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I love your blog and I was so shocked to learn I'm a year older than you! I didn't have any friends who were into Life is Strange when I was younger, but it's really cool to know that there were other kids like me who really latched onto the franchise and still have love for it even as ancient 20-somethings. Happy birthday!

Thank you for the (on time when you sent it but now late because I'm slow af answering asks) birthday wishes!

From personal experience, I've noticed a lot of people in this fandom are in their twenties. Everyone I've talked to has been in the age range of 20 to 29, and I've seen a few people say in their bios that they're older than that. 

LIS is such an "old" game (almost ten years old!) that many people still interested in the fandom are people who first played the game as a teen (like me!) and never fully escaped it. I see new fans occasionally, but most of the time, it seems like the people in this fandom have been familiar with the franchise for a while. 

It's actually really sweet that a bunch of us are people who latched onto the game years ago and never let go. We're really stuck in a time loop of our own creation.

#life is strange #lis #personalnotesappmain #mod rambles

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Fun things about turning 21: I am now the oldest I’ve ever been, therefore beating my previous record of 20.

Bad things about turning 21: I am now older than 85% of the characters I loved as a teenager, which makes me feel like I should be screaming at unruly youths to get off my lawn.

#mod rambles #logged into Tumblr thought “Man I can’t believe I’m older than Max and Chloe I remember playing the game for the first time and wishing I #“was as old as them #and now I’m logging out of Tumblr before I start getting grey hairs

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(So the entire point of this post is the screenshot with the lighthouse in it, but then the lighthouse didn't show up super well in the screenshot, so I highlighted it with a red pen tool.)

It's insane of the LIS franchise to have the lighthouse in the back of the scene where Max and Chloe reunite, and you could see this visual choice in a lot of different ways!

A: There are technical reasons for this choice. Maybe the devs wanted us to get a glimpse of where exactly the lighthouse was located, or maybe it just looked good in the background. However, even though both of those reasons are likely, we're going to discard them completely for the moment because this is a meta blog where we over think things.

B: The lighthouse in the back is used as a subtle visual hint that Chloe and the lighthouse will be intertwined throughout the story. It's not a big stretch when you think about how much LIS relies on visual story telling. We see things like the scattered graffiti that foreshadows the games later events, and the pictures Mark Jefferson have up around campus are all in black and white with the theme of innocence lost. There are a lot of visual clues in this game if you're looking, so that's why I think this is a possibility.

C: It's to show that the lighthouse is always lingering in the back of Max and Chloe's story. They can't escape it, just as they can't escape Chloe's fate until they go to the lighthouse and Max makes her final choice. I think this is pretty likely actually because at the start of Episode 1 Max can find a picture of the lighthouse and make the comment "You can never escape the lighthouse here," and no, she can't Not when her determination and Chloe's fate is chasing them there.

I never noticed the lighthouse in this scene until my latest playthrough, but it's certainly interesting visual framing.

#life is strange #lis #chloe price

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Wait your town got hit by a tornado? Elaborate??

Yep, my town was hit by a high end EF2 tornado during an outbreak. It's a really long story, so I'll do my best to tell it in bullet points.

A: It was late when I got the warning. I wasn't that worried at first because I live in the South where we get warnings every five minutes. B: Then the warning got upgraded to "confirmed large tornado on the ground," and I got very worried very quickly. C: Then the lights cut out because the tornado took out the power lines, and at this point I was making peace with death. D: Me and my family took cover, which was hard because my cats thought it was a game and kept pouncing on our heads. F: My house wasn't hit, so the warning got called off. For a brief moment we hoped the tornado had lifted before it hit anything more than the power lines, then we started hearing more sirens then I've heard in my entire life, and we assumed that wasn't the case. We were unfortunately right.

Thankfully, no one died or was seriously injured, and my house was missed entirely, but the entire thing still feels like a bizarre fever dream. It's hard to put into words what it feels like to go down a road in your hometown, and see snapped trees and debris where houses are supposed to be. Left the majority of people here with some form of storm anxiety as well.

On a more positive note, it was nice to see how much my community came together to help each other. Everyone in town who wasn't hit railed around the people that were by donating literally whatever they had that could be helpful. Our local church (they were in charge of the fundraiser,) even stopped taking donations because of the overwhelming number that were received! The tornado was awful, but it was nice to see the light of community after the darkness of the storm. That stands out in mind just as much, if not more, than the destruction does.

#mod rambles #asks

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Surprised I haven’t seen anyone talk about how Max is probably terrified of storms now-

I think she would be too, at the very least in the initial aftermath of the storm! However, one of my more angsty headcanons is that Max and Chloe suffer from storm anxiety long after the events of Arcadia Bay.

