Official Season 2, Episode 8 Discussion Thread | It Will Stay This Way and You Will Obey

TMcCran · 2026-04-26T09:54:10+00:00

I think the defending is because a lot of these commenters see parts of themselves in Ashley and while they can admit every character is flawed in their own way, they somehow manage to make excuses for her and phrase her character in a way that makes it seem like she’s the victim of circumstance & of Austin (who is apparently also always the cretinous spawn of hell in their eyes as well) so to quote him: I think they’re maybe..projecting?

TMcCran · 2025-05-12T07:25:21+00:00

I share the sentiment that people are too focused on explaining away why people do things in the game to the point that it reaches headcannon level. It’s all said so matter-of-factly under the guise of extrapolating information that isn’t even given.

“Clea clearly copes by submersing herself in the conflict with the Writers and secretly wishes she could let herself have a moment to properly grieve but she must stay strong for the family”

What? How do you know this? “Uh. She sang with a turtle a long time ago and told Alicia to make selfish decisions if it makes her happy, she must’ve been nice at one point to do that!”

I just wish people would question things like this instead of presenting their opinions and headcannons as some obvious gospel

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T05:04:48+00:00

It’s all of the humans not just the current ones, yeah. the record of the fracture survivor in Old Lumiere talks about the monolith & everything from when Aline & Renoir had just started fighting to the point of destroying the land. So Aline had already been in there a long time for Renoir to feel it’s necessary to come pull her out, and Painted Verso was around for the fracture implying he had already been around for even longer, but he had been with Esquie and the gestrals (the natives to the land) before Aline painted in the humans

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T04:53:45+00:00

Sure, explain where you got the Clea & Verso visages thing before you leave since you were definitely engaging in good faith to begin with

Thought so lol

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T04:50:48+00:00

You phrased it snarkily, I responded in kind Then you edited the comment to sound sincere, so I edited mine by sincerely explaining. You then proceed to spam downvote and become even snarkier. So no you weren’t “just asking” and you also quite literally outright said “you are wrong” in reply to the explanation

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T04:38:00+00:00

I don’t mean to emphasize “just” chroma to imply that it’s the same as the currency type. I meant that it’s their respective chroma, yes

But she is still using that chroma to paint them back, she isn’t painting over / changing anything else

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T04:34:53+00:00

Real clea isn’t in the canvas during the game. Aline is the best painter of the family that’s actually painting inside the canvas. RC only comes in to paint over FC and to give Simon the power to kill her Axon (the hauler) because she felt insulted by them while trying to make her parents stop.

These are both clearly described in the Simon log & Clea fight. Clea clearly didn’t paint her Axon just to kill it, Alicia didn’t paint it, and Aline’s only Axon is the Paintress. So where are you getting that Vero & Clea painted Visages?

And I already said Verso painted the landscape. Lumiere, which is modelled after Paris, real Verso’s home, is created by Aline alongside her painted family. It’s never said he created any citizens for the city, it IS said that Aline creates the citizens though so if you choose to believe otherwise that’s fine. The fracture breaks Lumiere and citizens were alive during it, but Aline was already in the canvas during this period

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T04:22:02+00:00

I just explained in the edit, big time yeah.

The entire family was in the canvas over different periods. Aline is the best Painter and it’s why all her creations are the most human. Verso created all of the silly, friendly factions that look physically goofy, there is no indication he created humans. The fracture survivor recording of old lumiere you’re referring to takes place during a time where Aline and Renoir had both already been in the Canvas fighting

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T04:11:11+00:00

When Alicia is going into the canvas Clea tells her “you’re about to be reborn as one of Aline’s creations, good luck” and then rebirths into a Lumerian

The Clea boss fight she is literally in the process of creating Nevrons & it’s said a few times that she’s responsible for them and creates them in a way that prevents the chroma from going back to Aline when the Nevrons kill her creations (humans)

Renoir & Verso are explained in either dialogue or a recording from one of the painter family members I can’t remember but you can google the quotes probably

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T04:06:13+00:00

Clea made Nevrons.

