"...we all hold secrets in our hearts that we do not wish to be revealed to the world, and these characters are no different."
What secrets do your characters hide?
Find the clues in my essay “The Case of the Mystery Game Writer” in the new collection “Game Narrative Kaleidoscope”.
#GameWriting #narrative #gameNarrative #writing #videoGames #mysteryGame #mystery
https://ironiciconicstudios.ca/2026/03/04/the-game-narrative-kaleidoscope/
Thursday's #DailyBlogroll features all new stories by @davew, @wilhelm_arcturus, @brennanbrown, Cliffski, @zarfeblong, @axxuy, @monsterladysdiary.com, @WarnerCrocker, @anarchaeopteryx, @rogeredwards and more!
#IndieGames #SteamNextFest #ArtificialIntelligence #GamingCulture #GameNarrative
Anyone able to point me toward any long-form discussions on story in 2D platformers?
I'm especially interested in elements of plot, pacing, character, and methods of communicating the narrative to the player!
Bonus points if the discussion never uses the word "subversive"
One year after Metaphor: ReFantazio’s launch, director Katsura Hashino reveals the surprise: fans loved the deep narrative and themes right from the start, proving story is truly at the heart of the game. #GameNarrative #ReFantazio
https://gameinformer.com/interview/refantazio-director-katsura-hashino
Dispatch devs are frustrated players play it safe, choosing 'nice' and boring options over bold choices—missing out on deeper storylines and drama.
The love triangle favored Invisigal due to limited Blonde Blazer scenes.
Season 2?
Maybe. #GameNarrative #PlayerChoices
https://www.videogamer.com/news/dispatch-dev-disappointed-players-nice-boring/
Clair Obscur: To be accountable to those that come after
CROSSPOST FROM COMRADERY. Part of a three part series: Disability (part 1), Right to Exist (part 2), and Accountability and Healing (part 3).
In my prior essays, I related themes woven through Clair Obscur to show how it can parallel real world complexities and oppression.
For the character of Alicia and Gustave (and even Lune if we accept my assertion of her as neurodivergent), disability cords through the story and asks questions the game may not have intended. I explored in that essay how Disability was a class constructed by capitalism to control labor and those unable to labor, and through that I showed how disability has been used to denote evil and bad throughout American history. But Clair Obscur twists those tropes on their head and refuses to villianize the disabled within the game. Instead, Alicia, Gustave, and others are given complex journeys and heralded as heroes in a way. Yet, by the end, the final ending choice between Verso and Maelle felt as if the player was the judge determining the fate of the disabled person for them. I wrote:
Will we be given the care and support we need to thrive? Will we be given agency to choose our own fate and route to healing?
Clair Obscur offers that choice to the player, thus placing the fate of a disabled person in their hands. In a way, the player acts as the judge who determines the fate of a disabled person, to determine whether they ever access the care and benefits they need. It is a replica of how our real world works, and it forces a painful glimpse into the struggles of disabled people.
This essay led me to my next where I explored the nature of the Canvas people and whether they are real. I examined how this paralleled dehumanizing narratives that subjugate and destroy unique cultures. I laid down a map of the shifting temporal realities the game presents through the different main characters of each act: Gustave (Lumierian reality), Verso (immortal painted Dessendre reality), and Maelle (both Dessendre reality and Lumierian reality). How weaving these different realities forces us to contend with the nature of what is real and who is allowed to exist within that reality.
The conclusion I came to, which perhaps will not surprise anyone reading my writings, is that I chose the ending that gave agency to people and saved the most lives. I could not accept that the unique lives of those in the Canvas were less than the Dessendre family. Nor could I accept anyone deciding for a disabled person how they must exist and heal.
By exploring these darker aspects of Clair Obscur, I undoubtedly focused on the more abusive and manipulative aspects of the Dessendre family to show how unsupportive they’ve been to Alicia/Maelle. The evidence painted within the game left me uneasy about the Dessendre family, partly informed by my own traumas as a queer nonbinary disabled person. Yes, they do love each other but love does not mean abuse cannot happen or exist, which I argued in my essay on Disability. That darkness echoed trauma and pain that destroying the Canvas cannot truly heal. A cycle of violence doesn’t heal through the use of more violence, but only when the cycle is stopped.
One could argue that Verso sought to stop the cycle of grief, and isn’t that stopping the cycle of violence? But that negates the temporal reality of the Canvas people, who endured countless oppressive actions and outright genocide. Sacrificing a population of people in an effort to ‘heal’ one family only continues the cycle of violence, and it doesn’t solve the lack of support in the Dessendre world, which Verso’s ending never truly reconciles. Alicia is still isolated, still without a voice, still disabled in a world that has done little to meet any of her needs.
So then, do we ever exit the cycle of violence? And what would it look like to attempt such a thing?
In my Disability essay, I pointed out healing cannot begin until we exit the abusive/traumatic environment/situation. Part of healing involves the end of the cycle of violence, which differs based on who abused and who endured the abuse. Those that abuse must hold themselves accountable and engage in repair as well as work on their own healing. Those that endured abuse must work on their own healing, and recognize the best place for that, which might require them to not engage again the person who harmed them. Ending the cycle of violence and moving toward accountability and healing is not an easy process and the trajectory will differ based on who is involved.
Yet even with those differing paths, one must still hold oneself accountable in order to push forward in the healing process. We will backslide. We will mess up, but it is crucial to acknowledge when we cause harm or when we make a mistake, apologize, and do better. That’s all part of the accountability process.
So in this essay, I want to explore what accountability is and how it does and doesn’t manifest in the characters’ storylines. Whether the characters were able to truly end the cycle of violence and move forward into healing or if the game leaves those questions open-ended.
What is Accountability? And how do we do it?
Accountability within today’s culture, especially within America where I’m situated, is wrought with videos and images of call-out culture. Where people call others out publically the harm and demand repair. While this may be a useful tactic when facing off against the rich and powerful, it ultimately isn’t true accountability. Or at least not the kind that may lead to actual healing and change.
So when I speak of accountability, I do not mean that public spectacle. I instead mean conversations like what Maelle and Verso have in Clair Obscur. They happen on a personal level and/or within the community, and often are not on a public stage. They may instead happen behind closed doors with or without a mediator. The survivor may decide or not decide to be present, while the person who harmed them works toward healing and accountability. It’s a complex process that goes far, far beyond the initial identification of the harm.
In the first chapter of the anthology Beyond Suvival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement, editors Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes:
“Transformative justice and community accountability are terms that describe ways to address violence without relying on police or prisons. These approaches often work to prevent violence, to intervene when harm is occurring, to hold people accountable, and to transform individuals and society to build safer communities. These strategies are some of hte only options that marginalized communities have to address harm.
The work of transformative justice can happen in a variety of ways. Some groups support survivors by helping them identify their needs and boundaries while ensuring their attackers agree to these boundaries and atone for the harm they caused. Other groups create safe spaces and sanctuaries to support people escaping from violence.”
Here they show how accountability is only one piece of a larger puzzle of addressing violence. Without accountability, much of the work to address and end the cycle of violence would fracture and fall apart, yet as crucial as it is, full healing requires far more than just accountability.
Ejeris Dixon goes on to add:
“Violence and oppression break community ties and breed fear and distrust. At its core, the work to create safety is to build meaningful, accountable relationships within our neighborhoods and communities.”
Without trust, one cannot build safety. Without safety, one struggles to be vulnerable. Without vulnerability, one struggles to heal. And without the choice to heal, one will fail to hold oneself accountable.
This isn’t to say these are steps in a process, but more they are interlinking threads that are woven into a larger tapestry. Each thread crucial to the final form, and the tapestry wouldn’t be the same without each thread and stitch. None of this is easy, but then healing isn’t ever easy.
Healing always requires a choice. Do we choose to heal? Do we choose to hold ourselves accountable to that journey? Do we choose to be accountable for our actions and engage in repair when we inevitably cause harm? How do we engage in repair? Are we willing to be responsible and listen to those harmed by us? To let those harmed take the lead? Can we separate shame from guilt? To not fear accountability but instead embrace it so all involved can move forward in healing?
Of course, asking those questions can feel daunting, and it’s why relationship-building is so crucial. Healing requires support of one’s family, friends, and/or community. We can’t really heal in isolation. In chapter three of Beyond Survival, Blythe Barnow speaks about how isolation harmed her ability to heal:
“In the end, that was the most damaging. Doing it alone. Believing it was all my responsibility. Not the assault. But the healing. The justice. The protection for nameless other girls. I leaned heavy into the skills I learned as a child, over responsibility, independence, sharp analysis, and self-sacrifice. Which meant I never asked for the support I was so desperate for.
Because what I needed, maybe more than his apology, was a community of people who could help me hold and honor the stories that led to this one, who could help me uproot the layers of silence learned through too much violence. I needed to be asked what I wanted and what I was hoping for. I needed someone to help me craft those letters, someone to remind me that I could list expectations. I needed someone who was going to sit with me through the fallout. Someone who could read the responses people sent me and tell me to wait before reading them myself. I needed someone beside me to reflect the ways my own trauma, old and new, was informing the process. I needed someone who could show me love that was deeper and more nuanced than just hating him.”
I relate deeply to Barnow’s words here because isolation can steal away our voice, where we put on a brave mask for others. Often society and even friends and family can put tremendous pressure on survivors to ‘move on’ from the harm, to not speak of it, to stay silent, but that too is part of the cycle of violence. If we cannot acknowledge violence happened, how can we ever stop it from replaying again and again? Many therapists and researchers have written of the cycle of domestic violence and how it can sometimes thread through families. Part of that relies on silence and isolation.
Breaking silence and isolation requires the support of others, and it’s not easy to do. Believe me, I’ve struggled with this my whole life, but I’ve made progress on my healing from abuse because of the support of dear friends and good therapists.
This is why Maelle and Verso are able to have any conversation that deals with accountability. Lune, Sciel, Esquie, and Monoco form a support system to help them break the cycle of silence and isolation. This chosen family gives Maelle the love she needs to learn and grow, and they attempt to offer this to Verso as well.
For example, exploring the Reacher area will lead to the peak, where Painted Alicia ignores her brother to speak with Maelle privately — here the color fades into greyscale. She leads Maelle into the cavern at the peak to show her the true axon, and also to express her thoughts to Maelle through gestures and their fencing match.
After Painted Alicia leads Maelle back to the others, the scene snaps back into color. Maelle offers Alicia “a new beginning,” and I think she meant to repaint Alicia’s face and restore her voice. However, Painted Alicia grasps Maelle’s hand and presses it against her, thus thwarting Maelle’s attempt to repaint her face. Instead, she gasps out her desire for Maelle to gommage her. Verso doesn’t have a chance to stop it, because Maelle does as Painted Alicia asks.
Verso responds by trying to stop Maelle, and ends up holding the red petal remains of Painted Alicia. Sciel is at his side to comfort him in his grief.
The conversation they have later at camp delves into the impact of Maelle’s act:
MAELLE: I’m sorry.
VERSO: …
MAELLE: It’s what she wanted. I owed her that much. We owed her that much. I honoured her wishes. That’s something neither you nor Renoir ever did. And not Maman either.
VERSO: … I didn’t get to say goodbye. You didn’t wait. You didn’t give me a chance to persuade her.
MAELLE: She knew what she wanted. You wouldn’t have been able to sway her.
VERSO: She’s not you. You don’t know that. I know her better than you do. But you didn’t even give me the chance to try. You just erased her.
MAELLE: Verso…
VERSO: You’ve lost two brothers. You know what it’s like to lose your sibling and never get the chance to say goodbye.
MAELLE: …
VERSO: You Painters. You just do what you want, you don’t care how it affects the rest of us.
MAELLE: I do care. I know you’re hurting, but the person who made that decision wasn’t me. It was her. It would have been wrong to deny her just so you could try and talk her out of her decision.
Here Maelle seeks to understand Verso and why he is upset. She wants him to understand her reasons, where she sought to honor Painted Alicia’s wishes. She argues here for Painted Alicia’s agency in this, and how taking away her agency wouldn’t have been right.
Verso lashes out because of his grief and pain, but his words here “you don’t care how it affects the rest of us,” doesn’t align with the truth of Painted Alicia and Maelle’s actions at the peak of Reacher. Painted Alicia had made her wishes known, where she did not wish to continue in the disabled body Aline had given her in punishment for an action she’d never done. Perhaps there could have been other ways for her to thrive, but Painted Alicia had tried for decades to find that. Yet, perhaps it is irony that she sought the same annihilation that Painted Verso secretly seeks.
Maelle tries, in her own way, to honor the agency of others. To offer them different solutions, but Painted Alicia didn’t want any other solution. She had taken Maelle’s hand to press against her and urged her to gommage her away.
Does Maelle come to understand what Verso is trying to articulate here? Because so far, she gives her reasons and argues for Painted Alicia’s agency. The scene continues:
VERSO: She’s the last of my family. I have no one left now.
