Reshaping Reality

THIS IS A CROSSPOST FROM COMRADERY. Part of a three part series: Disability (part 1), Right to Exist (part 2), and Accountability and Healing (part 3).

In a world built upon alienation, people seek to be heard and seen. This may happen through social media, video or podcasts, essays like this one, video game guilds, or other creative avenues. There’s this innate need for our existence to be recognized. For us to not be erased. When forces beyond our control seek to dominate and coerce us into either compliance or annihilation, people will eventually rise up to demand their freedom. Many marginalized populations within Capitalist Colonialist societies, such as America, struggle with institutions that often seek to erase their identity, culture, and their personhood. 

In Clair Obscur, we can see this struggle with existence and erasure play out visibly through the yearly “gommage.” After the Fracture — a cataclysmic event — Lumeire must contend with yearly erasures of all people above a specific age. That age is determined by the number painted on the monolith, which looms oppressively over the world. Each year that number decreases, and more are erased from existence. The temporal existence of their society within their present and future lays in uncertainty.

This has a parallel with how oppressors treat the oppressed within societies. Just as the number warns Lumiere who will be next, Fascist/Authoritarian societies will declare who is unfit for society. Who they focus on, and from there we can see the potential trajectory for others who lay in their destructive path. 

By constructing a specific framework to paint over marginalized people, fascist/authoritarian societies seek to control the marginalized population, and effectively erase what makes them uniquely them. Thus, like the oppressors within our world, the Dessendre family render the Canvas people’s existence as less than their own; in this way, it justifies the gommage’s genocidal consequences. However, is it true that the Canvas people are not real? That their existence is less than the Dessendre’s? Is destroying them the morally good choice? Or does it only continue the injustice preyed upon the Canvas people of Lumiere?

Parallels between Our World and That of Clair Obscur

The act of erasing people often begins through dehumanization and a redefining of the attributes of reality. For example, as of June 2025, under Trump’s Administration, nonbinary genders were erased, and gender was collapsed into a binary sex structure. This was done despite biology revealing that gender is not a simple binary, that it is based on chromosomes, primary and secondary sex characteristics. If looking simply at chromosomes, six biological genders would exist, but if one adds in the primary sex characteristics — reproductive organs for example — and secondary sex characteristics — effects of hormones on the body — one can calculate over 50 possible permutations (See chapters 11 through 13 of Evolution’s Rainbow by Joan Roughgarden). 

But that reality has been erased by the Trump Administrations narrow definition. This in turn places people like myself — a nonbinary disabled person — in a state of simultaneously existing in the physical realm of the planet Earth but also not existing by American law. The erasure of my personhood and identity is a way to sterilize who I am and force me into a narrow mold, and anyone who does not fit will be eradicated.

However, no matter how much control fascist governments weaponize, freedom cannot be erased. In Star Wars Andor, Nemik writes a manifesto, where he explains how Fascist control is fragile and the spontaneity of freedom: 

“There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Remember this. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. And then remember this. The Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that. And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege. Remember this. Try.”

Thus, people who are being erased by fascism continue to reach for freedom. To try and break free of the restrictive definitions of reality. Part of those restrictions lay in the temporal reality that oppressors construct to place their victims in a past reality, where we no longer exist in the present.

This is the method that the United States of America used to control and erase the Native cultures that existed prior to the white settlers of the 1600s. Historians and lawmakers construct a temporal reality that places Native people as existing in the past, where the violence conducted against them was sanitized. As relics of a bygone age, and thus, any Native that still lives becomes coerced into the American society, their culture and identity stripped from them through relocation to reservations and brutal Indian schools. This is one part of the larger genocide against Native people’s.

Erasure of people, denial of their existence, and the question of whether such people even still exist creates a temporal paradox. Can people both simultaneously exist but not exist? In my case, I exist in the reference frame of the planet Earth, where people can see my body and speak with me directly if they so choose. However, in the realm of American (and some states’) law and history, my existence has been erased, and thus I no longer exist within the current Administration’s temporal reference frame. I am collapsed into a facsimile of who I am — a painted version of my self positioned to narrowly fit what others have decided I must be in order to be allowed existence.

This question of who is allowed to exist, what cultures can exist, and whether a population exists within our present not only shapes our discourse but also the world in which we live. We can see this in how the rights of trans people like myself have slowly been stripped away — loss of healthcare, loss of anti-discrimination laws, loss of the right to exist in public and use a restroom, etc., until nothing remains. A slow gommage that ripples through my community, until we are but petals on the wind.

Take the Gommage in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and stretch it slowly over months and/or years, where each part of the person slowly begans to evaporate away into rose petals. It’s a slow sort of temporal-based death, and is the reality of many marginalized people in our current society. However, we refuse to go quietly, just as the people of Lumiere also refused. 

To resist the Gommage, the people of Lumiere send Expeditions in the hope they will defeat the Paintress and end the slow temporal and spatial erasure. So that they can secure a future for their people once more. This need to not be erased, to exist, becomes a revolutionary anthem. 

It’s a parallel to the revolutionary anthem of Trans people resisting our erasure, of Indigenous people fighting against genocide as they simultaneously restore their culture and identity, of Black people and their demands for justice, of Disabled people and our refusal to just lay down and die. Marginalized populations face their own form of gommage, but it’s a much slower and traumatic death than what Lumeire faces.

To illustrate, let’s look at Gustave and Maelle speaking of death: 

MAELLE: I, uh, I thought I was used to losing people. Life of a foster child, right? But not — not like that — on the beach… that man… 

GUSTAVE: Yeah. Yeah… I know. Nevrons we were prepared for but not… (pause) And now we finally found other survivors and it’s… (pause) You know, that — that’s the insidious thing about the Gommage. It’s predictable… almost gentle. It makes Lumiere complacent and accepting but … the Gommage is equally violent and death… Death is just as final.

That truly is the insidious thing as the Gommage — whether it happens relatively quickly like in Clair Obscur, or over long period of time in our world — people are complacent and almost accepting of it because the institutions have normalized sacrificing populations as necessary to the good of society. But truthfully, the gommage is indeed “equally violent” as simply killing a person. To strip a person of their identity, culture, personhood? To render them as no longer real within society? That is a form of death.

