Life is Strange Chapters 4 & 5: The Villain is Patriarchy [TW]

Okay, folks. So before I start, this post is CHOCK FULL of spoilers for Life is Strange. Episode 5, the final episode, has been out since last October, so I figured that now would be a good time to finish playing and write about the experience, but if you haven’t finished Life is Strange yet, or if you haven’t played it but intend to, I’m going to emphatically recommend not reading this until after you’ve played it. Normally I’m pretty spoiler-agnostic, but the twist at the end of Chapter 4 is one of the most genuinely surprising and unsettling twists I’ve encountered in a game and I would really hate to ruin that for anyone invested in playing.

Also, it’s important to note that this post comes with a trigger warning for descriptions of unsettling depictions of gendered violence, harassment, and graphic rape metaphors.

So, now that that’s been said…

Here there are only spoilers for Chapters 1-3:

I’ve written about Life is Strange previously; last year I binged Chapters 1-3 in rapid succession and wrote about the experience here. What drew me into the series was the complex portrayal of a wide variety of female characters – all of whom have complex motivations and characterizations, and the explicit centering of women’s stories.

What I came to appreciate after playing the first three chapters, however, was how the writers very purposefully led the audience through a narrative that builds a very clear picture of the lived emotional reality of being a woman who has to live in a patriarchal society and the awful choices that can happen as a result. Further, while a lot of media can include depictions of online harassment or sexual violence in the name of being “topical” or “edgy”, the developers at DONTNOD impressively manage to make both harassment and sexual violence central plot points in such a way that doesn’t cheapen the narrative or demean the characters who suffer from this violence. The gendered nature of both the harassment and the sexual violence is made very clear, and while the player is given a choice in how to respond when stories of violence are recounted, choosing to respond in ways that blame the victim results in having those responses thrown back at you in ways that highlight the injustice and horror of blaming women for their own victimization.

Importantly, as the player begins to uncover more detail about the strange and terrible things happening at Blackwell, a situation is set up where all of the possible villains are men with status and power. At the end of Chapter 3, Max finds herself in an office with all of them as she is being pressured to point fingers and assign blame.

And each of the men is, in his own way, a different toxic manifestation of internalized male privilege:

• David Madsen, the chief of Blackwell security, is the male representative of authority who takes it upon himself to govern the women around him in the name of law and order.
• Nathan Prescott is the platonic ideal of violent toxic masculinity, who threatens violence freely against women who get in his way and who serially drugs and sexually victimizes women without ever showing remorse for his actions.
• Principal Wells is the institutional authority who recognizes Nathan for the violent sociopath he is, and yet continues to cover up his actions to protect both the institution he serves and to materially benefit himself and his personal finances, allowing Nathan free reign to continue victimizing women as he sees fit.
• And Mark Jefferson, the enlightened mentor figure who has so many positive things to say about encouraging women to step forward and take risks, is the disappointing ally – the man who you thought Got It until he revealed the extent of his internalized misogyny by blaming Kate Marsh for what happened to her and escalating an already untenable situation.

All of this is left implicit, however, in the first three chapters. In Chapter 4, however…

Commence spoilers for Chapters 4 and 5!

Chapter 4 is when the gloves come off, when the developers make it explicitly clear that HEY – IN CASE YOU HADN’T NOTICED, THE VILLAIN IS PATRIARCHY.

First, there is Nathan. If you choose to blame Nathan for what happened to Kate Marsh, he continues to escalate his sexist abuse – which began as just calling Max things like “dyke” and “bitch”, but graduates to “feminazi” in Chapter 4 – a slur that you hear a few times from this point on. Perhaps the most chilling of which is when you receive an “anonymous” text from what you already know to be Nathan’s phone saying only “feminazis will be exterminated”.

