icantnotwaitforyou

[icantnotwaitforyou]

I was so close to siding with Maelle at the end of Expedition 33. Through the arguments she has with Renoir before and after the final battle, to her making the case that her friends in the Canvas are important to her and she can’t lose them too, I was on her side. I believed her when she said that she could strike a balance between living in the Canvas and the real world, or maybe I WANTED to believe her the same way Renoir did. Still, I thought she was right.

But then.

But then you actually see the fragment of the true Verso’s soul painting in the space between worlds. And he looks…so tired. So weak. Just a small shadow of a wisp with a cratered face trapped in a cycle he can’t break because he has no agency to do so. Painted Verso recognizes it. He might not be the true Verso, but I think Aline painted him the most accurately. I saw it then too, that the last piece of the real Verso would be just as much a prisoner as Maelle if it is left there. And I don’t think the real Verso, the one who died to save his beloved sister, would want to see her lose herself in the past.

And I realized…Maelle is right, and even though she’s right I had to destroy the Canvas. I don’t think Painted Verso was trying to destroy it for purely selfish reasons, just like I don’t think Maelle was trying to save it for purely selfish reasons. But he’s painted to be like the real Verso, and he will always try to save Alicia even if he has to sacrifice himself to do so.

Because if she stays, Alicia never has to process her grief. She has a version of Verso, none of the reminders of the pain of life, and no feeling in the Canvas of her real body withering on the other side. Even if she has to trap both versions of her brother to keep the painting perfect, she can be happy.

But life is about hard choices, and sometimes the hardest choice is to let go and move on. And yes, the people of the Canvas are real and alive. Yes, it isn’t fair that they have no choice in either outcome. That’s the point, I’d argue. We make that choice, and we live with the consequences. Neither ending is clean; grief is not clean. It stings that I can’t save them and Alicia. One choice isn’t morally superior to the other.

I sided with Verso. Because Alicia is suffering, and I’ve suffered the sting of grief and know what it can do if you don’t meet it when it comes. And Alicia deserves the chance to work through her grief over losing Verso. To paint her own Canvases instead of just maintaining the world of a ghost. To truly live instead of just exist. And Verso, the last vestige of Verso, deserves to have his sacrifice for his sister honored. He deserves to stop painting so she can truly begin to.

[icantnotwaitforyou]

"If you could grow old...would you find a reason to smile?"

[icantnotwaitforyou]

Clair Obscur: Thoughts about the Writers (Worldbuilding)

So my fiance has been playing this game recently and has told me about the story and how the worlds work, and I have been so intrigued by everything that I had to just offload my thoughts. There are a few spoilers, so I'm going to leave everything under the cut. Read at your discretion

In the game, there is the world within the painting and the real world. I'm mainly going to be talking about the real world because there's so much potential for "what if"s.

We know that in the Painting we're playing in, the characters have free will. Their whole goal, essentially, is to destroy their creator. Even the painting version of Verso wants to stop what's happening. Verso was created exactly how Aline remembers him, and yet she has no full control over him--only his personality. This leads me into my next main question: what about the Writers?

When writing, we dictate everything a character does, from how they act, to what they say, and even what they think and how they feel. When painting or making visual still art, there's only so much that can go into it. A painter can determine certain rules and what people look like and relatively how they're supposed to act. But ultimately, the characters' choices are their own. What would that look like in a written story? Would the characters find some ways to rebel against the story? If they did, would the words on the paper change? Or would the writer simply feel inclined to write a certain way based on what the characters want? Some of us on Tumblr already claim that "my character does what they want", "they direct the story". Would it be the same here?

And when the Writer goes into their story, is that added into the manuscript somehow? What does that look like in the real world?

What got me thinking about all this was the singular thought: this game could lead to some very self-aware fanfiction. We know from Painting Verso that he was written with his counterpart's memories. So what about fictional characters that already exist? Would they remember their original story? How things were supposed to go? Would they question this change of fate? If someone were to rewrite this story, how much would they know or even accept?

[icantnotwaitforyou]

hi! anon of the Visages/Renoir analogue question.

firstly, yes those were the two I was thinking about.

secondly, I am actually just as unsure as you are about it. I kinda think there's solid evidence for either read, and now I am also really curious if the Hauler had an analogue in it or not and what either that might say about the Dessendre's. it's difficult to try to piece together the out of Canvas family dynamics b/c it's pretty much entirely told to us through implication, unreliable narration and the twisted lens that is the aftermath of the worst day of their lives and the absolute wreckage it made of them.

I suppose it's possible that that's the reason Visages doesn't have a helper: Verso's dead. Renoir can't be there for him anymore in any way, shape or form b/c Verso's not here. Renoir can't help him, Renoir can't be with him, and even in this painted parable, he can't imagine himself in any sort of support role with respect to Verso b/c he can't escape the belief that he wasn't there at the moment when Verso really, truly needed him the most and wow, I just made myself really sad.

kinda ended this on a depressing note, but I hope it gives you more to chew on! love to hear your thoughts on it

yay, you're back!

And you made me sad, too :(

But also, you made me very excited to rant about the Dessendres for a while.

I think you're onto something with Renoir and his missing analogue in Visages. The Fading Man repeats twice that "I would have traded my years for his." He'd have given anything, done anything, to keep his son alive, and yet he couldn't help him. And he says that Verso "paid the price for our hubris." That whole conversation is drenched in guilt: that Renoir (and more importantly Aline and the Painters' Council, I assume) first provoked the Writers and then failed to protect Verso from them. Couldn't even be there to die in his place.

I so agree about the Dessendres, as well. Each of them is so individually complex! How can we really deduce anything about Renoir unless we understand his artistic philosophy and what that suggests about the clues he leaves behind in the Canvas... but how can we understand his artistic philosophy without first knowing something about the man? And then, as you say, we're looking at the shattered wreckage of the family and trying to extrapolate back into normality.

But the family dynamics. I'm fascinated. I don't hang out in the tags very much at the moment so I might be mischaracterising the Discourse, but my sense is there's some consensus the Dessendres were an incredibly close, loving family. There's lots of evidence for that, all over the game and the soundtrack.

But I don't know. I like the idea that the family was struggling a bit. That there was a lot of love, but also fractures. Partly just because that satisfies my own particular taste for angst: I think losing a deeply loved person at a moment when the relationship is damaged is uniquely tragic. To be cheated out of the opportunity to reconcile and always wonder if they even knew you still loved them. Awful. And if that was the case, it only increases Renoir's desperation to save Aline's life, because they've been fighting for decades in this Canvas. What if she, too, slips away before he can save her? Before he can make things right between them?

