Welcome back to Pixel Project Radio.

This is the finale of our Clear Obscure Analysis series.

It's been great fun to do this, it's been rewarding.

I think the conversations have been terrific if you think so too.

If you've been enjoying this series, if you've been enjoying the show, please consider giving us a rating or a review, Please consider sharing our stuff on social media's like Blue Sky, Instagram, Reddit, things like that.

Best way to grow the show and it would be much appreciated.

I'm joined again by Frak, who's been with me throughout this series.

Thanks again, Frak.

How's it going.

Oh it's great, buddy, Thank you, thank you for having me.

I'm so to be rounding out this game.

It's it's it's been a long, fruitful talk, but all good talks must come to an end.

So it's exciting.

It's very true and thematically appropriate too.

Yes, yes, of course.

So I know last episode I said there was a lot to cover, and it turned out to be a little bit felt a little more slim than usual, But I think this one is going to have more breadth to it.

So let's jump right back in.

We left off right when Alicia wakes up at what is labeled the epilogue.

So this is a glimpse into the past of Monolith year forty nine.

We're taking control of Alicia.

Here.

She wakes up from a nightmare.

Her face is totally disfigured.

She can't speak.

This is a result of the fire in the manner.

She's called downstairs by a woman, her sister, named Claya.

This is going to begin the epilogue Alicia.

So Claia.

Claia is Alicia and Verso's sister.

What did you think of Claya at first?

Threck You know, it was I think this was the point in the game where it's where everything kind of starts to I guess make sense.

I guess where they're trying to be, like, so this is what's like been really going on.

And I was just I was kind of confused, to be honest, just because I'm like, oh, I didn't I did not expect the game to be taking the kind of turn that it actually ends up taking right here.

You know, Yeah, that's interesting.

A lot of folks said the same thing.

So let's before we get into that, let's, uh, let's give an overview of the situation we're in the finale.

I think spoilers can be safely set on the table.

Nobody is jumping in here that hasn't listened to the rest.

I don't think at unless that's you, in which case jump back to the beginning.

So here's the situation.

The Dessandras were a family, Aleen and Renoir, the parents, the kids, Verso, Alicia and Claya.

There was a fire in the manner that is said to have been somehow caused by Alicia and this faction known as the writers.

More on them in a little bit.

It's unclear, it's not clear what happened here.

It's left vague, which a cynical part of me is saying, like, oh, sequel bait, But the more realistic part of me is like, you know, I've said it before, I'll say it again.

Fiction doesn't need to speen food.

You have speen food.

Spoon feed you, spoonerism feed you everything.

I don't want to be speen fed.

Don't speen food me.

It's my least favorite kind of food, the worst utensil.

Yeah yeah, it was quickly discarded.

I don't think it needs to spoon feed you everything Like mysteries are okay, but there was some kind of faction known as the Writers, and Alicia got involved with them somehow started this fire.

Verso saved her at the cost of his life.

Verso died.

Alicia sustained incredible injuries, face completely burned, she lost an eye, She can't speak any more more.

What happens is a lean Renoir and Clia, to varying degrees within their grief, they sort of blame her in unconsciously or consciously.

Clia, for instance, is really cold and austere and terse here towards Alicia, And I mean she kind of doesn't hide the fact that she looks at it as her fault.

She says, Verso traded his life for yours.

I both love and hate him for that.

That damn fool not hidden at all.

No, that is a very like complicated emotion to express, you know, And I'm sure that's happened many other times, where it's like, yeah, it's it's great that this one person ended up surviving, but you know, this person sacrificed their life for that.

Like I've never dealt with that personally, but I could imagine that is a very complicated feeling to have, where it's like you're glad this one person is alive, but maybe you subconsciously resent them because somebody's life had to be sacrificed for them to live.

You know.

It's a perfectly natural thing to feel, too.

It's one of those things where like you can logically in your head tell yourself that there's no reason you should feel this way, that it's a totally natural but not unproductive, but kind of hostile feeling, but your heart just doesn't believe it.

You know.

I'm sure we've all been there.

We have feelings that we have and we tell ourselves like I shouldn't be feeling this, like this is totally irrational and yet like comma, and.

Yet yeah, it almost reminds me a little bit of like survivor's guilt as.

Well in a way.

Yeah, I was thinking that too, Yeah, whichah Alicia certainly has right.

Oh absolutely, I mean I would too, especially like if you think about the state that she's in, you know, like, oh, somebody you know, like died to save me, and yet I'm like not the same person as before.

Like it's one thing to have survivor's guilt, where it's like like say, like you were drowning and somebody you know died to save you from drowning kind of a thing.

Like it doesn't disfigure you.

You're still normal, at least physically, I guess, but like to be mentally and physically scarred from that, Like that's really a lot, you know.

Yeah.

I wrote this down somewhere later, but this reminds me of something that the late Francis Davis wrote Terry Gross's late husband, by the way, who recently passed away.

He used this line and I wrote it somewhere that Alicia sort of whars the debts of time and grief on her at all times.

Yeah.

I couldn't have said that better me neither.

That's that's why I took to Terry Gross and her husband.

Yeah.

So back to the Desandras.

After Verso died, they all began grieving in their own ways.

Aileen, the mother, went into Verso's canvas and as the painter's capital p painters, they have sort of special powers where they can paint entire worlds within these canvases.

And that's what Lumiere is.

Verso's soul.

The last remaining piece of his soul is within the canvas that he painted.

Aileen went into there and painted her family within there as a way of coping with her grief.

Now, she painted them in different ways.

She painted Verso basically picture perfect as to what he would have been, strong, handsome, voiced by Ben Starr, what we all wish we were.

Naturally.

She painted Renoir the renoir we've been fighting as a bit unflattering, as Maya will eventually say, he's a bit broader and meaner than he actually is.

We'll see that in time.

Now we never see Cleia's painted form that Aleen painted.

Will get to that later too, But she painted Alicia with somewhat even more disfigurement than what she has in real life.

It's this sort of tearing between razils and love that comes with this sort of grief, right.

It's the love is unending, it's unconditional, but at the same time, the grief is persistent, it cannot be scrubbed away.

So it's a sort of hug of war between those two.

And that's how Alicia was painted.

It's why she always wears the mask, it's why she feels that survivor's guilt NonStop.

And she spent so much time in there, tons of time time in the canvas passes quicker than in real life, but it also takes a great toll on the body.

She will die if she stays in there.

So Renoir went in there to try and get her out.

Expedition zero him vers So, and I think Cleia too, or maybe not Cleia.

They went to try and get her out forcefully.

That's what caused the fracture.

So Painted Renoir, this is the important part.

Painted Renoir is the one causing the gomages.

He is going through and wiping out Aleen's creations little by little as they get older her and as her powers ween, he is able to take down her creations a little more easily.

The reason that he's not under her control is because he retains memories of the actual Renoir.

He is more unflattering, this is true, but he you know, he's not entirely her puppet, so he is stopping expeditioners from getting to her.

That's also because he has become obsessed.

He has become obsessed with immortality, as we've learned from Verso.

Yeah, so he's doing that.

The real Aleen and Renoir are sort of fixed statuesque outside of the canvas.

The real Renoir is in here, and you know, we find this out shortly.

He is the curator, that is the real renoir.

The real paintress is the one that we fought at the very end, the curator esque looking woman.

My read on that, I don't know if you agree with me, here, Threck.

My read on that is that because time age is quicker in the canvas, that their painted forms have just begun to crack and crack and fall away.

Like I I think that's why their faces have sort of those shallow dips in them.

It's like the cracked paint is literally falling off of the canvas, and you know, as old paint does, it chips away.

I don't know if that's spot on, but that's how I looked at it.

I agree with that, actually, and I think it also kind of fits with how it's like the grief is like consuming them as well, and it's starting to like chip away at their physical form because a lot of this is just like the main crux is just that they just can't move on from the horrible event that has happened outside of the painting, and it's like they're almost retreating within the painting as a way of trying to get over that grief, but doing it in like an unhealthy way by like not being able to move on from versus passing, you know, be like, oh, he's recreated in the painting.

But I think that kind of swell of emotions is also reflected in the chipping away, that it's just they're just letting it consume them.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I think that's a good read of it.

So Renoire is in there, he's trying to get Aleen back.

Clia is in there as well.

Clia doesn't necessarily agree with either of them, She sort of Cleia is frustrated with everybody.

She wants them out, not because of the cycle of grief necessarily.

She believes that the real fight is with the writers.

That's what she wants to deal with.

She wants to deal with them.

She needs Aleen to snap out of her grief.

She says as much too.

She says when she's talking to Alicia here, she says, Renoire is wasting his time in there trying to help someone who doesn't want his help.

We have more urgent matters to attend to.

Honestly, if Alene wants to numb herself in the canvas, then let her grief is no excuse, and then to Alicia, she says, lest you forget, the only reason Renoir and Aline are in the canvas is because your naivety cost Verso his life.

Kind of paints the picture of cleya pretty pretty Yeah.

Yeah, and it's pretty, and I think it shows why she's not really a main character in the plot until like this point in the game.

She's also painting nevrons, which they're helping take care of the expeditioners as a way to help pull Aleen out and possibly run War two.

We should say too, if they're painted versions, or rather, if they get killed in the canvas, they don't like die in real life like some bad horror movie.

They just or at least I presume that's the case, they would just come out of the canvas, and we see that happen a little later.

Yeah, I think so.

And that's why they're, you know, constantly pushing everybody away, because they just want to stay within the canvas and they don't want to, you know, be thrown out of it.

You know, they don't want to deal with those pesky writers.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I feel like the whole writers versus painters thing, not to get too deep into that.

That could be some like based on some like real life tension that maybe the Sandfal devs dealt with, maybe during their time at like Ubisoft.

Or maybe this is just me theorizing that, like this whole writers versus painters thing could be based on some real life tension that they've dealt with.

It's certainly possible.

There are a lot of ways you can interpret this, you know.

It could be a Sandfall thing where the artists wanted to do something the writers wanted to do something different.

It could be like critics of art writing about art and critiquing what the artists are doing, kind of fighting that way.

It could be a meta commentary wherein the writers are the devs of the game writing this situation into existence that is directly antagonizing the fictional characters.

It could be a lot of things.

I'm glad that they left it open ended because it, you know, allows for this kind of speculation.