For Max, it comes in the form of overthinking. The rumble of thunder in the distance always makes her wonder if the past is chasing her. Depending on which ending she's gone through, she has two different concerns. If she's sacrificed Chloe, then she worries that her best friend's death will be for nothing, and the town will be wiped out, with no way for her to go back to the cliffs.

If she's sacrificed the town, she worries she could be a harbinger of death and chaos wherever she goes. All it it takes is a little rain for her to question if the universe is still angry about it's unpaid price.

Chloe tries to be the steady one for Max's sake, but she has a lot of problems with storms as well. She's always checking the SCP for weather updates and pays close attention to any odd weather phenomena near them. Storms are also hard for her emotionally. It's hard not to feel the rain on her skin and be taken right back to the lighthouse. It's hard not to hear the roar of lighting and know it was one of the final things Joyce heard. It's hard not to hear people talk about the crazy weather in their town and think about her town that no longer exists.

It's hard for me to think Max and Chloe wouldn't come out of Arcadia without some level of storm anxiety, especially because we see the severe effect the storm had on people more distant from it, like Steph. And as someone who's had personal experience with her town being hit by a tornado…yeah, that sticks with you. But! It's nothing that can't be recovered from, and I'm sure Max and Chloe will in the long term.

#life is strange #lis #asks #chloe price #max caulfield

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This aspect of the Amberprice relationship fascinates me so much because how much did Rachel hide, and how much did Chloe refuse to see? 

Did Rachel put on a sweet smile and lie that she was heading home when she was really going to hang out with friends that Chloe wouldn’t like? Or did Rachel tell the truth knowing that Chloe would make up a narrative in her head? Did Rachel admit to hanging out with characters that Chloe wouldn’t like, only to be met with the thought process of: “Well, she would never really enjoy hanging out with those people. She probably just wants her photo taken.” 

The game very much says that both are true, but we don’t have the finer details.  For example: Chloe says that Rachel lied to her about Frank, though we don’t know what the lie was or the maginitude of the lie. Did Rachel tell Chloe that she wasn’t romantically involved with Frank and she was crazy for even thinking so? Or did Rachel say that she was “just” flirting with him, and Chloe downplayed what that meant because she couldn’t face the idea that Rachel was moving on without her? 

It’s so interesting to think about because we only see Chloe’s side of the story. She feels like Rachel deceived her, and we know that’s true because of the junkyard letter where Rachel blatantly says that she’s keeping her “romance” with Mark a secret. However, I do sometimes wonder how much Chloe refused to see what was right in front of her, especially because her first reaction to Rachel and Frank was to go into denial and justify it to herself. 

This is one aspect of Amberprice I think about all the time because, while Rachel clearly wasn’t a 100% honest person, Chloe was clearly turning a blind eye to things as well. I think “How much did Rachel lie about, and how much was obvious but Chloe either downplayed or chose not to pay attention to?” is a genuine question because the answer majorly changes things about their dynamic. Personally, I imagine it as a bit of a 50/50 split, but that answer isn’t set in stone. 

#I'm thinking about comic Rachel casually telling Chloe that she's going to see Frank and having a lot of thoughts about it #Rachel Amber #Chloe Price #LIS #life is strange #before the storm

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Which is The better sequel to Life is Strange in your opinion? Life is Strange 2 or True Colors?

I think True Colors is the better sequal. Which game is better overall is a different question, but I think True Colors feels more of a follow up to the original LIS.

LIS 2 is known for is taking everything about the first game and changing it. No more consistant locations. No more consistant cast outside of Sean and Daniel. No more power system that can be controlled, etc.

Whether these changes are a good or bad thing is up to you, but I feel like LIS 2 is a very diffrent game than LIS 1. Meanwhile, TC feels more connected to what the first LIS was. There's the small town setting, familar cast of cast of characters, huge focus on music and the soundtrack, you can control the powers, and there's more of a focus on romance.

Either games works as a sequal because we get a follow up on Chloe or Arcadia Bay. In LIS 2 we learn more about how the main cast from the first game is doing these days. In TC, Steph's Story, we get to learn the overall impact the storm or Chloe's death had on the side characters. So both are direct sequals, but I feel like TC has more of a similar vibe to the first LIS.

#life is strange #lis #lis 2 #life is strange 2 #life is strange true colors #asks #lis tc

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What are your thoughts on the twist that Mark Jefferson was the one behind everything? Did you see it coming or did it shock you? (love reading your Life is Strange analysis btw :))

I wasn't shocked that Nathan wasn't the only culprit, but I was shocked that the second culprit was Mark Jefferson.

I first played LIS when I was 12ish, and I didn't have good media literacy skills then. For me to fully grasp something a character needed to look directly into the camera and go "The action I am taking is good/bad. This is because I am a good/bad person. Just so we're clear." So no. I did not suspect Mark for a second because he acted like a good teacher and I trusted that at face value.

