After seeing both endings I have so many questions my head hurts just by thinking about all of it, so I'm going to dump them here in hopes someone knows the answers to some of them. I'm going to write them as they are formed in my mind, if it becomes a bit of a mess, I'll tidy it up later.

Have in mind this is regarding both endings. Here we go:

How did they survived? Why didn't they figured out a way to save the rest of the people? If they survived then other people could. If they knew about the tornado going to attack the town beforehand and they decided to survive, they could go back and warn people to leave or get ready for it.

How come the town is as destroyed after the tornado as it was before it?

Why did the tornado disappeared? If the tornado was created by Chloe still being alive, shouldn't the tornado or other creations of chaos theory follow her until she dies? Why was the tornado and the other forms of chaos theory created just because of Chloe? What about the other people that died or stayed alive during all the alternate timelines, shouldn't exist tornadoes or other forms of chaos theory for them as well? (i.e., Max can save or let Kate die, one of them isn't what the 'universe' wanted, so chaos theory should kick in; if Chloe's father survived, then chaos theory should come after him as well)

Why did Warren knew so much about chaos theory and time traveling after hearing about it for the first time, in the middle of a stressful chaotic storm? Even if he wasn't as impressed as a normal person would be knowing that information for the first time, it's still an odd thing to process so quickly. I know it's mostly exposition dump for the player, but still.

How come Chloe figured out that the way to fix everything was to go back in time and let her die? How did she knew it was all about her? Even with the information Max gave her, it's still a wild guess.

Why did Chloe got so happy for staying alive with Max after the tornado? Wasn't she extremely sad for discovering that Rachel is dead just like an hour ago? Shouldn't they both be sad for knowing that all of their family died and they caused it?

Why does every trace of the chaos disappears if Chloe dies, doesn't Max still have time travel powers anyway? Shouldn't more chaos theory craziness theoretically have the possibility to appear while Max has the powers?

How did Max get the powers? Why her?

Why did destroying the photo for the competition got her back on the Dark Room, wasn't her message to David that got the professor arrested? How come having her destroying the photo made David took longer to find the Dark Room than it did when she entered the competition? When she enters the competition, Jefferson is already arrested while she is traveling to San Francisco and it's on the news, meaning it was at least on the day before her travel, but if she destroys the photo then David hasn't found out about Jefferson in the same day on the same time on a different timeline.

Why did Mr. Jefferson burned Max's photos in one timeline but not on another? Max didn't did anything different to him to make him burn them on the second time she's back at the Dark Room.

Why did she had to have certain conversations and do certain actions if she already knew she was going to change the timeline anyway? (i.e. killing crippled Chloe, telling David that Chloe is dead, saving people on her way to the dinner, telling Frank Rachel is dead, etc)

Why were all the options so bi-dimensional to Max and Chloe if there were obviously other options?

If Max wanted to let Arcadia be destroyed to have a better life by herself with Chloe, why didn't she go back and redid everything to go to San Francisco, where she was obviously even better fulfilling her dream of being a known artist?

Why Max's friendship with Chloe turned into a romantic relationship in the final hours if they never had any romantic interest whatsoever before (besides the option to have one dumb kiss mid-way in a scene clearly based on 80s teen movies) and there were options to be more romantic to Warren?

Who took some of the photos on those sequences where we see the photos change if in some situations there was no one else with Max to take those photos?

In the timeline where Chloe dies and Arcadia is saved, why is every major character on her funeral if most people didn't knew Chloe? Even if some of them knew her, why would people like Victoria or Kate be in the funeral?

If Chloe got crippled from the timeline where her father was saved, why didn't Max go back in time again in that timeline to prevent Chloe to get crippled? If she saved Chloe's father then Max could keep trying until Chloe was safe as well. Why isn't also no presence of chaos theory on that timeline?

Why is there a limit for how far Max can get back in time without needing a photo? Why can she even go back in time without looking at a photo? (I know, I know, it's a game, but there's no explained internal rules on the story)

What decides how long can Max stay in the past when she's traveling through a photography?

Why does Max have to do all those things at the dinner to prove to Chloe that she can move through time? There's way more effective ways.

Why does no one notice changes in the objects Max uses while going back and forward through time? (i.e., At Chloe's home, Max can eat the breakfast, leaving half of the plate empty, and then rewind time making Chloe's mom give Max a plate with half eaten food)

AND WHY THE F*CK NO ONE NOTICED MAX WARPING FROM ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER?