Maybe in some way it's a combination of all of them.

It very well could be, and there's nothing wrong with that.

There are no laws against it.

Let's jump back into the game.

I've been reading about this stuff all day.

My head's in a bit of a tizzy.

If I need to come back in and edit any clarifications that don't come in later, I can do so.

But my head's spinning.

So let's get back into it.

So Claya asks Alicia to go into the canvas to help get Renoir out.

Get Renoir out, we can get a Lien out, at least Renoir so he can help with the fight with the writers, So she and Claa.

Alicia and Claya hide the canvas because they think a Lien will try to return to it once she's forcibly removed, which is you know, probable given her situation.

Alicia jumps in to get Renoir and a Lien both out destroy the canvas for good, but it doesn't go according to plan.

What happens is chroma from a Lien, and Claya explains this sort of takes hold of Alisa and she can't calm down, so it kind of shapes her and makes her reborn as one of Aline's creations as Mael.

That's Aline's proma.

Stay came.

Don't let it take control of you.

Calm Elisia a little over you.

It's just stopped.

Well, you're about to be reborn in this world as one of Aline's creations.

Have fun.

Now, I've heard folks say that Eleen didn't even recognize Alicia when she jumped into the painting, and that's why she was reborn.

I'm not a hundred percent certain that I agree with that, but I could see where that interpretation is coming from.

I could.

But also, like, if you compare Alicia to Myel, they're not they don't look that different.

No, they don't look different at all.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it could just be that Eleen is so far gone that maybe she's having a hard time recognizing Mael's Alicia, you know, potentially.

But also I feel like you would recognize somebody like that if you saw him anywhere, right.

You would think so, Yeah, it could also be that she sees Alicia, perhaps feels badly about her own painted version, and then subconsciously creates Miele, who is in all facets a quote unquote I don't want to say normal, but I hope that gets off what I'm trying to convey here, version of maybe idolized, unbroken, untainted, not disfigured as she was before.

Yeah, it could be that, but you know this, this is the gist of this is, this is what the canvas and the whole world of Lumiere is.

It's Versuo's canvas.

It's paintings to help cope with grief.

It's Verso's soul, the last remaining bit of his soul painting into eternity, Monoco, the gesturals, they're all versus creations.

What I love about this, especially too, is that it's revealed later that Ska is like a little plush doll, like a little dolly.

Yeah, yeah, I hope they sell that.

I love that they mentioned that, like Ska is the most powerful creature in the universe, because like when you've got a little plush as a kid, a little doll, like that's your friend.

So what he's doing is he made his little friend the most powerful being in the universe.

And I think that's just so cool.

That's exactly what a kid would do.

It is very wholesome, very very beautiful and wholesome.

But like when we get to this point where it's like, oh, it's all like when it does the big reveal of oh, everything's just like in a painting and it's like separated from the quote unquote real world, Like did you see that coming, because I did not at all.

No, I definitely didn't see it coming.

But in retrospect, I think it makes total narrative sense.

That's one of the criticisms of this game.

There are two main ones that I see all the time.

One is that it's sort of takes away the flow of the game, which I think, you know, that doesn't hold a lot of weight.

You know, I don't think narrative fantasy fiction is beholden to like super action y adventure kind of deal, you know, the standard hero's journey kind of thing, don't.

I don't think that makes sense all the time.

I think this adheres to that quite well.

But the other criticism that I've heard is that it makes the whole first part of the game irrelevant, which I think is an interesting criticism because the only way one could assume this is by tacitly feeling and admitting that the painted world and the characters are in some way less than conscious.

They aren't real.

And this will be a central discussion point with regard to the ending, and you know, depending on who you ask, it's not entirely off base.

We're gonna get all into quality and the hard problem of consciousness and a little saur episode on the Taalos principle.

It's gonna get it's gonna get crazy.

I'm thinking of why people would think, yeah, the first act is relevant.

Maybe it's just because I don't want to say the game does like a bait and switch, but once you get to this point in the game, it does sort of you think about the first act differently than when you were playing it and you were just assuming that this was the world, right, but then when you learn it's not the world, you know, I think it's for for some people they would just think, oh, yeah, well, you know, why would I care about, like, you know, Gustav or any of these other characters because it didn't matter.

But I think it does matter to the whole.

It kind of fits with the whole arc kind of a thing.

And what I like is when they do the painting stuff, it doesn't get like super meta, which is something I was a little bit worried about when that happened.

I'm like, is this going to be like a weird fourth wall breaking or they're going to try to like say something weirdly meta or anything, And they really don't, at least I don't think if they do, they don't do it in a very explicit way.

I don't want to say it necessarily hurts the flow, but it definitely.

It's like if you're, you know, driving on the highway for a few hours and it's like a nice, smooth sailing and then all of a sudden, it's like, oh, we have to get off an exit, and then we're like at a dead stop and it's like, oh, we're here now, you know.

Like, I think you feel it because it's such a drastic change, but I think in context with everything else, it doesn't hurt it by any means.

Yeah, I think I get what you're saying.

I think we're saying the same thing.

It's narratively justified, and I think irrelevant.

I think I'm mis spoke.

I maybe tacked on is a better way to phrase what, Yeah, thanks are thinking.

In some ways, it reminds me a little bit of I don't know, if you ever watched a Dragon Quest your story, which is like the weird it was the weird Netflix adaptation of Dragon Quest five.

I don't want to get cut out your spoilers on Metal Gear Solo three in the last episode, so we might be doing that here.

Too.

I'm not going to go into details because I'll just get mad, but basically it is an adaptation of Dragon Quest five, but at the very end it goes and when it went meta, it absolutely ruined it for me.

H, that's interesting another discussion.

I don't want to talk about it now because I will get mad.

So epilogue is rained back and we're now into act three.

Act three is titled mile So.

Miele is back in Lumiere.

It's dark.

We're in the uh sort of the fading, somber evening of Loumiere.

Mile sits down beside Verso.

Her hair is now white white gray, whitish gray.

This is a feature of the painters.

As far as I can tell, Renoir has white gray hair.

Verso, it's revealed he does, but he dies it.

I think that's revealed in a conversation with cel.

And now that Myle is remembered who she is, she's got it.

I'm pretty sure that's the case.

But this is so.

Yeah, this is where they start talking because remember this Verso is painted.

He's not the real Verso that died.

This is where they start talking and Verso begins to question his existence.

You know, at the core, it's a facsimile.

Memories that aren't his, features that aren't his, a family that isn't his.

And this is the central question that forms you know, is he a real person?

What is the distinguishing factor that would separate somebody like Verso real human like feelings thoughts.

Let's even extend this out to real life, like an AI, like a robot.

If something is human looking, human like, it can feel, it can think, it can speak, why wouldn't they be considered human or why not?

You know, there are no answers to this in real life.

This is still a debated topic over what's called qualia or phenomenal consciousness.

I'm pretty sure there's no right answer.

My l sides with yes, of course you're a person.

You are you?

Verso sort of sides with renoir at this point in time.

Yeah, it's funny you bring up the AI thinks.

I saw an article the other day about like AI hallucinations and where like AI is like starting to become like you'll have like weird sentient moments almost, and it kind of fits in with like what Verso is doing.

It's almost like he's becoming sentient and realizing that like he's technically not a real person.

He's just a memory of another person that was you know, created, And it just reminded me of that a little bit.

Now, is this AI?

Is this like llm's like chat GPT, because they'll say stuff like that just because they scrubbed the Internet and see people talking about it.

It probably could have been that.

I didn't I don't remember the entire article, but it was discussing like the whole idea of like AI hallucinations and like sort of what that could I guess lead to later.

Oh, no, we're yeah, we're living in basically, yeah, we're living in scary times.

These two go to meet Renoir, the real Renoir, and this verse meets him for the first time.

It's the curator.

As we said, he sheds the disguise.

It's the real Renoir.

He's basically the one that we know.

He's slightly thinner, somewhat softer, but he's Renwarre.

Yeah, he's not a stoic.

He's relieved to see myele and he apologizes to Verso in a very interesting way.

He looks at him and says, some.

Of Feline's finest work, I regret that it caused you so much pain.

What Elene did was unfair to you.

Most of all, please accept the disorder family's apologies.

I know it seems absurd to offer oblivion his recompense, but perhaps that's the outcome we both desire.

It's practically dehumanizing, yeah, that is if you side with Mile's point of view.

It in a way, Yeah, it is.

Yeah, and myle shocked to hear this, you know.

His argument, renoirres is that Eileen won't abandon this canvas.

A piece of Verso's soul is still within it.

She will always find it.

She will go to all ends of the earth to find this to numb her grief.

She refuses to accept her son's death precisely so, and renoirre calls this out.

He says, for the sake of the living, we must part with the dead.

And it's difficult for me to disagree with this, But it's also difficult for me not to understand Male's point of view.

And that's the entire point of this whole last chapter.

Her point of view is that you can't destroy the last piece of Verso.

You just can't do it.

And besides, this is now her home.

Alicia think about earlier in this when she first sits down with Verso, she says that she prefers mile And think about why Alicia is fundamentally and intensely unhappy with her life outside and why shouldn't she be.

She is a shell of her former self.

And this is where I use that turn of phrase from Francis Davis.

She wears the debts and scars of the past on her body.

She will forever be defined by that moment, by her family, by her loved ones, by herself survivor's guilt.

Her life cannot ever go back to how it was, So why wouldn't she want to live here where she can just exist normally, unexciting, uneventful, but normal quote unquote normal, which is how you know, folks that go through these tragedies that define their lives, that's how they tend to speak about it.

Why can't I go back to the normalcy of what it was before?

I know this feeling all too well?

Yeah, and you can't blame her for wanting to, yeah, live in this kind of like ANRNIA type world where, yeah, she's completely free of the shackles that she had, you know, that had been given to her in the real world, you know, right, it's I couldn't imagine.

Man, it's difficult, you know, And I say, I know all too well.

I obviously I don't have a disability or anything.

I have a couple of scars that are pretty noticeable, but it's it's nothing life changing like this.

It's more so like I don't want to get into this on Mike, but like I understand, being wholly unsatisfied with your life is the thing.

I get it.

Yeah, No, I totally get that too.

And it's it's easy to want that escape, especially when you feel like in the real world there is no like way to improve things.

When I mean I feel like there's always a way to improve things.

