I was so tired Behind Clair Obscur Expedition 33s beloved whee whoo scene
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen would be the first to tell you: writing a video game is work.
At least writing a novel is a one-person operation for most of the time. At least a screenplay for a film only needs to come in around 120 pages, unless you’re working for Martin Scorsese. But writing a video game? That means filling hours of space, bending the material to fit the play, and usually working with a team of other writers to make it all cohere. Sometimes to hit a deadline, you just need to throw words at the wall. Especially when it’s 3 a.m. That can still result in brilliance.
All the Frenchy bits and bobs in Clair Obscur have captured the imaginations of players, but few quite like the character of Esquie, and especially one camp conversation in which the oversized gestral reflects on his friend François with Verso. Verso knows François to be a grump, but Esquie insists that “Franfran used to be all ‘Wheeee!’ But now he’s all ‘Whooo.’” Over about a minute, Esquie further defines “whee” and “woo” while players even choose their own whee/woo path through the dialogue tree. It is tremendously silly.
“That was me at three in the morning trying to come up with something,” Svedberg-Yen admits with a laugh. “I needed to write seven relationship dialogues for Esquie!”
Svedberg-Yen says the script for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 comes in around 800 pages long, which doesn’t even include all of the NPC dialogue or the piles of lore-related documentation written as foundation for the story. To fill that much space, the writer says she grabbed inspiration from everything and everywhere around her. For instance, Svedberg-Yen says Monoco, the floating gestral who later joins the Expedition 33 crew, is based on her dog, and when her pup needed a haircut, she decided to write that into the story.
“I was like, OK, that’s going to be the conversation for Monoco and Verso about haircuts. He says, ‘you look like an overgrown mop.’ I literally said that to my dog — and I could use that.”
The “whee whoo” sequence made even less sense in the wee hours of the morning, but it felt right.
“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,” Svedberg-Yen says. “And I was so tired. I didn’t have any words. So I was just like, ‘wheeeeee!’”
As a fantasy writer, Svedberg-Yen says her number one goal is authenticity, sculpting characters who are born from real places and real circumstances, even if they’re otherworldly. So she doesn’t often question her instincts – even the kooky ones. There was room for moments of levity in the otherwise tragic Clair Obscur because, hey, that’s life. “Did I push it too far at all? Sometimes, when I’m at a loss for words, I’m like, what am I feeling right now? And then I put that into the script. That’s authentic because it is what I am feeling.”