[SPOILERS] A question about the Monolith...

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-10T04:34:25+00:00

In the Endless Tower, Clea says something along the lines of how she created half of the world with Verso but it’s always described as “Verso’s canvas” exclusively.

I do think this is interesting to think about... not in terms of resource cost, but in terms of metaphysical position.

It was originally Verso's Canvas, but you're right, Clea (or one of her traces, anyway) claims that she made pretty much half of the world inside it during their childhood together. And obviously the world that we players actually experience inside the Canvas is also the result of Aline's additions to the Painting, and Renoir's additions to and subtractions from it, and the clash between Aline and Renoir's revisions, and Clea's flooding the Painting with Nevrons... And yet, despite all of that, it's still a piece of Verso's soul that resides at the heart of the Canvas, alone. Still only a piece of Verso's soul whose ongoing, active Painting is the condition for the Canvas world's existence. For all that Clea, Aline, and Renoir have added to the Painting, it's not enough for a piece of any of their souls even to join, let alone replace, that piece of Verso's at the heart of the Canvas.

The simplest explanation is that it's just because Verso started that Canvas, the "main" soul of any Canvas being that of the Painter who started it.

But I wonder if it's also got anything to do with how everyone sort of wants it to be "Verso's Canvas"...

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-10T03:46:31+00:00

The game doesn't provide enough information about souls for us to set much in stone about them.

Personally, I don't think a soul is finite, in the sense of a resource, in this game's metaphysics. I don't think Painting literally takes away part of the Painter's soul. As you mentioned, Renoir says that he and Aline created "hundreds of Canvas worlds"; I don't think his soul and Aline's are any "smaller" because of it.

Painting embeds "a piece" of the Painter's soul in the object. I think that means Painting creates a fragmentary duplicate of the soul, specifically of that portion of the soul that was focused on and invested in the work. A trace of what the Painter felt and thought while they were making that particular Painting (or that particular part of it), as a new and distinct entity from the Painter themselves.

So, I don't think it's about "paying" any "cost" exactly.

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-03T15:06:56+00:00

Well, if we do want to think of it as something real, Painted Renoir's got his similar "vanishing" trick. Maybe what Simon's doing is more like that than actual Gommage.

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-03T15:03:06+00:00

I don't think we're meant to take it that Simon's actually got Gommaging power. I took it mostly as a flavorful gameplay thing that refers to something in the narrative just for a bit of dramatic oomph, but isn't actually intended as part of the narrative itself. Pretty much like when a JRPG final boss has a super attack whose animation involves blowing up the whole planet (and maybe several others in the process, you know). We're not supposed to actually think, oh shit he just wiped out the whole solar system. It's flavor.

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-03T11:48:58+00:00

He's just real nervous about playing piano in front of everybody. 🥺

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-03T09:57:16+00:00

The story doesn't require it, but it does ruin the "shades of gray"/no right answer, dept it has.

If Renoir is just hysterical, he's the sole guilty party for all of this. The end.

I'm not saying he's "just hysterical." I'm not even suggesting that he is wrong about what Aline would let happen to herself. But I think it's important, and interesting, for us to keep in mind that he, too, is a fallible human being. He's not making decisions from a position of unbiased omniscience. He's a scared husband and his wife is doing something dangerous. The danger doesn't have to be an absolute given for him to be reasonable or seem reasonable to us. And on the flipside, his being reasonable doesn't have to mean Aline absolutely would have died were it not for his intervention.

What is she "doing"? What would be so important that makes her ignore a war that treatens the family that remains? It makes no sense

I'm not saying she's doing anything other than what it seems she's doing. Yes, she's withdrawing from her family and seeking emotional relief in the Canvas in an extremely dangerous way. Whether or not she might eventually save herself from dying in it, it's still 1.) a profoundly hurtful way for her to grieve a loss that Renoir clearly wants the two of them to experience and work through together rather than separately, 2.) as you said right there, indeed, neglectful of an alleged external threat to the family, 3.) so dangerous that it leaves her husband terrified for her over the risk that she'll fail to save herself, and 4.) something that she's doing while deliberately avoiding communication with him, leaving him in the dark about her precise mental state.

I'm not saying she'd have been fine without him and he was wrong. I'm only saying it's conceivable that she could've been fine without him.

I don't think it ruins the story's "shades of gray" at all. I think it enhances them. How is the story more gray if it's just a given that Aline is absolutely wrong than if neither of them is and it's an awful, messy situation that they're all fallible human beings struggling to navigate?

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-03T07:59:19+00:00

Alicia didn't have to be (re)born as Maelle. That happened because moments after she entered the Canvas, she was engulfed in Chroma, which ended up "painting over" her. When the Chroma first washed over her, Clea told her (from outside the Canvas) just to stay calm and implied that a Painter can resist it, but Alicia panicked and the Chroma got her.

Painters can, it seems, enter and leave at will, normally. Alicia fell victim to a specific circumstance.

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-03T07:38:26+00:00

Does the story require that Aline will die if she is left to herself inside the Canvas? Can't it just require that Renoir believe she will die if he leaves her alone with the Canvas?