Sure, I imagine with her situation it's a lot more difficult than some other people.

But you know, you can't you can't blame somebody for wanting to take the easy route in this kind of a situation.

And in a way, Eleene is doing the same thing.

She needs therapy, that's really what she needs do, but instead but instead she just like, yeah, instead of hiring a grief counselor they just paint this fantastic world to just you know, escape in and fight Nevron's in like the lengths people will go to to avoid therapyment, Well, we talk about like numbing the pain in real life, you know, escaping into I don't know, social media, alcohol, podcasts or something like that.

But like now, but like think about how intense this pain must be.

You know, this is why with the most intense injuries on the planet, they'll give like not narcotics like opiates, you know, fentanyl's that comes from a hospital setting because it numbs pain and sensations.

So well, that's psychologically what they're approaching here.

So like, I don't know, just talking to each other that might not necessarily numb the pain in the way that they need.

Now I'm not saying this is healthy, but it's understandable.

Yeah, Like, well, clearly talking to each other is not working.

Yeah, has it worked so far?

Get a professional kids if you can.

I know, I know it's difficult, especially these days, but if you have the means, please try.

It's worth it.

So Renoir is not having any of this shit.

He slams his cane down.

He's prepared to fight, he summons Nevron's He's ready to go, ses Squire, Thank you, Google, Skia and Minoco comes down.

They come to sweep us back to camp.

This is where Mio rediscovers her paintress powers.

She can control chroma, she can paint reality, although she's not quite as skilled as Eleen or Clea, but she does here.

She is able to repaint Lune and Coo.

And this is another online talking point.

Before you say anything, the in game justification of this is that one, as I said, she lacks the power, and two she lacks the chroma to repaint everybody, hence the lack of Gustav, or at least that's one reason Gustave is lost.

My interpretation of this, and I think this is the right one is as right as you can be with interpretations, which is to say not at all.

But if she were to repaint Gustav, that would take away significant character development for her on accept loss.

Now that will come into complete dissonance with what we're going to see later.

But that's just the human condition.

It's messy, it's thorny.

We can't avoid that.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

Like I didn't even think about her potentially repainting Gustave, but I think it's smart that she doesn't because I think if she did, it would have come off a little too like Fairy Taley everything's okay kind of thing, which I think would have been kind of bullshit.

But think about it.

Yeah, the game is about like these people who are struggling with grief and to see my l and don't even necessarily they don't I can't remember if they necessarily make a point of her not bringing back Gustave.

But yet in a way, her not doing that shows that she has, you know, been through the grieving process and that she can move on from that.

Right.

But then of course you can make the argument why she do that with lunin cl butay day whatever, man, Okay, well they didn't you need you need an RPG.

Okay, we need fight.

They didn't die in universe, so like they got gomad.

That's true.

Oh, that's true.

That's true.

And you know the stakes that we see later in the game where her and Verso kind of are at odds with what they fundamentally believe that is that's around the idea of loved ones, and that's when that's when logic and consistency starts to break down with a lot of people.

So that's understandable.

Yeah, yeah, Lune here they're at camp.

They're all reminiscing, why is your hair of that color?

And she says, well, it's a long story.

Fade the black, you know, just call me gain it off.

Lune brings up a point.

All expeditioners killed by Nevron's did not have their chroma returned to Aleen.

I'm a little bit confused on this.

Like they are gray, which suggests the color is gone from their body.

You know, yeah, did Claya take it.

I'm a little unclear on those.

Yeah, I don't think.

I don't think the game makes it clear either, which again, you know, that's okay, it's not a huge deal, But it didn't go back to Aleen is the big thing.

So what we gathered all of the chroma to bring back our following fallen comrades, you know, and that's what we're gonna do.

There's a there's a little line here I wrote down Verso says Aleen wants her son back.

Renoir wants you in a lean back, You want Gustav back.

The cycle we needed to break wasn't the gomage.

It's your family cycle of grief.

I wish this wasn't here.

It's a little heavy handed.

I think they do a perfectly fine job of highlighting that in the story, but uh, he says it.

It's fine.

It feels like at this point they're like, this is what the story is about.

If you're confused here it is, which I'm sure there's somebody who appreciated it.

Sure, yeah, probably, So that's what we do.

We're going around to collect the chroma.

She is.

She's creating an army of the undead.

She's a fucking army of dead men.

She's pulling a mister Bones from the hit Sega Saturn game.

Mister Bone, It's just an army of uh corpses.

Yeah, that's a great game, it is.

I made the U the Lord of the Rings reference, you know, And I think it's Return of the King when aer Gorna gets the the Army of the Dead to help him fight on the Plantier Hills.

Oh yeah, that's a better pool than mister Bones.

Eh.

It's about even I'd say, I'd say it's about even.

So.

This is the World of Ruin section.

If you're a Final Fantasy six fan, you can head to the Final Dungeon as soon as you get here.

This Act three can be the shortest in the entire game if you want.

Yeah, that being said, why don't we talk about some of the relationship quests and the superbosses.

Sure, I probably didn't dive into them as much as you did, but I did what I could do the ones that were like not heavy on, like the questing, you know, because there were some or just like, oh, just talk to him a bunch of times and you're good.

But there were I think there was one where I did the quest and it was super easy.

But yeah, we can get there.

As we go.

Yeah, no problem, let's talk about them here.

You mentioned one one one of them does have no quest attached to it, and that's Cel's.

I'm kind of perplexed as to why, because, like compared to Lunez especially, it's much more intense and fits with the thesis of the game much better.

You talk with cl and you learn why she's afraid of water.

It's because she tried to kill herself.

Losing her husband Pierre was so painful that she tried to kill herself, and when she was revived, the doctors told her that one she was pregnant and to the attempt killed the baby too.

So her big thing now is like Mayo can bring these people back.

How is she going to tell Pierre that she lost the baby?

Yeah?

It very very very heavy handed, because when you're not heavy or yeah, not heavy handed, just heavy but no, no, yeah heavy, that's what I meant.

And yet it's all like incredibly sad, and it's her going through the grief and talking to Verso about it, and you learn all about this like dark side of her which you didn't really know existed beforehand.

But then it like culminates in like you two consummating, I think, yeah, yeah, you.

Can hook up with her.

That was kind of weird to me, like like, okay, is this pity sex?

Well?

Well, I mean, I mean we see that a lot in real life, to that thorniness, like just because somebody's lost a partner, they can have that grief and seek out relationships.

You know, no, for sure, for sure, I'm not denying that.

It's just it just feels like it's a weird kind of shift, kind of like the one you know, you know what I mean.

It's just it's not bad.

It's just like, oh, okay, like you intentionally wrote it this way interesting and if you hook up with her, you cannot hook up with Lunae, which you can also do.

Yeah, I prefer cl anyway.

Yeah, I'm I don't know, I'm not sure who I prefer.

Ska.

But with speaking of Luna's I actually like Luna's quest the least.

I don't mean to be reductive about it, but it kind of boils down to the stereotype of strict Asian parents, you know, which might resonate with some people, but I don't know, it feels very overdone in cliche.

Yeah, it's a little stereotyped, and they just it feels like they never really bothered to give her like an actual decent like backstory or like a little twit, Like I think she could have had a little bit of a twist to her story, you know, but she really doesn't.

And it just kind of amounts to like what you expect, which isn't always a bad thing.

Sure, but I don't know.

I just I was hoping they do a little bit more with her.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a stereotype, it's wrote, it's trite, whatever you want to say.

She like in it accounts for her austere and logic nature, you know.

She says that her parents saw her as a research assistant.

That's why they had her when she That's why they had her.

You go and fight this SPOS near Currend's dungeon.

You receive the journal forty six, which was written by Luna's mom's comrade.

Luna's mom, Bridget, died protecting them from Nevron's and her last words were those of gratification that Lunae would pick up the research after their deaths.

Yeah, you know, it's it's just very predictable.

I feel like they could have I don't know why.

I just thought this, like they could have went like almost like a Spock vibe with her backstory, you know where it's like say like wonderful, are you.

Gonna spoil Star Trek for me now?

Too?

Is nothing sacred to you?

I mean giving you slight details on Spock's backstories, but well, basically, like for those who don't know, Spock is half Vulcan the other half is human.

He has a Vulcan father and a human mother, and Vulcans are known for being rational, logical creatures.

They have no emotions, right, but with Spock being a half race, a by racial angel if you will, he kind of struggles with those type of like human emotions and like just wants to be like a pure logical vulcan and that's always and that's a conflict with him through like a lot of the original series and mainly in A Star Trek the Motion Picture.

His arc in that movie is really good about him going through that whole process.

And I feel like with Lune they could have done something like that where maybe one of her parents was really strict and the other one was like more care free, and they both maybe were trying to like give her different directions to go in life, and she's like.

Not sure which one to go down.

So it's like she's like, I feel like I should be strict because I feels like that's the logical thing to do.

But you know, there's this like other voice in her head saying that she doesn't have to be so strict, and maybe like that conflict in her could have been more of the story, you know.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good way of looking at it.

Just just an idea.

You know, go watch some Star Trek's great.

She takes up songwriting afterwards.

Her parents never liked it, of course, so you know she's moving on.

Ska's is pretty sweet.

You try to cheer Francois up.

He Francois has your rock gui, which gives you the diving power, so you're gonna trade rocks with him.

Get you make this little rock figurine that looks like him with a grumpy little face and a doll version of Claya on top, which makes me think, like, did Clia have a pet turtle or a pet rock?

And was she born in the eighties?

I think pet rock was a seventies thing?

Oh was it?

I think?

Okay?

I used to watch a lot of when VH one had those like I love the seventies, I love the eighties.

Oh sure, and one of the I Love the seventies they did a whole section on the pet rock I was.

I never had a pet rock.

They were even you still saw them now and then in the nineties too.

I never had that.

I had the sea monkeys for a little bit.

Oh really, those little thing.

Yeah that was very weird.

Yeah.

My grandparents were like, kids are into these, right, and I'm like, I guess.

Now those freaked me out.

I get that they're a little weird.

It's really sweet.

You have to fight Francois, of course, but give him the rock.

He's very grumpy.

He's like, take your rock, and then he's like, yeah, but you can leave that one.

And it's really sweet.

As you're leaving, you hear him crying.

So Ska was right the whole time.

You know, he he's been desperately missing Clea.

