🍂🌊🔮

Let me preface this by acknowledging that my reading is informed by the fact that I ship them. I’ve been writing them as lovers since A Winter Night’s Lazzo came out, based solely on a familiarity with the Commedia dell’arte, a degree in identifying queer subtext, and a dream that Hoyo most definitely fulfilled. But the game is not being subtle here. Even if you don’t see their partnership as romantic, it is, at the very least, queerplatonic.

Regardless of how you interpret their relationship, the game makes it clear that Pantalone is the most significant person in Dottore’s life, more significant to Dottore than Dottore himself. Dottore’s primary record—his first memory in a game where memory is tantamount to life and identity—is a meticulously kept catalogue of every time his many selves saved and extended Pantalone’s life. It is Anomalous Tree Marrow I on purpose because Pantalone’s survival is written into every part of Zandik’s soul, down to the 8 year old who scolds Pantalone for misplacing his glasses. Forget the bickering Segments, forget the god-making, world-changing experiments—Pantalone’s safety, survival, and even comfort (looking at you, Alpaca wool) comes first.

I hardly have words for how incomprehensibly tragic they are.

Feofan spent 50 years with Zandik, the notoriously unsympathetic scientist who had already cauterized his compassion by the time of their first meeting. This is the heretic who preferred to view humans as test subjects and machines rather than leave himself open to more rejection than what he had already experienced.

This guy sets his eyes on Pantalone and immediately wants to keep him forever. Zandik fell hard enough for Test Subject 3 after a single meeting that he not only decided to refrain from experimenting on him, but went and learned his name, put in a good word with Pierro, and spent the rest of his life (and death!!!) guaranteeing Feofan's continued existence. This is U-hauling to the nth degree.

Now for some quick math: Pantalone is 72 years old when Zandik dies on his 85th birthday, meaning it was a 33-year-old Zandik who first met a 20-year-old Pantalone.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the 35-year-old Segment is the one who sees himself as the most selfish. He’s the closest to the 33-year-old Zandik who only needed one encounter with this nameless, injured, smooth-talking test subject before saying: “this one is mine. I’m keeping him. Not just until I get bored. Not just until I need a new test subject. Forever.” And this means that 35 is the first version of Zandik who sees himself as having something to lose. This is the Zandik who experienced a desire to keep Pantalone at his side for the rest of time. And also the Dottore who is still in the throes of NRE lol.

Prior to their in-game appearance, I headcannoned Pantalone as avaricious and possessive based on the Moment of Cessation artifact description. I still think he is in some respects, but Dottore definitely has him beat when it comes to sheer obsessive devotion.

If Dottore is the Segment who is closest—temporally speaking—to the moment in which he found a genuine partner whose views and values align with his own, then it doesn’t seem surprising that he would be the one most threatened by Zandik’s existence. Again, his selfishness is the same selfishness that made Zandik want to keep Pantalone in the first place. His envy is that of knowing what it is like for someone to look at him and not see a monster for the first time, and it makes him monstrous. Dottore might not have actively killed Zandik, but the Anomalous Tree Marrow III certainly makes it seem as though he, at the very least, persuaded the other Segments to agree to a DNR should Zandik end up in critical condition:

The fact that he often refers to his fellow Segments as “me” and “myself” makes me think he’s talking about getting the other Segments onto his side here rather than to Zandik, who he often describes as being somewhat apart from himselves.

I think it’s important to note that Dottore recognizes how Pantalone’s immortality cannot be guaranteed until Zandik dies. Zandik is the missing ingredient and Dottore understands this much. His willingness to let Zandik die can be partly attributed to his own selfishness and desire to supplant the original in all ways (including as Pantalone’s partner). But, regardless of intent, it also succeeds in ensuring Pantalone’s immortality, which has to be a fairly bitter pill for the latter to swallow.

Although Pantalone plays off the fact that he was unsettled by Zandik’s death and dissection (interjecting with “I never said that” when Dottore calls him on his past reaction during story time), it is abundantly clear that Pantalone experiences a potent emotional response every time one or more Zandik dies.

In the medical logs, for instance, Dottore makes a “joke” about developing antidepressants for Pantalone. But, given the timing and the fact that there had been no prior indication that Pantalone suffered from depression, one can easily assume that Pantalone is grieving and Dottore is being an envious asshole about it. (“Unsettled” also feels like a very Dottore way to describe someone suffering the grief of losing their partner of 50 years).

