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User Name/Nick: Alex
User DW: N/A
Method of contact: Discord @ alexceptionally ~or~

aleeeeeeex
Other Characters Currently In-Game: N/A.

Clair Obscur Spoilers Beyond this Point

Character Name: Maelle & Alicia Dessendre
(Note: When referencing events in the canvas, I’ll use Maelle as her name. While referencing events in reality or outside of the canvas, I’ll use Alicia. This is not meant to confuse, but instead make the difference between her two lives easier to understand.)

Series: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Age: 16x2

Maelle has lived two lives to the age of 16. Despite those experiences, she is still very much both mentally and physically a 16 year old. In her life as Maelle, she was orphaned very young and a foster child in a world where the max age at the start of the game is 32 (technically 33 for the first like. 10 min.). Everyone in Lumiere had to grow up fast. Especially when the max life expectancy for her would've been 25. Alicia’s life was much easier until she made a fatal mistake and has been running and hiding from those consequences ever since.

I think she’d be fine for the game despite her age because she’s mature enough from the experiences of her two lives combined to understand the gravity of the situation and maybe finally navigate through those consequences she’s been avoiding for so long.

From When?:

Although she never “dies” in canon, she does get Gommaged twice (potentially). I’ll be taking her from the second Gommage when she loses to Verso at the very end, but before the events outside of the canvas take place for Verso’s Ending. She will be aware she Gommaged and aware that she lost to him.

Inmate Justification:

Alicia is ultimately self-destructive and arrogant, but her self-destructive choices have rippling effects that impact everyone around her and always for the worse. Yet when the consequences come for her she tries to run, hide or avoid them as much as possible. She would rather paint a perfect life than live in one that lacks her brother and makes her face the reality of her mistakes.

Basically, the girl is a bit delusional, prefers denial and has an addiction to a make-believe world that she can manipulate to her choosing and force a painted version of her dead brother to exist there against his will for as long as she wants. Or until it kills her. She would blissfully die from staying in the canvas if she could.

A Warden would have to convince her that somehow, despite reality’s flaws and her flaws within reality, that it’s a place worth living in and she should at least try to live in it before writing it off. For her, to live is to be Maelle. Alicia doesn’t live, she merely exists.

Arrival:

If she thought even for a minute that something went wrong and she had actually stayed in the canvas long enough for it to kill her, she would take that opportunity so fast. Anything but consequences for this princess!

Abilities/Powers:

Out of the Canvas
Alicia is a Paintress and as such she is capable of creating living, breathing worlds with living, breathing people. She is also capable of entering these worlds and living inside amongst her creations.

Inside the Canvas
Maelle is capable of creating, recreating and literally deleting entire people through the manipulation of chroma, an element that makes up all things within a canvas world. With a flick of her rapier and some pure chroma she can make whole people so long as she understands the essence of her creations. With a push from her hand, she can undo all that hard work and delete them just as quickly. Although it’s barely practiced, it’s implied that she’s also figured out painted Alicia’s ability to control time by stopping and moving through time around her while allowing others of her choosing to move through it freely with her.

General Fighting in the Canvas
Maelle can summon a rapier with a fluttering of golden petals. She has an affinity to fire and void elements. She can rain fiery swords onto opponents or coat her rapier with flame to leave stacks and stacks of burning DoTs. Her void abilities, in particular Stendhal (a tip of the hat to Stendhal Syndrome), are some of her most deadly but leave her defenseless thereafter.

Alternatively, she can act as a party tank, taking damage in place of allies, buffing them with shells while stripping her opponents of their own defenses. She can also sacrifice all of her health for the sake of gaining max action points so she can do more costly and more powerful abilities. She is all about high risk, high reward. The game does well to put the characterization into their abilities.

Her gradient attacks range from heavy hits, to burning enemies while resurrecting allies, to erasing or Gommaging her opponents.

All of the above would be nerfed. At most, I’d like her to keep her rapier as something summonable for the sake of some mild self-defense, but we can leave out the fire and all of the rest. If she ever got her hands on some paint, she can paint a pretty picture at best but she can’t hide in any canvases for obvious reasons.

Inmate Information:

Wouldn’t it be great if you could just paint the perfect life? Bring back the people who died because of you, get rid of some awful scars, get a whole eye and your lost voice back? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could live in that world you created and never be touched by the consequences of those mistakes?

Meet Alicia.

Somewhere between delusional and denial, Alicia would much rather hide than face the consequences outside the make believe world of Verso’s canvas. In short, she refuses to try and move on from her brother’s death and her new reality.

Alicia made a grievous mistake: arrogance. A pattern of behavior that she’s never learned from. Time after time, she throws herself down self-destructive paths and despite any pleading or warnings made by others, she thinks she knows better and the consequences can’t touch her.