Chapter 4 is also when Nathan is revealed for the entitled, misogynistic monster that he is – an unapologetic sexual predator who is a danger to any woman around him. Through Max and Chloe’s investigation, it becomes clear that Nathan is, if not a serial rapist, then definitely someone who has serially sexually assaulted women – there is the video of him with a drugged Kate Marsh, in which he encourages people to take advantage of someone too drugged to consent to sexual activity. There is also Chloe’s story of Nathan’s attempt to drug her with similar intent. Both of these events actually occur after Nathan killed and secretly buried Rachel Amber, resulting in her disappearance two months before the events of the game take place.

[Sidebar: Relative to Nathan, for all the fact that he is an unstable, paranoid, borderline psychotic sexual predator, I actually really appreciate what happens if you attempt to warn Victoria to stay away from Nathan during the Vortex Club party in Chapter 4. Victoria reacts with disbelief and anger, accusing Max of saying that Nathan is dangerous out of jealousy or other personal motivations. She defends Nathan as being her best friend, and that she couldn’t possibly believe that he could be both her best friend and a predator to be avoided.

Which. Oof. This was such a powerful and true-to-life portrayal of conversations that actually happen – the danger that keeps women from attempting to warn other women about “missing stairs“, because there is always the risk that your warnings will not only not be received, but that you will be punished socially for it.]

But Nathan, as it turns out isn’t the real villain after all. The villain behind Rachel Amber’s disappearance, the drugging of Kate Marsh, and the whole sordid mess going on at Blackwell turns out not to be David Madsen – who has been established up to this point as a creepy, borderline domestic-abusing, teenage-fetishizing weirdo, or Principal Wells – who has explicitly used his institutional authority to protect a sexual predator. In what is one of the most genuinely shocking and upsetting twists I have ever encountered in a video game, it turns out to be Mr. Jefferson – the trusted authority and mentor figure who up until the reveal at the end of Chapter 4 has been an entirely sympathetic character.

[TW: If you want to skip discussion of rape metaphor, skip to where I tag the end of the trigger warning]

The reveal of Mr. Jefferson at the end of Chapter 4 is harrowing, but the opening of Chapter 5 takes that horror to an entirely new level when Max wakes up in a secret bunker that she discovers with Chloe in Chapter 4, but had assumed to be Nathan’s, as it is on old property belonging to Nathan’s family. Jefferson has drugged Max, just as he did with Kate, so that he can photograph her while unconscious – without that inconvenient free will and personhood that would only screw up his photographs.

The dialogue that he gives while photographing Max, as he enthuses about how pure, beautiful, and “innocent” she is in her unconscious/semiconscious state, is chilling, as is the rage that he shows when Max – who is groggy as she wakes up from the drugs – attempts to move and “ruins” his shots. It is at this point that Mark Jefferson becomes the literal embodiment of patriarchy.

The way that he crouches over Max as he photographs her, at times even straddling her for the sake of a shot… Let’s just say that obvious rape metaphor is obvious. The camera angles that the developer chooses, the ways in which Jefferson defines the space around Max and physically moves her in the space, the things that he says as he is waxing rhapsodic about her special qualities — it a horrifying violation.

The level of remove that the writers provide by writing the scene as “obvious rape metaphor is obvious”, however, is deftly done in that it evokes feelings of terror and threat without being a portrayal that would be triggering for most survivors with trauma surrounding real-life assault. But critically, it also provides an additional layer of critical commentary about the attitudes about women that make Jefferson’s monstrous behavior possible.

[/Trigger warning]

Just to leave some space after the next session, have a picture of a baby rabbit in a coffee mug.

Mark Jefferson LITERALLY objectifies women for the purposes of subjecting them to his male gaze. By drugging women he finds sexually appealing, he turns them into objects incapable of asserting their agency or desires, so that he can photograph them the way that HE WANTS TO SEE THEM.

The level of meta-narrative happening is deafening, even as it manages to do what I have literally never seen any other video game do – tell a story about sexual violence against women in ways that centers the survivor of that violence, without being done in such a way that it comes across as being done for easy “shock” value or to make the story “edgy”.

