The Meaning of the Axons

 In my replay of Expedition 33, I've now gotten through Visage and Sirene. The latter is one of my favorite areas of the game, even if the number of flying enemies can be frustrating (I just wish there were more ways to deal with them than just shooting them in Free Aim over and over). Sirene's boss music is mind-blowing, in that category with the Ancestral Spirit from Elden Ring as the kind of "how is this even combat music?"

However, one thing that's a little frustrating is that the bosses are just going down too quickly. I didn't have a chance to get used to the timing on the parries (or is it jumps?) for the Grand Ballet during Sirene's fight because she only got one of them off before I finished.

It's a reminder that, while the highest-level post-game stuff can be extremely hard, the actual story stuff is pretty reasonably challenging, and with a lot of experience with that post-game stuff, I've gotten good enough at figuring out builds, timing parries, and understanding the interplay between characters' powers that I'm just, I don't know, good at the game now. (I also know where more of the optional content is, so I might be a bit overleveled - though there's also a 20% XP bonus if you don't take damage during a fight, which might also account for being higher level.)

Anyway, the Axons are super cool, but when you first approach them, you might not entirely understand their significance. What makes them distinct from Nevrons, for example?

For that, we need to go into serious endgame spoilers.

Expedition 33 is a game about copies. Once a child's playground with just Gestrals and Grandis having adventures, the Canvas became a grieving mother's coping mechanism. Our Verso, and the versions of Renoir and Alicia that we see through much of the game, are copies of "real" people from the outer world.

Interestingly, Renoir plays an antagonistic goal in both of his incarnations, but these two versions of him are actually seeking opposite things: Painted Renoir wants to prevent the Paintress from being interfered with because she is the one who created him and his children as immortal beings. I do think he's probably the most truly villainous character because he seeks only to preserve his own immortality and that of those who he cares about, while callously slaughtering his fellow Lumierans.

Seriously, couldn't Painted Renoir just tell the Expeditions that she's not the cause of the Gommage? Why slaughter them? I suppose we have to wonder how much he knows, but when he is finally destroyed by the Curator/The Real Renoir, he knows who the guy is, and thus presumably also knows what he's doing.

Of course, the Curator/Real Renoir is more complicated: the Gommage is brutally horrible if you assume (as I tend to) that the people of Lumiere are real, sentient individuals. And while you could argue that they never should have been created in the first place - that Aline ruined this relic of the real Verso's by adding humans to it - I think that's no more grounds for erasing them than it would be to murder your kids because you weren't emotionally prepared for parenthood.

I think we can be pretty confident that the Curator does not think of them in this way. What he sees instead is his grieving wife detaching from reality to live in a fantasy world rather than confront the grief over losing her son. It's not purely altruistic - I think Renoir is also struggling with his grief and needs his wife to be with him.

But what, truly, is the nature of that grief?

Renoir also created a number of being within the Canvas that did not previously exist: the Axons. (Interesting question: are the non-boss foes in those areas Nevrons, or did Renoir create them? We do see a lot of them in Renoir's Drafts).

There are four Axons, though one of them is long-dead, a hulking form with long hair in the ruins of Old Lumiere, slain by Simon with a massive light-sword.

Much as Aline created pretty direct copies of her family, Renoir made more abstract versions of his family - Axons inspired by his wife and three children.

I don't know if we get a name for the one in Old Lumiere, but she's based on Clea, a character whom we also learn probably the least about (though there is some stuff to glean that's less straightforward). She is carrying a city on her back, and certainly in our brief interaction with the real Clea at the end of Act Two, she seems to be frustrated that she has to take responsibility for the family.

Sirene might be the most straightforward: she represents beauty, yes, but also a kind of narcotic effect that art and beauty can have. One wonders if this was already a flaw that Renoir saw in her before Verso's death, but certainly the fact that Aline retreated into the Canvas, to push away the real world and her real grief by painting herself a new family aligns with this. Indeed, the fact that she did not merely make a new Verso, but also new versions of the still-living Renoir, Alicia, and Clea adds a bit of a bitter insult to the entire endeavor - not only does she want a version of her son back, but she also wants versions of the rest of her family that she can control.

The Reacher is interesting: Aline clearly places some blame for Verso's death on Alicia, and even though painted Verso is alive, the painted Alicia is still forced to live burned and voiceless, a punishment that even the real Alicia (probably) didn't deserve, but surely someone created in this pained state is an innocent victim. But I think the relationship between Renoir and Alicia is very different. She's represented in The Reacher as someone ambitious, striving to be greater than she is, literally reaching to new heights.

