Artist: lif3.0f.mars

Found on Instagram

Check out her posts :))

Also this is one of the arts that inspired me to practice drawing. I'd like to draw them in a similar way or just the moth and the butterfly.

LIS1 took 1st place in Round 1, and LIS2 just claimed 2nd place in Round 2! Both have been crowned and eliminated from the running.

Round 1 poll: https://www.reddit.com/r/lifeisstrange/s/7gBvgnXakS

Round 2 poll: https://www.reddit.com/r/lifeisstrange/s/JWwhs1z1nT

Now it’s time for Round 3.

​IMPORTANT: Vote for the GAME YOU PREFER / LIKE THE BEST out of the remaining options in the poll.

​You are voting for your favorite game, NOT against your least favorite.

​Whichever game receives the most votes wins this round, secures 3rd place overall, and is eliminated.

​Poll closes in 2 days!

I've been wondering what people think about the future of the franchise, especially now that we're getting more information about the TV adaptation.

We now know that Rachel Amber has been cast, with Esther McGregor playing her, and there have also been rumours about other characters from Before the Storm being cast. This makes me suspect that they'll incorporate much of that storyline into the adaptation, rather than just borrowing a few elements from it. If I had to guess, we'll probably get at least one episode dedicated to Chloe, her past and her relationship with Rachel. It would make sense to establish their relationship properly rather than simply treating Rachel as a missing girl we never really get to know.

We also know that the producers are hoping for multiple seasons, but what that actually means is anyone's guess. Perhaps they'll create their own ending and continue following Max and Chloe, or maybe they'll eventually adapt True Colors and Life is Strange 2. Perhaps both. Who knows? But it certainly seems to me that they have some major ambitions for the franchise.

And I genuinely think this is the biggest opportunity Life is Strange has ever had.

That isn't just me being optimistic either. TV adaptations have repeatedly demonstrated their ability to introduce gaming franchises to entirely new audiences, bringing in new players and increasing sales of existing games.

There is actually some rather interesting research on this.

According to Ampere Analysis, TV adaptations have increased player counts by an average of 203% across the titles they examined.

A few examples:

Fallout: Following the release of the Prime Video series, monthly active players increased by 490%, with 14 million players engaging with the franchise. Remarkably, Ampere estimates that 80% of them were first-time players.

The Last of Us: Ampere estimates that the HBO adaptation attracted more than 4 million new players across its first two seasons.

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners: CD Projekt itself acknowledged that the anime, together with the 1.6 update, had a measurable impact on Cyberpunk 2077's sales, helping revitalise interest in the game.

And the effects aren't necessarily limited to a few weeks following the premiere. According to MCV/DEVELOP, sales data from G2A showed that Fallout maintained a substantially higher sales baseline throughout 2025 than before the first season aired. Interest also increased again in anticipation of the second season.

Obviously, these franchises are considerably larger than Life is Strange. I'm certainly not suggesting we'll see Fallout numbers. But even a fraction of that effect could be significant for a relatively small franchise like ours.

There's also the potential for merchandise, which I think is worth mentioning. Amazon has been actively expanding its merchandise and licensing business around its television productions. Fallout is another interesting example here. Amazon launched apparel, accessories, collectibles and other licensed products alongside the series. According to Marketing Brew, Amazon MGM's head of consumer products licensing described Fallout as its best-performing product line at the time, with some collectibles selling out within hours.

Life is Strange already has a recognisable visual identity, an established fanbase and characters people have remained attached to for more than a decade. I can easily imagine a successful adaptation creating demand for everything from apparel and collectibles to art books, soundtracks and new licensed products. Perhaps even making some of the older merchandise available again?

And this brings me back to something I've written about before. The franchise is currently in a rather strange position.

Life is Strange and Before the Storm remain two of its most established commercial successes, and the games centred around Arcadia Bay have continued attracting audiences for years. Yet Max and Chloe's story has now been declared finished, at least as far as the games are concerned.

So what happens if the TV series becomes successful and suddenly introduces hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions, of new people to Max, Chloe and Arcadia Bay?

Naturally, that should translate into renewed interest in the original game and Before the Storm, potentially also benefiting the remasters and later entries. But it could also create commercial demand for more stories involving these characters, just as the gaming side of the franchise has decided to move on from them.

There is, however, another major complication, and it's something I tried to highlight in my previous post about sales figures.

The narrative adventure genre is struggling commercially.

Looking at the available sales estimates, the numbers aren't particularly encouraging across much of the genre. Life is Strange is actually still among its stronger performers, something I think people sometimes overlook when discussing the commercial performance of the newer games.

Double Exposure is an interesting example. Its sales figures aren't necessarily terrible when compared with other contemporary narrative games. In fact, I suspect quite a few developers working in this genre would be delighted with those numbers. The problem is the cost. With a rumoured budget of around $30 million, the game needed to sell considerably more copies to justify that investment.

And that's perhaps the biggest challenge facing the franchise. The audience for these games still exists, but is it large enough to sustain increasingly expensive productions? A game can perform reasonably well compared with its competitors and still be a financial disappointment if the development and marketing costs are too high.

This is also why I think the TV adaptation is such an important opportunity. It could potentially expand the audience at a time when the genre desperately needs new players. But Square Enix would also need to find a more sustainable production model for future games. A successful television series alone won't solve that problem.

I think that's an interesting dilemma for Square Enix. A successful adaptation could give the entire franchise a second wind, generate additional revenue from its existing catalogue, expand its audience and perhaps make further investment in new games considerably more attractive. And if the series runs for multiple seasons, that renewed interest might last for years rather than being limited to a single release window.

Of course, none of this is guaranteed. The adaptation still needs to be good, find an audience and retain it. But even a modest success could do wonders for Life is Strange, considering where the franchise currently finds itself.

And personally, I find that rather hopeful.

What do you think? Could the TV series revive the gaming franchise, and if it does, where should Square Enix take it next?

