Of all things that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has done, it’s this — reopening the conversation of grief. It also made me revisit the complexity of it within a family dynamic and the is means a lot to me. It’s because I’ve been there.
This blog was going to be a massive theme conversation with spoilers of Act 3 ahead of the videos I’ve uploaded on my YouTube channel; I’ve opted to instead just…save that for a Part 2 of this blog mini-series.
The Prologue was a great premise and gave us that initial “kill god cuz they killing us” premise but when Sophia brought up how the Paintress seemed sad, I got “Fractured Marika” vibes from Elden Ring and even made me wonder if all this was due to losing a child long before what I’d unearth later on.
Act 1’s journey was wondrous in a balance of tension and lightheartedness. We knew the stakes and met friends along the way. Then Esquie mentioned his bestie Verso and made me wonder if he was dead or someone we’d meet later. Then we lost Gustave at the hands of Renoir. My heart broke. I haven’t had it break this bad since Aerith’s death in Final Fantasy VII; you grow to genuinely love these characters, only for them to be plucked from us before seeing their full potential. Then Verso steps in before anything worse happens but we’re left wondering what’s his business here.
Act 2 has us learning how to get to the Monolith and on the process, learn about Verso’s friendship with Monoco & Esquie but eventually learning how Renoir is his father and that Verso may have some secrets and truths that he hides with lies (as implied by the trip to Visages). There’s also still that chill you’re left in your spine about Renoir claiming that what he’s doing is a kindness not a cruelty. He even brings up a final warning to Verso about the real stakes of eliminating the Paintress; it’s as though the Paintress isn’t who we need to remove?
Verso said that family is complicated and definitely not his favorite subject. Oddly enough, I connect with Verso in that way because…I came to an odd realization.
The realization? I don’t feel deeply connected emotionally with most of my family. Maybe it’s living distance, change of beliefs from experiences or perhaps realizing that I didn’t have as close a bond as I thought I did — and it sucks.
I’ll often hear people talk about all the stories they had passed down to them from their parents and grandparents about what life was like in their world before the kids came to existence — culture, economy, lifestyle, struggles. I think it’s beautiful that people have this connection with their parents, grandparents and so on. I realized that I didn’t have that and it dawned on me after all my grandparents passed away.
I experienced a new kind of grief — the kind where you realize that a whole generation of lore and history from my grandparents’ perspective is now forever lost in time unless they had some random diary or journal where they hold their thoughts, experiences and feelings for us to learn from and to my understanding, they didn’t have such a thing.
This made me realize that I need to possibly have something similar for my daughter; so that whenever I depart from this world, I leave something behind that will help my daughter learn things I may not teach instantly.
…and For Those Who Come After.
