Words and Word-based Derivatives

It is ten-thirty PM on August the 20th and I am hunched over the bowl of the toilet sitting in vomit the floor is covered in vomit my legs are covered in vomit the rim of the bowl is covered in vomit and it is dripping from my face and I heave and I wretch and more spills out and suddenly it stops.

This is the worst it's ever going to get. Say it. Say "This is the worst it's ever going to get." You have to say it and you have to mean it or it'll keep getting worse.

So I loved Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Really great gameplay, beautiful music, a gorgeous world brought vividly to life by performances and animation that rivals anything in games in the past decade.

I didn't like the story.

Don't get me wrong, it's a well-told story. Like I said, performances are peak and the actual telling of the tale is top notch. But I found fault with the story itself, the big plot points and the choices made.

If you haven't already realized this is a spoiler post, maybe duck out now.

For those who otherwise don't care, the set up for the story is that once a year, a being known as the Paintress sends out a wave of death which kills everyone of a certain age. Each year that number ticks downward, so this year everyone of age 33 is killed. It's been like this for about 60-70 years, and so Expedition 33, then, is something more like the 66th Expedition to go out with the intentions of killing the Paintress and ending this genocide. For our team, we have Gustave, Lune, Sciel, and Maelle, a teenage girl who's Gustave's adoptive sister/daughter and a two-step glass cannon who can one shot most enemies by the 1/3rd mark. A lot more people went out than that, but that's our surviving party after everyone gets merked right at the start.

So I'm tired of killing our protagonists. I thought it was lame in The Walking Dead, I thought it was lame in Game of Thrones, and I found it lame here when Gustave is killed at the end of Act I. Putting aside the manner of his death (How fucking hard is it to find a rock in a cave full of rocks?!), this is really just another example of fridging, where a character is killed for the sake of another's development. In this case, our "beneficiary" is Maelle.

Normally it's a woman who's fridged in favor of a man's development (I'd say look up "women in refrigerators," but you're on Tumblr, you know what that is), so I guess some might consider this progressive, but personally I think it's a bad trope either way.

Now I'm willing to say that this event is necessary for the story and for Maelle, and for serving the greater themes of grief and loss that the story circles around. However it's with Act II that I think things start falling off the rails.

So in Act II we get a new Handsome White Man™ named Verso, who takes over as "main character." The main character is really Maelle, but for some reason the game really wants us to identify with Verso, and so we control him in our camp and now approach our former friends as a stranger.

I'm gonna be honest, I really have no idea what the point is to shifting our perspective to Verso in these sections. The game has a "relationship" mechanic denoting how close Verso has grown towards the various members of the cast, but on some level I can't help but feel this exists solely so Verso can shack up with Lune and Sciel, the two other main women of the Expedition. Honestly, they get basically nothing to do in the story from this point onward (Sciel doesn't even get a side quest like the others to finish her storyline, it just kind of ends) so maybe that's the point. I really don't know, I found the intersection of mechanics and story here to be really odd. Folks are welcome to add to my understanding if they'd be so kind. Anyway so eventually we figure out that the Paintress who we've been trying to kill, who we've believed was effectively conducting a yearly purge of people for decades, a slowroll genocide as it were, was actually trying to help us.

The Expeditioners aren't "real" per se. They live in a painting. (If this is a shock to you I can only ask "Why did you think she was called the Paintress?") The Paintress is a woman named Aline Dessendre: Her son Verso died in a fire that also scarred her youngest daughter Alicia and she'd entered the Canvas, the only one painted by Verso, to grieve.

Our Verso is a painted copy of the real one. His "Father," a man named Renoir who'd killed Gustave and who'd attacked us with the most annoying ball of visual goop ever (How am I supposed to dodge what I can't see, man) is also a painted copy: The real Renoir had followed his wife into the Canvas to get her out and fought with her, becoming a being we know as the Curator and he was actually the one responsible for killing everyone, thinking that if the Canvas were devoid of life it'd force his wife to return home.

And the Alicia we'd known is also a painted copy; the real Alicia entered the Canvas after her mother and father, gotten trapped, and was reborn as Maelle.

Now I'll admit: This is a fun twist. But it's also where the thing falls apart for me.

The end of the game hinges on the idea that Alicia/Maelle wishes to stay in the Canvas, rather than return to the world where her brother is dead and she's a horribly scarred mute in a family desperately in need of therapy. After Real-Renoir (Realnoir?) is defeated, you get the choice between Maelle, who wishes to stay in the Canvas, and Painted-Verso, who wants to kick her out, which will necessarily destroy the Canvas for plot reasons.