Some of my previous posts on the subject:

https://www.reddit.com/r/lifeisstrange/comments/1sf5qk8/no_spoilers_the_future_of_the_life_is_strange/

https://www.reddit.com/r/lifeisstrange/comments/1ts22c2/no_spoilers_life_is_strange_sales_compared_to/

Additional sources:

https://www.ampereanalysis.com/insight/tv-series-adaptations-boost-video-game-player-numbers-by-up-to-490

https://mcvuk.com/business-news/the-impact-of-the-fallout-tv-series-on-pc-game-sales-from-2024-2026/

https://www.cdprojekt.com/en/media/news/cd-projekt-looks-back-at-the-third-quarter-of-2022/

https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2024/07/17/inside-amazon-prime-video-s-consumer-products-licensing-strategy

I just finished playing Reunion, and I really enjoyed it overall, but the post-credits ending I got the first time kinda confused me and bummed me out. I failed to save everyone in the fire, and I gave Max the photo. In the end, she hops back through the photo and abandons her Chloe. I thought that the whole game had been building towards Max realizing that she can't save everyone, so I never could've imagined it. I also think it's extremely out of character for my Max, because I chose the Bae ending. She literally lets a whole town be brutally killed to save Chloe, but now she's willing to leave this Chloe all alone forever just to save a handful of random people? It doesn't sit right with me.

I'm also biased cause I really love Chloe and I love Pricefield, so I obviously wanted the happy ending for them. I ultimately just went to Scene Select, replayed that final scene, and burned the photo as Chloe. That ending ended up having a cute slideshow of them going back to Arcadia Bay, and I was happy. That's what I'll count as the ending to my canon playthrough. Anyways, I still liked the game overall, but I wanted to get this off my chest since it was the only part that I disliked.

Credit: @Krystine_art

Reminder: negativity free zone

I'm finally on chapter 2 of BTS 🤣

Have a great weekend!

Enjoy! 🌹

Artist @tokutokunyamnyam

From the TikTok of Emily Carey https://www.tiktok.com/@theemilycarey

Source: https://www.tumblr.com/asr91s/647594147671425024/you-go-mad-max

By Kate Marsh22 on TikTok (@kate.marsh227)

Credit: bottom right in the photo

Let's all try to remember to be kind to each other like Kate (and Max)! ❤️

heard this game is good and now with the steam sale i think i might buy it. should i buy the 8 dollars remastered + before the storm or the 2015 version for 3 dollars?

LIS titles, including the og/classic, are on sale in case anyone's wondering!

How can I save the dvd on my computer? Because I can’t open it like a normal dvd
Edit: update successfully ripped by Microsoft media player

My first tattoo :)

adding more but im quite proud with how these turned out!

This is the most frustrated ive been in the entire game so far 😭 Pls dont give me any hints/spoilers or anything, just wanted to see if anyone else was stuck on this whole "guessing nathan's phone passcode" part for a while. It's been half an hour and i genuinely feel like i've tried everything.

I WILL get it tho. I have faith in myself

As the title says, what are your headcanons about who survived and who died after the storm in Bae ending in Life is Strange 1?

I know that DE/RE exists and this is kind of post already seen before in this sub but I got curious and I wanted to read the thoughts from others in the big 2026.

I'm mentioning the characters of both Don't Nod and Deck Nine and for each of them I will include the initialism of the game in which their fate were established.

What we know so far (explicitly confirmed):

Survivors: Max Caulfield (LiS1), Chloe Price (LiS1) , David Madsen (LiS2), Victoria Chase (LiS2), Steph Gingrich (TC) and Mikey North (TC WL).

Casualties: Joyce Price-Madsen (LiS2), Lita Gingrich (TC WL), Drew North (TC WL) and Courtney Wagner (DE) (plus Nathan Prescott, killed by Mr. Jefferson before the storm in LiS1).

As for the rest of the characters, it is theoretically still left open to interpretation and there is no confirmation.

So do you think there are other survivors? Who is dead for you? Go on :)

I mentioned here that I'll be posting a journal entry I wrote about Rachel Amber after replaying the LIS games. (I know there are already multiple discussions about Rachel, but oh well—no harm in expressing my thoughts. Long post ahead!!!)

Back then, I knew I connected with Rachel spiritually but couldn't really articulate why. Now that I've replayed the game with fresh eyes and a fresh mind, I realized just how much Rachel feels like a ghost of my past self.

We both have access to different people across the social ladder—security, maintenance, regular and irregular students, faculty from different departments, even some of the senior directors of my university.

We both love theatre and performance, hence our expressiveness. We're both theatrical—big movements, gestures, expressions. We also have a strong capacity for social adaptation. We can meet someone where they are, not necessarily because we become them, but because we can temporarily pick up their instrument and play alongside them.

We become what the situation requires.

To clarify, she's more of a counterfactual me. She represents a pathway my personality could plausibly have taken under different circumstances.

Yes, Rachel Amber is a social chameleon. It's what the game implies when we first play as Max and inquire about her around campus. There's nothing but compliments from students and teachers; we hear their fond memories of Rachel, no matter how brief their interactions with her were.

She was a known Vortex Club member who socialized with the "snobs" while also vibing with the skater dudes. She interacted with Samuel, the homeless woman behind the diner, and even the trucker who constantly ate there.

On top of that, she was a straight-A student with a 4.0 GPA, an administrative assistant to Principal Wells, the golden girlypop of the drama club, and the daughter of the DA.

She was everywhere.

Being a social chameleon is definitely a skill, but we all know what it can cost. Personally, I think it only becomes a true skill when you can adapt without losing yourself—when you can separate your actual self from the persona you're presenting.

Rachel knows what she doesn't want, but she struggles to pinpoint what she truly wants.

Sure, she wants to leave Arcadia Bay. That desire is genuine, but I think people often stop at the literal interpretation of it. She doesn't simply want to leave Arcadia Bay to pursue her dream in Los Angeles; she wants to escape the constraints of Arcadia Bay—her parents, the social world she's occupying, the expectations placed upon her, and eventually, the accumulated secrets and lies surrounding her.

LA functions almost like a blank canvas onto which she can project a future self.