Similarly, when Dottore eradicates the rest of the Segments, he pithily describes Pantalone as behaving like “little more than a decorative vase” at the Harbinger meeting, which again comes across as a rather cold way of telling us that Pantalone is dissociating to cope with the grief of losing five more versions of Zandik—aspects he had, by then, lived with for four centuries. Ouch.

(At least Dottore thinks he’s pretty.)

Pantalone never shares his emotions with us players directly—his feelings are always focalized through Dottore’s mocking asides about Pantalone’s behaviors—but that honestly makes me think that Pantalone was even more distraught than what the text tells us. If even Dottore is making flippant comments that speak to him picking up on Pantalone’s distress, then it has to be pretty bad.

Partners, at the End, Even Still

And so Pantalone’s ongoing decision to maintain his partnership with Dottore is utterly excruciating on multiple levels. There is, of course, the fact that it dooms them both to death—Dottore immediately (big asterisk here because I don’t think he’s dead for good but that’s another essay) and Pantalone once the Elixir runs out and old age finally catches up to him. But the emotional registers beneath all this are, in my mind, even more devastating.

Dottore is all Pantalone has left of Zandik. And yet Dottore is also the reason that he’s all Pantalone has left of Zandik.

When Pantalone follows Dottore and stands at his side, he is standing beside his partner and his partner’s murderer at the same time. The only way Pantalone can reckon with the abject tragedy of this fact is by holding onto the belief that Dottore is Zandik and Zandik is Dottore and that he will always be part of him.

Feofan and Zandik had 50 years where they (presumably) continued to learn, grow, and evolve together. Dottore is fixed in time at 35, but Pantalone is mentally fixed in time at 72, the year Zandik died, after which 35 perfected the Elixir so that it would pause physical and mental aging.

When Dottore explains that the other Segments had erased his “uniqueness,” he talks about how “a soul living forever in the past inevitably holds different views than he did in his later years,” acknowledging that he’s imprisoned by the moment of his own creation. The fact that he immediately pivots to then focus on Pantalone’s preservation is important because it reminds us that Pantalone is also frozen in time. He says:

There are a lot of ways we can read these lines. On the surface, we can simply read it as expository information to give the player some background on Pantalone—it definitely is that for sure. We can also read it as an example of Dottore’s callousness, how he casually brings up Pantalone being trafficked.

But I think there’s another layer, too. It’s an example of how Dottore still latches onto the Pantalone that Zandik met at 33. And this isn’t the first time in the conversation that Dottore demonstrates how fixed his perspective is. Nearly four centuries have gone by and yet he still thinks the reason Pantalone is helping him is because he spared him as a test subject. Pantalone has already had to remind Dottore that he ascended to the rank of Harbinger on his own merit and that he isn’t there because of some quid pro quo from centuries ago. Rather, he sees their values and goals as fundamentally aligned. Pantalone is there for Zandik because he still sees Dottore as Zandik.

And so, when given the opportunity to say his final farewell, Pantalone says goodbye to Zandik. Despite the literal words he speaks, I don’t think he’s actually asking what 35 prefers to be called. He already knows that 35 sees himself as Dottore from their prior conversation. What Pantalone is really asking is who he can say goodbye to in this moment, at the end, when they are finally free from fate itself. After the enormous personal sacrifices Pantalone has made, Dottore gives Pantalone the choice to see him as Zandik. And how heartbreaking is it that Pantalone does even though, by this point, it is Dottore who has spent some 330 years with Pantalone—centuries more than Pantalone had ever experienced with Zandik.

It is, as far as final acts go, surprisingly selfless of Dottore to recognize what it means for Pantalone to see him that way, even though he himself despises being forever tied to Zandik. It is especially surprising coming from the Segment who wholeheartedly embraces his own greed and repeatedly proclaims himself to be the most selfish of them all. So much for not being able to change!

For me, their greatest tragedy is the fact that they are out of time from one another, asynchronous, yearning for each other in different forms and ages. Dottore is forever looking for the Feofan he met at 33; he sees their present relationship as contractually predicated on saving Feofan in the past. Pantalone, frozen at 72, looks for the remnants of the man who shared his worldviews in the most selfish version of Dottore.

We open the game on the gommage. We open the game spending maybe thirty minutes to an hour getting to know how deeply Lumiere is grieving; how they have grieved for the past 67 years; how they will, like as not, continue to grieve more. Lumiere is, much like the game itself, a city made more of ghosts than those that still live in it.