But I do think there's some actual textual (or at least subtextual) support for some very complicated family dynamics, though. I haven't nailed down a Unified Theory of the Dessendre Family, but here's some speculation about the possible fault lines and what evidence there might be for them.

Artistic sensibilities

We know for a fact there's conflict between the Writers and the Painters. And I've really latched on to the idea that, in a world where artists can literally create and destroy worlds through their art, one's preferred art form becomes really salient to one's identity, politics, and spiritual/philosophical beliefs. I've yammered on at length about Verso's musicianship as it relates to his personality and his relationship with Renoir, but I'm toying with the idea that this extends to the rest of the family, too.

The manor is full of instruments, books, and sculptures, not just paintings. And these are scattered through the house; Alicia's isn't the only large collection of books, Verso's isn't the only room with an instrument. It's pretty clear the Dessendre family appreciated other forms of art than painting, and probably all of them practiced other arts. But we know Verso's greatest passion was music, Alicia's literature. I think we can infer some preferences for the rest of the family and speculate from there.

Both Aline's tremendous skill and her former leadership of the Painters' political organisation suggest she devoted herself primarily to painting. I can't think of any particular evidence, but I suspect Renoir's primarily a painter, too. I think his love of Aline and their shared creative work are all bound up together. He and Aline are a unit, and that unit paints.

That leaves Clea, the only Paintress skilled enough to paint over somebody else's creation. But we know she also sculpts, and I can't remember if it's canon, fanon, or somebody's headcanon but somewhere along the line I've become convinced that sculpting is her preferred mode. (Maybe I got that idea from this post, which doesn't actually claim its her favourite, by @linka-from-captain-planet who has pretty much singlehandedly shaped my thinking about Clea).

So to wildly speculate! I'd draw a loose fracture line down the middle of the family with Verso and Alicia on one side, Renoir, Aline and Clea on the other. Literature isn't a performance, which I think is an important difference between music and painting when it comes to Verso and Renoir's relationship. But it is, like music and theatre, an unfolding narrative that you experience over time in a manner determined by the artist. The writer guides you through a story, concealing and revealing information as they choose. And at the end of the story, some part of the storyworld has changed. By contrast, painting—and sculpture—capture images, moments, static representations of beauty that you can gaze at however you like.

I've combed through my likes looking for this post and can't find it, so apologies to whoever I'm stealing this idea from: somebody speculated that while the Painters create worlds, the Writers' powers might have more to do with manifesting events within their own worlds. I'm not sure I have a strong opinion on what the Writers' special powers actually look like, but I do like the idea that these sorts of differences in the experience of creating and consuming art have very fundamental implications for how the different artistic factions see the world and each other. And how the individual Dessendres do.

Of course, there's plenty of arguments against this reading or for a version of this reading that puts the fault line somewhere else. Clea potentially throws a fairly large wrench in the works, but that's another post.

Aline and Renoir

Love affair for the ages, absolutely. But the Fading Man on Sirène's island makes me think perhaps there was something happening before Verso's loss. He wonders

"What I missed… that might have changed things. What is it that I didn't see? That I couldn't make myself see? ... When did she start pulling away…"

This might just mean he regrets not seeing how much Aline was drowning in her grief, but unless several months or more passed between Verso's death and Aline's retreat to the canvas, it sounds more to me like regret for a gradual pulling away without a clear inciting incident.

(I think he has to be talking about Aline, here, given the location. But maybe "she" is Alicia? And he regrets not seeing a change in Alicia, a drift towards the Writers that would set the stage for the catastrophe that befell the family. I don't think this is the case, but everything in this game is so ambiguous, it's such a fun sandbox to play in.)

Parents and Children

Painted Verso and Maelle quibble a little during the Reacher over whether Clea or Alicia was Renoir's favourite; Verso's name isn't even thrown in the ring.

So did Renoir have a favourite? I think perhaps he was closest to Clea, if only because she was the most like him and she loved to challenge him (thank you @athenas-only-daughter for assembling the Clea post from which I'm stealing this point!). But maybe challenge is something he loved about Verso, too: that in spite of their different ideas and difficulties understanding one another, Verso presented him with new ideas, new understandings of art, new ways of being.

But then again, Renoir's analogue is hard at work building Alicia's wings; there's no Renoir analogue with Verso's axon and we don't know about Clea's, before its death. I tend to think Renoir didn’t have a favourite, but you could make the case for any of them.

I think Aline did have a favourite. And it definitely wasn't Alicia.

Because what the fuck, Aline.

When we meet Aline in the monolith, she believes (or is trying to convince herself) that Maelle is not Alicia but a painted version made by Renoir. But even if she believes Alicia is safe at home, it's wild to me that she was able to watch someone who looks just like her daughter suffer in a fire, just as her daughter had, by her own hand. Presumably, she was willing to watch that someone die in that fire, because she makes no move to douse it until painted Verso puts himself at risk of the flames.

Yes, painted Verso is now the only Verso; maybe that matters here (not to me!). But she knows he's painted and she knows he's immortal. And while she'll watch Maelle suffer and die, she can't bear to relive Verso's death.

I'm not arguing that Aline is evil or a terrible mother. I think it's quite possible that her anger at Alicia is to some degree justified; we have no idea of the details of Verso's death. Even so, Aline's journal entry suggests that she knows its unfair to blame Alicia for Verso's death; maybe part of her motivation for clinging to the Canvas is that she doesn't want Alicia to have to live with a mother who cannot forgive her. @obibail posits in this post that Painters would have to develop some mental distance from their creations, and so perhaps Aline, despite living for some time with the humans she created in this world, skews more towards Clea on the question of their personhood. Perhaps all the humans of the canvas, even painted Verso, are just shadows to her, a poor facsimile of her real life, only worth enduring because even a poor facsimile of Verso is worth having.

I don't know. I'm the sort of person who cannot make the evil or mean choice in video games because I can't bear to hurt the little pixel people's feelings. I find it difficult to understand, even given that paragraph of justification, Aline's indifference to Maelle's pain or that she gave her own painted Alicia the scarred face or damaged throat. The only way it makes any emotional sense to me is if Verso was her favourite and something was already wrong in her relationship with Alicia.

(Sidebar: Just proofreading this and then definitely hitting post before my dogs spontaneously combust because I've been ignoring them so long. But I went back to check the Fading Man dialogue for the paragraph way up top about Visages. I hadn't quite twigged until now that, at least from Renoir's perspective, the Painters either started or renewed the conflict with the Writers. Another datapoint RE Aline placing sooo much blame on Alicia but I realllllly have to wrap up!