The Dessendre family is part of the Painters’ Guild, her mother is the head of the guild and for reasons unknown, they are rivals to the Writers’ Guild. Alicia, described as timid, weak and naive by her sister Clea, tried to befriend the Writers’ Guild despite her mother’s warnings that they would betray her. But she thought she knew better, that she’d be different. It’s unclear how the house fire started, but what is clear is that the Writers’ Guild started it and Alicia’s trust in them allowed it to happen.

The fire was devastating. Alicia came away from it heavily scarred, losing her right eye and her voice to the flames. The only reason she survived the fire at all was because her brother, Verso, saved her but at the cost of his own life.

Since then, her mother has heavily blamed her, refusing to speak or even look at her while holding a deep level of animosity toward her. Her older sister fights a war against the Writers to clean up the mess she made. And her father remains torn between keeping his family from somehow breaking apart further through more self-destruction and dealing with the loss of his son and his own form of survivor’s guilt (he wasn’t present when the fire happened). Behold, consequences.

Through her grief Alicia’s mother, Aline, entered an old canvas of Verso’s and in it she painted her family. All of them doppelgangers of their true selves including the dead Verso. And then Aline refused to leave the canvas. However, remaining in any canvas has consequences. While one can paint and build whole worlds and people while within, their body can wither and die on the outside if they remain inside for too long.

When Alicia entered Verso's canvas, she did it because Clea asked her to and because she thought it was what Verso would’ve wanted and she owed it to her family to help after the mess she'd made. In their parents' fight between staying (Aline's goal) and leaving (their father, Renoir's goal) the canvas, neither had safely returned for way too long. However, Alicia’s earnest to help also backfired. Of the Dessendre siblings, Alicia was the least experienced with canvases, often preferring to stay in her room, read books and avoid people instead of playing with her older siblings in any canvas. So when she did enter she was easily overwhelmed by her mother's chroma and was sucked in as another one of her mother's creations.

Meet Maelle.

Maelle is everything Alicia isn’t but wants to be. She’s confident (honestly, overconfident), she’s sassy, she can fight, and she hasn’t been weighed down by the guilt and scars of her actions in the real world. Cocky and reckless, Maelle grew up faster having been orphaned at age 3, tossed between fosters for being a “weird” kid who was plagued by waking nightmares and constantly running away. Maelle was completely unaware of her life outside of the canvas or even knowing she was in a canvas. To her, the canvas world was real. It was all she knew. But despite that unawareness, she always knew she didn’t belong in Lumiere and that she was missing something. Much like Alicia, Maelle is arrogant. At 16 with 9 years to live, she joins Expedition 33, something known as being certain death and effectively throwing those "9 good years" away. But again, she thinks she’ll be different, that the consequences won’t come for her and that this is her chance to get out of Lumiere and finally see the world with the time she has left. Somehow... those consequences don’t come for her. But they come for almost everyone else.

Just as the Expedition reaches the continent, nearly all of them are killed by the painted doppelganger of Alicia’s father, Renoir. The only reason Maelle even survived was thanks to the painted version of Verso, who Clea had asked 16 years before to keep an eye on Alicia when she was initially sucked into the canvas. (It’s not clear but Canvas time =/= real time. Maybe 1 year in the canvas is 1 hour in the real world) Through whatever luck, Gustave, Maelle’s guardian and foster-brother survived the initial onslaught. But that too was fleeting.

Later, the painted Renoir returns, taking Gustave’s life. With Gustave’s death, Maelle settles on revenge. She couldn’t have cared less about the grand mission the Expedition was on, although she understood its significance, she hardly shows much interest or optimism in the greater goal the others are fighting for. But with Gustave’s death, suddenly it’s personal. If she wants revenge, she needs to kill the Paintress (the Expedition's ultimate goal) and in doing so, she can also kill the one responsible for killing Gustave, the painted Renoir.

She succeeds in both these tasks, but with unpredicted consequences.

She had no idea the Paintress was her mother, Aline, and even less idea that by destroying her mother in the canvas she would be indirectly destroying all of her mother’s creations, including herself.

When a Painter or Paintress dies in the canvas, they are essentially pushed out and back into reality. By defeating the Paintress, Alicia accomplished what Clea had originally sent her into the canvas to do. With the Paintress out of the way Alicia’s father, Renoir, finally wins that initial feud he had with Alicia’s mother. His goal was to not only drag Aline out of Verso's canvas to avoid her killing herself from being in the canvas for too long, but to keep her from ever coming back. So with the Paintress no longer able to protect her creations, Renoir erases them all in the hopes of severing Aline’s addiction to the canvas. He effectively Gommages all of Aline's creations, though he is unable to Gommage the remnants of Aline's painted family (painted Clea, painted Verso and painted Alicia). Maelle, being among Aline’s creations, Gommages as well and Alicia is kicked from Verso's canvas and returns to the reality she hates. She returns to the guilt, the scars, and the future she doesn’t have because of her mistakes. It doesn’t take her long before she reenters the canvas and this time, much like her mother before her, she doesn’t intend to leave.