It's really sweet.

Wow.

Hey there, folks, mild Persona four spoilers are coming up.

If you want to miss those, skip to forty three minutes.

I'll give you a second just in case you can't get to the phone.

Maybe you're driving, maybe you're doing dishes, got sudsy hands, driving to the bakery, maybe coffee, post office?

All right, you got your phone?

All right?

Skip to forty three minutes or so to skip the spoilers.

Thanks.

He reminds me a teeny bit of a Kangi social link in Persona four, where it's like it's mostly like he's mostly played as like a like a comedic kind of a character, but the closer you get to him, you realize more of the kind of emotion in his situation, you know, And I think they try to do something similar with Skia, but you know, not as like questioning other things about his character.

But wanted to talk about that.

One.

I need to replay that.

Two.

I don't think it needs a remake, but you know I'll play that two.

Three.

Nothing drives play the remake.

That's the replay, will be the remake.

Nothing drives me crazier than when people talk about Kanji and best girl Nalto.

Is it Nuto?

Uh?

If you think Nwato's best girl, I was asking for her name.

I think it's an Alato.

Yeah, I don't think she's best girl.

Nothing drives me crazier than like when they're like, you know, Kanji's gay, like that's his arc, or like NATO's trans It's like if if that's the narrow brush part in the pun that you want wide rush, excuse me that you want to paint with and you want to miss all the nuance with it, be my guest, But that is such a reductive take of those two characters.

Persona's got enough reductive writing as it is.

You got to give them the credit where it's due.

Well, I do think Naoto and Kanji like questioning their sexuality is part of their characters.

Well, yes, it's much deeper than it's just Kanji's in the closet or Naoto you know, is like transgender.

Like it's if that's all somebody is saying about them, it's like, well, they didn't really play the game, because there's clearly more there with those characters.

I mean, it could be an element of it, absolutely, I mean.

And what I like is Kanji is left kind of vague because I think even he doesn't know what he is, you know, and he's only a teenager.

He'll figure it out.

It deals with societal expectations, It deals with conformity, how one views oneself.

There's so much more than just you know, Kanji is gay, I don't know.

But that's why Kanji's my favorite character in the game.

Monoko Monoko.

His relationship quest is focused on bringing Noko back.

Here's something that I admittedly did not realize until very late.

The Gesturles are all paint brush looking things, right, That's what they are representive of.

Explains their heads.

They reincarnate, that's set up earlier.

That's kind of like washing off the paint brush in the water, like cleaning it off.

And you know, they mentioned that when they're reincarnated, When Noko's reincarnated, he'll never be he'll not be the same Noco.

He will be a different Noko than we knew, but he will look the same.

And that's you know, that's kind of what washing a paint brush off is.

You know, it's never going to be the exact same thing.

You think about it that way?

Pretty cool.

Well, and when you dip it in, when when you.

Dip it in paintbrush to give it a different color, you know, each color represents something completely different, you know, like red has its own meaning and blue has its own meaning that you know, or like kind of employ said biases or you know what society is, Like red means this, you know that kind of a thing.

And I think that's also reflective of it of like a different color could bring about a different personality.

Yeah, sure, I could see that.

You head to the Sacred River, which is a really beautiful location.

Ah, oh my god.

Yes, it's like really dark and shimmering.

There are like colorful uh statuettes and rocks everywhere.

It's really nice.

I mean you've got to fight golgra because, like you could see all around there are like statue petrified past gesturals that are waiting to be reincarnated.

There's a queue there's a line and Monoco is jumping it.

So Gogra's like, all right, well you gotta you gotta fight me.

And this fight is bitchen.

It is hard, man, it's difficult.

I didn't beat it.

I tried like three times and I couldn't do it.

Halfway through she goes super Saiyan and she just cranks up the heat.

Man.

I barely scraped through this one.

But man, this I love this fight.

It's so I was always able to get when she went super Saiyan, but then I just I just couldn't hang after that.

You know.

I was probably just too under leveled and I didn't want to spend however long it would have taken to grind.

So oh well, when you beat her, you do you do revive Noko?

He is he does not remember anything.

And this deeply, deeply saddens Monoco because like Noko raised Munoco Ya and some folks have tied this back to the Dessander's family's dogs, possibly because Monoko was their dog, and it could have been that, you know, you dog dies, you get a new dog.

Cat diyes you a new cat, that kind of thing.

That's a good way of thinking of it.

Yeah, yeah, it's neat.

It's it's a neat interpretation.

But Noko raised Munoco, and Monoco said like, this should have been my turn.

But you know, Eskia or not esk Versa and Golger are like, dude, we're going to kill God.

Noko is better suited reacquainting with.

The world in the village.

Yeah, yeah, and I don't think he has the ability to kill God.

We talked about cl Mile.

This is my favorite one.

I mean, not surprisingly Myle's my favorite character, but we are.

This is a confrontation of painted Alicia.

You go up into this tower called the Reacher.

This is actually the third axon the Reacher and this I couldn't wrap my mind around this at first.

This tower is like quasi living, you know, it can move around.

This is a representation of male of Alicia.

The other two are representative of Cleo and Verso.

This one of Alicia.

It's the most abstract one.

She who reaches for the skies.

I think it's it's hopeful, right, she's the youngest, she's the most impacted other than you know Verso, because you know he's sad, so there's an inherent hope.

It's made of flammable materials, which is a little grim sardonic, but you know, you get to the top of it and Painted Alicia is there.

She's painting.

Verso tries to give her the letter, but she is so upset with him because Verso killed her parents.

You know, we've already killed the painted versions of them.

She drops the letter.

She agrees to talk with Mael.

They have a friendly little duel.

This is one of my favorite fights in the game.

It's a really good fight.

Yeah, it's so good.

It's so cool seeing her with like she's got Mile's move set, but she's got variations on it where they just hit harder, they move faster, there's more moves on it.

Oh man, it is so cool.

She also has a touching line Mile does.

She says she blames us, doesn't she And then she turns to Painted Alicia and she says, you didn't deserve that.

You know she Miyle knows too well what losing family is.

She's lost many, but you beat her.

It's a really sweet moment.

It's a love of fencing between the two.

You know.

Miele offers her a new life.

She says, we both deserve to fly.

Let me give you a new beginning.

But painted Alicia doesn't want this.

Her voice is strained.

She says, send me to my family, and Mael obliges.

She mimages her and Verso cannot stand this.

He freaks out, but he can't get there quick enough.

He never got the chance to say goodbye.

This is interesting, you know, This is what I was saying before.

Verso will eventually come around to like what Mayo was thinking here.

But his sister was the last of his family that he had.

He never got to say goodbye.

She took him away too quickly.

She took the renoirre route of like trying to advance this along quicker.

He says, You painters, you just do what you want.

You don't care how it affects the rest of us.

It's a nice little wrinkle in their philosophies of this.

I think, Yeah, I agree.

Did you do this one?

No?

I did not.

Oh man, it's good, it's good.

You should.

You should check it out, you know what, I just might just might do that.

Did you check out the Superbosses?

Oh no, I didn't even know they were a thing.

Oh yeah, so one of them is Clea.

This isn't so like you find her, and she is like super gray with very beady eyes.

They look so evil and intimidating.

Mile says that she painted over Eleen's version of her.

I guess she didn't like it, so she painted over this one to be like super strong, because she's a really talented painter.

And this boss is wicked man.

She like attacks with Nevron.

She can summon them and they'll all have adjectives like powerful, agile, strange.

So you have to learn their attack patterns because if you miss a Perry, or if you dodge, or if you get hit Clay, I will hear herself from like one point five to two million HP.

Oh great, I mean this fight demands perfection.

Luckily, it's not like there aren't a crazy amount of them, and you can you can learn their attack patterns pretty fairly simply, but it does it takes a while.

Yeah, yeah, And knowing how much I struggled with the combat at time, I feel like I wouldn't have made much progress in this one.

So Simon is even worse now.

Like you're going down there and everybody's like, I've got a really bad feeling about this, and you get down there.

This is the most metal looking scene in the game.

There's this dude sitting there, one armed, huge sword with his hair like long hair sticking up like super sayan three goku and those you remember those like molten swords we saw in Old Lumiere.

Yeah, yeah, those were all his.

Like, there are just loads of them down here sticking up.

It looks like a metal album cover.

It's sick.

Yeah.

Look looking at his character model, he's like a weird mixture of like cloud, a little bit of suffer Off and maybe a little bit of Orin as well.

Yeah.

Yeah, like very very final fantasy.

He was in Expedition zero with Verso he's Versa's old friend.

He's Cleya's lover.

That's revealed in his journal.

His fight.

It's just infamously brutal.

I built a bit old with solo male that could take one shot his Phase one.

But here's the problem.

One, I mean one, his attacks are crazy.

Two.

If any of your characters die and you don't revive them quickly, he just erases them from the canvas.

He just takes them away.

Phase two.

After you deplete his after you debuff his health to zero, Phase two gets the health bar up again.

His sword gets even bigger.

His attacks now have shadows, so like they're they're the same attacks mostly, but now you have to hit Harry twice because he's got like a shadow sword.

It's weird.

And once you get him down to like a third or a fourth of his health, he automatically wipes whoever is on the on the battlefield away.

He just removes them, and then your backups have to come in, so like, you can't even get away with just three good characters.

Everybody has to be up to snuff.

Fuck that, Yeah, dude, it's it's crazy.

Yeah, no, thank you, Yeah, agreed.

Why don't we beat the game now?

Huh?

Good idea.

I feel like I talked like mostly throughout a lot of that.

I apologize.

I hope that's cool.

Oh you are good man.

So we're beating the game.

Now.

We go back into Lumiere.

It's draped in this sort of constant pallid darkness.

Void type Nevron's are introduced here.

That one that looks like a horse with like a void sphere on its back.

Yeah yeah, that thing is sick.

That's the most thing is I can get that as an attack, and it's easily one of his most powerful.

Oh that sounds great.

We get down there.

It gets a little bit to avengers for me, you know, we get down there.

Mile points her sword and says it gets a close up and she's like, tomorrow comes.

It's yeah, yeah, that's really where it felt like they were getting to the end and they're like, okay, we got to wrap it up, throw some cliches in there, just to get get it going.

I didn't even think they were trying to wrap it up so much as like, I don't know, they were like, you know, what's epic marvels Like, no, no, I mean it's epic to somebody.