Perfection

There something here that means something about the family, but I'm not sure what. The word perfection is constantly coming up: Clea seeks perfection, Renoir counsels her against it, Verso fails to achieve it, but Clea is perhaps, still jealous of him? Perfection is Painted Verso's battle mechanic; Maelle's fighting style is precise and graceful—perfect. Can art be perfect? Should it be perfect, or is there beauty in imperfection?

Whew. I don't know.

OP, it's been four hours since I sat down to answer you and I am forcing myself to stop here. I've cut paragraphs upon paragraphs of tangents, started a couple of drafts and added points to a few more that have been languishing a while.

Which is to say, thank you so much. Both of your asks have given me tons to chew on AND gotten me to sit down and do the writing part, without which my thoughts are an incoherent jumble. Come chat about this game anytime!

(Edit, fifteen minutes later, remembering to FINISH the proofread I began: added some transition sentences, fixed a couple typos.)

[icantnotwaitforyou]

oh boy do i wanna explore the ethics of Painting real people and how deeply unethical Aline probably was for painting the Dessendres into Verso’s Canvas. oh boy do i wish every day i could be normal about stuff i like

so, considering there is a Painters’ Council, there are almost certainly rules and standards that come with membership in that Council, but I wonder how regulated Painting in general is in the sense of there being an ethical/moral code of conduct Painters subscribe to. Nothing that can be legally/officially upheld but a social contract they agree to, lines they agree should never be crossed. Because I can’t imagine a world where it’s not considered at least a little gauche and much more likely an ethical cardinal sin/a literal taboo to Paint real people, living or dead, into Canvases.

Clea and Renoir take massive issue with Aline’s painted version of their family (Clea so much so that she painted over her version and Renoir never interacted with his painted counterpart until the moment he gommaged him) but how much of that is their personal outrage for her making an escapism fantasy out of their dead family member’s only Canvas and how much of that is ethical outrage because Painters Don’t Do That and she should know better, be better (Renoir’s “I trust in the rules she taught me;” Aline having, in Clea’s words, “failed” her responsibilities as head of the Painters’ Council)

(Alicia/Maelle takes issue with her depiction in Aline’s painted family too but I don’t think it’s from the same ethical standpoint, I think it’s purely emotional, it’s pure hurt that Aline painted a perfect version of her family where Verso never died but still gave Alicia her scars and still left her voiceless. Which, other people with much bigger brains than me have discussed Alicia/Maelle’s view of that being a cruelty vs. Aline painting her as she was and not intentionally being cruel.)

imo, the ethics of cloning and the questions it raises about identity and personhood apply to Painting real people. Is a clone of a real person that person? Is the painted version of my dead son I painted out of grief actually my son or does he just look exactly like him and behave exactly like him and suffer from his same neuroses and mental health struggles and have (biased versions of) his memories? When he calls me mother? Are memories what make a person a person?

(non-clone painted people are less a cloning question and more a question of what do Gods owe their sentient creations and is the sentience of a Canvas world of equal weight to the sentience of the real world)(don’t ask me how Painters possibly leaving parts of their literal physical souls in Canvases plays into this, I don’t know, man. I don’t know. Can a painted person ever truly be Real/carry the same ethical weight of being a person when there’s no proof they have souls but textual proof their creators do? And that souls can be fragmented? And that their soul fragment is what is keeping a Canvas alive? That Verso died but a part of his soul he left in a Canvas as a child is still Painting, can still seemingly think and feel and suffer, that the world exists because a fragment of a child’s soul is embedded within its very fabric? Do all canvases contain a part of the Creator’s soul, and if so what happens when it’s erased? Does that part of the soul return, if the Creator is still living? How many times can a Painter do that without doing lasting damage to themselves? What happens to a Painter’s soul when they die? Did Verso just love his Canvas so much that he’s a special case and describing the fragment of him left in the Canvas as a soul is metaphorical? what the fuck)

I wonder if there are rules around “abandoned” Canvases or the Canvases of the dead and in general rules concerning what you can and cannot do in others’ Canvases. I wonder if there is an attempt to protect or restrict Canvases after an individual's death unless they gave others permission, in order to prevent almost exactly what the Dessendre do to Verso’s Canvas and thus to his memory. Are there unspoken/agreed upon moral rules to leave a painting as you found it/as it was given to you, to not change someone else’s work? Can Canvases be adopted by other Painters, can a Canvas not created by you truly be your Canvas or will you always be a visitor, a usurper, within it? How much can you change a Canvas painted by someone else before it’s no longer their Canvas? Did Verso’s Canvas ever stop being his?

I can imagine at the very least it would be a faux pas to make any lasting or not easily fixed mark on someone else’s Canvas without permission/without being invited to as a collaborator (like Verso and Clea painting together as children, him not loving some of the things she created - like the Lampmaster - but also not erasing them, because it was their Canvas, their collaboration. He wanted her there Painting and adventuring by his side. That was her world almost as much as it was his, and they both basically say as much).

(something something what are the ethical implications of Renoir creating the Axons in Verso’s Canvas and are they as serious as painting copies, because even though Aline is the one arguably doing something truly taboo by painting real people, Renoir is also altering the Canvas in a way Verso never intended/never agreed to and altering it in a way that births--albeit very abstractly and densely metaphorically, and contained to their islands--versions of that same family.)

I assume erasing Canvases isn’t seen as that big of a deal if it’s the original Painter doing it, or someone they have given permission (and someone else erasing a canvas without permission is at most cruel for destroying someone else’s work, and not because they theoretically did a genocide). People have all the rights in the world to destroy their own creations, and I doubt the ethical dilemma of painted personhood weighs particularly heavy on people who can just create another world with other equally sentient people.

I think there almost HAS to be a level of mental distance Painters learn over time or are taught early to keep from their creations or else it gets fucked up really quickly. A mental distance Alicia either never learned (given she doesn’t have a Canvas of her own and didn’t seem to spend much time in others’ Canvases) or forgot during her life as Maelle and found it hard to course correct back to when she regains her memories, and which Aline’s grief makes her disregard while Renoir and Clea held onto theirs. Neither of them see the painted Dessendres as real, literally refuse to fall into that trap because that’s exactly what it is, painted clones are an emotional trap that can easily cause a Painter to lose objectivity about their own creations and ascribe far more value to their lives than is healthy.

all this because i really fixated on Renoir refusing to look at Verso during the final confrontation because he cannot allow himself to make the mistake of seeing Verso as a real person, and certainly not as his son, because it would mean grappling with if he’s killing two versions of his child by erasing the Canvas.

[icantnotwaitforyou]

Haunting the Canvas - The Clea Post

spurred on by conversations I've been having with @linka-from-captain-planet, I'm collecting the info we've been able to gather about Clea here, under a read-more for spoilers, because if you run around act 3, there's actually QUITE a bit to glean about her.