That, in and of itself, is an impressive achievement in game writing. As is the scene where David rescues Max from Jefferson, or rather, assists Max in rescuing herself, and the conversation that follows – in which it becomes clear that David has been trying to be an ally all along, although he has been going about it in the dumbest, most wrong-headed fashion possible. And he acknowledges his failings without flinching from the fact that he failed, and that he acted in ways that were inappropriate, and would need to try make amends for his behavior.

But the nail in the coffin, the final layer of “HEY, BTW, THE VILLAIN IS TOTES PATRIARCHY” is the nightmare level where all of Max’s cumulative changes warp reality and trap her in a combination of alternate dimensions that she has to find her way out of. As reality continues falling apart around her, Max finds herself trapped in a maze in which all of the major male characters become villains – monsters that she has to hide from in order to survive. That in itself is unnerving, but the things that the men shout out as they patrol, looking for Max, hammers home the gendered nature of the threat they represent.

Nathan hurls gendered insults like “feminazi” and promises violence when he finds Max. Principal Wells makes threats about how he will use his power to punish Max, blaming her for everything that has happened. David similarly hurls insults and promises retribution. And Jefferson maintains the level of imminent threat by trying to convince her of the merits of his artistic vision, even as he says some truly vile things like, “Max, Rachel not only gave great headshots, she gave great head”. Just as frightening, however, is the fact that men who are actual allies also stalk the maze. Frank – who can become either an ally or an enemy in Chapter 4 (I made him an ally), is there – blaming Max for what happened to Rachel and promising retribution. Samuel, who is only ever gentle and kind, is there too. And Warren, who is only ever sweet and earnest and eager to help Max stand up to Nathan, alternately pleads for and demands Max’s attention.

In the end, Max escapes and what leads her back to reality and sanity are her memories of Chloe and the moments of real happiness and female companionship that they’ve shared in the last week – which is what makes the final choice at the end so agonizing. But for all that I sobbed my way through the ending after choosing to sacrifice Chloe, that wasn’t the part that has been sticking with me since finishing the game.

I keep finding myself on the power and resonance of the nightmare maze, because I have never played a game that so accurately reflected the experiences that I have had since starting my blog that have led to me being afraid of men as a class of human being. Despite the fact that some of my closest, deepest, most intimate ties are with men, spaces that are heavily marked as male are spaces that I am not able to feel safe in. And this game, THIS FUCKING GAME, made by (from what I have been able to gather) a team of mostly-white-dudes, is the first time in my whole goddamn life that I have seen a game FUCKING NAIL my emotional truth.

Which, you know, given that I’ve been playing video games since I was about 6, it’s about fucking time.

On female protagonists and the cowardice of AAA publishers

While it’s clear that there is still a long way to go in terms of evening the playing field as far as representation of women in AAA gaming is concerned, undeniably things are (slowly) getting better. Recently I’ve written about female representation in games previewed at E3, as well as the amazing and rich focus on women’s stories in Life is Strange – so there is tangible evidence that things are indeed changing! Unfortunately, one thing that really isn’t helping is the, sadly still quite prevalent, myth that female protagonists are bad for sales.

You see, despite women now accounting for half of video gamers and the clear majority of all consumer purchases, AAA Game studios are terrified of female-led titles, because marketing to the 18-34 white cishet dude is how it’s always been done. And much like Hollywood, big-budget games have such large budgets that the big studios are reluctant to try anything “new” that might stray outside of their already-proven sales formulas – even if that “something new” is making games that star protagonists that look like half the people on the goddamn planet.

There are developers out there who are bucking the trend and managing to get female-led games published. But the resistance that they face in finding AAA publishers who are willing to publish and distribute these games can be… formidable. Things may be changing, but that change can fairly be described as glacial, and there are still a lot of publishers out there who prefer to make their money the way it’s always been done. (Read: by not publishing games with women in them)

So on the rare occasion that there is a development studio working on a game that features female protagonists, all too often what they hear from the publishers they attempt to court is that they need to make the protagonists male. Take, for example, Dontnod Entertainment – the developers behind both Remember Me and Life is Strange. Both titles were conceived of as stories with female protagonists from the beginning:

LEFT: Niln, Remember Me RIGHT: Max and Chloe, Life is Strange

Predictably, when Dontnod started approaching developers about both of these games, the very first response was “looks great, but you need to make the protagonists male”. Because, of course, men are relateable and universal while women are weird with only limited niche appeal.

