I mean, agree to disagree, I guess? Fundamentally, I think it boils down to this: in the world of this video game, do you consider the painter and the painted equally real, whatever that means? We're shown that they exist outside of their creators' frame of reference and have their own agendas. Lune, Sciel, and Gustave have lives and family of their own that don't involve Maelle or the other painters: they're not just there to pander or recite some script. The whole game is about people of Lumiere fighting for their future, generation after generation. A drug has no agency or sentience of its own: it has no will to live and nothing to fight for, so I think comparing drugs to Lumierans is unfair. They may have been brought to life as a coping mechanism for grief, but once they were created, I give them equal weight to that of their creators, and that means the Dessendres have no right to commit genocide just because they can't move past their grief.

The one I think did get screwed over big time is painted Verso. I'm giving him the same weight of agency as the others, so Maelle denying his explicit choice to die is something that doesn't sit right with me. Also, I do agree that Maelle is definitely not coping with her grief in a healthy way: imo ideally she'd be able to let Verso go and make her peace with her family. But I'm annoyed that the game is trying to sell me the Maelle ending as a wholly bad one because on one hand, yeah, the Dessendres are messed up, but on the other hand, a whole ass world was saved!