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GOP leaders want to vote this week to pass Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Act, so call your Senators NOW.

The bill, if passed, would cause widespread harm by making massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, gut climate protections and open public land to fossil fuel exploitation, restrict states from regulating AI for the next TEN YEARS, end gender-affirming care under Medicaid & CHIP, increase taxes on those who make less than $157k while giving massive tax cuts to the richest, tax breaks on gun silencers, defund planned parenthood, adds trillions to the national debt and billions to defense spending.

Call now! Spread the word.

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If you're in NYC and you haven't voted yet I'm gonna need you to go tomorrow and rank Zohran Mamdani #1. Tomorrow is the last day for early voting and then you won't get a chance again until Tuesday. It's extremely important that we elect Zohran.

His platform centers the following:

Affordable housing

Freezing the rent

Fast and free busses

Department of Community safety

No cost childcare

City owned grocery stores

Taxing corporations and the wealthy to pay for all of this

Here is a direct link to the platform with more details.

DO NOT RANK CUOMO.

Andrew Cuomo is a rapist. He's a Zionist who is literally on Netanyahu's defense team against the ICC. And his primary interest is upholding the status quo. He's backed by billionaires and landlords. NYC cannot afford a mayor like this.

If you are registered to vote in NYC I'm begging you to do so. We have a real chance here

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Lucanis combat aniamtion

src

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Me: *tries to write smut*

Me:

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There's a common issue in fandom when people take the words and ideas of the villains as 100% canonical truth even though the narrative clearly shows those villains as wrong and incorrect.

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Y'know, Clea's refusal to recognise the creatures of the Canvas as real people is clearly supposed to make her come across as callous and uncaring, and in some ways it does? But in other ways it actually makes her seem the least callous of her family. Renoir and Aline (and to a lesser extent Alicia in her ending) know they're hurting people! Renoir is actively killing people, Aline is refusing to leave the Canvas even knowing her and Verso's creations will continue to suffer until she does, and Alicia in her ending basically uses them as toys to pose and play with in her idealised world (most notably with painted Verso, who repeatedly makes it clear to her that he does not in any way want this and she does seem to be actively forcing him to play along)! At least when Clea sends her Nevrons to slaughter them and warps her painted self to continue doing that even when she's not there she is making those choices believing they aren't real. In her mind they may as well be... well, NPCs in a video game. They're there to be done with as she pleases, because they don't have real thoughts and feelings and so she's not really hurting anyone. She's sad about destroying the Canvas her beloved brother made, sure, but she has no reason to care about the people in it because she doesn't believe they're really alive. Renoir makes it clear that he truly does believe that these painted creations are real with real lives that genuinely matter! And he's going to kill them anyway. Alicia truly loves her painted friends and family! And she's going to force them to play the parts she wants in her ideal world even if they don't want to. Killing, injuring or otherwise harming NPCs because that's more convenient for you is fine, because you have no reason to believe you're actually hurting them; doing the same to people you genuinely, wholeheartedly believe are real is monstrous.

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It's the endless thing with DLC and sequels where the original, vanilla game should be able to stand on its own! In this case a DLC about the war between the Painters and Writers would be cool (very cool even), but it wouldn't fix the fact that the end of the game makes everything our heroes fought for pointless. Like yeah, we might get to learn more about the Dessendres' world! But it's a little harder to care when they've killed the world we spent the whole game coming to love. Like...

#like I want to know more about the real world ramifications of painters and writers and their abilities#actually that might be a part of why I'm so mad at the ending#it doesnt give us the chance to explore all that through the characters we got so attached to

Your tags really hit the nail on the head! Even if we don't learn about the real world through the Canvas characters—and to some extent I don't think it should be through the Canvas characters, since they can't leave the Canvas so showing it from their perspective would be a lot of telling with very little showing—the fact that they can't even find out about it and we never get to know what they think of all this is kind of the problem! I mean, thinking about it we barely even get to see them (or at least Lune and Sciel; I think Monoco and Esquie already knew they were painted?) respond to the reveal that they're created beings and their creators don't really register them as real. But instead of giving them a chance to learn about the world outside of their own or come to terms with what they are as they move forward their options are... being trapped in a doomed world that will only last so long as Alicia is there to keep her family from destroying it (something which won't buy them much time, since we know staying in the Canvas without ever leaving will kill her sooner rather than later) or just dying immediately. These are not good options! They're good choices for good/bad endings for the Dessendres, who either move on and start to recover as a family or lose their youngest child to her grief and despair, but at the end of the day this wasn't really the Dessendres' game until maybe the final section, and I do think the writers might not have fully considered what that would mean for how the endings would come across.

