PLAYER INFO
Player Name: Alex
• Player Contact: ![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
aleeeeeeex or Discord @ alexceptionally
• Player Age: 18+
• Permissions: Permissions.
Major Clair Obscur Spoilers Through End Game
CHARACTER INFO
• Character Name: Alicia Dessendre but also Maelle
• Character Age: 16x2
• Character Canon: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Canon Point: Post-Game, Verso’s Ending
• Character History: From the Wiki
• Character Personality:
Quick Note: I use her name as Maelle when referring to events in the canvas and use Alicia when referring to events that take place in the real-world. This is in part to make the contrast between some of the conflicting personality traits easier to understand. Despite the clashing though, both experiences and personalities are still hers. However, it’s worth mentioning that she wants to be more like Maelle (strong, confident) than Alicia (weak, timid).
— Positive Trait: Eager & Determined
Maelle, if nothing else, does what she says she will do and it’s very hard, if not impossible, to change her mind. When she says she’s joining the Expedition, nothing Gustave or Emma say can persuade her to change her mind. When she says she will kill Renoir to avenge Gustave, she does exactly that. The same goes for the Paintress. She doesn’t give up even when there are deadly obstacles and she pursues her goal each time with reckless abandon.
From the start of the game, Maelle is eager to join the Expeditions and see it through to the end by killing the Paintress. She cares little for the worries others have about the journey or how decisively life threatening it is. She is fine with throwing herself into danger if it means seeing and experiencing something and somewhere new, and being with the people she cares about a little bit longer.
In the Act 2 Epilogue we see Alicia do much the same, agreeing to help her family even though she’s clearly inexperienced and uncertain of what to do when it comes to entering and interacting with canvases. Despite being nervous about it, she believes she should help because Verso would have wanted it and because she owes it to her family.
— Positive Trait: Trusting
Maelle and Alicia both are quick to trust, for better or for worse. Maelle quickly trusts the Curator, despite his scary appearance and demeanor. The same goes for the Expedition's encounter with Goblu, where Maelle actively trusts the Nevron enough to try to touch it or comfort it despite Gustave's instant hostility toward it. She's also immediately trusting of Verso. Despite the dubious and tragic circumstances of meeting Verso, Maelle accepts his hand for help and later pushes against questioning him when he comes to camp. Despite knowing very little about him, she even welcomes him to join their expedition, offering him her old armband as a token.
In the real world, Alicia also seems quick to trust the Writers’ Guild, an act that literally backfires in her face and causes the self-sacrificing death of her brother, Verso. Although it isn’t terribly clear how the house fire began, what’s understood is that she had trusted the Writers’ Guild and the house fire that followed was their doing. So her habit of trusting isn’t always so positive…
— Positive Trait: Responsible
In both cases for Maelle and Alicia, they both take on great responsibilities beyond what might be expected of a 16 year old. Alicia bears the weight of her mistakes, the survivor's guilt from the fire and her brother's death and these things push her to want to right those wrongs where she can. This sense of responsibility is partially egged on by Clea as Alicia agrees to enter the canvas to save her mother and father.
In Act 3 when Maelle returns to the canvas, more responsibility sits on her shoulders as she eagerly takes on the burden of returning Lumiere and its residents. She feels that she owes them, that Verso wouldn't have wanted his creations or their mother's creations destroyed. This mindset is what propels her throughout Act 3. But despite the responsibility she seems to take on, it is not exactly from any self-sacrifice.
— Negative Trait: Selfish
Although Maelle says she didn’t want to leave the canvas because she felt responsible for Lumiere and wanted to bring everyone back, it is not the whole truth. Of course she cares deeply about the people of Lumiere and the family she has there. But the other half of that earnest to remain in the canvas is because her life outside of the canvas is bleak. Scarred, mute, friendless, hopeless and dealing with the survivor’s guilt of her brother’s death, Maelle wants nothing to do with the real world and the consequences of her actions. She would much rather live in a make-believe world that she has full control over with a painted version of her dead brother and her painted family and friends. Despite the grief it would cause her already grief-stricken family in the real world. However, because of the chosen path of the ending for her canon point, she will have been forced out of the canvas thanks to Verso killing her. With the canvas destroyed, she has no way to re-enter or see her plans through.
— Negative Trait: Arrogant & Self-Conscious
Despite everyone’s best efforts, Maelle is cocky, sassy and reckless. Nightmares scare her, but Nevrons and potentially certain death do not. She consistently lacks caution despite Gustave urging her to take things slower and look before she leaps. She is also quite guilty of assuming she’s won long before the battle’s over (so many phase 2 fights…). It’s not entirely unfounded. She’s a good fighter, after all. However, her cocky behavior extends beyond simply fighting Nevrons.