MAELLE: You have me. You have us.
VERSO: MAELLE. I wasn’t ready.
MAELLE: I don’t understand. You were ready when you set Papa free. You expected that he would erase the Canvas and everyone in it. Isn’t that the same thing?
VERSO: It’s different! It’s different. Why did she do that?
MAELLE: You know why.
VERSO: …
MAELLE: But you’re right. I should have thought of you. I should have given you a chance to say goodbye. I’m truly sorry, Verso.
VERSO: … *cries* At least she’s free now.
Maelle briefly gets defensive because she struggles to understand, but then she takes a moment to think. She may view the two events of setting Renoir free to erase everyone versus her honoring Alicia’s wishes to be erased as equivalent, but Verso does not. We then see Maelle hold herself accountable by putting herself in Verso’s shoes in an effort to understand. She admits that Verso is indeed right. She should have thought of him, and she apologizes. As one continues through the journey, Maelle does her best to honor this by doing better.
She also tries to show Verso that he does have people left. He has Maelle, Lune, Sciel, Monoco, and others as they all have been trying to reach out and build connections with him. He chooses to hold himself in isolation from them, whether he is conscious of it or not.
She actively does her best to hold herself accountable, to learn from her actions, and this shows how she wishes to end the cycle of harm. She wants everyone’s agency to be honored, for people to find what they need, and although she may offer different ways to do that, if the person ultimately rejects a solution, who is Maelle to refuse to honor their decision? For a sixteen-year-old, she’s remarkably mature here.
Verso, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to hold that same self-awareness, or if he did, he seems to have lost it. He’s so caught up in his cycle of violence, that he struggles to see any other solution as viable. To see this, let’s look at a conversation near the start of Act 3, when Maelle returns to the Canvas:
MAELLE: You should have helped me remember.
VERSO: Yeah… I wanted to, but I… I’m sorry.
MAELLE: I’m sorry too. If I’d listened to Maman… if I hadn’t trusted the Writers, Verso would still be alive, and you —
VERSO: Wouldn’t exist.
MAELLE: Wouldn’t be caught in the middle. Maman did a terrible thing, painting you into Verso’s Canvas. Giving you his memories. Pretending the fire only took me. But I’m glad you exist.
VERSO: Your father was right to erase everyone. It’s better this way.
MAELLE: Better for who? Verso would have never wanted his Canvas gone. He loved Esquie and his Gestrals and the Grandis.
VERSO: It was killing my … our mother, staying here so long in a make-believe world with her make-believe family.
MAELLE: It’s not make-believe. It’s not… you’re not.. To me…
Here Verso sees only one solution: annihilation. However, his reasons for why he manipulated and lied to Maelle are just that — excuses. So he acknowledges the hurt he did and apologizes. For true accountability to happen, it’s not enough to simply apologize; one’s present and future behaviors will need changed to avoid replicating the harm and continuing the cycle of violence.
For Maelle, she also apologizes, but in this instance, what is there for her to apologize for? Perhaps she shouldn’t have trusted whoever the Writers were, but she is not responsible for them starting a fire and for Verso’s death. Maelle is only responsible for her own actions, not the actions of others. This shows how she’s internalized the shame and guilt Clea and Aline both shoved onto her; both needed someone to blame, and Alicia, the survivor, is a convenient person to lay down the blame. Maelle/Alicia is young and lacking the support to realize that she does not need to carry this blame as it is not hers to bear.
Painted Verso does not try to negate the blame Maelle/Alicia puts on herself. Instead, he tries to convince Maelle that it is better for those in the Canvas to not exist, for the Canvas to be destroyed, but Maelle refuses to accept that destruction of entire people’s is the right answer. She disagrees that everyone in the Canvas is make-believe. To her they are as real as herself. This ties into what I discussed in my Right to Exist essay.
I wrote there:
We have now returned to one of the most crucial questions in the game: What is the right decision in regards to the fate of the Canvas people and the fate of Alicia/Maelle? As I have hopefully shown thus far, erasing people’s temporal realities causes immense harm and is genocide; people have a right to exist, and sacrificing them for the ‘greater good of society’ (or in this case the Dessendre family) cannot ever be the morally right answer.
Necrosecurity, as I spoke of earlier, paints a bleak and death-filled reality, where healing cannot ever take place because denial and control is at its roots. [Defined as sacrificing a population for the greater ‘good’ of society.] Until people’s temporal realities are respected and their agency honored, healing will forever stay out of reach.
Thus, escaping pain by committing genocide is not healing. It’s a continuation of the cycle of violence. The marginalized populations facing genocide have a right to exist, and their temporal realities are as valid and important as the oppressor. Just as the temporal reality of the Canvas people are as valid and important as the Dessendre family.
Healing can only happen when the cycle of violence ends.
Verso tries to justify the death and destruction as necessary to end the cycle, but Maelle refuses to accept that reasoning. She believes Verso is wrong when he claims his self and those of the Canvas people are make-believe, and she believes they have a right to exist. She acknowledges harm happened to Painted Verso. She apologizes for her part in it. This is a step forward in the addressing of harm and ending the cycle: acknowledging what happened and why it wasn’t okay.
Again, Maelle cannot repair what her mother did because it’s not her burden to bear. Only Aline can take responsibility for her own actions. Maelle can only take responsibility for Maelle’s actions, which Maelle tries her best to do. She tries to hold herself accountable, which is something neither Clea nor Aline ever seem to do. This act of being accountable seems to have been taught to Maelle perhaps by Renoir, but far more likely it was Gustave, Lune, Sciel, and the Lumierians who taught her this.
She may have regained her memories from the real world, but that doesn’t mean she lost her memories of growing up as a Lumierian. She holds both in her head, as she will admit to Lune and Sciel after she brings them back:
MAELLE: I’m sorry. I didn’t — My memories — I would’ve told you if I’d known —
LUNE: Don’t apologize. You were trapped too. You lived among us. You’re one of us. Even if you’re also one of them.
MAELLE: It’s… so weird. I have memories of two childhoods. Two homes. Two Lumieres.
SCIEL: You’re not an orphan anymore. You just found your family. Don’t you want to be with them?
MAELLE: I love my family, but … they’re all gone. In one way of another. And you’re my family too. So are Gustave and Emma. And I didn’t see it at the time, but all the families who took turns taking care of me…
Here Maelle, once again, tries to take on burdens that aren’t hers to hold. She had no memory of being a Paintress, so how could she have told them? Lune understands this and gently points this out to her. To root her in the facts of what they now know. She accepts who Maelle is — Maelle’s full self of being of Lune’s Lumiere but also of the Dessendre’s Lumiere — and provides comfort in this way.
Sciel, in turn, asks a crucial question, even though her voice aches with grief. “Don’t you want to be with them?”
Maelle’s answer is heart-rending, because truthfully, her family is gone. Clea is off fighting a one-person war with the Writers, Aline — Maelle’s mother — blames Maelle and casts her aside, Renoir may seek to bring Maelle back but he too has been neglectful of her, and Verso is gone. So what roots her in the Dessendre World? There she is disabled with no support system and half the family is abusive toward her (as I discuss in my Disability essay). So in a way, her Dessendre family is “gone” in the sense they do not truly support her, not like the Canvas Lumierians.
When Maelle blames herself for those that have harmed her or those she loved, she exhibits a common traumatic response; when she apologizes for actions that aren’t truly hers to own, that is also a traumatic response.
I know I’ve fallen into those trauma responses, where I had internalized the blame that it was my fault for the abuse done to me, my fault for the sexual assault. However, that blame is false. In reality, it wasn’t my fault as I did not do those actions. Those actions were done by other people to me. Just as Maelle did not paint Painted Verso, Aline did that. Just as Maelle didn’t start the fire, the Writers did that. Just as Maelle didn’t kill Verso, the fire and whoever started the fire did that. Just as Maelle didn’t lie to Lune and Sciel, she had no memories of her Dessendre life and thus no information to share; instead, Verso had that information and chose to not share it.
Maelle still tries to take accountability, but truthfully, it is not hers to bear. Lune gently teaches her that in that scene above.
Understanding these truths are hard when society and/or loved ones pressure us into thinking it’s our fault we were hurt. That’s just a falsehood to avoid accountability and to pressure survivors into silence, which effectively continues the cycle of violence.
To break out of that cycle, we must acknowledge that we are only responsible for our own actions and speech. Then we must separate out shame and guilt. We must choose to heal and continue toward healing no matter how hard that trajectory may become. But to even make that choice requires us to have support of others, to help us see when we are falling back into harmful thought processes that inhibit our ability to heal. Those that support us help us stay accountable to the process of healing.
Lune and Sciel both act as supporters for Maelle here. Lune, especially as she has also been hurt by Verso’s actions, seeks to hold Verso accountable. At this point in the game, Lune acts as a protective older sister to Maelle, while Sciel often falls into a motherly role. That’s part of how chosen families relate to one another — they fall into roles with one another, and those roles may change depending on the situation. Sometimes Maelle may be the more sisterly one to offer support to Lune or Sciel.
Chosen family can be a powerful support group and a crucial one, especially if one’s biological family has been abusive toward us. In the case of Maelle, some of her family members have been abusive toward her. So her chosen family provides the support for Maelle to work toward healing from that.
So what about Painted Verso? How does he hold himself accountable after this massive reveal? He hid the truth of who Maelle was from not only Maelle but everyone in the party. He manipulated them toward his end-goals. He chooses to talk to each individually, which the player can choose which character to start these conversations (or could choose to avoid them). If the player chooses to have these conversations, then how do they go?
Lune calls Painted Verso out for his lies:
LUNE: I was right not to trust you.
VERSO: And what would you have done in my position?
LUNE: I wouldn’t have betrayed my expedition. I would have warned them that everyone they cared about was about to be erased. That THEY were about to be erased. I would have told them the truth. Because after everything we’ve been through, we deserved that.
VERSO: So you’d choose your expedition over your mother?
LUNE: That’s your problem. You think in false dichotomies. It wasn’t an “either / or” a situation. Other solutions were possible, if you’d only trusted us enough to ask.
VERSO: Knowing what you know now, would you have helped me force my mother out of the Canvas?
LUNE: … *sighs*
VERSO: I don’t apologize for saving her. But I am sorry I broke your trust. And I will do everything I can to help bring everyone back.
LUNE: I guess we’ll see.
Here Verso is intent on his reasons for his lies and manipulations. Lune, of course, points to the faults in his argument, because there might have been more solutions possible. Verso’s response is to put Lune on the spot, which when it comes to intense conversations like this? It’s very hard to consider alternatives when one is upset, so of course Lune couldn’t respond right away. She takes her time deliberating and analyzing possible solutions. Put her on the spot? And she falls quiet because she has not been given adequate time to process the information and analyze for other solutions. So Verso acts rather unfairly toward her, and then makes a promise to win back her trust.
For Sciel, she processes her anger and hurt differently. She may have chosen to ‘get over’ her anger, but the hurt in her voice betrays how she feels. She tries to keep her tone light, but the desperate hope still slips through. Their conversation ends with her saying:
SCIEL: As long as you help me bring Pierre back. You owe me.
VERSO: You got it.
Once again, he makes a promise. Yet, his conversation with Maelle shows he may not honor the promise to Lune and Sciel:
MAELLE: We have to push Papa out of the Canvas before he erases everything.
VERSO: I’m surprised he hasn’t already.
MAELLE: He’s been weakened by his battle with Maman. That’s probably why he hasn’t come after us. But it won’t stop him for long.
VERSO: If you and your father keep fighting, you risk breaking the world again. Another Fracture, but this time, it might be you trapped inside the Monolith.
MAELLE: What’s the alternative?
VERSO: Maybe… maybe you should go home.
MAELLE: Verso…
VERSO: You’re fighting each other but you’re all doing the same thing.
MAELLE: No.
VERSO: Aline wants her son back. Renoir wants you and Aline back. You want Gustave back. The cycle we needed to break wasn’t the Gommage. It’s your family’s cycle of grief.
MAELLE: …
VERSO: Our whole world carries the burden of your family’s grief.
Although there is truth that the Canvas world carries the burden of the Dessendre’s family’s grief, he makes an assumption about Maelle’s motivations. Yes, Maelle may want Gustave back, but she earlier clarified that she doesn’t believe Painted Verso nor the Canvas people are ‘make-believe.’ She views them as real, and she refuses to let people die simply because her father decided they were a threat. So his assertion that it’s her continuing the cycle fails to understand the complexity in her motivations.
Instead, Verso tries to argue again why Maelle should leave the Canvas, but if she does, that means Renoir will finish erasing the Canvas and Lune and Sciel will never see their friends and family again. In fact, Lune and Sciel will cease to exist too. This conversation reveals that Verso is simply telling Lune and Sciel what they want to hear so that they can aid him in his goals. He isn’t holding himself accountable here. He’s manipulating everyone to push them toward the end-goal that he’s decided is best.
