#lis ending

Afterall, whatever Max chooses doesn’t change the fact that the things that happened…. Happened. Even in the rewind ending. Because either way all of those choices, interactions and experiences changed Max as a person and taught her important lessons. The choice you make by the end is still informed by those things and not made in a vacuum. And just that is enough to show that the choices you made in LIS continue to matter. But I can find other reasons too.

In the Bae ending, Max keeps her relationship with Chloe (no we don’t talk about Double Exposure in this household I have my grievances with it) which is really the thing she traded the town for. Chloe also experienced what Max did and witnessed her choices and their consequences, so that alone means that whatever you did in that game still had an impact even with the town reduced to nothing. Furthermore, in LIS 2 it’s basically confirmed that there were survivors with David’s cameo. In fact, he’s someone who was impacted by Max’s choices in one way or another.

As for Bay, you’d think that following the logic I just explained, the opposite is true for this ending. Nobody remembers anything Max did before her big rewind, hell, Chloe doesn’t even get to *meet* her. And yet, through the montage of pictures we can see what Max’s adventure changed in this timeline, namely Mark and Nathan being brought to justice, which is pretty big considering that in the other ending it’s not really as black and white. Max was probably able to help Kate more in this ending as well.

At the end of the day, whatever choice you make, it remains aligned with Max’s development which centres around responsibility and moving on, accepting consequences of choices and learning to live with them. In both endings Max lives with her choices, no matter how bitter the outcomes are. She probably wouldn’t have been able to do that without the events of the game.

While I can see why some people feel betrayed or tricked by the game, or like the endings were cheap cop outs, I believe that it gets us to reflect on what makes a choice or action “meaningful”. Honestly, and maybe this is a tad pretentious, but I feel like we could compare these endings/the storm to death itself. We all die eventually, including everyone we’ve ever known, and very few of us are politicians, celebrities, or anything of the sort so we’ll be forgotten a lot quicker and probably won’t have a huge impact on the world in the grand scheme of things. That’s where the question “What is life’s meaning?” comes from, no? But despite this, does it really mean that our choices and experiences just don’t matter? Was our time here a waste? Is this some big paradox of the human experience?

I believe that with Max’s story, we’re (maybe unintentionally) driven to ponder these questions. Which is fitting for a game called Life Is Strange.

From there, the story becomes a quest to find out what happened with Rachel, a “friend” of Chloe’s that went missing. There’s a mystery with why Nathan is drugging other girls and with Frank the drug dealer and his relationship to Rachel. Chloe and Max work together as partners in time as Max saves Chloe’s life over and over again. It’s all fine and fun—until Episode 4 and 5.

We find out Nathan killed Rachel, that the photography professor Jefferson has been posing the drugged girls in some sick photo session and that he’s been using Nathan, and in Episode 5 things get really intense as we find out the major plot twist of the game: the powers Max has been using has been causing the storm and to save the town of Arcadia Bay, you have to let Chloe die in the bathroom.

You have two choices: sacrifice Arcadia Bay or sacrifice Chloe.

So the ending is a mess. It received backlash from both critics and fans. Even just attempting to look up the ending I didn’t play ended up in dozens of results that were venting their displeasure. Why? The idea of the storm being caused by Max’s own power and messing with the time stream is an interesting idea enough. Maybe this could work in a different story. However, this is not that story.

From the set-up, we are given a few questions besides those of the main plot: Where did these powers come from? Why did Max receive them? What are they for? What is Rachel’s goal as she shows up in repeated symbolism? What is causing the storm?

The problem with the ending is not only that it’s an unnecessary and rather frustrating example of the “bury your gays” trope but also that it leads to more questions than it answers.

What is causing the storm? Max’s powers.

Where did these powers come from? Rachel? A butterfly? If so, then that leads to

What are they for? If they are connected to Rachel, and they were given to Max at a time where Chloe’s life is in danger, then it’s to protect Chloe.

 But if those two are correct, then why does the ending insist that that is the wrong path to take? Why is it so adamant that Max should’ve never used her powers? Because if she should’ve never saved Chloe, why did she get those powers in the first place?

