In 2014, Bioware released Dragon Age: Inquisition, a game that I was going to joke was the last Dragon Age game. But then I remembered that this article can't happen without acknowledging what Dragon Age: The Veilguard did wrong. So there goes that joke.
Either way, Inquisition left off on perhaps the most promising cliffhanger ever with its Trespasser DLC. Throughout the base game, an elf named Solas serves as your constant companion and the cast member who drives a lot of key plot points forward. In the end, he is revealed to be the elven trickster god, Fen'Harel. Having returned to the world to find that his people have lost their immortality because of his actions, he resolves to essentially burn the world down and start over. But he doesn't do this from a place of cruelty. One of his requests to the Inquisitor is to not raise an army against him. In his mind, the people of this soon-to-be-destroyed world should spend the time they have left in blissful ignorance amongst their loved ones.
After these revelations, the game concludes with the idea that Solas will ultimately accomplish his goals by rallying the modern elves (who he doesn't even actually view as people) around the noble cause of freeing themselves from mistreatment by humans. The implication is that he'll be moving like a shadow through the world, sowing discord in key places to make sure nobody can stand against him.
All of this set Solas up to be potentially the most compelling villain in all of gaming. And all of it was thrown away with Dragon Age: The Veilguard. He became a side villain in his own story, with the only bright spots in that story being the occasional conniving action. It still kind of hurts to think about.
Earlier this year, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 released. With it came antagonist Renoir, who easily takes up the mantle Solas was poised to take had Bioware not fumbled the ball...and I've been wondering why that is since the credits rolled. The man is sympathetic, sure. He's a quality aura farmer, sure. He's played by Andy Serkis, sure. He's French, sure. But there was something more.
Renoir is the most compelling antagonist in all of gaming because he is, as the title of this article suggests, the Solas we never got. To prove my point, I've structured the rest of this article in chunks centered around pieces of Renoir that serve as both points of commonality and key differences between him and his bald elf counterpart. Starting off on the most basic level.
"We painted hundreds of canvas worlds, pushing the very boundaries of creation"
His Godhood
Meet the Dessendre family: Renoir, Aline (the paintress), Verso, Alicia (Maelle), and Clea are all essentially gods who create worlds like it's nothing, including the one that serves as our setting. I say "essentially" because, like Solas, they aren't actually gods, just extremely powerful forces of creation. They're people in the same way that Solas is an elf. And like Solas, they have an inciting incident that leads them to where they are in this story: Verso's death in a fire that left Alicia horribly disfigured.
Verso created the canvas world as we know it when he was young, and as such, it's literally the last piece of his soul.
Following the fire, Aline locked herself away inside the canvas and created a painted, idealized version of her family: a Renoir that simply enables her and destroys all who try to take her away, an Alicia as much in the background as she is in the real world, a Verso doing the bare minimum of still being alive, and a Clea who funnels her frankly astounding cruelty into creating Nevrons to protect their family.
Alicia ended up being reborn in the canvas as Maelle, in a body unscarred by the fire.
Clea was Clea and denounced her family for being "childish" in their mourning. Instead, she focused her efforts on revenge against the people who kickstarted Verso's death.
And Renoir just tried to hold the family together in spite of their self-destructive tendencies. To do so, he had to embrace Solas' most notable feature.
"The one who invokes the flowers of the gommage. An act of love"
His Scheming
The fracture that split Lumiere from the main continent was the result of a clash between Renoir and Aline that ended in a stalemate: with Aline trapped at the top of the monolith and Renoir below. But Renoir is nothing if not cunning and resourceful.
He knew he couldn't continue to engage in open combat, but he could whittle Aline's power down piece by piece. He couldn't force her out of the canvas, but he could try to erase its denizens and force her to use her powers to save them. Every year, Aline's power wanes, and the amount of people she can save from him decreases. Her attempts to save the youngest people in Verso's world ultimately became the yearly gommage, but instead of actively gommaging the oldest people each time, she simply had to let them gommage in order to save the rest of the populace.