This concept of sacrificing populations for the ‘good of society’ has its name in necrosecurity. Martha Lincoln writes: 

Thus, though necrosecurity is deeply informed by anti-scientific and anti-expert sentiments, it is not simply a failed biosecurity, nor is it a form of biosecurity in which the project’s intrinsic flaws are made visible. Normatively, biosecurity does not call for human illness or deaths. By contrast, necrosecurity explicitly and centrally instrumentalizes death—imagining a sacrificial population whose exposure to harm will secure against losses to more qualified populations. It is a calculated attempt to leverage the pathogenic and epidemiological properties of disease towards social, political, and economic ends. Lying between passive “letting die” and overt murder of political enemies, necrosecurity entails the promotion of death intended to preempt other deaths; instead of seeking to prevent human deaths, as biosecurity would, it attempts to secure life by allowing death to flourish selectively. 

We saw this concept of necrosecurity at work through the last five years, where America — and other countries — engaged in normalizing death for specific populations, in order to boost the economy for “more qualified populations.” America has also shifted to past tense regarding the pandemic, despite Covid-19 still existing, still mutating, and still disabling and/or killing vulnerable populations. This shift of placing the virus in the past is a form of temporal erasure.

Within the game, Gommage places those erased in the past. They fade into rose petals, lost to the present, and thus temporally erased from the world and Lumiere society. This Gommage is seen as a force perpetuated by the Paintress, but this is only because the Lumierians see her actions before the Gommage sweeps over their city. So they associate her repainting the number to be the act that unleashes the Gommage. With the truth masked and no other source of knowledge disputing this theory, the misinformation perpetuates through their culture and their expeditions.

In this manner, people can become misguided with incorrect information, and thus not understand the true culprit is not necessarily the Paintress at all. Lune says to Gustave at one point that, “this is a war of information.”

Indeed it is. Not just for the people of Lumiere, but also for our own world. This is why the current American Administration hid and erased data pertaining to infectious diseases, LGBTQIA people, and Black and Indigenous People of Color. Why sources of information are being placed under lock and key and no longer accessible to the public. The war on information puts the oppressed into a constant reactionary stance; if they don’t have the full information, then how do they know who to target to end their oppression? 

Thus, the Lumierians, lacking the full information, focus on reaching the Paintress, but the truth of Gommage lies under the Monolith, not at its peak. Gommage doesn’t come from the Paintress, but from a being trapped under her monolith, who unleashes the Gommage after she issues her warning. It’s not until end of Act 2 that this truth is revealed.

Thus, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 forces the player to reckon with questions situated on who is allowed to exist, who is allowed to continue into a future, and if sacrificing populations are necessary for the ‘good’ of society.

Or to dig even deeper, what is this temporal reality in which Lumiere in its people exist? Is it situated in the past, soon to be a footnote in the history of the Dessendre family? Or is it a present, a hope to continue to exist despite the Dessendre family? Does the people of the Lumiere and of the Canvas hold the same value, worthy, and right to exist as the Dessendre family?

The game itself posits a neutral position, where the various endings and presentation of story are up to the player to interpret. At least that’s what some game analysts say, but I think the game pushes the player toward a specific conclusion to these questions of existence versus erasure.

We are placed immediately within Lumiere with Gustave and Maelle, and soon we meet other people in the city. We see its population preparing for the Gommage. We experience the heartache and pain with them, and the oppression they face under this totalizing force that governs their lives.

Throughout the first Act, we connect with these characters — their hopes, fears, dreams, joys — and through them we are able to see a temporal existence that paints their lives with meaning. So when we are thrust into the ‘real world’ of the Painters by the start of Act 3, it feels jarring. Disjointed and strange. We are no longer in the same temporal reality, and the truth unveiled about the nature of the Lumierian world unsettles. It shakes our understanding of reality and existence.

The game also shifts the timeline, where the start of Act 3 becomes the past. We then see the start of our journey existed beyond the world of the Canvas, where the story threads through the timelines of two linked worlds: Dessendre’s ‘real’ world and the world of the Canvas. Time between the two do not fully match either, as the decades spent in the Canvas do not match precisely with the time span in the ‘real world.’ Within this game, multiple temporal realities exist, and as the game shows, each are uniquely their own.

It’s only in the second and third Acts where the questions the games ask start to shift. Part of this is due to Act 2 being specifically Verso’s perspective, where he stands in a separate temporal reality than the Lumierians. Thus, the game asks: are other temporal realities as equally valid as the Dessendre’s? Or does the Dessendre’s temporal reality matter more?

Temporal Realities and the Right to Exist

Mark Riften writes in Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination: 

“Within post-Einsteinian notions of time, there is no such thing as an absolute time that applies everywhere at once. Instead, the experience and calculation of time are contingent. Simultaneity depends on one’s inertial frame of reference, such that two observers who are moving with respect to each other will not agree on when an event occurs or on other aspects of time’s passage. If in physics a frame of reference refers to relative motion, we also can think about that concept in more socially resonant ways. Such collective frames comprise the effects on one’s perception and material experience of patterns of individual and collective memory, the legacies of historical events and dynamics, consistent or recursive forms of inhabitance, and the length and character of the timescales in which current events are situated.”

Within Special Relativity, the inertial frame of reference is crucial to understanding a particular scenario. Reference frames describe a coordinate system in which temporal, motion, and spatial measurements of an observer can be done. Without articulating the reference frame, the situation becomes incomprehensible and impossible to measure or observe. Thus, reference frames are denoted by observers in order to agree on a shared understanding of the events in question.

Let’s place it within a social context. For example, much of American history books will label Indigenous Tribes of North America as being in the past, as if they no longer exist within the present time. For some tribes this may be so, but for many this is a falsehood, as they do indeed still exist in present time. America has crafted a reference frame here, but it posits that its frame is more real than those of Native people.

Riften clarifies: 

U.S. settler colonialism produces its own temporal formation, with its own particular ways of apprehending time, and the state’s policies, mappings, and imperatives generate the frame of reference (such as plotting events with respect to their place in national history and seeing change in terms of forms of American progress). More than just affecting ideologies or discourses of time, that network of institutionalized authority over “domestic” territory also powerfully shapes the possibilities for interaction, development, and regularity within it. Such imposition can be understood as the denial of Indigenous temporal sovereignty, in the sense that one vision or way of experiencing time is cast as the only temporal formation—as the baseline for the unfolding of time itself. 

As Riften describes, America seeks to situate Native people in the past in an attempt to control their narrative, their legacy, and their existence. It’s a form of erasure and genocide, to rewrite history and present time in order to exclude populations. This makes it easier to justify the death of populations if the narrative already posits them as being of the past and not the present. 

