Around about my fifth attempt at summarizing my thoughts about Clive, in the summer of 2020, four months after my first playthrough of Professor Layton and the Unwound Future (have I mentioned I’m American yet?), I gave up. Analyzing him head-on proved way more difficult for me than writing pages and pages of fanfic about him. If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ve probably read some of those pages.
Clive is one of those characters who turns every hundred words I try to write into a thousand. I’ve catalogued all his dialogue, I’ve dug through every bit of canon which might say something about him, I’ve covered hundreds of pages in drawings and writing, but I still can’t settle on one quick hot take about him. He’s a lot.
This essay covers five takes on Clive I struggle to address in non-analysis-essay mediums. I'm calling it a character analysis, and these takes don't stray far from canon, but my arrival at them might not have happened had I been a different person at time of first playthrough. I tried to limit personal stuff and conjecture as much as possible here, but I also want it to be clear that you do not have to have the same exact thoughts about Clive as I do. (It would be cool if you let me know whether any of these resonated, though; I haven't managed to dig up much Clive discussion in the past couple years. This essay is very lowkey an attempt at planting some seeds.) Without any further introduction:
1. Future Luke - about a person pretending to be who they used to be
2. Parasocial Self-Identification - trying to define what "I relate to this character" means
3. Seeking Legitimacy - about casting oneself as a minor character in someone else's story
4. Hoping to be Held Back - about trust-falls, but instead of falling it's making bad decisions
5. Righteous Anger - about politics, rage, cowardice, and doing a big violence
6. Conclusion - in which I find some kind of overarching take after all.
7. Dialogue Excerpts which I thought were useful. There's only three of them. The text that refers to each of them is color-coded to make it easier to scroll down to the bottom, find it, and come back. I considered linking them in separate posts but that seemed excessive.
"In the months that followed the explosion, [the professor] slowly grew distant from me ... Time has a way of changing people, Luke."
The narrative Clive writes for Luke's future is one I personally find convincing, given Luke's situation at the time Clive encounters the kid.
At the time of Unwound Future, Luke is canonically 12 or 13. And Luke has chosen as his mentor in life, in puzzles and in crisis, an adult whom he has no real chance of understanding. I say that partially because children in general are not mentally on the same page as adults, and partially because this particular adult tends to avoid being understood.
Professor Hershel Layton doesn't talk about himself often, especially if, like me during my first playthrough of Unwound Future, you’ve only ever seen him at his least backstoried. In Curious Village and Diabolical Box, Luke doesn't seem to know very much about Layton, despite having followed him around for a while. Clive also doesn't seem to know very much about Layton, but Clive does know one thing about Layton that Luke doesn’t know, and Clive picks up on this as a plausible point of future conflict.
There's a tendency in fiction to emphasize (or exaggerate) the lengths people will go to be reunited with their loved ones, and Clive has a few good reasons to project this onto Layton regarding Claire. First, Clive's been working with Dimitri, another man who knew and had feelings for Claire while she was alive, and could have vouched for the temptation to go back and prevent her woefully-preventable death. Second, Clive lost both his parents in the accident that killed Claire and only later learned about the existence of time travel; he's familiar (or thinks he's familiar) with Layton's particular flavor of grief. Third, Clive seems to have a mix of contempt and admiration for Layton himself; I think Clive wants to believe that what his and Dimitri’s reactions to the event that caused Claire’s death are somewhat reasonable - and part of him wants to see if Layton has found a different way of dealing with that grief.
In any case, these are not things Clive assumes Luke is likely to understand, so Clive conceives of this narrative where Layton is so struck by the possibility of time travel, and more specifically, the possibility of getting Claire back, that he commits a series of crimes to get a time machine constructed (as Dimitri does), while leaving Luke completely in the dark (as Clive leaves Dimitri in the dark about his own grief-driven plans).
There's a moment halfway through the game that I suspect is supposed to hint that Clive’s “Future Luke” narrative is implausible: Luke reveals (to us, the audience; the character Luke's talking to seems to already know) that his family will be moving to America soon, meaning he could not have witnessed Hershel's "slowly growing distant" directly. But on my first playthrough (when I was fully prepared to dismiss Unwound Future as yet another hacky edutainment game with a time travel story – believe me, these are a dime a dozen) this revelation only FURTHER convinced me that Clive's "Future Luke" narrative was true.
