Maelle is the best character in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Considering Sandfall’s RPG epic is fil🌼led with excellent characters you can’t help falling in love with across its 30-hour runtime means this is quite an achie☂vement. The young swordswoman is a faint spectre of hope and melancholy that spurs the narrative forward in spite of the demons holding her back.
With very few loved ones to call her own and an existence that counts down to her own utter obliteration, she chooses to embark on a suicide mission instead of living a longer life aware of the fact it will all be for nothing. She’s emotionally immature, unsure of herself, and putting so much hope into a 𝓰surrogate brother who ꦯwon’t be around for much longer. That alone has made so many✨ players fall in love with her journey, and I’m right there along with them.
But because she is a female character in a video game in 2025, of course peopl♛e online are being weird about her. So let’s talk about it.
Female Characters Don’t Exist Just To Be Sexualized
It’s fair to say that the majority of characters in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are pretty, and it’s hard not to spend time on the party menu ogling everyone and their various different outfits. It became a habit of mine to seek out every single optional location and mꦐerchant just in case I stumbled upon a random hairstyle I was yet to discover.
Gustave is a r🌃efined gentleman that I wouldn’t hesitate to take home to my parents, while Lune is a gorgeous woman with a noted passion for all things weird and wonderful. Sciel is well aware of her sexual appeal, and isn’t afraid of propositioning Verso in camp for a fling, knowing that each night might be her last.
Luไne also has her dogs out in combat all the time, which is nice if you’re into that sort of thing.
These are all people in their thirties with nuanced life experiences, and the way in whic𝓰h we see them approach romantic relationships, sex, and intimacy throughout the narrative is very reflective of that perspe🐭ctive. Lune and Sciel even allude to a fling they had together to deal with the trauma of the Gommage, but the storytelling trusts us enough to piece these little beats together ourselves.
Maelle,ꦡ as a 16-year-old teenageꦦr, is an obvious outlier as the youngest member of the team by more than a decade. She’s designed with deliberately youthful looks that reflect her initial optimism, a trait of her character we see gradually chipped away as her journey pivots from one of her living out her entire life to that of bittersweet revenge.
It’s okay to find Gustave, Verso, Lune, and Sciel attractive, and I’d say the same of all other video game characters who are canonically of agꦏe and in possession of their own agency. But in the modern cultural landscape, saying that alone and calling it a day isn’t enough.
I have watched following the game’s release as people try to work out Maelle’s age, as it’s seemingly not mentioned in the campaign aside from Maelle stating she’s a teenager and the snippets of dialogue that confirm she i✃s 🌸at least a decade younger than her peers.
She isn’t an adult though. That much is clear. But that hasn’t stopped certain corners of t🍰he internet from framiꩲng her as an object of desire.
Maelle Is Underaged, And The Internet Needs To Respect That
What damages my psyche the most is how select audiences online will discover a new female 🐻character in a video game and, if she isn’t conventionally attractive or pushing some form of clichéd fanservice, she’ll be viewed as lesser. Like Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn, Abby in The Last of Us, or Star Wars Outlaws’ Kay Vess.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:They either look like real people or reflect design conventions♋ that aren’t catering to a heteronormative perspective and thus must be burned to the ground. It𓂃’s a predictaꦜble cycle in the online world,
Japanese RPGs are unfortunately no stranger to sexualising underaged girls, such as Ann from Perso𝓰na 5 or Rikku from Final Fantasy 10, both of whom are teenagers.
Asking your audience to pick between a fully-grown woman and an underaged girl to be all hot and ♔bothered for because it fits you꧑r narrow-minded grifter attitude is helping nobody, and trivialises the excellent narrative work put forward by Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Not that it matters, in order to put a target on its back.
It’s just skin-crawling to see Maelle viewed as the sexy female character people have waited for when she is obviously underage, with this forming part of her character design and development, or her attractiveness being seen as the only part of her that matters. Maelle’s entire story is focused on her being a child pushed to the extreme of heading on the Expe☂dition, despite her guardians’ wishes.
What is most unnerving about🅠 this scenario is that we seeꦛ individuals look up the age of characters like Maelle, hoping that will justify their already problematic attraction.
To see how deep the problem goes, one of this site’s best-performing articles is a list of the ages of al🍨l of Genshin Iꩲmpact’s characters.
One of the common excuses made for charactꦍers from select anime or JRPGs is that “well, they aren’t real” so nobody is getting hurt or, in Maelle’s case, in some parts of the world, she has hit the age of consent.
But viewing it from that perspective and using it as justification is a red flag in the first place. Maelle is a wonderfully designed and narratively nuanced female character, and gamers should be able to appreciate heಌr younger perspective without this bizarre need to turn it into something perverse. Unfortunately, that isn’t the world we live in.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- Released
- April 24, 2025
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ // Blood a𝔉nd Gore, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Developer(s)
- ༺ Sandfall Interacti✃ve
- Publisher(s)
- 🃏 Kepler In💧teractive
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