11 Nov 6th Annual Symposium on Pop Culture and International Law: Genocide in the Canvas? International Law and the Destruction of Lumière in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
[Dr Laurence Atkin-Teillet is a Lecturer in International Criminal and Humanitarian Law at Nottingham Law School, Nottingham Trent University.]
What makes a world real? Is it the material from which it is made, the person who created it, or the lives of those who inhabit it? And if a world contains beings who think, love, suffer, build communities and fear their own destruction, does it matter that they were painted into existence rather than born?
These questions are at the heart of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the role-playing game developed by Sandfall Interactive. They also raise a very difficult question for international law: could the deliberate destruction of an entire population of human-like beings constitute genocide, even if those beings exist inside a painting?
The answer under existing international law is obviously not straightforward. Yet the question does show some important assumptions about the groups whom international law protects, the nature of personhood, and the boundaries between what we consider real and what we consider worthy of legal protection.
Welcome to Lumière
At first, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 appears to tell a story of a population living under the shadow of an existential threat. Its inhabitants live in Lumière, a city in a strange and beautiful world shaped by magic.
Each year, a figure known as the Paintress marks a new number on a distant Monolith. This number determines the age of those who will disappear in an event known as the Gommage. When the number changes to 33, everyone aged 33 vanishes, leaving families and friends to mourn those they have lost. Expedition 33 sets out to stop the Paintress and end the cycle. As the story continues, however, the distinction between reality and fiction begins to disappear.
The Canvas is not an imaginary world inhabited by characters who exist for the entertainment of an audience – it is a world created through the artistic powers of the Dessendre family. The real-world painter Verso created the Canvas; following his death, his mother, Aline, retreated into it and recreated aspects of the family she had lost. The world came to contain painted versions of people, alongside other beings with their own lives and identities.
Aline’s husband, Renoir, enters the Canvas in an attempt to bring her back to reality. Their conflict gradually threatens the survival of the world and its inhabitants. The struggle becomes even more complicated when we discover that Maelle is the real-world Alicia, who entered the Canvas and lost her former identity, while the painted Verso is a recreation of the real Verso.
The game’s ending presents a difficult choice. In Verso’s ending, often nicknamed the “Genocide Ending”, he defeats Maelle and destroys the Canvas. The painted world and the inhabitants whom the player has come to know disappear. In Maelle’s ending, she preserves the Canvas, but her decision also raises questions about autonomy and the right to determine one’s own existence.
The choice is between two understandings of what makes a life worth preserving. The painted inhabitants may have been created by another person, but they experience relationships, loss, fear and attachment – their lives have meaning to them. From their perspective, the destruction of the Canvas is the end of their world.
And that’s why I started wondering: could destroying the Canvas and everyone who lives in it amount to genocide?
Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide through two central requirements: certain prohibited acts must be committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such. The prohibited acts include killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction, imposing measures intended to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children to another group.
The definition is reproduced in Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Can the Inhabitants of Lumière Constitute an Ethnic Group?
Article II of the Genocide Convention protects four categories of group: national, ethnic, racial and religious.
In Prosecutor v Akayesu, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda described an ethnic group as one whose members generally share a common language or culture. The judgment also considered the stability and permanence conventionally associated with the groups protected by the Convention.
This provides an interesting starting point for considering Lumière. Its inhabitants share a collective history, language, cultural practices and social institutions. They have families, friendships, traditions and an understanding of themselves as members of a community: their shared existence in the Canvas has shaped their identities and their relationships with one another.
Therefore, there is a plausible argument that the painted inhabitants of Lumière constitute a distinct ethnic community.
But even if we could establish that the inhabitants constitute a protected ethnic group, a more fundamental question remains: can a group of human-like beings be protected by the prohibition of genocide if they are not biologically human?
Does International Law Protect Only Human Groups?
The Genocide Convention does not explicitly state that its protection is limited to members of Homo sapiens. Nevertheless, the prevailing interpretation of genocide has a distinctly human focus. There is no established international precedent extending the crime to artificially created human-like populations. So, even if the inhabitants of Lumière meet the social and cultural characteristics of an ethnicity, their status as non-biological creations makes it more difficult.
In Prosecutor v Krstić, the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia stated that the Genocide Convention and customary international law prohibit the physical or biological destruction of a “human” group. The International Court of Justice has likewise endorsed a physical or biological understanding of the destruction required for genocide.
But what if the painted inhabitants possess the same cognitive capacities, emotional experiences and capacity for suffering as human beings? What if their communities are culturally indistinguishable from human societies? Would their artificial origin alone be sufficient to exclude them from protection?