I think my biggest frustration with Clair Obscur's endings is that they feel like they belong to a different game. Like, if the Canvas was a dream world or something similar, something where the people living there didn't really exist outside of Aline's and later Alicia's heads, then having a good end where that world is destroyed so the family can begin to move on and a bad end where Alicia reforms the dream and vanishes into it forever would make sense and be fine! It probably would've necessitated spending a lot more time with the real Dessendres to avoid the frustration that "and it was all just a dream" stories generally create (which... honestly the game as it stands already runs into with how the "good" ending involves treating the Canvas like a dream world that needs to be woken up from), but the endings themselves would be fine and make sense and the emotional impact of Life to Love's theme of moving on would be there without being muddied by all the characters we spent the game with (except Maelle) dying and making everything they fought for pointless.

Except the problem is that the Canvas isn't a dream world that only exists in Aline and Alicia's heads. It's a real enough place that people (Painters at least) can go there whether they made it or not. The people that live there are created beings, yes, but they have thoughts and feelings and rich inner lives that exist outside of their creators' actions. There's never any serious suggestion that they aren't real (Renoir and Clea do to some extent dismiss them as not real, but they're set up as the villains of the piece insofar as any of the Dessendres are true villains). And because we spend so much time in the Canvas and so little time with the Dessendres we're predisposed to if anything think of the people in the Canvas as more real than the people the endings require us to see as the real people whose lives really matter to be at all satisfying. The endings are supposed to be bittersweet at best, but even the good ending just comes across as a callous abandonment of the world we've just spent so many hours exploring and getting to know. Like, I don't actually get the impression from Alicia's dialogue in that final section that she necessarily wants to remain as Maelle in the painting forever, never leaving to be with her family as Alicia until being in the Canvas kills her! It's treated as her bluntly refusing Verso's suggestion that she leave for now and come back for visits without risking her health by spending too long in there, but that's very much muddied by the fact that she's scared Renoir will kill everyone in the Canvas if she leaves. Could she be using that as an excuse? Sure. But the fact remains that a) Renoir has been trying to kill everyone in the Canvas to force a member of his family out of it for decades as the people within it experience time, b) up to about five minutes ago he was pretty dead set on destroying the Canvas, and c) he absolutely would lie about changing his mind to get Alicia out of it. The "good" ending doesn't feel bittersweet, it just feels bad, because this whole world was already collateral damage in this family's self-destructive grief and now it doesn't even get the chance to recover because destroying it was an easier way out than the family having to learn to live with that temptation and interact with it in healthy ways. Which would've been fine if these characters weren't alive in any meaningful way, but the game spent most of its runtime hammering home the exact opposite.

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Antivan Crows by Volta

Illustrations

If you enjoy this blog please support with Ko-fi

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Thinking about how Rook plays the handsome prince (gender neutral) in Lucanis's romance. How Rook needs to be able to read Lucanis so closely to understand what he's trying to say in the dessert scene.

And then Rook escapes the Fade. Lucanis meets them in their room, holding back tears. Rook is either trying desperately to hold onto the mask of being on, or letting it slip entirely.

Either way, Lucanis is ready to sweep in and catch them. Because he sees them, too.

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i have this disease called i will open your message and get distracted and forget to reply and then the notification will be gone so i will not have replied for ages and you will think i am ignoring you but. i am not. it’s incurable

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It's interesting because there's clearly all this stuff going on out in the real world that the game doesn't go into because it's focusing on the conflict within the Canvas, and that's kind of fun! It's cool that there's all this stuff going on out there that doesn't get elaborated on because it's not relevant to what Expedition 33 is going through and their struggle for survival! And then you get to the end of the game and the writers are like "So uh actually you should kill Expedition 33. Yeah and everyone else in the Canvas. Yep for the Dessendres' sake" and. well if you were going to do that you should perhaps have focused just a little more on what was going on in the real world instead of only mentioning it in passing around the stuff in the Canvas. If you wanted us so invested in the Dessendres that we'd consider killing off all but one of our playable characters to help them move past their grief to be anything other than a monstrous act you maybe should've given us more than vague hints and fragments, actually. It was, one might argue, rather poor planning to deliberately keep the information we get on the people whose lives we're clearly supposed to see as more valuable to such a bare minimum when we learn so much more about the people who are ultimately treated as disposable. And yet!