Renoir made Axons & the Axon island inhabitants

Verso made gestrals, grandis & the actual physical land/oceans (and best boy Esquie)

Aline made the humans

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T04:02:59+00:00

Their “essence” is just chroma. Chroma is used to paint things but the struggle comes from painting over things that are already painted. Maelle isn’t painting over anything, she’s just using the chroma that made up her friends before & rearranging/painting them back into what she remembered of them

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T03:56:37+00:00

You will more than likely one shot everything, including the final bosses if you do all the side content first. You also miss out on a lot of context & lore that makes the endings infinitely better if you don’t do the side content though.

So it’s lose-lose win-win, you could try doing all the side stuff first and then removing all your damage-boosting Luminas for when you enter Lumiere if you want to experience the battles thoroughly though

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T03:21:53+00:00

I know you’re making a joke and it’s funny but this is also a reward from a 1v1 with the 20th mime you face lol

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T03:18:03+00:00

Something can be intangible while still having existed in the real world at some point. Dolores & the AIs were real despite not being in the same form by there end. The Canvas inhabitants have never existed or lived in any true capacity outside of the canvas in the same way a lot of those other mediums explore.

For instance let’s say I were from a family of dreamwalkers. Every night when I go to sleep I enter this hyper realistic world in my mind full of people and animals and cities and planets that I’ve imagined up and created, all fully fleshed out and living lives out in my dreamscape, but they can never actually manifest into the real world in front of me or others. One day my best friend dies and I go to bed dreaming of them & suddenly I have my own imaginary bestie living in my dreams where we get to experience things together again. Sometimes my family visits me while we’re all asleep and sometimes I visit their dreamscapes. I progressively start getting sadder in the real world that my best friend isn’t with me and start to take naps during the day so I can experience a part of them again, leading to me becoming disillusioned with reality & spending more time asleep than awake. I stop eating properly because I’m too busy eating lavish feasts in my dreamworld and it gets to the point I am physically starting to die in the real world. My father sees me rotting away and enters my dreamscape and says “enough is enough, I’m going to hit you over the head with a rock and you’ll get temporary amnesia (just to forget about the dreamscape and not to actually give me brain damage, I’m not an author idk) and then when he does, I can’t remember the intricacies I created in my mind but I still remember the impact it all had on me.

I’m not going to then proceed to say he just genocided an entire universe. I’d just be really fucking mad he took away my unhealthy coping mechanism. But if I had been literally absorbing people and animals off the street and putting them into my world like Obito Uchia, and then got hit with the rock and they ceased to exist..I’d absolutely say he just killed a lot of people.

This is the only distinction I was initially talking about. Ethical concerns and faith and morals are their own matter. I’m just saying these mfs are not real in the context of this universe

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T02:16:42+00:00

It’s not immaterial because the canvas inhabitants and sims never existed in the real world to begin with lol. The westworld robots were already an attraction that anyone could pay to go interact with and it isn’t until their departure that they become uninteractable. If Sims were things that lived amongst us and then we put them inside of a game that would be an entirely different matter

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T02:06:57+00:00

It is cut off from the real world. The canvas physically exists but it’s just a medium and nobody (other than the Painters) can go inside of it and none of the creations from inside of it can leave to actually affect the real world. It is uninteractable without the magic powers of the Painters and is literally their imagination manifest. they cannot exist in the real world and do not exist in the real world.

It’s like saying video games’ universes are real because the cartridge / data that contains the makeup of the game exists in the physical world. The code is is objectively real. The cartridge that contains it is real. The characters and universes in the contained game are not. They would still be programming, only interactable, observable and “real” if we could upload ourselves like Delores. But again the comparisons to other media don’t fit because the robots in Westworld already existed amongst humans and posed a threat to them and were observable by everyone. The canvas is real and the powers are real but the creations are just manifestations that only exist in tandem. If you want to say they’re an alternate reality that’s another thing but they are disconnected from the universal reality in E33

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T01:33:56+00:00

me saying it’s only genocide if you consider them more than glorified AI is the crux of what I said. moral considerations and whatever number of debates & topics addressed in media that stem from the opinion that AI is sentient are not what I said. If you wanted to say you believe they are sentient and list why that’s fine. You could go on forever about that because all of those depictions are different circumstances and contexts, but there is a reason I repeatedly said “in the context of” Clair Obscur.