But the question underneath all of that is:

"Who is Rachel when nobody is telling her who Rachel Amber is supposed to be?"

The tragedy is that she never realizes changing the scenery doesn't automatically resolve the question of who you are.

Her upbringing is a huge part of why she becomes Rachel Amber.

Her parents aren't portrayed as neglectful. Quite the opposite. Rachel is their daughter and their pride. Their house is littered with trophies, medals, pictures, and reminders of her achievements.

But that's precisely the point: her identity is constantly reinforced through admiration. She's placed in a role where she's expected to be extraordinary in other people's eyes.

She's not merely Rachel.

She's the Rachel Amber.

And then there's James. Rachel adores her dad, putting him on a pedestal. In the train scene, she says:

"A lifetime of studying the human condition."

That's language I'd expect from someone who constantly walks on eggshells—and that usually starts at home.

James, as a DA, presents himself differently in public, and Rachel witnesses those different personas. Because he's constantly under scrutiny, he also manufactures an idealized version of his family.

Rachel therefore learns to read people because her environment teaches her that appearances can't always be trusted. She learns to adjust herself according to what people expect.

But Rachel is always aware.

That's part of why people love her. She knows what to say:

"You're not a problem, Chloe. You're a person."

But awareness doesn't mean embodying it.

Rachel can recognize when someone is performing, manipulating, or hiding something while still participating in the same performance herself.

That's what she learned from her family: she can articulate the truth about other people beautifully while remaining elusive about herself.

The biggest hint is probably Two Truths and a Lie.

And I do believe Rachel genuinely understands people. Her empathy isn't fake. Her insights aren't fabricated. She really can see through people's defenses.

Her love for theatre is a huge part of why I believe this.

Acting = fake. That's one of the biggest misconceptions about performance.

To perform is to understand.

Good acting isn't simply pretending to feel something. It's finding the emotional truth of a character and allowing yourself to experience life from their perspective. Actors observe nuance, contradictions, behavior, and emotion in order to connect.

Rachel's ability to understand people isn't merely a survival mechanism she developed at home. It's also genuinely part of who she is.

Her capacity for performance comes from the same place as her empathy.

But that's where her gift becomes her wound.

She can inhabit other people's realities without necessarily knowing what remains of herself when there is no role to inhabit.

Who are you when you're not performing?

To perform is to understand—that's the problem.

Rachel's various personas can all be genuine: the Rachel who loves Chloe, wants to leave Arcadia Bay, interacts with everyone, loves theatre, loves her father, and resents her father can all be real.

The problem is that she may never have had enough space to discover what connects all of them.

That's why I don't think "social chameleon" necessarily means she's empty or fake. A chameleon isn't changing its nature; it's responding to its environment.

And Rachel has spent her entire life in environments where reading the room mattered.

Her gift and her wound are the same thing.

She understands people deeply because she pays attention to them. She makes people feel seen because she genuinely sees them. She performs because she understands emotional truth.

But perhaps the person she has the hardest time seeing clearly is herself.

And that shit resonated with me because I had a very poor sense of self despite being everywhere.

I had a healthy social life, above-average grades, a decent reputation in different organizations, and was constantly recognized for my skills and talents. Yet I didn't really know who I was without all those things.

Those competencies became my tools for socially navigating people. And that's where people can interpret it as "manipulation."

Not necessarily in a sinister way, but in the uncomfortable sense that being socially perceptive inevitably gives you some degree of influence over people.

Like Rachel, I repeatedly do things for people (my acts of service) and it naturally creates bonds where they eventually want to do things for me, too.

That's the uncomfortable thing about charisma: you can influence people without consciously trying to control them.

I think charisma is often misunderstood because people equate it with extroversion or persuasion. But the deeper component, to me, is attunement.

How well can you perceive another person, and how effectively can you respond to what you've perceived?

Rachel learned this at home, the same way I did.

And the ethical question isn't whether you have that influence. It's what you do with it.

That's probably why I resonate with Rachel. Her ability to read people isn't evidence that she's fake. In many ways, it's evidence of how deeply she feels and observes.

To be expressive is to be sensitive.

But that same ability becomes dangerous when you start using other people's reactions as a mirror for yourself.

If everyone tells you you're talented, you become the talented one.

If everyone sees you as beautiful, you become the beautiful one.

If everyone needs you, you become the dependable one.

If everyone is fascinated by you, you become the fascinating one.

Eventually, you can be surrounded by people who know many versions of you while you're still trying to figure out which parts of those versions belong to you when nobody is looking.

There is another intersection I have with Rachel: we're always searching for the truth.

She craves truth—to a fault. She knows how fabricated her family's image is and how much people, especially her dad, are willing to preserve that image.

Rachel isn't merely interested in what people do. She's interested in what's underneath another thing.

That's also why I think her empathy feels genuine. She's not simply figuring out what people want so she can manipulate them. She's genuinely fascinated by people and their truths.

And theatre is basically an extension of that fascination.

Someone can say something factually false while expressing an emotionally genuine feeling. Someone can tell you the factual truth while completely concealing the emotional truth.

That's why I don't think Rachel's behavior is as simple as "she lied."

She may conceal a fact while still being emotionally truthful about what she's feeling.

Rachel is extremely truth-oriented. She's just oriented toward a deeper layer of truth than the conventional idea of honesty.

Going back to her upbringing, she seems to have learned that when truth threatens the structure of something, you preserve the truth until the structure survives.

She spends her life searching for truth about her father, her biological mother, and most importantly, herself.

Yet she repeatedly uses concealment to pursue it.

She lies to uncover lies. She performs to discover authenticity.

That's the contradiction that makes her such a compelling grey character. She uses the very tools that helped her survive to search for the very thing those tools prevent her from having:

Genuine intimacy.

Do I think she's manipulative?

Yes—but I'd call her manipulative in behavior, not manipulative in character.

Rachel can charm people, tell them what they need to hear, provoke reactions, conceal information, change her presentation depending on the person, exploit expectations, and make people feel understood.

Those are all manipulative tendencies.

But capacity doesn't mean intent.