But while this was Renoir's plan for the longest time, another opportunity eventually arose. He realized Alicia had come to the canvas when Maelle was born. Once she arrived on the continent, he set a different plan into motion.
As the plot progresses, he takes on the guise of The Curator: a nonviolent Nevron with the ability to upgrade the party's gear. Not only that, but he serves as one of the plot's central arbiters, being the only one who could create the weapon to break the barrier protecting Aline. Like Solas in Inquisition, his invisible hand gives our heroes a little push every time they need it, all in the service of his goal. He eases Maelle into remembering who she is and the power she has, ultimately allowing her to gommage Aline.
"Life keeps forcing cruel choices"
His Perceived Cruelty
One way in which Renoir differs from Solas is that he more or less succeeds. With Aline's removal from the canvas, Renoir is finally able to bring about the end of Act 2, gommaging every person in the world except Maelle and the painted Verso. And like Solas, this is a choice that seems rooted in cruelty on the surface. Wouldn't you think so?
Our first introduction to Renoir isn't the true Renoir: it's Aline's painted version. Her point of view in the midst of her grief. For reasons we'll get into, Renoir isn't at all supportive of Aline's grieving method, and her feelings about this make their way into the painted version.
The painted version protects her, but he also murders (rather than gommages) without a second thought. This may be her ideal, enabling version of Renoir, but it's also colored with her extreme view of his behavior in the real world. This painted version is the support she thinks she needs and the cruelty she thinks she's experiencing all wrapped into one package.
But as cruel as Renoir's actions at the end of Act 2 appear, they're nothing compared to his ultimate goal. After gommaging (nearly) every human in the canvas, Renoir's next step is to destroy the canvas in its entirety so that nobody in the family can ever return. He seems ecstatic about this possibility. But for us, it's a plan to destroy a world we've come to love. And for Maelle and Aline, it's a plan to destroy the last piece of Verso that remains. Renoir comes off as entirely unwilling to entertain any option other than destroying the canvas, so we continue to see him as downright dismissive of the rest of the family's grief.
Despite this, Renoir is a man without a cruel bone in his body. Every villainous choice he makes is one he doesn't want to make, but to him, it's always the necessary one...and depending on your own point of view, it may very well be the necessary one.
But that obviously doesn't mean he's innocent. While his actions aren't motivated by cruelty, they are, in part, driven by one of his biggest flaws.
"I want it to be fixed, I need it to be fixed"
His Destructive Responsibility
One of the main reasons Solas intends to destroy the world in Dragon Age is his own guilt at the hand he played in the world's current state. He created the veil to seal the other gods away, and in doing so, he stripped immortality from the elves. In this new weakened state, the elves were almost immediately subjugated and enslaved by the surrounding human kingdoms. His villainous actions, in other words, are driven by his sense of responsibility. The same can be said for Renoir.
While Renoir had no hand in what happened to his family, he's nonetheless the only member who hasn't become completely lost in grief. His whole family is crumbling around him, and he finds himself in the unenviable position of having to step up to save his loved ones.
The fact of the matter, though, is that he's not equipped to do this. His way of grieving is to try and keep going for the sake of the living. He's the embodiment of the Expedition motto: "When one falls, we continue." So his well-meaning sense of responsibility manifests in the correct direction, but not the correct tone. I've implied that Renoir isn't an enabler, and an enabler is exactly what he doesn't need to be. But at the same time, he tries to brute force his family through their problems, and he aims to take extreme steps in the name of this goal.
As we already discussed, Renoir doesn't want to do half of what he does. His ultimate end goal, after all, requires him to destroy the last piece of his son. Not only does he have to save his family, he has to be the one to make the cruelest sacrifice, because he recognizes that if he doesn't, nobody will.
