#Dontnod Entertainment

[asm5129]

So I’m coming back to this post with a clearer head.

Look, I’ve…I’ve just experienced so much toxicity and gatekeeping in this fandom, seen so many posts talking about how none of the games after the first one are “real” life is strange, so much obsession with these white girls and disdain for the other stories told in this world that are more diverse and have just as much love poured into making them.

I kept telling people, Max and Chloe’s story was over. Life is Strange is an anthology series. And I got harassed for it, laughed at for enjoying BtS and TC and ESPECIALLY LiS2.

People praising Don’t Nod to shit on Deck Nine really got under my skin too because I’ve seen so much unwarranted hostility towards LiS2, which was Don’t Nod.

It felt like people were just ignoring that hostility towards LiS2 so that they could feel better about shitting on D9.

I know that I lumped a lot of people in together with some of the worst people who call themselves fans of LiS. There are people with legitimate criticisms of DE that aren’t the toxic gatekeepers I’ve encountered or the people harassing the devs.

But I’ve seen enough people normalizing the idea that the LiS narrative team at deck nine just have a personal hatred for Pricefield and Chloe specifically. And that’s just gonna empower those inclined to harass the devs, even if you’re not one of them.

That is a myth.

Objectively speaking, it doesn’t even make any sense.

Before the Storm, for all its canon inconsistencies, tells a *really* good Chloe story

The idea that Felice Khuan (staff writer on Before the Storm and now the narrative director for Deck Nine) and a majority queer narrative team would not understand ahead of time how a lot of this would be recieved feels genuinely strange, as does the idea that a majority queer narrative team would have a collective hatred for a pioneering queer couple.

I think they were handed the mandate for a Max game, and the narrative team genuinely tried to tell a meaningful story about Max in the aftermath of the first game.

And I think Square Enix was very hands-on with the creative direction of the story.

I have a lot of faith in the narrative team.

But I have significantly less faith in deck nine or square Enix management, and one thing in that IGN expose was that Square Enix is apparently very hands-on with the scripts.

DE—and I say this as someone who genuinely liked a lot of it— reeks of the narrative team desperately trying to tell a meaningful story with a lot of interference.

And obviously this is all speculation of course, but it makes so much more sense than the team behind True Colors taking such a significant step backwards from the quality of that game.

And it’s a far more likely reality than that the narrative team somehow hates Pricefield stans so much that they made an entire video game with complex branching paths just to piss them off and make some easy cash.

Anyways. I apologize to those I lumped in with the worst so-called “fans”.

But I hope this gets y’all to think a little harder about LiS discourse.

I’m playing the new life is strange game and apparently people are pissed at how it handles following up the original because OF COURSE THEY ARE.

The first game has two endings, one where Chloe survives and one where she dies.

Officially, neither is the “canon” ending, that’s been made repeatedly clear since the original game released.

But a bunch of people keep demanding more of the Max and Chloe story. It doesn’t matter that they’ve gotten comics about it and a prequel, they still want more. They don’t want to let Life is Strange be an anthology series.

So here, Max is back as the protagonist. But guess what? Chloe isn’t a main character.

Because she fucking DIED in one of the endings, and both are canon.

So even if you choose to play in the timeline where she survived, they had to write her out or they would have had to develop two different games, one with Chloe and one without.

So instead they made it an interesting character issue. Max is stuck in the past, in the trauma of the events of the first game while Chloe wants to move forward.

It was never going to be Max and Chloe living happily ever after. It couldn’t be.

That’s not an interesting game, and it flies in the face of the ending of the original.

This game is in many ways rooted in Max dealing with that trauma and like…that’s an interesting story.

But you’re mad because the story you wanted isn’t the story they made, even though that was literally never going to happen.

The LiS fandom is shitty sometimes

Very gatekeep-y

There’s a sort of notion that there’s only one way for a Life is Strange game to be Life is Strange, but the people that buy into that don’t seem to realize that their criteria is literally just the game that already exists.

[diazmaximoff]

Saw this on Twitter and tbh, I can't detect any lies🤷🏾‍♂️

[petrichora-art]

was (finally) able to save her in my second playthrough 🐰 heres a doodle to celebrate

wanted to try replicating the blocky painting style I love so much in the game

[ignacia-redhead-vampire]

I bet you do.