It's very deliberate that we start the game with Gustave. There's a lot of reasons we do this, but--one is clear from the very start. We are starting this game as a man who loves a ghost. Because Sophie is already dead. The flowers that ring the necks of those who are about to gommage are mourning garlands laid on graves that still live and breathe.

For now.

The gommage, the prologue entire--it's masterful at getting you emotionally connected to Gustave. To understanding the stakes of what they are fighting for.

And then Act I happens.

From hour one, the game works to establish how haunted Gustave, personally, is. The love of his life turns to dust in his arms, and the only reassurance he can offer her is that he's there with her. That she won't be alone as it happens. And then he reaches the continent, and death is all that surrounds him. He watches his comrades die, one after the other. And when he makes his way back to look for survivors, he instead finds an altar of corpses he willingly goes to lay himself upon. The ghosts are calling out to him, weighing down on him, and if Lune hadn't arrived when she did--if she hadn't called out to him before he pulled that trigger--Gustave would have joined their ranks.

(Put a pin in this knowledge. We will come back to it later.)

Lune and Sciel are, of course, haunted in their own ways--Sciel's ghosts are horribly painful and depressing to think about--but the game is invested in Gustave's ghosts, because his ghosts are about to become Maelle's. And he's going to join them, be one of them.

Beyond the Dessendre family's grief, beyond and above all of that--Gustave is undoubtedly the ghost that haunts the narrative the most. It's in a lot of subtle ways, outside of that first wrench of grief and the scene where they lay him to rest. His name and inspiration in Maelle's skills. His name invoked in battle. The fact that in camp scenes he is consistently brought up. In a way, he's even with the party throughout the final battle--he was the one who noticed that the chroma was lingering in the bodies of expeditioners slain by nevrons; without Gustave, there is no sword of Lumiere to clear the path to Renoir. The game shows, over and over again, that while Gustave is dead, he is not gone.

And it's in light of this, and finishing the game, that you realise...Gustave is sort of just Verso?

Rewatching Act I, the first moment this understanding hit me--with a depth beyond just thinking of them as foils of "Maelle's brother"--was when he pulled out that gun. Faced with such terrible loss, faced with such terrible loneliness, Gustave makes the same decision Verso would, a hundred times over: oblivion. And it's very deliberate, and a very stark note about Gustave's character, because it's him alone of the expedition survivors with this reaction. Verso might have been the one to spirit Maelle away from the slaughter, but alone in the manor she was firm on staying alive. Lune and Sciel, arguable more cynical than Maelle, also choose to forge ahead. To live, because the oath is WHEN one falls. When, not if.

And it's in those words that the most telling link between Gustave and Verso is made clear, in the silence that echoes from an answer and a truth that Gustave cannot give: does Gustave still believe that Lumiere is more important than any one individual life?

Rewatching that scene with eyes that have seen the end was like a bullet to the head. The characters might not know in that moment. The player might not know. But the writers do, and it's with lines like this that they set up pain in a myriad of subtle ways. From the start, Gustave was a ghost. From the start, Verso was a ghost. They're the same goddamn person.

The scene where Verso reveals he could have saved Gustave, but chose not to--in the moment, it was shocking and not, all at once. His timing had felt suspicious from the start. And as he gave his reasoning, it became clear it was...more of Verso's unintentional self-sabotage you see time and again through his character beats and history.

We know Verso has travelled with multiple expeditions. We know that he genuinely does come to care for them, despite knowing what inevitably waits for them, whether they succeed or fail; it is clear in every inch of him that Verso is a man who cannot help but fall a little bit in love with everyone around him. With those who, unlike him, fight with something he doesn't have (hope).

Verso, time and again, makes choices that are bad and hurt him. And really, if you think about it...his allowing Gustave to die was really one of these. Because of everyone on the expedition...Gustave was the most likely to agree with Verso's point of view?

Because he'd already expressed, unspoken: Maelle's life is more important to him than not just his own, but all of Lumiere. There's a reason they chose that exact framing for the question Lune posits to him way back in the first hours of the game, and it's because that's the exact thing the entire game is about. Which lives matter more?

To Verso, it is, at the end of the day, the real Dessendre family. And while I doubt Gustave would care about "real" or "painted," what he does care about is Maelle, and he would want her to live, not keep living in a world that would kill her.