Throughout her time in the canvas, Maelle consistently believed no harm could come to her, that somehow she’d be different. She holds this mindset when joining the Expedition, alongside her need for adventure, and she also holds this mindset throughout Act 3 while she is refusing to leave the canvas despite staying for too long having deadly consequences. Especially in the circumstances regarding Act 3, she doesn’t think she’ll make the same mistakes as her much more experienced, much more canvas savvy mother. That she’ll understand when to cease her canvas addiction and death won’t come for her.
But on the exact opposite side of this Alicia is also terribly shy and extremely self-conscious. Alicia is known for hiding in her room with her nose in books. She refuses to try new things and often avoids people, even refusing to play with her older siblings. She complains of lacking friends but refuses to make any, possibly out of a fear of failure. In both instances of Maelle and Alicia, we see her troubled by past mistakes and survivor’s guilt. These mistakes seem to consistently haunt her and prevent her from holding more self-confidence, even as Maelle.
Given her canonpoint and having been forced out of the canvas, both sides to Alicia are probably going to come through. She will likely be extremely shy and self-conscious at first. But if she were to become more comfortable, or given the right circumstances, there’s little doubt that Maelle’s more arrogant side might shine through.
— Negative Trait: Overconfident & Unconfident As mentioned, Maelle can be cocky and overconfident. In Verso’s canvas she is literally capable of changing landscapes, controlling time, creating people or even deleting them with a swish of her rapier or touch of her hand. She’s essentially playing god and can shape her world and her life through paint in any way she wishes.
However, part of that appeal is from the sheer contrast to herself in the real world. Alicia has no confidence, no friends, and no ability as a paintress (or so she insists). Her sister, Clea, calls her naive, timid and weak. Painted Verso says she’s too self-conscious to realize her potential. She calls herself a “ghost” living in a “shell of body” that only exists rather than lives. She insists there is nothing for her in the real world and that she has tried to find “joy” in life, but based on conversations with Clea, who is the one to say she has no friends because she doesn’t try to, these attempts may have been few and far between at best.
— Edit For Revision: While you've made it clear you understand that Maelle is Alicia and Alicia is Maelle, we'd like a little more clarification on how you intend to play the different aspects of Maelle and Alicia coming together in game. Could you please elaborate on this?
For a great deal of Act 3, Verso consistently tries to remind her that she is as much Maelle as she is Alicia but she refuses to believe she can live as meaningful of a life as Maelle could. This continues all the way through the end of the game with her given canonpoint and Verso is still trying to reassure her that she can be as much Maelle in the canvas as out of it. For Alicia, to live is to be Maelle.
Considering her canonpoint is right after the canvas is destroyed these things are fresh on her mind alongside all of the encouragement given for her to try and live her life, something Alicia has mostly refused to try to do up to this point.
So this would be her attempt to try and do that. Alicia is her default, Maelle is the goal. Really what it amounts to is building up her self-confidence and self-esteem, both things Alicia deeply lacks and Maelle held with much more ease. She wants to be cocky, reckless and confident, and the longer she's away from the crutch and addiction of a canvas, the more she'll be forced to try and do so as Alicia, despite Alicia's physical condition and burdens of guilt fighting against her.
To be more specific, although this is edging toward hypotheticals.. She's going to assume, given her condition and lack of ability to change it, that she's still in reality while in Sing's setting. Here, she's Alicia. It's going to be equal parts disappointing and depressing at first. She's both mourning the loss of Maelle as well as the entirety of the canvas and her brother Verso. But life goes on. Thanks to the encouragement that she's had canonically, and if there's more to come through interactions in the setting, she's going to start trying to live. Eventually, as opportunities come around, she'll find ways to live (living is being Maelle) and gain the confidence she lacked as Alicia but had as Maelle.
I'm not sure if it's fair to mention this, but for some of her TDM threads, there was already a bit of this transition happening. Especially in regards to her thread with Randvi where she starts off sad and uncomfortable (Alicia things) but the thread concludes with her having a goal to aim for and some confidence that it will be okay (Maelle things).
I think I should mention that this isn't to say every thread is going to have this level of progress. I am expecting there to be as many pitfalls as strides. But I think it's a good example of the direction a nervous and timid Alicia could take to incorporate more of her Maelle side as she gets more comfortable and confident with herself and her surroundings.
• Character Skills:
— Skilled with a rapier
— She can… paint. Yep. That’s about it.
• Character Inventory:
— ITEM ONE: A cute plushie of Esquie
— ITEM TWO: A rapier
— ITEM THREE: Gustave’s journal
• Important Notes: Given the aurora, I’d like to have her throat healed to some extent. In particular, so that she is able to speak. In the TDM I was kind of playing it as she can talk, but it sounds raspy and sounds like it’s a struggle. This is in contrast to her real self, Alicia, who is mute thanks to extreme smoke inhalation because of the house fire. To balance it out, she’ll still naturally have trouble breathing from time to time (ex: physical exertion) and speaking a lot might lead her to lose her voice for a day or two.
• Writing Samples:
— SAMPLE ONE: On the TDM with Frédéric
— SAMPLE TWO: On the TDM with Randvi ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