All the inconsistencies with the writing

The character assassination

Being too cowardly to say Max is a lesbian despite "writing her as one" (tbf this could be a Squeenix issue)

This tweet just reads as patronizing a side of the fanbase that is reasonably upset with their favorite characters getting assassinated

I'm aware the full game isn't out yet, so who knows maybe the game is good, but no matter how good it is

It can't avoid the stain it has on it

Especially with some.of the potential leaks I've seen

Anyway fuck decknine

Buy Dontnods new game 🙏

[welldonekhushi]

if you see me sleeping with these two men, don't be surprised 🩷

[jennysparksandtheauthority]

The fallacy of realism in Life is Strange Double Exposure. Another more or less analytic rant :)

Okay. I lied. This is the real LAST commentary about Deck Nine's fiasco. Or maybe not.

ANYWAY. I'm reading a lot of discourse of how it's realistic that Max and Chloe would break up.

Even the devs have been on Twitter saying the most basic stuff you've heard a thousand times before:

As someone who’s been in a loving, committed relationship for more than a decade (and we met in our early 20s), that shit MAKES NO SENSE FOR PRICEFIELD. Move forward? Yes. Absolutely. But you can move forward with another person. Moving forward doesn't have to mean leaving your partner behind, and certainly not for these two.

Max and Chloe didn’t create a “trauma bond”. People seem to forget they were childhood best friends. They went through trauma together. There’s a difference.

Each time my wife and I went through devastating shit (cause life is a bitch sometimes), I leaned on her, we carried each other. We went through rough days, of course, we fought sometimes, but we grew together. I fell more in love with her seeing her taking decisions, reacting to me, dealing with her own shit, taking care of me when I didn’t have the energy to take care of myself as I would take care of her when the roles were reversed.

Sure, some relationships don’t survive when they go through bad times.

But Max and Chloe? These two literary broke space and time for each other.

Characters have to be profoundly CHANGED at the end of stories for them to be meaningful, for stories to move us. This has been established since we began to tell stories around campfires thousands of years ago. It's been engraved in conventional storytelling even way before Aristotle gave it a name in his Poetics.

At the end of the BAE romantic path, Chloe was ready to die for Max, and for a whole town of people who mostly despised her. She had changed profoundly. She had understood the meaning of love and loyalty and devotion, because Max showed her.

Max was ready to face the consequences of choosing Chloe. She had changed too. She had understood that loving Chloe made her better, braver, determined, that the past was in the past and that she couldn’t keep rewinding. That she had to accept herself, fight back, take ownership of her destiny.

When they left Arcadia Bay they were both devastated, but ready to fight for each other and move on. The Chloe that gave Max that reassuring touch and that loving look at the end of the game would NEVER, under no circumstances, break up with Max by letter saying all kinds of mean shit. This destroys both their characters' arcs from LIS1. It's an unsuccessful, poorly camouflaged reboot.

Maybe if the break up was presented differently it wouldn’t have enraged so many people. Maybe. We’ll never know. I’d still argue that having a path where Chloe is dead, the decision to break them up was absolutely unnecessary. But to have made that decision, and to justify the OOC behavior and the outcome of their relationship by saying “it’s realistic” (some people have taken the devs' discourse to heart) is just ridiculous and dissapointing, and just straight out unprofessional. This kind of revisionism and lack of understanding of the themes and motivations of the first game is truly baffling, so much so it’s hard for me to believe how NO ONE at Deck Nine or Square Enix with some level of responsibility and proper education in media stopped the madness.

Writers choose what to include in a story, meaning they bear responsibility for the narrative choices they make, regardless of whether those choices are realistic. Fiction is an inherently constructed art form. Authors decide what to include, exclude, emphasize, or downplay. Using “realism” as a justification can be seen as a way to avoid responsibility for narrative decisions, especially when those decisions are unpopular or ethically troubling.

This is writing 101, and I can’t believe a supposedly professional game dev studio is acting like children writing their first fics on Wattpad and falling into the realistic fallacy.

In “The Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde famously argued that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” suggesting that art should not be constrained by realism. Another example is the philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes, who in “The Death of the Author,” argued that the meaning of a text is not determined solely by the author’s intentions, thus challenging the notion that invoking realism absolves a writer of their choices.

They CHOSE to break them up.

They chose to villainize Chloe, the canonically queer, fan-favorite character that was at the heart of the story along with Max. Together.

Crying realism doesn’t make it any less senseless, knowing damn well they knew how it would affect people.

So, Deck Nine, Square Enix: please take some fucking responsibility.

BONUS (Michel Koch ❤️):

[lenorenevermore99]

You guys know that I love Max Caulfield to the moon and back. She's one of my favorite characters not only in the Life is Strange series, but of all time.

But I think this game was a really, really bad idea.

I've seen most people think it's set after the sacrifice Chloe ending, others think since there are two timelines, there is one for each ending. And even if that was true, there is still one main timeline. And it that timeline, one of the endings has to be canonized.

