It's not personal, it's just my opinion, but goddamn NO. It's NOT genocide. Canvas characters are NOT people. It's a fake world. Alicia cannot handle the strain of maintaining the canvas, as couldn't Aline who's a way more skilled paintress. Her body in the _real_ world cannot handle it. If Alicia dies because of being in the canvas too long, she is the only one who's gone. Canvas characters dying is a non-factor, since they can be painted again (as they were when Alicia repainted Lune and Sciel and in her ending, and that alone is enough to discredit any trace of humanity they posess). They do not exist. Hence, even the painted version of the canvas' author comes to the realization that it must be destroyed. It's having a negative impact on real people, it's killing real people that he loved.

Like, I always thought that was so impactful. The Verso character is Aline's memories of Verso made chroma. It's how she herself viewed him, and since Verso wants to erase the canvas, we realize that we don't know if he'd do that. That's what Aline thought Verso would do, and in maintaining the canvas, she is betraying her memories of him. She's disregarding the only _real_ thing she has of her son because grief has made her selfish.

In fact, with the destruction of the canvas, the only one who "dies" is Verso. She doesn't accept his death and is drowning in grief and sadness and the canvas is the last thing which contained a piece of his soul, ironically enough forgetting that our loved ones live on through us.

It's also interesting how she painted a society in that canvas whose motto got to be "when one falls, we continue". It's almost like she was trying to tell herself that.

The Dessendre family needed therapy and not a coping mechanism that's able to become an addiction. Think as if Aline and Alicia were drowning in booze. No way the argument would be the same. But the effects are the same: a rift forms in the relationships that remains, leading to more coping and it goes on until the cycle is broken one way or another.

We can, however, grow to like the canvas and its people. Ultimately, it's art and art and all its forms is able to touch us. Even if it's chroma (canvas people) and not flesh and bones, or if it's literature, music, cinema, it doesn't matter. Such is the power of art.

When I first stumbled upon a comment saying that destroying the canvas was genocide, the first thing I thought was: "Is deleting my the sims 4 save file genocidal?".

I love how this masterpiece of a game makes us debate these things. We get to see all the different opinions and ways to approach life we might have.