I think my biggest frustration with Clair Obscur's endings is that they feel like they belong to a different game. Like, if the Canvas was a dream world or something similar, something where the people living there didn't really exist outside of Aline's and later Alicia's heads, then having a good end where that world is destroyed so the family can begin to move on and a bad end where Alicia reforms the dream and vanishes into it forever would make sense and be fine! It probably would've necessitated spending a lot more time with the real Dessendres to avoid the frustration that "and it was all just a dream" stories generally create (which... honestly the game as it stands already runs into with how the "good" ending involves treating the Canvas like a dream world that needs to be woken up from), but the endings themselves would be fine and make sense and the emotional impact of Life to Love's theme of moving on would be there without being muddied by all the characters we spent the game with (except Maelle) dying and making everything they fought for pointless.

Except the problem is that the Canvas isn't a dream world that only exists in Aline and Alicia's heads. It's a real enough place that people (Painters at least) can go there whether they made it or not. The people that live there are created beings, yes, but they have thoughts and feelings and rich inner lives that exist outside of their creators' actions. There's never any serious suggestion that they aren't real (Renoir and Clea do to some extent dismiss them as not real, but they're set up as the villains of the piece insofar as any of the Dessendres are true villains). And because we spend so much time in the Canvas and so little time with the Dessendres we're predisposed to if anything think of the people in the Canvas as more real than the people the endings require us to see as the real people whose lives really matter to be at all satisfying. The endings are supposed to be bittersweet at best, but even the good ending just comes across as a callous abandonment of the world we've just spent so many hours exploring and getting to know. Like, I don't actually get the impression from Alicia's dialogue in that final section that she necessarily wants to remain as Maelle in the painting forever, never leaving to be with her family as Alicia until being in the Canvas kills her! It's treated as her bluntly refusing Verso's suggestion that she leave for now and come back for visits without risking her health by spending too long in there, but that's very much muddied by the fact that she's scared Renoir will kill everyone in the Canvas if she leaves. Could she be using that as an excuse? Sure. But the fact remains that a) Renoir has been trying to kill everyone in the Canvas to force a member of his family out of it for decades as the people within it experience time, b) up to about five minutes ago he was pretty dead set on destroying the Canvas, and c) he absolutely would lie about changing his mind to get Alicia out of it. The "good" ending doesn't feel bittersweet, it just feels bad, because this whole world was already collateral damage in this family's self-destructive grief and now it doesn't even get the chance to recover because destroying it was an easier way out than the family having to learn to live with that temptation and interact with it in healthy ways. Which would've been fine if these characters weren't alive in any meaningful way, but the game spent most of its runtime hammering home the exact opposite.

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My issue with the "the piece of Verso that was still in the Canvas actually wanted to stop painting" element of it is that in his dialogue when you run into him throughout the world the thing that's upsetting him seems to be less the fact that he's still painting this world and more what his family has done to the world and creations he loves so much. He's a little boy who doesn't understand why his family is hurting his Canvas! This was his fantastical playground full of people he loved; I didn't get the impression he wanted to stop painting because he was tired of that world, I got the impression he wanted to stop painting because his family was just using it to hurt themselves and each other and the creations he loved were getting caught in the crossfire. There's actually a side quest in Falling Leaves where the piece of his soul asks the Expedition to ask Clea (via the Lady of Sap in that area) why she's killing Expeditioners, and he's quite distressed to learn that she thinks she's doing it for him out of respect for the world the two of them worked together to create (because she thinks the humans Aline added are distorting it, an opinion he clearly doesn't share). Another aspect of the whole situation that the game kind of glosses over is that from what little we see of him Verso would never have wanted his family to make his Canvas suffer like this or destroy it!