Unless they make you choose at the beginning like they did with LiS 2, but I honestly don't know how that will work in this game, because in LiS 2 it was a matter of a small cameo, in this it's the whole freaking game.

And if the game actually does canonize one of the endings, that is one big problem.

It's gonna ruin the first game.

Canonizing one ending, either one, will invalidate the player's choice. It will take away the player's choice, which was the basis, the ESSENCE of Life is Strange as a game.

This wasn't what Dontnod had originally envisioned. This is why I hate the fact that Deck Nine took over Life is Strange. Dontnod had said Chloe and Max's story was over, and I really think it was for the best. That story should've been left alone, but deck nine keeps milking it because people are unable to let go.

[krysto-art]

Pricefield forever.

Another reason I refuse to touch Deck Nine's attempts at Life is Strange.

[louniey]

I’ll never get over life is strange. It’s like it’s weaved into my brain down my spine and will forever keep the core of my body intact. (I LOVE LIFE IS STRANGE)

Anyways are the books of lis any good? I’ve heard about the comics but what about those official (?) “blackhell” books?

[c4llahansgirl]

casual

pairings - sean diaz x reader

cw - blood brothers ending sean but a bit before the events of the ending, high sex, verrry slight munch sean, he whimpers ‼️, p in v, theyre situationship ish type situation, sean calls reader mama and ma, unprotected sex

a/n - def meant to make sean more pathetic and in love but oh welllll (also do u guys think they were knee deep in the passenger seat??? and he was eating her out???? do u guys think it was casual then????)

the joint hit your lips, smoke filling your lungs as you inhaled. sean’s eyes locked on yours, his hand rested just above your ass. you inhale the smoke into your lungs, then lean down, breathing the excess smoke into sean’s slightly parted lips. he inhales the smoke, breathing out the rest into the air. you giggle, pressing a kiss to his lips.

he pushes his hips up to bump against yours, his growing arousal touching yours sending shivers down your spine. a sigh escapes from his lips as they curl into a smirk. he reaches his hand up and drags your bottom lip down with his thumb, his eyebrows knitting together.

“so fuckin’ beautiful, y’know that?” his head cocks to the side, a soft groan pushing past his lips when you roll your hips against his. you take another drag before leaning down and pressing kisses to his lips, letting smoke flow out of your mouth as you do. he smiles, grabbing hold of your hips and flipping you two over. he positions himself between your legs, grabbing the joint from your hand. he takes a hit, letting the smoke flow out before inhaling it back in. his free hand falls, haphazardly unbuttoning your jeans. he hands off the joint to you, kissing you again as he slips your pants off.

you two were a “casual” hookup. he’d only been in mexico a few years and you were only supposed to be visiting for a few weeks. he wasn’t ready to be dating and you weren’t ready to be a one night stand with some random guy in another country. it didn’t stay just casual, you two never spoke about it ever evolving but you both knew the second you extended your visit. sean at least couldn’t stay casual, not when you looked so gorgeous with your eyes red and your lips pink and glossy.

his hand dipped past your panties, groaning once his middle finger hit your sopping arousal. he smiles, letting out a chuckle.

“all for me? huh?” he says, dragging a finger up your folds. you push his arm, rolling your eyes at his stupid, dopey smile.

he leans down, laying on his stomach as he wraps his arms around your thighs, laying his hands on your stomach. he slides your panties up and off your legs, kissing down to your clit. he sighs, smiling as he licks up from your hole to the hood of your pussy. a moan erupts from his throat, a small and breathy ‘fuck’ vibrating against your clit. he sloppily and slowly laps up your cunt, two fingers slowly falling down to curl against the gummy spot hidden in the back of your pussy. he whines as you clench around his fingers, sean seemingly getting fed up with something.

he presses another kiss to your clit, sitting back up and unzipping his pants. his hard and heavy erection practically spills out, aching and begging for some sort of release. he watches as you take another drag, pressing kisses to your neck as his tip pushes against your wetness.

your bodies were like magnets. you both ached for each other and when you finally got to feel each other, skin on skin it was like your bodies completely understood the other. you both always knew exactly how and where you needed the other, if sean was feeling some type of way so were you and vise versa. there was never any questions between you two it was always the case of knowing exactly the others thoughts.

his noises sounded tired, low in your ear as he slowly pushed in, almost like the was scared he’d hurt you. he always knew he wasn’t going to hurt you, you took everything he gave you like a champ, and he knew exactly what would please you.

he sighs, pulling out then thrusting back in. he set a slow pace, the soft and spaced out slaps of your hips slamming together filled the room along with your soft moans. he whined in your ear, hands finding their way into yours and interlocking your fingers. you pressed kisses to his shoulder, gasping as his pace picked up slightly.

he pushed himself up from his resting position in the crook of your neck, smiling down at you. he admired you, much like he did constantly, as he took long drags in and out of your sopping pussy. the joint was long forgotten by now, resting in the ashtray next to his bed. he watched your expressions, how they changed, how you reacted to certain things, and especially how you admired him back.

his hands left yours to pull your legs over his shoulders, leaning back down to kiss you. the new angle gave him more control, and gave you more pleasure. he watched your eyebrows furrow and your mouth fall agape as he sped up, chasing his climax. soft gasps and loud claps filled the room and bounced off the walls and your cries got louder as your hand gripped his arm for support.