This is gonna be a living/edited post as we find more info! Pls let me know if you guys see anything that's missing, find out new info, etc!

Truly as soon as you get to act three, you can't go three feet without bumping into a sidequest that has to do with Clea in some regard. She is HAUNTING the canvas almost as much as real!Verso and she's not even dead.

First and foremost, The Fading Woman is often Clea! Sometimes it's Aline (if she's sad, it's Aline) but especially in act 3 it's Clea. Particularly at the Endless Tower location. If you want to glean more about Clea, I recommend talking to the fading woman when you see her, particularly as Maelle.

Clea is the eldest sibling, this is made plain during Maelle's companion quest at The Reacher

Also in this quest Maelle implies that Clea is Renoir's favorite. Verso disputes this, saying Alicia was his favorite child. However, earlier in a conversation with Lune, Verso says Clea was Renoir's favorite. Seems like there's some nuance here!

Clea has her own axon! If you were like 'hey Renoir made Axons for the rest of his family, where is Clea's?' it's easy to miss but it's the Axon in old Lumiere that's already dead (more on this later)

Clea's Axon seems to be called 'The Hauler' and is carrying part of the world on its back (incredibly on brand Eldest Daughter Shit)

Aline also painted a version of Clea - she is no longer with the painted family and is now trapped in the Flying Manor location by Clea herself.

Clea seemed to not like the portrait Aline painted of her, or at the very least resents her parents trying to portray her in the canvas full stop (she also dislikes the Axon). This led to Clea painting over her mother's version of her and leaving her in the painting to continue her work of making Nevrons.

We know Clea is making the Nevrons thanks to dialogue in the Fountain and Flying Manor quests, as well as Clea's dialogue to Maelle before act 3 AND dialogue with the Fading Woman in the Endless Tower.

The only Nevrons that are NOT Clea's are the ones on the Axon Islands, those are Renoir's.

On that note, why is Clea making Nevrons? she's using them to stop the chroma from returning to her mother when the painted citizens die, hoping to speed along her parents' conflict and then end this once and for all.

Also on this note! Clea is also making the painted WHITE Nevrons that we see and help. I'm still not 100% sure why, but we find this out by talking to Blanche during the Fountain quest, who has the special task of killing all of Clea's failed Nevrons, because god forbid someone see she made a mistake (perfectionist eldest daughter Clea Dessendre I am studying you sooo closely)

Painted Clea had a romance! with a painted lumiere citizen named Simon (he can be fought by reaching the Abyss in Renoir's Drafts)

Real!Clea apparently shared none of her painted counterpart's affections because she tricked him by pretending to be painted!Clea and gave him enough power so he could kill her Axon (also through trickery).

Has entered the painting several times since the start of Aline and Renoir's conflict. Notably to make Nevrons, capture her painted counterpart, trick Simon, but also she met Expedition 00 at the barrier and told them everything. Then tried to kill them when they wouldn’t leave. She also came in and tried to recruit Verso at one point.

Her final time in the canvas, that we know of, was when she came in 16 years ago and told him to watch over Alicia/Maelle.

Clea thinks its safer for Alicia to be in the Canvas, away from the war.

On that note, there's a war! Clea is apparently fighting a war against the Writers near singlehandedly. Renoir calls this her 'solitary war' and Alicia/Maelle says she 'took Verso's death personally', so it seems she's seeking revenge.

Clea is noted by both Alicia/Maelle and painted!Verso as being the most talented painter of the three of them

Also plays the harp!

There's a record you can unlock play at camp called "Clea! Don't Pull Your Sister's Hair!"

Clea seems to have stopped playing in the Canvas well before either of her siblings - Francois is mentioned as missing her for over a hundred years, well before the fracture.

Francois and Clea used to sing together!

Much of the original canvas was made my Verso and Clea together. In the Endless Tower, the Fading Woman (Clea, here) says that she "spent far more time" in the canvas than Alicia and that she painted "half this world with Verso"

Despite this, Clea does not share her family's same fixation on it and seems to dislike their meddling with it - her mother's painted creations, her father's axons, etc. She does not consider the painting 'real', but "was perfectly fine to leave Maman here to work on her sorrows", and says it's Alicia's choice if she stays. She seems equally dismissive of her parents, saying that Aline "doesn't want help" and Renoir is "wasting time" when she needs his help.

There's a Fading Boy and another fragment of Clea in Fading Leaves. The Clea fragment has been erasing things from the canvas, 'out of respect for him, his creations and the things they made together'. We can infer she's talking about Verso here. The Fading Boy (remember, a fragment of Verso's soul) seems to be disheartened by this.

ETA: In the Painting Workshop, the Fading Boy talks to you about both real!Clea and Painted!Clea. It's hard to parse which is which but it seems like Real!Clea might have made the Lampmaster specifically to spook Verso, maybe when they were kids? The Fading Boy implies that he told Clea he was scared of the dark and she made him the world's most haunted nightlight (sisters amiright?)

Additionally, he mentions 'jealousy' so it seems Clea was, at times, jealous of Verso. This tracks with her being the most talented painter of the 3 but overlooked for her brother and also with something the Fading Boy says at the start of the flying manor that seems to be about Clea (not sure whether real or painted): "Everything is always about her. Her paintings, her sculptures. Everything has to be perfect, but perfect I have never been"

ETA: In Old Lumiere, the Fading Man (Renoir) seems to have some interesting things to say about 'she who painted nevrons' aka Clea: "She wasn't scared of death itself. / She was sad because there are more works of art than she'd ever be able to see in her lifetime. / So many fables from around the world that she'd never be able to collect. To bring her life in her workshop. / All the beauty in the world she'd never get to experience. That saddened her."

He also says that Clea "loved to challenge him" and that they were "the most alike"

ETA: At the Forgotten Battlefield, there's a Clea Fading Woman who asks Maelle if she can help and when Maelle is confused, says "I guess not. Pity. I'd hoped to return to more important matters. But instead I must occupy my time with... this." She then tells Maelle to "Go and play with your friends. I'll handle this."