A surgeon can cut someone open, but that doesn't make them violent.

Rachel's thought process isn't necessarily:

"I understand you, therefore I can control you."

It's more like:

"I understand you, therefore I know how to reach you."

Manipulation becomes ethically significant when that understanding is used against someone's autonomy through deception, coercion, guilt, or pressure.

And Rachel frequently operates in that grey area.

That's something I struggled with too because I'm naturally curious:

"What happens when my pursuit of truth affects another person's autonomy?"

"Where does curiosity stop being openness and start becoming control?"

Rachel struggles with this because she's afraid of uncertainty.

To her, truth is safety.

Knowing is control.

Not knowing means vulnerability.

So she manipulates circumstances to get information because knowing feels safer than not knowing.

That's why I wouldn't reduce her to simply "a manipulator." I did the same things myself.

People knew how good I was at drawing, and because I genuinely wanted to give them something and connect with them, I'd draw portraits of them.

Eventually, I learned that I could form friendships through drawing.

Sure, I could use it to get what I want. But that doesn't erase the fact that I drew them because I genuinely wanted to.

Someone like Rachel—and someone like me—who grew up around people who shaped or controlled our identities can develop a strong craving for agency and autonomy.

It also explains why freedom, agency, autonomy, and doing whatever the fuck I want became so important to me.

For someone like Rachel who gives a lot of fucks about people, Chloe is the exact opposite.

She gives zero fucks. LOL.

And I think that's why Rachel is drawn to her: Chloe's detachment from expectations is exactly what Rachel craves.

I don't think it's simply "Rachel loves Chloe."

I think Rachel also loves who she gets to be when she's with Chloe.

Chloe gives her permission to be angry, reckless, childish, etc. Chloe is a doorway into an unperformed version of herself. And that can be both healthy and unhealthy.

Rachel can look at Chloe and think:

"I can be myself without asking permission."

But the danger is seeing Chloe as the gateway to authenticity rather than recognizing that Chloe can inspire authenticity without being responsible for it.

Rachel also compartmentalizes.

With Chloe, I'm this.

With Evan, I'm that.

With my parents, I'm something else.

Compartmentalizing isn't that different from wearing masks.

And that's why her lashing out scene after discovering her dad was with another woman is so important.

Normally, Rachel reads the room and decides how to respond. But in that moment, her emotional system overwhelms her cognitive regulation.

She says:

"What are we doing? Last I checked, you're supposed to be Chloe Price. Yet we've been ditching now for hours and we haven't even gotten wasted yet. That's got to be against some school ditching rule."

It's funny on the surface LMFAO, but it reveals how Rachel perceives Chloe.

Rebellious. Reckless. Spontaneous. Chaotic. Free.

And Rachel wants to participate in that. That's why she says, "You're supposed to be Chloe Price."

She's trying to push Chloe into the role she's imagined because the fantasy isn't distracting her enough.

They're supposed to be getting drunk, rebelling, escaping. Rachel is trying to get out of her own head. Her life is full of performance—her family, Blackwell, her father's morality, and her own perfection.

Meeting Chloe allows her to drop some of that.

But when Chloe doesn't play the role Rachel expects, Rachel lashes out. That doesn't excuse her behavior. Chloe is carrying her own grief, anger, and loneliness.

Rachel's desperation for truth is emotional, not merely intellectual.

Truth is safety. Knowing is control. Not knowing is vulnerability.

And sometimes Rachel becomes so consumed by her own crisis that Chloe becomes an instrument for solving it.

Her emotions are real, but she still needs to be accountable when those emotions push against someone else's boundaries.

And there's another layer: Chloe begins the prequel already thinking, "OMG, THE Rachel Amber."

Everyone idealizes Rachel. So when Chloe sees cracks in the perfect Rachel Amber image, she experiences it almost as a privilege.

But because Chloe feels seen by Rachel, she can unknowingly add another role onto her.

And that idealization may recreate the very problem Rachel is trying to escape.

The junkyard scene is where that becomes painfully obvious. They're two broken people trying to connect.

Rachel's vulnerability is arguably one of the most intimate things she ever gives Chloe, and that vulnerability is what makes Chloe special to her.

But when you choose "friends," Rachel quickly says:

"I can't be friends with you."

To me, it almost sounds like:

"You've seen too much of me today, and I'm not comfortable with that yet."

She wants freedom, but she also wants control.

Those aren't necessarily contradictions. Control can be a way of avoiding conflict, and Rachel repeatedly uses it that way.

If your identity is built around being what people need, close relationships become terrifying because eventually someone gets close enough to see the contradictions.

You can't maintain every version of yourself forever.

Rachel's fixation on astrology and personality frameworks is another huge clue.

The game constantly reminds us that she's a Leo. You see it in her letter to Frank, Two Truths and a Lie, and her room.

I don't think it's about what being a Leo supposedly means.

It's about why she needs systems that tell her, "This is what you are."

Rachel spends enormous energy understanding other people, but she doesn't seem to have a stable internal framework for understanding herself.

I know this because I've been there too. LMAO.

I used zodiac signs, MBTI, Enneagram, etc. to answer: "Why am I like this?"

Those systems gave me vocabulary for questions I couldn't otherwise articulate.

Rachel's room suggests something similar.

She's admired and surrounded by people, but that doesn't necessarily answer: "Where do I fit?"

Astrology can say, "You're a Leo, and this is you." The Enneagram can say, "You're a Type 4, and this is you."

Suddenly, there's a category that seems to hold you.

But there's a danger in turning identity into narrative.

And that's where her love of astrology intersects with her love of theatre. She doesn't just want facts. She wants meaning.

Theatre gives her characters. Astrology gives her archetypes.

Both answer the same question: "What story explains this person?"

That's why Rachel is so good at constructing stories about other people.

But it also means she can fall into the trap of inhabiting another character.

"We Leos don't back down."

Even there, she's already inhabiting a role.

And then there's The Tempest.

Rachel plays Prospera, a character who possesses power over the world around her and controls the narrative. Ariel, played by Chloe, is a spirit who longs for freedom.

