#only for that boy to later take advantage of his near-comprehensive similarity to luke

[smile-files]

obviously, clive resembles luke, which is why he was able to pretend to be his older self... but golly, the parallels are crazy...

i recall layton saying that the explosion happened before luke was even born, and that it was 10 years before the present, and here you have clive pretending to be luke 10 years after the present, making clive almost directly "future luke". and clive, given how much he looks like luke now, must've looked even more like luke when he was a child, when he'd been clutching onto layton in the streets looking for his parents - and given that 10-year divergence, clive must've been around 10 at the time, the same age as luke when layton met him. and i forget the details of the last specter (when layton met luke), but wasn't luke's father missing for part of that game, similar to clive's parents? (i don't remember what's up with his mother lol.) it's like deja vu... same age, same face, same outfit, same problem... two little boys in blue missing their parents... clive was adopted by the kindly constance dove, who became his mother, only for time to separate them - while luke has been under the care of the kindly hershel layton, who effectively serves as his father, and time is going to separate them too...

and as it is, despite neither dimitri nor clive truly being the future layton or luke respectively, dimitri at the very least represents a dark path layton could've gone down: out of grief over claire, he could've gone to extreme, terrible lengths. so what of luke? is clive his dark path? perhaps, though i don't know (and/or remember) enough about luke's backstory to say how...