And yeah, painted Verso emphatically does not have the right to make this call. He decides entirely on his own that this family that he doesn't actually know getting to take an easier route to healing is more important than not letting an entire world (including people he knows very well and who he claims to care about) die. You know, when the cast and players were told that painted Renoir was keeping the Paintress alive despite her causing the Gommage because he thought she was the source of his family's immortality and they would age and die if she died screwing over the whole Canvas (well, actually significantly less of it than Renoir, Clea and painted Verso are screwing over, since the Gommage only affects humans) for one family's gain was treated like an incredibly shitty, selfish, evil thing to do! And in painted Renoir's case there was literally no other option, death being kind of hard to avoid indefinitely through normal means. (I know that's not his actual motive, but the player and cast don't know that at the time.) Like, I do think a huge amount of why this ending bothers me so much is that the Canvas is destroyed because it's easier. It would be very very hard to get Aline or Alicia to stop destroying themselves by staying in the Canvas too long and/or going there too frequently, so why try beyond Renoir's comment that he's tried hiding it before? Why not just destroy it and kill everyone inside so they can't hurt themselves? It's not like the two of them know they're doing something that will kill them and are choosing to do it even so oh wait yes they do and they are. And I mean, that doesn't mean they don't deserve help or that Renoir and Clea shouldn't be trying to keep them away from the Canvas for their own good (people deserve help after all, this is why I think the Canvas should be locked away somewhere for at least a while, perhaps in some sort of vault that only Renoir has access to, leaving it unharmed but inaccessible; hiding it presumably in their own home isn't actually the only or best way to keep it away from Aline). However even if the literal only alternative to letting them slowly kill themselves was destroying the Canvas (which again it's not) I think that would still be a situation where serious thought would need to be put into whether letting them make this decision that they knew was a bad one that would get them killed was in fact actually worse than destroying a whole world full of sentient creatures who are not involved and want no part in it to save them from themselves. Especially since this game clearly isn't necessarily against letting people who are dealing with severe mental health issues harm themselves; another thing I'm not super happy about, the fact that the "good" ending of this game about moving on and getting past the things causing you pain so that you can live is predicated on a suicidal man successfully killing himself and taking the rest of the world with him!

And all of this could have been avoided just by having the good ending not involve destroying the Canvas and killing everyone living in it. Please, just stick the Canvas in a locked vault that Aline doesn't have the key to or something of that ilk while her and Alicia work through their grief. Cut them off from it without killing the people that this family has been hurting and slowly wiping out for decades within the Canvas's timeline. I don't care if it would make the ending sequence slightly less emotional, I really, really don't like that they set up all these characters and built them up so well and then in the last like fifteen minutes of this 40+ (based on my play time anyway) hour game turned around and said "Actually none of that mattered, please kill them all so that this one family that is responsible for all the pain these characters you love have gone through has an easier time of working through their grief because they're uh. more real".

I think my biggest frustration with Clair Obscur's endings is that they feel like they belong to a different game. Like, if the Canvas was a dream world or something similar, something where the people living there didn't really exist outside of Aline's and later Alicia's heads, then having a good end where that world is destroyed so the family can begin to move on and a bad end where Alicia reforms the dream and vanishes into it forever would make sense and be fine! It probably would've necessitated spending a lot more time with the real Dessendres to avoid the frustration that "and it was all just a dream" stories generally create (which... honestly the game as it stands already runs into with how the "good" ending involves treating the Canvas like a dream world that needs to be woken up from), but the endings themselves would be fine and make sense and the emotional impact of Life to Love's theme of moving on would be there without being muddied by all the characters we spent the game with (except Maelle) dying and making everything they fought for pointless.