Seriously! Check this out:

When Dontnod started showing Remember Me to publishers, some of them refused to publish the title simply because people would playing as a woman in it, and because that could reduce the game’s sales potential.

“We had some [companies] that said, ‘Well, we don’t want to publish it because that’s not going to succeed. You can’t have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that,'” said Moris.

–Source: Polygon – Remember Me dev says publishers balked at a female lead character

But wait! It gets even more damning than that, as witnessed by this quote here:

“We wanted to be able to tease on Nilin’s private life, and that means for instance, at one point, we wanted a scene where she was kissing a guy. We had people tell us, ‘You can’t make a dude like the player kiss another dude in the game, that’s going to feel awkward.'”

— Source: Eurogamer – Why Publishers Refuse Games Such as Remember Me

Thankfully, things seemed to go a little better for Dontnod while they were shopping around for a publisher for Life is Strange, in that nobody said anything quite as boneheaded. (Or at least, nobody said anything that Dontnod quoted.) Still, Squeenix was pretty much the only one willing to run with a story about two teenage girls for Life is Strange:

“Square is basically the only publisher that didn’t want to change a single thing about the game,” Dontnod co-founder Jean-Maxime “J-Max” Moris says in the video. “We had other publishers telling us ‘Make it a male lead character,’ and Square didn’t even question that once.”

–Source: Kotaku – Publishers Wanted to Change Life is Strange’s Protagonists Into Men

Which, okay. I’ll admit that I’ve been deeply, deeply disappointed by the increasingly misogynistic visual design of Squeenix’s single-player Final Fantasy titles. However, as awful as Squeenix’s character design has gotten in Final Fantasy, the writing for their female characters has always been top notch[1]! So it does make a certain amount of sense that it would be Squeenix that would wind up publishing Life is Strange.

However, it’s also worth noting that this was also well after the runaway success of The Last of Us – Naughty Dog’s survival horror game about a grizzled man and a young girl on a harrowing mission in the fungus-zombie apocalypse. While Joel was the primary protagonist of TLoU, the story was about both Joel and Ellie. Furthermore, Ellie is actually playable for a large chunk of the game, and repeatedly saves Joel’s life.

The Last of Us totally killed in terms of sales numbers. In the first week alone, The Last of Us sold 1.3 million  copies! Perhaps because Naughty Dog is an established studio with a proven track record of franchise-spawning hits, they didn’t face pressure to remove Ellie from the game (although the cynic in me says that’s because she was the secondary protagonist, and thus not a threat to Joel’s primacy). However, they did wind up fighting a lesser version of that same pernicious battle, as their publisher made efforts to get them to remove Ellie from the cover art, or at the very least push her to the back of the box:

During the making of The Last of Us, developer Naughty Dog “flat-out refused” to move Ellie — one of this title’s two central characters — to the back of the game’s cover art, during discussions over whether female-led game covers sell fewer units, creative director Neil Druckmann told VG247.

— Source: Polygon – The Last of Us developer refused to push female lead to back of cover

Thankfully Naughty Dog stuck to their guns, because AAA gaming has more than enough cover art featuring grizzled white dudes looking grimly into the middle distance, thank you very much.

The same could not be said of Irrational Games, who caved to pressure to push Elizabeth, the protagonist’s companion and partner, to the back of the box. Worse, the cover art itself was one of the blandest renditions of “white dude with firearm in front of explosions” that I have ever seen grace the cover of a video game.

Subsquently, when there was a flap over Elizabeth’s exclusion, Ken Levine – Bioshock Infinite’s creative director – gave the most weak sauce explanation of why they HAD to make their cover so bland.