[icantnotwaitforyou]

cataclysmically in my feelings about Clea and the Nevrons

She *could* have created a faceless legion to do the same job, but she didn't. The White Hexga says she created them with "great love and care", and yes it seems to be somewhat under her control/otherwise lost in the sauce but it is undoubtedly the truth. Clea made the Nevrons not just beautiful, complex, and unique, but she also made them artistically harmonic with the part of Verso's canvas they inhabit. Because more than anyone else, Clea loves and respects the work that Verso created - together with herself. She has always painted beautiful, complex, unique, thematically-cogent monsters in that canvas: Sprong was "one of her first creations" (more on this in a bit), the original Lampmaster was the classic eldest sister bully/bolster combo, they played in the Gauntlet together, creatures like the sky serpent seem to be there mostly for ambiance. Many of the Nevrons are even cheery and playful like the Gestrals and Grandis. They *belong* there. What doesn't belong - what flies in the face of Verso's artistic vision - is Aline's diorama and the dolls in it. What others perceive as destruction, she perceives as preservation. The Nevrons are a means to an end, but Clea doesn't half-ass and if she must trespass against Verso's memory, she's going to do it on the god damn theme

Also! HOW do the Nevrons kill people to sequester their chroma? By turning them to statues. Sculpture, her other favorite medium.

I notice also that there's a Sprong outside of The Fountain, where Blanche hides so it doesn't have to destroy the others of its kind because it doesn't want to destroy the beautiful things that belong in this world. The Flying Manor is supposedly Clea's home base - suitably, ominous and untouchable - but could the Fountain be a sort of "Clea's Drafts", expressing more of her true feelings, tucked away someplace private and peaceful?

It seems that Painters can't help but imbue parts of themselves in their works - no matter how much they'd rather not. The White Nevrons express yearning for acceptance, pains of neglect and abandonment, feelings of helplessness, regret, reluctance, insecurity, so on - things Clea rejects herself them for, and wishes to destroy before anyone sees. She does not want to see herself in this canvas; that's why she destroyed Painted Clea and Hauler (notable, that canvas-Hauler is more realistic than the version in Renoir's atelier she doesn't seem to mind). Is that why she only paints monsters - to distance herself from them, or because she can't help but reflect how she sees herself in them? Does she think herself a monster?

And what about Goblu? It seems to be her favorite - it's the painting that hangs on the family gallery wall in Epilogue Alicia, it has several other paintings and sculptures in Clea's rooms, it's one of the four creations in the Flying Manor questline. (ETA: now having thoughts about Goblu being Clea's Esquie........................)

And it's the one that isn't hostile until something it holds precious is touched by these creatures that do! not! belong!!!

[icantnotwaitforyou]

Visages, Versos, and Masking

I've been thinking about Visages, because some aspects of that island confounded me at first. I think I expected a less nuanced view of masks and masking than the game ultimately delivered, and I should by now know better than to expect less nuance from this game.

Major, character-defining, endgame spoilers below.

So after some rumination, my hot take is this: Renoir's artistic advice to Verso is wrong, and that advice reveals an incomplete understanding of his son. Controversial! So let me stress that this is not a critique of Renoir or his parenting: sometimes the people we're closest to, that we love the most, are the hardest ones to see clearly.

(Note: When I'm very specifically talking about painted Verso I refer to him as such. I hate calling the other Verso 'real' or 'first', so when I haven't specified, I'm talking about that one. The other one. The not-painted one. You get it.)

The axon Renoir paints to represent his son is known as He Who Guards Truth with Lies; Monoco reports that guard in this context means both protect and control. To Renoir, Verso's masks are a wall between Verso and both the viewers of his art and the rest of the Dessendre family. They're a defense mechanism. They're training wheels, keeping Verso safe from vulnerability and loss of control. Great art might be oblique or metaphorical, but it must be raw. Verso's masks, to Renoir, are inauthentic.

He writes in a journal entry directed to his son:

… art can be a Window and art can be a Mirror. And great art. Great art is both. Son, you'll never be a true artist if there's always a mask between you and viewer, especially when the viewer is you…

Verso, know thyself.

The axon in question, however, and the island it inhabits, suggest a more nuanced view of masks: that masks need not be walls. They can be mirrors and they can be windows. I think there's good textual support for this first part of the argument, but I'm going to take an extra step that is much more vibes-based: Masks can be part of great art, because they can be both mirror and window at the same time. And then, one more teeny little vibes-based step: Verso understood this.

A confession: the vibes-based reasoning I'm doing in the latter part of this is highly motivated. It pleases me for Autism Reasons to understand Verso as consciously and purposefully masking in ways that don't disable him artistically. I'll get into that a bit at the end.

The Vales and mask-as-window

Mask of Joy: "He who painted this world, seeking what he could not grasp, longing to share with those he loves. Behind his smile, what could it be?" Mask of Anger: "He who cannot fight fate, behind his scowl, emotions blaze, but in the shadows, his temper fades. What am I but a mask of…" Mask of Sadness: "He who lives in-between, behind his veil, emotions swell, for a life forced to paint, What is he but a reflection of…"

The masks of the Vales each express a truth about Verso: there is joy behind his smile, anger behind his scowl (though it fades in the shadows), and sadness behind his veil.

I don't personally read Verso as actually neurodivergent, despite all the autism-y stuff I'm about to read into this part of his story. But this here? Feels like pretty good evidence for that case, if you're so inclined. At any rate, this is a thing I relate to: deliberately and self-consciously performing an emotion that I genuinely feel, because otherwise the neurotypical people around me will misconstrue my emotional state. I want to relate, and so I perform.

This can be a way to fawn or people-please. It can be exhausting. It is necessarily performative (which isn't synonymous with inauthentic, in my opinion). It should be and usually isn't reciprocal; we should be able to expect the people close to us to make an effort to understand us as well (that's why it's called the double empathy problem).

But it can also be an act of love, care, and genuine striving towards connection. It can be honest. The mask, in this case, is a window.

The Expeditioners and mask-as-mirror

The false axon, Visages, fights using five masks, one for each expeditioner. From left to right as we look at Visages, these are Peace, Confidence, Determination, Anxiety, Doubt. These masks are wielded without a lot of, um, subtlety... until Visages is defeated and the Mask Keeper, the true axon, uses them much more expertly.

Painted Verso, Lune, and Maelle are each paired with a mask that incapacitates them: Doubt, Confidence, and Anxiety respectively. Sciel gets the Determination mask but quickly overcomes it. Monoco is protected by his own mask, but I'm assigning him the leftover Mask of Peace. Five expeditioners, five masks.

Some of these expeditioner-mask pairs surprised me at first. But I think they make sense when the masks are considered as mirrors intended to create an incapacitating emotional response. That is, if we think of the Mask Keeper (Verso) as a an artist who has weaponised his art to force his audience to confront themselves.

Painted Verso and the Mask of Doubt: The least surprising pair, in my opinion. This Verso lives in a perpetual state of doubt; he hides it poorly, though he manages to fool himself much of the time (this is one of very few examples of a mask actually obscuring something in this game, if only from its own wearer). He has to deceive himself, because if he lets himself feel that doubt for even a moment, he won't be able to do what he believes he must: let Gustave die, manipulate the expeditioners into expelling the Paintress, and ultimately, stop the fragment of Verso's soul from painting. By attacking him with the Mask of Doubt, the artist (the Mask Keeper) uses a mask to force the viewer (Verso) to confront a lie that he tells himself. Mask as mirror.