However, I did know something about media thanks to the power of autism pattern recognition. It was that if a media is pointing to a guy and screaming "He totally did this," then it's never that simple.

I thought Nathan was a red herring, and there was going to be big bad reveal. My first and very incorrect thought was that Rachel was maybe working with Nathan and nobody could find her because she was hiding out at the dark room. That doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it for more than ten seconds, but I was 12. My second and more logical thought was that Sean Prescott was going to make an appearance in Episode 5 and be the big bad, which wasn't that bad of a theory, actually.

So I knew SOMETHING was up, but I didn't think about Mark's character for more than a millisecond. I actually think he's kind of interesting in that regard, though, because I know a lot of people, including myself, who were dumbfounded by the reveal. However, on a second playthrough, it becomes really obvious if you're looking more critically at his character. He's a big "in hindsight" character and I think his writing is really impressive in that regard.

#lis #life is strange #asks #mark jefferson

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Thoughts on the alternate universe Victoria Chase? I get that she seems nicer than the prime version of her, but I have to wonder how much of that is her identifying Max as a future photography great and trying to kiss up to her early on.

I think the way Victoria behaves in the alternative timeline is a confirmation of what Taylor says in the main timeline.

Taylor says that, despite her bossiness, Victoria is a good friend. She was the only one there for her when her Mom had surgery, and Taylor clearly appreciates it. At this point in the game, it's hard to imagine Victoria being a good friend because we've mostly seen her nasty interactions with Kate or her frenemy interactions with Max. I think that's why the alternative timeline expands her character to show that she's more than one thing. She's not just a bully; she's capable of being a good friend too.

I think alternative universe Victoria is a glimpse of the friend that Taylor knows. It makes sense Max would see this side of her on this timeline because the game states multiple times that the only reason Max and Victoria aren't friends is because of jealousy on both sides and Victoria's nasty attitude toward people like Kate.

The trait Victoria envies most about Max is how little she cares about what other people think. However, an argument could be made that if alt Max was trying to cozy up with the Vortex Club, she probably cared more about the school's social hierarchy than main Max did. That might mean that Victoria was less threatened by Max because she was conforming with the popular kids instead of doing her own thing. It's also implied that alt Max is mean (it's revealed through texts that she's thrown things at Alyssa) and she might not have cared as much, or at all, about how Victoria treated Kate.

So that's what I think is going on with alt Victoria. She's the friend Taylor has, but Max never really gets to see. Though the other interpretations that Victoria is sucking up to Max because she's higher on the hiercery are super interesting too!

#lis #life is strange #max caulfield #victoria chase #jaydude1992 #asks

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Forgive me Father, for I have sinned. (I accidentally clicked the wrong button on a Tumblr poll and incorrectly skewed the results.)

#mod rambles #tumblr polls

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what pokemon do you think max and chloe would be? iyw you can also assign any other characters pokemon :>

I will never not overcomplicated an ask by adding more characters then needed. /hj

Max - Deerling

Chloe - Butterfree

Rachel - Sawsbuck

Kate - Buneary

Sean - Lycanroc

Daniel - Rockruff

Alex - Mesprit

Steph - Rapidash

Ryan - Gogoat

#lis #life is strange #max caulfield #chloe price #rachel amber #kate marsh #Sean Diaz #Daniel Diaz #alex chen #steph gringrich #ryan lucan #lis 2 #life is strange 2 #true colors #asks #maxthesillyy

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Max Caulfield is an unreliable narrator. The game provides many examples of Max saying/thinking something that isn't particularly true, such as Max swearing up and down that she's a loner who might as well be invisible to her classmates.

We see a lot of evidence to dispute this idea. While she might not have as many friends as someone like Dana does, she's only been at Blackwell for a month, and she's already made three friends. We see in texts that Max and Kate have gotten tea together a few times, and it's implied that she hangs out with Warren during science class. She also seems to friends with Dana, though we get less details about that relationship.

Most of her other classmates know who she is as well. They address her by name, and most of them speak to her like this isn't their first conversation. They may not know her well, sure, but Max a has only been at Blackwell a month. The fact that so many people are familiar with her show that she's not nearly as much of an invisible loner as she thinks she is.

There's a few other things that back this up: A: Max has 81 friends on her social media profile. That's a pretty big number. B: Max has made an arch enemy in Victoria after only being at school for a few weeks. C: She's left an impression on Stella and Taylor even though it's said that she's never really spoke to either of them before the events of the game.

Max is an unreliable narrator. She's a good example someone who has a perspective of themselves that necessarily translate into reality, and she's also a good example that we're often much harsher on ourselves than other people are. She thinks no notices her, but most of Blackwell seem to think of her fondly. It's a good reminder that people don't get themselves from a 3rd person view, and if we did, there's a good chance a lot of the negative perceptions we have about ourselves would look differently in another light.

