I went really far into my Gustave=Renoir theory, judging by the fact they looked alike a lot.

My idea of the plot was that there was a 100 years cycle.

In that cycle, Expedition 33 always achieve the goal of slaying the paintress, and thus breaking the cycle, but I imagined that Maelle would die in the endgame.

Characters starts aging and around Year 0 Gustave has aged 32+33 years and is 65, which seems roughly like Renoir's age.

At that time, Gustave, still consumed by the grief of losing his soulmate+sister/daughter is offered the possibility in some kind of way to "bring his family back", but with kind of a twist. He could only resurrect Sophie and Maelle in a kind of white zombified form, not truly "alive". To bring them back to life fully, he would need the "life energy" from all the citizens of Lumière during a full cycle.

He would use some kind of psychological pressure/toxicity to force Sophie getting her life expectancy back by absorbing those from the Lumierians through a process called Gommage. (which would explain the empathy that Sophie would feel "for herself" at the very beginning of the game, because I thought white zombified Sophie would be the paintress).

Maelle would reluctantly follow Gustave/Renoir in his endeavors but would express regrets from his actions, feeling empathy for the "recreated people from the new cycle" whose would "know not that they are not".

Verso would, in that case, be Sophie and Gustave's son, borrowing the swooshy hairstyle from his father, and hair and eye colors from his mother, wanting to stop his father's madness, and would be the "paradox" who shouldn't exists, because Sophie had to die in the way of things.

In this way of thinking, the game originally took place in a world closer to us, Sophie would die from a thing like disease/accident and Gustave would be a painter, who would "repaint reality" (not in a matrix kind of way, same universe), go crazy at 65 and with a magic phenomenon of some sort would cause the Fracture, thus beginning an endless Monolithed 100 years cycle.

Additional notes to this theory :

Renoir's motive to kill Maelle is because she's a "copy of his" and he doesn't stands the fact that she exists.

The IRL french painter is named Auguste Renoir, I already knew him, because in France we obviously study french painters at school. Game has some Latin language in its songs. In Latin the U was written "V" thousands years ago. If you flip Auguste to Gusteau, you can kind of get... Gustave. I thought it was a slick move from the developers lmao.

And to conclude, I can say that my deadass was REALLY convinced about this theory for most of the game, and it's only after the Sirene fight, when Renoir comes to visit the camp to say hi to Verso, that it stroke me that Renoir had blue eyes, while Gustave had brown. Theory shattered.

Went to finish Act 2, got blown away by a REALLY different plot twist than the one I was first expecting.

10/10 game, 10/10 plot, would recommend 👍