I guess, yeah, I guess.

I'm not trying to yuck anyone's yum.

It's just, uh, I don't know.

It made me kind of grown.

No.

I think I think that's fair because the game has had a very mature kind of writing that to do something like that that feels more like a a weird tonal shift than the whole like revealing the paint paint, the revealing the canvas thing.

You know.

You know, it's funny you said this game's got mature writing, and immediately my voice went back to Ska throwing up mid sentence.

I'm sorry, Hey, Hey, it happens, man, it's just part of life.

You've never thrown up mid sentence.

It happens to the best who hasn't drank an entire bottle of it at the cac to see who gets the last pie.

Not specifically that type, but yeah, sure, those nevrons are everywhere, but we've got our mister Bones army or I guess if you're thrack the air Gorn army.

I like, mister Bones, that's fine.

You run forward and like they're jumping out to get the nevrons.

It's pretty sweet, Like it's pretty cool.

Love it, absolutely love it.

The scale here is insane, Like you're running towards that distortion of the Eiffel Tower.

It is so big.

I love how this game plays with scale.

I really do.

Yeah, And when you see that crazy Eiffel Tower, I was like, man, I hope we actually get close to it.

Like we don't actually ever do anything.

Inside that Eiffel Tower, but it was nice to get like closer to it, especially for it to be the backdrop for some of like the last fights.

Yeah.

Absolutely, you eventually encounter run here.

It's the final stand.

This is going to decide the fate of Lumiere and all its inhabitants, Verso and the canvas.

Miele is pleading, but Renoirre is steadfast.

Some of this I'm going to just read because the audio the voices get a little tough to hear.

Renoire says, I know how powerful and intoxicating it is, how deeply attached we can become to the worlds we pour our hearts and souls into.

I was enthralled and it nearly killed me.

Child.

Do you think I want to erase versus Canvas?

Do you really think I want to destroy the last piece of his soul?

There's no right answer here.

I mean, That's what I love so much about this last act is this is less of a trying to find out who's right and more of an unraveling and exploration of how these emotions can manifest and what the thought processes behind them are.

Yeah and yeah, with the emotions manifesting kind of explains how it feels like everything is just starting to fall apart around you, you know, like just all this pent up emotion that's been happening, it's just it's.

The dam is starting to burst.

I guess and it's too much to deal with.

It weighs on the mind like a vice.

It squeezes it until the I mean the air is sucked out of it.

It's like it's like when you get hit so hard in the chest you can't breathe, like you want to, but you just cannot.

It's it's like that, like really, for some people, it gets physically like that, like you just you can't do anything exactly, and it does stuff to you.

It changes how you think and feel.

It's our brains are insane things.

Indeed they are.

They named themselves.

Oh my god.

Yeah, oh geez, I'm having like a timan Eric mind blow a moment.

I haven't mean to do that too.

Oh man, I gotta take a shower.

That's a shower thought if I've ever heard one, that is.

I think I saw that in our slash Shower.

Mayo pleads some more.

Renoir will not hear it, and his patience is wearing thin.

He I love this line, he says.

He says, I treat you as if the shadows from the worst day of our lives is going to suffocate you and take you from us too.

So powerful, very powerful.

That's what it is.

For him, seeing them in some way reminds him.

It's a constant reminder of the worst day of his life, of losing his son.

Yeah, Like, I feel like he's the one who wants to properly grieve and move on from this, but everyone around him just doesn't want to do it, and because of that, he's getting sucked into this and being treated as the bad guy when in right, if you really think about it, he's probably the most sensible one here.

Well, And that's one argument that I've heard too, and I can understand Mael has this viewpoint of wanting to prolong the comfortable experience Renoirre is older and grison.

He's been through this before.

He knows that this is no way to deal with grief.

You know.

The way to deal with grief is to accept that those that are gone will not come back.

That's the cycle of life.

Now.

Admittedly he is trying to push others through their own cycles into that, which can become thorny.

But you know, that's one argument.

He's been through this.

He's been through this before, he's walked this road.

He knows how it goes.

It probably comes from a place of frustration, you know, like he wants to be.

And also think about it, he's, you know, the father, he's supposed to be like the leader of the family right in terms, and he's trying to like guide everybody to like, hey, I know how to like deal with this, or like I've been through it.

Here's what we do.

And to see basically his whole family unit breaking down in front of him over this, and he's losing control of it, right, you know.

And I think the end of this is kind of like templary of that.

It's just him like he's just lost control of the whole thing, and kind of at the end he just goes, fuck it.

I guess he's like, I'll take it by force.

I'll do it myself.

Yeah, yeah, fuck it, I'll do it.

He's been here before.

He doesn't want what happened, what presumably may have happened to him, happened to my own.

And I want to point out too, it's not just the sight of Mael that reminds him of that day.

He's thinking about that.

Seeing Verso two Verso is an unholy reminder in his eyes of what transpired that day.

He should not be and yet here he is the thing.

This should not be.

This leads into a battle.

Nobody can take it anymore.

The dope music begins again, Renoir morphs into the Curator terrific A really good fight too.

I you know, I feel like he summons the axons throughout this fight, which is really cool.

I don't know, I feel like I'm just changed as a person from fighting Simon.

Yeah, because I I could imagine this fight isn't nearly as hard as that one is something that I've seen folks online say so like when you do New Game Plus, everything just gets harder, more difficult, And I think Simon and Claya do too, like big time.

But I've now I dude, you gotta fight them.

You'll you'll understand it's it's something else.

Maybe I'll find them just just try it once just to see how bad it is and go, okay.

It's it's weird.

I mean like like this is a weird thing.

But like like when your friends are like, come on, do this like dumb thing, You're like, I'll just do it once just to make you happy, and then you never do it again.

The big thing in my middle school that's like that where everyone's like, come on, man, just try it once.

Was the dairy challenge, where you drink a gallon of milk and under an hour and try not to protect how vomit everywhere?

Oh no, we never did that, thankfully.

Yeah I never did it, but uh, it was big amongst my friends.

I'll say we were into the cinema and challenge that was Oh that too.

Yeah, that one can kill you.

It didn't kill me.

Yeah, it didn't stop us.

We've got iron twenty bucks that day.

Yeah, we've got the good genes.

I'm not wearing geens.

I have heard that if you do do the Superbosses that the end of this game becomes like crazy easy, you know, something to keep in mind.

I could imagine, because, yeah, because this final battle is challenging, but I didn't think it was like ridiculously tough.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, it's family drama time.

Remember at the beginning when Claya and Alicia hid the canvas, Yes, well Eleen found it, damn it.

Renoire was right, she found it.

She returns to the canvas.

She brings the painted version of herself, the or not the painted version, the representation of like her grief.

That creation the goldlame esque paintress in the background it's fighting against Sarn super sick.

Oh yeah.

I love when you see like big fights happening behind you when you're doing the small little fight you know.

Oh yeah, yeah, the fight gets harder with Renoir.

Here, the frenetic attack got me pretty decently.

Oh yeah, yeah, I'm I was surprised I beat him.

It was the second try.

Yeah, first try, I got real close and then I kind of messed up a little bit and died.

But when I did it the second time, I was able to clear it, which was I was honestly kind of surprised by that.

But it wasn't until much later in the game where I got the one chromo where you can exceed the ninety nine like damage.

Yeah, you get that at the start of act three.

Yeah, and once I figured out how that works and I was able to pass it to everybody, Yeah, that definitely made a lot of these fights much easier.

And especially like may L, who was like my big, you know, hitter, I could get her to do like crazy amounts to damage on him.

Oh yeah, yeah, that it becomes essential at a certain point.

Yeah.

I just wish I had learned that earlier in the game.

Yeah.

I probably discussed it in part one.

So go listen.

You know, if you beat Claia get you get an absolute banger of a pictose where and this came in clutch for me for Simon where if if you don't take damage on the turn previous, you automatically regain one hundred percent health.

Oh that sounds amazing.

Yeah, it's crazy because I mean that's what she does the entire fight to you, you know, yeah, yeah, here's my power.

So Renoird knows that he's been beaten.

He's not entirely upset, though.

He says that it was a lean who first saved him when he was in the canvas.

He doesn't want this to be like a hymn versus them, but he still will not back down.

He thinks he sees nothing but that day, every day, NonStop, and how his family crumbled.

Do you know why?

Do you know why I cannot leave her.

Or you behind?

This?

This is what I see every.

Day.

I cannot spend another day with living corpses.

Since the fire, our family has crumbled and leaned in the canvas, Claire fighting her solitary war, you living ghost.

Verso's death broke.

Us wanted to be fixed.

I needed to be fixed.

I get.

I cannot lose you too.

It's I mean, it's it's the kind of feelings that makes your hair stand on end.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's tired of reliving this grief over and over again.

He just wants it done.

But the thing is is, Mile says, that's exactly how she feels about all the friends that she's made along the way.

You know, that's maybe the expeditioners were the friends we made along the way.

Yeah.

The music here is like really still a lot of non vibrating strings.

It's nice, She convinces him honestly, She lies to him, and he believes her.

She says like, look, I'll I'll come back.

I'll come out of the canvas, like I won't stay here forever, and he believes her.

He well, he doesn't gomage himself.

He leaves the canvas willingly.

He says, I'll keep the light on for you.

I hope you find peace.

Hm.

But we know she's lying, she's gonna stay here.

Do you think that he chose to believe her because he's just tired, or do you think he truly believed what she was saying in that moment.

I think he was so broken that he was willing to accept whatever, you know, because by the end of the fight, you can tell he is just a completely broken down man and is just willing to accept whatever is told to him, you know, even if he knows it's not true.

And I think he does know that, but at this point there's nothing he can do about it.

I think we've all been there, like when we're in a particularly grueling back and forth with somebody we love, or when we're just that depressed talking with somebody who's trying to cheer us up, Like at some point you just shut down.

You're like, all right, Like I trust you, like in some base level, I don't believe you, but I just do not have the energy or the heart to, you know, convince you.

Otherwise I'm just going to go along with you.

Or maybe maybe even he's just you know, placating her.

Maybe he's like, I just I don't agree with you.

I want you to be happy.

That has become over these last few hours the most important thing to me.

I just hope you find your piece.

Maybe it's that I think it is too.

I think in some ways he's letting go as well.

