Some people just aren’t built to endure the kind of bleak, unrelenting tragedy that often exists at the bottom of a great story’s emotional arc. Rapper T-Pain may just have that affliction, having recently started Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on his Nappy Boy Gaming YouTube channel and noped out after its notoriously sad opening sequence.
*Spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 below. Turn back if you haven’t played through the prologue yet.*
In the video just below, you can see T-Pain playing about 15 minutes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from the very start, which of course means he witnesses the awfully tragic death of Sophie in the prologue, leaving him speechless for a few seconds as he resumes control of Gustave. T-Pain eventually makes an exacerbated “shewwww” sound and exits to desktop. “Is it a sad story?” an offscreen person says, clearly noticing T-Pain’s emotional exhaustion. “Yeah.”
“Is it too sad?”
“Yeah, it was too sad,” T-Pain responds, laughing. Just before ending the video, the rapper appears to read a comment on his stream warning him that, “it gets worse” – and anyone who’s played through the game knows it absolutely does get worse, and soon – and T-Pain decides then and there, “Absolutely not.”
I totally get his reluctance to continue here. Sometimes I just want to play a game, or watch a movie, or read a book, and not feel like I need to text my therapist. Unfortunately, in my view, if a story’s writing and performances are effective enough to evoke such powerful emotion, it’s probably worth seeing through, even if it never provides the sort of emotional upswing you want.
The Last of Us is one of my all-time favorite stories across all mediums precisely because it offers such an uncompromising, realistic account of two normal people trying to navigate a zombie apocalypse. Bad things are going to happen to good people, and there won’t always be a picture-perfect redemption for anyone. Casting aside the conventional trajectories of heroes and villains makes for a much more believable, and thus absorbing story. You might not be moving your body like a cyclone afterwards, but you can always get low with something a little lighter to balance things out.