doe-eye-oswald

[doe-eye-oswald]

"I heard your tears."

"From so far away?"

"I heard you, so I came."

[doe-eye-oswald]

Absolutely obsessed with Clea Dessendre, who is apparently busy with a completely different anime plot and needs everyone else to STOP LARPING and GET IT TOGETHER there's A WAR ON OKAY

[doe-eye-oswald]

↳ ᴄʟᴀɪʀ ᴏʙꜱᴄᴜʀ: ᴇxᴘᴇᴅɪᴛɪᴏɴ 33 — ᴛʜᴇ ᴍᴏɴᴏʟɪᴛʜ

[doe-eye-oswald]

Is Alicia more likely to be in her early twenties than 16? Probably.

Will I ignore this because her still being a teenager makes everything worse, and it also means she's lived 32 years just like the other expeditioners? Definitely.

[doe-eye-oswald]

Just imagine little Clea and Verso mucking around the Canvas as kids, Verso seeing François for the first time and going 'is that a talking rock' and Clea indignantly snapping back 'he is Clearly a Turtle... and he casts the Strongest Ice Attack Ever >:(' and then she absolutely wrecks little versos shit

[doe-eye-oswald]

Actually, I think Lune and Sciel took the whole act III situation pretty well. I don't think I would recover so easily from finding out in one take that:

I live in a child's painting

I'm a side character in said painting

I accidentally enabled the end of the world

The strange girl from my neighborhood is a god

That emo guy I meet a few weeks ago is the most important guy in the world

I died once and there is nothing after.

[doe-eye-oswald]

P.Alicia & P.Renoir: Justice

A/n: Minor warnings for some violence and endangerment of a minor? Minor expansion on the Journal 56 entry where Painted Alicia is captured.

A & R: Justice

~~~~~~~~~~~

Justice, the Expeditioner screamed. They would have justice. 

Alicia cannot speak—cannot tell them there was as much room for justice in this world as there was for mercy, or hope, or any of those pretty and ephemeral concepts. The girl could only stare wide-eyed. One of them yanked at her bound hands. Pain screamed through her shoulder joint—too far, much too far, the bone could not bend, and soon it would break. 

Kill her, another said.

Alicia wanted to scream back: you can’t kill me. You can’t kill me, but he will kill you. 

Justice, the woman said again, and pain exploded in Alicia’s head. Her ear and temple felt feverishly warm, blood gushing to the surface—gray, gray, gray, not red, but still real blood and still real pain. Alicia blinked, attempting to reorganize herself. One of them had shoved her. They hadn’t hit her…only let her fall, bouncing off the rock like a pretty and broken doll. 

They wanted her to talk. She’d have no words to offer even if she could. 

Alicia winced. She supposed there was a degree of poetry in her situation, galvanizing and affirming in its wretchedness. Echoes were incapable of change, slavish mirrors to their originators. What was she if not such a poor reflection?

Do not speak with the writers. Alicia-in-Truth failed to heed this warning, and oh, had it cost her—cost them all. 

Do not speak to the Expeditions. And Alicia ignored their warnings, a false mirror echoing its truth. It had cost her. 

Curiosity proved both their undoing. 

Alicia had followed them at a distance. They were a meager, bloodied group of stragglers, a precious few who had been lucky—or unlucky—enough to escape Papa’s culling. She found them beautiful regardless—they who lived such fleeting lives, born and dying in their ignorance. Their world was a vibrant, violent place. Alicia cherished them, envied them. So she’d followed, confident in her skills and maman’s gift. 

But they’d caught her, trapped her. 

Hurt her. 

Alicia did the only thing she could think to do. She could not move—they’d bound her hands and feet—but she could borrow some of maman’s power. The girl closed her eyes, willing time to stop around her, yanking handfuls of chroma from the air and twisting them around her like silver-grey streaks of paint. 

Notice, she wanted to shout, even through the ruin of her throat. Papa, maman, notice. 

Time spun back up again. The tall woman stared down at her with so much hate in her colorless eyes. Justice. 

They never managed to make her talk. 

But Alicia screamed. 

~~~~~~~~~~~

The Expeditioners screamed, too.  

Far louder. Far, far louder. 

Papa never enjoyed his killings. They were acts of necessity, he promised—it was the only way to keep them safe. His killings were a mercy, always—as clean and clinical as a surgeon excising infected tissue. 

She couldn’t say if he enjoyed her tormentors deaths. Only that he felt them. Papa’s lips curled back from his teeth in a snarl as he moved through the survivors, a black stain amidst so much gray. He cut, but few cuts were fatal, so, so few. Alicia watched the tall woman—the justice woman—run at him, blade raised. 