In doing this, he shows a lack of ability to understand and learn from the hurt and pain he’s done to others. He’s not really listening to them because he’s mapped out ways to carefully push each person into the actions he needs for his own goals. Thus, he’s continuing the cycle of violence.
Maelle has made it clear she wants the cycle of violence to end. She wants to save the Canvas people, because she believes they have a right to exist, that they are not ‘make-believe’ but real. Yet in these conversations, Verso turns up his charm and manipulation tactics to try to tweak the situation to his benefit. He wants Maelle to give up and leave the canvas so Renoir can erase it. He needs Lune and Sciel to work with them so that he can reach Renoir as he suspects that confrontation will be the only way he can push Maelle out of the Canvas.
Healing cannot happen in a manipulative environment that continues to cause harm to others. In the Beyond Survival Anthology, Kai Cheng Thom’s essay called ‘What to Do when You’ve Been Abusive,’ has a list of steps to assist people on that journey toward accountability and healing. The first step:
“‘Learn to Listen When Someone Says You Have Hurt Them.’ When one has been abusive, the very first — and one of the most difficult — skills of holding oneself accountable is learning to simply listen to the person or people whom one has harmed:
When someone, particularly a partner or loved one, tells you that you have hurt or abused them, it can be easy to understand this as an accusation or attack…”
Thom here lists what Verso struggles to do in these conversations. He listens but is also defensive with Lune about his actions and proceeds to make excuses for his actions. In a way, Verso struggles to not see these confrontation as an attack, but truthfully, Lune calling out the harm isn’t an attack, it’s a consequence. Pointing out harm isn’t an attack but a courageous moment of honesty and vulnerability. Whether Verso sees that gift of vulnerability is hard to say as his actions and words are conflict depending on the person to whom he speaks.
Verso tends to make himself the center of the story being told in both Lune and Maelle’s conversations. The only one he doesn’t do this with is Sciel, but then Sciel doesn’t really give him that chance. Sciel recognizes that he speaks to give his reasons, and she doesn’t want to hear it, so she instead takes the conversation toward what they will do next. It’s a masterful way of pivoting the conversation to a more active form of accountability — Sciel is essentially asking Verso, “So, you hurt us, what are you going to do to fix this? Here’s one solution.”
Verso accepts Sciel’s solution, but then his conversation with Maelle, he goes on the rampage. He points out her family’s cycle of grief continues to hurt this Canvas, but he also knows that if Maelle leaves, there is no possible way he can honor his promises to Sciel and Lune. He speaks of a cycle of grief that causes harm, which is important to acknowledge, yet he refuses to listen to what Maelle is saying. In turn, Maelle goes quiet, which she often does to think over what others have said.
Thus, Verso’s defensiveness with Lune and Maelle ends up being:
“… the cycle of violence talking. This is the script that rape culture has built for us: a script in which there must be a hero and a villain, a right and a wrong, an accuser and an accused. What if we understood being confronted about perpetuating abuse as an act of courage — even a gift — on the part of the survivor?
What if, instead of reacting immediately in our own defense, we instead took the time to listen, to really try to understand the harm we might have done to another person?
When we think of accountability in terms of listening and love instead of accusation and punishment, everything changes. Listenign without becoming defensive does not necessarily mean relinquishing one’s own truth. We must be able to make room for varying perspectives and multiple emotional truths in our hearts.”
Painted Verso doesn’t make room for varying perspectives or multiple emotional truths. He may take some responsibility for his actions, or at least acknowledges the harm his actions have done, where he takes on only what he has done — no more, no less, but he doesn’t truly grow from that.
Thom writes how taking responsibility for the abuse is a crucial step, but one must also “accept that your reasons are not excuses.”
There is no reason good enough to excuse abusive behavior. Reasons help us understand abuse, but they do not excuse it. Accepting this is essential to transforming culpability into accountability and turning justice into healing.
Painted Verso spends a lot of time giving his reasons and expecting that to excuse his actions. Lune will have none of it as his reasons doesn’t excuse his lying and manipulative actions. He didn’t just betray them but also lied to them and manipulated them in harmful ways. Can Verso recognize the harm and truly be accountable?
This is where support of others can be crucial. Thom writes:
“When having a dialogue with someone who has been abused, it’s essential to give the survivor the space to take the lead in expressive their needs and setting boundaries. You should also take time to think about your own needs and boundaries without making the person you have harmed take care of you. This is why having support in the community is crucial. If basic needs are going unmet, no one can heal from abuse, nor can anyone truly be accountable.
If you have abused someone, it’s not up to you to decide how the process of healing or accountability should work. This doesn’t mean that you don’t get to have rights or boundaries, or that you can’t contribute actively to the process. It means that you don’t get to say that the person you have hurt is “crazy” or that what they are expressing doesn’t matter.
Instead, it might be good idea to try asking the person who has confronted you questions like these: what do you need right now? Is there anything I can do to make this feel better? How much contact would you like to have with me going forward? If we share a community, how should I navigate situations where we might end up int he same place? How does this conversation feel for you, right now?
At the same time, it’s important to understand that the needs of survivors of abuse can change over time, and that survivors may not always know right away — or ever — what their needs are.
Being accountable and responsible for abuse means being patient, flexible, and reflective about the process of having dialogue with the survivor.”
It’s crucial to note here that Thom is not saying that the survivor is an expert on accountability or that they should have full control over the process. Thom adds:
“I feel strongly that as long as punishment remains at the center of our thinking around accountability and justice, survivor-led processes are doomed to fall into the trap of individuals desperately trying to avoid accountability out of fear. Survivor-led, to me, means that survivors get to lead their own process of recovery, that survivors are given space to tell their stories and speak their needs (which criminal justice usually does not allow).
It does not mean that people who have been deeply wounded are suddenly handed full responsibility for a community dialogue and rehabilitation process. Survivor-led does not mean that the community gets to abdicate its responsibility for providing support, safety, expertise, and leadership in making healing happen.”
There are multiple paths in the accountability and healing process: the survivor, the one who caused harm, and the community. These paths may intersect at times, but Thom is arguing that none should exert control over the other’s path. Instead, listening, understanding, honoring boundaries, and opening onself up to changing present and future behaviors is what ‘survivor-led’ should mean.
Thom also makes it clear that the community itself needs to be involved to lay the groundwork to meet the needs of those within this process. Support by building safety, sharing expertise to help guide, and providing leadership to keep those involved accountable are all needed to assist in the healing process here.
Community support allows those involved to have someone with which to work through their emotions and thoughts. By working through emotions and thoughts, one can come to understand one’s own behaviors, emotions, actions, and through that find a path forward. This work means they are also holding themself accountable in the sense they are continuing to move forward on the path toward healing. Supportive friends, family, and community members can assist in helping those in this process stay on the healing path — that’s another type of accountability.
Supportive community is is what Painted Verso lacks. He does not allow anyone to truly be in community with him, and those that try are held at arm’s length with him manipulating events toward his own ends. Whether he ever allowed community to help him work through his trauma and pain relies on his own shared stories, of which seem suspect since what he says to one person doesn’t always align with what he says to another of the same event. The best we have is a journal entry from a prior expedition where he expresses his pain and hopes — hopes he doesn’t seem to have in Maelle’s time.
VERSO’S JOURNAL:
I miss you. I don’t have the right to miss you but I do. I wish I could talk to you. Tell you. Fuck. I don’t know what I would tell you. Just ask that you forgive me. Julie, forgive me. I’m not… I’m not a traitor. I’m not. I’m trying to save… I’m trying to save us all. But you’re right. I am a coward. I’m a fucking coward. You deserved to know why. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t face you properly. Not and still do what had to be done. Papa believes you are Clea’s creation, and even if you’re not, we can no longer trust you. But I think you just wanted answers.
Why? Why couldn’t you just let it go? Why did you convince them to abduct me? Interrogate me? No. I shouldn’t say that. You thought I was a traitor. You were doing what you thought was right, just like we are. I swear to you, I’m doing what’s right. I should have known when you started questioning things that you wouldn’t be fooled. But how could I even explain? You’d have thought I’d gone mad. Doppelgangers. Countless worlds. But Papa’s right. We can’t take the risk. Too much is at stake. Too much. It had to be done. It had to. Clea already took our sister. If we want to save our family, our world, our people, we can’t take any chances. And once we free Maman, she… she’ll bring you back. It won’t be forever. I promise. We deserve to live. All of us. We deserve to exist.
In this journal, Verso admits to his pain and how much he misses Julie, who seems to be a loved one. He justifies his actions, but also shows a willingness to understand why Julie did what she thought was right. He does his best to not internalize the hurtful words that Julie and her expedition likely threw at him — traitor for one. However, he makes a crucial mistake here by assuming Julie’s reactions to the actual truth. He doesn’t allow her to have agency, and instead took that from her by keeping her in the dark. This fueled distrust, especially as he acknowledges Julie had started to question things and notice what doesn’t make sense. Julie wanted answers, and Verso, here at least, acknowledges that she did deserve to know why things transpired the way they did.
He also asserts that they “deserve to exist.” Yet, in Maelle’s time, he seems to have changed his mind entirely as he spends far too much energy trying to convince Maelle to let the Canvas be erased. In his ending, he goes to great lengths to make sure the Canvas is erased. So he breaks all of his promises, and decides that no one deserves to exist in the Canvas. That they are not real and thus it is okay to erase populations.
Why does he come to this conclusion? Partly due to the massive amount of death he witnesses over the decades, and also because he doesn’t have a community to hold him accountable. When one is isolated like Painted Verso, it is all too easy to fall into despair and a desire for annihilation. This is why those who are suicidal shouldn’t be left alone, but need supportive family and friends to help them heal and find new meaning in life.
In Maelle’s ending, Maelle will try to give Verso that opportunity when she offers him the choice of “if you could grow old, would you… find a reason to smile?”
She’s trying to break the cycle of violence by making sure Verso doesn’t have to live the immortal life he so abhors. So she offers solutions that doesn’t end in a genocide of peoples or Painted Verso’s death. Despite the harm Verso has done, Maelle seeks to humanize him and offer him a compromise. Her ending hints strongly that he accepts her alternate solution and seems to find some hope in it, as he does indeed grow old.
This humanization of the person causing harm is also critical to the healing process. The survivor of abuse doesn’t have to be the one to humanize the one causing harm, but those in the community ought to be able to step in for that.
In another essay in the Beyond Survival Anthology, there is an excerpt from the handbook, Ending Child Sexual Abuse:
“We see that abuse happens when one person believes, consciously or unconsciously, that their needs, wants, and preferences take precedence over others. People engaging in abusive behaviors are often numb to, or seemingly unable to feel, the impacts of their behaviors on others.
A process of accountability and transformation requires that the person who has been harmful:
Here the list shows how difficult healing can be, and how scary it is to make the choice to heal. Yet, it’s crucial for ending the cycle of violence to not dehumanize anyone involved. Dehumanization continues the cycle of violence. As the handbook excerpt says:
“It is important to center the needs of those most directly impacted by the harm in a situation. We also hold that recognizing and attending to the humanity of those who harm is a central aspect of transforming our families, communities, and society. Seeing and dignifying the healing needs of people who abuse also runs counter to the idea that some people “out there” are “monsters” who are expendable or need to be “weeded out.” By standing for everyone’s need for healing, we challenge the dehumanizing logic that is central to systems of oppression, domination, and abuse. By standing for everyone’s need for healing, we maintain our commitment to a vision of true liberation.”
Part of this process means those who cause harm need to understand that not all consequences are “harm.” Consequences to their actions are often necessary and may not be a form of “harm.” For example, Lune calling out the harm of Verso’s lies is the consequence of his actions. She lost trust in him is another consequence. Him having to earn back that trust is yet another consequence. None of these consequences are “harms” done to Verso. It’s simply part of the accountability process.
Humanizing those involved are absolutely critical to ending the cycle of violence. When people are dehumanized, they are stripped of who they are, and this causes harm to all involved. If the cycle of violence is to be ended, then those involved must be humanized and their dignity honored.
This is incredibly difficult to do at times. As a survivor of abuse, I struggled greatly with wanting my abuser to feel the weight of my pain, but through therapy, I learned that truthfully I didn’t want my abuser to be harmed in return. I wanted the cycle of abuse to end. That revelation allowed me to move past the anger and make a conscious choice to heal.
This conscious choice to heal is required of those that cause harm as well. However, shame, guilt, and fear can often make that choice extremely difficult.
Both Verso and Maelle struggle with shame and guilt. Maelle’s guilt and shame lay in her internalizing the blame Aline and Clea lay at her feet. Except, the fire is not Maelle’s fault, but that of the Writers that cause it. Her guilt and shame originate from actions that are not her own.
