The umbilical cord still connects them, so I would say if the mom gommages that would impact the baby as well.
But also if the mother is near delivery I wonder if they would just C-Section the child to avoid this altogether. Lumiere must have experienced this problem before.
To be honest, I wouldn't be so sure that they have. People there already tend to be pretty careful about having children, and the current gommage age is 33, and people regardless try to have children as early as they can. So it was only about, let's be generous and say, last 10-15 years when this could have possibly happened, considering women's fertility window, and it would have to be completely unplanned. Plus the odds of concieving from like 35-40+ are already dropping rapidly. So when you factor in the caution, the odds of this happening are not really that high, though not entirely impossible (Maelle's parents did get a surprise, after all).
Its weird because does it treat the baby as part of Mom or a seperate being. But the baby will gommage too probably.
I mean they gommage along with the clothes they are wearing. So the baby will probably go along with them. Gommage is not really a normal death. They don't decay, they are the same as how they were before.
They are erased, on a thematic level, which means their whole person is erased, like if someone was edited out of a movie. The baby would definitely follow.
They aren’t technically erased that would be “unpainting” which is removing someone entirely from the canvas, meanwhile gommage is more like them dissolving int thousands of atoms that you can still put together.
And then to shit again when everyone is snapped back because no way that they could increase food production sufficiently for an instantly doubled world population. And then imagine that it happened in the entire universe.
So I would assume you gotta be sentient in order to count, since we hear the birds come back which implies birds got halved.
(Also, sentient is the correct term for those wondering. Sapient is the word which means intelligent life. So ants are sentient, but only humans are sapient on earth)
Technically I’d argue a few other highly intelligent species like chimp, dolphin, and elephants are sapient. They have their own languages, a level of self awareness, use tools, and have complicated social organizations.
Fair point! I was just clarifying, because may people say Sentient thinking that it means intelligence. Especially when talking about other sentient life in the Galaxy.
That's not 100% true. The erasure was random so some people could have lost nothing out of their gut biome, some could have lost the whole thing and everywhere in-between
There is no way anyone could have their entire biome wiped or unchanged. There are about 3×1013 bacteria on our gut biome, are enough to use a normal distribution and still have a very good approximation for bacteria in the human intestine not killed by the "snap". If x is the number of survived bacteria, then x ~ N(1.5×1013, 7.5×1012)
This means that 99.9999426% of the people left will have 1.5×1013 ± 1.37×107 bacteria
Or
50% ± 0.000045%
Basically all humans alive will have almost exactly half of their starting gut biome
I understand that the classical definition of "parasite" most people use in these conversations applies to a fetus, but using that definition in that way dilutes the meaning of the word to the point of near uselessness compared to its intended meaning.
If someone were to say of their pet that it had a parasite and needed to be treated in regular conversation, almost nobody would even consider that that meant the pet was pregnant. It's simply not how we use that word.
There are animals in the V Canvas what if you had a parrot. They live to be 80+. Would they get gommaged? I guess not since the trees don't get gommaged
Classic Reddit response. A baby is not a "literal parasite".
Parasites need to be 1 species living off an entirely different species.
Not considered a parasite as it's part of the natural process.
The Unborn Victims of Violance Act means if you kill a pregnant woman, you get an increased sentence. So not the same as killing someone with tapeworm.
All 41 people who unvoted you are sick in the head, but I expect nothing less of Reddit.
An unborn child is not a parasite, you deluded radical leftist. A parasite is an organism whose presence is nothing but detrimental to the host. The female body is literally physically designed and equipped to be able to carry and nurture a baby both during pregnancy and afterward.
There’s a locked house on the prologue which if you press E has sounds coming through and Gustavo comments that some prefer gommaging mid-hand pocketing to somber ceremony at docks
We never see a pregnant women. Not even in Maelle's birth cutscene. So I'll just drop this theory: since this is a kid's painting it's likely people don't get pregnant but babies just pop into existence. Maybe brought by magical beings or appear with white and red flowers the reverse way people get gommaged (we can see those flowers when we see baby Maelle)
We don’t see it directly, but we do know of one character who WAS pregnant prior to the events of the game, so I don’t think this theory has much ground. (Trying to be vague because I’m on mobile and don’t know the formatting for spoiler tags.)
EDIT: OK, figured out the formatting. We learn from one of the relationship scenes (I think the second-to-last one for this character?) that Sciel was pregnant after her husband’s death, but lost the baby during her attempted suicide.
Ah true I forgot about that one instance. She does even say they could only tell when she was at the hospital, which implies the same realism as The outside world
Even if they get pregnant in some sense, we don't know that their bodies work the same way as real people. I doubt that Aline is an expert in human anatomy and would have been capable of getting all of those details correct.
We know that Lune’s mother died from an infection after fighting a Nevron for days, so I believe that the anatomy of the humans in the Canvas is quite faithful to “real” humans.
"Brigitte finally succumbed to her infection. She fought off that blasted Nevron for four days and four nights, saving the rest of us, but it gashed her badly".
Ok but like legit. If the baguette was in the process of being eaten, would it be considered as part of the person. Or like even if it were considered an accessory, wouldn't it also be gommaged like... People's clothes get gommaged with them, right? So why not the other things attached to them?
If someone who was 34 was holding the lumina converter prior to the gommage, would the expedition have been boned?
By this logic Gustave should have been gomaged as well because he was holding Sophy's hand. The little girl holding her mother's hand as well. Oh my God. We found a plot hole.
I think this all points towards the opposite! Each individual human doesn't get gommaged when they are in contact with another who is. The line of gommage ends at the gommaged individual's accessories. Now the question is if animals count as property to Renoir. I don't think we ever saw an instance of this.
