Just a few days ago, the third and final episode of Life is Strange: Before the Storm was released. And while everyone else is either writing up their game of the year lists, or not writing at all, I have found myself compelled to write about Before the Storm. There's going to be SPOILERS, for it and original Life is Strange, so here's your warning. Go play it, the first two episodes are fantastic, but episode 3 has problems. I'll get to that soon enough.

In particular, I wanted to write about how the game handles queer characters, and queerness in general. As a queer person (I'm bi, and nonbinary in terms of gender, fyi), to say I have some thoughts on it is putting it lightly.

Generally, I have a lot of thoughts about how media, and specifically video games, deals with LGBT+ characters and themes. In terms of bigger budget games, that basically amounts to a whole lot of nothing. The best you can usually hope for are queer romance options in BioWare games, which is a whole other topic. But just as often what you get is Watch_Dogs 2, where they cast a cisgender man as a transgender woman. Usually if you want games about these sorts of things, you need to look at the indie scene, and when I say that, I mean the indie scene of games most people don't even hear about. Not the bigger stuff that ends up on consoles and played by people like myself.

And that brings me to Before the Storm. A prequel to a game that was, if I'm being polite, "hesitant" to make its characters openly queer, and instead was happy to just imply it. But, one thing I thought was obvious in the original Life is Strange was that Chloe and Rachel were romantically involved. That relationship, and specifically how it began, is the focus on Before the Storm, so from the outset, I was curious how it would be handled.

I was surprised. Not so much at what was in the game, but how much I related to it. It's not really something I can remember any other game making me feel. For as different as Chloe is from me, I still saw more of myself in her than any other character in a game, in recent memory, at least. She's brash, outspoken, rebellious. When I was her age, I was quiet, reserved, and content to just stay holed up on my own, letting the world go by.

The thing I saw in Chloe, that I see in myself at that age, and really, through most of my life, is that combination of not knowing where your place in the world is, just that it isn't here, and...loneliness. The difference between her and me is that she tried to hide it behind rebellion, and being an 'insufferable teen,' whereas I hid it by, well, hiding away in my room. Maybe our reasons were different, I've been fortunate to not have to deal with the loss of a family member like Chloe, but I couldn't help but see myself in Chloe. Both of us just hiding our actual problems, going about our lives with our very small number of friends, pretending like nothing is wrong.

But then when she meets Rachel, and then sees her again at school, everything changes. Chloe lights up, and almost becomes another person. She goes from rebellion for the sake of rebellion, to actually feeling like she has, if not a place in the world, then at least someone to share it with. Someone to discover the world with, and discover herself with. Someone to help through her the rough times in life, and someone she could help through the rough times in life.

I never had a "Rachel." Maybe a few people who could've been, had things worked out differently. Instead I'm left to live vicariously through things like this. Feeling what I've come to call "lesbian envy," because I can never take anything seriously, even now. But, even without a literal version of her in my life, I can still relate to Chloe. She just had the opportunity to discover herself through a teenage love instead of thinking too much about Metal Gear's queer characters one night. She got to share a truly beautiful moment on stage with her love, and follow it up with a first kiss, rather than being left with the memories of a few lost friends, like me.

To get away from me not so subtly complaining about my life, that realization, and feeling it come so clearly into focus is something I relate to completely. Going from being stuck in a rut, not knowing what's wrong, just that something is wrong, to having it all make perfect sense? I've never seen a game capture that part of being queer so perfectly, and again, beautifully.

It's not just that the game has these things, it's that it does them better than I'm capable of conveying in text here. The writing, performances, music choices, plot beats, all line up perfectly in those first two episodes to create a truly magical, wonderful thing. Even when things go wrong for them, they still go wrong in ways that I can feel deep inside. That awkward dinner with Rachel's parents is unlike anything I've seen in a game, but I've had dinners in real life that felt like that, even if the reasons why were different.

Which is why episode 3 was such a disappointment. It takes all those good, warm and fuzzy queer feelings, and chucks them to the side to focus on Rachel wanting to reunite with her birth mother, Sera. Focusing the plot on that is fine, but that then quickly turns into a bizarre hostage and ransom situation, and sidelines Rachel into the hospital while Chloe goes off on her own. But the real problem, the real knife in the gut, that made me wonder if the developers actually understood what they made at all, came after the credits.

After the final choice, and after a montage of Chloe and Rachel doing stuff, the credits roll. Then after the game shows the stats of what everyone else did, there's a stinger. First it's just more of Chloe and Rachel, in a photo booth, laughing and having fun. Then it cuts to Rachel's phone, getting a call from Chloe, in Jefferson's photo dungeon from Life is Strange.

I haven't been this angry at a game in a long time. Here was this game, that for the first two episodes, felt like it understood what it was like to be queer, and to realize you're queer better than any game I've played. Sure, it got sidelined a bit in episode 3 to focus on a ginned up, thrown together feeling story, but I could slough that off as probably due to time constraints, cuts, or any number of things.

