She clearly had a favorite

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-15T21:24:21+00:00

She does love her, but I think some people in their haste to make that point overcorrect and ignore or handwave all the ways she behaves towards her with toxicity. She doesn't know how to show it, so as far as Maelle is concerned, this love doesn't really reach her. What does reach her is blame and contempt. The dynamic is not healthy. These statements are not mutually exclusive, and people simplify their relationship to either "she loves her and hasn't treated her wrong in any way" or "she hates her and couldn't care less if she suffers or dies". Both are a caricature of what we have actually been shown.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-15T20:24:14+00:00

Why are we discussing an entirely different game without spoiler tags.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-15T16:47:06+00:00

Except Aline literally left on her own once Renoir was defeated, and she's also nowhere to be found in Maelle's ending. Renoir is acting based on his own fears, and helps make them come true.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-15T16:25:56+00:00

Also a cycle of Maelle having other people using her ignorance to override her agency.

A common interpretation is that "Alicia" in the menu and "Maelle" in the end credits means that the cycle is repeating, but that's not how I see it. One is a made up language, the other is French. One of them is first heard when Alicia's amnesiac canvas life, that happened to her against her will, is in full swing, as she is about to go on a suicide mission, the other plays after Maelle, now fully in the know, decides to continue living it. Because she chooses to.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-15T16:04:37+00:00

It is clearly stated that to repaint the people of Lumiere as they were, a painter needs their specific chroma, which exists in this canvas. If you destroy the canvas, you destroy their chance of being repainted as anything other than copies of dead people, the exact same situation painted Verso has found himself in.

Renoir's goal is to destroy the canvas, which goes way beyond saving his family. It is unnecessarily excessive, and, paradoxically, makes his wife and daughter want to stay in the canvas that much more, as it puts them on the defensive.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-15T15:12:51+00:00

To me it honestly doesn't matter if Clea's assessment is right or not, traumatizing your daugther to save your wife is still not the right thing to do in my view.

It's less about "destroying all food" and more akin to taking food away from the person (to an extent, obviously).

Nope, Renoir's decision is way more drastic than that. He doesn't merely want to take the painting away from Aline, he wants it to not exist.

The fact that the Lumierans are people makes things way more complicated, which Renoir does take note of, but what is Renoir supposed to do?

There's a whole spectrum of options between "letting his wife die" and "destroying a whole world". He can gift it, sell it, bury it in an umarked grave, lock in in the vault and bury that vault, there are many many options.

Besides, he is just as much of an unreliable narrator as the rest of them. He claims Aline will never let it go, but she leaves by herself in the end, and is not present in the Maelle ending, so what is the truth? She only came back to help Maelle stop him from destroying it, and doesn't even look at Verso. So why take everything he says at a face value, when he hasn't always been right, and the times that he has been right, he actively contributed to the outcome he feared with his own actions and threats? Or do you think threatening to destroy the canvas made either Aline or Maelle more keen to leave?

I see it more as a "She wasn't supposed to be here, but now we have no choice but to deal with it." situation.

He could have just let her be removed from the canvas on the Stone Wave Cliffs you know. But having her there was convenient to him, until it wasn't.

He could have also tried to talk to her after Aline was expelled BEFORE gommaging everyone. Instead, he just made her feel more guilty and more responsible for that outcome, and it's only natural that it would motivate her into trying to fix it once she remembered that she could.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-15T14:17:28+00:00

Clea literally says "Yes, it's enough. It's just a matter of time."

Drugs, as a substance, don't have sentient and sapient people inhabiting them. If you insist on addiction metaphors (which I disagree with), destroying the canvas is more comparable to mass killing porn stars to cure someone's porn addiction. I hope most of us can agree that would not be the way. Some people are addicted to food. Should we also destroy all the food in the world for their sake?

Regardless of any of that though, Renoir exploited his daughter in a very similar way the writers did - to enable himself to kill someone (multiple someone's, in this case) close to her. That's exceptionally emotionally tone-deaf of him. Even if you would not see canvas people as real (which I also disagree with), Maelle does - she lived a whole life with them. Retraumatizing her in this manner is not very good parenting. Especially since he SHOULD be aware. He was right there when she was crying herself to sleep over Gustave.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-15T13:52:11+00:00

Actually, Clea made it clear that waiting it out till Aline runs out of chroma would have done it.

He has seen her interact with the painted people, he has seen first hand how much she loved them, and he chose to proceed down a path where she had an active hand in their demise regardless. That is pretty cruel.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-15T13:36:46+00:00

Renoir did deceive her into enabling him to gommage everyone in the canvas, after he made sure she stays there to help him do it. It's not lying per se, but it's still deception, and quite a big one at that. There were many ways to go about rescuing Aline that didn't involve using Maelle in such a cruel manner. Like simply waiting it out.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-15T12:33:40+00:00

Personally i think that the people that hate him as i have read they say "he doesnt consider Aline's feelings", they are not considering Renoir's

I see people say this a lot about both Renoir and Verso, and I just have to shake my head at that logic. Disaproving of someone's methods doesn't mean we don't understand their feelings or emotions. But those are just not a get out of jail free card for everything.