However, for Verso, his guilt and shame do originate from his own actions, for he did kill members of his prior expeditions, he did lie to people, and he did manipulate people for his own ends. However, it’s crucial to separate shame from guilt. In Kai Cheng Thom’s essay, shame and guilt is defined:
“Shame and social stigma are powerful emotional forces that can prevent us from holding ourselves accountable for being abusive. We don’t want to admit to “being that person,” so we don’t admit to having been abusive at all.
Some people might suggest that people who have been abusive ought to feel shame — after all, perpetuating abuse is wrong. I would argue, though, that this is where the difference between guilt and shame is key. Guilt is feeling bad about something you’ve done; shame is feeling bad about who you are. People who have been abusive should feel guilty for the specific acts of abuse they are responsible for. They should not feel shame about who they are because this means that abuse has become a part of their identity. It means they believe that they are fundamentally a bad person — in other words, “an abuser.”
But if you believe that you are an “abuser,” a bad person who hurts others, then you have already lost the struggle for change — because we cannot change who we are. If you believe that you are a fundamentally good person who has done hurtful or abusive things, then you open the possibility for change.”
When Thom says we “cannot change who we are,” this is in regard to our identities and personality. The “possibility for change” is in regard to our decisions, actions, and future decisions and actions. Those we can change, but we shouldn’t try to alter our personality and identity to be someone we are not. We should focus on how to make better decisions and to act in ways that are more healthy and holistic for us and those around us.
Verso, when he first introduces himself to Expedition 33, calls himself a liar. By doing so, he shows he internalized his actions as part of his identity. This makes it very difficult to hold oneself accountable and being open to the “possibility for change.” If he views lying as crucial to his identity, then why should he stop? It’s who he is, isn’t it? It’s a complete 180 from his journal entry where he refused to accept ‘traitor’ as being who he is.
But lying isn’t who he truly is. He’s, instead, taken a behavior and marked it as a personality trait. Truthfully, his personality isn’t a lying manipulator — we can see bits and pieces of who he is in the scenes where he plays a piano with Maelle, goes out of his way to help Sciel move past her fear of water, shares music with Lune, chats with Esquie, or hangs out with Monoco. He’s a bit silly, fun-loving, jokester, that wants to do the right thing but doesn’t know how. He’s trapped in a cycle of his own making, yet he’s unwilling to recognize his own cycle. Instead, he internalizes the lies as part of who he is, when it’s not — that’s his trauma speaking.
Until Verso can recognize his own cycle of violence and shame, he remains trapped in his cycle, unable to acknowledge his abuse and never able to progress toward healing. Even in his ending, when he fights Maelle to force her from the Canvas, his solution to his cycle is to annihilate himself and everyone in the Canvas. He refuses to see another way. Yet, until he recognizes that his harmful behaviors are not core to his personality, he won’t ever see how to stop his cycle of harm.
This is where Thom goes on to state that as much as those who cause harm shouldn’t “expect anyone to forgive you,” they should, however, forgive themselves:
“Being accountable is not about earning forgiveness. This is to say, it doesn’t matter how accountable you are — nobody has to forgive you for being abusive, least of all the person you have abused. In fact, using the process of “doing” accountability to manipulate or coerce someone into their forgiveness to you is an extension of the abuse dynamic. It center the abuser, not the survivor. One shouldn’t aim for forgiveness when holding oneself accountable. Rather self-accountability is about learning how we have harmed others, why we have harmed others, and how we can stop.
But… you do have to forgive yourself. Because you can’t stop hurting other people until you stop hurting yourself. When one is abusive, when one is hurting so much on the inside that it feels like the only way to make it stop is to hurt other people, it can be terrifying to face the hard truth of words like abuse and accountability. One might rather blame others, blame society, blame the people we love, instead of ourselves.
This is true, I think, of community as well as individuals. It is so much easier, so much simpler, to create hard lines between good and bad people, to create walls to shut the shadowy archetype of “the abuser” out instead of mirrors to look at the abuser within.
Perhaps this is why self-accountability tools like this list are so rare. It takes courage to be accountable. To decide to heal. But when we do decide, we discover incredible new possibilities. There is good and bad in everyone. Anyone can heal, given the right circumstances, and everyone can heal, given the same. You are capable of loving and being loved. Always. Always. Always.”
These are critical points for accountability. The process isn’t so we can “earn forgiveness” like it’s some sort of game achievement. Accountability is about learning, listening, seeking to understand why we did what we did, and finding solutions on how we can stop. Where we end the cycle of violence and instead move into a trajectory toward healing and choosing actions that cause the least harm and the most good.
And what is the most good? How do we know what is good?
To understand what ‘good’ means, we need to briefly explore ethics and morality. This game, thankfully, has already given us that exploration already in the Lumierians — Gustave and Lune in particular. I won’t dig too deeply into this as I feel that Lord Khoury does a much better job in his video here (which I recommend as he lays out an excellent case for why Maelle’s ending is a morally good one). I will simply briefly highlight Gustave’s and Lune’s use of Utilitarianism.
Consequences and Utilitarianism
Gustave, at the start of the game points out how the Gommage seems almost gentle, how it makes Lumiere seem complacent, but it is no less violent. He defines the act of violence and injustice, and in his temporal reality, Lumiere identified the best route to liberation is through confrontation with the Paintress.
Throughout the Prologue and Act 1, we are shown how Gustave lives his morals and how he determines actions to be morally good. These deliberations rely on what is known as utilitarianism. The Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines this as:
“…utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many ways to spell out this general claim. One thing to note is that the theory is a form of consequentialism: the right action is understood entirely in terms of consequences produced. What distinguishes utilitarianism from egoism has to do with the scope of the relevant consequences. On the utilitarian view one ought to maximize the overall good — that is, consider the good of others as well as one’s own good.”
Gustave’s moralism shows through the projects he describes — teaching his apprentices, Aquafarms, etc. — and in how he interacts with those around him. He understands quite well the consequences of possible actions, and chooses the ones that will do the most good.
For example, when Expedition 33 is separated, Gustave determines the right action is to seek Maelle. He evaluates the consequences of this, and although his emotions push for a specific end result, he still evaluates based on the known information at that time. As in, the note inscribed on the Indigo Tree, the lack of survivors at the Indigo Tree meeting point, and the knowledge of how difficult it is to survive alone.
GUSTAVE: It’s a lead, or only lead, whoever this is has Maelle. We have to go.
LUNE: No, not yet. Protocol is to regroup at rendevous point and wait three days. This message feels off. If it was an Expeditioner, they would have stayed here. Everyone knows the protocol.
GUSTAVE: Right, but they may have been in danger. Maybe this location has been compromised. Things change in the field.
LUNE: There’s a reason its protocol.
GUSTAVE: Protocol doesn’t cover every contingency. You know that.
LUNE: There’s a reason its Protocol. We designed it to yield the optimal result in the vast majority of situations.
GUSTAVE: Was our entire team dying part of that “optimal result?”
LUNE: …
GUSTAVE: Look, I’m going after Maelle. Protocol also states ‘never move solo.’ I’ll let you choose what protocol to break.
Here we see how both Gustave and Lune lay out their reasoning for the preferred actions. Gustave focuses on the consequences and concludes going after Maelle will save the most lives based on their current information. Lune, who attempts to argue for the Protocol, finds herself faced with possible consequences that could either endanger Gustave — if he goes alone — or herself — if she stays and he goes — or the mission — if the team is split up.
Lune follows him because of the two protocols they are breaking — one results in a higher number of lives saved and better chance at surviving long enough to complete their mission. Thus, after evaluating what is known and the consequences of various actions, she determines the action that achieve the most good.
In survival, determining the consequences of actions that result in the most lives saved fits firmly in the utilitarianism worldview. Thus, in determining what actions are ‘good,’ it is crucial to seek to understand the consequences of that action for everyone — not just ourselves. This is where Verso falls short as his understanding of the consequences of his actions revolves around the impact on himself; he continues to assert his view, even when others protest and show the harm of it.
Part of that is because he doesn’t show a willingness to examine the situation fully with other people. He’s kept himself relatively isolated for decades, and sought to meet his needs on his own. Isolation can easily distort our thinking and lead us toward despair.
With the Lumierians, we see an alternate route. Gustave and Lune actively talk through the situation at the Indigo Tree. Gustave lays out his analysis and Lune does as well. Gustave, however, focuses on the lives he can actively save in that moment rather than the lives they do not know still live or not. Though this dialogue, the two examine consequences of their actions. Both go back and forth in acknowledging what the other is saying, and also responding to the concerns brought up. In the end, Gustave’s decision to go after Maelle is vindicated in his eyes, and he offers Lune a choice. Lune, in turn, honors the protocol that will save the most lives — staying with Gustave and saving someone that is likely still alive. Considering, they have no further data on anyone else surviving, going after Maelle ends up being justified as the ‘good’ decision through the consequences of their actions.
We see this same sort of analysis play out a few times in Act 1 with how the group analyzes the situation, examines consequences, and come to a decision. Gustave and Lune lead the charge here, and their example provides a litmus test for Maelle to use in trying to determine what decisions are ‘good.’
For another example, Gustave and Lune’s intense fight before they find Maelle:
GUSTAVE: I am not letting Maelle die out here. I’m taking her home.
LUNE: What? No, no, no, we have a mission —
GUSTAVE: Oh, fuck the mission! Fuck the mission, Lune. What are we gonna do? Tell me. What are we gonna do? We’re gonna take down the Paintress, just the three of us? My — my gun and your sparks?
LUNE: I didn’t take you for a coward.
GUSTAVE: I’m not a coward.
LUNE: You swore the oath. “When one falls, we continue.”
GUSTAVE: Yes, I know.
LUNE: When one falls. WHEN one falls. Not if. When. We knew not all of us would make it. But “We Continue.” As long even one of us stands, our fight is not over.
GUSTAVE: But I’m not afraid to fight, it’s just Maelle, she’s —
LUNE: Maelle swore the same oath!
GUSTAVE: I know that!
LUNE: She choose her life! Come on, we always said that the future of Lumiere was more important than any —
GUSTAVE: individual life, yes.
LUNE: Do you still believe that?
Here Lune reminds Gustave of the consequences of swearing their oath. Consequences all of them knew before they swore the oath. She also makes it clear that Maelle also swore this oath, knowing the risks, and that she choose that. Lune is reminding Gustave of Maelle’s agency. Through this conversation, she’s challenging him on the consequences of what will happen if he takes Maelle back: he’d break his oath, he’d leave Lune here to continue alone, he’d violate Maelle’s agency, and he would put the future of Lumiere at risk.
This conversation pushes Gustave toward the ‘good’ decision, which is to honor Maelle’s agency. Something he will confirm in a later conversation after they are reunited with Maelle and have found Sciel with the Gestrals:
GUSTAVE: Maybe you should stay…
MAELLE: What?
GUSTAVE: It’s safer in the village.
MAELLE: And miss the change to meet Esquie? No way.
GUSTAVE: Maelle…
MAELLE: I’m okay. We stick together.
This conversation proved Lune to be correct. The consequences Lune had laid out as her reasoning on the ‘good choice,’ made it clear that Maelle had chosen this life. Gustave here confirms it with Maelle herself, and he then honors that choice.
Thus, Gustave and Lune provide excellent examples of the use of utilitarianism for determining the morally ‘good’ choice, as well as how to handle conflict. They also show how the Canvas Lumierians honor the agency of others.
It’s through our dialogue with those around us that we come to understand possible consequences and how they may impact others. That dialog then allows us to generate ideas that cause the least harm to all involved and saves the most lives (or in less dire situations, helps the most people feel heard, understood, and agency honored). This can be difficult to do, and in times of danger, we often act on instinct because there isn’t enough time to deliberate on consequences.
However, after the danger is over, we must be willing to analyze what happened and take accountability for our actions. We must not take on the responsibility of other people’s actions, only take on our own. We need to listen to others, and they in turn listen to us. We need to be open to change behaviors if we cause harm, which we see Lune, Gustave, Maelle, and Sciel do on their journey. That’s part of holding one another accountable and choosing healing.
Maelle having the support of her Canvas family is critical to her own journey toward healing. The scene where Maelle has a waking nightmare in Act 1 after the Gestral Village, we see Gustave, Sciel, and Lune gather around her to comfort her. They bring down her panic, and stay at her side until she’s calm. This level of care is not shown by the Dessendre family toward Maelle. Thus, Maelle finds her strongest support system within the Canvas, away from an environment of abuse and neglect. This chosen family helps hold her accountable and supports her as she makes decisions to end the cycle of violence. To choose to heal.
Verso struggles to understand this lesson the entirety of the game. The only clue we are given that he may finally learn it is in Maelle’s ending, when Maelle offers a different solution to his desire to cease his immortal life. He still lives in her ending, but he’s grown old. His fingers find it harder to play the piano — hence the dissonance at first before he plays. Perhaps in this ending he learns how to be accountable and chooses healing. The game seems to imply it, but the game also leaves it open-ended.