His Flawed Compassion
A cynical way of viewing this story would be to say the people of this painted world aren't actually people (like how Solas views the modern elves). But Renoir wouldn't agree with that. He recognizes the power that he and his family have, and he understands that this power comes with a responsibility to their creations. To him, every person he has gommaged was a living, breathing human being worthy of life. He knows that he has to gommage them in order to save his own family, but it isn't a task he takes lightly.
Do you remember how I said he spared both Maelle and the painted Verso? Keep in mind that the Verso in this world is just another creation. There would be no way for this Verso to escape the canvas once Renoir destroys it, but Renoir elects to spare him for the time being anyway.
This is his compassion for the people of this world at play. He acknowledges how unfair it was to have used Verso in his plan, and that it was equally unfair that Aline forced him into her fake family in the first place. After making that acknowledgement and offering an apology on behalf of the family, he moves on to the next step: explaining his plan to Verso. He tells Verso that he's going to give him what he wants: eternal rest for his soul.
It's important to note that Renoir doesn't fall on his sword upon seeing his son again, and he doesn't apologize for any mistakes made during the real Verso's life (like one might expect a father would in a case like this). Instead, he remains focused on the individual in front of him. The painted Verso, despite being a carbon copy of his son with all the same memories, is his own person as deserving of respect as his real son.
To further back up my point about his compassion for this canvas, I'd like to give an example of how deeply he knows the denizens...just like any loving god would. Before the final confrontation, Sciel and Lune gently confront him about the nature of grief and how it can change people, and Renoir has responses for both of them.
It's Sciel, specifically, that I want to focus on. After Sciel gives Renoir her spiel, he turns to her and, as compassionately as he spoke to Verso, remarks "you grieve for two." Everyone in this world knows that after Sciel's husband gommaged, she attempted suicide...but only she and Verso know the rest of the story. Sciel, at the time of her attempt, was unaware that she was in the earliest stages of pregnancy. She survived the attempt, but the baby she didn't even know she had wasn't so lucky. Renoir, in this moment, demonstrates how deeply he knows Sciel, and he does so specifically to acknowledge the validity of her feelings. This sentiment is echoed again later in this same sequence when he tells Maelle: "your friends speak truth...and it changes nothing."
There's the rub, and it's one more aspect of Renoir's compassion that I want to highlight here to make things as clear as I can. His compassion, though clearly present, is also at least a little performative...and largely pointless. Renoir views the people of this world as people...but they aren't equals. They're supposedly equally deserving of respect as anyone else to him, but the fact that he's able to make the choice to gommage them at all shows there's a limit to that respect. Through this article, you've seen and will continue to see me talk about the "real" world and "real" people. This is strictly an easy way to differentiate between the realms in a written context. I'm never quoting anything Renoir says when I use these terms...but I might as well be.
I bring this up because as I was reading over an initial draft of this article, I realized that I'd glossed over these details and painted his compassion in an entirely too generous light. That, I think, is another testament to Renoir's power as a villain. As you describe him, his motivations, and (depending on your choices) the ultimate outcome of his actions, the whole genocide thing can kind of fade into a background detail...and if that isn't a terrifying sentence to read, I don't know what is. That so many people who play this game can see the immense warmth in Renoir's character and fall under his spell so readily in spite of his actions says quite a bit about how far evil can go under a sufficiently sympathetic banner.
"I treat you as if the shadow from the worst day of our lives is going to suffocate you and take you from us too!"
His Love
Every aspect of Renoir we've discussed so far - his manipulative nature, his perceived cruelties, his sense of responsibility, and the compassion he treats the canvas with - mirror the pieces of Solas that made him the powerhouse villain he stood to be. But Renoir has another quality that Solas largely lacks: a deep, all-encompassing love that drives every piece of him.
For the sake of more intriguing reading, I've been omitting a key detail from this discussion. Anyone who has finished the game already knows this detail, but for those few and far between folks who haven't, here's what I haven't mentioned yet.
For a "real" person to remain in a canvas is akin to a drug addiction. While inside, a person becomes more and more addicted to the escape, all while their real bodies start to crumble and fail them. It's an addiction that Renoir knows all too well, since he was essentially an addict before Aline helped him break the habit.