Example: person X is talking to Max and Max goes talk with person Y afterwards. Then Max rewinds time to when person X is talking to Max but since Max doesn't move back to her original place, for person X Max just disappeared and for person Y Max just warped out of nowhere. It's proven by the narrative that Max can warp through time, as seen in sequences where things fall on her.

This is just a few questions I have, sorry if some are difficult to understand, I'll try to explain better if you don't understand some.

I have more questions regarding earlier episodes but after the last episode I can't even think correctly about earlier stuff.

Sooo yeah.

Sorry that I'm not going to go through this one by one but I'm afraid for a lot of your questions there simply isn't an answer. Answering those big "hard sci-fi" questions seems like something LiS never intended.

All the weird, timey-wimey magic stuff is really just a backdrop for character drama. Maybe there'll be a season 2 that dives into that stuff but I honestly think that's very unlikely. The gaps are just there and you have to fill them with whatever makes the most sense to you, or just say fuck it and enjoy the game for what it is, plotholes and all.

Because the ending is bad and rushed.

I answered a fair bit of your questions right there!

The answers to most of your questions is we were not given them/ they don't even exist.

A lot of your questions come from the sacrifice Chloe option which is just terrible mechanically and I go in exhaustive details why in the episode 5 spoiler thread if you want to look up those posts. The Chloe ending is the the way it is because it completes the original theme and the narrative of the game screw how it doesn't work in actual narrative of the story where they wrote themselves into a hole where it just doesn't work. Chloe needs to die to complete the lesson of the story and nothing else matters.

The bigger narrative was supposed to be you are a girl who keeps leaving her past behind her including the most important person in your life and you wasted all your chances through your inaction. A point hammered in when you let your best friend get shot in the bathroom. The ghost of Rachel Amber (the doe) give you her time powers (it was implied she had them and probably had to die to stop chaos) so that you could have the time with your mutual best friend that she had. But ultimately still had failed to save Chloe originally and all you can do is live with that fact and carry on as a now active participant of your life because you now know how high the stakes are.

Some of your other questions can be answered by the explanation in the game of the headaches and hallucination indicated that Max was nearing the end of her rope on how much she could keep using her power.

The Max/Chloe relationship thing you are having is the fact that Max is a predefined character that you are playing. Despite the options of romance with Warren. It is pretty clearly indicated by Max upfront they she has no romantic interest in him at all. As for her preferences all we really got was that she liked skater boys. Chloe is basically a female skater boy. So outside the gender romantically she is up her alley. The kiss option was basically the game's trigger warning of are you ok with girls kissing.

As for why the romance angle wasn't played with until the end. On Max's end her diary makes it kind of a thing throughout. The main issue was that Chloe was hung up on Rachel who she was clearly in love with. She would not allow your relationship to advance until she got resolution with Rachel. The only time she had that resolution was in the final hours.

Here I go because why not?