I would like to return to a previous point: the fact that this story is one of two girls falling in love.

Chloe and Max grow closer and closer throughout the course of the game. By Episode 5, Max is utterly obsessed with saving Chloe so much so that she throws away an ideal reality just to get another shot at saving her. Throughout the entire game, her one priority is Chloe’s happiness and survival. And even though the player has the option to romance Warren, why would they? They barely get any time together in the game and the two women are a much more interesting story and dynamic.

So could this story be one of the hubris of not being able to accept fate, not being able to accept death? Completely. There’s just one big problem—the beginning of the game starts out with Max seeing a vision of the tornado and then receiving her powers. So the audience is convinced the powers are supposed to be used to prevent this and it being linked to Rachel reinforces this. So the plot twist that the powers caused the tornado is shocking, but less in that “Oh man, the foreshadowing makes so much sense! How did I not see that coming?” but more in a “…Wait, what?” way.

You see, if the powers were the cause of the storm, then why did she have the vision before she got them? What was the purpose of receiving of them? To save Chloe? Then why does the game seem to be disappointed in you if you do? What about Rachel?

What was the point of this game? With the reveal of this plot twist, it seems the point was that you shouldn’t have played the game at all.

Endings should wrap things up in a satisfying enough way. There’s something to be said about leaving some plot threads loose and up to the audience’s imagination. Instead Life is Strange gives its players a half-woven sweater and says “Here, you fill in the holes we didn’t.”

It’s, plot wise, the inferior ending. Yet, the ending where you save Chloe isn’t nearly as long. They show about 20 seconds of them driving through town where everyone seems dead, which is insane, because surely they’ve faced storms before. They’re clearly upset. They don’t show any snapshot of a hopeful future like the other ending does, which is better done and at least tries to give a sense of closure. It’s infuriating. The game seems to want one to take the ending where Chloe dies and Arcadia Bay survives yet it’s essentially the ending that goes against everything the game has been setting up.

It also seems to imply that Chloe has to die for the storm to not come. Yet, Chloe dies in Episode 4 briefly and the storm is still coming. In the Save Arcadia Bay ending Max still uses her knowledge of the future to prevent Jefferson from hurting any more girls. So why can’t she just save Chloe? It doesn’t make sense. It’s a contrived mess just so that the player has to choose between an entire town and Chloe. It’s “bury your gays” at its worse.

This was supposed to be the hardest choice of the game. As a player, I agonized over every decision, no matter how small. I would sit there, mapping out consequences and reactions. Yet, with the big conclusion that was supposed to elicit that reaction I found that it was, in fact, the easiest choice of the game. Max wouldn’t let Chloe die and neither would I. The writers failed in that.

Alright, with a few changes and rearranging we can make this a game where the protagonist gets powers and abuses them to save their loved one yet has to eventually accept that they must die. However, should we make this that game?

This is a game, at its core, about two women falling in love. Yet, one of the endings results in Chloe dying on the bathroom floor, alone, never knowing that she would come to find such a friend and lover in Max. It is a miserable, depressing ending that makes no sense in the context of what the game has established.

Putting aside the narrative mess, it’s cruel and disturbing that the game insists that these two were drawn together by fate yet cannot be together. Rachel is discovered to be dead, who was in a previous relationship with Chloe, and then Chloe is dead as well? How many gays will they bury?

It’s unfair that the heterosexual relationship that was only added for what? Options? is allowed to have a happy ending. Max repeatedly establishes she isn’t interested in him throughout the course of the game. Yet, this beautiful set-up with the two leading ladies must end in tragedy.

It becomes even more infuriating that only in the ending where Chloe dies do they actually kiss and confess their feelings. In the other ending it is left more ambiguous as to what that relationship is which is horribly unfair seeing as the straight couple got their kiss regardless of whatever decision one makes. So after all that build-up, one either gets a tragic kiss as Max leads Chloe to her death or a silent and ambiguous ending as they drive out of what used to be Arcadia Bay.

Their queer audience deserves better and Max and Chloe deserve better.