Our gaming world, we sometimes forget, is so important to us, but… there are plenty of products that I buy that I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about. My salad dressing. If there’s a new salad dressing coming out, I would have no idea. I use salad dressing; I don’t read Salad Dressing Weekly. I don’t care who makes it, I don’t know any of the personalities in the salad dressing business.

— Source: Wired – Ken Levine Explains Bioshock Infinite’s Bland Box Art

Their hands were tied! Honest! There’s just no way that they could ever have made a business case for putting a fucking woman on the cover of a game that she features prominently in! Because reasons! Salad dressing reasons!

(I’m sure there are more examples of this sort of shenanigans that I’m not aware of, given that I don’t tend to closely follow the politics of game development in the AAA industry, but going further would be beating a dead horse.)

So now we have a landscape in which games like The Last of Us and Life is Strange (which cracked the top five Playstation games in February of this year) have started to blaze a trail towards AAA publishers finally pulling their heads out of their asses and realizing that yes people will still pay to play games starring women. And yet, the studios smart enough to actually start moving in this “bold” and “new” direction are engaging in so much whinging about how MAKING GAMES ABOUT WOMEN IS HARD AND REALLY SCARY YOU GUYS that it’s enough to make me want to punch someone.

Case in point: just about everything I read coming out of E3 about Sony’s upcoming title Horizon Zero Dawn featured Sony execs simultaneously trying to sell the game on its merits while also fearfully apologizing for having the temerity to make a game with a female lead. Frex:

“She’s a female lead character,” he said. “That has always been the vision by the team, but we had a discussion. Is it risky to do a female character?”

In fact, once development was underway, so many questions were asked about the protagonist internally, that the company brought in a marketing team to do some focus testing.

“The concern came after the game was in development,” he said. “We started to show it to many more people internally and they had questions about it. So we worked with our marketing groups to do this focus testing.

“We wanted to see how people would react to some of the things: open world RPG, the set up of machine versus primitive weapons and the female protagonist. All of those things.”

— Source: Sony was worried about a female protagonist in Killzone dev’s new IP

“We’re just… we’re just so worried. I mean, we have this great concept for a killer game with entertaining game play, and we have an obscene budget for graphics, but we’re just worried that no one will buy it because cooties. So, you know, we did lots of focus groups and they all told us that cooties aren’t a thing, but that doesn’t square with our industry experience that gamers won’t buy games with women because they don’t want cooties. After extensive research, we’re pressing forward, but we just want to say that we’re really, really nervous about cooties.”

OH MY GOD JUST SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UUUUUUP.

Look , you’re making a game about a wildling woman fighting robot dinosaurs in the post-apocalypse. THAT’S AMAZING. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

If you’re going to publish games about women, just fucking do it and spare me the hand-wringing apologies, because honestly – this level of cowardice is pretty hard to stomach when all we’re talking about is making games that happen to star a fucking woman.

Okay? Okay. Now get out there and make me some more games with female protagonists, pronto. I’m all caught up on Life is Strange and I’m jonesing for more games like that, please.

[1] With the notable exception of Lightning Returns, which was garbage.

 

Life is Strange and the importance of womens’ stories

[Concerning spoilers: Before I get started, this post does contain spoilers. I have written as broadly as I can about certain plot points to avoid ruining the story, but a certain level of specificity is required. Only episode 1 is spoiled in any great detail. If you’re looking to avoid spoilers, I’ll mark the point in the post past which you’ll want to stop reading.]

(spoiler-free) reflections on the “relateable-ness[1]” of women’s stories

I spent a large portion of my free time last week catching up on Life Is Strange, the breathtakingly amazing adventure game/RPG by Dontnod studios about a high school senior who discovers that she can rewind time by about two minutes and her subsequent, increasingly weird, adventures as she attempts to solve the mystery of a missing student while also averting a vision of a disastrous future.