Having already lost his son, our tragic antagonist has been forced to watch as his wife succumbs to the same addiction that she saved him from...and as Act 3 begins, he realizes that he's about to lose one of his daughters as well. I've been saying he needs to destroy the canvas in order to save his family, but clearly the stakes are much higher than "his family will die." Really, they'll slowly crumble away under the weight of their grief. Something much slower and less pleasant than simply dying.
When the team meets Aline at the top of the monolith after defeating the painted Renoir, she's clearly a frail old woman. And the second she sees Verso, she immediately embraces him, tearfully celebrating that he's finally come back. Lord knows I've had that exact kind of dream before when it comes to departed loved ones. But things do end up taking a different turn, and the party obviously has to defeat her.
The inciting incident for this clash? Verso taking her hands and gently telling her that it's time for her to go home. The second she's faced with that gentle suggestion, she becomes hostile, accusing him (accurately, though he doesn't realize it at this point) of working with his real father. It's not unlike a poorly-received intervention.
Of course, we know how this battle ends. The party prevails and Aline is forced out of the canvas.
This is the main reason why Renoir seems ecstatic to destroy it. After over 60 years trapped below the monolith, chipping away at Aline's energy piece by piece, he's finally in a position where he can "fix" things. But his victory is cut short when Maelle starts to insist on staying in the canvas.
60 years of seemingly futile struggle, giving all his energy every single day to give his wife the same care she gave him. He finally succeeded...only to have his daughter start to fall victim to the same addiction, all while he's about to have his hands full supporting Aline through the "rehab" phase. For an already feeble old man to handle that "rehab" phase is a tall order, but now he'll be fighting a war on two fronts.
And this second war promises to be even harder than the first, because what Maelle wants enablement for is much more personal than simply wanting to live in denial of a loss. In the "real" world, Alicia is disfigured from the fire, missing an eye, and unable to speak. That alone would be reason enough to seek the escapism of being Maelle. But the reason she faces these afflictions in the first place is because Verso saved her from that fire; an action that would cost him his life. The physical cage she finds herself living in is not just a daily horror, it's a daily dose of guilt. Not just when she looks in the mirror, but when the rest of the family aside from Renoir looks at her...and the fact that Aline's painted version of her is still disfigured despite Verso being "alive" speaks volumes about that. In the canvas, she doesn't have the scars. In the canvas, she gets to be with her brother. But seemingly above all else, the guilt is entirely gone. Whereas Aline wants enablement from Renoir because she wants relief from the pain, Maelle wants this enablement because literally everything about the life she currently lives is something she needs to escape from. While Aline's life in the canvas is a facsimile of what she already has, Maelle's is an entirely different life as an entirely different person. And that, dear reader, is the kind of battle Renoir finds himself on the cusp of after an exhausting 60 years of constant fighting.
After a brief argument with Maelle at the start of Act 3, Renoir summons a whole host of Nevrons to try and force her out like Aline, but he doesn't succeed. In this moment, he is clearly backed into a corner and feeling about as desperate as one can.
Wouldn't you be?
Eventually, the player guides the team back to Lumiere for the final battle, cutting through Renoir's horde to confront him. And it's in this confrontation where we see something that we never saw in the excessively violent painted version of him.
We see him lose his temper.
The argument with Maelle is calm up until she makes a crucial mistake: she accuses him of treating her like she's still five. Here, Andy Serkis shows his acting chops in a way that doesn't involve walking on all fours. Renoir doesn't even let the last word fall out of Maelle's mouth before he turns around and roars the line I opened this section up with. It shows both the desperation and the exhaustion yet again, but it's not the last time we'll see that before the credits roll.
After depleting Renoir's health in the final battle, he starts to do the whole "lose in gameplay, win in the cutscene" thing that RPGs love to do. In the cutscene, he summons all the bosses the player has faced to help him out. But before the party can be crushed, Aline re-enters the canvas to join them.