 It would be bad even if it made sense within the narrative. However, it sticking out like a sore thumb in terms of not making sense is a lot worse. She didn’t die because she had to but because the writers attempted oh so desperately to shove it in. They wanted a dark, edgy twist on the ending which could’ve been accomplished without this. Episode 5, while being the most interesting on a game-play level, was the worse on a narrative level.

It could’ve been a game focused around the fact that no one is expendable. No one should be sacrificed. It should’ve had those two endings, each with Chloe surviving.

This is a blog about representation. Life is Strange is so difficult and heart-wrenching because of the fact that it had the potential to be so much more. I can only recommend it with a huge asterisk regarding the ending and how Episode 5 played out. There’s something to be said about giving the audience a choice but it’s really hard to overlook the narrative crumbling around each choice. Before the Storm is a prequel to this that seems to be focused around Rachel and Chloe’s relationship, which we already know ends terribly. Let’s hope they’re somewhat smarter about that.

I presume if you decided to click on this post, you have played the original Life is Strange until the very end of episode five. I also presume you are very angry at the game for only having two direct endings: Saving Arcadia Bay or Saving Chloe, Max’s implied Girlfriend or best friend depending on the decisions made throughout the 5 episodes. Here I will say my reasons for believing the best ending for Life is Strange is saving Chloe, you may agree or disagree it’s a free world. This is just my opinion.

It makes most of the game you just finished completely non-canon. I know this is a very selfish reason. But do we as players, who just devoted a lot of time to this game, really want everything that we just played to not exist in the world of the game? It has been heavily implied by the developers that completely resetting the timeline back to Chloe dying in the bathroom also affects Max, causing her to forget the week that could have existed. As a player that extremely irks me that Max will not be the same Max that we shaped during our gameplay.

Put yourself in Max’s shoes. Imagine yourself standing on a cliff beside someone you love whether romantically or platonically. You are the one deciding to kill someone you love. Can you really say wholeheartedly that you would sacrifice them? In its essence, human nature is very selfish. In my opinion, you are one of the kindest people in the world if you could sacrifice someone so close to you for people you barely know. Even if you do prefer the bay>bae ending you must admit that the bae>bay ending is slightly more realistic for Max as a character.

This ending is much more open-ended for fan interpretation. This is very much a personal thing, I personally much prefer stories that give very open endings so that the fans can decide what their own canon ending is. I find the Bay>Bae ending much more constricting. Especially as someone who likes to write and play with different ideas in stories. You can imagine this ending to be as weirdly happy or sad as you want. (my own canon ending for lis is for another day and for after before the storm has finished in case I want to revise it)

A big argument against the bae>bay ending is the fate of Mark Jefferson being unknown compared to in the bay>bae ending in which he is arrested for his crimes and assumed to receive jail time. There is a chance he dies in the storm however that is not guaranteed as the game never shows how far the barn is from Arcadia Bay. Also, if he was in the bunker during the storm he would easily survive it. You see as Max never goes to the party in the canon October 11th, does Mark stay at the party until the storm starts to come or does he take someone else (probably Victoria) back to the dark room instead of his planned victim, Max? But no matter what happens to him during the storm, Max and Chloe can still report what they “believe” the barn to be, leading the cops to countless evidence against Jefferson. The only barrier would be getting into the bunker and hoping the cops do believe Max and Chloe which I think they would. (they are white after all)

Lastly, I believe the death of Chloe, a canon queer character is unfair to many of the wlw who decided to play Life is Strange due to the possibility of seeing a canon wlw relationship in a pretty popular game. Especially as the #BuryYourGays trope was very strong in 2015.

The only thing I do see as a complete downside to this ending is obvious; the destruction of Arcadia Bay and the deaths it would cause. Although, as I said earlier this ending is very open and the shots we do get off Arcadia Bay do not show it completely destroyed, very damaged but not entirely gone. The chance is slim for survivors but still possible.

The deciding factor for myself when I originally played Life is Strange Episode 5 back when it was first released was the fact that in the situation Max was in I would without hesitation choose someone I love, however selfish that would make me.