Reviving thread because I just finished the game, playing with my GF, and wanted to talk about it with someone. here’s my original post in the “Games You Played Today” thread, and I expand upon it. also, I could enclose the whole post with tags, but instead let’s just say
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SPOILERS APPLY TO EVERYTHING BELOW
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Before I start —
Let me state, I approach this from the angle that Chloe x Max is a thing. Like, that’s how I played it, and I’m a wlw, and this is a very strongly wlw story, especially depending how you play the pool scene and the day after – those scenes especially are played with a tenderness that makes it clear this is what’s happening. The flirtation in Chloe’s voice when she says “oOoOo there’s an OTTER in my water…” come on! Lying in bed in your PJ’s with your ‘best friend,’ letting the silence linger, resting in each other’s atmosphere, soft music, closeups of toes… come on! And this diary entry if you play the route right… come on!! It’s WLW.
And really, whether or not you decided to play Max as het, Chloe is the pivotal driving force of the whole game. That relationship is clearly the whole emotional center, and denying its romantic potential really just leans into “just gals being pals / Sappho and her friend” territory. I see some dudes online aggressively defending this het angle and i’m not having it, it’s embarrassing. moving on . . .
When we get into Episode 5, you’re getting a ton of mixed messages. It honestly feels like we the player are being set up for a big gay reveal. There’s a lot of time travel mucking around trying not to get Chloe killed — Max is doggedly insisting that no matter what, Just This Once, Chloe Lives. You do a big gay montage in your dream sequence, walking through every meaningful scene between the two. Let me be clear, I support big gay buildup. I am a Big Gay!
Let’s talk genre. This is something that resonates very deeply in WLW stories- the idea of a relationship between two women beyond time, beyond space, beyond everything that science and logic and society says is right. (Again, see She-Ra, see Simoun, see Portrait of a Lady on Fire, see etc etc.) The Point is that love between two women is, can be, something greater than what we traditionally consider human relationships to be capable of. Remember the motif of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the myth of Orpheus?
Héloïse : They were nearing the surface, approaching the threshold, when, fearing losing Eurydice and impatient to see her, her loving spouse turned.
Sophie : No, he can’t look at her for fear of losing her. That’s no reason. He was told not to do that.
Héloïse : He’s madly in love. He can’t resist.
Marianne : I think Sophie has a point. He could resist. His reasons aren’t serious. Perhaps he makes a choice.
Sophie : What choice?
Marianne : He chooses the memory of her. That’s why he turns. He doesn’t make the lover’s choice, but the poet’s.
Héloïse : She spoke a last farewell that scarcely reached his ears and fell back into the abyss. Perhaps she was the one who said, Turn around.
“Let me die if I can look at you one last time.” Holy shit!! I’m tearing up right now. That’s the pathos of the thing, that’s the whole deal with this kind of WLW story. This is what that whole clumsy dream sequence should be setting you up for — The Biggest Choice between saving the anchor and meaning of your whole life and saving all these people that depend upon you.
If the story says not only “you must sacrifice this woman to save everyone you love” but also “sacrificing this woman will break you and render your life empty,” then there’s stakes.
And you know what? I was holding out hope for most of Episode 5 that there could be a happy ending, an “I can’t possibly choose, what psycho would make me choose between you and my whole town?”, that we could get a “love redeems all” storyline. Because why can’t we have that? We never learned why Max had these powers or why this storm had to come out of nowhere because she used them. We don’t know if she’s allowed to change the timeline a lot, or a little, or not at all. There’s a lot of time travel mechanics stuff the game doesn’t talk about.
But by the walk up the mountain, the game is screaming at you to sacrifice Chloe. It becomes clear that your choice is a set-up, that you have to sacrifice her. The game wants to run its little morality play, it wants you to choose, but it doesn’t want you to have a choice. There’s that Star Trek quote in the diary – “let the person he loves die, so the Nazis don’t win the war.” And why do you suppose all those people in the diner are begging you not to kill them? To make the player feel like a monster if she does pick Chloe. It’s worth noting that Chloe is the only character in the diner who is “real”, who actually behaves like herself — but if you (player) say that, aren’t you really saying that you (Max) see everyone else in your life as a 2-D cardboard cutout? What kind of selfish hero are you?
It feels like by this point in the story, the devs are twisting the knife. We all see what you’re doing here, game! We all see that you want this specific emotional payoff — Max must “do the right thing” and kill Chloe to save the town.
One question though: how is sacrificing everything for the woman you love “selfish”? Remember, I approach this critique again as a lesbian who has been consuming every piece of media with a WLW theme since before I even knew I was a woman (I watched Strike Witches, for god’s sake). Lesbians are ALWAYS asked to sacrifice their loves on some bullshit. Bury Your Gays is a trope, look at Portrait of a Lady on Fire, look at Simoun, look at really any WLW media out there! Happy endings are subversive in WLW land, letting lesbians be happy is subversive.
She-Ra and the Princesses of Power raised the bar for me on this whole front. In She-Ra you get a slow-build romantic wlw relationship for the entire series. Catra is evil, and then she’s more evil, and then less evil, and flirtatious, and then Really Evil, and then she’s Evil but oh shit we have to save her. Her mere presence is constantly pulling the main character Adora into and through the various plot twists of the show. But it’s incredibly subversive in one main way: it actually FOLLOWS THROUGH, shows an actual romantic relationship reveal, and most importantly a happy ending. Adora actually saves Catra, Catra actually loves Adora back, and what happens? Their love literally saves the whole universe.
