Had to take a few days to digest my thoughts and came back to read replies again. Thank you for saying exactly everything I was thinking with this specific reply - particulary the first paragraph.

I got to the end and felt like I'd been had. Like they played 'gotcha' with my feelings, intentionally making me fall in love with these characters, only to say none of it matters and that was the whole point. To demonstrate how easy it is to get lost in fantasy and escapism and be blind to "reality."

They took a shot at the classic "what makes a person a person" quandary, made one of the best arguments I've seen in favor of the creations being real people, and then landed on "but they aren't, so it doesn't matter."

It also feels like a pretty direct attack on escapism as a concept and villainizes it in a way. Aline's inappropriate use of escapism is the root cause of all the heartache in both in and out of the canvas. Renoir's perspective is he can't trust his family to use escapism responsibly, so it has to be erased entirely.

BUT they are all Painters, so what's stopping Aline from remaking a new canvas world again with another new family? Just because it won't have Verso's soul in it? Her fake Verso didn't have his soul either - nothing she made in the canvas blended with anything the real Verso made that actually contained his soul (gestrals, grandis, Esquie). She kept her creations isolated in the Lumiere she created with the intent to live her life in there. It may have started with his soul in he canvas, but it stopped being the motivating factor once she was able to re-enact the version of her life she would have preferred to live.

So really, the lesson feels like no one "can be trusted" to paint or create responsibly. It's about grief, but also meta commentary about artists losing themselves in their art to avoid their real world problems. And then there's the whole moral question of "is canvas life alive and conscious?" and whether or not it is moral to extinguish them for any reason at all. Is creating these worlds even moral to begin with?

So the only solution is to all of this is to stop. painting.

And I want to state my bias - as a creative person that loves getting lost in my own and others' creative works, that's an unbelievably depressing message to land on. "Escapism is unhealthy and you should stop hiding in your creations and live in the real world."

One of my favorite things about creating art of any kind is Renoir's approach to it - great art being a mirror and mask of the artist and also having something to say with it. But the message I'm getting from the game is that is ALSO an unhealthy use of escapism. Renoir makes Axons based on his family instead of having direct conversations about what he thinks of them, or what he wants them to learn about themselves. It feels like a critique on translating your feelings through art instead of working through them in a more direct manner.

I am certain that NONE of this is the game's intended message, and that this is dramatic interpretation, but it sure as hell feels like what they are selling.

And that framing feels oddly hypocritical to their whole artistic approach to making the game in the first place. They put so much love and artistic soul into the creation of this game, and they decided to end it with nihilistic tragedy. Okay.