I've failed to maintain a lot of long-distance friendships in my time, but trying to keep up with adults I'd moved away from was always - ALWAYS - the most difficult. Generally, when I was little, I got along better with adults than with my peers, because adults had SO much more patience for my specific brand of smart-asssery, but when you, a child, start only seeing a familiar adult once a year instead of once a week, you start to realize they operate on a completely different time-scale. A year or two is not, for instance, a significant portion of their life, and does not mark a significant change in the way they perceive the world or the people in it. Meanwhile, you, a child, go into 6th grade assuming your cool neighbor had your best interests in mind, then come out of 8th grade suspecting that you’re developing a very different personal and political philosophy from them and you might not want to call them so often. And that's only two years' absence. (Details have been obliterated, but that’s a true story.)
Also relevant to my belief in Future Luke is that character design. Unwound Future leaves me to assume that “Future Luke” chose this outfit, yet it looks like a parody of the sort of thing Luke wears in the "present" of the story.
If there's one thing I used to get paranoid about when reuniting with long-distance friends, it's "character consistency." Do I look like I used to? Do I talk like I used to? Are they going to recognize me as the same goddamn person? And you would think in the cases of it being more than a couple childhood years’ difference it'd be easy to say "no, probably not," and move on with my life but no, it couldn't be that simple. As I watched friend after long-distance friend become unrecognizable strangers, I remained terrified of leaving people in the dust by changing too quickly. When I visited old haunts, I'd "dress up as myself" to quietly convince old friends (and myself?) that I'm not an unknowable person.
The "Future Luke" design came off to me as a blatant, clumsy attempt at doing just that. When I started the game convinced that "Future Luke" was actually who he claimed to be, this came off as relatable and kind of charming in a second-hand embarrassment sort of way; now that I know that "Future Luke" is in fact some guy named Clive, that meaning is lost.
I can't help but find Clive's narrative about the kid relatable and compelling, though, and I still use it as a point of comparison whenever I go to write the canonical Future Luke.
Also I can’t help but draw pre- and post-Unwound Future Clive in literally any other outfit. I want that "Future Luke" costume single-use.
PARASOCIAL SELF-IDENTIFICATION
"I was you in the past, but you may not be me in the future. You follow?"
What I mean by “parasocial self-identification” (a term too long to write a fourth time) is: making the mistake of thinking other people are/were you.
This is a thing I consciously try not to do. I think it's ridiculous to assume I understand any real person to any profound extent. Fictional characters, however, are immensely knowable, and infinitely more difficult not to identify with. Authors conveniently lay every important moment of their lives, every relevant facet of their personality, every pertinent personal problem out for their audience to witness and analyze. Of course, it's up to the author how many pieces of their characters they put out there, and to each member of their audience to put these pieces together in ways that make sense specifically to them. Personally, if I recognize small parts of myself in a character, it's very tempting to headcanon them in my own image.
This is a temptation I experienced regarding Luke Triton.
In the first Layton games I played (ie, the crossover with Ace Attorney, Curious Village, and Diabolical Box, in that order), Luke and Layton aren't written with very much depth. This is not, contrary to what people usually mean when they say a character lacks depth, necessarily a bad thing. In fact, having just trudged my way through the late-series Ace Attorney games (where every character’s backstory and personality traits are exposited about at least twice), I found Professor Layton’s lack of depth refreshing. I had hours of fun filling in Layton and Luke’s “missing pieces”... with facetious jokes at first, but then more and more earnestly.
Clive's "Future Luke" narrative completely snapped me into earnest mode.
I looked at what I had picked up about Current Luke from earlier games: the sometimes-misplaced self-confidence, the devotion to Hershel as a mentor/hero figure, the occasional backtalk or temper; and I looked at what this new narrative had given me: Luke slowly growing distant from this mentor, hints of anxiety and a need for control over his situation, and that "dressing up as himself" design; and soon I found myself mapping my own experiences onto the life of this fictional character... who, I'd find out a week or two later, was actually two separate "people".
