i know there's a lot of surface similarities between Gustave and Verso, because they fill the same role in the expedition and Verso literally takes his place within it (and of course, they are both brothers, kind of, to Maelle). but i think actually a better description for them would be "mirrors" and Verso's true parallel in characterization from among the Lumièrians, is actually Sophie.
i chattered a little before about how i think the major incompatibility between Gustave & Sophie was the fact that Gustave insisted on fighting against the fate of the Gommage, whereas Sophie was instead resigned to it. She didn't want to spend her life in a struggle against the (to that point in time) inevitable. She didn't want to have children and subject others to the same fate. She came to a kind of acceptance (if still somewhat bitter) about dying. She even had sympathy for the Paintress herself, who in her life had only ever been understood as an evil figure cursing all of Lumière. Whereas Gustave really struggles to accept that others aren't willing to keep fighting for any chance they can get to save everyone. He can't understand why they wouldn't, and truly believes there is a real chance they'll save everyone, and that it is a failure not to at least try.
And Verso--the one we meet in the game, who spent 67 years torn between two sides, seeing death after death and how inevitably not only would everyone in the Canvas eventually be gommaged, but Aline succumb as well--doesn't have the drive to keep fighting for the Canvas anymore. He has weighed the suffering and decided it is better to go out now rather than keep fighting and prolonging it, so that at least some of his family can survive. Like Sophie, who according to Sciel loved her children so much she refused to give birth to them. Sophie who tells another woman in the prologue she's "not selfish enough to bring others into our doomed world." Because Verso DOES understand how doomed they all truly are--that even if the Paintress keeps holding Renoir back, eventually Aline will also die, and then everything will collapse again when Renoir has no reason to leave the Canvas intact. Even when Maelle shows she can sustain the Lumièrians once Aline is ousted--it just is prolonigng the same cycle, where either eventually one of the Dessendres will come back to drag Maelle away after all, or she also will die inside the Canvas. So is it better to lose the world now, or later? When there's already so few people left in it, or only once everyone thinks they're safe and have nothing to fear? he is playing the long game, becuase he's spent one hundred years already playing it. he has a scale of perspective that no one else in the expedition can.
It's not that Verso doesn't care about those in the Canvas, or think their lives aren't worth anything--we can see in his journal entry that he does. He just thinks the fate is truly inescapable, and not worth putting off. And not worth subjecting even more to over time. Is it better to let everyone die slowly as their fate approaches rather than end it all at once? The truly dark potential of Clair Obscur is hinted at but never really stated outright, which is how much more terrible the situation would be a decade after the game's timeline had Verso not changed his mind when he did. In real life, we consider it more ethical to euthanize animals quickly and peacefully rather than watch them struggle. People sign DNRs becuase they don't want to be painfully kept alive as long as possible when they can't do anything but lay there and suffer. What happens if Verso had let things continue, and in another 15 years the gommage age falls below 18? What happens when it's only 10 & under year olds left, with no one to take care of the youngest children--would everyone REALLY give up having children for the last decade? Would teens with low impulse control and no adults around to stop them? Or are there going to be 5 year olds & younger slowly starving as a city breaks around them once everyone who might care for them is gone? it's GRIM. it's what Verso sees coming. And his answer was instead: let them all go at once, together, before they realize what's happening.
Should he technically make that choice for everyone? No, no one should have that much power over the lives of others. But I can see the path that brought him there, along with the obvious stated desires of seeing his mother survive, and freeing the tired, captive shred of true-Verso's soul from the Canvas. Verso is resigned to the death of everyone including himself, the same way Sophie was. And at the point in the game's timeline has chosen to embrace it.
Which I think really makes the ending of the game fantastic, because it mimics the ending of the prologue--Sophie and Gustave facing each other, and then Verso and Maelle. Because Maelle is the one here who is truly the most like Gustave--they are both convinced that they CAN fix everything and make it okay. Maelle believes she can save the Canvas and not get sucked in, the way Gustave believed he could help defeat the Paintress and end the Gommage. They are both stubborn, and struggle to accept that others don't feel the same way about things they do, and argue that they know better. Whereas Sophie and Verso have said that it's not worth the potential cost any longer--that the price eventually will come, and it's better to avoid that now than pay even more dearly in a handful of years.
And i think THAT really is what the choice at the end of the game is about: optimism vs pessimism. The first time you play it, you don't KNOW how either option will end up. By siding with Verso, what you know is that the Canvas will end but that Maelle and the Dessendres outside will survive. By siding with Maelle, the only thing you know is that she MIGHT have a chance--she MIGHT not succumb to the lure of staying inside the painting forever, she MIGHT leave and live her own life, her family MIGHT not eventually come back in AGAIN and start another war to save her and drag her out. The first time you play it blind--you are betting on a chance, not an outcome. Choosing between certainty vs potential. Heavy suffering but on a short scale with finality vs EITHER a peaceful existence forever or simply prolonging the existing conundrum.
the fact that Maelle's ending is not perfectly happy (and doesn't guarantee long term stability) is to provide balance once you do know the outcomes, and keep them equivalent, since the developers at Sandfall clearly want this story to be a discussion and choice you actively engage with rather than a simple "good ending" and "bad ending". And I do think this is where a lot of discourse about the ending choices looses me, because they forgets that you don't know the first time you play. Once you have played both endings, then it can be a matter of which outcome you prefer--but ONLY one you've seen them.
The REAL choice is about certainty vs uncertainty, pessimism vs optimism, resignation vs hope. Which is why it plays out between Verso and Maelle, the same way it played out with Sophie and Gustave at the very start of the game, telling us how the story would go.