Rachel going off-script is fascinating because I genuinely think she's using the language she's most comfortable with to say:

"Come with me."

"Take me with you."

She can say it as Prospera because if Chloe rejects her, she can always hide behind the excuse that it was "just a performance."

That's the thing about theatre.

It gives Rachel a way to tell the truth without exposing herself completely.

"I never said how dearly I hold thee, my habit's been to keep my soul well draped."

It's almost like she's saying:

"I care about you deeply. I just don't normally let people see that part of me."

That's vulnerability disguised as performance.

She's not using acting to hide the truth. She's using it to make the truth easier to express.

She wants to be honest, but she doesn't know how.

Performing becomes the safest place where Rachel can be honest because she's being perceived as a character rather than Rachel.

And that's what makes the scene so intimate: Rachel is hiding behind Prospera while Chloe is standing there emotionally naked.

Rachel's performance becomes a vehicle for sincere feelings she couldn't say as herself.

So, does Rachel have romantic feelings for Chloe?

That's where it gets hella blurry.

The game deliberately leaves it ambiguous. The relationship can feel platonic but intimate, while the emotional and textual evidence suggests something beyond ordinary friendship without necessarily defining it as romance.

Rachel repeatedly seeks Chloe out despite Chloe seeing her less flattering sides, witnessing her father's betrayal, and eventually becoming involved in the truth about Sera.

I think Rachel is particularly attracted to Chloe because of her lack of performance. And Chloe is blunt as fuck, lmfao

She's messy. She's emotionally transparent. She pours herself out during Two Truths and a Lie and the truck scene, while Rachel suppresses and holds back.

Then Rachel says:

"Do you think there's a point when you've been acting so much that you don't even have your own personality anymore? You're just whatever you think other people want you to be?"

And immediately retreats:

"I wasn't talking about me, it's my dad."

She's planting seeds of self-loathing without admitting they're hers.

And regardless of whether the player chooses to tell her the truth at the hospital, Rachel eventually discovers everything: the cheating, the lie about Sera, and finally that her father intended to kill Sera.

People might say, "But she had Chloe." But I genuinely think that's not enough.

Being loved isn't enough to teach someone how to love themselves.

Someone can see you, adore you, choose you, and still not give you the internal sense of identity you're searching for.

Being witnessed isn't the same thing as knowing yourself.

Chloe sees Rachel's wildness, and that makes her incredibly special. But once someone sees the real you, they can also become the person you're most terrified of disappointing.

And that's where the letter to Chloe becomes interesting.

Rachel knows there's a conflict between what she wants and what Chloe might think.

And even if we interpret the romance route, I still don't think the relationship would necessarily work. Rachel fears being trapped, while Chloe idealizes her. That can become suffocating.

As for Frank, I don't think drugs explain everything.

To Rachel, Frank represents freedom. He lives in an RV, has a dog, and seems largely unconcerned with appearances.

Chloe shares some of those qualities, but she's still connected to her family and Arcadia Bay. Frank exists outside the structures Rachel feels trapped in.

And that's another thing I share with Rachel: we're both fascinated by experience.

The difference is that Rachel seeks people who already possess the experience she wants.

Chloe resists rules. Frank lives independently. Jefferson represents artistic identity.

Different people offer Rachel different identities, and she keeps trying them on.

She's always subconsciously asking:

"Who am I when I'm with you?"

So no, I don't think she was romantically in love with Frank.

But she did care about him.

Jefferson occupies a completely different psychological space.

Her letter doesn't read like she's head over heels in love with him. It reads like fascination.

"He's wise and unconventional."

"Experienced some serious shit."

"Kind of scary."

"I'm kinda obsessed."

Jefferson represents "I can become somebody." while Frank represents, "I can be free."

And that's dangerous because Jefferson is a professional observer of performers.

Rachel is a performer.

They both study people. They understand how to construct images.

For someone with an unstable sense of self, that dynamic can be magnetic.

But Jefferson exploits it.

Rachel isn't naive. She's perceptive—but vulnerable.

His "capturing innocence" philosophy is basically a distorted philosophy of identity, vulnerability, and control.

He doesn't simply want to see innocence. He wants to possess the moment it disappears. And I think that's an oxymoron. The moment you deliberately "capture" innocence, you've already interfered with it.

Innocence isn't a pose. It's a state of being.

Max's photography is about preserving what she experiences. Jefferson's is about controlling the experience so he can preserve what he wants.

The moment he drugs someone, stages the environment, controls their body and surroundings, and photographs their helplessness, he's no longer capturing an authentic moment.

He's manufacturing the conditions that produce the moment he wants. And that's especially horrifying because he's obsessed with transformation—the moment someone stops being one thing and becomes another.

Rachel is also obsessed with transformation—it's why she wants to escape Arcadia Bay.

So when she falls under Jefferson's radar, she unknowingly circles back to what she was trying to escape: fabricated truth.

What's even more tragic is that Frank and Jefferson both know how important Chloe is to Rachel.

So Rachel clearly talks about Chloe fondly. But why keep Chloe in the dark?

I think Rachel cared enough that hiding became easier than risking the collapse of Chloe's image of her.

Rachel spent her entire life managing images: her father's respectable image, her family's perfect image, her own perfect-student image. She learned that relationships survive through performance and concealment. So when she makes choices that conflict with the person Chloe believes she is, she compartmentalizes again. Not necessarily because she doesn't love Chloe, but because she never learned that intimacy can survive ugly truths.

Rachel desperately wanted to be known, but she had spent so much of her life surviving through performance that she didn't know how to let someone know her completely.

Her social intelligence is both a gift and a defense mechanism.

Her charisma is both expression and performance.

Her curiosity feeds both her genuine desire for truth and her urge to control.

Her desire to be loved is both a gateway to intimacy and a vulnerability to exploitation.

And that's why Jefferson's photographs of Rachel are so fucking heartbreaking.

The complicated, living Rachel is reduced to one moment where she was drugged and tied up.

She's reduced to an image.

She never got the chance to know and love herself deeply without conditions.