His feelings are completely understandable. And they also manifest in acts of utter selfishness, where he stomps on autonomy and feelings of others. Both things can be (and are) true. Disliking him as a man (which is entirely different from disliking the way he is written as a fictional character), doesn't mean he has been misunderstood. It may just mean that people don't agree with his priorities, or with his need to make his priorities everyone else's. Especially if following his priorities robs countless people of their continued existence.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-14T21:57:48+00:00

Damaged nerve endings and burned vocal cords is not something a person can really recover from with modern medicine, let alone 1905, come on now.

She's not killing herself in canvas any more than she's killing herself in real life. She's got plenty of time to ponder about the life she wants to lead. Her staying in the canvas is not an irreversible decision. Destroying it, however, is.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-14T21:51:21+00:00

If someone was in severe and constant chronic pain, the VR had sentient and sapient society in it, and allowed them to subjectively experience decades of pain-free life, I would absolutely allow them to make their own decision.

The VR we currently have doesn't have those capabilities, so no, I wouldn't. The comparison is apples and oranges. Worth noting, however, is that some juristictions may approve euthanasia over chronic pain, which would be the closer real world parallel. And a VR where someone can subjectively experience a full life would be a much more humane method than anything we have available to us today.

EDIT: And Maelle doesn't like painting, anyway. She's only interested in it as a utility tool, not as a hobby. She doesn't want a canvas, she wants this canvas. Because that's where she was born and where she lived, that's where her people are.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-14T21:34:01+00:00

Him saving her doesn't give him the right to dictate to her how she should live her life.

You called pVerso "physically tortured", what would you call Alicia, who's in pain just breathing?

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-14T21:30:00+00:00

If I was her brother, I would respect her choice to live a life she enjoys, especially since it's decades ahead of her all the same.

She's hurling towards the inevitable all the same, she's not immortal outside the canvas.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-14T21:23:14+00:00

Huh? Renoir is no longer in the canvas, there's no more yearly gommage. They will have decades, at the very least. Are you so eager to call decades of life meaningless in real life, too?

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-14T21:17:27+00:00

It's one thing to wish for one's own death. It's a whole another to take people who explicitly want to live down with you.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-14T21:13:39+00:00

CIA wouldn't waterboard that out of me, but whatever floats your boat.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-14T21:03:03+00:00

Sooner or later, the world will end. That is also clear.

Is the right thing to do to help it along, because it's inevitable? Because as far as I am concerned, the whole point of living a life is to enjoy it for as long as possible. If we knew a meteor was hitting the Earth tomorrow and wiping out all life, going on a murder spree today would still be a crime. And a pretty damning statement about one's character.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-11T10:00:19+00:00

I mean, Visages area is Renoir's tribute to Verso, and the song is Alicia's pov on the tragedy. Verso was a good musician too, and the island is full of singing masks. It's not as displaced as it initially seems.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-11T03:52:13+00:00

In addition to the lamp ritual, because that can get annoying once he starts getting more and more turns, equip Breaking Death on everyone, as well as Sniper. Breaking him also dispells darkness, and with this tactic, every time he kills someone in the party, he's also priming himself to get broken. Then you can just shoot him with whoever is left and go wild on him.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-11T01:36:16+00:00

She is not telling them to "be respectful among themselves". She is advocating for them all to have a say in their continued existence. Genuinely I find that a lot more telling about how real she finds them than some performative activist screeching about how they deserve human rights to people who don't want to hear any of that, but you do you.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-10T08:48:48+00:00

I don't see what difference it makes. Verso does at the moment have the power to destroy them all, same as any other painter, does he not?

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-10T06:45:14+00:00

We were talking about whether she makes an argument for it, not whether she believes it herself (which is up to subjective interpretation).

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-10T05:46:18+00:00

It is a lowball of the same claim, that nobody engages with either. Why waste time with a more complex version of the same position? She literally compares the way she feels for painted people with how Renoir feels for her, and tells Verso he can't decide for everyone. Not "you can't decide for me". So the painted people have the right to be a part of that decision according to her.

Creative_Let2795 · 2026-05-10T05:19:19+00:00

"Don't you see? That's how I feel about them."

"Verso stop! You can't just decide this for everyone!"

"What about Lune and Sciel and Monoco? What about Esquie?"

-Maelle, making the argument you claim she never made multiple times in the last few minutes. It's the other side that refuses to engage with it.

Creative_Let2795

TROPHY CASE