Riften writes: 

As in the account offered by relativity, there is no inherently privileged or mutual “now” (or sense of time’s passage more broadly) shared by disparate frames of reference. Through Indian law and policy, Native peoples have been subjected to profound reorganizations of prior geographies and modes of inhabitance, forms of governance, networks of exchange, tempos of ordinary life, and dynamics of individual maturation in an attempt to reorder Indigenous temporalities, to remake them in ways that fit non-native timescapes of expansion and dispossession.

It is true that within the laws of physics “there is no inherently privileged or mutual ‘now.’ Indeed, special relativity directly states:

1. The laws of physics must be the same in all inertial reference frames.
2. The speed of light (in a vacuum) is constant in all inertial reference frames.

Inertial refers to a reference frame in which everything within that frame moves at a constant velocity.

The Earth would be an inertial reference frame in the sense the planet’s motion can approximate to fit the definition. (There are some caveats here that relate to gravity and orbits, but it’s unnecessary for the overall argument). Thus, within the reference frames of those on the planet Earth, there is no privileged frame that exists as more real than another. The laws of physics are the same in all frames, and each are equally valid. 

Is There One Reference Frame To Rule Them All?

To dig deeper, let’s examine the differences between Canvas Time and World and Dessendre Time and World. To compare the worlds, we must establish frames of reference. Within special relativity, this is done by situating a common origin point to start our analysis.

For Clair Obscur, that origin point is the moment of Fracture.

So at time (t) equals 0, Canvas experienced Fracture that devastated the world, broke apart cultures, and scattered the peoples of Canvas across a broken world. The city of Lumiere landed in the southern ocean, and after great upheaval a dome is constructed to keep its citizens safe.

At time-prime (t’) equals 0, the equivalent origin for Dessendre’s ‘real’ world, the Fracture represents the moment Aline, in her grief, faces off with her husband Renoir, who has entered the Canvas to bring his wife back to the Dessendre world. This cataclysmic war of Painter’s chroma causes the Fracture and starts the deadly countdown toward zero.

This is where the temporal realities then diverge, as in we’d have to brush off our mathematics and calculate with Lorentz Transforms to translate the coordinates of an event between frames. This isn’t to say one is more ‘right’ than the other, only that the temporal coordinates are not a one-to-one ratio.

The game tells us that in Canvas a century passes; however, in the Dessendre world, a century most definitely does not pass. For that to be so, the Dessendres would need to be immortal and unaging. However, we can safely assume the Dessendre family is not ageless nor immortal due to the ages of the children and the aging of the parents. We see glimpses of how the children do indeed grow into their current selves (current signifying the time of the Fracture, to orient each character within our established frames of reference). 

So time does pass in the Dessendre’s world, but it moves slower than Canvas. While the Canvas world seems sped up. Within special relativity, this concept is explored within ‘time dilation.’

Position a person on Planet Earth, then send their twin toward a nearby star near the speed of light. For the twin on Earth, they would view their twin as moving slower and aging slower. While the twin on the rocket would view Earth as sped up, aging faster. Within each of their reference frames, they disagree on the temporal coordinates of events, but when they compare notes after the twin’s return home, the person on Earth will have aged more than the one on the rocket. Of course, I am doing a quick summary of this concept to avoid belaboring the point with excessive mathematics.

Regardless, it’s a fascinating phenomenon, and the game tips its hat toward it with how it differentiates the difference in temporal realities between Canvas Time and Dessendre Time. It’s also important to note that both reference frames within the twin example — the twin on Earth versus the twin on the rocket — are all valid frames. None is more ‘right’ than the other. Both frames will result in the same solution — the difference in aging, but their perspectives differ on how they experience it and come to that solution. Despite this, both frames are still equally valid.

In that same manner, the Dessendre Time is equally valid to Canvas Time, at least per this relativity postulate.

Within the Dessendre Time and World, the Canvas is seen as a created object, painted by Verso’s child-self. As a created world, it’s right to exist becomes called into question, and the neutrality of our reference frames also becomes conflicted.

Is the Dessendre reference frame, the one that was not painted, the one true frame? The One Frame To Rule Them All?

Or is both reference frames still equally valid?

So far, in our argument, we’ve posited that both reference frames are equally valid. Yes, there are differences in how time plays out within each frame but we see this only when we compare one to the other. Within the frame itself, one would not experience such differences. Meaning, those who live in the Canvas World and do not know of the Dessendre world would not know or experience a difference in time within their world. Their world would still feel time unwinding from their present just as their society has defined it.

It’s the same with the Dessendre world, where time within their world still unwinds within the definitions of their society. 

So if the reference frames are equally valid, then is the question of what is created and what is not created what tells us whose reality is real and valid?

But that assumes the Dessendre world is ‘not created.’ It also assumes that if a culture is ‘created’ it is less real and valid than the ‘creator.’ This situates us within the realm of philosophy and religion, where-in some religions posit a creator who created the universe and all in it. If such a thing is true, and since the Dessendre world is still ‘created’ in the sense that the ‘creators’ are the game developers, then can we truly establish that the Dessendre world is ‘not created?’

If we put aside the fact that we are discussing a video game (at least for a moment), we have the issue of is there a ‘creator’ for Dessendre world that fits the lore and story? Religious or spirituality doesn’t truly come into play in the game. The most we see is references to myths and/or philosophy. For example, when the team goes to defeat the Axons, Monoco will cite the name of each axon as it’s part of the mythos of his people:

LUNE: So this is Visage’s Island.

MONOCO: He Who Guards Truth With Lies.

The name Monoco’s people — the Gestrals — gave the Visage Axon is layered with double meanings. It also falls neatly into the philosophical arguments concerning morality. In the Axons, we see their embodiment as ‘lessons’ painted by Renoir, who sought to capture his family into a philosophical being. Indeed, we see this in what the Mask Keeper, after giving the team Visage’s invitation, says: 

SCIEL: What of the other paths?

MASK KEEPER: You are free to traverse them. Masks are not just to Obscure. They may also to Illuminate. Look for the masks that you need.
MAELLE: Meaning?

MASK KEEPER: The invitation stands.

For Visage, the axon, masks are a tool that assist with not only hiding the truth, when the need arises, but illuminating the truth when the time comes. This is the closest the game ever comes to spirituality, and in truth, this is far more of a moralistic philosophy as debated by those within the Enlightenment period of Europe and Early America. Spiritual arguments will do little to assist us even if spirituality existed within the Canvas world (which perhaps it does but the game does not show it). 