Does that sound stupid? Well first off it’s a children’s cartoon, and second off I don’t care. Queer people need fairytales more than straight people, and there’s nothing wrong with fairytales — stories is stories is stories, and queer people rarely get happy ones. (Queer women created She-Ra; Life Is Strange was created by Some Guys, and it shows.)
So back to LiS: How do we make it so this lesbian relationship isn’t automatically treated as the wrong choice? Well, we need to not automatically punish the woman for choosing love. That’s all, isn’t it? We need to follow through with the promise that This Love overcomes time, overcomes space and society and all these bullshit rules. This is what the game suggests, and the game needs to follow through. If it’s Just A Relationship, then why would anyone in their right minds sacrifice thousands of lives for it? And why should we care about the emotional beats of the story?
So we need both endings to be equally meaningful and emotional. Well, let’s save Chloe and see what happens. What cutscene do we get? Max tears up the picture, she holds hands with Chloe, they watch the storm destroy the whole town. Then they drive through the destroyed town into the sunset, fade to black. No grand speech, no love confession, no emotional beats, nothing. Just a flat “congrats hero, you killed everyone.” Great, the hell do I do with that? Clearly I picked the Bad End. I have not looked up the Good End on Youtube as of time of publication.
So again I ask the question: why can’t we have a happy ending here? Is it (as dudes online seem to think) less artistic, less mature? The devs want you to believe that sacrificing Chloe is a subversion of Your Desires in the sake of What Is Right. But queer people are always told our desires are Not Right. What’s truly subversive in this society is affirming our loves - feeling no guilt in our desires. Is that not artistic or mature? Don’t we have enough AIDS Stories and dead lovers and guilt and shame and erasure?
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It’s not even that I think it’s inherently poor art to center the choice of whether to sacrifice Chloe or to sacrifice the town. Max has been building up relationships with various people throughout the town (again, depending on how you played it, but let’s say canon!Max is a nice girl who befriends everyone). So you can set up a major emotional inflection point – do you keep being that nice girl, or do you sacrifice everything you knew to pursue this new, unimaginable, wonderful love. The thing that gives the choice its stakes is the depth of the relationship – not just a standard ‘this is my bae’ depth, not a cutout depth, but a transcendent depth. We need to see that sacrificing the town is worth it to Max, otherwise it’s a fake choice. And if it’s unimaginable per the story that Max would ever sacrifice the whole town to save Chloe, then we need to change this ending so that the whole town doesn’t get sacrificed.
Unfortunately, the ending does feel like a fake choice – created by the devs (again, Some Guys) to make you (a gay woman) give up your wife, because It’s Better That Way. The choice seems especially contrived when you consider that, for reality to be fixed, all you have to do is never use your power. So let’s consider the whole plot of the game: Why did you magically out of nowhere get a power you were never supposed to use upon threat of killing all your friends? Shh, as my mother would say, “you’re not supposed to ask that”.
The Point is have you to fall in love and then kill your girlfriend. The Point is to reinforce heteronormativity. it doesn’t feel like the immortal twists of fate - it feels like Some Guys wanted you to fall in love and then be forced to kill your girlfriend.
Why is the town getting destroyed the lesbians’ fault? These are not forces of nature, this is a work of fiction. Who created this world, and why? Some Guys, what’s your deal? Let me baldly assert that a queer woman would not have created such a world. Who’s the real villain of the story, Mr. Jefferson or Raoul Barbet and Michel Koch? (Doth I denounce too much?)
i see a lot of people online complaining about the LiS ending in that it makes the rest of the game ‘meaningless’ – either you did all that time travel for nothing, or you built all these relationships with the townspeople for nothing. That’s not really my main argument. My criticism is that the game could have treated this WLW relationship with the seriousness it deserves, but it doesn’t. It thinks there’s a Good End and a Bad End, and the Bad End is the one where the lesbians live.
What would have been better? I don’t know. I would have loved an unalloyed Happy End where you save Chloe and the townspeople — we can make it happen, handwave it, there’s no logic behind this plotline anyway — but a well-handled bittersweet end could have worked as well. (Maybe you save Chloe, in such a way as to ameliorate the severity of the tornado, and some folks die, but we grieve and move on, buoyed by our love, etc etc.)* There’s really no reason this game couldn’t have been a She-Ra ending, apart from the fact Some Guys didn’t want it to be, and as a lesbian in The Year Of Our Luigi 2020 I really do expect better.
I saved Chloe, because fuck you game, I’m getting my happy ending. Even with the devs’ clumsy railroading, 48% of players did the same, and I imagine they must have felt the same way — that at the end of the day, this ending choice is not a deep and immersive work of art, it’s just a stupid videogame.
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*{EDIT: You know what would have been a great way to tie it all together? Have Max use some minimally-invasive time travel to send anonymous messages to herself, encouraging her to be in Chloe’s life more consistently. Chloe doesn’t start hanging out with the wrong crowd, doesn’t do so many drugs, maybe she avoids getting tangled up with Nathan or avoids getting shot, ends up with Max in the end… and the time travel is subtle enough to avoid the tornado, or make it more of a freak rainshower… I dunno just a thought. Give us the happy lesbians dammit.}
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SPOILERS END HERE
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Anyways despite me being mean about the ending I did quite like Episodes 2 and 3 especially the tender portrayal of Max and Chloe, and the airiness of the scenes (my girlfriend used the words “spacious” and “luminous”). I always took the option to sit on the bed/bench when I had one. it gave a certain amount of mindfulness/present-ness/emplacement that I found quite unique in games i’ve played.