Writing is hard. Sometimes, the words just don't come, and you're left staring at the blank space where the perfect one should be. And sometimes you write a beloved, hilarious, and emotional sequence at 3 AM, like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen did.
The perfect word doesn't always need to properly explain what's going on – it can simply describe a feeling and leave us, the audience, to figure out its deeper meaning. Such is the case when Verso and Esquie discuss "whee" and "whoo" while looking up at the starry night sky.
"Franfran used to be all 'Wheeee!' But now he's all 'Whooo,'" explains Esquie. The gestral is talking about how his friend has gone from carefree and happy to becoming someone much more glum – "Monsieur Grumpface," as Vesco knows him.
"That was me at three in the morning trying to come up with something," Svedberg-Yen tells Polygon. "I knew what I wanted to say, where it's talking about something heavy and sad and how you can feel the joy and the grief. And I was so tired. I didn't have any words. So I was just like, 'wheeeeee!'"
It might not be the kind of dialogue that you'd think was great during office hours, but "whee" and "whoo" capture the spirit of what Svedberg-Yen was trying to communicate perfectly, and the scene is a bright moment in an often dark story. It's quirks like these that made our Clair Obscur review so positive.
It makes sense for the characters, and Svedberg-Yen says her main goal is authenticity, trying to make it feel like her characters are real. Real people don't always say the most poetic things, and we don't always know how to express our feelings. Sometimes all we can do is "whee" and "whoo."
If you've finished Clair Obscur and you're feeling pretty "whoo" about not having any more to get through, check out our list of all the best RPGs you can use to fill the void it left behind.
