Passion, Young, Fever

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“Hey, hey, hey, Chidorita!”

Junpei strolled into the hospital room and took a seat right next to the stiff recovery bed. He placed a small box he had been carrying onto his lap. Chidori looked up from her sketchbook just long enough to give him a glazed stare, her eyes only half-open. The girl went back to her drawing.

“So… what’re you drawing today?”

“…A hideous monster from my dream.”

“Hm…” Junpei leaned over at her paper. “Kinda looks like me.”

“Yes,” she subtly smiled. “I know.”

The painted family and their relationships with the Dessendre family are super fascinating to me. One of the things that's really interesting to me is that, in the game files, they're referred to as the "mirror family". This evokes Renoir's line about art as a mask and a mirror, and has me thinking about what these mirrors reflect. I wanted to make some images that play off of the mirror idea and I guess I'll start with Clea's.

Verso can be super cocky and smug and even admits to being vain about his looks to the point he keeps getting his hair dyed now that it’s been turned grey but his skill tree has moves that lead him to do damage to himself or take on the burdens (status effects) of the others in the party. Not to mention when the going gets tough- when things get serious -Verso does as well. The man has a buttfuckton of self loathing and Feelings(tm) about being what we think he perceives- or at least what we, personally, think he perceives -as a “lesser” existence. He’s more than willing to die if it means the “real” Dessendre family gets at least some sort of closure. He may have the original Verso’s memories but he also doesn’t see himself as the Verso that painted Lumiére. Because that Verso died in the fire and for as much as he loves Aline, as much as he calls her “mother”, he’s also acutely aware that the canvas isn’t where Aline belongs. She may have spent time with the painted Verso and Renoir and Alicia and Clea but Aline needs to move on and she refuses. Verso very clearly blames himself and his entire existence for keeping her there and he probably feels like dying for real would be some sort of recompense for the harm he feels he’s caused by simply being there. He (poorly) hides this self-loathing behind his goading of enemies and talking about how he’s oh so handsome and it’s clear from his skill tree alone. And that’s not even getting into the whole “Perfection” aspect of his gameplay style.

And speaking of characters who gain gameplay bonuses by being consistently good at what he does but also has a lot of family trauma he hides behind a sense of bravado: Dante Sparda.

Not enough people give Dante credit for pretending to be well-adjusted when he’s only just really good at deflection and subterfuge when it comes to his past.

For all of his silly little dances, for all of his enemy taunting, and for all of his love of pizza and strawberry sundaes Dante is very very much full of the trauma of being orphaned at a young age. The man grew up constantly being hunted by demons and being the inadvertent cause of so much death and suffering that he blames himself to the point he sends most of the money he earns on the jobs he completes to various different charity organizations and the families of people who also lost loved ones thanks to him. Dante isn’t much better at hiding his inner turmoil as Verso is; it just seems like it because he’s more deceptively outgoing. And we do mean deceptively. Dante is the kind of guy who at first appears to be friendly and chill to everyone but the moment you dig deeper into the man himself he will shut you down. He’ll make excuses about how nobody wants to hear sob stories about his past or he’ll lie by omission; talking up certain more sensationalized events and dismissing other things as unimportant. If he even talks about himself in the first place. Dante doesn’t talk about his past with anyone except maybe Vergil and even then they both tend to be too busy fighting each other to actually talk about their real feelings (hello again sparda sibling communication issues. how do you do?). But the only time you really get much of anything about their pasts other than the legend of Papa Sparda it’s to do with Dante and Vergil as twins and what happened in relation to each other before they got separated.

Dante getting super salty at Vergil in the DMC5 ending credits stuff for not saying “Jackpot” is both funny because for real? That’s the thing you get genuinely upset over? The fact your brother refused to say your shared childhood catchphrase? But also helps you realize just how stuck in the past Dante actually, truly is. He can’t let it go because it’s all he thinks he has. Even with all of the friends and colleagues he’s made over the years- including the ones who have died just for being around him and/or while they were in the process of helping him fight demons (you know, like how Verso lost a lot of people while trying to get Aline out of the canvas) -Dante still keeps all of them at an arms length. Even his nephew. Although we’d argue that it’s because he doesn’t want to be reminded of the fact that his brother spent a night with someone who wasn’t him even though Dante has been trying since he was fucking eight to find and keep Vergil with him for longer than a fleeting moment but that’s besides the point.

Both Dante and Verso are way more broken up inside thanks to the things that have happened to them and the things they’ve done than they’d ever care to admit and the fact that they both refuse to talk about their pasts with anyone other than their family- or what’s left of them at least -is very much proof of that. They’re much less well-adjusted than they want others to think they are and the more you watch them in their natural habitat the more it shows.

She painted half this world with Verso. She painted the strongest turtle ever, gave him overpowered abilities and made him her best friend. They sang and they danced and ever since she left Francois was never the same.

She helped paint the landscape, together they made the endless tower. He was scared of the dark so she painted her Lampmaster to fuck with him. She fought with Verso, Monoco, Noco and all the Gestrals and traded words with the Grandis, helped Esquie find his rocks.

After the Fracture she could’ve made her Nevrons anything, an army without soul to end her families madness. She doesn’t. She adds stalacts in the cold, she adds over a dozen mimes, she adds her Nevrons that do not attack they simply eat the mountains their on. She adds her dancers, her sky and sea serpent. She adds things that belong in this world, creatures who match their position in the Painting.

She paints over Painted Clea. She was content to let Aline stew in her grief, but she draws a line at this false representation of her. She has Simon kill her Axon. She is already in this painting. She is the Fading Woman and the Lady of Sap. This whole world is her work, all of it her representation.

Her family is fighting over Verso’s memory like dogs with a bone and they have destroyed her world. She painted half of this Canvas, a Canvas wrecked during the Fracture. His Gestrals and Grandis were misplaced, the land split.

Clea does not want to destroy this Canvas. The last piece of their brothers soul. But her brother is dead now, and her sister has been maimed and her mother is running from it and her father is too content to run right after her. The people who did this still breathe, something Verso can’t do and Alicia can only do with pain.

War is on their doorstep, and she can’t protect Alicia and her parents are too busy to be useful, her mother lost her spot as head of the painters council. Destroying the Canvas is the only way to get that semblance of her family back because Aline will never stop and Renoir will never stop chasing her.

They all tackle their grief differently, and Clea’s method is revenge. I imagine it’s no help that the only way she’ll have support in this war she singlehandedly wages is if she destroys the world she built with her deceased brother.

It's about escapism. It's about surviving despite it all. It's about the wonder of the world even in darkness. It's about mimes beating the shit out of you.