What was frustration up until this point quickly gives way to anxiety. Having only just been kicked out of the canvas, Aline's body is still too frail to handle the shock of re-entering, so now Renoir finds himself, again, fighting a war on two fronts...but literally in this case. As Aline fights off the bosses, the team continues to battle Renoir, all while he begs his wife to look at their daughter and see the kind of harm she's enabling. The music may be epic during this fight, but it doesn't exactly feel badass to beat up a pleading old man.
So, Renoir is eventually defeated...but I think by now we all know that his love gives him determination that would make an anime protagonist blush. He once again kicks Aline out and starts to beg Maelle to leave. With neither party willing to budge, he brings out his ace in the hole. He opens up a little window to the "real" world to show Aline's frail body: gasping, sputtering, barely able to stand, and still trying to get back into the canvas. He tells the party that this is what he has to look at every day, and that he just isn't strong enough to have to live with "living corpses" anymore. It's his last ditch "scared straight" approach, and it does have an effect of some kind.
Maelle still argues about it, but her argument ultimately changes to "please, just a little longer" and "I promise I'll leave on my own." Surprisingly, he seems to reluctantly agree to this as he hugs her...that is, until a detail small enough to be missed if you look at your phone for a second: a slight, knowing flitter of his pupils away from Maelle towards Verso. Clearly Renoir was banking on the scared straight approach working, but if that didn't work, he knew that forcing Verso to look at what has become of his "mother" would cause him to switch sides. And this final manipulation drives this game's plot to its conclusion.
After Renoir leaves the canvas, Verso leaps through a newly-opened window to the canvas' physical location, followed by Maelle. This results in the emotional true final confrontation: a battle between siblings to determine the fate of the "world". Who comes out on top depends on your choice, and if you're anything like me, it's a choice that agonizes you. I sat on the selection screen for maybe five minutes trying to decide what the right thing to do was. But most people tend to make the same choice.
This whole segment exists to lay out the stakes and hammer home the idea of how powerful Renoir's love is. Solas, too, has love as a motivation, but it feeds more into his sense of vengeance than anything else. Solas, you see, is just a villain. And that's the biggest difference between him and Renoir.
"See things as they are, not as you want them to be"
His Heroism/His Villainy.
Moral decisions in games tend to be a pretty clear binary: do you shoot the puppy or cuddle it? Even the better-written decisions tend to get the idea of a good choice versus an evil choice wrong. A lot of the time in these games, the evil choice is the emotionally hard one to make. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the first game to actually get the concept right. The right choice here is painful to make. We don't want to admit it...but the fact of the matter is that destroying the world we've come to know is the "right" choice.
[A quick note before I continue that train of thought: remember that everyone save for the party has already been gommaged at this point. The choice here is not "genocide" vs "not genocide", it's "destroy the world itself" vs "preserve the world under Maelle's control."]
If you don't automatically believe that the world-ending choice is ultimately the more morally sound one, I can hardly blame you. But let's look at the endings themselves.
If Maelle wins the decisive battle, the ending you get is one that feels good, but it isn't quite that simple.
In this ending, the team is in the opera house about to watch a piano recital from Verso. Every party member is with loved ones that have gommaged, and warm-and-fuzziest of all, Gustave is back, hand-in-hand with Sophie. Everyone sits down, Verso takes his place at the piano, and in the final shot, Maelle's face is shown with the little paint marks that represent the breakdown of her "real" body. This shot is accompanied by a sharp, dissonant sting. She clearly lied to Renoir when she said she'd leave the canvas eventually.
Maelle gets the ending she wants, but it costs her everything she already has. Her choice allows her to continue to see things as she wants them to be, and it's pretty clearly the bad ending. Again, we probably don't want to admit it. I mean, for crying out loud, she gets Gustave back!
