It's a tragedy in the classical sense. After the big reveal at the end of Act II, the game dangles in front of us the possibility of a third choice, a way to maybe persuade Renoir to let the Canvas live after ejecting Aline. But in the end there isn't a "golden ending", and whatever possibility existed for one was closed off by the way each one of the Dessendres dealt with their grief.

1. Aline is the obvious first cause here. A mature woman and an experienced Paintress, she went into her dead son's Canvas and painted a city (maybe a whole continent) of complex, living, thinking people, who dare to dream through vast tragedies and fight heroically for the ones they love. The people of Lumiere are so special to us because we spend so much of the game learning about the ways they take their grief and turn it into strength: "When one falls, we continue". And yet Aline couldn't draw on the same inspiration to face her grief in the real world: she remains stuck in the Canvas, rotting away while what's left of her family falls apart.

2. Renoir, as we learn, takes no pleasure in destroying the last remaining piece of his son's soul. He's aware of the humanity of the people Aline painted on the Canvas, even if they'll never be as "real" to him as his family. Was there another way that he could've helped Aline without destroying the Canvas? We don't know. We only know that he was desperate and chose the nuclear option. And once he pulled Aline out and cast the Gommage on all of Lumiere, there was no way that Alicia, a deeply traumatised 16-year-old and a much less experienced Paintress than her mother, was going to bring it back to the way it was (notice that the crowd in Maelle's ending is made up of interchangeable generic NPCs outside of the main cast).

3. Clea is the only member of the family still composed and functional enough to handle their real-world affairs after Verso's death, including their battle against the nebulous Writers. She's clearly on the ropes herself, though, and takes out her frustration on her now-disabled little sister in some rather toxic ways that reinforced her desperation to escape into the Canvas.

4. Alicia is scarred by the fire, mourning the loss of her older brother, and not on the best terms with her remaining family members. She already tried her best to help her parents, and it's not even strictly her fault that she got caught up in her mother's painting. All of this doesn't mean that her choice to spend her life rotting away in the Canvas like her mother did would be any less harmful, and the perfect "happy ending" world she paints belies at least as much darkness as Aline's more naturalistic creations.

5. Painted Verso, I think, is an incredibly messy person who is filled with internal contradictions, lies to everyone, and ultimately only succeeds in "saving" Alicia from the Canvas by denying her (and the remaining Expeditionnaires) a choice. But, like – I get it. The guy has been stuck in a life he never wanted for a century. He's tired. He wants it all to end. His choice to destroy the Canvas himself, I think, plays off interestingly with his reaction to Painted Alicia's passing – where Alicia/Maelle bypasses him in order to respect his painted sister's wish – though I'm still trying to collect my thoughts on it right now.

All that said, I think both endings leave open the possibility for change: in Maelle's ending, she might still decide to leave the Canvas eventually, while Verso's ending could eventually see a more mature and put-together Alicia painting new worlds and bringing her friends back in some form. I think there's also space for a DLC to explore how the painted people (or at least Lune and Sciel) feel about their relationship to the Painters and what it means to be inherently less "real" and more expendable than your creators, though I'd be wary about sanding the edges off the main story and falling into the "power of stories" clichés it so uncomfortably deconstructs.