Except the problem is that the Canvas isn't a dream world that only exists in Aline and Alicia's heads. It's a real enough place that people (Painters at least) can go there whether they made it or not. The people that live there are created beings, yes, but they have thoughts and feelings and rich inner lives that exist outside of their creators' actions. There's never any serious suggestion that they aren't real (Renoir and Clea do to some extent dismiss them as not real, but they're set up as the villains of the piece insofar as any of the Dessendres are true villains). And because we spend so much time in the Canvas and so little time with the Dessendres we're predisposed to if anything think of the people in the Canvas as more real than the people the endings require us to see as the real people whose lives really matter to be at all satisfying. The endings are supposed to be bittersweet at best, but even the good ending just comes across as a callous abandonment of the world we've just spent so many hours exploring and getting to know. Like, I don't actually get the impression from Alicia's dialogue in that final section that she necessarily wants to remain as Maelle in the painting forever, never leaving to be with her family as Alicia until being in the Canvas kills her! It's treated as her bluntly refusing Verso's suggestion that she leave for now and come back for visits without risking her health by spending too long in there, but that's very much muddied by the fact that she's scared Renoir will kill everyone in the Canvas if she leaves. Could she be using that as an excuse? Sure. But the fact remains that a) Renoir has been trying to kill everyone in the Canvas to force a member of his family out of it for decades as the people within it experience time, b) up to about five minutes ago he was pretty dead set on destroying the Canvas, and c) he absolutely would lie about changing his mind to get Alicia out of it. The "good" ending doesn't feel bittersweet, it just feels bad, because this whole world was already collateral damage in this family's self-destructive grief and now it doesn't even get the chance to recover because destroying it was an easier way out than the family having to learn to live with that temptation and interact with it in healthy ways. Which would've been fine if these characters weren't alive in any meaningful way, but the game spent most of its runtime hammering home the exact opposite.

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"DAV is bad because it doesn't explain what the Circles that were abolished ten years ago were like outside of the lore glossary which literally exists to briefly explain lore things that aren't relevant to the plot of DAV, new players won't understand this part of the lore that is not in any way relevant ten years after they were abolished in a plot that has nothing to do with the Chantry or mage/Templar stuff, how dare it not pause to explain this stuff!" Well shit, it's almost like if you start with the fourth game in a narrative-driven series without looking into the earlier games' plots at all (and you can't have looked into the earlier games' plots at all if you don't know what the Circle is) you're going to miss out on information that was covered earlier in the franchise.

Come on, I thought we already went over this with DAI and the complaints about it pausing to explain things returning players already knew. The fourth game in a series with an overarching narrative that spans the full series should be allowed to assume that players will have some understanding of the lore going in. It should not need to explain every little thing that was covered earlier in the series, especially not things that are no longer relevant to the plot. I remember saying this about DAI trying so hard to be new player friendly, but it's like starting up ME3 and complaining that they don't explain what a Reaper is. Or for a non-game example, like walking into grade 12 math and complaining they aren't explaining basic multiplication. Sometimes you are just expected to know things already! Maybe I'm just a bitch and a hater but I think if someone decides to start a narrative series multiple instalments in and not look into the plot of the previous games or the lore established in those games (not even necessarily play them! Just look at the lore a bit, poke around on the wiki! If you have access to a machine that can play a AAA game in 2025 you can use a search engine, come on. And you don't even have to since that is literally what the lore glossary is for, so if you can play DAV at all you can find these things out) even enough to find out about something that comes up as much as the Circles do they do in fact deserve to miss out on that information. The game shouldn't have to spoon-feed things that were established three games ago and brought up repeatedly in the other two to the player just because some people decided to start four games in.

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I think my biggest frustration with Clair Obscur's endings is that they feel like they belong to a different game. Like, if the Canvas was a dream world or something similar, something where the people living there didn't really exist outside of Aline's and later Alicia's heads, then having a good end where that world is destroyed so the family can begin to move on and a bad end where Alicia reforms the dream and vanishes into it forever would make sense and be fine! It probably would've necessitated spending a lot more time with the real Dessendres to avoid the frustration that "and it was all just a dream" stories generally create (which... honestly the game as it stands already runs into with how the "good" ending involves treating the Canvas like a dream world that needs to be woken up from), but the endings themselves would be fine and make sense and the emotional impact of Life to Love's theme of moving on would be there without being muddied by all the characters we spent the game with (except Maelle) dying and making everything they fought for pointless.