In Verso’s ending, Verso doesn’t choose healing but instead chooses to take the agency from everyone involved — Maelle, the faded boy, the different Canvas peoples — and fades into annihilation. Maelle, then, returns to life as Alicia Dessendre, who is disabled and essentially institutionalized in her family’s manor. She has no support system, and her mother still looks at her with disdain. Clea still offers no support, only goes off to do her one-person war. In the ending, Renoir doesn’t even look at Alicia — only at Aline. Alicia stands isolated, and tries to smile, tries to see anything good in this, but instead, she hallucinates the family she’s lost. As they gommage away, I noticed how her shoulders droop and she holds Esquie tighter. A sign that her hope evaporates with them? Again, the game leaves it open-ended.
When still in an abusive environment, healing is out of reach, even if one chooses it, because the circumstances causing the trauma is ongoing. One must exit the abusive environment, but to do so often requires support of others to assist in finding a safer place to be. If there is no one there to provide the necessary support to heal, then it is incredibly difficult to actively heal.
Thus, healing from grief and from abuse both require breaking cycles, but to break those cycles, we need the necessarily family/friends and/or community support. It is not truly possible to do this when we are isolated, because isolation itself is a form of harm that can easily lead us into despair, as we saw with Painted Verso.
Breaking the cycle of violence can only happen when we have built up a community of people who love us for who we are. Then and only then, will we have the support to choose to heal, to hold ourselves accountable, to actively listen to others, and when needed alter our behaviors toward more healthy patterns.
This is not an easy process, and it will require hard work from all involved. Yet the payoff is a healthier existence and a chance to thrive rather than just survive.
#abuse #accountability #Characters #clairObscurExpedition33 #disability #GameAnalysis #gameNarrative #healing #healingJourney #justice #mentalHealth #narrativeAnalysis #responsibility #transformativeJustice #writing
Clair Obscur: That Which Seeks The Right To Exist Temporally and Spatially
THIS IS A CROSSPOST FROM COMRADERY. Part of a three part series: Disability (part 1), Right to Exist (part 2), and Accountability and Healing (part 3).
In a world built upon alienation, people seek to be heard and seen. This may happen through social media, video or podcasts, essays like this one, video game guilds, or other creative avenues. There’s this innate need for our existence to be recognized. For us to not be erased. When forces beyond our control seek to dominate and coerce us into either compliance or annihilation, people will eventually rise up to demand their freedom. Many marginalized populations within Capitalist Colonialist societies, such as America, struggle with institutions that often seek to erase their identity, culture, and their personhood.
In Clair Obscur, we can see this struggle with existence and erasure play out visibly through the yearly “gommage.” After the Fracture — a cataclysmic event — Lumeire must contend with yearly erasures of all people above a specific age. That age is determined by the number painted on the monolith, which looms oppressively over the world. Each year that number decreases, and more are erased from existence. The temporal existence of their society within their present and future lays in uncertainty.
This has a parallel with how oppressors treat the oppressed within societies. Just as the number warns Lumiere who will be next, Fascist/Authoritarian societies will declare who is unfit for society. Who they focus on, and from there we can see the potential trajectory for others who lay in their destructive path.
By constructing a specific framework to paint over marginalized people, fascist/authoritarian societies seek to control the marginalized population, and effectively erase what makes them uniquely them. Thus, like the oppressors within our world, the Dessendre family render the Canvas people’s existence as less than their own; in this way, it justifies the gommage’s genocidal consequences. However, is it true that the Canvas people are not real? That their existence is less than the Dessendre’s? Is destroying them the morally good choice? Or does it only continue the injustice preyed upon the Canvas people of Lumiere?
Parallels between Our World and That of Clair Obscur
The act of erasing people often begins through dehumanization and a redefining of the attributes of reality. For example, as of June 2025, under Trump’s Administration, nonbinary genders were erased, and gender was collapsed into a binary sex structure. This was done despite biology revealing that gender is not a simple binary, that it is based on chromosomes, primary and secondary sex characteristics. If looking simply at chromosomes, six biological genders would exist, but if one adds in the primary sex characteristics — reproductive organs for example — and secondary sex characteristics — effects of hormones on the body — one can calculate over 50 possible permutations (See chapters 11 through 13 of Evolution’s Rainbow by Joan Roughgarden).
But that reality has been erased by the Trump Administrations narrow definition. This in turn places people like myself — a nonbinary disabled person — in a state of simultaneously existing in the physical realm of the planet Earth but also not existing by American law. The erasure of my personhood and identity is a way to sterilize who I am and force me into a narrow mold, and anyone who does not fit will be eradicated.
However, no matter how much control fascist governments weaponize, freedom cannot be erased. In Star Wars Andor, Nemik writes a manifesto, where he explains how Fascist control is fragile and the spontaneity of freedom:
“There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.”
Thus, people who are being erased by fascism continue to reach for freedom. To try and break free of the restrictive definitions of reality. Part of those restrictions lay in the temporal reality that oppressors construct to place their victims in a past reality, where we no longer exist in the present.
This is the method that the United States of America used to control and erase the Native cultures that existed prior to the white settlers of the 1600s. Historians and lawmakers construct a temporal reality that places Native people as existing in the past, where the violence conducted against them was sanitized. As relics of a bygone age, and thus, any Native that still lives becomes coerced into the American society, their culture and identity stripped from them through relocation to reservations and brutal Indian schools. This is one part of the larger genocide against Native people’s.
Erasure of people, denial of their existence, and the question of whether such people even still exist creates a temporal paradox. Can people both simultaneously exist but not exist? In my case, I exist in the reference frame of the planet Earth, where people can see my body and speak with me directly if they so choose. However, in the realm of American (and some states’) law and history, my existence has been erased, and thus I no longer exist within the current Administration’s temporal reference frame. I am collapsed into a facsimile of who I am — a painted version of my self positioned to narrowly fit what others have decided I must be in order to be allowed existence.
This question of who is allowed to exist, what cultures can exist, and whether a population exists within our present not only shapes our discourse but also the world in which we live. We can see this in how the rights of trans people like myself have slowly been stripped away — loss of healthcare, loss of anti-discrimination laws, loss of the right to exist in public and use a restroom, etc., until nothing remains. A slow gommage that ripples through my community, until we are but petals on the wind.
Take the Gommage in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and stretch it slowly over months and/or years, where each part of the person slowly begans to evaporate away into rose petals. It’s a slow sort of temporal-based death, and is the reality of many marginalized people in our current society. However, we refuse to go quietly, just as the people of Lumiere also refused.
To resist the Gommage, the people of Lumiere send Expeditions in the hope they will defeat the Paintress and end the slow temporal and spatial erasure. So that they can secure a future for their people once more. This need to not be erased, to exist, becomes a revolutionary anthem.
It’s a parallel to the revolutionary anthem of Trans people resisting our erasure, of Indigenous people fighting against genocide as they simultaneously restore their culture and identity, of Black people and their demands for justice, of Disabled people and our refusal to just lay down and die. Marginalized populations face their own form of gommage, but it’s a much slower and traumatic death than what Lumeire faces.
To illustrate, let’s look at Gustave and Maelle speaking of death:
MAELLE: I, uh, I thought I was used to losing people. Life of a foster child, right? But not — not like that — on the beach… that man…
GUSTAVE: Yeah. Yeah… I know. Nevrons we were prepared for but not… (pause) And now we finally found other survivors and it’s… (pause) You know, that — that’s the insidious thing about the Gommage. It’s predictable… almost gentle. It makes Lumiere complacent and accepting but … the Gommage is equally violent and death… Death is just as final.
That truly is the insidious thing as the Gommage — whether it happens relatively quickly like in Clair Obscur, or over long period of time in our world — people are complacent and almost accepting of it because the institutions have normalized sacrificing populations as necessary to the good of society. But truthfully, the gommage is indeed “equally violent” as simply killing a person. To strip a person of their identity, culture, personhood? To render them as no longer real within society? That is a form of death.
This concept of sacrificing populations for the ‘good of society’ has its name in necrosecurity. Martha Lincoln writes:
Thus, though necrosecurity is deeply informed by anti-scientific and anti-expert sentiments, it is not simply a failed biosecurity, nor is it a form of biosecurity in which the project’s intrinsic flaws are made visible. Normatively, biosecurity does not call for human illness or deaths. By contrast, necrosecurity explicitly and centrally instrumentalizes death—imagining a sacrificial population whose exposure to harm will secure against losses to more qualified populations. It is a calculated attempt to leverage the pathogenic and epidemiological properties of disease towards social, political, and economic ends. Lying between passive “letting die” and overt murder of political enemies, necrosecurity entails the promotion of death intended to preempt other deaths; instead of seeking to prevent human deaths, as biosecurity would, it attempts to secure life by allowing death to flourish selectively.
We saw this concept of necrosecurity at work through the last five years, where America — and other countries — engaged in normalizing death for specific populations, in order to boost the economy for “more qualified populations.” America has also shifted to past tense regarding the pandemic, despite Covid-19 still existing, still mutating, and still disabling and/or killing vulnerable populations. This shift of placing the virus in the past is a form of temporal erasure.
Within the game, Gommage places those erased in the past. They fade into rose petals, lost to the present, and thus temporally erased from the world and Lumiere society. This Gommage is seen as a force perpetuated by the Paintress, but this is only because the Lumierians see her actions before the Gommage sweeps over their city. So they associate her repainting the number to be the act that unleashes the Gommage. With the truth masked and no other source of knowledge disputing this theory, the misinformation perpetuates through their culture and their expeditions.
In this manner, people can become misguided with incorrect information, and thus not understand the true culprit is not necessarily the Paintress at all. Lune says to Gustave at one point that, “this is a war of information.”
Indeed it is. Not just for the people of Lumiere, but also for our own world. This is why the current American Administration hid and erased data pertaining to infectious diseases, LGBTQIA people, and Black and Indigenous People of Color. Why sources of information are being placed under lock and key and no longer accessible to the public. The war on information puts the oppressed into a constant reactionary stance; if they don’t have the full information, then how do they know who to target to end their oppression?
Thus, the Lumierians, lacking the full information, focus on reaching the Paintress, but the truth of Gommage lies under the Monolith, not at its peak. Gommage doesn’t come from the Paintress, but from a being trapped under her monolith, who unleashes the Gommage after she issues her warning. It’s not until end of Act 2 that this truth is revealed.
Thus, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 forces the player to reckon with questions situated on who is allowed to exist, who is allowed to continue into a future, and if sacrificing populations are necessary for the ‘good’ of society.
Or to dig even deeper, what is this temporal reality in which Lumiere in its people exist? Is it situated in the past, soon to be a footnote in the history of the Dessendre family? Or is it a present, a hope to continue to exist despite the Dessendre family? Does the people of the Lumiere and of the Canvas hold the same value, worthy, and right to exist as the Dessendre family?
The game itself posits a neutral position, where the various endings and presentation of story are up to the player to interpret. At least that’s what some game analysts say, but I think the game pushes the player toward a specific conclusion to these questions of existence versus erasure.
We are placed immediately within Lumiere with Gustave and Maelle, and soon we meet other people in the city. We see its population preparing for the Gommage. We experience the heartache and pain with them, and the oppression they face under this totalizing force that governs their lives.
Throughout the first Act, we connect with these characters — their hopes, fears, dreams, joys — and through them we are able to see a temporal existence that paints their lives with meaning. So when we are thrust into the ‘real world’ of the Painters by the start of Act 3, it feels jarring. Disjointed and strange. We are no longer in the same temporal reality, and the truth unveiled about the nature of the Lumierian world unsettles. It shakes our understanding of reality and existence.
The game also shifts the timeline, where the start of Act 3 becomes the past. We then see the start of our journey existed beyond the world of the Canvas, where the story threads through the timelines of two linked worlds: Dessendre’s ‘real’ world and the world of the Canvas. Time between the two do not fully match either, as the decades spent in the Canvas do not match precisely with the time span in the ‘real world.’ Within this game, multiple temporal realities exist, and as the game shows, each are uniquely their own.
It’s only in the second and third Acts where the questions the games ask start to shift. Part of this is due to Act 2 being specifically Verso’s perspective, where he stands in a separate temporal reality than the Lumierians. Thus, the game asks: are other temporal realities as equally valid as the Dessendre’s? Or does the Dessendre’s temporal reality matter more?
Temporal Realities and the Right to Exist
Mark Riften writes in Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination:
“Within post-Einsteinian notions of time, there is no such thing as an absolute time that applies everywhere at once. Instead, the experience and calculation of time are contingent. Simultaneity depends on one’s inertial frame of reference, such that two observers who are moving with respect to each other will not agree on when an event occurs or on other aspects of time’s passage. If in physics a frame of reference refers to relative motion, we also can think about that concept in more socially resonant ways. Such collective frames comprise the effects on one’s perception and material experience of patterns of individual and collective memory, the legacies of historical events and dynamics, consistent or recursive forms of inhabitance, and the length and character of the timescales in which current events are situated.”