Now we can read this as Painted-Verso basically taking the Shinji Ikari route of committing suicide and bringing the whole world with him, but that's me remembering subtext, rather than how the game actually frames this. The Canvas's survival, and the validity of the lifeforms within the Canvas, is treated as borderline irrelevant. The only thing that matters is Maelle, and that she's trying to escape her problems by going into a fantasy world.

There's a few problems here: One, the fantasy of the Canvas is no less real to me, as an audience member, than the fantasy of the world outside the Canvas where there's magical painters at war with magical writers (by the way, probably the single funniest joke in the game). In fact, I spent 40 hours in the Canvas, and maybe 4 minutes outside of it, and you simply can't convince me that the world I don't experience is somehow more valid than the world I have experienced. At that point, you're literally fighting the story you've been telling up until now. This is a problem endemic to the "fantasy escapism" trope, but it feels rather egregious here.

Second: Maelle had lived a full life in the Canvas. She was 14 when she went in and she spent 14 years inside of it. As far as she's concerned, she's simply lived two, different, equally valid lives. Neither is an escape; they're two different kinds of hardship, and to claim one is invalid and another valid is entirely arbitrary.

Third: Seriously, why the fuck don't Lune and Sciel, who set out to stop the genocide of their community, get a say in this? Lune gets one, really great scene in Act I and then the whole plot pivots to Maelle and Verso and she's just around. Which, again, more than can be said for Sciel.

Like I recognize the Dessendre family is a bunch of psychotic, callous gods running about creation and mucking it all up for the rest of us, but it honestly feels like the writers shared that callousness. We get a lot of development for all these characters only for the ultimate resolution to be "Who cares about them? They're not even real." Which, that's kinda twisted.

This wouldn't be so bad if the endings were more neutral. They're both a mix of good and bad, though they're both framed in a way where one clearly is meant to feel more "good" and another "bad."

The Verso ending is good and Maelle's is bad, of course.

When Verso kills Maelle, Sciel walks in, and accepts her fate rather kindly. And Lune looks dour and sits and accepts it, begrudgingly. But that's really all the thought they gave them; by the end, Alicia looks out on Real-Verso's grave and sees that vision of everyone smiling and waving goodbye. Which again, seems really twisted given that we murdered them all and wiped their world from existence.

And in Maelle's ending everyone is brought back to life and Painted Verso is effectively enslaved to Maelle's whims, even as we get a horror-sting flash of her real body, slowly falling apart. So. Obviously not a "good" ending.

There's something to be said here about big stories with sweeping themes trying to tie them all together in a way that's satisfying. In the attempt to make a big "point," the story winds up tripping over itself, raising questions it cannot answer and then failing to resolve them in a way consistent with the "point." At the end, the story betrays itself. And that's sad, since the rest of the game is fucking top tier.

Thank you to everyone who got me to 50 likes!

there are times when it may seem hopeless when all things seem to collapse and the center cannot hold and things fall apart

But I assure you, it is not as bad as it seems. The world is unceasing in its movement. There is nothing stopping it from moving closer to Globular Cluster M13 in Hercules. This endpoint was fixed the moment the arc began and you cannot stop it and I cannot stop it and no motherfucking fascist on this godforsaken Earth can stop it.

Tell me, friend: Do you hear the metronome? The steady click of the gears, turning and turning in perfect synchronicity? Do you hear the clockwork of the world? Keeping time, all time, forever? Can you hear the choir of the ancients? Do you hear the people sing? Are you ready to join them? Are you ready to sing, and sing loud?

Listen: The God of Justice, Mercy, and Forward Momentum has awoken. He's in the other room. He's stretching his arms. He's swinging his feet over the bed. He's feeling the carpet between his toes. He breathes in. The air is cool and sweet.

I sent you a love letter. It was some years ago; I doubt you remember It was a vision of our future. We had a little home on an island mountain So high up it snowed, and yet so close to the water that you could smell the salt.

Yes I know that sounds impossible Or at least unlikely. But it's a fantasy, and it's mine, So I got the mountain And you got the sea.

And we'd drink and we'd dance and we'd share our notes And on occasion, we'd even do our jobs, Writing and learning and sharing what we'd found with the world But only after we'd shared it with each other.

And the world was kind, and we knew it was kind Because I was there for you And you were there for me And we could do anything together.

Gargoyling.

You fucking dumbass. You really think you can partition the world. That you can put up a fence and everyone will respect the borders you've defined for them. You fool. You absolute rube.

The human spirit abhors a cage. You'd know this if you actually walked and talked among them instead of merely observing them from your penthouse suite, pouring over data instead of pouring some goddamn coffee.

Human beings will mix. They'll intermingle. They'll cross the borders you've set for them. They'll do it once by accident and again for fun and a third time just to piss you off. They will connect, they will combine, they will become stronger while you sit around, bemoaning the erosion of the nation, race, gender, sci-fi movie series, etc.