While in the canvas for a second time, Maelle is well aware of both of her lives. She’s more mature, she’s technically lived 32 years, albeit she is still very much a teenager. And her goal sets itself on recreating Lumiere and her mother’s creations that she lived beside for 16 years and cares for. To her, those people were real. She is determined to bring back what was and now that she understands herself as a Paintress, it is far easier to accomplish that. However, while she paints herself (pun intended) as feeling responsible for the Gommage of all of Lumiere and its destruction that follows, she is actually there for selfish reasons.

No scars, both eyes and a voice? Who would want to leave?

To make matters worse, Maelle makes some rough decisions on her canvas return. In an earnest attempt to meet with her own painted self she initially offers her painted doppelganger an opportunity to repaint her face. Aline had painted her daughter with the same burn scars and disfigurements, without life or color, while keeping her son, Verso, intact. It’s clearly an act of laying blame solely on Alicia for the fire but making a creation take the fall and anger in place of her own daughter. Aline had redone the catastrophic fire as though it had only taken Alicia and never touched Verso. Understanding this now, Maelle wanted to give painted Alicia a new beginning. But her offer was refused and instead painted Alicia wanted death. Maelle didn’t question it and granted her wish by Gommaging her. Problem being, painted Verso did not agree to it and had to watch as his sister was erased in front of him without getting to say goodbye. While Maelle argues it’s what painted Alicia wanted, when Verso (different ending but consistent mindset) makes the same request of Maelle, pleading and begging for death, she refuses him. The fact of the matter is that she didn’t need her doppelganger self but she needed the painted version of her dead brother, emphasizing her inability to move on and drag him along kicking and screaming if need be.

And just to drive this home one more time, she’s still arrogant. When she did re-enter the canvas, her father, Renoir, was right behind her. He pleaded for her to let the canvas go, let Verso go, and not remain as it’s certain to kill her given that she’s already the weakest of the family and has spent 16 years there already. But she refuses because once again, she thinks she will be different. She won’t make the same mistakes as her far more experienced and canvas savvy mother and she won’t be at risk of death in the canvas like her mother was. She goes as far as lying to her father in the end, reassuring him she’ll leave when the time is right yet has no intention of doing so. She would happily live a whole life in the canvas, a make believe world with make believe friends and family than face the consequences in reality.

From her canonpoint Verso has successfully defeated her after having caught onto her lie, effectively kicking her from the canvas once again. But she would absolutely jump back in if given the chance and continue the cycle, eagerly forfeiting her life in reality in the process if it lets her play make believe just a little longer.

Path to Redemption:

What does your character need to change about themselves, and what sorts of milestones do you envision them needing to reach before they're ready for graduation?

The girl needs grief counseling, let’s be honest. She swings between huge bouts of depression and survivor’s guilt to straight up denial and delusions with no moderation in-between. A lot of what she’ll have to do involves finally moving on from Verso’s death, but also being willing to live her own life without him and with the scars and guilt that she carries. Although Verso is a great part of why she won’t leave the canvas, most of it stems from her own inability to accept her new reality. It’s unclear how much time has passed since Verso’s death, but what is clear is that she has refused to even try to move on, leave her room, make friends or even live.

Beyond the grief, one of her largest issues is her arrogance and inconsiderate behavior toward others. When she is self-destructive she takes down everyone with her. Her trust in the Writers ultimately killed Verso and tore her family apart. Her joining Expedition 33 led to Gustave's death. If she hadn't been on the cliff with him there would be no rock throw, Renoir wouldn't have caught them in time and Gustave would have never chosen to stay instead of run. When she selfishly chooses to stay in the canvas, it is at her own expense and her family's and in particular, her grieving father's who desperately doesn't want to lose anyone else. Not to mention her insistence to drag the painted Verso along against his will for as long as she wants. The humans of Verso's canvas were both created and destroyed because of her choices and actions as well as her blatant inability to think before leaping despite warnings and pleadings from everyone around her. To truly be redeemed, she would need to learn that her actions have consequences, that she can't jump into danger simply because she thinks she'll be okay and that she should be wary when she's warned to do so. She needs to understand that the consequences of jumping ripples out onto the people she cares about and who care about her and that despite believing she knows better than them she doesn't and they might be warning her for good reason.