Within Special Relativity, the inertial frame of reference is crucial to understanding a particular scenario. Reference frames describe a coordinate system in which temporal, motion, and spatial measurements of an observer can be done. Without articulating the reference frame, the situation becomes incomprehensible and impossible to measure or observe. Thus, reference frames are denoted by observers in order to agree on a shared understanding of the events in question.
Let’s place it within a social context. For example, much of American history books will label Indigenous Tribes of North America as being in the past, as if they no longer exist within the present time. For some tribes this may be so, but for many this is a falsehood, as they do indeed still exist in present time. America has crafted a reference frame here, but it posits that its frame is more real than those of Native people.
Riften clarifies:
U.S. settler colonialism produces its own temporal formation, with its own particular ways of apprehending time, and the state’s policies, mappings, and imperatives generate the frame of reference (such as plotting events with respect to their place in national history and seeing change in terms of forms of American progress). More than just affecting ideologies or discourses of time, that network of institutionalized authority over “domestic” territory also powerfully shapes the possibilities for interaction, development, and regularity within it. Such imposition can be understood as the denial of Indigenous temporal sovereignty, in the sense that one vision or way of experiencing time is cast as the only temporal formation—as the baseline for the unfolding of time itself.
As Riften describes, America seeks to situate Native people in the past in an attempt to control their narrative, their legacy, and their existence. It’s a form of erasure and genocide, to rewrite history and present time in order to exclude populations. This makes it easier to justify the death of populations if the narrative already posits them as being of the past and not the present.
Riften writes:
As in the account offered by relativity, there is no inherently privileged or mutual “now” (or sense of time’s passage more broadly) shared by disparate frames of reference. Through Indian law and policy, Native peoples have been subjected to profound reorganizations of prior geographies and modes of inhabitance, forms of governance, networks of exchange, tempos of ordinary life, and dynamics of individual maturation in an attempt to reorder Indigenous temporalities, to remake them in ways that fit non-native timescapes of expansion and dispossession.
It is true that within the laws of physics “there is no inherently privileged or mutual ‘now.’ Indeed, special relativity directly states:
Inertial refers to a reference frame in which everything within that frame moves at a constant velocity.
The Earth would be an inertial reference frame in the sense the planet’s motion can approximate to fit the definition. (There are some caveats here that relate to gravity and orbits, but it’s unnecessary for the overall argument). Thus, within the reference frames of those on the planet Earth, there is no privileged frame that exists as more real than another. The laws of physics are the same in all frames, and each are equally valid.
Is There One Reference Frame To Rule Them All?
To dig deeper, let’s examine the differences between Canvas Time and World and Dessendre Time and World. To compare the worlds, we must establish frames of reference. Within special relativity, this is done by situating a common origin point to start our analysis.
For Clair Obscur, that origin point is the moment of Fracture.
So at time (t) equals 0, Canvas experienced Fracture that devastated the world, broke apart cultures, and scattered the peoples of Canvas across a broken world. The city of Lumiere landed in the southern ocean, and after great upheaval a dome is constructed to keep its citizens safe.
At time-prime (t’) equals 0, the equivalent origin for Dessendre’s ‘real’ world, the Fracture represents the moment Aline, in her grief, faces off with her husband Renoir, who has entered the Canvas to bring his wife back to the Dessendre world. This cataclysmic war of Painter’s chroma causes the Fracture and starts the deadly countdown toward zero.
This is where the temporal realities then diverge, as in we’d have to brush off our mathematics and calculate with Lorentz Transforms to translate the coordinates of an event between frames. This isn’t to say one is more ‘right’ than the other, only that the temporal coordinates are not a one-to-one ratio.
The game tells us that in Canvas a century passes; however, in the Dessendre world, a century most definitely does not pass. For that to be so, the Dessendres would need to be immortal and unaging. However, we can safely assume the Dessendre family is not ageless nor immortal due to the ages of the children and the aging of the parents. We see glimpses of how the children do indeed grow into their current selves (current signifying the time of the Fracture, to orient each character within our established frames of reference).
So time does pass in the Dessendre’s world, but it moves slower than Canvas. While the Canvas world seems sped up. Within special relativity, this concept is explored within ‘time dilation.’
Position a person on Planet Earth, then send their twin toward a nearby star near the speed of light. For the twin on Earth, they would view their twin as moving slower and aging slower. While the twin on the rocket would view Earth as sped up, aging faster. Within each of their reference frames, they disagree on the temporal coordinates of events, but when they compare notes after the twin’s return home, the person on Earth will have aged more than the one on the rocket. Of course, I am doing a quick summary of this concept to avoid belaboring the point with excessive mathematics.
Regardless, it’s a fascinating phenomenon, and the game tips its hat toward it with how it differentiates the difference in temporal realities between Canvas Time and Dessendre Time. It’s also important to note that both reference frames within the twin example — the twin on Earth versus the twin on the rocket — are all valid frames. None is more ‘right’ than the other. Both frames will result in the same solution — the difference in aging, but their perspectives differ on how they experience it and come to that solution. Despite this, both frames are still equally valid.
In that same manner, the Dessendre Time is equally valid to Canvas Time, at least per this relativity postulate.
Within the Dessendre Time and World, the Canvas is seen as a created object, painted by Verso’s child-self. As a created world, it’s right to exist becomes called into question, and the neutrality of our reference frames also becomes conflicted.
Is the Dessendre reference frame, the one that was not painted, the one true frame? The One Frame To Rule Them All?
Or is both reference frames still equally valid?
So far, in our argument, we’ve posited that both reference frames are equally valid. Yes, there are differences in how time plays out within each frame but we see this only when we compare one to the other. Within the frame itself, one would not experience such differences. Meaning, those who live in the Canvas World and do not know of the Dessendre world would not know or experience a difference in time within their world. Their world would still feel time unwinding from their present just as their society has defined it.
It’s the same with the Dessendre world, where time within their world still unwinds within the definitions of their society.
So if the reference frames are equally valid, then is the question of what is created and what is not created what tells us whose reality is real and valid?
But that assumes the Dessendre world is ‘not created.’ It also assumes that if a culture is ‘created’ it is less real and valid than the ‘creator.’ This situates us within the realm of philosophy and religion, where-in some religions posit a creator who created the universe and all in it. If such a thing is true, and since the Dessendre world is still ‘created’ in the sense that the ‘creators’ are the game developers, then can we truly establish that the Dessendre world is ‘not created?’
If we put aside the fact that we are discussing a video game (at least for a moment), we have the issue of is there a ‘creator’ for Dessendre world that fits the lore and story? Religious or spirituality doesn’t truly come into play in the game. The most we see is references to myths and/or philosophy. For example, when the team goes to defeat the Axons, Monoco will cite the name of each axon as it’s part of the mythos of his people:
LUNE: So this is Visage’s Island.
MONOCO: He Who Guards Truth With Lies.
The name Monoco’s people — the Gestrals — gave the Visage Axon is layered with double meanings. It also falls neatly into the philosophical arguments concerning morality. In the Axons, we see their embodiment as ‘lessons’ painted by Renoir, who sought to capture his family into a philosophical being. Indeed, we see this in what the Mask Keeper, after giving the team Visage’s invitation, says:
SCIEL: What of the other paths?
MASK KEEPER: You are free to traverse them. Masks are not just to Obscure. They may also to Illuminate. Look for the masks that you need.
MAELLE: Meaning?
MASK KEEPER: The invitation stands.
For Visage, the axon, masks are a tool that assist with not only hiding the truth, when the need arises, but illuminating the truth when the time comes. This is the closest the game ever comes to spirituality, and in truth, this is far more of a moralistic philosophy as debated by those within the Enlightenment period of Europe and Early America. Spiritual arguments will do little to assist us even if spirituality existed within the Canvas world (which perhaps it does but the game does not show it).
The Mask Keeper provides a definitive hint that Verso’s temporal reality differs from the Lumierians. He admits this when he says, “some of us stopped aging,” to Maelle, Lune, and Sciel after meeting and rescuing them. This establishes two temporal realities within the Canvas alone.
The only other hint we have is when you examine the Painter’s studio at the Start of Act 3, one will notice that canvases float around the room. This was an attribute of the Canvas world stemming from the Fracture, so what does it tell us that it appears within the Dessendre world? Is that a signal that their world is also constructed? It’s a question that is never fully answered by the game itself.
In this way, the game plays with our sense of reality. Due to how it lays out its acts, it plays with our temporal reality as well. Prologue/Act 1 focuses on Gustave as the primary perspective. This changes in Act 2, where we shift from the Lumierian timeline to Painted Verso’s timeline. Then in Act 3, we shift out of the Canvas temporal reality entirely and go back in time to an event before the other acts, where Alicia and Clea discuss the fate of the Canvas. Here Alicia will enter the Canvas, at her sister’s suggestion. At that point, the game narrates how Alicia becomes Maelle, and eventually spits us out into the temporal reality of Lumiere after the final Gommage that erased the rest of Lumiere.
Thus, the game gives us multiple temporal realities: Gustave, Verso, Alicia/Maelle. Each have their roots in different temporal reference frames: Gustave within the Lumiere reference frame, Verso within the immortal Paintress frame, and Alicia/Maelle who stands in both the Dessendre World frame but also in the Lumiere frame. Of all the characters, Maelle is the only one that steps in all of the reference frames.
As Alicia, she was born of the Dessendre family and grew to age sixteen. However, she transitions into the Canvas and end up reborn as Maelle within the city of Lumiere. She spends sixteen years there feeling slightly out of place, but she has no memories of her former life in the Dessendre world. For all Maelle knows in Act 1 and 2, she is a Lumierian. It’s only in Act 3 that she learns the truth of who she is, and she bridges her two selves, and thus both worlds within herself. Thus, she enters the ‘immortal’ frame as a ‘Paintress.’ This gives her a unique view of seeing the humanity and beautiful complexity inherent in both her Dessendre world and the Canvas/Lumiere world.
In a way, one could posit that Alicia/Maelle is the twin in the Special Relativity metaphor, who leaves her world to go to another and then returns. This journey alters her, and she experiences temporal reality differently when compared to Clea’s reference frame. However, the end result gives Alicia/Maelle a perspective that Clea lacks.
Clea, for her part, asserts the Canvas is but a playground. She does not give it any special qualities, and does not believe any person within it is truly real. We see this in her dialogue.
CLEA: She’s a grown woman, and she was the head of the Painter’s Council. She has failed her responsibilities. I don’t have time to coddle her. And before Verso died, she would have said the same.
ALICIA: …?
CLEA: I already have. Aline is a more skilled than Renoir, but I tipped the scales in his favor. I have my pets in place. “She who controls the chroma, controls the Canvas.” I can’t take her chroma, but I can keep it from returning to her. As she weakens, Renoir is able to erase her oldest creations. With the except of her obscene fake family. She made them all immortal, but luckily they’re also quite useless.
Here Clea speaks of the people in the Canvas as pieces on a chessboard. She gives them no consideration as to how the ‘creations’ feel about this erasure nor the trauma and pain it inflicts on them. For Clea, they are a distraction. She wants this ‘conflict’ in the Canvas over, so she can return to her own concerns in the present of the Dessendre World.
Her bias tilts toward the Dessendre World, for that is the reality in which she resides and has spent the majority of her time. For her, creations are simply creations that can be erased or remade at a whim. Her view here represents the oppressor view. She orients her reference frame as the superior one, and the Canvas’s frame as inferior. Thus, her conclusions result in denying the reality of the Canvas people and denying the sentience and complexity of their existence.
If she were to acknowledge their sentience and complexity, she could no longer posit her reference frame as the superior one. She’d have to reckon with the question of whether ‘erasing’ these ‘creations’ is morally good or morally evil.
Her attempt here to ignore such a question doesn’t solve it. It simply places the burden of solving it on Alicia’s shoulders, especially after she sends Alicia into the painting to “assist Renoir.”
Here the game is rather nebulous. We hear Clea’s words as Alicia falls into the Canvas, then we see how Alicia is painted over to become a baby born into Lumiere.
CLEA: Calm Alicia, or it’ll paint over you… what an auspicious start. Well, you’re about to be reborn in this world as one of Aline’s creations. Have fun.
The word “it” here seems to signify ‘chroma,’ but Clea doesn’t make clear whether it is Aline who paints over Alicia or if she herself does it. She only criticizes Alicia for her panic after giving her no real lessons on how to enter the Canvas and assist in it. Once again, she has a very flippant view of the Canvas and its inhabitants due to how she dehumanizes them with the term “creation.”
This dehumanization of groups of people are very common within authoritarian and/or fascist states. We see this in how those in power throughout America’s history called Native people “savages” or “redskins.” We see this with the slurs white people have said to Black people, such as the one starting with ‘n.’ We see this in the slurs cisgender (non trans) people give to trans people like me, such as ‘tr*nny.’