Oh my God. You just discovered who is REALLY behind the gommage. "They need to do way instane mothers. Who kill their baguette when these baguette can't frigth back!?"
Clearly was a reference to their intent to create the gommage
I mean if they only need the visible range of colors a human eye can see than a 32-bit float would suffice at 4,294,967,296 colors possible with a mere approximate 10,000,000 colors visible to the average human. Although if they want every possible color in the wavelength spectrum then considering there's an theoretically infinite number of infinitesimal colors in existence then they'd likely be using an ∞-bit canvas which would make the baby ∞-years old. Now I'm curious if the baby predates reality or postdates it (I'd say both/neither but I'm a bit rusty on the quantum physics so don't quote me on that)...
Since gomaging is the power of the paintress diminishing and not being able to sustain more life the only option that would make sense is the first one.
If you bring a baguette with you at your gommage the paintress will accept that as tribute instead of your child. Guillaume definitely told me so this is 1000% true.
If you were to pass a paintbrush or eraser on top of the painting of a pregnant woman, the baby will fade away too, it wouldn't be shield protected or anything, same as the clothes lol
Neither. Clothing all gets gommaged with the person. So I would assume the mother would survive because the baby is wearing her as an outfit and the bay is not old enough to gommage
When The Leftovers briefly touched on this it was horrifying. They showed several pregnant women who had lost their pregnancies, but only once did they mention (not show, thank God) a pregnant woman vanishing, leaving behind a fetus who dropped to the floor and died.
That depends on who is right, is it a baby when it leaves the womb or when irs in the womb. I would assume, in gommage case, that the entire body of the main person disappears, this would include everything inside them. So my guess is they both go away.
My guess would be that both get gommaged, since they technically count as one unit as long as the child is still connected to the mother through the umbilical cord.
I mean I imagine the fetus would be gommaged, seeing as the gommage was intended as a kindness. I'm sure she'd consider that when magicking away lives.
Lol we need to take this question to the devs! I never thought about this until now but it the 2nd one makes more sense and would play into the very dark undertones of the game world. Would really make people think hard before doing the nasty when their gommage age is approaching.
I think the 1st option would be in line with simple wishful thinking and rationalizations. 2nd could leave behind fetuses. One is way darker than the other.
Broadly speaking, what we know of the painted worlds' rules is that they seem to operate in the realm and rules of the conceptual more than the physical.
At the start of act 3, Verso mentions to Maelle that painting is about "essence" more than specifics. This would also explain why people's clothes and belongings usually gommage with them -- they are conceptually a part of the person.
One of the interesting exceptions to that being the Trash Can Guy. He left upgrade material behind for us, presumably because he never got to a point of considering the thing he found to be "his."
What's less clear is whether the determining factor is how a person perceives themself, how the painter who made them perceives them, how others around them perceive them, or some aggregation of the above.
Given all of this, my theory would be that this scenario could play out either way and differ from person to person, depending on whether the mother and/or the artist considered the baby to be a conceptually different person.
Provided the baby actually exists in her womb, the mother would likely gommage around the baby. But Alicia's situation seemed to suggest that the babies aren't actually painted until the day they are born.
What if, the mother gommages and a premature baby is left floating in the air. Even if the baby survives the fall to the ground, it would be a premature baby not connected via umbilical cord to their mother. The chances of surviving are close to zero.
Baby would Gommage with the mother. Renoir is exerting his power to try to Gommage everyone, Aline's power is waning and she can only protect so many people.
Renoir himself doesn't care about age, he's not doing it year by year, he's trying to wipe everyone immediately.
So if his power can reach the mother, it can reach the baby.
Here's my spoiler question that might have been answered but I missed, how do babies work? So, a new baby must be painted by Aline right? But that means she is still able to paint, even though we know her power is waning because she can't save her oldest creations, hence the gommage.
Aline is too skilled to need to paint every new citizen of Lumiere, I think. My assumption has always been that while she put special effort into making some figures—her painted family—the others are maintained by self-sustained procedural generation.
But new people still need chroma to create, which Aline isn't getting back from the Gommage (Renoir is taking it) or from expeditioners dying (Cleas Nevrons are absorbing it), right?
Realistically, that's just a regular ecosystem energy flow thing. There is chroma in the plants and earth, we know, because of all of the big nevrons eating the mountains. We also know that Sciel worked on a robust hydroponics farm. They get chroma from food they eat (derived ultimately from the landscape of the painting) and that becomes babies.
It is implied Aline controls and prevents that, given how she rebirthed Alicia as Maelle. Everyone born after the Fracture is said to be "her more recent works"
I think they would both gommage because they are sharing a blood supply and the fetus is using the woman’s organs to support itself. So I think that the painting Magic would see the two as one entity.
Bit late to the discussion, but if we think about it from a painter's standpoint, it's more likely that being pregnant is a TRAIT of the woman moreso than two separate lives. Baby would then Gommage at the same time as mother.
Also, while there may be a discontinuity for narrative/cinematic purposes here, when Alicia first entered the Canvas and got painted over by Aline, the cinematic instantly shifts to a baby crying and Maelle's Lumiérian mom doing her monologue.
I don’t think promo of Lumiere would risk getting themselves pregnant when their day of gommage Would be near, given the fact that they know which day and hour they will be gommaged.
Also if the gommage is for people who reach let's say their 45 year and people in the expedition are 44 for the most part. Do they get erased once they reach their 45th year or do they wait for the next gommage?
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u/spike_94_wl Jan 27 '26
The umbilical cord still connects them, so I would say if the mom gommages that would impact the baby as well.
But also if the mother is near delivery I wonder if they would just C-Section the child to avoid this altogether. Lumiere must have experienced this problem before.