Saving Kate and Saving Myself in Life is Strange
I’m so sorry, Kate. I let us down.
More than enough has been said about Life is Strange, the episodic five-part adventure first released by Square Enix early last year. It combined a unique gameplay mechanism—the heroine Max’s ability to rewind time— with the concept of the Butterfly Effect to produce a game that questioned the uncertainty of the future and, ultimately, the futility of trying to change it. With this it challenged the triple A game mainstream both by rejecting the appeasement of objectives fulfilled and by denying its audience the satisfaction of a happy ending. For many, the game is devastating. I know few people who got through Chapter 2 without crying.
Perhaps the most hypnotically tempting promise of Life is Strange is the hint of control in a world otherwise out of the player’s hands. We’ve all been in difficult situations where we wonder what could have been if we’d had the chance to go back and change one key decision. Would it have helped anything? Or, as with Max and Chloe, the tornado that threatens to destroy the town, and that ultimate choice to save them or her, would it have ended up the same way anyway?
I grew up in a fundamentalist Christian household, the type you see on Trinity Broadcasting Network and Here Come The Duggars. While we didn’t belong to the Quiverfull movement, my father was a pastor at an Evangelical, Pentecostal church and my mother, a cold, troubled woman who militaristically applied her religious philosophy to every aspect of our lives, was plagued by a driving misery punctuated by her legalistic control. My two sisters and I were subject to constant emotional and sometimes physical abuse, confined to a rigid environment where a hypercritical level of vigilance and self-reliance became the only way to survive. Sometimes I don’t know how we did. Survive, that is.
When I first met Kate during Life is Strange, I didn’t come to recognize myself in her until the end of the second chapter. It’d been many years since my parents had first kicked me out of the home at 16. While my packs of birth control were the last straw for my parents, Kate instead maintains her conservativeness even as she is miles away from home at photography prep school. Her angelic image is shattered when Kate is drugged at a party and filmed behaving in promiscuous behavior, a digital-era horror that I was thankfully spared in the ‘90s.
It’s hard not to view the past with 20/20 vision. I think abused children do it more than most folks. Sometimes the only way to escape the horror of what was is to imagine what could have been, what you might have done if you’d only known how the pain and neglect would affect you later. Even though I spent most of my time as a kid suffering from a debilitating illness and taking care of my sisters, providing care and resources my parents could or would not, I still daydream about what I should have done. Maybe I could have been stronger. Maybe I could have confronted them. Maybe I could have convinced them that we were miserable and that something needed to change. Maybe I could have gotten them to care. I wish I could go back to a time where foreknowledge of the future would have helped me the most, to change everything so it didn’t end up the way it did. There’s a part of me that still blames the child I was for not making everything right.
The first time I tried to commit suicide, I was 14 and in San Francisco on a “mission trip.” The Foursquare sect of fundamentalist Christianity places heavy emphasis on evangelical outreach to non-Christian communities, and every summer I would head down to California for a few weeks of training before being sent out to impoverished cities and neighborhoods, most of which needed a good meal far more than they needed our sermons. Despite our suspect motivations, we did help some of the people we met, building houses and providing hot food. It was the most fulfilling experience I’d had in my young life up until that point, but I was still troubled, socially awkward, and utterly alone—the first time I’d longed for death was at age 8. That mission trip ended in a desperate attempt to silence my pain once and for all with a fistful of pills I’d stolen out of a counselor’s makeup bag.
It was a desperate cry for help—maybe I meant it, maybe I didn’t. Someone found me before they could take their full effect.
While Life is Strange centers mostly on the friendship and possible romance between lead characters Max and Chloe (and Max’s attempt to save Chloe from murder at the hands of fellow student Nathan Prescott), a second story underrunning the game centers on the harassment of Max’s classmate, Kate. Throughout the first two chapters of Life is Strange, the cruelty of the gossip on Max’s campus builds as word spreads of Kate’s taped exploits, the bullies of the school viciously descending on her drugged antics with glee. They openly enjoy her suffering, even as they’re aware it was not her fault.
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