But despite these people being arguably as "real" as the Dessendre family, this new world that Maelle has carved out is not. It's a world where everyone is happy, but this painted population within the canvas is exactly what Clea would have called the original population: fake. It's an entire world of dead people brought back to life and forced to play their roles whether they realize it or not. It's the unfair treatment Aline forced on the painted Verso, but applied to every person in the world...making Maelle arguably more of a villain than Aline. In countless games, there's a statement like this: that a happy lie is inferior to an uncomfortable truth, and this "bad" ending takes that to its logical conclusion.
That just leaves us with the "right" ending, wherein you fight as Verso. The thing about the bad ending is that it doesn't cause any tears...but the "right" ending breaks everyone who sees it. Maelle begins to gommage in Verso's arms as he tries to soothe her. Through sobs, she does something that cuts to the heart of why she really wants to stay in the canvas when all is said and done: she stops arguing about escaping from her body, and instead starts begging Verso not to leave her again. Verso continues to soothe her, telling her that with the power she wields, she'll never truly have to live a life she doesn't want.
After she fades from the canvas, the other party members begin filing in one by one. Monoco, Esquie, and Sciel take it well, Lune does not. But that's a topic for another day.
Then it's just Verso, who turns to the real Verso's soul and grants him permission to finally rest after all these years. The fact that the only characters concerned with giving Verso's soul what it actually wants are this fake Verso and the real Renoir shouldn't go unnoticed.
We next see the "real" world, with the whole Dessendre family standing at Verso's grave. Renoir is walking without a cane, and we see him embrace Aline, who is far from the "living corpse" she was presented as before. Clea actually looks like she doesn't hate everything and everyone for the first time. And Alicia, just like everyone else, seems to be fine. As the family starts to file out away from the grave, Alicia is greeted by one last vision of the team. Having been able to "kick the habit," she can now see things as they are. She can understand that she needed to be taken out of the canvas, but that doesn't mean she disregards the good parts of it. She had friends in there who helped her become a version of herself that would be able to move on. Their presence in her life was as crucial as the painful goodbye...a point hammered home by the fact that her Maelle body is included in this vision. This is an ending where not everyone is satisfied, but it's ultimately the one that leads to healing. It isn't a "good" ending (after all, it's the ending that rewards a man for committing genocide), but it is the "right" one for its context. And for better or worse, it's all because of Renoir.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, in spite of everything it would have you believe at first, is not a tale made up of heroes and villains. It's a story about the difficulty that comes with handling your grief and the fact that it will get better if you allow it to. At the end of the last section, I mentioned that the biggest difference between Renoir and Solas is that Solas is just a villain. Renoir is far more than that. He is this story's villain and hero, and he's also neither one. He's a hero in the "real" world, having ultimately won an impossible battle and saved his family from an addiction that threatened to destroy them. He's a villain to countless generations of dead people for reasons that should be pretty obvious. But can a person be a hero if they're also a villain and vice/versa? Do ends justify means? Are people created in worlds we dream up truly as deserving of life as you or I? Are we, in fact, living in our own kind of canvas and poised for hypocrisy when we answer these questions? These ideas and many more are ideas Renoir brings to light in everything he does, and I leave all the questions surrounding them in your no doubt capable hands, dear reader. Whatever way you slice it, one thing is for certain: were it not for his boundless love, his immensely imperfect and somewhat hypocritical compassion, his many flaws, everything that makes Renoir Renoir, this story could never have been the heavy-hitting masterpiece that it is.
And for all these reasons, Renoir is the Solas we never got.
Thank you for sticking with me until the end! It's worth noting that while this article took me about 30-40 minutes to read out loud, if you go on YouTube, you'll find character analyses three times as long. Some are about Renoir for sure, but you'll find equally long character studies around every other character. There's even one or two about Clea, who only gets maybe 2 minutes of screen time. So if you've got the means, the hardware, and the desire to give Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a shot despite now knowing almost everything about the plot, let this serve as a push to do so. Because Renoir is but the tip of the iceberg.
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