The Luxury of Borrowed Pain
I look at Clair-Obscur: Expedition 33 and the song Une vie à t’aimer, and I can’t help but notice something: people love to romanticize pain they’ve never lived. They’ll call the music “haunting” and the imagery “profound,” but what they’re really drawn to is the idea of suffering without ever touching the fire. It’s easy to cry over a sad melody when it’s not tied to a real memory. Easy to call it “beautiful” when you’ve never felt your life unravel in silence. Real struggle? It’s not artfully composed. It’s messy, raw, and often brutal in a way that can’t be softened with violins or brushstrokes.
That’s why I think this game’s themes—cycles, lies, and erasure—hit differently for those who’ve actually been through something. You can tell the difference between art that bleeds and art that’s just paint on a canvas. Most people consuming this aren’t hearing the cries behind the notes—they’re just vibing to what “sadness” is supposed to feel like. It’s aesthetic suffering, safe suffering, the kind of emotion you can dip into like warm bathwater and step out of whenever you want. For those of us who’ve clawed out of real darkness, though? We see it for what it is: a shadow, not the storm.
I don’t knock the game or the song for existing. They’re both great in their own ways, and sometimes fantasy gives us room to explore emotions we can’t touch otherwise. But I also can’t ignore the fact that people want the feel of struggle without the scars that come with it. They want depth, but not the cost. And maybe that’s why I’m detached from how they gush about it—it’s not real to them. I’m not staring at a pretty painting or listening to a “sad song.” I’m remembering the fire it would’ve taken to burn the truth into it.
Book of Boris — The Painter’s Clock
- "If you knew what real pain feels like,
- you’d stop dressing it in pretty words."
- "You’d see how cold it is—
- how it doesn’t wait for you to find the right song,
- or the perfect canvas."
- "It comes like a thief,
- rips through the colors,
- and leaves you staring at the raw,
- unpainted truth."
#perspective #art #truth #realstruggle #expedition33 #bearblog