Sciel must navigate complex emotions and ambivalence over the mission as she and Lune press on through the petal waste towards a large chroma source.
Read chapter 4 here - READ IT
@kestrelgreys is absolutely killing it with the writing! I love how she's written Sciel in this chapter, it's just UGH. I have been so inspired everytime I read a new draft - god these two.
Huge thank you to everyone’s who’s given it a read and given us feedback! We’re so excited to get to the next chapter!
Well, now its Verso's turn... He exists in something that i would call a fragmented condition, between what is real and what should never have existed, he does not feel like a complete human being, but neither is he a simple creation on the canvas, he is the essence of a Verso that is no longer there, carrying memories that do not fully belong to him, and feeling a grief that he cannot resolve.
As far as we could see, for him the life inside the canvas does not have the same value as the "original" life. Not cuz its inhabitants do not breathe, feel or suffer, but cuz they are born from a brush, from an impulse or denial, a place where existence can be repeated, corrected, erased or remade without limit, life loses that fragility that makes it meaningful, this is where a question that i have questioned myself for years arises again:
What value is life if you can create and destroy it at will?
Verso understood that when life can be painted infinitely, death stops hurting, and when that happens there is no change and nothing transforms.
The Dessendre family lost reality by clinging to an artificial miracle, a world that allowed them to avoid grief while their real life was extinguished. And Verso, who only existed thanks to that evasion, sees the canvas as a symbolic root of the breakup of his family, a world that only exists cuz his family could not let go of the loss of their son, they preferred to create copies, illusions and lives that could be corrected instead of facing the irreparable.
From that perspective, destroying the canvas is not an act of hate, but rather liberation, it's not genocide in his mind, it's correction.
For him, saving the family means eliminating the world that was born of pain and perpetuated its ruin.
His identity is in a paradox, he is not the original verse, but he carries the love that he had for his sister, his sacrifice, with his desperation to save others, and from that distorted love, he thinks that erasing the canvas is the last act that the true verse would have been willing to do if he had had the power to prevent his family from being destroyed.
In the end i suppose that Verso represents an uncomfortable truth, life makes sense when its end is real, that grief only heals when loss is accepted and that in a world without limits, without death, without consequences it does not offer hope, only stagnation.
Sometimes destroying an illusion is the only way to recover what is left of reality....
Some thoughts on Clair Obscur’s “A Life to Love” epilogue
I’ll admit, I got super nervous when towards the end of Clair Obscur Maelle begged to be left inside the canvas because she was so sure she wouldn’t have a life outside of it
I got nervous because I thought that was going to be the ending the game promoted. I thought that Clair Obscur was going to end with Maelle un-gommaging all of Lumiere and rebuilding it into this perfect little paradise, which, admittedly, would have been nice, but…I kept worrying about the cost
And more than that, I worried the game would promote this idea that a life lived with disabilities wasn’t a life worth living at all
It’s clearly what Maelle thinks. A life lived with a scarred face and no voice is deeply unappealing to her. She acts as though she might as well be dead back in the real world. This is what she says right before you decide the fate of the canvas:
“What life? My life of loneliness in a shell of a body? With no voice and no future? … Everything I want is here. Here I chance to live, Verso. To live. Out there I merely exist.”
So with some trepidation I chose Maelle’s ending first…and instantly I was hit with a wrongness that was both eerily discomforting and somewhat relieving because life inside the canvas wasn’t the perfect paradise I thought the game was going to present me.
No, it was something vaguely sinister, and it was clear the cost of keeping her voice and getting to be the all-powerful, non-disabled girl inside a canvas was too high. In a way, it seemed to cost Maelle her very humanity.
So I went back. I chose Verso. I forced Maelle back into the real world to be Alicia again, because like Verso, like Renoir, I believed that there was a life worth living outside the canvas, even with the scars and the disability. Having a disability does not detract from your value, though I can understand why Maelle/Alicia struggled with being newly disabled, especially as a teenager. It probably did feel like the end of the world to her
But the fact is, Alicia didn’t give herself enough time to come to terms with her new disability. Hardly surprising, given that she was also wrestling with grief, trauma, survivor’s guilt, and more. She’d lost a brother, an eye, her voice, and her youthful beauty at the young age of around 16 or so. And yes, that’s hard—that’s something to grieve! But it never made her less, and I had a small worry that the game was going to insist that somehow it did. That if we chose to force her back into her real, disabled body, that we the player would be “punished” with a more miserable ending somehow.
Thankfully that wasn’t the case
See, what Alicia needed was time. Not time spent inside a canvas, but time to find her bearings, mourn her losses, grieve for everything she’d lost, and then take a deep breath and face life again. Time to learn new ways of navigating life with reduced vision, with little or no voice, and with scars and other body traumas that would she would carry the rest of her life
She can’t learn to love her new body and its abilities and limitations inside the canvas where her body is perfectly fine, even super human. She has to be outside of the canvas to learn how to live in the world with one working eye and a voice that is slowly, slowly repairing itself.
But she’s a teen. She thinks that it’s a fate worse than death, living half-blind and voiceless. And if “real” Paris where she lives is actually like 1905 Paris, sure, she would have a very, very hard road ahead of her. But there’s still a little magic in the world where she lives. I’m not saying that magic can cure her, and that’s not what I’d be interested in the game doing, but I mean that there’s enough whimsy in her real world to suggest the future may be a lot more accepting of her than she thinks. Maybe humans are just a little bit kinder or more accepting in Clair Obscur’s “reality” of Paris
That, I think, is why the game presents Verso’s ending as the melancholy but lighter ending of the two. It’s not a perfect ending. It’s not even entirely happy. We’re left with a broken family that is slowly healing, but they stand in the daylight, outside, in the real world. Alicia isn’t shut away, hidden inside her room, or trapped in some kind of institution. She’s out under the sun with her broken but healing family.
It’s the epilogue that is called A Life to Love
A life to love each other, but also a life that she can love. A chance to learn to love the life she has.
Ten, twenty years ago, a game like this would have tried to sell a painted paradise as the only solution. But I’m glad Clair Obscur didn’t take that road. I’m glad it gave us the nudge to realize that despite Maelle’s teenaged theatrics, which are born of very real, very deep, very difficult emotions that she’s feeling in real time (within the context of the narrative I mean), we don’t have to believe her when she says her life is ruined
It’s not. She just needs to learn to love the life she has, and those who are still alive around her
There was a fic I read a while back that got into Renoir and Aline's early relationship, and one of the extra bits of lore the author added was that Renoir was a war veteran, presumably of the Franco-Prussian war. And I wonder how that might affect his relationship with Alicia post-Verso ending. I suspect he never told his kids much but they would've known he'd been in the war, especially if that was the source of his leg injury. Maelle was basically a child soldier and I wonder if Alicia would try to use that shared trauma to try and bond with him, or if she'd resent him even more for killing her loved ones when he knew full well what that does to a person. And I wonder if maybe the gommage worked the way it did because Renoir was trying to make the death as clean and painless as he could.