The Mask Keeper provides a definitive hint that Verso’s temporal reality differs from the Lumierians. He admits this when he says, “some of us stopped aging,” to Maelle, Lune, and Sciel after meeting and rescuing them. This establishes two temporal realities within the Canvas alone.

The only other hint we have is when you examine the Painter’s studio at the Start of Act 3, one will notice that canvases float around the room. This was an attribute of the Canvas world stemming from the Fracture, so what does it tell us that it appears within the Dessendre world? Is that a signal that their world is also constructed? It’s a question that is never fully answered by the game itself.

In this way, the game plays with our sense of reality. Due to how it lays out its acts, it plays with our temporal reality as well. Prologue/Act 1 focuses on Gustave as the primary perspective. This changes in Act 2, where we shift from the Lumierian timeline to Painted Verso’s timeline. Then in Act 3, we shift out of the Canvas temporal reality entirely and go back in time to an event before the other acts, where Alicia and Clea discuss the fate of the Canvas. Here Alicia will enter the Canvas, at her sister’s suggestion. At that point, the game narrates how Alicia becomes Maelle, and eventually spits us out into the temporal reality of Lumiere after the final Gommage that erased the rest of Lumiere. 

Thus, the game gives us multiple temporal realities: Gustave, Verso, Alicia/Maelle. Each have their roots in different temporal reference frames: Gustave within the Lumiere reference frame, Verso within the immortal Paintress frame, and Alicia/Maelle who stands in both the Dessendre World frame but also in the Lumiere frame. Of all the characters, Maelle is the only one that steps in all of the reference frames. 

As Alicia, she was born of the Dessendre family and grew to age sixteen. However, she transitions into the Canvas and end up reborn as Maelle within the city of Lumiere. She spends sixteen years there feeling slightly out of place, but she has no memories of her former life in the Dessendre world. For all Maelle knows in Act 1 and 2, she is a Lumierian. It’s only in Act 3 that she learns the truth of who she is, and she bridges her two selves, and thus both worlds within herself. Thus, she enters the ‘immortal’ frame as a ‘Paintress.’ This gives her a unique view of seeing the humanity and beautiful complexity inherent in both her Dessendre world and the Canvas/Lumiere world.

In a way, one could posit that Alicia/Maelle is the twin in the Special Relativity metaphor, who leaves her world to go to another and then returns. This journey alters her, and she experiences temporal reality differently when compared to Clea’s reference frame. However, the end result gives Alicia/Maelle a perspective that Clea lacks.

Clea, for her part, asserts the Canvas is but a playground. She does not give it any special qualities, and does not believe any person within it is truly real. We see this in her dialogue.

CLEA: She’s a grown woman, and she was the head of the Painter’s Council. She has failed her responsibilities. I don’t have time to coddle her. And before Verso died, she would have said the same. 

ALICIA: …? 

CLEA: I already have. Aline is a more skilled than Renoir, but I tipped the scales in his favor. I have my pets in place. “She who controls the chroma, controls the Canvas.” I can’t take her chroma, but I can keep it from returning to her. As she weakens, Renoir is able to erase her oldest creations. With the except of her obscene fake family. She made them all immortal, but luckily they’re also quite useless.

Here Clea speaks of the people in the Canvas as pieces on a chessboard. She gives them no consideration as to how the ‘creations’ feel about this erasure nor the trauma and pain it inflicts on them. For Clea, they are a distraction. She wants this ‘conflict’ in the Canvas over, so she can return to her own concerns in the present of the Dessendre World. 

Her bias tilts toward the Dessendre World, for that is the reality in which she resides and has spent the majority of her time. For her, creations are simply creations that can be erased or remade at a whim. Her view here represents the oppressor view. She orients her reference frame as the superior one, and the Canvas’s frame as inferior. Thus, her conclusions result in denying the reality of the Canvas people and denying the sentience and complexity of their existence. 

If she were to acknowledge their sentience and complexity, she could no longer posit her reference frame as the superior one. She’d have to reckon with the question of whether ‘erasing’ these ‘creations’ is morally good or morally evil.

Her attempt here to ignore such a question doesn’t solve it. It simply places the burden of solving it on Alicia’s shoulders, especially after she sends Alicia into the painting to “assist Renoir.”

Here the game is rather nebulous. We hear Clea’s words as Alicia falls into the Canvas, then we see how Alicia is painted over to become a baby born into Lumiere. 

CLEA: Calm Alicia, or it’ll paint over you… what an auspicious start. Well, you’re about to be reborn in this world as one of Aline’s creations. Have fun.

The word “it” here seems to signify ‘chroma,’ but Clea doesn’t make clear whether it is Aline who paints over Alicia or if she herself does it. She only criticizes Alicia for her panic after giving her no real lessons on how to enter the Canvas and assist in it. Once again, she has a very flippant view of the Canvas and its inhabitants due to how she dehumanizes them with the term “creation.”

This dehumanization of groups of people are very common within authoritarian and/or fascist states. We see this in how those in power throughout America’s history called Native people “savages” or “redskins.” We see this with the slurs white people have said to Black people, such as the one starting with ‘n.’ We see this in the slurs cisgender (non trans) people give to trans people like me, such as ‘tr*nny.’ 

Then there is the false myths of certain populations being dangerous, or dirty, or less than in some way. This painting of a mythos to justify the eradication and erasure of an entire population. For example, in my essay concerning Disability in Clair Obscur, I spoke to how various forms of media use disfigurement and other disabilities to denote evil, badness, and villainy. I spoke to how this originated in Capitalism crafting a disposable class of people who were not abled-bodied or healthy enough to be exploitable labor. Black people were folded into the disabled category as well due to harmful race theories that posited they were ‘less intelligent,’ could bear ‘more’ pain, and other falsehoods to justify enslavement and/or imprisonment.

In her book Killing Rage, Ending Racism, bell hooks shares: 

In the beginning black folks were most effectively colonized via a structure of ownership. Once slavery ended, white supremacy could be effectively maintained by the institutionalization of social apartheid and by creating a philosophy of racial inferiority that would be taught to everyone. This strategy of colonialism needed no country, for the space it sought to own and conquer was the minds of whites and blacks. As long as a harsh brutal system of racial apartheid was in place, separating blacks from whites by laws, coercive structures of punishment, and economic disenfranchisement, many black people seemed to intuitively understand that our ability to resist racist domination was nurtured by a refusal of the colonizing mindset. Segregation enabled black folks to maintain oppositional worldviews and standpoints to counter the effects of racism and to nurture resistance. The effectiveness of those survival strategies was made evident by both civil rights movements and the militant resistance that followed in their wake. This resistance to colonialism was so fierce, a new strategy was required to maintain and perpetuate white supremacy. 