See, "Future Luke’s" narrative closely matched up with the narrative I had about my life at the time, and the differences I perceived between who I was at 23 (that's how old I was when I played this game for the first time – the exact implied age of Future Luke) and who I'd been at 13 were eerily similar to the differences between Clive and Luke. It was uncanny, and it made Clive's lies far more convincing than I probably would've found them otherwise.
I thought it was clear from the moments where Clive gives advice to Luke that he (like me!), projects his own anxieties onto this child. That's not a good look, but it is something non-children tend to do - that whole "I wish I had known this when I was your age" thing. It's just especially uncomfortable here because the child is actually convinced, for like a day, that he will literally grow up to become this guy.
I have a deep dislike for “fix the future” or “defy your destiny” stories. Typically, the source of said "destiny" is a higher power - a god, or Fate itself, or something even more strange and metaphysical. (Don't ask me how I feel about "butterfly effect" worldbuilding. There aren't words disparaging enough.) Meanwhile, every "destiny" I've had to defy was pushed on me by my fellow humans, and there's something very bureaucratic and domestic about choosing to abandon the futures your society or a loved one offers you. Honestly, the main thing that kept me playing through every Layton game was that every major conflict within them had a human or sociological origin, no matter how supernatural the premises and worldbuilding elements might be. It's so refreshing!
Clive may not have been right about who Luke Triton is or would become, but I think pretending to be Future Luke might've helped Clive figure out who Clive might be. Just like how, you know, I keep trying to do character analysis but it keeps turning into self-analysis instead.
"At first I was just toying with you. But at some point, I realized I was enjoying our time together."
You ever get the feeling that people would pay more attention to you if you acted like someone you're not?
Given every sitcom for the past several decades has had at least one episode dedicated to this, I assume it's a pretty common dilemma. The answer to this dilemma, both from the aforementioned shows and from anyone you probably ask about it, tends to be "no, just be yourself, and people will come to value you for who you are." Unfortunately, there are some situations where this is demonstrably untrue.
I've spent a good part of my life trapped uncomfortably between the "be yourself" message and the quiet socially-enforced threat that I absolutely should not attempt any such thing. So I found myself asking "alright, what version of myself does the world want me to be?" and shopping around for socially-acceptable roles I could stand to play for the rest of my life. (It's like job-hunting, but all the jobs require you to be on-call every hour you're awake, are made up entirely of emotional labor and don't come with vacations. But they'll guarantee you plenty of future opportunities! Probably.)
The role Clive selects for himself as part of his “Future London” ruse turns out to be a pretty good career for him. The only job requirements are to give instructions, act generally polite and look clever every once in a while. It also guarantees him the companionship of an adult from whom he can seek advice and a kid who might listen to advice in turn. And there are moments in Unwound Future where Clive seems to relax within this role - he'll react a little more carelessly or bank on the authority that being “Future Luke” gives him.
This is something the "be yourself" message often misses - it can be genuinely comforting to have an inauthentic role to fall back on, something people will expect you to say or do, a situation you've all seen before, where you know down to the [beat] how everyone ought to react. And yes, you might end up trapping yourself in a prison of perceived expectations, but every once in a while a hole in social norms will open and you'll be permitted to express yourself freely for a second or two, then pass it off as a joke or an eccentricity or something similarly harmless that won't upset the status quo. Or anyone who believes in a "status quo."
Of course, Clive's chosen role also comes with the side-effect that Hershel is going to be quietly questioning who "Future Luke" REALLY is from the moment they're introduced, but guess what: that's relatable, too. I used to lose my mind over the side-glances I'd catch people maybe making when I stumbled over some social trip-wire. Horrified at all times that someone might've noticed me letting the mask slip, I quietly hoped SOMEONE would figure out who the hell I actually was and clue me in on it, because I didn't think it'd be a good move to figure it out on my own, without someone else's guidance and approval.
In the Thames Arms, of course, this happens. Layton tells Clive who the hell Clive actually is: his backstory, his ulterior motive for befriending Dimitri, and the doomsday weapon Clive’s been building in secret. And Clive responds by booking it out of the room with a hostage I’m not sure he expected to take when he mailed that first letter. Layton firing Clive (freeing Clive?) from his self-imposed roles as “Future Luke” AND “Dimitri’s confidante” simultaneously caught Clive by complete surprise, is what I’m saying.
