#verso's drafts

[fil3t]

pleurer en couleur (to cry in color)

[prints]

[zoinyoi]

worlds within a world

[comickergirl]

DEC'PEDITION 33 - 33. Painter

[mistress-light]

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 • Verso's drafts dlc

[sky-kiss]

Just wanna say that while the DLC is about Verso, and god, what a good brother he was and how much he loves his sister and family, it also says a lot about how much Alicia and Aline loved him.

Alicia, per the start of the dlc, was never allowed to visit Verso's Drafts. But she remembers the poetry she made with Esquie. And she knows how all of Verso's battles went. Verso told his baby sister of his thrilling escapades, and she collected them. Still knows them years and years later.

Our Verso never experienced any of these events, but he knows all of them. He still knows the script for his final battle. He still knows the motivation behind certain creations, defends the rightness of his candy world, and his sweet tooth, and his trains.

All of that is from Aline, a mother who knew her son that intimately. Aline remembered her eight- or ten-year-old son's stories about triumphing over Osquio and other silliness, up to and including his heroic speeches, and imparted that to her painted son. Verso has nostalgia for riding the swing, even though he knows he never did himself. It's miserably sad-Verso struggles with his feelings of reality and personhood-but Aline remembered that her son created a ride and adored it and gave him that too. It wasn't just the broad strokes; she remembered the minutia of her boy.

Verso loved his sister and his mother enough to happily lay down his life and his everything for them. He died for Alicia, willingly, without qualm, twice. And lord knows, they adored him back.

[pandadrake]

What the fuck is wrong with him

[yourdicc]

dessendre family nevron/enemy design be like

[thewritersdidit]

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.