How the Queer Experience of ‘Life is Strange’ Is Being Misunderstood
There’s an increasing trend of remedial media literacy among modern audiences. People miss obvious narrative moments and thematic elements, only really engaging with media on a base level, perhaps due to sheer amount of content they’re ingesting every single day. This most recently became clear with the release of Life is Strange: Double Exposure, a sequel to the original Life is Strange (2015) game featuring a return to the franchise’s original protagonist, Max Caulfield.
Fandom is a double-edged sword. While it provides comfort, and a familiar surrounding to those who engage with it, there’s always something unspoken hanging over the discussion. Expectations and the weight thereof are always omnipresent in a fandom as large as the Life is Strange community, and with that comes toxicity.
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Fans of the franchise weren’t at all happy with the fact that Chloe, the secondary protagonist of the original Life is Strange game, wouldn’t be in this title, regardless of the player’s choices that were made throughout the course of the original game. After all, the games are sold under the pretense that choices matter, so why would that particular choice not factor in?
The fandom’s debacle
In Life is Strange, fans were faced with the choice of sacrificing a town to save Chloe or sacrificing Chloe to save a town. When it came to Life is Strange: Double Exposure, the fans who chose to save Chloe had a problem with the fact Chloe, a beloved romance option, wasn’t in the game. There are many reasons for this, but what’s curious is that in the 2015 title, it was actually possible to romance one of two characters: Warren or Chloe. Warren isn’t even mentioned in Life is Strange: Double Exposure, but Chloe was the focus of complaints, showing how heavily the fandom skewered towards a certain choice.
Choices made in the original game lead to a thrilling climax, and it’s one that changes completely how Max would live her life. The choice is given to either sacrifice Chloe, thus saving Max’s hometown of Arcadia Bay from a devastating weather event, or to save Chloe. Saving Chloe, however, causes Arcadia Bay to be wiped off the map, with an entire town of people dying. With all that weighing on both of their consciences, it’s no wonder Max and Chloe drifted apart over time. High school romances rarely work out, with people drifting apart and changing who they are.
As a queer writer who found their identity at a time when the original Life is Strange was really hitting the nadir of its popularity, it’s understandable, to an extent, but after a certain point, you have to realize that there’s a deeper reason for all of this. Regardless of what a certain section of the fandom would have you believe, Chloe does echo throughout the entire game, and her impact is felt throughout. It’s possible to see both the impact of Chloe’s death on Max and the impact of Chloe’s life, depending on what decision is chosen at the start of the game. Players can decide exactly how they would have ended (or indeed, how they did end) the original game, and that has a ripple effect on the rest of the story. Unlike online rhetoric, Chloe isn’t ignored at all.
Spoilers ahead for the final chapters of Life is Strange: Double Exposure.
How the game addresses these complaints
I’m not here to argue that Life is Strange: Double Exposure is a perfect game. It’s not. It’s a game with a very rough final chapter, one that threatens to derail the entire game and it’s a minor miracle it doesn’t. Yet it’s also misunderstood. On a base level, this appears to be a game that’s roughly about retreading the same well-worn ground that the original walked across the first time around.
Max is faced with a murder that she’s willing to bend reality to prevent, discovering new powers along the way while the plot twists and turns. That murder is of her best friend, Safi, akin to how the inciting murder in the first game was Chloe. Similarly, this is how Max discovers her time manipulation powers. The difference here is that Max can’t just travel through time now: she’s also able to cross through realities, seeing alternate timelines. Specifically, a reality where Safi isn’t dead yet, and Max is given yet another chance to fix her mistakes, consequences be damned.
There’s a corrupt teacher who, while not quite as downright evil as the serial killer that was Mark Jefferson in the first game, has done some pretty bad things in the pursuit of recognition. Her best friend here, Safi, is essentially a mirror of Max from the first game, down to the fact that she too has powers. Unlike Max, however, she’s not using them wisely, or for the greater good. She’s using them for personal gain — for revenge. The repetition here isn’t coincidental, it’s reflective, it’s being done to show how much trauma Max is carrying with her, and has been carrying with her for the better part of a decade.
Something very important to note, and under-discussed, is that Life is Strange features a very idealized representation of queer community and storytelling. America is not a place that is very welcoming to those that are different, as shown in recent news stories such as Disney pulling queer stories from their product. Sure, there are outliers, but as the recent election cycle has proven, America isn’t always an accepting place. There’s no real need to reflect that in every video game though, however, especially when escapism is becoming harder and harder to actually render when the outside world is burning all the time.
Yet, Life is Strange: Double Exposure isn’t naive. It never asserts that everything is perfect, it just doesn’t want to focus on the fact that America is a cold and hostile place. There’s still a lot of trauma in Max’s story, and indeed that’s what this story is all about: queer trauma, and the fact that we often never let ourselves recover from it.