Although it is a smaller issue, both Maelle and Alicia are known for struggling with people. Maelle keeps away from the Expedition Festival and prefers Gestrals (creatures based off of dogs) to people. Meanwhile Alicia's struggle with other people is far more challenging. From what's understood from the snippet given of her life in reality, she is incapable of speech and essentially rasps her way through single syllable sentences that are miraculously understood by her older sister, Clea (give Clea all the crap you want, she knows her baby sister). An easy first milestone would be for her to be comfortable with alternative methods of communicating, even if it's just the Barge's network or (why no one's thought of this in canon is beyond me) sign language. It's brought up several times that she's bad with people and has difficulties understanding them (people are complicated), but it's also likely that she'd rather avoid or keep away from them than try to communicate at all. She is both fiercely lonely yet does nothing to change it. If she can be more comfortable communicating with others in general then another milestone could simply be to willingly make a friend who isn't forced on her by immediate association.

Lastly, she says that she merely exists and lives in a shell of a body. That there’s no joy in her life and emphasizes that her life couldn’t possibly have joy in the state that it’s in. It probably could! But that’s something she’s refused to even attempt to find out. No one said it would be easy. A lot of her journey will need to be gaining some self-confidence and self-acceptance while also finally accepting and living with the consequences of her actions. With that all said, I know there are some fantastic healing magics hanging around the Barge, but I'd like none of them to work on her. Cuts, bruises, fine. But if the scars went, she'd learn nothing. She views Maelle as living but the ultimate goal is for Alicia to be the one living, not just existing.

How will they react to being on the Barge? How will they react to being wardened?

Her reaction to the Barge will probably be somewhere between disappointment that she isn’t in Verso’s canvas, panic that she isn’t in Verso’s canvas (not being there likely means her father’s destroyed it) and just straight up depression and grief because she’s stuck in her own body rather than the painted one in Verso’s canvas and everyone she knew from the canvas is gone forever.

As for being wardened... she’s a teenager who already struggles with communicating and with people. The first struggle is going to be getting her to communicate at all. She can be the princess of silent treatment quite easily! And why should she bother communicating with them? She’s done nothing wrong, according to her. For all the disappointment she’ll have that she’s out of Verso’s canvas, she will need to be convinced that she even needs wardening to begin with, or that there’s anything in it for her at the end of the tunnel. And if there are any canonmates present from the canvas, that task will be a hell of a lot more challenging. She might have everything she wants here, besides her face and voice, so it might become a mountainous task. Why bother improving? Why should she bother to return? There’s nothing for her there. It’s all here now.

What sorts of wardening styles would they be likely to respond best to, and conversely, what wardening styles would likely be ineffective or unhelpful? What methods can a warden use to get through to them, and what are some ideas for things that might trigger or motivate them to change?

Maelle is stubborn and once her mind is settled to do something or think a certain way it is near impossible to steer her away from that, regardless of how reckless or self-destructive that choice might be. What I’m trying to say is that she’s going to need a lot of patience and more of a mentor figure than a warden.

Consistently, the only advice she has ever been willing to hear out has been from those who she's found trustworthy, has earned her respect and who she finds to be knowledgeable about a given topic. She asks Sciel for advice on fighting since she's the best fighter she knows. She asks Lune how she can just keep going despite emotions threatening to get in the way. She considers Verso's expert advice on grief. She gets advice from Gustave frequently about life and growing up. He's always giving her life lessons and a lot of her willingness to hear him out is because she trusts he wants what's best for her and he's willing to let her deal with the pitfalls of growing up on her own while being there when she needs the help.

She’s going to make a lot of mistakes and some of those have to happen. Above all, she wouldn’t do well with any Warden who uses manipulation or is prone to violence (granted, she'll never turn down a friendly duel..). She’s gullible, she’s easy to manipulate, but she’s also experienced it enough times to have grown a backbone and is willing to fight back for her own choices and opinions. From Alicia’s own family, there is a history of manipulating one another. Clea creates nightmares to teach her siblings a lesson. Verso lies and masks his feelings, while using Maelle as literal bait and manipulating her goals. Renoir tries to control her actions and choices through violence (best fight music though tbh). And Aline ignores and blames her daughter to the point of painting her doppelganger in lifeless monochrome, scars and all. That said, the more of an iron grip a warden would have with her, the more she’ll retreat and double down on her bad habits and mindsets. Instead, she’ll need someone willing to pick her up when she does fall, guide her a little bit and then wait for the next time she scrapes her knee and do it all over again. The more respect she’s given, the more she’ll be willing to come to them for help and respect them and their position in return.

History: From the Wiki

Sample Network Entry: Thread with Princess Donut from the July TDM

Sample RP: Thread with Verso from the June TDM

And just in case, Top Level!

Maëlle

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