Here hooks lays out America’s brutal regime against the black population, and how America adjusted its temporal reference frame to craft a new strategy to control and exploit. To do this, the oppression must be recast in the past, as we have seen with Native temporal realities, while also re-enforcing false stereotypes of inferiority. By doing so, oppressors once again avoid accountability, while also continuing to assert their temporal reality onto the oppressed. Often, the oppressor will attempt to adjust the narrative to posit it is the victim that is violent rather than the oppressor. bell hooks spells this out implicitly: 

Currently black folks are often depicted on television in situations where they charge racist victimization and then the viewer is bombarded with evidence that shows this to be a trumped-up charge, that whites are indeed far more caring and able to be social equals than “misguided” blacks realize. The message that television sends then is that the problem of racism lies with black people-that it exists in our minds and imaginations. On a recent episode of Law and Order a white lawyer directs anger at a black woman and tells her, “If you want to see the cause of racism, look in the mirror.” Television does not hold white people responsible for white supremacy; it socializes them to believe that subjugation and subordination of black people by any means necessary is essential for the maintenance of law and order. 

These painted stereotypes then enfold into the minds of the oppressor and oppressed, and acts as another vehicle for which the dominant temporal reality to assert itself. 

Paulo Freire writes about this dehumanization in Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 

Violence is initiated by those who oppress, who exploit, who fail to recognize others as persons—not by those who are oppressed, exploited, and unrecognized. It is not the unloved who initiate disaffection, but those who cannot love because they love only themselves. It is not the helpless, subject to terror, who initiate terror, but the violent, who with their power create the concrete situation which begets the “rejects of life.” It is not the tyrannized who initiate despotism, but the tyrants. It is not the despised who initiate hatred, but those who despise. It is not those whose humanity is denied them who negate humankind, but those who denied that humanity (thus negating their own as well).

Violence starts with the oppressor — in the case of the Canvas world, the Dessendre family — initiating the Fracture and gommage that erases the Lumierian population slowly over time. Clea dismisses the Canvas people as simply ‘creations’ because she fails to recognize the Canvas people as persons. Renoir sidesteps this by recognizing, mostly at the end of Act 3, the humanity of the Canvas people, but ultimately decides his actions and the consequences of his actions are for the greater good.

The Canvas people, by fighting for their right to exist, subverts the temporal reality of the Dessendre’s. Renoir and Clea cannot preceive the monopoly of their power and privilege dehumanizes those within the Canvas as well as themselves and their family. Instead, they are caught up in the idea they have an exclusive right to act as they will, consequences be damned.

Freire goes on to write: 

Humanity is a “thing,” and they possess it as an exclusive right, as inherited property. To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the “others,” of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion. The oppressors do not perceive their monopoly on having more as a privilege which dehumanizes others and themselves. They can not see that, in the egoistic pursuit of having as a possessing class, they suffocate in their own possessions and no longer are; they merely have. For them, having more is an inalienable right, a right they acquired through their own “effort,” with their “courage to take risks.” If others do not have more, it is because they are incompetent and lazy, and worst of all is their unjustifiable ingratitude towards the “generous gestures” of the dominant class. Precisely because they are “ungrateful” and “envious,” the oppressed are regarded as potential enemies who must be watched.

It could not be otherwise. If the humanization of the oppressed signifies subversion, so also does their freedom; hence the necessity for constant control. And the more the oppressors control the oppressed, the more they change them into apparently inanimate “things.”

Thus, in order to justify erasure of a people, their temporal, spatial, and cultural reality must be reduced to a stereotype or in other words, a creation or construct. This stereotype and/or false reality is painted over the targeted population, then shared wildly to make it seem like the oppressor’s reference frame is the One True One — the One To Rule Them All.

But these arguments pivot on falsehoods. Pull out the falsehoods, and the arguments topple. For the Canvas people, dehumanizing them into simply “Aline’s creations” as Clea asserts, this cannot fully describe the lived realities of the Canvas people themselves. They are more than just ‘Aline’s creations.’ Their lived realities are as complex as Clea’s own, and the player knows this because they have spent the majority of the game immersed in a complex and nuanced world, surrounded by intricate people with very real concerns, dreams, ethics, sorrows, and joys.

It’s not so easy to dismiss an entire population after one has lived with them. This is why the game starts us in Lumiere, why we live with the Lumierians, so we can understand their struggle to not be erased. To not be eradicated. To have a future once more.

The reference frame of the Dessendre World versus the Canvas World are equally valid as we have seen. Just because one could be said to be a construct made by a Dessendre family member doesn’t mean the Canvas is any less real for those that live within it.

(One could argue that the Dessendre World is no less constructed, as the people within it constructed their society and their relations with one another. One can also spin in circles debating whether the Dessendre world is created or not by some other being beyond Clea’s understanding or knowledge. Philosophers have debated this very question for centuries.) 

Regardless of whether a world is constructed or not, those within it experience the temporal and spatial aspects of their world fully. The game shows us through our journey with Expedition 33, and through our interactions with the Dessendre family. Of these two groups, the one that dehumanizes the other is the Dessendre family. The Canvas people go to great lengths to not dehumanize others (as we shall soon see). Freire reminds us: 

When people are already dehumanized, due to the oppression they suffer, the process of their liberation must not employ the methods of dehumanization.

For American society, leaders posit a reference frame that enforces a temporal, spatial, and legal reality to supersede the reality experienced by marginalized populations. This action dehumanizes them and strips them of their agency and lived reality.

Riften in the book Beyond Settler Time speaks to how America weaponized its rigid reference frame to reorganize geographies of who exists on which land and also to erase a culture’s way of living in the present (their temporal reality). Thus, Riften identifies how America attempts to claim its reference frame is the One True Frame just as Clea attempts in regards to Dessendre versus the Canvas (and Renoir as well through the act of gommage).

In essence, American leaders, Clea, and Renoir are privileging their own frame over that of any others, regardless of the harm and often brutal enforcement of such a frame. This then reframes populations as being ‘stuck in the past’ or ‘uncivilized’ if they do not conform to how the oppressor defines civilization and humanity’s temporal reality.