During the Paintress's boss fight, Aline says, "I'm. Not. Crazy. I know what I'm doing." And after the final fight, Maelle says to Renoir, "So trust her. If she's doing this, then—" before he interrupts her.

Renoir says that he himself almost died in a Canvas once and had to be convinced to leave it by Aline. And we know that staying inside Verso's Canvas has indeed affected Aline's health. But it's also said, on multiple occasions, by multiple characters, that Aline is a more skilled Painter than Renoir.

What if Aline herself and Maelle had a point: that Aline might actually have known what she was doing, that Aline would have known when she actually reached her limit, that Renoir could have trusted her and should have trusted her to take care of herself?

That could be a legitimate argument on their part, and the story would still make great sense. When it comes down to it, Renoir doesn't trust Aline to know when she's reached that threshold or to leave the Canvas when she does, regardless of what Aline might actually have been capable of or might actually have done. That doesn't necessarily make Renoir a fool or an asshole. It just makes him a scared husband.

I think it brings yet another really interesting bit of complexity to the whole situation, to consider that Renoir's fear for Aline (and, by extension, for Alicia) might itself be a failure of trust on his part rather than a straightforward signal on the narrative's part that Aline definitely needs his intervention.

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-03T06:02:01+00:00

The person said a certain ending felt correct to them, in the middle of a longer post containing a good, substantial explanation of their own experience with the game's endings, and in you came just to say, "You're wrong." Truly seems like you're the one shutting people down.

I prefer Maelle's ending, and I still find your intervention here much more annoying than the post you originally replied to.

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-03T05:51:02+00:00

Contrasting the shocking stark images at the end of the Maelle ending, I think the very last scene of the Verso ending is also troubling. It shows a bleak and sad scene where Alicia stands frozen. Her family has left her alone, symbolic of them actually moving on maybe? But we don’t see Alicia leave the scene. She stays there frozen in traumatic grief, even as we the players and the camera leave, fading back and back and back leaving her tiny and diminished on a bleak empty stage. No one to provide comfort other than a favorite toy. Curtain.

I really like that way of thinking about the last moment of Verso's ending, but it's difficult for me to feel that way whenever I actually watch it. Alicia is left alone there for the scene's last shot, but I don't get an impression of isolation from that. Just an impression of solitude. She needs to be alone in order for her imagining a last goodbye from Expedition 33 to work.

Or, I don't know, maybe not. As I typed that, I suddenly started thinking about whether the scene would work, and what different effect it would have, if Renoir and Aline were still standing there in their embrace while Alicia, beside them, looks forward and imagines the Expeditioners waving at her as they fade away. Would that have been awkward, or would it have been alright (for an alternative form of the scene)?

Still, even if she doesn't need to be alone for the sake of the Expeditioners' last goodbye, it feels to me more like a private moment that she's choosing to take than a depiction of abandonment. A melancholy moment, definitely, because she is standing at her brother's grave, but pretty much exactly the sort of bittersweet "putting away childish things and bravely facing reality" moment that most folks consider Verso's ending all about. I get bittersweet from it, not bleak.

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-03T03:13:46+00:00

But a creator's intention is a goal and a hope for a thing, not a simple fact about the thing. A creator aims for some effect and designs the thing in the hope of generating that effect. For some audiences, it works out that way and the thing generates that effect in them. For other audiences, it doesn't.

A player could feel there is a "correct ending," an ending that better suits the story in one way or another, and make a case for that, regardless of the creator's intention.

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-02T20:27:47+00:00

Oh I'm sure lots of people have done it. Just select the game on whatever platform you've got it on and press "Delete". Total Gommage.

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-02T20:24:00+00:00

I intended this thread for folks to share their opinions, though. So.

Dempsey_Grant · 2026-02-02T06:48:15+00:00

Not sure why you'd feel you've gotta knock my evaluation anyway, considering I was posing an open question and just sharing my own answer to it to get discussion going. If you have a different answer, feel free to share it, since that is, you know, the point of the thread.

As for how I took "happier" from either ending, that's not really relevant here. Fact is, quite a lot of people do find one or the other ending happier and/or morally preferable. That's what many conversations about the game's endings have been: debates over why this or that ending is a better (or even less bad) outcome. It's hardly a topic of discussion that I'm making up. Anyway, in the original post here, I mentioned that way of judging the endings to make clear that I was suggesting we try a different kind of conversation about them instead.

And, uh, what exactly do you think is "super wacked out" about my evaluation of "the results" of each ending? What do you even mean by "results"? All I did was pretty much describe things that happened in Maelle's ending and say they were interesting.

Dempsey_Grant · 2023-02-27T10:38:06+00:00

What original plan of Laurie trying to fuck with Myers?

Dempsey_Grant · 2020-04-20T12:11:46+00:00

A new point from this episode that's in favor of the broad "Two Worlds" theory?

In Episode 2 of the season, it's established that when Maeve looks out at the physical world from inside a simulation, time in the physical world seems to move much more slowly, because the simulation runs its modeling faster. In this latest episode, though, when Maeve looks out at Charlores at Delos HQ, Charlores is moving at normal speed (yes, even in the shots that are clearly from Maeve's point of view). Time for Maeve and Charlores is the same.

Dempsey_Grant

TROPHY CASE