Lune and the Mask of Confidence: Lune's arc over the game is about shedding the weight of her parents' expectations and making sure the voices in her head are hers, not theirs. She must find confidence in her own understanding of what makes this world worth saving (music, for one, which her parents found frivolous) and in her ability to carry out this mission as herself and for her own sake, rather than as the embodiment of her parents' legacy. At this point in the game, Lune is intensely dutiful but not confident in her bones, for all she performs it. The Mask Keeper forces her to confront this lack in herself—never a pleasant experience, especially for an overachiever. Mask as mirror.

Maelle and the Mask of Anxiety: This one stumped me a little, as Maelle neither lacks nor has an excess of anxiety. But Alicia… I think this is a mask very well suited to Alicia, and to Maelle's later reaction to the prospect of returning to Alicia's life outside the canvas: to rehearse all the ways that life will suffocate or imprison her. She cannot imagine herself buoyed by it, growing in it, thriving in it. It is a dark future full of terrible uncertainties. Maelle is, at this point, still ignorant of her true identity, but those memories are inside her, churning up enough anxiety that she just keeps. on. repressing. The mask forces her to look that fear in the face, even before she can recognise it in herself. Mask as mirror.

Monoco and the Mask of Peace: Unless I'm mistaken (it's quite hard to see in the video, even frame by frame), the masks we see bounce off Monoco are Doubt and Anxiety. Neither Confidence nor Determination so much as threaten him. The mask left over once all the humans have their own is Peace.

Monoco is the child Verso's representation of the family dog: faithful, untroubled by what may come so long as his silly humans are nearby and happy. But Monoco is also a person, and he does express doubt and anxiety to Verso over the course of the game—about Noco, about travelling with an expedition again and all the grief that entails. But he faces those feelings, names them, and so they have no power over him. Monoco is peace personified: what will be, will be, and in the meantime he'll help his friends and get in some good scraps. He doesn't need this artist's mirror, and the masks cannot hurt him.

Sciel and the Mask of Determination: This might have been the most unintuitive pairing for me. Like Lune and confidence, determination is an emotion that Sciel performs, but not one I felt she was strongly driven by.

After all, she doesn't really have a clear goal in mind. In Act One, reminiscing with Gustave about Aquafarm 3, she strongly implies that she doesn't believe the expeditions—or anything the people of Lumiere do—can make a difference.

Sciel: Kinda nostalgic, thinking back. We really thought we were making a difference. Gustave: Hey, we're still making a difference. Sciel: (unconvincingly) Yes. Of course! Gustave: (also kinda unconvincingly) Yeah!

Sciel is along for the ride. This expedition is something to do with her final year, and inasmuch as she has any goals, they are help my buddies and have fun while it lasts. She's pleased, after defeating the Paintress, to suddenly have (or believe she has) decades of life ahead of her, but she's also unafraid of death. She accepts her Gommage with equanimity, both at the close of Act Two and in Verso's ending.

But Sciel is determined. Her goal is to live—not forever but fully, in as much or as little time as she's permitted. She dances on stage on the day of the Gommage; she leaps dramatically into the Gestral arena; she loves openly, wholeheartedly, and honestly.

She decided, after her attempted suicide and despite her grief, to keep on living. Living, not surviving.

This is a truth Sciel knows about herself, so the Mask of Determination has nothing to show her. It can't hurt her, because it is her.

The Mask Keeper

We're approaching the point where I abandon the actual text and roll about in pure uncut headcanon. But first, a few things about the Mask Keeper. Because he might be Renoir's creature, but his understanding of masks is not identical to his creator's.

Mask Keeper: People want so badly to know, "What's behind the mask?" Front, back. Recto, verso. Great art is both window and mirror. Whether it's your mask or theirs. Verso: Harmless, huh. Sciel: He's the real Axon. Mask Keeper: Child, we all need masks, but how you use them, mmm….

The Mask Keeper first quotes Renoir, but goes on to challenge Renoir's view of masks. We all wear masks, artist and audience alike, Verso and Renoir alike, because we all need them.

And where Renoir thinks that masks impede an artist's ability to create great art, the Mask Keeper seems to disagree. How you use the mask is what's important. You can use them as a window, as we saw in the Vales, or you can use them as a mirror, as we will see when the theatrics are over and the fight is on.

And here is where I get speculative, because I want to take two more steps: First, to say that masks can be mirror and window simultaneously, so that Verso can make great art without abandoning his masks. Second, to say that Verso, before his death, understood this.

Neither proposition has much textual support! We see a lot of masks on this island, none of which serve simultaneously as window and mirror. And what little we learn about the first Verso over the course of the entire game is filtered through his childhood creation or through other people, who loved him dearly but perhaps didn't always see him clearly.

But here's my last shred of evidence: Renoir's axons are, with the exception of the Mask Keeper, wholly representative of his point of view. Parables, according to Maelle. (You could argue that they're great art as Renoir understands it: mirrors for his loved ones, windows to his wishes for them and what those wishes reveal about himself, but that's another post, I think.)

My point is that Verso's axon should reflect Renoir's understanding of Verso: beloved, brilliant, but hiding behind his masks. Held back by reluctance to know himself or let himself be known.

The Mask Keeper isn't that. He's a trickster, yes, but he doesn't hide. The masks don't restrain his art, they are his art. He uses them with intent, precision, and clarity of purpose. Because he is, after all, not a visual artist but an actor, lit by spotlights, monologuing as he gazes at a skull mask.

Renoir, with his incredible talent, captured with this axon parts of his son that he, Renoir, doesn't consciously perceive.

(I think the Mask Keeper's divergence from Renoir's vision has interesting implications for the debate about whether Renoir's criticism of Aline for painting humans is hypocritical, but that, too, is another post.)

I wrote a few weeks ago about how Verso's passion for music above the visual arts informs his understanding of the canvas. I think this difference in artistic sensibility between Verso and the rest of the family is also significant here. Theatre and musical performance are very different, of course, but they have more in common than music and visual art: they are both performance arts, in which the performers both affect and are affected by the emotions of their audience. And they are both arts that (while we now have the technology to record them) are historically, and I think fundamentally, transient: the performance ends, and no subsequent performance will ever be exactly the same. Performance unfolds over time, while visual artists create artifacts, complete and whole, unchanging.

So, with those similarities in mind, allow me to shamelessly conflate theatre and music. There are important differences, but I want to make some inferences about Verso from the nature of theatre, so gosh darn it I shall.