Through law and policy, America sought to change Natives into suitable subjects to the American empire, thus erasing their past, present, and future. The reference frame for Native people becomes revolutionary in their struggle to assert their existence and keep alive their culture and identities. Riften argues: 

The representation of Native peoples as either having disappeared or being remnants on the verge of vanishing constitutes one of the principal means of effacing Indigenous sovereignties. Such a portrayal of Indigenous temporal stasis or absence erases extant forms of occupancy, governance, and opposition to settler encroachments. Moreover, it generates a prism through which any evidence of such survival will be interpreted as either vestigial (and thus on the way to imminent extinction) or hopelessly contaminated (as having lost—or quickly losing—the qualities understood as defining something, someone, or some space as properly “Indian” in the first place). These kinds of elisions and anachronizations can be understood as a profound denial of Native being…

America’s attempt to constitute Native people in the past denies the Native being entirely; it’s a form of gommage and an attempt to control and eliminate Native resistance. However, as Nemik’s Manifesto asserts, authority is brittle, and freedom is spontaneously occurring. The ways in which our temporal reality differs from our oppressors cannot be denied, as people will and do rise up to reassert their right to exist. Recognition of our diverse temporal realities affirms our humanity.

For Native people (and other marginalized groups), multiple temporal reference frames have always existed. Native cultural practices, as diverse as the tribes within North America are, keep alive this alternate understanding of time, space, geography, ways of living and governing, identity, and one’s relationships with one another and the land. Riften writes of this by use fo the term ‘temporal orientation:’ 

To speak of temporal orientation suggests the ways that time can be regarded less as a container that holds events than as potentially divergent processes of becoming. Being temporally oriented suggests that one’s experiences, sensations, and possibilities for action are shaped by the existing inclinations, itineraries, and networks in which one is immersed, turning toward some things and away from others. More than a question of relations in space, orientation involves reiterated and nonconscious tendencies, suggesting ways of inhabiting time that shape how the past moves toward the present and future. 

Native people understood that each culture and people within that culture were oriented toward a specific temporal reality based on their “experiences, sensations, and possibilities for action.” And in turn, these  aspects were influenced by one’s environment such as the land or society, one’s connections with others (deemed networks by Riften), and the journey one took (deemed itineraries). Thus, temporality is a diverse range of multiplicity — there is no one reference frame when it came to temporal reality.

Rather than approaching time as an abstract, homogeneous measure of universal movement along a singular axis, we can think of it as plural, less as a temporality than temporalities. From this perspective, there is no singular unfolding of time, but, instead, varied temporal formations that have their own rhythms—patterns of consistency and transformation that emerge immanently out of the multifaceted and shifting sets of relationships that constitute those formations and out of the interactions among those formations. As V. F. Cordova observes, “time is an abstraction derived from the fact that there is motion and change in the world.”

America attempted (and still attempts today) to orient Native reality toward a very rigid way of existing. It denies their temporal reality and insists on only America’s temporality existing. If any failed to fit within America’s defined parameters for life, they were (and still are) eliminated/erased. Riften clarifies: 

Rather than marking an absolute distinction between Natives and nonnatives, suggesting that there are unbreachable barriers that generate utterly incommensurable and hermetically sealed Indian and white forms of experience, I am suggesting the presence of discrepant temporalities that can be understood as affecting each other, as all open to change, and yet as not equivalent or mergeable into a neutral, common frame—call it time, modernity, history, or the present. 

As much as America attempted a brutal and long-term gommage of Native people, they still fought back and resisted the oppressors attempts at genocide and erasure. Part of that lay in holding onto one’s temporal orientation within which the roots of one’s identity and culture grow. As Riften explains, this isn’t to say Native temporal reality and America’s temporal reality are so distinct they cannot be overlapped. Instead, the interplay between the Native temporal reality and American temporal reality affects one another in often painful and/or genocidal ways. America’s temporal reality insists on merging all other realities into one “neutral, common frame,” but in doing so erases those who do not fit its narrow and biased parameters.

The Earth holds great diversity within how one may identify, may live, the customs one may have, the relationships formed with others or with the land, and so on. These are all lived realities that are just as valid as any other, and attempts to collapse them into the One Frame To Rule Them All is our world’s version of gommage. A cultural genocide often can escalate into full genocide of both culture and body until no one is left standing within that group.

That is one thing that fascism and authoritarian/colonialism hates — diversity. It’s why fascism tries to wipe out diversity and force everyone into the reference frame carefully sculpted by the oppressor — a frame often posited as the “universal.” 

Franz Fanon wrote in Wretched of the Earth: 

Challenging the the colonial world is not a rational confrontration of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different.

The colonial world seeks to dominate and erase the colonized, to collapse all frames into their own. This simplifies their control, but in doing so, they paint specific groups as disposable and thus erase those that fail to conform.

This same threat darkens the world of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, where a continued genocide — in the form of the erasure from gommage — seeks to destroy the people of Lumiere and steals away their future. Their ability to exist in the ‘now’ and thrive is slowly carved away as more and more of their people are lost to the Gommage.

For those in Lumiere, they do not know why they are being erased. Even when the player finally learns the full truth in Act 3, the erasure of the Lumierians is shown to be at the whim of one family. Yes, the Dessendre family aren’t truly seeking to dominate or exploit the Lumierians, only are caught in spirals of grief. However, the consequences of their actions oppress the Lumierians and cause tremendous harm to all involved. One cannot simply write off those consequences by saying “they were grieving, and erasing the Canvas stops the temptation to hide from grief.” 

That still puts the fate of the Canvas people as ‘less than’ and not as real as the Dessendre family. No matter the motivations or original intentions, the consequences of erasing an entire population of people invokes genocide. The question then becomes, do we accept that the Canvas people are real and their existence valid?

That brings us back to Riften’s argument concerning the temporal realities that America thrust on the Native people. America deemed Native realities not real or valid, and thus justified the erasure and elimination of the “savage” in order to “civilize” and/or clear the land for America’s harmful “manifest destiny.” (See Indigeneous People’s History of the United States for a full breakdown of this history.) Riften speaks to this: 

In 1906 Congress passed the Osage Allotment Act, extending to the Osage Nation the principles at play in the allotment program generally. These include efforts to break up Native land tenure into privatized property holding, organized primarily around nuclear family units; dismantle Indigenous structures of governance, asserting greater U.S. jurisdictional authority over Native peoples and places; insert Native peoples into the cash economy and Euramerican agricultural production; and transform everyday patterns of life so that they would conform to Euramerican conventions of dress, language, religion, literacy, gender roles, and so on. This policy imaginary draws on temporal figurations in order to remap and reorder spatial relations. Presented by officials and supporters as a means by which Indians could progress from a stunted and backward savagery toward civilization, allotment offered a vision of necessary development over time that enabled the struggle between Indigenous and settler geopolitical formations to be conceptually bracketed.

