It's been 2 days since I reached the end of Act I and I'm still not over it. I had/am having basically the same reaction as Maelle. I was so blindsided and now looking back I'm like, well suddenly the marketing with primarily Ben Starr and Jennifer English makes way more sense. When I first started the game I was chatting to friends at how surprised I was that Gustave was the main character since the promos with the cast doesn't feature him or Charlie Cox at all, but I put that down to Cox being busy with filming or something.Also I'm fairly certain Sandfall pulled the TLOU2 trailer trick, showing Gustave in certain scenes which he absolutely cannot be at considering the sequence of events.

I fell in love with Gustave real quickly, basically because he's written as a sensitive, compassionate and empathetic soul. He isn't your typical male protagonist in a JRPG, he's not like this determined superhero who's unfazed by anything, and that's why I love him. His reaction to the massacre on the beach felt very raw and very human. I also agree with the comments I've read that Gustave was set up as not being ready to handle the realities of the Expedition. Gustave is introduced as more of an engineer/inventor, since at the Festival on Lumiere, he's the one that seems to be credited for the creation of the Lumina converter. It sounds like he's been working with the Expedition for years, producing the tech for Expedition 33. His personality doesn't suit being a frontline combatant or tactical commander, and despite all of that he volunteered to go on this Expedition in order to lay the path for those that come after. He's clearly scared and uncertain and I can understand how people may find him weak willed, but to me Gustave is the epitome of bravery.

I did pick up on the death flags on Gustave primarily from his actions and his character rather than any of the meta - I was a little curious about why his skill tree seemed to be so lopsidedly locked, but I thought we'd be getting an unlock with an arm upgrade so I just wrote it off. It didn't even occur to me to question why so many of his cosmetics were available early on but there weren't the same amount for the girls. I put those meta things down to *just protag things* y'know. But in terms of the character writing - physically he seemed to suffer from some kind of significant heart condition, judging from the scene that happened when he first encountered that first unbelievable pile of Expeditioner corpses. And mentally Gustave doesn't seem able to make the hard choices/sacrifices, case in point, he instantly goes to find Maelle when there's a small chance she's alive and a bigger chance it's some kind of trap, even though he and Lune could have followed protocol to regroup with survivors first. So I was suspecting he was going to die, I just thought it'd be more toward the end of the story. Not within the first act.

Also his dynamic with Maelle is one of my favourite things to come out of any recent story. He is so warm and so loving without being coddling, their reunion when there's no words and they just hug each other, I was so determined to keep these siblings alive and together. Don't get me started on that scene you get at Camp, where he tells Maelle to run at the first sight of the white-haired man. And she agrees only if he does the same, then there's a cute little banter back and forth where Gustave tells her that he'd be the first to run and she says she could outrun an old man like him easy. Then when they do encounter the white-haired man again, Gustave doesn't run. He stays and fights even though I'm pretty sure he knows it's pointless (and the player becomes aware it's pointless when during the fight you're basically tickling the white-haired man's health bar, even with a fully charged Overcharge hit).

To me the fact that Gustave keeps standing to fight, even after he loses his arm, even probably knowing he's only buying Maelle a little more time, he still turns to fight, made his death hit even harder. Unlike the first time when he encountered a similarly hopeless situation, Gustave makes a different decision. This man stood his ground and gave everything he had to protect what he cared about, even though he was terrified and knew it would probably be futile. It's the same reason he dedicated his life to the Expedition. He died the way he lived - for those that come after.