Then there is the false myths of certain populations being dangerous, or dirty, or less than in some way. This painting of a mythos to justify the eradication and erasure of an entire population. For example, in my essay concerning Disability in Clair Obscur, I spoke to how various forms of media use disfigurement and other disabilities to denote evil, badness, and villainy. I spoke to how this originated in Capitalism crafting a disposable class of people who were not abled-bodied or healthy enough to be exploitable labor. Black people were folded into the disabled category as well due to harmful race theories that posited they were ‘less intelligent,’ could bear ‘more’ pain, and other falsehoods to justify enslavement and/or imprisonment.
In her book Killing Rage, Ending Racism, bell hooks shares:
In the beginning black folks were most effectively colonized via a structure of ownership. Once slavery ended, white supremacy could be effectively maintained by the institutionalization of social apartheid and by creating a philosophy of racial inferiority that would be taught to everyone. This strategy of colonialism needed no country, for the space it sought to own and conquer was the minds of whites and blacks. As long as a harsh brutal system of racial apartheid was in place, separating blacks from whites by laws, coercive structures of punishment, and economic disenfranchisement, many black people seemed to intuitively understand that our ability to resist racist domination was nurtured by a refusal of the colonizing mindset. Segregation enabled black folks to maintain oppositional worldviews and standpoints to counter the effects of racism and to nurture resistance. The effectiveness of those survival strategies was made evident by both civil rights movements and the militant resistance that followed in their wake. This resistance to colonialism was so fierce, a new strategy was required to maintain and perpetuate white supremacy.
Here hooks lays out America’s brutal regime against the black population, and how America adjusted its temporal reference frame to craft a new strategy to control and exploit. To do this, the oppression must be recast in the past, as we have seen with Native temporal realities, while also re-enforcing false stereotypes of inferiority. By doing so, oppressors once again avoid accountability, while also continuing to assert their temporal reality onto the oppressed. Often, the oppressor will attempt to adjust the narrative to posit it is the victim that is violent rather than the oppressor. bell hooks spells this out implicitly:
Currently black folks are often depicted on television in situations where they charge racist victimization and then the viewer is bombarded with evidence that shows this to be a trumped-up charge, that whites are indeed far more caring and able to be social equals than “misguided” blacks realize. The message that television sends then is that the problem of racism lies with black people-that it exists in our minds and imaginations. On a recent episode of Law and Order a white lawyer directs anger at a black woman and tells her, “If you want to see the cause of racism, look in the mirror.” Television does not hold white people responsible for white supremacy; it socializes them to believe that subjugation and subordination of black people by any means necessary is essential for the maintenance of law and order.
These painted stereotypes then enfold into the minds of the oppressor and oppressed, and acts as another vehicle for which the dominant temporal reality to assert itself.
Paulo Freire writes about this dehumanization in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized. It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the “rejects of life.” It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well).
Violence starts with the oppressor — in the case of the Canvas world, the Dessendre family — initiating the Fracture and gommage that erases the Lumierian population slowly over time. Clea dismisses the Canvas people as simply ‘creations’ because she fails to recognize the Canvas people as persons. Renoir sidesteps this by recognizing, mostly at the end of Act 3, the humanity of the Canvas people, but ultimately decides his actions and the consequences of his actions are for the greater good.
The Canvas people, by fighting for their right to exist, subverts the temporal reality of the Dessendre’s. Renoir and Clea cannot preceive the monopoly of their power and privilege dehumanizes those within the Canvas as well as themselves and their family. Instead, they are caught up in the idea they have an exclusive right to act as they will, consequences be damned.
Freire goes on to write:
Humanity is a “thing,” and they possess it as an exclusive right, as inherited property. To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the “others,” of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion. The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They can not see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own “effort,” with their “courage to take risks.” If others do not have more, it is because they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of all is their unjustifiable ingratitude towards the “generous gestures” of the dominant class. Precisely because they are “ungrateful” and “envious,” the oppressed are regarded as potential enemies who must be watched.
It could not be otherwise. If the humanization of the oppressed signifies subversion, so also does their freedom; hence the necessity for constant control. And the more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they change them into apparently inanimate “things.”
Thus, in order to justify erasure of a people, their temporal, spatial, and cultural reality must be reduced to a stereotype or in other words, a creation or construct. This stereotype and/or false reality is painted over the targeted population, then shared wildly to make it seem like the oppressor’s reference frame is the One True One — the One To Rule Them All.
But these arguments pivot on falsehoods. Pull out the falsehoods, and the arguments topple. For the Canvas people, dehumanizing them into simply “Aline’s creations” as Clea asserts, this cannot fully describe the lived realities of the Canvas people themselves. They are more than just ‘Aline’s creations.’ Their lived realities are as complex as Clea’s own, and the player knows this because they have spent the majority of the game immersed in a complex and nuanced world, surrounded by intricate people with very real concerns, dreams, ethics, sorrows, and joys.
It’s not so easy to dismiss an entire population after one has lived with them. This is why the game starts us in Lumiere, why we live with the Lumierians, so we can understand their struggle to not be erased. To not be eradicated. To have a future once more.
The reference frame of the Dessendre World versus the Canvas World are equally valid as we have seen. Just because one could be said to be a construct made by a Dessendre family member doesn’t mean the Canvas is any less real for those that live within it.
(One could argue that the Dessendre World is no less constructed, as the people within it constructed their society and their relations with one another. One can also spin in circles debating whether the Dessendre world is created or not by some other being beyond Clea’s understanding or knowledge. Philosophers have debated this very question for centuries.)
Regardless of whether a world is constructed or not, those within it experience the temporal and spatial aspects of their world fully. The game shows us through our journey with Expedition 33, and through our interactions with the Dessendre family. Of these two groups, the one that dehumanizes the other is the Dessendre family. The Canvas people go to great lengths to not dehumanize others (as we shall soon see). Freire reminds us:
When people are already dehumanized, due to the oppression they suffer, the process of their liberation must not employ the methods of dehumanization.
For American society, leaders posit a reference frame that enforces a temporal, spatial, and legal reality to supersede the reality experienced by marginalized populations. This action dehumanizes them and strips them of their agency and lived reality.
Riften in the book Beyond Settler Time speaks to how America weaponized its rigid reference frame to reorganize geographies of who exists on which land and also to erase a culture’s way of living in the present (their temporal reality). Thus, Riften identifies how America attempts to claim its reference frame is the One True Frame just as Clea attempts in regards to Dessendre versus the Canvas (and Renoir as well through the act of gommage).
In essence, American leaders, Clea, and Renoir are privileging their own frame over that of any others, regardless of the harm and often brutal enforcement of such a frame. This then reframes populations as being ‘stuck in the past’ or ‘uncivilized’ if they do not conform to how the oppressor defines civilization and humanity’s temporal reality.
Through law and policy, America sought to change Natives into suitable subjects to the American empire, thus erasing their past, present, and future. The reference frame for Native people becomes revolutionary in their struggle to assert their existence and keep alive their culture and identities. Riften argues:
The representation of Native peoples as either having disappeared or being remnants on the verge of vanishing constitutes one of the principal means of effacing Indigenous sovereignties. Such a portrayal of Indigenous temporal stasis or absence erases extant forms of occupancy, governance, and opposition to settler encroachments. Moreover, it generates a prism through which any evidence of such survival will be interpreted as either vestigial (and thus on the way to imminent extinction) or hopelessly contaminated (as having lost—or quickly losing—the qualities understood as defining something, someone, or some space as properly “Indian” in the first place). These kinds of elisions and anachronizations can be understood as a profound denial of Native being…
America’s attempt to constitute Native people in the past denies the Native being entirely; it’s a form of gommage and an attempt to control and eliminate Native resistance. However, as Nemik’s Manifesto asserts, authority is brittle, and freedom is spontaneously occurring. The ways in which our temporal reality differs from our oppressors cannot be denied, as people will and do rise up to reassert their right to exist. Recognition of our diverse temporal realities affirms our humanity.
For Native people (and other marginalized groups), multiple temporal reference frames have always existed. Native cultural practices, as diverse as the tribes within North America are, keep alive this alternate understanding of time, space, geography, ways of living and governing, identity, and one’s relationships with one another and the land. Riften writes of this by use fo the term ‘temporal orientation:’
To speak of temporal orientation suggests the ways that time can be regarded less as a container that holds events than as potentially divergent processes of becoming. Being temporally oriented suggests that one’s experiences, sensations, and possibilities for action are shaped by the existing inclinations, itineraries, and networks in which one is immersed, turning toward some things and away from others. More than a question of relations in space, orientation involves reiterated and nonconscious tendencies, suggesting ways of inhabiting time that shape how the past moves toward the present and future.
Native people understood that each culture and people within that culture were oriented toward a specific temporal reality based on their “experiences, sensations, and possibilities for action.” And in turn, these aspects were influenced by one’s environment such as the land or society, one’s connections with others (deemed networks by Riften), and the journey one took (deemed itineraries). Thus, temporality is a diverse range of multiplicity — there is no one reference frame when it came to temporal reality.
Rather than approaching time as an abstract, homogeneous measure of universal movement along a singular axis, we can think of it as plural, less as a temporality than temporalities. From this perspective, there is no singular unfolding of time, but, instead, varied temporal formations that have their own rhythms—patterns of consistency and transformation that emerge immanently out of the multifaceted and shifting sets of relationships that constitute those formations and out of the interactions among those formations. As V. F. Cordova observes, “time is an abstraction derived from the fact that there is motion and change in the world.”
America attempted (and still attempts today) to orient Native reality toward a very rigid way of existing. It denies their temporal reality and insists on only America’s temporality existing. If any failed to fit within America’s defined parameters for life, they were (and still are) eliminated/erased. Riften clarifies:
Rather than marking an absolute distinction between Natives and nonnatives, suggesting that there are unbreachable barriers that generate utterly incommensurable and hermetically sealed Indian and white forms of experience, I am suggesting the presence of discrepant temporalities that can be understood as affecting each other, as all open to change, and yet as not equivalent or mergeable into a neutral, common frame—call it time, modernity, history, or the present.
As much as America attempted a brutal and long-term gommage of Native people, they still fought back and resisted the oppressors attempts at genocide and erasure. Part of that lay in holding onto one’s temporal orientation within which the roots of one’s identity and culture grow. As Riften explains, this isn’t to say Native temporal reality and America’s temporal reality are so distinct they cannot be overlapped. Instead, the interplay between the Native temporal reality and American temporal reality affects one another in often painful and/or genocidal ways. America’s temporal reality insists on merging all other realities into one “neutral, common frame,” but in doing so erases those who do not fit its narrow and biased parameters.
The Earth holds great diversity within how one may identify, may live, the customs one may have, the relationships formed with others or with the land, and so on. These are all lived realities that are just as valid as any other, and attempts to collapse them into the One Frame To Rule Them All is our world’s version of gommage. A cultural genocide often can escalate into full genocide of both culture and body until no one is left standing within that group.
That is one thing that fascism and authoritarian/colonialism hates — diversity. It’s why fascism tries to wipe out diversity and force everyone into the reference frame carefully sculpted by the oppressor — a frame often posited as the “universal.”
Franz Fanon wrote in Wretched of the Earth:
Challenging the the colonial world is not a rational confrontration of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different.
The colonial world seeks to dominate and erase the colonized, to collapse all frames into their own. This simplifies their control, but in doing so, they paint specific groups as disposable and thus erase those that fail to conform.
This same threat darkens the world of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, where a continued genocide — in the form of the erasure from gommage — seeks to destroy the people of Lumiere and steals away their future. Their ability to exist in the ‘now’ and thrive is slowly carved away as more and more of their people are lost to the Gommage.
For those in Lumiere, they do not know why they are being erased. Even when the player finally learns the full truth in Act 3, the erasure of the Lumierians is shown to be at the whim of one family. Yes, the Dessendre family aren’t truly seeking to dominate or exploit the Lumierians, only are caught in spirals of grief. However, the consequences of their actions oppress the Lumierians and cause tremendous harm to all involved. One cannot simply write off those consequences by saying “they were grieving, and erasing the Canvas stops the temptation to hide from grief.”
That still puts the fate of the Canvas people as ‘less than’ and not as real as the Dessendre family. No matter the motivations or original intentions, the consequences of erasing an entire population of people invokes genocide. The question then becomes, do we accept that the Canvas people are real and their existence valid?
That brings us back to Riften’s argument concerning the temporal realities that America thrust on the Native people. America deemed Native realities not real or valid, and thus justified the erasure and elimination of the “savage” in order to “civilize” and/or clear the land for America’s harmful “manifest destiny.” (See Indigeneous People’s History of the United States for a full breakdown of this history.) Riften speaks to this:
In 1906 Congress passed the Osage Allotment Act, extending to the Osage Nation the principles at play in the allotment program generally. These include efforts to break up Native land tenure into privatized property holding, organized primarily around nuclear family units; dismantle Indigenous structures of governance, asserting greater U.S. jurisdictional authority over Native peoples and places; insert Native peoples into the cash economy and Euramerican agricultural production; and transform everyday patterns of life so that they would conform to Euramerican conventions of dress, language, religion, literacy, gender roles, and so on. This policy imaginary draws on temporal figurations in order to remap and reorder spatial relations. Presented by officials and supporters as a means by which Indians could progress from a stunted and backward savagery toward civilization, allotment offered a vision of necessary development over time that enabled the struggle between Indigenous and settler geopolitical formations to be conceptually bracketed.
