nothing that you do in overture changes the fates of like, anyone. almost everyone that you could’ve hoped to save, ESPECIALLY those most beloved to carlo, still die. anything that you change after completing the dlc (which honestly surprised me there was anything at all), was still only the smallest of things. you cannot save anyone
but this is not to say that none of it matters, that it was pointless. that’s exactly what the point of the final scene is, and lea’s letter at the end, sharing that just one more sunrise with her apprentices was all she wanted. with the both of them
P could not save anyone and he wasn’t exactly carlo as he once was. but he still got more time with lea and romeo, the most important people in his life. and they got that extra time with him, that extra sunrise. and its certainly not as if that meant NOTHING
not even then to speak of rosaura, salao, goddard, the tracker. none of these fates were changed either, but P’s involvement can still be something special all the same. ohhh what a beautiful expansion to an already beautiful game
i usually try not to be upset over fanfic however i'm going to let myself be angry just this once. why do so many describe juliet's hands as dainty as soft but lassiter's hands are always calloused. like dont they work the same amount? arent they always doing shit? at one point she was too busy to even open the spices in her kitchen cupboard but her hands are beautifully moisturized? i refuse to accept this interpretation if you're seeing this write her hands as dry and cracked and calloused from overwork do it NOW
ok time for me to talk about gepetto. i like gepetto
and of course this isn’t to demean anything he’s done, because the whole point of my enjoying him as a character is THAT he’s done so much fucked up stuff. like, other than the alchemists as a whole entirely, every other grief in the story can be attributed to gepetto’s actions. and its honestly tragic, infuriating, and also kinda funny. lies of p is half about how One Guy can fuck up so much. he has never made a single beneficial decision in his life (bar like, making P, and even then that’s only beneficial due to P’s own actions)
he thinks highly of himself to the point of despising venigni, who earnestly looks up to him. he abandoned his son in his grief over camille, and then came to regret THAT so greatly that he formed an obsession over getting him back. he murdered hundreds, perhaps thousands by proxy, in causing the puppet frenzy. he started that frenzy in order to make sure people were killed by puppets, and not tortured and experimented on by alchemists (and having the resource of their ergo taken away, notably). he likely killed lea and romeo. but he also turned his son’s best friend into a puppet, ensuring they’d see each other once again. but also he framed the frenzy on romeo and ensured P would be sent to kill him anyway
if the dlc hadn’t revealed that carlo was a stalker, it probably would’ve been even more worrying that gepetto seems to see his son as a killing machine. kind of still is, but just lesser now. carlo is precious to him, but he is an extension of him, a tool, as seen how gepetto quite literally uses his corpse as a weapon. but he’ll also sacrifice himself to keep carlo’s heart itself intact.
undoubtedly, gepetto is someone who does more harm than good. he doesn’t even see P as a person until perhaps his very last moments, and arguably hardly thinks of carlo as much of his own person either. and to some degree, seeing your child as just an extension of yourself is kind of… very much a fatherly thing to do, lol.
he acts out of what IS righteous rage against the alchemists, and out of grief for the loss of his wife and son. but his every action to get there is selfish, and wholly focused on himself and his own emotions. but P still cries for him. and while not every father is like him, in both the good ways and the bad ways, i do think he’s a wonderful character in both carrying the complexity of being a human consumed by grief, as well as the complexity of being a father with a strained relationship to one’s child. and then how it very much is up to the child to address the sins of that father
watching streamer reactions to the arlecchino boss fight to feel something. crazy as hell that his fleshy parts kinda “crisp up” during the burning, and also there looks to be shreds of flesh across his chest too… oh my goddddd bruh you know he was wearing human skin
smth also interesting to me is the fact that while usually he touts himself as an artist, he’s also got a couple of lines referencing his “study” of the human soul and similar “research”. maybe stuff could be implied as to further backstory with that, or maybe he’s mocking the alchemists. or maybe that’s just speaking on how he is as a “creator”, not only tearing people apart, but genuinely curious as to their properties and emotional limits as well as the physical. artists like to put “soul” onto their canvases, of course— arlecchino just used others’. Lol