Would Gustave want to kill the rest of Lumiere for this? No, of course not. He isn't so far gone in his own grief as Verso to write off the entirety of the Canvas. But if he had survived until Act III--if he was one of three remaining lives of Lumiere in the final stand against Renoir...I think he would accept the inevitable. I think he would try and convince Maelle to leave, instead of remaining to repaint the world and dead around them.

Because Gustave is a character defined by his grief in a way almost none of the others are. Lune chafes under her parents legacy but strives for it anyway. Sciel lives like life nor death matter to her and falls for the dream that Maelle can bring her husband back.

But when we see Gustave face down grief, while we see him shut down in the wake of it, we also see him accept it. In that sense, Gustave--despite the Versoisms of him, at his core--is one of the most balanced and well adjusted members of the cast, suicide attempt and all. No wonder they had to kill him.

Maelle calls Gustave "the best father and brother I ever had," and once again--she doesn't know what she's saying in that moment. But the writers do.

Gustave is the Verso and the Renoir who is capable of doing something we see the Dessendre's struggling with time and again: he is the father and brother capable of letting go. And his death really foreshadows both endings: in one, Maelle cannot let go of the Canvas, and in the other, Verso cannot let go of oblivion.

You think in false dichotomies, Lune told Verso once. It's not always an either/or situation.

Because yes, there is a world out there, maybe, where Maelle could have kept the Canvas, where she could have granted Verso his oblivion without the rest of the world going with him. A world where maybe Maelle could find balance in being Alicia, where she could leave the Canvas and return and know that Renoir would not erase it in her absence because he trusts her.

But that world isn't here. It's not the world we get, because at the end of the day this game is about grief and not moving on. It's about repeating the same patterns and cycles and hoping that things end up differently this time.

It's a game about ghosts.

The reveal that Verso intentionally allowed Gustave to die is incredible.

First, on a narrative level, I think it's natural to feel like maybe Gustave's death scene was a little contrived. C'mon, you're telling me Verso showed up just in time to save Maelle but not in time to save Gustave? How convenient for the narrative, right?

That he did this on purpose completely recontextualizes the whole thing. It's not contrived at all. It's Verso being Verso.

Second: holy shit, the decision to have Verso, the player character, do something so incredibly unsympathetic is brilliant, as is the decision to wait to reveal it until we've already come to understand who Verso is and why he makes the choices he does. Gustave was a good man, full stop. He was kind, generous, brave, intelligent both academically and emotionally. He was mature, strong, yet gentle. The player likely has come to really love Gustave by the time he dies, and for good reason. He's just a legitimately really great guy.

And Verso let him die. On purpose. Because he thought Gustave would be an obstacle to his ultimate goal, a goal that he believes deep down is his only choice. And because he knew achieving that goal would lead to Gustave's death anyway.

Which brings me to the third point: Verso never knew Gustave, and if he did, he might have chosen differently.

Verso worried that, if Maelle learned the true nature of the Canvas before they fought the Paintress, and learned what the Paintress's defeat would mean, she would refuse to help save Aline because she wouldn't want to lose Gustave. And he's probably right about that.

But Gustave, I think, would have agreed with Verso.

This is a blindingly hot take, I recognize, but in Act I, I think we see Gustave's true priorities. In the really great "fuck the mission" scene, Lune asks Gustave if he still believes saving Lumiere is the most important thing, or whether he would choose Maelle over Lumiere. Crucially, Gustave never answers the question. He tells Lune he hopes he still believes that, but he never says he does.

And his decision to die to save Maelle was not about the mission. If he was prioritizing the mission, he would have fled with the Lumina Converter, even if it meant losing Maelle. But he couldn't do that: deep down, in that moment, he chose Maelle over Lumiere.

The most important thing to Gustave was his sister. If he knew staying in the Canvas was killing her and preventing her from healing from her trauma, I think he would understand Verso's choices and even support him. For both of them, their sister is the most important person in the world, and they would both do anything to make sure she's okay. I really believe Gustave would have made the same choice as Verso, and Verso will never know.

There's something just so poignant about it all.

And Maelle accepts Verso's answer. She accepts Verso, even after he admits the truth. (It does seem like she already suspected it, too.) It's probably not lost on either Maelle or Verso that, by this point, they have each taken a sibling from the other--Verso letting Gustave die, and Maelle erasing Alicia. They have also both contributed to the death of almost every single person in the Canvas, too, though only one of them did so knowingly. (It probably helps that Maelle believes she can bring Gustave back as long as she can kick her father out of the Canvas, too.) So she accepts Verso's actions without hate or even anger.