We see here how America attempted to force Native people into a very rigid binaries, in order to “civilize” them. If they failed to exist within these parameters, then destruction would befall them. For the Canvas people, they have even less agency, as there is no parameters that asserts a specific mode of being into which they are allowed to exist. Similar approaches to erasure and control was instituted on other marginalized populations as well.
The Canvas people are seen as oddities and anomalies. They are “creations” and not deemed real enough for continued existence. This is how Renoir (and Clea) is able to justify his erasure of them. In a similar vein, Riften, in his book Beyond Settler Time, points out a similar concept regarding the temporal reality of Native people:
Indigenous experiences of time may appear as oddities—anachronisms, aberrations, irrationalities, anomalies—when they do not line up neatly with dominant forms of chronology, historicism, and perception. As Sara Ahmed observes,“ Things seem ‘straight’ . . . when they are ‘in line,’ which means when they are aligned with other lines…”
The metaphor of lines is used to denote the temporal relations within groups of people. A group’s timeline may seem a straight path if aligned with other lines based on how we align such trajectories. Just as it is possible to craft a timeline or trajectory by lining up sequences of events, that does not mean this is the only way to build up temporal relations and/or paths. Other trajectories and timelines can exist in parallel.
She later notes, “Queer orientations are those that put within reach bodies that have been made unreachable by the lines of conventional genealogy,” further contending that a “queer commitment” is one that does not “presume that lives have to follow certain lines in order to count as lives…”
Here Riften quotes Ahmed’s observation that we do not have to “presume that lives have to follow certain lives in order to count as lives.” This is a crucial point for the temporal reality of people who do not fit into the dominant worldviews of the colonial society. The oppressed then, through the act of asserting their existence, proves the existence of alternate temporal realities, and the ‘straight’ lines becomes a tapestry of woven realities that may overlap, intersect, and inform one another even as they stand distinct. This plurality of worldviews is seen as a threat to Capitalists and Fascists who seek to collapse everyone into only their temporal reality.
The Fate of the Canvas People
For the Canvas people, their existence does not fit the dominant worldview of the Dessendre family. Instead, their existence is seen as a threat to the health of the Dessendre family by the act of temptation. Renoir and Clea both claim the Canvas exists only as a temptation for family members to live out a fantasy. In doing so, they deem the Canvas people a fascimile of true reality. In orienting the trajectory/timeline in this manner, the Dessendre family attempt to assert that their temporal reality matters more. That their emotions and sorrows matter more.
Except, Maelle subverts such a claim when she tells her father, at the end of Act 3, that she refuses to accept that the Canvas people must die for the family to heal. After her fight with Renoir, where they defeat him, this is part of their conversation:
RENOIR: I cannot spend another day with living corpses. Since the fire, our family has crumbled. Aline in the Canvas. Clea fighting her solitary war. You, a living ghost.
MAELLE: (shakes her head)
RENOIR: Verso’s death broke us. I want it to be fixed. I need it to be fixed! I– (coughs) I cannot lose you too!
MAELLE: Don’t you see? That’s how I feel about them! I can’t lose them either.
Here Renoir sees only his family, and he holds tightly to them. He attempts to control them through his own grief. But in doing so he takes away not only the agency of his family members, but also the agency of an entire world of people.
Maelle, on the other hand, tries to reach her father by showing how his feelings for his family is similar to how she feels about the family she’s built in Lumiere. She does her best to convince him that she’s not leaving him forever, but she can’t let him erase the people of the Canvas simply because he views them as a temptation for his family’s grief. She attempts to humanize the people of the Canvas by showing they are family too, while Renoir dehumanizes them by painting them as a temptation.
As another example, let’s look at prior to the fight. Here Maelle tries to convince him to not erase the entire Canvas.
RENOIR: I know how powerful and intoxicating it is, how deeply attached we can become to the worlds we pour our hearts and soul into. I was enthralled, and it nearly killed me.
MAELLE: It doesn’t mean you have to erase Verso’s Canvas!
For For Maelle, she sees beyond the limitations of just the family. This isn’t just Verso’s soul she’s fighting for here. She’s also fighting for the souls of every person who lives in Lumiere, who had lived until Gommage erased them. She lived sixteen years as a Lumierian, and she cannot simply erase that temporal reality simply because her father decided the Canvas is a temptation to be destroyed. For her, this goes beyond her family’s contours of grief.
Lune and Sciel both step forward to offer their truth, where they place comforting hands on Maelle’s shoulders. They lay down their claim of their different temporal reality and how it is just as valid.
RENOIR: Life keeps forcing cruel choices. We do what we must.
SCIEL: Grief often blinds us. And we make choices we can never take back.
RENOIR: You grieve for two.
SCIEL: I grieve for many.
LUNE: The choices of parents leave indelible marks upon their children. But ultimately the voices in their head have to be their own. You cannot set the boundaries of their life for them.
Here Lune and Sciel both attempt to argue why their right to exist matters. They use the language Renoir is most likely to understand. This is an excellent example of how the oppressed — Sciel and Lune — leverage a shared language — grief and family — in order to re-humanize themselves and their oppressor.
When Sciel says she ‘grieves for many,’ she references all the poeple Renoir gommaged.
When Lune says ‘you cannot set the boundaries of their life for them,’ she is also referencing the boundaries of the life of her people. Renoir seeks to set a final boundary by erasing them forever, yet is that not ripping away the agency of Lune and her people as well as the agency of Renoir’s own daughter? The erasure is a violence enacted upon them and a dehumanization of their personhoods.
Thus, the people of the Canvas argue with who is essentially a godlike being for their right to exist. The oppressed, as Fanon pointed out (repeated for emphasis), must lay claim to their temporal and spatial realities:
Challenging the the colonial world is not a rational confrontration of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different.
Lune, Sciel, and Maelle all have impassioned claims of their world being different than what Renoir claims. He focuses only on his own needs, and his arguments are not truly rational. Sciel rightly calls him out for being ‘blinded’ by his grief, and she shifts the perspective to a different worldview. Lune does the same by calling out his inability to recognize and acknowledge his daughter’s agency. Both are attempts to reason with Renoir, but at the same time lay out an impassioned claim to their own agency.
In this manner, the Canvas people not only attempt to humanize themselves for Renoir — the one who has oppressed them through Gommage — but also to humanize Renoir. Through the Gommage he may have stolen their humanity and erased them, but in doing so, he erased his own humanity by becoming this godlike being of death.
Paulo Friere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed puts this most succinctly:
The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.
Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the
oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.
This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.
Thus, Lune and Sciel attempt to humanize everyone involved in the conflict. Despite their attempt, it will fail at first. They must defeat Renoir, and then and only then, is he finally willing to give Maelle and the Canvas people their agency.
RENOIR: I’ll leave a light on for you.
He leaves the Canvas in Maelle’s hands. Thus, the Canvas people have not only liberated themselves but also Renoir.
Yet, despite this win, a final confrontation between Painted Verso and Maelle will determine the true fate of the Canvas. In a way, this reflects how victories by the oppressed can push forward their fight for liberation and freedom, but there can also be inside actors that sabotage their goals.
We see this in Painted Verso, who betrays them in his goal to seek complete annihilation. He’s fallen into the despair that Friere speaks about in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he sees his dehumanization as being only a painted version of the true Verso. He cannot reach past this distortion to become more fully himself, something beyond what he was painted to be. His rigidity and stubbornness narrows his ability to relate to Maelle, and he attempts to force his temporal reality onto not only Maelle but the faded boy and all of the Canvas. By using leading questions, Painted Verso extracts the answer he wants from the faded boy, which he uses to justify his actions.
Verso fights for annihilation and to force upon Maelle his idea of what ‘healing’ looks like. He represents a refusal to accountability and is trapped in his own despair. (I will write a separate essay on accountability to dig into Verso’s temporal reality, so for now I will simply point out his final motivations.)
Maelle fights for her agency, the agency of her Dessendre family, and the agency of all Canvas people to exist and heal in the ways they need. She holds herself accountable and refuses to give in to despair.
In Verso’s ending, his selfish desire for annihilation will doom the Canvas entirely. He achieves his annihilation, and he tells Maelle it will be okay even as he forces her back into the Dessendre world. There Maelle becomes Alicia once more, trapped and isolated with her disability. The Canvas people have no place in this ending, their existence erased to become a segment of the Dessendre family’s past.
Yet, does this act truly bring healing to all involved? If the Canvas people are indeed real, how does this ending not doom them to erasure and genocide? To sacrifice an entire people to ensure the security and healing of another group is the death-narrative of necrosecurity, where the marginalized group are seen as less than and not as real. This only continues the cycle of violence, grief, and pain. (In my prior two essays I tackle the question of healing and agency. I also show how the Dessendre world does not offer a supportive system to aid the family, and specifically Alicia/Maelle’s, healing. I won’t belabor those points as my focus in this essay is the Canvas people’s fate.)
In Maelle’s ending, Maelle will offer Painted Verso an alternate way of existing instead of the one he currently abhors:
MAELLE: If you could grow old, would you… find a reason to smile?
By framing it this way, she offers him agency to choose his own way forward, one where he is not trapped in the bindings of another. She wishes to see him happy, to not be trapped in a cycle of despair and violence. She wants healing to blossom. The final scenes of Maelle’s ending takes place in a future point, where people have aged and Lumiere has started to rebuild.
Through the use of chroma, she aids the Canvas people in finally liberating themselves from the oppressive reference frames of the Dessendre family. Those that were erased once more find life, and Maelle’s question opens up an alternate temporal reality, one where people age and find their own happiness, without the shadow of gommage to steal away their future.
In a way, this once again parallels our reality. The oppressed often must resort to violence in order to free themselves from the yoke of their oppressors. For example, the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s involved civil disobedience, fights with racist police, and America’s assassination of Civil Rights leaders. Despite that violent backdrop, Black communities fought for their right to exist and have equal rights under the law, and they won some of those demands. Yes, this fight for justice still continues today, but each win threads a temporal trajectory toward a more just, equitable, and accessible world. That path will not be ‘straight’ line. Instead, it will curve in on itself, twist around, and yet still continue forward toward that better future.
We see this in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. This isn’t just a journey on how to deal with grief, but it’s also the question of whether the temporal reality of the Lumierians is as valid and as crucial as the Dessendre’s. And whether their reality has a right to exist and thrive.
In many video games, it’s rare for the player to play in the oppressed people’s reference frame. Generally, the game will posit a ‘hero’ that often comes from the oppressor culture or an outside ‘neutral’ culture to save the day. However, Clair Obscur turns this trope on its head by placing the player firmly within the people of the Canvas. The main characters are people of Lumiere, and our team of heroes are those that seek to end the erasure of their people — to assert their existence and restore their temporality in the present time. They don’t want to become past relics folded into the history books (the Dessendre family’s books to be precise). Instead, Lumiere and the sentient beings of the Canvas seek to exist within the present where they can build toward a shared future.
By placing us, at first, on the side of Lumierians, the player experiences the tempos of Lumierian’s ordinary life and their society (what Riften identifies as “modes of inhabitance” and “networks of exchange”). We are shown the complexity of these people and experience the reality of their world. The game may, at times, deliberately mislead the character, as we see in Act 2 with Painted Verso’s character, but this never negates how real the Canvas people’s world is. As I have shown in this essay, the Canvas World and Dessendre world are both real and valid, neither more important than the other.
We have now returned to one of the most crucial questions in the game: What is the right decision in regards to the fate of the Canvas people and the fate of Alicia/Maelle? As I have hopefully shown thus far, erasing people’s temporal realities causes immense harm and is genocide; people have a right to exist, and sacrificing them for the ‘greater good of society’ (or in this case the Dessendre family) cannot ever be the morally right answer.
Necrosecurity, as I spoke of earlier, paints a bleak and death-filled reality, where healing cannot ever take place because denial and control is at its roots. Until people’s temporal realities are respected and their agency honored, healing will forever stay out of reach.
Thus, escaping pain by committing genocide is not healing. It’s a continuation of the cycle of violence. The marginalized populations facing genocide have a right to exist, and their temporal realities are as valid and important as the oppressor. Just as the temporal reality of the Canvas people are as valid and important as the Dessendre family.
Healing can only happen when the cycle of violence ends.
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I find myself in a life-or-death situation after rushing to save a child and a woman from an oncoming truck. Instead of dying, I wake up in the hospital, with the woman who saved the child taking care of me. Her kindness begins to change my perspective on life.
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