#“claus survives and he's immediately more or less normal & happy again” is also wacky

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🔥claus

i've never vibed with fanon claus. i kinda had to disconnect from all the popular interpretations that've been floating around the fandom for ages, before i could start to really appreciate the character. (to be clear, i'm not on about any particular folks who make fan content - i mean fanon as in the amorphous mass of trends i've seen in the fandom space over the years. i've spent many seasons out here in the mother 3 mines 🫠.) i get that as players we don't spend a lotta time with claus, and that his character leaves a lot up to interpretation. m3's writing kinda begs you to fill in the blanks yourself. but i feel like a lotta fanon perceptions of claus are, like?? re-constructed out of unrelated tropes, instead of bein' built from what we do see in the game. he'll be an edgy "insane" villain, or a dark broody antihero, or a grumpy standoffish grouch. far cries imo from the chipper kid we meet, or the harrowing husk he becomes, or the apologetic & hopeful & brimming-with-love last words he utters once he's returned to his senses. not necessarily "mischaracterization" i guess, since there's all those gaps to fill in with the masked man, and it's anyone's guess what he'd be like if he had survived. just not really to my personal taste, if he comes off like an unrecognizably different character.

what i do think is a misstep though is whenever he's rendered permanently, irreparably miserable. mother 3's whole deal is about trauma survivors finding love & hope & joy in the world despite it all. growing up through horrific circumstances without giving up on your inner child. imo it'd be kind of a disservice to the story's meaning, for claus to come back a forever broken shell of his former self. or for his death to be necessary because it was just tooooo impossible for anyone to live with that kind of damage (another reason i think he had to have been "dead all along" 😶). a bummer of a message all its own.