While Renoir is obviously skilled in the use of metaphor and symbolism in his work, he nevertheless believes that a painter must bare their soul on the canvas. The painter who wears a mask puts a wall up between themselves and the audience; they can never be a great artist. But an actor must wear a mask, either literally or figuratively, in order to communicate and elicit emotion; they pretend in order to illuminate a truth. The mask is an essential part of the art. I believe Verso, a performer above all else, understands his masks to be part of his work, not an obstruction to it.

And there's a darker side to this, of course (light and shadow, clair-obscur). Theatre is more manipulative than the visual arts. The composition of a painting gently encourages the eye to follow a certain path, but bright spotlights place hard boundaries on the audience's perception: you will see what the director intends, when they intend, and you will see absolutely nothing else. The performance unfolds over time, along a route determined in advance by director, playwright, and actors, with the goal of eliciting an emotional response to that unfolding story; that is, with the goal of manipulating the audience. Viewing a painting (or reading a book, for that matter *gestures at Alicia*) is much freer: glance over it, or immerse yourself in it for hours, taking in its details at your own pace, according to your own whims, feeling however that work of art makes you feel at that particular moment.

The Mask Keeper is manipulating the expedition from the moment they step onto the island... just as painted Verso manipulates the expedition from the moment they step onto the continent. To paraphrase the Mask Keeper, masks are not just to illuminate. They may also obscure.

And so Renoir isn't wrong, but he isn't seeing the whole picture, either. Because masks can be many things: wall, mirror, window, art, tool.

Masking and authenticity, or: Yep, my reasoning is motivated

I'm what's known these days as a high-masking autistic person (because "high-functioning" *spits on ground* is a cursed misnomer). But I didn't learn that about myself until I was in my thirties. Instead I learned at a very young age that my autistic traits were bad and wrong, and that if I wanted to be loved I had to be different. I was so young when I began, and so good at conforming, that I even fooled myself.

But that sort of masking isn't sustainable. Everybody does something like masking a lot of the time: code-switching, putting on a professional face for work, smoothing over social conflict with a smile you don't actually feel. But autistic masking is… intense. It's not just pushing some parts of yourself to the fore and hiding others; it's developing new, wholly unintuitive, effortful ways of being in the world. It's constantly surveilling and policing every aspect of how you show up in the world.

Turns out, prolonged stress is really bad for you!

So I crash and burn, and suddenly all the ways I used to mask are just… gone? And I don't really know who I am anymore. Because I started suppressing that person as a child.

From what I've heard and read, this is a fairly common experience for late-diagnosed high-masking autistics. It's really difficult to figure out what part of you is the mask and which part is you. I've suppressed all my sensory discomfort and all my natural traits and impulses so hard that I have to rediscover them through laborious trial and error. I keep peeling back layers, thinking I've finally figured it out, but whoops. More mask.

But that mask? Is also me. I look back on who I was in my twenties and I don't think she's a phoney. She's confident and adventurous and full of life. I like her. I wish I could tell her that she's furiously treading water just under the surface, and hey girl you're autistic, why not go sit in a quiet, darkened room for a bit and listen to yourself. But… I like her. She might have been masking, but she lived a life better aligned with my values than the one I live right now. More closely resembling my dreams.

So if I must rebuild myself now, I don't want to throw the entire mask away. I just want to understand its shape and learn where the sharp edges are.

And this is why I appreciate the island of Visages: because a mask is just a tool. It isn't inherently deceitful. It isn't necessarily isolating. The trick is to understand it and yourself; to know when to take it off. Verso, I want to believe, understood that this was possible. He knew, or was learning, how to play with masks, how to create with them, and how to be unconstrained by them. To use them to illuminate, not to hide.

Because, in the words of Agrado, which I have thought about at least twice a month for two decades, "You are more authentic, the more you resemble what you've dreamed of being."

[icantnotwaitforyou]

Verso, Musician

It struck me today how appropriate it is that Verso's artistic passion is music, not painting. Spoilers below.

Music, unlike the visual arts, is a fundamentally ephemeral art form. It is performance, where painting is the creation of a lasting artifact.

Music existed before musical notation did. We developed notation systems in an attempt to capture and document pieces of art that otherwise faded into silence. But these systems suffer from the same limitations as all human language: they are attempts to impose order on an immense and unruly universe. They can never capture everything about a performance—each time a song is played, it becomes something new.

Later still, we developed technologies to record music: for the first time, we could capture and "display" a musical performance exactly as it was played.

We can collect music now, just as we can collect paintings. To admire as and when we like.

But I don't think that changes the fundamental transience of music.

Verso, a musician, doesn't need to capture beauty to appreciate it. He can erase his canvas. He can finish his song, and when it fades into silence it is doing exactly as it ought. Its beauty isn't diminished by its impermanence—in fact, it is more beautiful because of it.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a musician nor a musical historian! Please feel free to correct any errors/misunderstandings.)

[icantnotwaitforyou]

i'm so obsessed with the different ways the dessendre family choose to paint it's soooo good

aline doesn't create anything new and is only interested in copying real life, so she paints her family, paints paris, paints humans, all to try and escape the grief of her reality. renoir paints elaborate representations of his loved ones in the form of the axons, trying to express what he thinks art should be while also revealing his own judgements and wishes for his family in how he chooses to portray them. verso was just a kid when he made the canvas, and so he makes the things a young boy would want: funny guys with brushes for heads who love to fight, his dog except he can TALK and also they're BEST FRIENDS, etc etc.

you can tell clea is the eldest daughter because when she was given the ability to paint whatever she wanted into existence she said 'okay i'm going to create incredibly creepy and violent monsters that can kill people in at least 30 creative ways' like this fucking thing

[icantnotwaitforyou]

Onto my next part of different versions of the Dessendre siblings: Maelle.

Alicia the Paintress - we learn that before the game Alicia wasn't a good painter. She preferred to stay in her room, leaving Verso and Clea to play without her. Only one of her paintings was good enough to be deemed acceptable by her mother. Maybe painting wasn't her forte. Maybe the family pressure was too great and if given time she would bloom into a painter - she seems to progress well enough under the guidance of the Painted!Verso. What we also know is that she's made a mistake, came into contact with someone from the other side of the war between Painters and Writers. Was she tricked? Or maybe she knew who she was talking to but was simply too trusting? Maybe she had hoped to find peace?