Though this sort of thing – this “forceful outing” – hasn’t happened to me, I think I’d probably react to it in about the same way: with laughter, a desperate scramble for control, and violent impulsivity. And knowing that about myself does sort of scare me. Thankfully I’m no longer waiting for it to happen.
"Deep down inside, I hoped you might be able to talk me down from the edge of insanity again."
I'm a little sick of being told I can do anything I can set my mind to. For one thing, it's simply not true - I've failed at a lot of things I was determined to do - and for another, that is actually a terrifying thought. My mind has often set itself on things which I definitely do not want to do, or which might've seriously harmed me in the long run. To put it simply, there are things someone's got to be able to prevent me from doing, such as trying to keep up social obligations while I'm so ill it hurts to walk.
It's rare to see a character whose self-sabotaging/self-destructive tendencies are portrayed as such, and not as heroic bravery or an unchangeable, tragic fact. Taking the time to self-reflect and question what you're doing can be far more difficult than "working through the pain" if you aren't accustomed to self-reflecting. (Or have been scared out of it by social pressure.)
At age 13, Clive tried to run into a burning building to rescue his probably-already-dead parents, and was only held back by one of many random adults who happened to be on the scene. This intervention probably saved his life. Years later, when Clive has the resources and authority to ensure the success of basically anything he does, he convinces himself that the only way to get other people to help him is to pretend to be someone he's not, that his co-conspirator (Dimitri) must be someone he cannot bring himself to trust, and that the only way to deal with his grief is to cause an unfathomable number of deaths. His last few lines of dialogue (and, honestly, the general last-minute-decision vibes of his plans) suggest that even though he'd convinced himself these things were true, he desperately wanted to be told otherwise. “Maybe part of me wanted somebody to save me from my all-consuming madness. As you did all those years ago...”
It's a very, very desperate way of calling for attention – “Do you care that I’m gonna put myself through this? Will you try to stop me?” – that I try to avoid, but in certain extreme states of loneliness, it’s difficult to fight the temptation.
I think Clive must be very, very lonely.
"To those in power, the rest of us 'little people' are just bumps on the road to a brighter tomorrow ... without large-scale havoc, those fools in government will never change their ways!"
This is the part where I descend into "[villain] was right" territory, because here's the thing: this game establishes that there's a government-level conspiracy to cover up the cause of that explosion which killed 10 people 10 years before Unwound Future, including Clive's parents and Claire. Is this because Bill Hawks (former engineer, current prime minister) sold the patent for the exploding machine's engine to a major corporation under the nose of Dimitri Allen (former engineer, current partner-in-crime to Clive)? Or is it because Claire returned to the explosion site a little older than expected and in a totally different outfit, thus proving time travel was possible? The text offers us no clear answer. What is clear is that any character who looks into The Explosion is met with "resistance and threats of violence." Or, in Hershel's case, actual violence.
Clive, a reporter by profession and reckless by personality, also lost loved ones in that incident, so I find it difficult to believe that he wouldn't also have tried to poke at this conspiracy. At time of Unwound Future he's so incredibly jaded about "single-minded scientists and corrupt politicians" that he's determined to quash the conspiracy once and for all by razing all of London to the ground. His attempt at this does not explicitly kill anyone, but I sincerely doubt the portion of the city he converts into a large hole was warned ahead of time. And he seems very prepared to personally (if indirectly) cause the deaths of Dimitri Allen and Bill Hawks. (He crushes the Thames Arms - where Dimitri's last seen - immediately after starting up his doomsday mech; meanwhile Hawks is strapped to a bomb inside said mech.)
2020 was an interesting year to play Professor Layton and the Unwound Future. I mean, 2016 would also have been interesting, as would have many earlier years if I'd been politically conscious for them. What I'm getting at is I understand Clive's horror and frustration at deaths caused, excused, and glossed over by his government, and I think the collateral damage endemic to his plan – the destruction of thousands (millions?) of the lives/livelihoods of the "little people" he claims to champion - lays bare the selfish, privileged position he's attacking this problem from. He's rich enough to buy out a company, move its employees underground, and (presumably) fund their construction of his enormous doomsday machine... and on top of that maintain a mostly-functioning underground city. (There's a day/night cycle down there! Even considering that its sky looks permanently smoggy, that's one hell of a lighting system.)