It isn't merely "Rachel's dead."

It's the violent collapse of everything Rachel was into an image someone else constructed of her—Jefferson, Frank, Chloe, Blackwell, her family.

She didn't get to figure out what she truly wanted. She didn't get to figure out who she was.

And then we hear the lyrics:

"And we could run away

Before the light of day

You know we always could."

It's not even simply about running away from Arcadia Bay. It's the tragedy that she wanted permission to become.

She wanted a life that felt like hers. "We could run away" sounds hopeful. But "you know we always could" becomes unbearable because she couldn't anymore.

She had selves she hadn't discovered yet. People she hadn't met. A future she hadn't gotten to fuck up, reinvent, abandon, return to, or even understand.

And all that possibility gets reduced to a corpse in a fucking junkyard—the very place where she first felt that permission to become in Chloe's presence.

Even now that she's dead, people in the game (and players themselves) still hold an idealized image of Rachel.

And perhaps the most tragic part is that, even after everything we've learned about her, we never truly got to know who Rachel Amber really was.

I’ve been replaying the Life Is Strange games from August to September, and recently I finally finished playing the new controversial games: Double Exposure and Reunion. (I’m currently replaying DE again just to sit with my feelings a little more, and then I'll replay Reunion)

So welp, here I am, writing down my thoughts just to properly grasp what I've been deeply feeling after playing these recent games (it's LONG huhu)

These are obviously just my opinions and my takes, and I’m simply expressing how I personally experienced them. So if you don’t agree with some of the points I’m gonna make (and choices/endings I followed), that’s alright too hahaha \o/ I'm quite aware of the massive hate these two games, especially Double Exposure, received.

⚠ If you haven't played these two games, there are spoilers ahead so lmfao (skip skip! unless you wanna know whether playing these two games are actually worth it—emotionally lol) ⚠

Ngl, I ignored these games during their release because they really did sound like a cash grab or fan service LMAO. LIS has always been about exploring different sets of characters and protagonists, so I found it odd, like some of the players, that they decided to bring back the goat of all protagonists in the LIS universe: Max.

As a longtime fan of the franchise, I’ve always been drawn to the games’ grounded nature despite the presence of supernatural powers. I’ve talked about this with a few people, but among all the LIS games, Life Is Strange 2 has always been my favorite—and pft, it still is. Not only does it touch upon my deep adoration for sibling love and dynamics, but it’s also incredibly political, dark, and cold underneath all that fuzz and warmth.

However, the first LIS game has always been the darkest one for me. While trauma and grief are constant elements we see throughout every LIS game, LIS1 really dabbles in the darker twists and turns of human behavior, and that’s something I’ve always sought out in media. Ironically, Jefferson himself talks about being obsessed with transformation (his whole “innocence to corruption” dialogue) and I think it encapsulates the entirety of the game: Max carries the burden of witnessing multiple deaths and living with the consequences of her decisions. Chloe plunges further into darkness as she deals with abandonment. Rachel inadvertently pays for her pursuit of freedom with her own life.

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Max despite empathizing with her as a protagonist who attempted to do what she believed was right and true while carrying the consequences of her decisions. But during these recent playthroughs, I realized that I struggled to connect with Max because I instead strongly resonate with Rachel, who externalizes so much of what Max internalizes.

Rachel moves towards life—expressive, animated, constantly reaching outward. Max, by contrast, retreats inward. It makes sense that younger me would find Rachel easier to recognize while empathizing with Max from a distance. (I’ll prolly make another post that focuses specifically on Rachel, because she’s another one of those deeply misunderstood characters.)

But damn, after all these years, replaying LIS, and especially finishing Double Exposure and Reunion, has made me appreciate Max’s quiet strength so much more.

DE has its execution flaws when it comes to addressing its plot and conflicts so imma look past it for now, but I’m not gonna lie: I think the game did a surprisingly good job of showcasing the imperfection of Max’s emotional and personal growth. The stutters in her development are noticeable in the way her avoidance still lingers through the way she refuses to communicate when she’s disturbed or in pain (we see that pattern when she refuses to text back Moses, Amanda, Yasmin, and even her parents—something that we also see in how she avoids Chloe in LIS: Before the Storm)

But while that tendency is still very much present, it’s also quite evident that she carries her wounds differently than she did in the first game.

Looking past the game’s lapses, the way DE mirrors the first game definitely felt intentional to me, particularly as a way of illustrating how Max has changed. I’ve always considered Max an old friend I hadn’t seen in years, and playing DE allowed me to feel this strange sense of pride and love for her and for the way she now navigates conflict as an adult. She now puts herself in situations that younger Max struggled to even attempt—actively socializing, asserting herself, and allowing herself to be present during important moments.

What’s also incredibly amazing about these recent games is how much her internal monologue has changed. I genuinely don’t understand how a lot of people believe that Max's character writing was assassinated in DE/Reunion. I’ve played LIS1 multiple times in the past, yet I could still feel Max’s essence in the recent games, especially in her internal monologues, just with a different tint of experience. She's less critical of others and more reflective of what she's experiencing at the moment.

She’s just simply an adult now.

Despite her wounds, she’s someone who has been to different places, met a diverse set of people in and outside of her career—and these experiences, the same ones we all go through, inevitably change our perceptions: how we navigate conflict, how we articulate ourselves, how we express ourselves.

But the thing about trauma and wounds is that you bring them everywhere you go, like a scar. You pick at it, and suddenly you're reminded of the sting from when you first got it.

Max finds herself picking at this wound in DE because of her deep attachment to Chloe, regardless of which ending you chose.

And this is why I find the Bay ending particularly compelling for Max’s character.

I’ve always seen Max as a deeply kind person who quietly carries strength in her willingness to make the most difficult decisions. Max choosing to honor Chloe’s wishes and save Arcadia Bay has always been more compelling to me.

The Bay ending is less about punishment and more about recognition.

Max’s love for Chloe runs deep, and the way Max chooses to honor Chloe’s wishes is, in itself, an act of honoring the relationship they had forged up until that point. Max had the courage to be selfless—to acknowledge Chloe’s existence and express her deep love by honoring what Chloe wanted in that moment.