Except the problem is that the Canvas isn't a dream world that only exists in Aline and Alicia's heads. It's a real enough place that people (Painters at least) can go there whether they made it or not. The people that live there are created beings, yes, but they have thoughts and feelings and rich inner lives that exist outside of their creators' actions. There's never any serious suggestion that they aren't real (Renoir and Clea do to some extent dismiss them as not real, but they're set up as the villains of the piece insofar as any of the Dessendres are true villains). And because we spend so much time in the Canvas and so little time with the Dessendres we're predisposed to if anything think of the people in the Canvas as more real than the people the endings require us to see as the real people whose lives really matter to be at all satisfying. The endings are supposed to be bittersweet at best, but even the good ending just comes across as a callous abandonment of the world we've just spent so many hours exploring and getting to know. Like, I don't actually get the impression from Alicia's dialogue in that final section that she necessarily wants to remain as Maelle in the painting forever, never leaving to be with her family as Alicia until being in the Canvas kills her! It's treated as her bluntly refusing Verso's suggestion that she leave for now and come back for visits without risking her health by spending too long in there, but that's very much muddied by the fact that she's scared Renoir will kill everyone in the Canvas if she leaves. Could she be using that as an excuse? Sure. But the fact remains that a) Renoir has been trying to kill everyone in the Canvas to force a member of his family out of it for decades as the people within it experience time, b) up to about five minutes ago he was pretty dead set on destroying the Canvas, and c) he absolutely would lie about changing his mind to get Alicia out of it. The "good" ending doesn't feel bittersweet, it just feels bad, because this whole world was already collateral damage in this family's self-destructive grief and now it doesn't even get the chance to recover because destroying it was an easier way out than the family having to learn to live with that temptation and interact with it in healthy ways. Which would've been fine if these characters weren't alive in any meaningful way, but the game spent most of its runtime hammering home the exact opposite.

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Okay, not gonna lie. I know the Life to Love ending is about moving on from grief and how escapism can be unhealthy and it's not a way forward and all that, and it is very emotional, but it kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth because it very much glosses over the fact that... in-universe the people of the Canvas aren't characters in a game or a book or a movie or whatever that Aline and Alicia got unhealthily attached to. They are at least as far as we're shown real, sapient people, and they are people who got dragged into this family drama through no fault of their own, and if you go the Life to Love route they are all killed for the crime of happening to live in the world that Verso painted and Aline got overly attached to. And even when Maelle brings that up and points out to Verso that doing this will kill them he just... glosses over it? His response is "Sciel was right. Grief blinds us. All you see are walls", but the "wall" Maelle is seeing is the fact that her father will destroy the Canvas and kill her friends the second she leaves! It does muddy the message a bit, is what I'm saying, because while it's played as Alicia being too attached to the Canvas to the point where she can't move forward the reason she gives for wanting to stay is "Papa will destroy the Canvas the second I leave", which is... very reasonable, in fact. She doesn't want any more of her friends to die for her family's grief after most of an entire world has already done so. This is in fact a very rational, healthy response to the fact that her father intends to kill them (to protect her and her mother from getting hurt, sure, but he's still going to kill them—the few of them he hasn't already killed, that is—when they've done absolutely nothing wrong). Maybe it's just me, but I think a stronger ending would be Alicia getting to fix the damage her father did to the Canvas but not being able to stay; letting her friends live in a world where they can make it past 32 with everyone who died over this brought back, but having to put aside Maelle forever and never getting to see them again (maybe the painting is locked away somewhere completely inaccessible, a sealed vault or something) or at most only getting to see them occasionally; it keeps the theme of having to leave the world she escaped into behind in order to move forward with her life without the slight complication that this entire world of living people dies for it.

Basically what I'm saying is the writers did too good a job. The Canvas feels real, the people feel real, Alicia has as many memories of being Maelle as she does of being Alicia, and then in this ending all of that is just thrown away and everyone we've come to love and everyone we thought could be brought back is dead because apparently this one family (whose grief led to all the pain and misery and grief of the characters we spent the whole game coming to know and love) moving on necessitated it. Which is made especially frustrating by the fact that from what I understand—this is the only ending I've seen so far, I actually ended up flipping a coin to decide, and honestly I suspect I won't have the heart to go back and play the other one for a while; maybe I'll watch it on youtube later—this is set up in a way that suggests it's the "good" ending of the two (for lack of a better way of putting it, it's a complex game). I think either the characters in the Canvas needed to come across as less real and more artificial (maybe don't let them become aware that they're in a painting, for one) or the ending that symbolizes moving on from grief needed to not involve destroying the Canvas and killing them, basically. I don't think Alicia staying in the Canvas and staying as Maelle is a good ending either, she absolutely should accept what happened and move on, but this just feels... kind of cruel to all the people who are being treated as pawns and obstacles in the way of the Dessendre family's recovery that need to be removed when all they want to do is be allowed to live.