• They survived because they were in the right place at the right time. The tornado formed just off the shore and was heading directly to town, not the lighthouse where they were standing. Max's photos were burned and Warren had the other one but was trapped at the diner, there was no way for Max to use her powers to go back and try to warn the people in town.
• Not sure what you're asking. Do you mean why does the town look the same in the save Chloe ending as it does when Max is trying to make it to the diner to get the photo from Warren? Probably resources. Didn't want to spend all that time designing a more destroyed version of the city for a 30-second scene at the end of the game. The key point is that the city is fucked.
• Because tornadoes disappear. It's a tornado, not a magical force. Chaos theory is just about imperceptibly small events potentially having colossal consequences, in this case saving Chloe's life causing the town to be hit by a tornado. It's not a curse that is going to follow her around. It's not the universe trying to right some cosmic wrong. It's just that somehow, some way, Chloe being alive caused a series of small changes that cascaded into the formation of a tornado. Who knows what effect Kate living or dying may or may not have on the future. It could literally be anything. That's chaos theory.
• Warren is a huge sci-fi nerd, and huge sci-fi nerds have a lot of exposure to different forms of time-travel and chaos theory. Like, if this happened to me where I or someone I knew got Max's powers, I would be able to formulate an opinion on what was going on pretty damn quickly.
• Yep, basically a wild guess.
• Yeah but also she didn't die. Like, that's a lot of terrible shit happened and I'm sure Chloe spent/will spend a ton of time agonizing over it, but at the end of the day she thought she might die and she didn't die. No matter how much other bad shit happened, that's something you can forgive someone for feeling happy about.
• Chaos theory craziness isn't craziness because everything that happens is chaos theory. There are tons of things that will or won't happen whether or not Chloe lives or dies, it just so happens that her living caused the most blatantly obvious example of a fucking tornado. Think of all the tiny things that had to have happened throughout the world in order for your dad to meet your mom at just the right time and happen to impregnate her in a way that just happened to make you and all the things that caused you to grow up to be the person that you are who played Life Is Strange at this time and happened to post this thread and I just happened to exist with a similar series of unlikely events and just so happened to feel like answering your incredibly long post. "Boom, butterfly effect." But it's not a crazy tornado, it's something you wouldn't even think about which is what 99.9% of the shit Chloe living or dying would be.
• Dunno, no explanation for where her powers came from.
• More chaos theory. It's unclear why her destroying the photo would have had that change but it did.
• He burned them because the second time he found her entry for the contest that she had destroyed and it angered him. Remember, for all his creepy sociopathness at his core everything he did was for his art. He admired Max's gift as well so to see her squander it in such an aggressive manner pushed his buttons in all the right ways.
• She didn't have to. You could have done none of that outside of dealing with Chloe, so the real question is why did you have to have certain conversations and do certain actions if you knew you were going to change the timeline anyway? Probably because we're all human.
• Well, above all else, it's a game. There's a limit to how many different diverging paths they could afford to write/develop/program for. Also, there's something to be said with a clear either-or choice that leaves very little ambiguity for the player to have to contend with.
• The entire end of the game Max is dealing with incredibly limited options of where and when she can jump, with her powers taking more and more of a toll on her. Even if she wanted to do something like that, she never had the time to figure something like that out let alone the opportunity.
• It doesn't. It can be a romance or not depending on the choices you made. You chose to have them kiss.
• It's more to show the player how much is changing. Also I don't actually remember but were there photos where clearly no one could have taken them?
• She died at their school. She died at the hands of one of their friends. She died because of the influence of one of their teachers. She was the BFF of one of their classmates. Any of these reasons could have chaos theoried their way into attending the funeral together.
• Chloe getting crippled is the result of chaos theory. Her dad not dying set of a series of events resulting in Chloe getting crippled. This is the first time Max gets smacked real hard by the effects of her powers and is scared of what else she might change so she decides to put things back the way they were rather than try mucking around any more and potentially making things even worse.
• Who knows how her powers work? Those are the limitations because those are the limitations. The why doesn't matter.
• Not important.
• Because she had barely just got her powers and probably just went with the first thing to pop into her head. Do you always take the time to consider the most efficient option in everything you do?
• No idea about the food thing. That seems weird because if she went back in time the food should become uneaten.
• Just a thing they didn't want to have to write/program for probably. Too many variables.

Hope this helps. Feel free to ask anything else and I'll do my best to answer.

@starvinggamer: That was a fantastic breakdown, helped me work through some issues I had with the story as well.

I believe that might be the real answer.

Max has no powers.

Its like a gun. When you pull the trigger of a gun, a spring mechanism hammers a metal firing pin into the back end of the bullet, igniting the small explosive charge in the primer. The primer then ignites the propellant that expands gas to push the bullet out.

Max is not the bullets. Max is not the gun. Max just has the ability to pull the trigger. As to WHY nature, the time lords, God, or Satan gave her that ability to make these choices is not information we can know. Because that power is not hers it is not under her control to keep or use after that final choice

The final choice is final. An the choice is go back or not. And it is not to change anything that happened after the penultimate change.

A) Go back and let Chloe die. Thus the rip in time/space/reality never occurs, so the storm never occur. Max lets Chloe die, David Madson after being tipped off nabs Jefferson, and must of the week is spent trying to fix the wounds of her fellow students before Chloe's funeral.

B) Max allows all the choices of her penultimate rewind stand "as is" knowing the storm will come. Maybe Max and Chloe get some people to prepare for the storm; but some people will die and people lose everything because they don't heed the warnings o two girls. The morning after the storm, rather than stay and watch people rebuild for that horror, the two girls go off in a melancholy mood...maybe take that road trip down the coast.