Often, this manifests in family problems. Perhaps family members are too overly judgmental, perhaps there’s an insistence on not showing emotion. In any case, queer trauma is usually something that has to be worked on throughout your life with actual therapy and a long, hard look at yourself. Sometimes, people might even get lucky and know a Queer person who themselves has suffered through queer trauma, and who is willing to be a shoulder to lean on in times of trouble.
Now, it normally doesn’t include time-travel powers and the ability to change reality at a whim, so you can understand why perhaps Max has been running away from her problems. She can’t discuss this with a therapist, this isn’t an unsupportive parent, this is a supernatural ability that would see her locked up if she tried to talk about it. So, Max keeps it all bottled up, and eventually, like overfilling any container, it all spills out and becomes too much for her to bear.
The true meaning
There’s a really curious inclusion in the game, one that could be completely glanced over by casual players: Max’s journal, which details her life in the gap between Life is Strange and Life is Strange: Double Exposure. There’s some insight into her relationship with Chloe here, one that paints a picture of a codependent and unhealthy pairing, and there’s the ramblings of a depressed woman. Max’s perceived one true love abandoned her, and it’s left a hole.
This is all dependent on which path you choose at the start of the game: Life is Strange: Double Exposure allows players to pick how they ended, or how they would have ended, the original game (that choice has affectionately become known as ‘Bae or Bay’ by fans). In the timeline where Chloe dies, her journal becomes a monument, letters to a dead woman from somebody who ran away from the past rather than confronting it.
In the timeline where she lives, though, there’s something fascinating about how different it all is. Gone is the initial sadness, the desperate need to reconcile. Instead, what we see is a lie — a web spun by somebody who doesn’t want to confront their own actions. Max is pretending that nothing happened and that she and Chloe are happy when they’re so clearly not. And then when Chloe leaves, Max realizes the consequences of her actions without her partner there to use as an outlet.
Due to Max changing the timeline repeatedly to make decisions and attempt, perhaps in a misguided fashion, to make the lives of her friends better, a massive storm comes to Arcadia Bay. This storm can end one of two ways, but in the timeline where Chloe lives, the town is destroyed in that event. Friends and family of both characters are dead, with no real time for reflection for Max or Chloe.
An entire town died, specifically because Max couldn’t let go of Chloe. The action of changing time had a consequence that killed hundreds of people. When Safi dies at the start of Double Exposure, the journal simply reads “Not again,” which should tell you exactly how Max is dealing with all of this.
When Max gets her powers again after Safi’s death, it’s a relapse. It’s very clear that Max doesn’t want this. She’s seen what her powers can do, she’s seen the consequences of her actions, even if she hasn’t actually reconciled her actions with the outcome yet. She wants to help Safi be a better person, be a queer mentor, the aforementioned shoulder to lean on. But she can’t be that until she acknowledges her own pain, which is why Safi rejects her help outright and tries to find people who are going through similar trauma, repeating Max’s mistake: attempting to help others without helping herself first.
Max never came to terms with the events of Arcadia Bay. The story of Double Exposure, at the very end of it all, shows that Max is a broken person. She’s been lying to the people she cares about and she’s been lying to herself. Fragments of her life post-Arcadia Bay are shown, and it’s shown that she was essentially living out of a suitcase, running from place to place to avoid ever making too many attachments, for fear of repeating the past.
By doing this, she’s been caught in an inadvertent metaphorical time loop of her own creation, and the only way to break out of that is to change, something that she makes the very first step towards at the end of the game by actually telling people about the fact that the supernatural exists and that she can use supernatural abilities to change the world. And more importantly, as evidenced by Safi, that she’s not the only one, that anybody else who might find themselves like this isn’t alone, and that they can always lean on her.
Again, the game isn’t perfect. I have quibbles with the way that Max’s trauma is dealt with, and personally, I’m still not entirely sure it was the best idea to make a direct sequel to a game that so heavily relies on decisions made by the player. But to say that Double Exposure throws aside the characters of the original (with the exception of Max herself), to say that the most important choice from it becomes a footnote, well that’s just not at all true.
The ending is effective because it’s so relatable and so personal. We’ve all realized that we’re in too deep and need to ask for help, and that realization is both a daunting one and one that feels like a weight being lifted. Max has a moment of realization when Safi abuses her power, realizing that it’s simply not a good idea to keep events from a decade ago bottled up. Safi is a twisted reflection of what Max could become, power-hungry and desperate for validation from a world that Safi feels has forgotten about her existence. In that beautifully written moment, where Max gathers friends together to explain everything, all of my complaints about those final two chapters are swept away. I’m happy to see a character I’ve loved for years find ways to better herself, and to move on from her past.
So yes, Life is Strange: Double Exposure does repeat the past, as does Max herself. But this repetition isn’t done out of a lack of creativity, it’s done out of a desire to explore the past. By the end of the game, Max is finally on a journey of healing, and only because she looked within herself and realized that she needs to talk to somebody about all of this. That’s what this game is all about, acknowledging the past instead of ignoring it, a fact that so many have missed in both the lead-up to release and the immediate reaction post-launch.
Life is Strange: Double Exposure is available now on PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox Series X|S.
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