Maybe so I don't know.

Because that would mean that he's accepting the loss of his daughter.

I'm not.

I you would have to convince me that's fair, that's fair.

Can you do it?

No?

I just threw it out there as an idea.

Man not on Mike, only behind closed doors.

Oh yes, yes.

Now.

One thing to note is that at a certain point, like when he talks about seeing that day over and over again, I just see living corpses.

He opens this like pair within the painting, within the canvas that shows you know, that day, and it also shows the young boy painting that remember the like ghostly young boy.

You know that.

At this point it's kind of clear it's Verso, you know, yep, Verso, hour verso, the painted Verso all throughout renoir and male's verbal sparring all throughout there.

It shows him he's looking at the ground, he's lost in thought, he's pensive.

He you can see a war raging on inside of him.

So he jumps inside of this rift and he walks over to the young boy and he says, it's time to stop painting.

You're tired of painting, aren't you, And he nods, I'm tired too.

Mile does not like this one bit.

No, she follows him in.

She doesn't want this oblivion, this recompense that Renoir suggested.

This is not what she wants.

She says, like, you know, if I leave, Papa will erase the canvas.

Immediately I leave, papago erase this canvas.

This is not worth your life, life, my life of loveliness in a shell of a body with no voice and no few you will in that way.

You don't need this covers Everything you want is here.

Here.

I have a chance to live, So.

To live.

Exists.

Life keeps forcing cruel choices.

He says that, and she's like, don't quote Papa at me.

Kind of funn oh dare you you know?

And this is the climax, Like Verso extends a hand to the young boy, Miele swipes the sword.

You know, cruel choices.

Indeed, it's you know.

And these are okay, let's talk endings.

These are the end.

These are divisive.

Again.

I want to totally make this point clear.

Neither one is correct.

I personally think one is much more interesting.

But neither are quote unquote correct.

Everybody is right and wrong simultaneously.

Here right Mayel will never ever lead a life that is not fraught with the debts of that day, the shadow of Verso's death, the quote naivety of her as Claya said that that caused the death of her brother.

Her disfiguring and a disability constant remind her a reminder, and she will be defined by that.

Verso has been cursed with ceaseless immortality.

He's tired.

He's a facsimile of somebody else, Like he's not even him technically.

He's been seeking an end for years.

He is so tired, and everybody he loves has gone away.

You know, I can see both points.

You know, I don't think either is wrong.

I think I don't know, I understand both of these.

It's a case of like the way the story was leading up, there was this way the story was building up.

There was no way for there to be like a happy ending.

There wasn't And I think the developers intentionally made it that way, because, Uh, it's gonna come down to your interpretation, like, which ending do you think is the better ending?

Right?

It was interesting where like the ending I chose seem to be the one most people didn't choose, which I found interesting.

Yeah, you know, there aren't as many of these takes anymore, because you know, now everybody can just make a video essay for better or for worse, and you know, people watch them and then make their own Reddit posts about it.

It's a whole carousel.

But people don't sharing cycle of content regurgitation.

Yeah, basically, yeah, we say on a podcast, basically it is what it is.

But I don't see this take anymore.

But a lot of folks said, like, yeah, there it is black and white.

One of these is clearly the right one that that the devs are steering you towards, and quite honestly, the one that they're citing, the one that we're going to talk about right now, versos ending is not the one that I think the devs were steering you towards at all.

No, I don't.

In a way.

I do think they are, like, in a way trying to point you to a specific ending.

I do.

I Yeah, I don't think it's the VERSA ending either.

I think it's the other one, which I think is interesting because in my opinion, I think the Verso ending is the more it's the more solid ending.

For my sake, Oh really, yes, do you.

Want to talk about it and then say why you think that is well, I would say, let's just discuss the versa ending real quick.

Okay, So if you choose versa, you fight as versa against my own.

She begins to gomage, and you know, he's just forcing her out of the canvas.

She's not being murdered here.

And this is like a sort of what I wrote here as an araboris of death.

He is losing her within the canvas.

She is losing him once more, because once she's gone, he's going to end at all.

Right, so she is once again losing a new found family member.

Right, this is part of the tragedy of her side of things.

Verso then embraces Minoco and Skia.

They all hug before those two gamage as well.

Then cl then Lune will not meet him.

She is kind of pissed.

She just sits down, and then he walks up to the young boy.

He says, it's okay, it's over.

Verso then you know he presumably destroys the canvas.

Well, no, because once the young boy, once real, Verso's soul stops painting, this whole thing ceases to be.

So that's done.

Versu's soul is gone.

That means his creation, his world is over in the real world, notably with a not distorted Eiffel Tower.

The Desandras hold a small funeral for verso you know, everybody seems content, mostly even Clea, although she is the first one to walk away.

Surprisingly, Alicia seems content too.

It is kind of the happy ending and that's it.

Then it goes to credits.

It's kind of the happy ending, but also it does kind of bring that sort of reality crushing moment to it as well, because I think, in my opinion, I think knowing what they knew after everything had happened, I feel like if they tried to just keep the canvas going, I feel like they wouldn't have gotten that sort of like kind of calming or relief that I think they would have felt, because it's one of those like it's hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube, and it's like when you already know, like, oh, this thing that I'm in, this positive sort of almost fantasyland that I live in, is not real and it only exists to relieve the grief of somebody else else in a very unhealthy manner.

Personally, I don't think I would be able to live with that, Like I think that would weigh heavier on me, like not facing reality but escaping into like a fantasy.

And that's why I think the verso ending for me, I think works better because it allows you to sort of realize that, hey, no matter what kind of way you try to escape the negative feelings, the only way you really can escape those is to confront them head on and take them on.

And it feels like that's what they're doing and realizing that, you know, no matter how many different canvases you try to paint, it's not going to take the pain away, and the only way to take the pain away is to confront that pain.

And I think that's what they're trying to say with that ending, which to me, I think fits better with the whole theme of Green.

So it sounds like you're aligning yourself with Renoir's pithy saying we must accept things how they are, not how we want them to be.

In a way, yes, because you can't have in my opinion, you can't have control over everything in your life.

You just can't.

And learning to accept that I think can make your life better, Like control the things you can control, but learn to accept that there are things beyond your control.

And I think like having the painterests and doing all this stuff is them trying to assert control in a situation they don't have control of at all, and and doing that, I feel like it only makes you weaker.

It only makes you feel weaker and feel like you can't do anything, which may equate to the way they, you know, start to break down and chip away.

You know that they're just desperately trying to hang on to something that is just it's already gone, They've already lost the fight and they're just still trying to hold on to it.

And I think that just makes you a I feel like that just makes you worse as opposed to just you know, accepting certain things.

I'm probably not worrying it correctly, but.

No, no, I think you are.

I can I float something by you please?

Now?

So if you can picture like a three pronged scale instead of like the traditional two pronged one, you know, something in the in the realm of a super scale, how would you balance the following three things of the life of Verso, the life of Mael, because again, if she stays in the canvas, she will die, and the lives of all of painted Lumiere, and I guess a follow up question or alternative question would be what do you think of the lives of those painted and Lumiere like, how do we weigh these sacrifices against each other when some of them are going to be cast away?

How do we reconcile that to make a decision?

I think how I reconcile that stuff is like I'm the guy in the movie where they shout like, but it's not real.

You know, I'm that guy because in a way they're not.

They kind of like represent that they're like, they're not.

They're just this world that has been created by this person to deal.

With their grief.

And no matter how real they may feel to you, at the end of the day, in my perspective is that they're not real.

They're just figments of your imagination.

And when you get lost in that too much and then you can't see what's right in front of you, that just makes things harder, you know what I mean?

Does that make myel and Gustav's relationship less real?

Not in the moment, And I don't think it detracts from the impact that it may have on people.

You know, and it was a you know it.

It was nice to see that, but just for me, it's like, but was it even real to begin with?

And if it wasn't, you know?

So do you see that Mayel and Gustav as a sort of self numbing then, like in the face of grief, like some sort of medicating pacifying in some ways, yes, because I think that's something we all try to do when we deal with grief, is try to try to numb that pain because we don't want to feel that those are bad feelings.

We don't like to feel bad feelings.

That's so interesting.

So like, at what point then, I mean, the question that follows is at what point would they become human or would something like this become human?

There's no mean real answer to that, but like.

No, it's down to perception, it is, and my perception is probably going to be different from other people's perceptions, and that's fine.

I'm willing to, Like, I accept that, that's okay if we have disagreements on it, but you know, and it can feel real to somebody else, and I understand that, you know, But at the end of the day, in my opinion, I'm like, I it probably wasn't.

It was just a coping mechanism, and it feels like the whole canvas, paintress, the entire thing to me boiled down to being like an elaborate coping mechanism, which is probably something that a lot of artists do when they're feeling those negative emotions, they express it in their art and then it creates the whole art imitating life, life imitating art type of thing.

You know.

Being in the music world, I'm sure you understand where I'm coming from from that, where like, even if it is art and it's not real, it can feel real to the person that's making it, And that's very much true.

But maybe it's because I'm not the one who made the art, so viewing it from an outsider's perspective is probably different than, say, if I were the one doing this to get over the grief.

Hmmm, So so you side?

Uh?

Do you largely side with Renoir for wanting to rush them through this?

Not rush them through it?

No, I don't.

I don't like his method of just trying to hurry it along.

Like grieving is a unique process for everybody, and everybody handles it differently.

Like not to get too deep into my own real life, but when my grandfather on my on my mom's side the family passed away quite a few years ago, seeing like he was kind of the centerpiece of the family in a lot of ways, and so seeing how his death affected not just like my mother, but like her siblings and then those siblings families, and then you know, my own siblings and everybody around it, Like seeing everybody dealing with the grief in their own way.

And in some ways I sympathize with Renoir because some of those family members I think went about their grieving process in I don't want to say the wrong way, but like in a way that wasn't good for them, unhealthy ways.

Yes, stuff that we're kind of still dealing with, honestly, And in some ways I can feel Renoir's frustration and seeing certain people do the things that they do.

But also like at the end when he just kind of accepts whatever he's told, like I kind of feel that as well.

Yeah, So maybe that's maybe that's why I lean towards him, is just from like my own personal vantage point, sure.

And that's that's an important thing to keep in mind too, is that I am paraphrasing Jizak And I'm sure a million other people that have had the same thought.