But this? This was just cruel. Not only did they not hesitate to take away the happiness I so desperately want those characters to have, they had to go about it by reminding me of one of the worst parts of Life is Strange. They had do it while reinforcing that terrible sad/dead lesbian trope. Do they actually understand what it's like to be queer, or do they just want to make people like me attached, and then twist the knife in, as if suffering is the ultimate art form?

And after thinking about it more, I found more to pick apart about the game as a whole. In particular, here's a quote from Zak Garriss, the lead writer on the game, when being asked about Chloe.

"to me, chloe is gay. but other players might make different choices and have different interpretations, and I want to respect that."

Now, on the surface, nothing wrong with that. But it brings me to my next issue. When I played Life is Strange, or even when I first experienced it through GB East's play through (I was in no place to be playing a game involving suicide on my own at that point in my life), there was no doubt in my mind that Chloe and Rachel were queer, and in a relationship. Just like I had no doubt Max and Chloe were developing similar feelings for each other. The fact that the developers chose to value player choice over making them explicitly queer is disappointing.

Player choice is important in a lot of games, but I think having explicitly queer characters is more important. This isn't Fallout, where the character is a blank slate. This is an established character that means something to me. I haven't felt this way about a game because I've never played a game this openly queer, and this accurately queer (which is a bizarre combination of words). Maybe that's partly on me for the sorts of games I tend to play, but it's not the least bit unreasonable to want to see more queer representation in the games I play.

Otherwise, it just leads to situations like episode 3, where aside from a goodnight kiss on the cheek, there's really nothing to indicate that they're in that sort of relationship. The first two episodes felt like they were written with them being queer as a focal point, but that feels forgotten in the third. Because of player choice, and letting people choose not to pursue romance, they had to write that episode ambiguously. Rather, they didn't have to, they chose to. And instead of exploring that relationship in greater detail, they chose let being straight be the default, like so many other things in life.

Yes, the queer stuff is still in those first two episodes, having the choice to do otherwise doesn't erase that. But making it clear says more. It says that the developers realize this stuff is important, and that it's an actual focus for them. That it matters. That people like me matter, rather than just being a choice in a game that some people won't choose.

Sure, discovering my sexuality through a Metal Gear vampire is a funny story I can tell now, but I've spent my entire life thinking I hated romance in stories because of the romance itself, not because it's just that straight people are boring. Like so many before me, I've had to cling onto little scraps because that's all there is, and frankly, I'm sick of it.

We deserve better. We deserve better than a small handful of games throwing us scraps, only to reveal they were poisoned to begin with. We deserve big dumb blockbuster games that just happen to be starring queer people as much as we deserve small, heartwarming experiences like the first two episodes of Before the Storm.

I don't deserve to feel my heart break when I realize people care more about suffering in art than in actual, good representation.

Maybe the worst part, if the internet is to be believed, is this wasn't the original plan. Like anything, it's to be taken with a grain of salt, but it sounds like a substantial amount of stuff was cut, or changed in episode 3. You can read it for yourselves, and decide on your own if it's true. To me, it reads as much like a fan wish list of improvements, but who knows. Outside of giving Sera magic powers, those all seem like improvements to me. If it is true, it would have been nice if further exploring that relationship got the focus, instead of the rushed hostage story. But I've already speculated more than I should.

So where does that leave me with Before the Storm? As bad as episode 3 gets, especially after the credits, it still doesn't change how the first two episodes made me feel. And the third one still has some good moments in it, even if none of them come close to Chloe and Rachel sharing the stage in The Tempest. It's a beautiful, heartwarming game full of cute, funny, nice moments. It's a game that isn't afraid to let you just sit, and think. It understands what it's like at that stage of life, what it's like to make a life changing realization about yourself, and just how powerful and magical that can be. It made me feel a very specific emotion whenever I hear a specific, corny country song, and I never thought that would happen to me.

It's also a game that took its last, final moment, to twist that knife back in.

If nothing else, it's only helped galvanize my feelings about the importance of representation, and that we need more, and better. And that's not something I'm giving up on.

Thank you for reading.

As a side note, yes, I know it's been months since the last time I wrote here. It's not for lack of having things to say about games, I've just been busy with my fiction writing. A little bit of putting my money where my mouth is in terms of representation, now that I think about it, haha. Not that it's nearly ready for public consumption, sorry. Listen, book writing is hard, and long, and I'm happy I got a full draft done this year. It'll be ready when it's ready.

Until then, I do intend to have my yearly GOTY blog up, and that'll also be ready once it's ready. But now that I have this up, I can focus on that, and hopefully that'll be a more fun read than this.

Good read. That's disappointing about the developer's view of Chloe's sexuality being up to the player in a game that didn't really have much player choice in a macro sense.