I don't know what Clive realistically could've done to improve the conspiracy situation - he's just one guy - but I've enjoyed speculating about the political situation both before and after his attack on London, and whether throwing his money behind, for instance, a journalism-based scheme might've had more or less of an effect.
There's a potent feeling of desperation I have with regard to public policy - things are going to have to change, and change quickly, for any large systemic problems to begin resolving. And unfortunately it looks like that won't happen soon enough for me or anyone I know to feel the effects of any change. (I wrote this paragraph three years ago. Lol. Lmao.)
I've insinuated above that Clive's plan feels very hastily-organized to me, and yeah - canon implies it's only been a few months since he set things into motion. The whole immensely destructive, horrendously convoluted fiasco reads, more than anything, as a desperate and pitiful cry for attention. Clive believes he is powerless to make things better, and to a degree, I believe him on this - after all, he's just one guy. But his individual capacity to cause others harm - to make things worse - is enormous, and there's no forgiving what he's done.
I guess part of me is worried that one of my (admittedly less-expensive) trails of desperate, impulsive decisions will make things worse for someone besides myself, too. I’d prefer to contribute to making things better.
So, having laid all that out, here’s my attempt at a unified “take”:
When I write Clive, in fic, in comics, and even here in this essay, I write him to explore narratives – both personal and societal. I believe Clive attempts, in his brief time as a journalist, to confront the larger systems that caused his trauma, but discovers that he is incapable of meaningfully combatting them on his own. Finding no one he’s willing to confide in, he instead works toward creating a world where this one-on-one fight might be possible: either a post-apocalypse where he rules over London with his doomsday machine and his mob, or his own “future London” fiction where all the problems of the world boil down to one man’s (Evil Layton’s) decisions and Clive has trusted allies who can help overpower him. When both these worlds fall apart, Clive’s just as afraid of what he’s done to construct them as what other people might say about him for having done it. “I’m afraid of who I am. But if you’re not afraid [of me]… maybe I don’t have to be.”
I’m glad our protagonists don’t condemn Clive for who they discover him to be; and I’m very glad Professor Layton and the Unwound Future doesn’t let Clive die for what he’s done. If this children's game's narrative isn't afraid enough of Clive to kill him, then I don’t have to be afraid of the part of myself who relates to him.
Incidentally, facing that part of myself helped me realize I was trans.
I think this bit of "advice" is especially revealing:
Clive: Think about this scenario. Imagine there's this bully who's always giving you trouble.
Luke: (looks surprised/invested) Go on.
Clive: Now, let's say you had that time machine we've been talking about. Would you travel back in time to when that bully was a bratty five-year-old and whale on him?
Luke: Of course not! That'd be cruel.
Clive: Of course you wouldn't, because you've got a good heart. But imagine the damage someone less kind could do with a machine like that.
Luke: I guess I never thought of it that way. We've got to stop that machine from being built!
Clive seems much less surprised about the police tagging along than he is about Flora tagging along.
Flora: I can't believe I'm meeting Luke from the future!
Clive: Eh? Oh, Flora, it's you! I didn't recognize you there for a moment... You'll have to excuse me. This is all a bit unexpected.
Flora: It's nice to know that some things never change. I see you're still easily flustered. Hee hee!
Clive: You're one to talk! As I recall, you're pretty easily flustered yourself. But it's good to see you. You look well.
Layton: Yes, Flora would be one of the unexpected turns in question. Inspector Chelmey and Barton are here as well.
Clive: Well, I'm not too surprised by the inspector's arrival. That man lives for police work.
Layton: Are you saying you expected him to tail us back here?
Clive: Expected? No. But I acknowledged it as a possibility.
I’m pretty sure that’s what this dialogue is referring to:
Viv: Yup. Dad moved out here and brought me and Mom along. But I think our move was a terrible idea. Dad hasn't come home once since he started working here, and all Mom does is complain about it.
Luke: What's he doing at work that keeps him there all the time?
Viv: Beats me! All I know is that when I grow up, there's no way I'll become or marry a mechanical engineer!
Layton: So, your father's an engineer.
Viv: Yup! Dad moved here after his old company got bought. Isn't that unbelievable? Can you imagine buying a whole company? You'd have to be super rich!
Luke: You certainly would.