Under the law as it currently stands, we cannot simply assume that such beings would qualify as victims of genocide. There is a considerable difference between arguing that they deserve protection and establishing that their destruction falls within an existing international crime. Nevertheless, the absence of a clear answer invites us to question the assumptions underlying the law. Is the relevant distinction necessarily between the biologically human and the non-human, or could it instead be between entities that experience no life of their own and beings whose existence has independent meaning to them?
If states, companies and rivers can have legal personality, why not a painted world? International law already recognises that not every legal person is a human being.
States are central subjects of international law. International organisations can possess international legal personality too. In its 1949 Reparation for Injuries advisory opinion, the International Court of Justice recognised the United Nations’ international legal personality and its capacity to bring international claims.
Companies provide another example of legal personality, although their legal status usually comes from domestic law and specific international regimes rather than from a universal grant of international legal personality equivalent to that enjoyed by States.
Environmental law also offers a comparison. New Zealand’s Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017, section 14, declares the Whanganui River an entity with the legal status of a person, with rights, powers, duties and liabilities exercised through an appointed representative.
These examples do not establish that a river has the same rights as a human being, or that it could be a victim of genocide. Legal personality, standing, moral status and the scope of international crimes are distinct concepts. Nevertheless, these examples demonstrate that the law does not recognise legal personality exclusively on the basis of biological humanity. Legal systems can create or recognise legal status to protect interests, structure responsibilities and allow particular entities to be represented.
Could a comparable argument be made for a world whose inhabitants possess human-like cognition, feelings and social relationships? If such a world existed, why should its artificial origin alone determine whether its inhabitants deserve legal protection?
Any extension of criminal liability would require particular care as the principle of legality prevents courts from simply expanding the definition of genocide by analogy (Article 22(2), Rome Statute). A moral argument for protecting artificial populations is not enough to establish that their destruction is already a crime under international law.
But the limits of current law should not prevent us from asking whether those limits are justified.
Would Verso’s Destruction of the Canvas Constitute Genocide?
Let us assume, for the purposes of the argument, that the inhabitants of Lumière are legally capable of constituting a protected ethnic group. We can then consider the two main elements of genocide: the prohibited act and the specific intent to destroy the group.
In Verso’s ending, the Canvas is destroyed and its inhabitants disappear with it.
If the painted inhabitants are conscious persons, their disappearance could be understood as functionally equivalent to killing them. The closest legal analogy is the prohibition on killing members of a protected group under Article II(a). Depending on the assumptions made about the nature of the Canvas and its inhabitants, one could argue that the destruction of the world amounts to the destruction of its population.
However, this remains an argument by analogy, not an established application of the Genocide Convention.
The Mental Element: Does Verso Intend to Destroy a Group?
Verso wants to destroy the Canvas in its entirety. He believes that ending the painted world is necessary to release Alicia and the Dessendre family from a cycle of grief and allow them to return to reality. He nevertheless chooses a course of action that destroys the painted inhabitants and everything they have built. Does this amount to genocidal intent?
One argument in favour is that the destruction of the inhabitants is not an accidental or incidental consequence of Verso’s actions. He chooses to destroy the Canvas despite knowing that its inhabitants will disappear. If the destruction of the population is an intended and unavoidable consequence of his decision, there is an argument that he intends their physical destruction in whole.
The motive for his decision would not, by itself, exclude genocide. International criminal law distinguishes between the intention to destroy a protected group and the ulterior reason for doing so. A perpetrator might intend to destroy a group while pursuing another objective at the same time.
Conclusion: Does it Matter Where a Life Begins?
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 does not provide a straightforward example of genocide under existing international law.
Yet the game highlight questions that are easy to overlook when considering genocide only in the context of ordinary human populations. What makes a group worthy of protection? Is it biological ancestry, shared culture, social identity, consciousness, or some combination of these characteristics? And can the destruction of a world constitute the destruction of a people when their existence is inseparable from that world?
The examples of international organisations, corporate legal personality and the rights of nature do demonstrate that legal status is not always dictated by biological origin. Those examples do not resolve the question of genocide, but they show that the relationship between legal personhood and humanity is more complicated than it may initially appear.
Perhaps the most disturbing question raised by the Canvas is whether a being who can think, feel, love, suffer and fear extinction should lose the possibility of legal protection simply because of how they came into existence. If a world like the Canvas existed, populated by conscious beings whose lives were as meaningful to them as ours are to us, would its artificial origin be a sufficient reason to deny them protection against deliberate destruction?
International law does not currently provide a clear affirmative answer. But Clair Obscur invites us to consider whether it should.