1. Wow, I didn't even realize you could play Before the storm as non-gay, that does seem completely at odds with every storybeat concerning Rachel and Chloe in both the original and bts.

2. I'm a straight dude. I prefer videogames where I can play as a lady. I have a much easier time if there's a lesbian instead of a straight romancing option in those games. I can't speak for every straight dude, but I imagine I'm hardly the only one feeling that way. For that reason I'd say an "explicit" lesbian relationship in a videogame is a pretty low hanging fruit for developers to put into their game. That's why I absolutely don't get the criticisim the first life is strange seems to be getting a lot about how it handles the characters sexual orientation. I don't think it's "hesitant" or half-assed or flip-flopy or anything. I think it's subtle, and that is for the life of me not something I view as bad, especially in a medium that is very much not subtle at all about anything usually. It also makes total sense imo, with you playing as a shy, socially akward, angsty teenager who is just discovering that about herself while also dealing with all kinds of other fucked up shit.

@hans_maulwurf: My read on BTS is that even if you play it without making any explicit passes at Rachel, it's still 100% a story about budding queer romance. The thing is Chloe isn't out, or even aware that she's gay yet. But the story makes very little sense if you don't assume that these characters are crushing on each other extremely hard. There's so much actual chemistry between them - looks, touches, innuendos - and they go to such lengths for each other despite knowing each other for all of 3 days by the end, that it just doesn't square if you assume they're "just friends". However, I've yet to play the game (or see anyone else play it) without going full gay, so maybe that changes some of their interactions significantly, but based on the variables in other aspects of the game I doubt it, and of course the story is still the story.

HOWEVER. That doesn't mean that I think it's okay at all that the lead writer is out there on twitter saying shit like "idk maybe Chloe just hasn't met a guy she liked yet in the player's mind". Like, that is some weak shit. Commit. This story is super queer, yet they can't help but placate the (small) segment of the player base that, for some reason (homophobia), wants Chloe to be straight. They're leaving in a margin for error for players in bad faith interpreting the characters are purely straight, because they never talk about sexuality directly. Which bums me out. To be clear, I think anyone engaging with the game in good faith won't be confused about the fact that it's queer as hell. But by still keeping up some appearance of plausible deniability, they leave room for bad-faith interpretations, which is just disappointing.

I feel bad because I harped on this game in the other thread, but they really nailed this whole story. If you've ever had a Rachel in your life be prepared to relive some stuff from your past.

I didn't go "full gay". When you're fighting in the junkyard I did bring up "more than friends", but Rachel kind of brushes that off. Then in the street when you're worried she's not serious I chose the bracelet instead of a kiss. Cause wtf does a kiss prove.

There's some cuddling and stuff but hey, people cuddle.

So to me, Chloe is gay, and Rachel probably drummed up those feelings if she wasn't aware. I still don't know Rachel's orientation. And it doesn't really make a difference to me whether this was a story of a romantic or platonic friendship, cause boy, they really nailed the feeling of this part of youth.

I completely agree with you about the ending scene after the credits. Not really knowing Rachel in the first game made her death a lot easier to handle at the time, but with Before the Storm she becomes as big of a character as Max and Chloe.

The game gives us this great backstory (besides some silly parts in the ending) and then has a really nice outro montage of Chloe and Rachel being together. Then for some reason they felt the need to show Rachel's phone vibrating from missed calls from Chloe, as presumably Nathan takes photos of Rachel as she is dying or already dead. It turned this really nice, happy ending into a complete downer.

I'm going to assume that the developer probably thought, "hey you are playing this because you liked the original game and we should tie this to that some way in the end, and yes people do love art to be sad." But as players we all already know what happens to Rachel, we also already know what happens at the end of Life is Strange. Yes, one of the reasons I love that game was because it was sad and tough and dealt with a lot of very serious issues, but I felt like Before the Storm should have been a bit of a reprieve from that sadness the original game portrayed, and it was just that until that very last clip. If anything it reminded me of Chloe dying and that just sucked all the joy out of the ending of Before the Storm.

Also on them allowing players to not make Chloe queer. From my interpretation of the original game and of this game, no matter how you play it, Chloe is gay. I think the fact that they let the player try to play her any other way is even more lame because you actually aren't making any choices for her character, it's kinda just like let Chloe realize she is gay and act on her feelings, or suppress her feelings a bit more and keep her confused.

The entire character of Eliot is the worst part of the game because hes mostly pointless and he's just a pretend "straight" way to play Chloe that actually isn't a real way to play her. She never dates Eliot, or does anything with him, and even when you play Chloe completely gay, the kid can't seem to take a hint that Chloe has absolutely no romantic feelings for him. And then they feel the need to turn a character, who was apparently Chloe's good friend for the past 2 years, into a complete psychopath. But I guess that's how they justify him not being in the original game, as he's shown with his room packed at the end. Really lame.