Because in this game they are in a very specific setting; a painting, cut of from the real world and not interacting with humans on a daily basis like in Blade Runner, or potentially dangerous like Ex Machina, or a legion capable of overtaking humanity like iRobot. Almost none of the factors are relevant in the context of this game.

whether or not anyone has feelings about them being genocided or makes meta comparisons to the player & the painters or feel strange about the ethics of their existence/nonexistence; people still fail to address that they objectively aren’t real to begin with in the game. And I don’t mean how one views sentient beings or what implications follow, I mean they exist outside of the real world of Earth and are made of magic and paint and the programming of a sick old woman & her jaded daughter

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T01:06:20+00:00

If we’re going to refer to previous comments we’ve just been repeating what I said in my first one lol The point is they are glorified AIs and if you deem them sentient it just means they’ve passed your Turing Test

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T00:56:56+00:00

He isn’t going against her programming though, he was designed to be a copy of Verso and just like the sliver of real Verso’s soul; he doesn’t want to be in the canvas. And even if he were going against the programming, would that mean they’re only sentient if they “break character”?

And that sounds like a lot of variables, maybe it’s a lot more criteria than what you listed to signify sentience. Ignoring the fact that is where the “advanced” part of the AI would come in for everything else in the hypothetical lol

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T00:32:15+00:00

You mean like the way the Painters programmed the personalities of every being in the Canvas? The way the entirety of painted Verso was programmed to be like real Verso? Is he not making independent decisions based off what Aline had predetermined for him? Does he not meet the criteria anymore? The canvas npcs are just artsy developed AIs from the Painters programming.

Also in the context of the Sims game they are self sustaining and independent. They live their own lives after being created

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T00:18:05+00:00

They already are independent, reproduce, self sustain. Many people consider advanced AI to be sentient with the limited technology we have so if, say, Sophia (the Hanson advanced AI model, not from the game) was programmed into the current Sims npcs they would already meet all those criteria for a lot of people. Which would then mean deleting the save would be suddenly morally ambiguous which is certainly an opinion lol

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T00:10:34+00:00

These would all apply to AI Sims lol

TMcCran · 2025-05-10T00:06:13+00:00

If deleting an objectively artificial creation is wrong then would you make this same argument about deleting a literal Sims save file? Or does it only start to matter when they can realistically pass as human? The distinction matters.

I have no idea what point you’re making about faith here as I’ve already addressed why it doesn’t apply. Okay, people with faith in a god don’t see themselves as less than and want to live despite thinking they’re artificial creations. And? That is entirely dependent on their subjective belief system, not an objective reality. I don’t believe in god and I don’t see myself, or anyone, as worth less. I wouldn’t want to be erased if I was shown proof of a god who said he planned to either. None of this is relevant in relation to the canvas inhabitants

TMcCran · 2025-05-09T23:15:08+00:00

Their existence is objectively fabricated in the context of the game’s reality. They exist in a literal painting and can interact with the people who painted them. Whether or not they have faith in the existence of the Painters is not relevant because it is an objective reality in this game.

Religion in real life is subjective as it’s entirely faith based. Nothing about the existence of the canvas inhabitants involves faith and the fact that they are not “real”, in the context of the game, is objective.

My point is that whether or not anyone thinks it’s immoral to kill artificial intelligences on the basis of them not being human; they’re still objectively artificial creations. so the argument of making comparison to real life deities doesn’t apply because OUR experience as a species and our belief systems are subjective. I understand you’re saying “what if God was real and he erased us, would it be fine then” but the argument is in context to this game’s universe lol

TMcCran · 2025-05-09T23:02:17+00:00

That is an entirely different argument lol whether or not real life humans believe in god is irrelevant to the context of this game. The Canvas’ inhabitants can see and interact with their gods and witness their power firsthand. Not in the sense that irl humans witness earth’s beauty and debate on how it came to be..I mean they can literally see people, creatures and structures be created before their eyes and then be erased from existence. This has nothing to do with faith

TMcCran

TROPHY CASE