We see here how America attempted to force Native people into a very rigid binaries, in order to “civilize” them. If they failed to exist within these parameters, then destruction would befall them. For the Canvas people, they have even less agency, as there is no parameters that asserts a specific mode of being into which they are allowed to exist. Similar approaches to erasure and control was instituted on other marginalized populations as well. 

 The Canvas people are seen as oddities and anomalies. They are “creations” and not deemed real enough for continued existence. This is how Renoir (and Clea) is able to justify his erasure of them. In a similar vein, Riften, in his book Beyond Settler Time, points out a similar concept regarding the temporal reality of Native people:

Indigenous experiences of time may appear as oddities—anachronisms, aberrations, irrationalities, anomalies—when they do not line up neatly with dominant forms of chronology, historicism, and perception. As Sara Ahmed observes,“ Things seem ‘straight’ . . . when they are ‘in line,’ which means when they are aligned with other lines…”

The metaphor of lines is used to denote the temporal relations within groups of people. A group’s timeline may seem a straight path if aligned with other lines based on how we align such trajectories. Just as it is possible to craft a timeline or trajectory by lining up sequences of events, that does not mean this is the only way to build up temporal relations and/or paths. Other trajectories and timelines can exist in parallel.

She later notes, “Queer orientations are those that put within reach bodies that have been made unreachable by the lines of conventional genealogy,” further contending that a “queer commitment” is one that does not “presume that lives have to follow certain lines in order to count as lives…”

Here Riften quotes Ahmed’s observation that we do not have to “presume that lives have to follow certain lives in order to count as lives.” This is a crucial point for the temporal reality of people who do not fit into the dominant worldviews of the colonial society. The oppressed then, through the act of asserting their existence, proves the existence of alternate temporal realities, and the ‘straight’ lines becomes a tapestry of woven realities that may overlap, intersect, and inform one another even as they stand distinct. This plurality of worldviews is seen as a threat to Capitalists and Fascists who seek to collapse everyone into only their temporal reality.

The Fate of the Canvas People

For the Canvas people, their existence does not fit the dominant worldview of the Dessendre family. Instead, their existence is seen as a threat to the health of the Dessendre family by the act of temptation. Renoir and Clea both claim the Canvas exists only as a temptation for family members to live out a fantasy. In doing so, they deem the Canvas people a fascimile of true reality. In orienting the trajectory/timeline in this manner, the Dessendre family attempt to assert that their temporal reality matters more. That their emotions and sorrows matter more.

Except, Maelle subverts such a claim when she tells her father, at the end of Act 3, that she refuses to accept that the Canvas people must die for the family to heal. After her fight with Renoir, where they defeat him, this is part of their conversation:

RENOIR: I cannot spend another day with living corpses. Since the fire, our family has crumbled. Aline in the Canvas. Clea fighting her solitary war. You, a living ghost.

MAELLE: (shakes her head)

RENOIR: Verso’s death broke us. I want it to be fixed. I need it to be fixed! I– (coughs) I cannot lose you too!

MAELLE: Don’t you see? That’s how I feel about them! I can’t lose them either.

Here Renoir sees only his family, and he holds tightly to them. He attempts to control them through his own grief. But in doing so he takes away not only the agency of his family members, but also the agency of an entire world of people.

Maelle, on the other hand, tries to reach her father by showing how his feelings for his family is similar to how she feels about the family she’s built in Lumiere. She does her best to convince him that she’s not leaving him forever, but she can’t let him erase the people of the Canvas simply because he views them as a temptation for his family’s grief. She attempts to humanize the people of the Canvas by showing they are family too, while Renoir dehumanizes them by painting them as a temptation.

As another example, let’s look at prior to the fight. Here Maelle tries to convince him to not erase the entire Canvas.

RENOIR: I know how powerful and intoxicating it is, how deeply attached we can become to the worlds we pour our hearts and soul into. I was enthralled, and it nearly killed me.

MAELLE: It doesn’t mean you have to erase Verso’s Canvas!

For For Maelle, she sees beyond the limitations of just the family. This isn’t just Verso’s soul she’s fighting for here. She’s also fighting for the souls of every person who lives in Lumiere, who had lived until Gommage erased them. She lived sixteen years as a Lumierian, and she cannot simply erase that temporal reality simply because her father decided the Canvas is a temptation to be destroyed. For her, this goes beyond her family’s contours of grief.

Lune and Sciel both step forward to offer their truth, where they place comforting hands on Maelle’s shoulders. They lay down their claim of their different temporal reality and how it is just as valid. 

RENOIR: Life keeps forcing cruel choices. We do what we must.
SCIEL: Grief often blinds us. And we make choices we can never take back.
RENOIR: You grieve for two.
SCIEL: I grieve for many.
LUNE: The choices of parents leave indelible marks upon their children. But ultimately the voices in their head have to be their own. You cannot set the boundaries of their life for them.

Here Lune and Sciel both attempt to argue why their right to exist matters. They use the language Renoir is most likely to understand. This is an excellent example of how the oppressed — Sciel and Lune — leverage a shared language — grief and family — in order to re-humanize themselves and their oppressor.

When Sciel says she ‘grieves for many,’ she references all the poeple Renoir gommaged.

When Lune says ‘you cannot set the boundaries of their life for them,’ she is also referencing the boundaries of the life of her people. Renoir seeks to set a final boundary by erasing them forever, yet is that not ripping away the agency of Lune and her people as well as the agency of Renoir’s own daughter? The erasure is a violence enacted upon them and a dehumanization of their personhoods.

Thus, the people of the Canvas argue with who is essentially a godlike being for their right to exist. The oppressed, as Fanon pointed out (repeated for emphasis), must lay claim to their temporal and spatial realities: 

Challenging the the colonial world is not a rational confrontration of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different.

Lune, Sciel, and Maelle all have impassioned claims of their world being different than what Renoir claims. He focuses only on his own needs, and his arguments are not truly rational. Sciel rightly calls him out for being ‘blinded’ by his grief, and she shifts the perspective to a different worldview. Lune does the same by calling out his inability to recognize and acknowledge his daughter’s agency. Both are attempts to reason with Renoir, but at the same time lay out an impassioned claim to their own agency.

