in a room for their own “safety”? Discussions about euthanasia when another person decides how well the disabled person is living? Huge yikes that Sandfall wasn’t ready to tackle, but tackled them anyway and threw those yikes at the players raw.
I am also mad as hell at Sandfall. This story was about disabled people from the beginning, but Sandfall focused too much on the quest, not the real life consequences of the quest. As soon as I read the ending and saw Alicia’s design, I just knew the kind of stuff I would find said about her online. I, too, favor the Dessendres to the world of the game—simply because the Dessendres have a much more interesting dynamic going on. A game about grief can be good. A game about historical family drama can be good—just ask Resident Evil and Silent Hill players. The Expedition 33 characters were fun and full of personality and motives, but this game felt like its title. Is it about the Expedition or about chiaro-oscuro, the high contrast painting technique the game is named for? Is it about epicness and fun or is it about the urgency of getting the family together in light of a tragedy?
Sandfall when I fucking get you for making me, a disabled person, have to see people use ableism to justify A CHOICE IN A VIDEO GAME. They should not have done that. They just shouldn't.
And this, people, is why I will be donning my armor and riding off into the sunset to slay game developers with my bare hands, because you said it exactly how it happened. Ableism was at play in both endings, and people somehow enjoyed both endings, while the realism of both Alicia and Renoir gets left in the dust.