living dead duo

Verso in the ending:

Noble - Save his sister, save his mother, stop the cycle.

Selfish - Wants his own death.

Maellicia in the ending:

Noble - Save the canvas residents and Gustave, save Verso’s only work of soul art.

Selfish - Have a playground to escape into without pain, where she is loved and no one challenges her.

You can even go into earlier decisions...

Maellicia gommaging Painted Alicia:

Noble - Give Alicia peace, honor her wishes.

Selfish - Erase the reminder of Maellicia's own pain and the life she rejects, maybe jealously since Verso only needs one Alicia to roleplay as his sister.

Verso letting Gustave die:

Noble - Best odds to get his mother out of the canvas and save her.

Selfish - Convenience, and maybe jealousy that Alicia was so close to a painted older brother.

Clair Obscur is packed with examples of narrative duality, the most dramatic of which are embodied by Verso and Maelle. Over and over again, they trace the same patterns as mirrors of each other. As protagonists they both selfish and self-sacrificing. How you calculate that ratio may differ depending on how sympathetically or critically you interpret their motivations. Yet what's incredible to me about the story is how it gives us the honorable and the dishonorable reasons for why characters make the choices they do.

The noble reason makes them sympathetic and admirable, but the selfish reason makes them feel human and realistic.

And importantly: both are true.

What he thought was a flicker of cold starlight coalesces into a wane, ghostly shape. Long white hair drifts around her, as if in an invisible breeze, her booted feet refusing to touch the floor. She is drawn in monochrome, save for the splash of deep red that runs down her chest.

I commissioned @lethallana for an illustration of my E33/Slay the Princess fic and ah! Look at it! It's so gorgeous, she does such good work! The petals were entirely her idea and she picked the colors perfectly! Go check out her work if you haven't already!

(Closeup under the cut)

To Clea:

To Verso:

To Alicia:

He gives Clea the world. Her Axon is just like her, her very long auburn hair, white shirt, dark blue skirt, suspenders. The Hauler is not an overdramatized version of Clea; it’s just Clea. A city on its back, the weight of their entire family on her shoulders constantly. Her Axon is in Old Lumiere, while everyone else’s are much further up toward the Monolith in a perfect line next to each other though divided by the sea.

He gives Verso his window and mirror. Visage is performer with dramatic lighting and stage sounds, Verso with his piano in the opera house as the lights dimmed. Verso hides both behind and within his art and cannot separate those things.

He gives Alicia the impossible, the endless possibilities he sees for her. Her Axon gets ever taller; always reaching for the sky. Neither storm nor fire may stop his little star from going beyond the boundaries of the world.

Aline Dessendre: I painted Paris and humans as a facsimile of real life

Clea:

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.

she isn't mad at Verso after The Reveal only insofar that it's not productive to be mad at him - there are only so many humans left on the Continent, and they need all the firepower they can get if they are to take down the strongest one. her whimsy is a big part of her, yes, but so is her practicality; all past reveals, too, she handles from the point of "okay, where do we go from here". it's just how she rolls.

To commemorate that, take a look at the fan art I created for DA2 throughout the years and appreciate the growth, fuelled by obsessing over its characters :D

2019:

2020:

2021:

2022:

2023:

2024:

2025:

2026 (so far):

I like big boats, I cannot lie.

this was so much fun to draw! I'm kind of gutted about how much worse it looks on my phone than on the screen I drew it on, where the colors were more muted and harmonized better. But I am Tired and done so this will have to do :''')