But we constantly we cannot really have an objective view of the world.

We're always viewing it through some lens of ideology.

Whether that's male American, somebody who's lost a family member, somebody dealing with alcoholism, any number of things.

We're always viewing through some lens.

So on your side, given your background, it makes sense why you would view grief this way.

It makes sense for a lot of people to view grief this way.

I think, Well, I think the important thing is, though, is that you can agree with Renoir largely.

But I think and I don't mean to speak for you, but I think it's understandable.

I think you could understand what makes all of this appealing and maybe in some ways necessary for Mayel and Aleen.

Yeah.

Yeah, Like again, I think his like real kind of aggressive approach probably is like the incorrect approach.

But they probably framed him that way so he could come off more as a quote unquote villainous type character.

Well, and let me let me steal man your argument a little bit.

Sure, it's I said, rush them through.

You could argue that that's not correct.

Whatsoever.

Aileen's been in there for a long time.

She's been in there so long that we're going to talk about the paint effects, but the paint effects in real life are staining them, and her in world avatar is so chipped away and broken that it doesn't hard.

It barely resembles a human.

So in some ways you can argue that, no, he's not rushing through that at all.

He's seeing his wife effectively kill herself and he can't bear to lose another family member.

Yeah, that's probably a good way of thinking about it, because you don't get the exact like how like the time difference between the real world and the canvas world.

So we're not one hundred percent sure how long it's been, but yeah, from the way Renoir deals with it, it's very much a you know, it's been going on for a long time.

Yeah, somebody in there says like they've been at something for hundreds of years, and like, yeah, I mean, even if it's I don't know why I keep thinking it's versa.

But even if it's versa, like that doesn't track from when he died to now, So like hundreds of n this is a hyperbolic time chamber.

Situation exactly exactly, and yeah, like seeing her like yet and viewing this as like her just guy kind of slowly killing herself with her grief is in some ways I find that to be accurate.

It reminds me of.

There's a book by well, if you know the band Rush, the drummer Neil Peart like to he wrote some books in the two thousands, and he wrote one called Ghostwriter, which was about his journey of grief from his daughter dying in a car accident, like right before she was about to go off to college, and then watch his wife basically slowly killed herself with grief over the next year, and then him basically, yeah, losing his wife and daughter and the four plus year journey of him kind of you know, trying to gain back some sort of normal life, you know, doing like you know, retiring from music completely and getting on his motorcycle and just driving around the entire North American continent pretty much just trying to find some form of like peace and moving on from the stuff.

The book's called Ghostwriter of if y'all are out there, if you haven't read it, I highly recommend it.

It is a very good read.

You learn a lot about him and sort of like like, it's a really good book about like long term grieving, especially in such a horrific tragedy that it's crazy to think that he was able to move on from it and actually live like a fairly decent life until he passed a couple of years ago now from a a I think it was a brain tumor.

Yeah, that's horrible.

I had no idea his daughter passed away like that.

Yeah, yeah, it's it was.

Yeah, it's pretty rough.

That was in ninety seven, Yeah, it was late nineties.

Oh yeah, it's a pretty it's a pretty heavy book, but it does have a fairly i don't want to say, like fairy tale happy ending, but like to see Neil come out of that and be able to like you know, kind of start a new life and like find love again and all, that's just it makes you feel good, you know, especially because I'm such a big fan of the band, So it was nice to see that he was able to you know, move on from that, I guess, and I'll maybe I'm also viewing this game from that perspective as well, the perspective of that book.

Do you want to do a little discussion around Miles ending oh yeah, yeah, I actually haven't seen her ending in full, like I've read it.

Okay, but you know, go ahead, you know, we'll try to paint a picture.

So this one sort of turns into the classic utilitarian argument, is the life of one or two worth, the lives of worth, the lives of a thousand.

I see a lot of folks label this one as the selfish ending.

I don't agree with that.

It kind of depends on whether you see these painted lumierez as conscient, conscious agents, which I submit to you that the game goes at length to suggest, so your view of the ending may change, and of course, through the lens of what you know.

Your personal life is of course, like we just discussed.

But here's what happens.

Verso begs for his life here, or he begs for the end of it is this has been star like winning the Oscar.

This is phenomenally acted.

He's he's painted, He's over and over again.

He's just saying, I don't want to live this life.

I don't want to live this life.

Please please please, oh.

You you can do this, you can do this.

Please bade me me.

I don't want this.

Love.

Stop saying that I want this life.

I love this I just I just wanted to live this life tub together, this life down that was stolen from us.

Please please, I don't love this life.

He's begging to be killed, to be put out of his misery, and my l sort of standing like like kneeling beside him as he's going, you know, saying you know, just no, And as she the screen fades black, and as it's fading up, she says this quote.

Above the darkness, she says.

You could growl.

With you.

Find a reason to smile, which that in and of itself, I think is a fantastic discussion point.

But let's close out the ending.

A crowd in Loumiere lines up for a piano recital put on by Verso.

The whole Lumier is repainted.

Skier and Monoco are ticket takers.

The whole crew is in the audience with their previously deceased loved ones.

Pierre is back, Gustave and Sophie are back.

Luna's parents don't seem to be back.

I don't know what that's about, but you know that's fine.

They all sit down, The lights go out, it turns to black and white sounds versa takes the stage.

Everybody applauds.

It looks like he's older.

It looks like Mayo painted him to be a bit older.

Maybe he's aging.

Maybe she gave him mortality in this universe.

Tough to say.

He goes to play, he's really nervous, like he can't bring himself to do it.

You know, given the circumstances, I'm not surprised.

But this dissonant piano chord immediately punctuates this jump.

Cut to close up of Mayeu, whose face has the splattered paint over her eyes, and then as Versa plays the theme the credits role, should him too.

I know we talked about the paint before, but as she's staying in there, Remember it's kind of a dual idea, right, If you continue to paint over a canvas, two things happen.

One paint splatters kind of accidentally get onto the canvas.

They splatter, They build up, they cake up, they dry up.

That's sort of what that looks like.

Also, recall pentiment Pentimento.

When old layer, when new layers excuse me, start to fade and crack and break off, and the old, faded, dry, cracked layers underneath begin to shine through.

You could say that's what's happening here too, and it happened to the other Dessanders as well.

You could see that almost like their paintedselves are cracking and breaking down.

But that's the end of this one.

I think narratively this one makes more sense, and I do think it's the more interesting ending.

I think a lot of folks and I'm not saying this is you thrack like, let me just be clear.

I think a lot of folks online like the other ending because it's happy because the leading boy, the leading man, gets to be saved.

I think, well saved.

You know he's dead, but you know the family has a happy send off.

His soul is freed.

Yeah yeah, Shangsung didn't get him that day.

I think your soul is mine.

I think this one is more narratively driven.

This game has gone to great lengths to suggest that the painted Lumierians are conscious agents.

You know they Mayo constantly stands up for them.

They're my friends that I made along the way.

And yeah, you could say that that's a biased view because this is her ending.

We can't it's it becomes a circular definition to cite her.

But I think the game does too.

It solely focuses us on them.

It shows their deaths as being meaningful.

It shows that they have feelings and relationships and their own thoughts and convictions.

I think this is where where I don't want to say the game is driving because I don't agree with that.

I don't think either one of these are quote unquote true or real.

But this one, I don't know.

This one just makes all the sense in the world to me.

Also, because you know, I deeply sympathize with Mael.

I understand how blind to destruction you could be when you are that devastated in grief.

And let's not even forget that Mael's you know, complete disfigurement and disabilities will now stay with her for the rest of her life, and all of her family kind of looks at her as the blame for what happened.

They look at her as the incitement for the fire that took their son.

Yeah, Cleia Aline Renoir, they all feel that way.

How could she go back to that life?

I don't know.

I totally get it.

I understand it too, you know, her wanting to live in this canvas world where you know she is a whole person and not like you know, a person, right.

Right, She just again, she just wants the normalcyback.

She's I mean, it's not like she's a superhero in here.

You could make the argument that she's God, but it doesn't make it doesn't seem like she's wielding that.

I mean, she just wants to live an unexciting totally you know, the banal of like the every day.

She just wants that.

Yeah, and I respect that, but you know, at the end when it shows that, like the paints blotch and like, you know, her body showing those signs of decline, like that almost says that.

That says to.

Me that she's not going to get that normal life that she wants, even in this fictional world.

It does say that it will eventually claim her.

But it also shows her moral values, her philosophy, her convictions.

She puts all of the painted Lumierans above herself too.

She in this way, she is also saying that she wants them to live the life that she never had too, that they would now have because they got gamaged at such a young age.

She brought them back at the expense of herself because she fully believed that they deserve that and.

It's that her.

She's like, you know, sacrificing her real life to live in this canvas life.

And even if it's a short term situation, it allows these people around her, who she perceives as being real people, the chance to actually live out their life, right right.

I mean again, it comes down to whether or not in this sense, it comes down to whether or not you view these people as basically automatons like painted just nothing but paint, you know, or if you think that they have somehow ascended into phenomenal consciousness, into having whatever that nebulous thing is that makes us human.

And there's no wrong answer.

Why I think this is the more interesting ending, though, is because you have to think about these things.

I think with the vers so ending now, and I want to be clear, Thrack, I think that your discussion around that was cogent and really solid and heartfelt too.

I don't think that you were choosing that because it's easier.

However, I do think that one is easier to justify for a lot of people, and I think this one is not.

And I think that's why it's a little more interesting, because it forces us to have these conversations.

You know, this is a seemingly self selfish action.

Why might she have chosen that?

You know?

Why are these people people and not just a collection of paint pigments?

You know, these are the hard questions that we might not be able to answer, but we have to.

I don't even necessarily think the other ending is like a bad ending or that, like if it's if somebody chooses that and prefers it that like you know, that they're missing the point or something like that.

I don't really necessarily think that.

I think the way that is presented is in some ways, yeah, narratively, it makes sense that Mayle would do that, you know, even knowing what she knows, now you know what I mean?

So in some ways, yeah, I get that.

I I guess it just comes down to, like, if you do view these characters as like, you know, deserving of this chance or not kind of a thing, you know, like, yeah, they may like they may not be real technically, but do you feel them as real?

I guess, yeah, there's a tipping point where at what point does reality does VERI similitude sort of tip over from feelings and perception and memories that mean something to you.