Blade and arm went tumbling to the stone. Alicia closed her eyes. 

They scream. They screamed for what seemed like hours, their cries bloodied and wet.

~~~~~~~~~~~

His hands were gentle. 

His hands were slick. Papa left a smear of black across her mask and the flesh of her cheek. Alicia’s heart ached in her chest, relief and love warring for dominance. His expression remained so worried. All she wanted to do was apologize: she was an echo, a mirror, and all she could do was reflect Alicia-in-Truth. She did not want to disobey. She didn’t want to hurt. She didn’t…

Papa dropped to his knees, gathering her to his chest. The scent of him, his warmth, his strength, surrounded her, and the urge to cry came again, stronger. His hand tangled in her hair, pressing her face to his shoulder. 

“Never again, little one—they will never touch you again.” He spat the words like poison. 

Did you…Alicia touched the blood on his jacket. All of them?

“Not all of them.” He smoothed the blood from her mask with his thumb. Cold fury burned in his voice and behind his eyes, pale even in grayscale. “Not yet. There is still a debt for them to pay—to you. To us.” 

She nodded. Alicia melted into his embrace. She let her body knit itself back together. Let maman's gift embrace her and wash the hurts away.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Papa allowed two of the expeditioners to live. They wept, pleading with him as they worked, eyes darting to Alicia.  Help them, their dead stares said—save them. 

She curled into Papa’s side, his arm snug around her shoulders. The muscles beneath his skin remained taut, coiled like some great cat poised to leap into action. Or like a live wire, deadly, thrumming with energy. 

The altar was their penance—a tribute to maman, their creator. Penance for the crimes committed against their god’s daughter. Disgust pooled in her belly as they fell to their knees in front of their clumsy edifice, begging for forgiveness, begging for mercy. 

Papa killed them quickly, she supposed, head cocked to the side. And that was as close to mercy one could expect in this dying world. Their bodies are his own grotesque work of art, hung as a warning for Expeditioners yet to come. 

When she asked him why—why was that necessary— Papa called it justice. 

[doe-eye-oswald]

means everything to me that for 2/3 of the game, the boogeyman of this world is this terrifying colossus weeping ominously beneath the magical doomsday clock

but then you get to act 3 and gradually realize the actual boogeyman is just

:3

[doe-eye-oswald]

Just,, Clea Dessendre.

She's part of the family at the centre of this story. She's got five minutes of screentime, a few dozen lines. She's a secondary character at best. Her presence is felt EVERYWHERE. Most bad things happening to the characters are directly or indirectly her doing. It's not personal to her. She's in a completely different story than everyone else. She condemns her painted counterpart and Simon to a fate worse than death. She's loves her family. She's so angry at them and wants them to get their shit together. She wants the Canvas gone. She helped paint it. This was her childhood too where she used to play with her brother,,,

[doe-eye-oswald]

F U N thought: do you think post-game Alicia ever gets panic attacks when Renoir walks past her with his cane?

[doe-eye-oswald]

Still in my feelings about Lune as well, like what a character, but in particular the life to love ending when she just sits. While everything she's given up her entire life to work towards, the rest she knows she deserves, is stolen in an instant, in fury and understanding, she's not going to give him the satisfaction of her forgiveness in their final moments. She takes that last moment to enforce her own humanity. She can still choose this. She has free will. She can't let go.

Her life, her rest, is denied so verso can have his, because it was always going to be like this. Even here and even like this, he is a Dessendre, and she is just a plaything to them.

Maelle told her she would paint the outside world for her, so she could see it. She was so excited to see it. And its gone. Im unwell about Lune.

[doe-eye-oswald]

CLAIR OBSCUR: EXPEDITION 33 (2025) dev. Sandfall Interactive

[doe-eye-oswald]

"average Painters spend several years playing god, fighting a war inside a Canvas because of grief" factoid is actualy just a statistically error. avarage Painters spend zero years playing god, fighting a war inside a Canvas because of grief. The Dessendres, who are rich and french and spent 67 years fighting each other, are an outlier adn should not have been counted

[doe-eye-oswald]

Welp...

[doe-eye-oswald]

Learning Sciel's story is just so:'((( ...I had initially assumed her husband isn't around anymore bc he was older and that she's afraid of water bc she can't swim..

And THEN you learn oh her husband died years before his gommage in an accident and that destroyed her so much she tried to drown herself in the sea and after that she learned she had been pregnant but had now lost the child and also two of her best friends, Sophie and Gustave, are gone now too and just HOLY FUCK:(

[doe-eye-oswald]

clair obscur: expedition 33 (sandfall, 2025)

[doe-eye-oswald]

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 | ▶ dev. Sandfall Interactive