Alicia the Painted - for most of the game Alicia stays back. She is curious about Maelle, about this version of herself that seems to have everything and bear no pain of the memories. Memories that don't really belong to Alicia herself, that were thrust upon her to make sure she never forgets the sins committed by this perfectly happy girl in front of her. She's tailed by her father, who protects her but also keeps her from taking risks that may endanger their family. She clings to her Paintress mother, stuck to her side. But she is also seeking her agency, she is reaching out to Maelle, observing her with Gustave and later on with Verso. She isn't just a marionette for her mother to fuel her frustration into. She writes a latter to her other self, one that shows she's also not subservient completely to her brother's or mother's wishes. She believes in Maelle, she wishes for them to find a different ending but she accepts the possibility there will be none. And when the time comes for her to see her end, she awaits next to the version of herself painted by the Father of the family. She is at peace with all versions of herself. She has suffered enough. It seems that while heavily influenced by the way she was painted, this version of Alicia grew and changed as she observed the world. She wasn't just a mirror but someone who was looking for a way to escape.

The Reacher/She who Grasps the Sky - the version of Maelle as seen by her father. A small figure that is responsible for building a structure reaching for the sky itself. Something that may be considered dangerous and daring, something that required courage. She dares to reach for the sky, to think differently despite the many who work against her. Once we reach her we see she is just a small figure, currently hiding away in her own structure. We can let her go, up toward the sky and then she can finally be free. Her father seems to see a great potential in her, further echoed by Painted!Verso. But she is hiding, she has to work against many obstacles and people working against her. Renoir knows how hard it is for his daughter and yet he still believes in her. As he tells her in a recording dedicated to her - only she can be there for herself. Only she find courage to reach for the sky once again

Maelle - when we start she's the odd one out. A person who doesn't belong so much she chooses to fight her way through impending doom next to her brother rather than staying behind. She dares to follow an Expedition heading toward a rather certain death. While she was younger she struggled with finding a family to call her own but once she got under the care of a pair of an older sister and a brother she fit right in. Then she lost her brother, mourned him with all she got and promised revenge against those who wronged her. This time at least she couldn't be faulted in any way, this time she had a clear enemy that she could fight (just as her sister real showed her how). If before Mealle seemed to be a little removed from the horror of the Expedition then the further down we go, the more she learns about her powers she seems to move further and further away from her Painted!family. She loves them, it's clear. She cares for Lune, Sciel, and hopes to bring back Gustave. But her attitude changes, she's been much more self-assured than Alicia but now she seems almost cocky. She'll make it right, now that she has the power and no one can stand in her way. She is reaching that sky no matter the damage.

What is fascinating is the answer Maelle offers to Alicia's plea for a different ending. If her mother paints life, her father paints death, than Maelle seems to paint control. She paints a world even more perfect than her mother's which in a way shows why Clea considered her a worse painter - her world isn't real. You can almost see the strings, especially when Verso tries to break free.

On the other hand, when Maelle is pushed from the canvas, when she has to face the reality she seems to grow as a person (at a cost of a whole world of people).

There is no happy ending here - an ending with Maelle learning her lesson and only occasionally dipping into the canvas. No future where Verso apologizes to Julie, Sciel meets her husband and Gustave has the future he wants. All versions of Maelle are trying to reach the sky, only that if left alone our Maelle isn't willing to accept failure. These leaves us with no other ending

[icantnotwaitforyou]

some thoughts on Maelle, Clea, and the ending [full game spoilers]

The Endless Tower is the place where we get the most insight into who Clea is as a person and hear her perspective on what is going on through her appearance as the Fading Woman. The conversation below occurs only after you beat all 33 boss challenges inside the tower.

Clea thinks of her parents' squabble mostly as a nuisance, with both of them being in the wrong and not mature enough to have a proper conversation. Her main advice to Maelle (who's the only person able to converse with Clea here) is to not let anyone drag her into their problems.

Preceding the question of "wait, aren't you also in their mess, Clea, aren't you being kind of a hypocrite?" (a common trait for Maelle's siblings, perhaps), she explains that she's helping rather than being dragged in.

The most important thing she says is that Maelle must not allow anyone to control her choices. The mistakes of their parents are their own; the worst mistake that Maelle can make is to allow their actions to influence the path she takes.

The way she talks about it here makes it look like she isn't helping Renoir because she thinks he's right, but rather to even the odds. The war with the Writers is called her solitary war, and she may prefer to conduct it alone, so she is not doing anything to speed up the resolution of the conflict.

UPD: a few people informed me that she says she needs Renoir's help with the war during Alicia's flashback. I'd feel weird just cutting the above paragraph out, though, so it stays. Plus we don't know how much time has passed in the real world between the flashback and the events of the game, things may have changed etc.

The final boss of the Tower is Painted Love, a representation of Renoir and Aline, the Curator and the Paintress. By beating them, Maelle could be implied to have surpassed her parents, now able to forge a life of her own.

Clea doesn't care what Maelle chooses to do, as long as the choice is her own.

At the very end of the conversation, Clea gives Maelle the white ponytail hairstyle that's meant to remind Maelle she's in control of her life, and nothing is as important as leading the life she enjoys.

That's also the hairstyle Maelle wears during the epilogue to the Life to Paint ending.

So... Maelle ending got Clea's seal of approval?

[icantnotwaitforyou]

actually, now that i think of it. extremely interesting that maelle respects alicia's wish to be erased and freed from the canvas, but she couldn't let go of verso. and tbh, i think it has to do with the way that aline chose to paint them: alicia is scarred, grey and with no voice, traits that clea erased for maelle when alicia entered the canvas, traits that "chained" alicia to a life of being unheard and blamed, forever the reminder of the role she played on the fire, PLUS some others that were added on the canvas (how grey she is? the mask?). "maybe she's better off erased than living that life" is what maelle is thinking. meanwhile verso has been painted with the care, love and memories of aline, giving him a proper "second life". but that was never their verso, this isn't a second life, this is just them projecting stuff on him, like wanting this lifetime. and the thing is that verso wants to be erased and freed from that canvas as much if not more than alicia.

[icantnotwaitforyou]

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

And I dunno about y’all…but I think that’s good.

[icantnotwaitforyou]

Clea Dessendre really is the eldest daughter of all-time

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

[icantnotwaitforyou]

Alicia - Maelle

[icantnotwaitforyou]

Probably a lukewarm take at best, but I don't really think Verso was gunning for the complete destruction of the canvas until after Maelle killed Alicia. Accepted that the death of Lumière was the outcome? Yeah, definitely. But the rest of the Canvas is still alive. The gestrals and Nevrons are still living their lives.

But then at the end, he's on Renoir and Clea's side of the debate, even if he's still by 33's side physically. The Canvas needs to go. And I don't think that's a conscious choice he makes until he's holding the petals that used to be his sister. The look on his face as he stares up at a completely passive Maelle is nothing but pure betrayal and pain (and many kudos to the devs, the detail on these characters' expressions is insane), and that's the face of a man who's decided it all needs to go.