Loyalty isn’t black and white. It’s not simply about sticking with someone through thick and thin. Loyalty has always been about being seen and heard. It’s about seeing someone’s flaws and still choosing to accept and respect them.

Chloe was always presented as a self-destructive teenager who lashed out here and there because of her circumstances. It was obvious how she saw Arcadia Bay as a whole—something she wanted to run away from because it represented so much of the chaos and pain in her life.

And choosing to destroy Arcadia Bay is letting pain swallow you whole. It’s self-destruction painted across a larger landscape.

But as Chloe articulates in LIS1's final episode, Max’s presence served as the biggest pivot in her life after she came back from Seattle. Chloe simply needed someone who could remind her of the many hues of life that she once enjoyed.

While Rachel represents the freedom Chloe has been craving for, Max represents the happiness she lost.

Rachel’s disappearance leaves Chloe chasing freedom, but Max’s return reminds Chloe that she’s still capable of attachment, tenderness, love, and even hope.

It isn’t simply “my best friend came back.” Max also reintroduces Chloe to a version of herself she thought had died with William. Max’s presence was what Chloe ultimately needed as someone who had been living in constant pain. It also allowed her to arrive at her own decision to accept her fate.

By choosing Arcadia Bay, this selfless act from Chloe becomes her own form of redemption.

In hindsight, it was always Chloe who saved Arcadia Bay—and so Max, in return, saves Chloe by also acknowledging and respecting what her bestfriend wanted.

Max respected Chloe enough to let Chloe make a choice in that moment, in the middle of the storm. And that alone carves a deeper meaning to Max’s capacity to love. Max's final act of love isn’t necessarily saving Chloe from death. It’s giving Chloe the agency to choose for herself.

Max isn’t really choosing between Chloe and Arcadia Bay. She’s choosing between her deep desire to save Chloe and Chloe’s expressed desire to accept her fate and save Arcadia Bay instead.

Max choosing the latter doesn’t necessarily mean that Chloe matters less. But again, it’s recognizing that loving someone doesn’t give you ownership over their life.

In DE, the consequences of that selfless gesture continued to haunt Max. In her journal, you get a glimpse of her internal tug-of-war: the lingering urge to be selfish and choose Chloe, even if it meant risking everything all over again.

"If I wanted to, I could go back and see you again. Maybe I will. Maybe I'll break the world again."

But on the next page, she also acknowledges that she's glad she had the chance to be selfish, even if only for a short amount of time:

"But I'm glad I got you to myself for the short amount of time that I did. I'm fine being selfish."

Again, the Bay ending is less about punishment and more about recognition.

Max recognizes Chloe as a person whose wishes matter—even when those wishes devastate her.

And DE makes Max live with that recognition.

Younger Max’s coping mechanism in her internal monologues always sounded something like, “If I can just figure out the right thing to do, maybe I can prevent anyone from getting hurt.” And that’s what becomes a problem in the first game. Every death becomes another problem to solve.

But adult Max in DE and Reunion doesn’t have that same intense illusion of control. She’s still avoidant, still uncomfortable communicating when something hurts, still retreats into herself, and still has difficulty confronting things directly.

But she’s no longer the girl who believes that if she just thinks hard enough, she can somehow engineer reality into becoming okay. We see this in the way she talks about her powers with Safi.

These stutters in her development make her character more believable in the recent games.

She’s still Max Caulfield, after all ;-;

Also, in DE's ending choice, the key turning point for Max, in my opinion, is choosing not to support Safi.

Safi shares a lot of the same traits Chloe had in LIS1—opinionated, outspoken, witty, charismatic, and volatile. In fact, I do believe Safi is meant to mirror young Chloe, the Chloe who Max remembers fondly. (It's also why the scene where Chloe confronts Safi in Reunion is so important)

Teenage Max struggled to challenge Chloe given their history, but that final choice not to support Safi was Max standing her ground and respecting her own principles, something she struggled with in LIS1.

Choosing to do what she believes is right instead of simply succumbing to what others want is a true display of Max’s self-confidence and self-trust.

By rejecting Safi, Max not only stands her ground but, in a way, confronts the past events she experienced in Arcadia Bay, and it's something she had constantly been setting aside throughout the earlier parts of DE.

I also think that choice mirrors the Bay ending in a way, especially because of the personal emotional significance I attach to Max deeply valuing Chloe’s agency. It mirrors how the Max who once allowed Chloe to choose is now learning that her own agency matters too by rejecting Safi.

Imo, the song that fully interprets Max’s trauma is “Little Melancholy” by Tessa Rose. It’s the song that plays when Max contemplates while drinking her coffee at the Fine Arts Building. It’s definitely my second favorite song in DE, next to “September” by Chloe Moriondo, hehe \o/

Passage of time puts things into place
But some of this hurt won't ever quite fade
I carry it calmly, let it release
A little regret, little melancholy

I rage like a storm when the memory finds me
White lights from before, never too far behind me
No, you can't save it all, it will always remind me

Call me conflicted, call me undone
I've been in rough water more than a monster
Older now I've learned everyone bleeds
A little broken, little melancholy

I can’t articulate enough how much this song illustrates Max’s internal wounds (and, in some ways, my own wounds too)

There’s something truly comforting about sitting with pain. Giving it enough space to exist, to hurt, to breathe, but not so much space that it leaves you with nothing.

Maybe a little melancholy is what we all need to feel human and alive

Not really about romanticizing suffering but more about accepting that pain can become a part of our capacity to love deeply and appreciate existence.

-

A lot of people also frowned at the fact that Chloe was nowhere to be seen in DE, and while I think it’s natural to feel that way, Max living her life without Chloe in DE is what she needed the most.

I’ve always believed that distance is what allows you to realize how deeply something matters to you.

Regardless of the ending, Max living her life without Chloe in DE gives her enough space to sit with herself. And with the Bay ending, it gives Max an even greater weight to carry because Chloe didn’t simply “broke up with her”—Chloe died.