And that's that's hard for us to to to speak about with conjecture.

Without conjecture, excuse me, because like we will never be in this situation.

There are no people, as far as I'm aware, that can paint a fictional world like this that we can just jump into.

That'd be great.

Yeah, if you can, don't let the government find out.

I mean, if I if I could blue Skidoo in doing another uh uh world, that'd be kind of dope.

Oh my god, yep, blue Skidoo.

We can't.

You know, he's he's taken a kind of turn to like speak to like his adult viewers now, like the ones that watched him as a kid.

I wonder what he would have to say about all this.

Yeah, he's been doing that for a while now, and it was weird when people were giving him crap for it.

I think he started in like COVID.

Yeah.

I have a lot of respect for for Steve, Steve Burns, I believe it's his name.

Oh yeah, just see, he just seems like a genuinely nice guy who kind of stumbled into like being what he became and you know, kind of learning to It's kind of the issue.

I think a lot of people who are in like children's like you know, media and all that kind of deal with the whole in like later in life, learning to kind of accept that, Yeah, because I think we kind of view children's media as less than for a lot of reasons, and so like and like being involved in it, you know, like it's hard to put that on your resume if you're trying to be quote unquote legit.

I guess sure.

And he and he's talked about that before as well, Like it's a really funny YouTube video about him going on a date.

You can look it up.

It was, It's really funny.

So but seeing him kind of embrace that, I think because he recognizes that some people kind of need that or it makes them feel better, is a good thing.

You know.

Yeah, I agree.

Just a couple of thoughts to close this out.

I do think like I've made a kerfuffle about the lumiarians.

The way that I envision this is like this has always been at the core about how she feels about that day, right about Verso.

I view this as like a box wherein Verso is the biggest marble, but all of these people that she's met in the canvas are tiny marbles that are just getting put in one at a time, and Verso's marble will always be the biggest, there's no changing that.

But eventually there's less and less room in the box because more of these marbles come in, more of these important people.

They might not mean what Verso meant, but there's so many that it becomes a new family, right, the family that she lost functionally right, like literally lost Verso figuratively lost Cleia, Renoir and Eleen in various ways and degrees.

I mean, you heard the stuff that Claya said downright cruel, horrible, Yes, horrible thing to say, and like, don't get me wrong, I understand it.

Grief does crazy things to people.

I get it, and I get it with my l too, Like how do I want to phrase this.

I've known people that you know, grieving in one way or another, maybe because of their lot in life, maybe because of their choices, who have done some serious self destructive acts and grieving whether it was like overspending or serious alcohol abuse.

And it's like it's one of those things where in the moment they maybe don't see it, maybe they do see it and they just don't care, Like they emotionally physically cannot bring themselves to care.

They need, play, cater they need they can't survive without that numbing I get it.

That's a tough tunnel to be within, especially if you can never see the end.

It's constricting.

I totally get it.

I think that's part of it.

I do think that the lunar lumiarians play a big role, though, Like I really do think that putting them above herself is not an insignificant thing.

I mean, is it the most important thing?

I don't know, but I think that's critical in this and I think on some level it's admirable.

Does it outweigh condemning Verso to his life?

That's not for me to say, you know, is one life greater than the life of hundreds?

I don't know.

I'm not getting into the trolley problem here.

Feels like, you know how I mentioned the sort of like lack of control that people feel.

It almost is like Mael feels like she has some control in the situation, or she's like realizing that she may have some and wants to use it to help as many people as possible.

I think that's a good point.

Yeah, it's it's her trying to make up for that day that she feels like she had no control over it.

Now she can control this new world, giving people a new life.

I that's a good point.

I think that's a good read on it.

And I think most people, if we're going to do the trolley problem, would rather save more people.

At the end of the day.

I think so too.

Yes, I know, I know, I know.

Context is key, you know, and they always try to throw in the context to kind of try to trip you up.

But well, it's funny.

It's funny you say that there was a I forget if it was a philosopher, scientist or what that's you know, because when you choose the hundreds you are they phrase it in different ways, like you know, you're just watching the train and it's going to hit the one person.

What do you do?

Then you're doing the lever.

You know, you're using the lever.

Then it's somebody positive that Like let's say you're on on an overpass and there is an extremely overweight man standing there and you can push him onto one of the tracks to save you know, for him to get killed, to save everybody, or like you know, him and the one hundred or him and the one other person.

Would you push you know, because if you pushed him, the fat man would die.

If you don't push him, either the one on the track or the hundreds on the track will die.

And then it gets thorny, right, because now you're actively causing the death of somebody if you didn't think you were before.

It's very thorny.

It's a very tricky issue.

Yeah.

Yeah, But also that just a lot of those like with philosophers are like, well, what about this or what about that?

You know, it's maybe it's because I've been watching The Good Place and like seeing the guy who's supposed to be the philosopher just be this indecisive guy who can't make a proper decision.

You know, it makes me think about those things a little differently.

Is he the one that can't make up his mind between like dry erase and pen and paper and he just goes on and on and never chooses anything.

Yes, And those kind of people drive me up the fucking wall.

That's so funny.

That's so funny.

That's what armchair philosophers like me end up doing.

Like I'm a nobody and I'll just talk in circles and not get anything done.

I mean, and I think philosophy is great because it shows that we're willing to like think about things and sort of view our existence kind of beyond ourselves.

I think it's a good thing.

But yeah, like it's so easy to get kind of caught into a corner, you know, and just like overthink everything to where it's like, you know, just.

Just you know.

That's why sometimes it's better to just give people two options, you know, Like they say that when you're like, you know, raising kids, it's like, hey, don't give them limitless options because they'll never make a choice.

Like tell them it's like it's either this or that, you know, that's all you get, and then making them pick.

We see that all the time in life, you know.

The audience's gamers, Like, you know, did you feel like you had do you feel like you're paralyzed by choice now that you have unlimited you know, Steam games, or you know, did you feel differently when you were a kid and you only had like five games?

Like the thing is my feeling, if we're going to get into that, my feeling about games hasn't changed when it comes to like they're like I always think about the things I'm not playing rather than the things I'm playing, like even as a kid, but like I didn't have the resources, so it's like, well, I guess I got to you know, dive into this game and deal with it.

But also we didn't have the Internet to constantly remind ourselves about all the millions of games that are out there, so.

Right, exactly like back then, the choosing was easier though, Like you've got five You've got Teken, Zeno Saga and Need for Speed and Midnight Club.

You know, that's four games you could just choose one, whereas now it's like I've got three hundred games in the Steam library, I don't know what to play.

Choice paralysis, yeah, I mean, And there are ways of getting around that.

I think we all do.

Like I try to organize my games into like these are the ones I haven't played and these are the ones I have played, so I can kind of have that separation there, which I think helps.

But that's just messing.

So that's the end of Claire Obscure.

As you can see, there's no right or wrong way to think about this.

The important thing is the conversations that spin out of it.

That's the sign of any good art.

It's that it continues to exist outside of itself, and I think Claire obscure fully fully conforms to that idea.

I think this series has been really, really invigorating.

I think it's been very thoughtful.

I think it's been very exciting.

I'm very proud of it.

I don't know how many people will listen.

I don't know if any new folks will find us because of it.

I hope so reality is you know, I don't know if reality will play out that way, but I'm proud of the work we've done here.

And I got to thank you again, Thrak.

I appreciate you being here.

Well, thank you for having me.

It's been It's been quite the journey and a if you ask me, doesn't matter how many people listen to this.

What's important is that you and me got together and had a conversation about a great video game.

And I think that's more important.

Yeah.

Absolutely, And I got to thank the listeners too for joining us on this conversation and hopefully taking this and you know, having conversations with themselves or their friends too, or with us in the discord server.

That's what the point of this is.

This.

I've said this all the time, this podcast isn't an exclamation point or a period at most, it's a semi colon or an m dash.

You know, I want the conversation to continue.

So that's what a semi colon does.

Yes, it joins two complete clauses together.

Okay, too independent.

If I man, if I had known that, I would have looked so much murder writ in my papers.

So thank you, thak, Thank you listeners.

Thrac If you want to tell folks about frack ops or through Yeah, what's new over there?

Yeah?

Yeah?

What?

What?

What better deviation this is?

It's a shooty bang bang So uh, I have a little solo show called Call of Duty thrack Ops where self explanatory.

I have been working my way through the Call of Duty franchise doing a solo podcast type thing, a little bit influenced by Rick and his editing skills about the sort of yeah, breaking down the campaigns of Call of Duty throughout the years, getting into the history of the development cycles and everything.

And as I get further in discussing certain facets of these games as far as they relate to like modern political climates, it's not gonna get that deep, but there are certain elements in certain games that are definitely worth talking about in that vein.

At the time of recording this episode, I'm up to episode four.

In Episode five should be out relatively soon after this, and then I'm gonna take a little break because I'm gonna be out of state for a while, so that'll be fun.

But it'll come back probably within a month of the last episode and just kind of keep rolling through into the next year.

So there's a lot of cod content to come.

And so yeah, there's that, and then also my main show is The three Dyo Experience, where me and Bill try to compile a weird history of the Panasonic three Dyo, the failed nineties video game.

It's a lot of fun, it's very loose.

We also talk about, you know, gaming news and things like that.

I Rick's beIN on there, so go listen to that episode pick project listeners, and we've had other guests as well.

We're all this is all part of the Superpod Network, So go to superpodnetwork dot com and you'll see a great list of podcasts across the spectrum that I've been a part of and haven't been a part of, but I have.

I put the stamp of approval onto all of them very nice.

You can find links to all of those in the description, to all of Thrax stuff, et cetera.

You can also find links to our stuff too, to the discord server, which again is free to the Patreon.

If you want to support the show and enable this stuff to keep, going to our socials would mean a lot if you shared our stuff, liked our stuff, share it with friends, Blue Sky, Instagram, Reddit, things like that.

Ratings and reviews, of course are always welcome, even if they are middling or somewhat negative.

If you feel that way, honest reviews are appreciated.

You can find all of that.

You can find thrack ops.

You can find the three do experience and the links to the supplemental materials that have been in each one, all in the description.

So with that, once again, Thrack thank you, once again listeners, thank you for closing the door on the Clear Obscure Analysis series.

Hope you love the show.

Today, I'm Rick, I'm signing off for now.

Take care of everyone.