my review on choices and ending of "life is strange"

 My thoughts on life are strange

 

After finishing Life is Strange 2, I decided to try the first one. Basically, it’s about Max who has the power to rewind time and such. She has a best friend Chloe who was shot by Nathan, which Max rewinds to save her and all the things that happened in the episodes. Then you’re left with two options at the end; sacrifice Chloe or sacrifice Arcadia Bay.

I understand people’s thoughts on why they chose to sacrifice Arcadia Bay; to define destiny for ourselves, to mean that all the things you’ve done mattered.

But I chose to sacrifice Chloe. Because people in general also mattered. It’s a trolley problem; should you sacrifice your one best friend who you went through everything to save and protect or save every one whom you helped and made things better for some if not many like saving Kate, being friendly instead of bullying and so on.

Here’s why I personally sacrificed Chloe for the people; to me, it’s not about destiny making the decision about Chloe’s death (She obviously had to die), but when I’ve done so much for people like Kate, Alyssia, and many others, I can’t imagine saying, “there, I helped you guys, now die!”

It’s not that I don’t value the adventures with Chloe or that I shouldn’t have to alter the course of things, nor does it mean I shouldn’t have to use my powers. But this is a very difficult choice, and neither is it a right or wrong choice. It’s really a matter of what we value and decide. When playing the ghost of Tsushima, I learned about the character Taka who dies at the hands of Khan. There’s no way you could save him and it had to happen to progress through the game sadly. I didn’t want to progress, but I decided to accept Taka’s death and progressed through the game.

To me, it’s about accepting that Chloe could die. We cannot alter what happened and even if we can, is it really worth it?

Don’t get me wrong, I would have loved to have the power to rewind time and do the same things Max did. But in the end, it really comes off as selfish and just trying to appease people rather than being yourself even when you say foolish things. It’s really more on them than you. You’re just not being yourself, you’re just trying to say what they want to hear. It’s like cheating on a test, you’re not learning, you’re just cheating.

I guess if anything, I would have used the power sparingly and not for the selfish reason of pleasing anybody. And probably not to spare people from death. But I guess that would have meant allowing Kate to take her life too as well. Or maybe because it was a suicide, it doesn’t have to be.

As for not allowing destiny to dictate my life or the lives around me, is it really dictating anything? When you went back in time to stop William, Chloe’s biological father, from dying, you ended up with Chloe being paralyzed from the neck down, in pain and the parents were swimming in debt just to pay medical bills! The way I see it, allowing William to die was the right choice. If I had been in the same situation as Chloe and someone altered my family’s timeline to save my dad from death but I ended up with paralysis, my family swimming in debt and I suffered in pain and feeling like a burden to them, I would not want that. I would rather accept my dad’s death than be in that situation.

It's also understandable to want to alter the past, but it also means not learning anything from it. Especially when Max altered the past, she was surprised at how different things were. Similar to Marty, in Back to the Future, discovers how different his life was when he changed the past. When you change the past, you don’t know what happened, you only know your current life. For all you know, you make your life worse than you thought. Could I have had a better life had I changed the time when I could have talked to my ex-husband instead of going no contact, which eventually led to his death? I have no idea. I’m not even sure I want to know. That’s the thing, as much as I wanted to, it could spell out worse things for us both and everything else. Accepting it is hard. I get it, no one wants to accept things that happened; whether it’s the loss of those we loved, the trauma we faced, or even mundane small stuff.