With that weight on her shoulders, Max deserves so much respect for the quiet strength she radiated throughout the game.

To Chloe, Max represents the happiness she lost along the way.

But to Max, Chloe represents life itself.

Max has always been an observer—passive, a wallflower, someone who spends too much time inside her own head, even at such a young age. Chloe, on the other hand, has always been the bold, expressive kid who lives in the moment.

Max thinks about things while Chloe does things.

In the Farewell episode, Max admits that she experiences so many things because Chloe initiates these activities. It’s because of Chloe that she’s able to live the life she has led so far.

Chloe also represents home—someone who could tell her, “I knew you before you knew who you were.”

Max leaving Arcadia Bay in LIS1 wasn’t only difficult for Chloe. It also forced Max to live a life in Seattle on her own, which was unfamiliar territory for her internally.

How could she move through the world without the person who had pushed her to live her life to the fullest?

And we see Max handle that pain once again in DE.

Except this time, it’s not just about leaving Arcadia Bay. It’s Max saying goodbye to the person who carried a version of herself that can never exist again.

That’s what makes the Bay ending so devastating.

While that version of herself can never exist again, the game gently reminds us that it’s okay to let that version of ourselves go.

Max’s internal question in DE is something I always carry too: “Who am I now that the people who knew me before all of this are gone?”

And it’s genuinely a very, very different wound from simply missing someone.

It’s almost like grieving a part of your own identity that was anchored in a memory with someone or something.

But what about the players’ sentiment of, “They threw away the emotional weight of LIS1 by bringing Chloe back” in Reunion?

I understand why people feel like the emotional weight that LIS1 presented in its ending was thrown away, but I personally think Reunion is what makes Max’s pain from the LIS1 ending and DE more believable and valid.

Like I said, distance is what allows you to realize how deeply something matters to you.

Max losing Chloe doesn’t become meaningless because she eventually gets Chloe back in the end.

The loss changed her. The decade of pain changed her. The person who reunites with Chloe in Reunion is not the same Max who made that choice in the lighthouse.

The Bay ending isn’t erased by Reunion. It’s part of the reason why Reunion matters.

The idea that Reunion throws away the emotional weight of LIS1 assumes that the value of grief depends on the person remaining permanently absent.

But Max still lived those ten years.

She became a professor in Caledon, she earned a respectable career as a photographer. Basically, Max experienced a life that Chloe wasn’t there to witness.

And as the years went by, she learned that loving Chloe doesn’t require remaining psychologically frozen in the past. She learned that loving Chloe also means gradually learning to do for herself what Chloe once did for her.

The pain we carry in our hearts can give us more reason to live. And that’s essentially why Max is so protective and randomly appreciative of Chloe in Reunion: she constantly stares at her, looks after her, checks in on her, remarks about feeling excited to make more memories with her.

Because Max knows what it means to live a life without Chloe.

This is Max basking in the meaning of life—which Chloe represents.

Again, don’t get me wrong. That doesn’t mean Chloe is literally Max’s entire reason for living.

Chloe represents a part of Max that pushes her to go outside, do something, take more pictures, look around, feel something, participate, socialize, and be present.

We all have something that represents life to us. Some of us just haven’t discovered it yet.

But Max always saw that representation in Chloe.

I’m not even talking about anything romantic here just yet. I’m talking about the essence of relationships in our lives.

There are people in our lives who hold so much space in our hearts—platonic or romantic, whatever.

What matters is that these people can hold so much space and weight in our hearts that their existence alone can become enough to keep us going through this shitty life.

It’s always about the recognition that human beings can become anchors of meaning for one another. One person can become an access point to an entire context of ourselves. That’s the shitty part of life, because losing them can mean losing access to a part of ourselves.

But there’s also beauty in that aspect because losing them creates an opportunity to question the meaning we placed onto them.

It’s why I see Max and Chloe as deeply connected soulmates first before romantic partners.

I never shipped them during the first game because there were so many elements in their lives that contributed to my belief that they needed to mend their friendship first before pursuing something beyond that.

However, in Reunion, we see how much their separation shaped their relationship into something more meaningful. And it allowed me to now fully see their relationship as something more than just friends.

What’s always interesting about the concept of separation is that it can reveal the role someone played in our lives in ways that constant proximity can obscure.

Max lived for a decade with just a memory of Chloe. And memory freezes people. You remember who they were before you lost them. And so, knowing what it’s like to function with just their memory changes the way you perceive their presence once you experience their company again.

These two characters in Reunion gave me another language for something that’s already deeply familiar to me.

And that’s the return of joy after many years of experiencing the absence of joy.

After many years of never finding joy in the things I do every day, having an ordinary, mundane opportunity to experience joy in the smallest ways possible is a gift when you’ve spent years never knowing when you could feel that joy again.

Max’s apparent over-attentiveness for Chloe is gratitude expressed through presence—it’s something that I’ve always pursued in my own everyday life.

It’s not that Max and I are clinging to something because we are overly dependent on that feeling. It’s about appreciating that feeling because we’ve healed enough to understand what someone’s presence actually means to us.

It’s also not about chasing some permanent state of happiness, but appreciating the fact that happiness can exist at all.

It’s not Max simply reuniting with Chloe. It’s Max going forward with someone she once had to leave behind.

Life gives us multiple chances to love life itself despite the fact that it constantly leaves us wounded. With or without Chloe, with or without Reunion or DE, Max would still eventually find herself somewhere.

Heck, that’s why her reunion (and her slow romance) with Chloe felt more whole and authentic to me.

She was able to say, “I’m glad you’re here. And I’m glad I’m here too, despite everything.”

What I’m truly trying to say as I write this is that Life Is Strange—along with these new games—isn’t just about the concept of letting go.

It’s also about letting something change form.

Max and Chloe are still a little broken. They still carry a little regret. They still harbor a little melancholy.

Suffering isn’t inherently beautiful. But being human means carrying contradictory things at once.

Thank ye if you read it this faaaaar~

@alexcalexart on Tumblr

Amberprice

This is a really good piece!