If that description doesn’t sound appealing, then let me add that I hate adventure games and make a point of avoiding them at all costs. But I have loved LiS episodes 1-3 and am eagerly awaiting the next installment! The writing is compelling – I cried at the end of episode 2 and damn near cried at the end of episode 3. It also feels very true-to-life; certainly Max’s (the protagonist) experiences as she awkwardly attempts to navigate the treacherous social waters of her school felt very true to my experiences as an outsider at my own high school.

So given the enjoyable gameplay, the well-crafted writing, and the fact that playing Life is Strange gave me ALL OF THE FEELS, you’d think that I’d be willing to shout its praise from the rooftops, right?

But when a male friend asked if he should give it a try, once I’d played through the first few hours of episode 1, I found myself stymied as to how to answer; the friend in question didn’t have the experience of being a teenage girl, for one, and that shared experience with the protagonist is part of what made the game so compelling for me. Not to mention that Life is Strange is a game that is primarily about the stories of women and girls, and “naturally” wouldn’t be as compelling or relateable to a male audience. So I wound up giving an equivocal answer, something along the lines of “I’m enjoying it but I don’t know how you’d like it”.

It was only later when I was discussing it with my husband that I caught myself making the same disclaimers and realized that that whole line of reasoning was absolutely full of shit.

The coming-of-age story is so ridiculously common that it has become a cornerstone of the modern literary and film canon. And while it’s true that there are a few examples where coming-of-age stories feature a female protagonist, the genre is largely defined by its male protagonists. But if I, as someone who has never been a teenage boy or had any experience of trying to navigate the social pressures of assuming a restrictive cultural definition of manhood, can be capable of consuming male coming-of-age stories and finding them (the well-crafted ones, at any rate) engaging, then why shouldn’t the opposite be true?

Books like Catcher in the Rye are considered to classics, books that truly educated people should have read. However, had Holden Caulfield been a girl, it’s most likely that Catcher in the Rye would be consigned to “young adult” or “girl’s” literature status, along with Judy Blume and any number of talented authors who wrote about girls’ experiences of being a teenager.

This is because in our patriarchal society, men are the default. Their stories are “universal” “accessible” “relateable” and “important”. Conversely, women are specific, atypical, unrelateable, and unimportant. And yet, even knowing all of that, my initial gut reaction when I was asked “should I play this” by a friend who is a man was “well I like it but it might not be to your taste”. Which was dumb, since Life is Strange is one of the most powerful, important games that I have ever played – something more than just another murder simulator that I devoutly hope that represents a new direction for AAA game studios like Squeenix.

past this point, there be spoilers

So what makes Life is Strange so important, you might ask? Well, gentle reader, LiS is unlike any game I have played before, for a number of reasons.

First, it is full of complex female characters. There are strong characters, passive characters, antagonist characters, and vulnerable characters. More importantly, all of the major female characters are complex enough that they can fill different roles at different times.

There are characters, like Victoria Chase and her lackies, who are undisputed villains, but they are never presented as villains because of their gender. It’s a tricky balance to strike, given that the actions that make them villains are very stereotypical teenage girl cruelty, but Victoria and her gang are given motivations that go beyond simply “girls are all enemies”. (It helps that Victoria does also get some small moments of sympathy, when the player is allowed to see behind the mask.)

There are also female characters with whom you form strong bonds of love and respect: Chloe and Joyce (Chloe’s mother), but also Kate to a lesser extent (if you choose to help her). Particularly with Chloe and Joyce, while these relationships have troubled aspects, they are also painted as enduring – which is refreshing, given how depressingly common “cat fight” is  as a default relationship for female characters in ANY medium.

Second, LiS takes a serious look at the lives and relationships of teenage girls without trivializing or infantalizing them. Because of how we’ve been conditioned to see the struggles of teenage girls navigating a path to adulthood as unimportant, it’s easy to look at a game like LiS and see nothing but “teenage drama”. Thankfully, the writers do an amazing job of looking at the emotional consequences of that “drama” and how that pain causes people to feel and react.