#life is strange #lis #max caulfield

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Do you think Joyce ever suspected Chloe's sexuality when Chloe and Rachel were always hanging out? Would she have said anything or just silently support Chloe if she did know? Or was she too fixated on David to bother noticing?

There's no in game confirmation about whether Joyce knows if Chloe is queer or not. However, I think Joyce at minimum suspected it between Chloe's "friendship" with Rachel taking up a lot of her time...and...well...the pictures of boobs she had up in her room were also probably a pretty good indicator that something not straight was going on.

Going into headcanon territory, I don't think Joyce knew for sure sure because she had never had that talk with Chloe. The reasons being:

A: At the point when Chloe realized her feelings her Rachel, her relationship with Joyce was on the decline. I could see her not talking about her queerness simply because it seemed easier to hide. B: Chloe's relationship with Rachel was complicated. It doesn't seem like they were together...but they also weren't not together. I can see Chloe not wanting to try and explain that situation to Joyce. C: I think Joyce was too fixated on other things to really focus in on Chloe's queerness. I think she realized what was going on, but at the end of the day, she was far more concerned about David/bills/work than Chloe's romantic life.

However, despite the fact that they never had that talk, she still knew. She noticed how much time Chloe spent with Rachel. She noticed how she talked about her. She noticed when Chloe stopped bringing bad boys around and replaced their presence with Rachel's. She noticed how Rachel and Chloe always sat just a little too close together when they swung by the dinner for breakfast.

So I think she knew, but she was never told. And that suited them both just fine. I also headcanon that Chloe knew that Joyce knew and appreciated how she just accepted it instead of turning it into a thing. I also also headcanon that Joyce isn't homophobic in the slightest, and would be thrilled to hear about her relationship with Rachel/Max if Chloe ever came to her with that information. The reason she was never told was because of their rocky relationship, not because she would have reacted badly.

#lis #life is strange #asks #chloe price #Joyce Price

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The final choice in LIS is so strongly written.

I save Chloe every single time, and yet, I always hesitate when that prompt pops up.

I know what choice I'll make and what choice I'll make Max live with. However, there's always a second where I hope they'll be some other way out. Some other choice that doesn't cause any pain or destruction.

The main theme of the game is "living with the choices you've made," and yet, you're still have one final moment to hope that there's another way. Just like Max, you are forced to take a deep breath and make your last choice. Just like Max, you the player have to accept that there's only two ways this can end.

And just like Max, you the player have to go about your day after your final choice, accepting that nothing you could have done would have changed anything. The ending was set in stone from the moment you heard the main menu music for the first time.

#life is strange #lis

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What do Rachel, Max and Chloe think of wearing dresses? Like if they absolutely had to wear one what color(s) would the dress be and how would it look?

Rachel - Rachel seems like they type of person who will wear anything as long as she looks good in it, so, yes, I think she'd wear a dress. I could see her wearing a lot of red, or green because the color would pair with her eyes. I think her go to style would be a club dress that would drop the jaw of anyone in the room.

Max - I honestly think Max is the least likely to wear a dress. She just strikes me as someone who's super uncomfortable wearing dresses, and she also strikes me as the kind of person who defaults into the🧍stance if she's ever forced to wear for an event. I think if she HAD to wear a dress she'd go for a loose fitting shirt dress in a pale pink or yellow color.

Chloe - I don't think Chloe is a dress person either. She's more of a "tuxedo t shirt" type of gal to me, though I do think she'd be slightly more comfortable in a dress then Max would be. I also think she'd be club dress girl, mainly because she wouldn't want to buy a dress to wear one time, and therefore would borrow one of Rachel's outfits.

#asks #chloe price #rachel amber #max caulfield

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Hyper fixations are all good and fun until you start feeling like a rabid dog that needs to be tranquilized.

#life is strange #lis #mod rambles

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Genuinely, I love Max and Victoria's dynamic.

They're such a good subversion from the "rich and mean popular girl bullies the shy, helpless, plain girl" trope. While Victoria is a mean girl, Max is far from a helpless victim of hers.

Max is pretty catty to Victoria from the start. Even if you're kind to her when she gets covered in paint, there will still be plenty of times when Max will make smart-ass comments regarding Vic.

However, internal dialogue isn't the only way Max can stand up to Victoria. She covers her in paint no matter what, and then can take a photo of her covered in said paint. Max can also rearrange the photos in her room to be a middle finger, break into her room repeatedly, and not warn her that her life is in imminent danger.

Max isn't a timid victim of Victoria. She's a strong person who stands on the same, or a higher, pedestal as Victoria. That makes their dynamic really interesting, as when Victoria says that she's jealous of Max in Episode 5, we believe her.

#lis #life is strange #max caulfield #victoria chase