In this manner, the Canvas people not only attempt to humanize themselves for Renoir — the one who has oppressed them through Gommage — but also to humanize Renoir. Through the Gommage he may have stolen their humanity and erased them, but in doing so, he erased his own humanity by becoming this godlike being of death.

Paulo Friere in Pedagogy of the Oppressed puts this most succinctly: 

The struggle for humanization, for the emancipation of labor, for the overcoming of alienation, for the affirmation of men and women as persons would be meaningless. This struggle is possible only because dehumanization, although a concrete historical fact, is not a given destiny but the result of an unjust order that engenders violence in the oppressors, which in turn dehumanizes the oppressed.

Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the
oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.

This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.

Thus, Lune and Sciel attempt to humanize everyone involved in the conflict. Despite their attempt, it will fail at first. They must defeat Renoir, and then and only then, is he finally willing to give Maelle and the Canvas people their agency.

RENOIR: I’ll leave a light on for you.

He leaves the Canvas in Maelle’s hands. Thus, the Canvas people have not only liberated themselves but also Renoir.  

Yet, despite this win, a final confrontation between Painted Verso and Maelle will determine the true fate of the Canvas. In a way, this reflects how victories by the oppressed can push forward their fight for liberation and freedom, but there can also be inside actors that sabotage their goals.

We see this in Painted Verso, who betrays them in his goal to seek complete annihilation. He’s fallen into the despair that Friere speaks about in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, where he sees his dehumanization as being only a painted version of the true Verso. He cannot reach past this distortion to become more fully himself, something beyond what he was painted to be. His rigidity and stubbornness narrows his ability to relate to Maelle, and he attempts to force his temporal reality onto not only Maelle but the faded boy and all of the Canvas. By using leading questions, Painted Verso extracts the answer he wants from the faded boy, which he uses to justify his actions. 

Verso fights for annihilation and to force upon Maelle his idea of what ‘healing’ looks like. He represents a refusal to accountability and is trapped in his own despair. (I will write a separate essay on accountability to dig into Verso’s temporal reality, so for now I will simply point out his final motivations.)

Maelle fights for her agency, the agency of her Dessendre family, and the agency of all Canvas people to exist and heal in the ways they need. She holds herself accountable and refuses to give in to despair.

In Verso’s ending, his selfish desire for annihilation will doom the Canvas entirely. He achieves his annihilation, and he tells Maelle it will be okay even as he forces her back into the Dessendre world. There Maelle becomes Alicia once more, trapped and isolated with her disability. The Canvas people have no place in this ending, their existence erased to become a segment of the Dessendre family’s past.

Yet, does this act truly bring healing to all involved? If the Canvas people are indeed real, how does this ending not doom them to erasure and genocide? To sacrifice an entire people to ensure the security and healing of another group is the death-narrative of necrosecurity, where the marginalized group are seen as less than and not as real. This only continues the cycle of violence, grief, and pain. (In my prior two essays I tackle the question of healing and agency. I also show how the Dessendre world does not offer a supportive system to aid the family, and specifically Alicia/Maelle’s, healing. I won’t belabor those points as my focus in this essay is the Canvas people’s fate.)

In Maelle’s ending, Maelle will offer Painted Verso an alternate way of existing instead of the one he currently abhors: 

MAELLE: If you could grow old, would you… find a reason to smile?

By framing it this way, she offers him agency to choose his own way forward, one where he is not trapped in the bindings of another. She wishes to see him happy, to not be trapped in a cycle of despair and violence. She wants healing to blossom. The final scenes of Maelle’s ending takes place in a future point, where people have aged and Lumiere has started to rebuild. 

Through the use of chroma, she aids the Canvas people in finally liberating themselves from the oppressive reference frames of the Dessendre family. Those that were erased once more find life, and Maelle’s question opens up an alternate temporal reality, one where people age and find their own happiness, without the shadow of gommage to steal away their future.

In a way, this once again parallels our reality. The oppressed often must resort to violence in order to free themselves from the yoke of their oppressors. For example, the Civil Rights Era of the 1960s involved civil disobedience, fights with racist police, and America’s assassination of Civil Rights leaders. Despite that violent backdrop, Black communities fought for their right to exist and have equal rights under the law, and they won some of those demands. Yes, this fight for justice still continues today, but each win threads a temporal trajectory toward a more just, equitable, and accessible world. That path will not be ‘straight’ line. Instead, it will curve in on itself, twist around, and yet still continue forward toward that better future.

We see this in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. This isn’t just a journey on how to deal with grief, but it’s also the question of whether the temporal reality of the Lumierians is as valid and as crucial as the Dessendre’s. And whether their reality has a right to exist and thrive.

In many video games, it’s rare for the player to play in the oppressed people’s reference frame. Generally, the game will posit a ‘hero’ that often comes from the oppressor culture or an outside ‘neutral’ culture to save the day. However, Clair Obscur turns this trope on its head by placing the player firmly within the people of the Canvas. The main characters are people of Lumiere, and our team of heroes are those that seek to end the erasure of their people — to assert their existence and restore their temporality in the present time. They don’t want to become past relics folded into the history books (the Dessendre family’s books to be precise). Instead, Lumiere and the sentient beings of the Canvas seek to exist within the present where they can build toward a shared future.

By placing us, at first, on the side of Lumierians, the player experiences the tempos of Lumierian’s ordinary life and their society (what Riften identifies as “modes of inhabitance” and “networks of exchange”). We are shown the complexity of these people and experience the reality of their world. The game may, at times, deliberately mislead the character, as we see in Act 2 with Painted Verso’s character, but this never negates how real the Canvas people’s world is. As I have shown in this essay, the Canvas World and Dessendre world are both real and valid, neither more important than the other. 

We have now returned to one of the most crucial questions in the game: What is the right decision in regards to the fate of the Canvas people and the fate of Alicia/Maelle? As I have hopefully shown thus far, erasing people’s temporal realities causes immense harm and is genocide; people have a right to exist, and sacrificing them for the ‘greater good of society’ (or in this case the Dessendre family) cannot ever be the morally right answer.

Necrosecurity, as I spoke of earlier, paints a bleak and death-filled reality, where healing cannot ever take place because denial and control is at its roots. Until people’s temporal realities are respected and their agency honored, healing will forever stay out of reach.

Thus, escaping pain by committing genocide is not healing. It’s a continuation of the cycle of violence. The marginalized populations facing genocide have a right to exist, and their temporal realities are as valid and important as the oppressor. Just as the temporal reality of the Canvas people are as valid and important as the Dessendre family.

Healing can only happen when the cycle of violence ends.