Life is Strange, But Not All That Queer

With Life is Strange: Before the Storm coming out later this week, I wanted to dive into my thoughts on the queerness featured in its predecessor. Warning: spoilers ahead.

I came to Life is Strange later than most, so I heard a lot about it prior to playing myself. Something I was excited for was the queer representation it supposedly had; my queer friends who had played all mentioned that there were queer characters in the game and were understandably excited about it. But when I finished the first episode, I was confused. There were no hints of the queerness my friends and the internet had described. I assumed it would start popping up in later episodes, and kept plugging along until I finally saw what people were talking about. I was disappointed by it.

Sure, there are obvious attempts to show girls loving each other, but they felt hollow, at least in part because there was no consistency or commitment to Max’s queerness.  The kissing dare Chloe suggests seemed random and forced, its significance lessened by the player’s ability to choose whether or not to go for it. I would’ve been fine with the game acknowledging Max’s brand of queerness, while realizing she’s not romantically attracted to Chloe, but that doesn’t happen.   The trend only continued as the kiss, and its implications, weren’t mentioned again or dealt with outside of half-assed jokes. It’s not until the final episode that Max has to confront her feelings for Chloe, but even then it doesn’t feel like a deep dive into her emotions or sexuality. Either you kiss her or you don’t, you end up with her, or you don’t. There’s no depth to it at all.

Now you might think ‘the world is ending and they’re investigating a murder! Max doesn’t have time to think about that kind of stuff’. Well, I’m here to tell you that that’s some bullshit. Even in the most frantic and terrifying of times, issues like these still come to mind because guess what? They’re also frantic and terrifying. Coming to terms with who you are and who you love is a huge, humanizing deal, and to leave it out of a character arc while still sprinkling on the trappings of an identity/experience does a disservice to the character and narrative. In fact, it completely ignores key details of the experience as Max doesn’t really have one. She never questions herself or her relationship with Chloe. Queer or not, everyone has doubts when coming to terms with having feelings for a friend. But Max never displays any of these doubts, never asks why she feels that way or what Chloe really means to her. Her feelings just escalate from ‘oh I should reconnect with this old friend who I feel shitty about abandoning’ to ‘I would fuck up time itself to save this person’.

This is where I felt like “diversity for diversity’s sake” was coming into play. Max didn’t feel like representation to me. I had no way to relate to her as a queer woman, because she didn’t go through any of the doubts, fears, or considerations of what that would mean, especially in a 2014 setting. There’s no question of “how will my parents/friends/teachers feel about this?” or even “how do I feel about this?”. Their relationship went from 0 to 100 with no introspection, which seems like a huge oversight in a story-driven game where the relationships are so key. Maybe you could argue that Max had already accepted her identity off-screen, but that seems nonsensical to me since there are no real hints to it within the game until you get to the first kissing scene. Max comments on how cute certain boys are throughout the game, but never once comments on the attractiveness of a girl, not even Chloe. It’s bizarre to think that she could be comfortable enough with her sexuality to jump into a spontaneous relationship with Chloe, and yet never comment on her attraction to anyone of the same gender.

I honestly preferred the hinted at relationship between Rachel and Chloe, because you could at least see the authenticity in Chloe’s feelings when she talked about Rachel and her reaction to Rachel being with Frank. There was a clear progression to those feelings from just a few lines of dialogue compared to the random jump from friends to maybe kinda-sorta something more. I wanted to see Max say “yes, I’m queer/bi/pan/fluid” or for her and Chloe or even her and Warren to have that conversation, but it never comes up. The two of them just make awkward jokes about being each other’s competition without really addressing it and it’s weird and honestly lazy.

I would love to see a game headlined by queer women more than anything, but Life is Strange is unfortunately not that game. Hopefully soon, we’ll get to see a game that commits to the queerness of their character, and to the exploration and thoughtful development of their relationships. Maybe Before the Storm will be that game. A girl can dream.