See, I think that the real tragedy of Renoir's antagonistic relationship with the party is that I actually think Alicia is his favorite child. Aline clearly favored Renoir (I think Clea is probably so bitter because she sensed that she was neither parent's favorite). Not only has his wife escaped to this fantasy world and refuses to come home, but now his favorite daughter has as well. He's already lost his son, and now more of his family is pulling away from him.

I think it's that love that he holds for her that allows him, after the final Curator boss fight, to leave the canvas and trust that Alicia/Maelle will come back after she's said her goodbyes. He wants, desperately, to give her the benefit of the doubt. While yes, accompanying Expedition 33 to the Monolith is part of a plan to allow the Gommage to proceed, I also think that he just wants to be there for his daughter. (The brief shot after defeating the first Axon where Maelle sees the Curator for who he really is shows him beaming down at her, a proud and loving father).

Now, the most complex of the Axons, I think, is Visages. Visages (it's plural, right?) is all about deception, with the massive monster we fight in phase one of the fight turning out to be a decoy, and the supposedly friendly Mask Keeper being the real Axon.

Visages is explicitly Verso - when we beat him, Verso says "that was Verso, wasn't it?" - a sentence that makes no sense without the context that the one we know is a copy.

But I think there are two very different reads here:

One way or another, Visages represents a sense Renoir had that he didn't truly know his son. It's a sadly common aspect of father/son relationships, especially when a lot of traditional masculinity makes a virtue of hiding emotions. Verso, as we know from the version of him we see in game, is cagey and deceptive - quick with a joke, sure, but the humor hides a profound, suicidal depression, and a deceitfulness. Verso knows that defeating the Paintress will enable, rather than stopping the Gommage - I think. Arguably, Verso is betraying the rest of the party the entire time, though to be fair, when Maelle brings back Lune and Sciel and it looks like there might be a future in which Aline has left but the Canvas can remain, Verso might be in alignment with Maelle, only to change his mind when he sees the fragment of the real Verso trapped and forced to maintain the Canvas.

But yes, a simple, and sad but still not utterly tragic reading of Visages is simply that Renoir laments not being able to reach Verso's inner emotional world, that his son always felt the need to put up these emotional facades, these masks, rather than just be real with him.

There is, however, a darker reading: Did Renoir have suspicions that Verso had betrayed the family?

The events in the real world with the Painter/Writer war are profoundly vague. There are environmental hints in the Manor that suggest that the family might not have had full solidarity in this conflict. Verso clearly could Paint - he created the Canvas that the game takes place in - but it's also clear that his art of choice was music.

We also see that Alicia has a typewriter in her room, and there's an entire library attached to her bedroom filled with books (there's also a large library for the whole family, to be fair). Aline blames Alicia for Verso's death because supposedly she was tricked by the Writers into allowing them to launch the attack on their family.

Now, I don't know that there's any evidence that Verso himself was collaborating with the Writers, but I wonder if Renoir perhaps suspected that Verso wasn't totally innocent in the even that took his life.

We don't actually even know if the Writers are anything like the Painters. Are they also just artists in Paris who are in some kind of war with the Painters for some reason? Or are they, themselves, on some higher plane of existence (are they Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, the game's lead writer? Surely she's to blame for all the pain and hardship the characters feel)? (Or, cheekily, is Alan Wake the bad guy here?)

We don't know precisely how long in the real world it has been since Verso died (in the Canvas it's probably centuries, given that Lumiere was created by Aline after he died and there was time for humans to spread over the world before the Fracture and then the Gommage started) but Alicia is only a teenager, so even if it was only a couple months ago, she was a kid.

I think there's a decent amount of circumstantial evidence to suggest that Alicia was being courted or at least manipulated by the Writers. But whether or not Verso had a hand in this, I think the darker reading of Visages is that Renoir suspected that he did.

Renoir is a fantastic anti-villain: all he wants is to get his family back together and actually process their grief, and in his mind, he's doing the painful but responsible thing of moving on from his son's death and letting go of his creation. It's clearly not healthy for Aline or Alicia to spend their entire lives within the Canvas - one imagines that if Aline merely visited occasionally, Renoir never would have had a problem with it. But again, if you consider the inhabitants of the Canas to be sentient beings (and I feel like the game does intend for us to think that,) his actions are just not acceptable.