Third, LiS deals explicitly with bullying and the realities of online harassment – and it doesn’t do so in a way that feels preachy or out of touch. Kate Marsh, one of the secondary characters, starts out as a target of bullying, which later escalates to online harassment. The LiS writers also do a good job of portraying how often the systems of power that are supposed to intervene and keep us (women) safe from harassment wind up further victimizing the women who attempt to access help. And as someone who has experienced both bullying in school and online harassment, I can attest that some of the interactions dealing with Kate were uncomfortably close to home.

Depending on the choices that you make, Max herself can also become a target of online harassment. The messages you receive are unnerving and arrive at unpredictable intervals, which is also true to life. It’s strange and upsetting to be in the middle of going about your business only to have these terrible messages intrude on what you were trying to do:

 

Fourth, LiS portrays sexism as a reality of navigating the world as a woman without ever shying away from the terrible emotional damage that that reality creates. One of the primary villains, Nathan Prescott, is a villain because he is rich and entitled – with that sense of entitlement extending to the bodies of the young women around him.

David, the security chief of Max’s school and Chloe’s stepfather, is also a villain and cautionary tale. He, a grown-ass adult, develops a weird and creepy obsession with a series of teenage girls (one of which is Max), and yet you as the protagonist have to be careful in dealing with him because of the power that he holds over your life. Later, if you choose to hide the first time Chloe butts heads with David, Chloe actually gets slapped by her stepfather but says nothing to anyone, saying that it just would have been worse if you’d tried to step in. And further down the line, if you choose to side with two other female characters in confronting him about his creepy and inappropriate behavior, he throws it back in your face by saying “bitches always stick together”.

And then there are the male authority figures and how they deal with the aftermath of Kate’s bullying coming to a dramatic head at the end of episode 2. It turns out that Mr. Jefferson, a teacher who is portrayed in very sympathetic terms, tried to talk to Kate about the online abuse, only to then blame her for her own victimization. David, who you already know to be a creep, is there in his official capacity. And then there is Nathan, a student, and Principal Wells – who has already proven that he is too invested in the Prescott’s money to take any serious action against Nathan, despite his key role in the matter.

Max, as the protagonist, finds herself the lone woman in an office full of powerful men who are demanding that she tell the truth about what happened, while also clearly conveying the subtext that doing so is clearly against Max’s own best interests. Which is some powerful shit, right there.

Lastly, and most importantly, LiS deals with sexual violence openly and honestly, without trivializing it or excusing it.

One of the key plot points is that young women are getting drugged at parties and being taken advantage of. As a protagonist, you must decide how to react on two separate occasions when two very different women tell you very similar stories of being drugged and possibly assaulted. Do you believe the women and offer support and backup? Or do you keep your distance by engaging in victim blaming? Moreover, the reaction if you do engage in victim blaming is emotionally wrenching and deeply shaming, which is as it should be!

Critically, LiS also avoids perpetrating the common (harmful) “wisdom” about sexual assault by having these attacks come from someone that is known to the victims. Because unfortunately, that is the reality of sexual assault; overwhelmingly women are attacked by people that they know and have reason to trust; evil-stranger-in-the-bushes assaults do exist, but are very rare. Neither do the writers flinch from showing how there are systems and institutions created by class and money (like school and the police) that protect serial predators from the consequences of their actions, so that they can be free to keep assaulting.

And yet, as difficult as these things are to deal with emotionally when presented in such hard-hitting terms, these factors all make me very happy that this game exists. Because THIS GAME. THIS GAME is the sort of thing that I have been wishing major studios like Squeenix would start publishing. Apart from its own merits as an artistic work, playing Life is Strange made me feel like there was actually a part of the gaming industry that was listening, that gave a shit about me as a human being. Finally, finally, it feels like someone is reflecting myself (or a younger version of myself) and my experiences, and that feeling is amazing.

[1] Yes that is too a word. Shut up, spell check.