“sean.. baby-“ he nods, pressing a kiss to your forehead as a lazy thumb presses circles into your clit.

“c’mon ma, cum for me” sean encourages you and your eyes roll back, back arching up off the bed slightly. you whine and whimper, gasping as sean reaches his own high. he stills inside you with a loud whine, thick and hot ropes spilling inside your walls. you both pant, catching your breath as you come back to reality. you two lock eyes, giggling with another smiley kiss. he kisses down your face, kissing up your jaw and nibbling on your ear gently.

“thank you mama,” he starts, kissing your neck. he mumbles and babbles, but lets a small “love you baby” escape past,

[sorrywh]

Discussions about Max and Chloe's breakup, along with sentiments like "this is disrespectful to fans" and "my Pricefield can't be like this," are bound to persist. It's clear that many fans are frustrated, and while I understand and share the love for Chloe, the overwhelming focus on her is excessive. I am concerned that it will overshadow the actual discussions about Double Exposure itself (the game's characters, their relationships, possible discussions about the development of events). From the outside (to those who could potentially become a part of the fandom), it could seem that in Life Is Strange, only sapphic relationships matter. As sad as it may be, this is further confirmed by the absence of any accompanying materials (books, comics) for LIS2, while True Colors has two (mutually exclusive!!!) sequels that focus solely on the female love interest—one in the form of a book, the other in the form of a comic.

Besides that, Life Is Strange as a franchise has never been limited to a single timeline. The comic Forget-Me-Not took as its basis the timeline with Rachel alive and living together with Chloe. The book Steph's Story directly stated that it's based on the events of bae over bay ending. There is even a whole six-volume comic series concluding its story with Max and Chloe's happily ever after and the restoration of Arcadia Bay, while in Life Is Strange 2, the town destroyed by the tornado remains a mere ghost town.

I don't see that supporters of the sapphic love line have a lack of content—there's space for Pricefield, Amberprice and Chenrich, and I don't see a problem with Deck Nine taking a completely different direction in the development of the characters' relationships.

We just have to wait for this discourse to quiet down, and for discussions about the game itself to become much more prominent. I want to see Life Is Strange as it was 9 years ago - full of discussions, theories, whodunnit guesses, symbolism explanations, and longreads connecting the dots. I've been a fan since the release of the first episode of the first season, and I'm grateful that the franchise is still alive and that new content is still being released.

[tiredlakes]

[obi-wokenobi]

Life is Strange creator, Michel Koch, has had his patience tested on Twitter by some fans...

This toxic reply motivated Mr. Koch to say something that raised some eyebrows:

He was not being serious, tho:

Toxic fans need to chill out, g'damn!

[northernstar9]

In a relationship with max caulfield (fluff, SFW)

At first, she's very shy and too scared to initiate anything ex: cuddles, kisses. slowly she became very comfortable around you and would always want to cuddle and kiss you. GETS VERY FLUSTERED.

She liked you for a while but was too scared to say anything in fear of rejection, but one day she built up the courage and confessed to you. it was VERY awkward and she blushing a lot. she so giddy and happy when you accepted her confession, wrote about it in her dairy, ranted to chloe, warren, ecctttt

Often plays the guitar for you. claims her skills are poor but ends up coming up with a stunning melodic piece to express her love as much as she can since words do her no justice.

Takes photos of you religiously and hangs them up on her wall even has you has her lock screen. LOVES to take silly cute pictures of the both of you. Takes gorgeous pictures of you without noticing.

Loves to sit next to you on quiet nights gazing at the stars while listening to music

Constantly rants your ear off with photography facts and all her geeky interest (you find it extremely interesting and adorable) shows you all the pictures she took while wandering around and can't wait to share the idea behind every single one of them.

Loves to have movie nights every single friday cuddle up with you and watch her favorite movies or series.

hand crafts many gifts for you sits down and patiently does everything even though she isn't very good at it.

extremely introverted. whenever you guys go out she stays close and turns off her brain since she trusts you. OR you turn off your brain and she guides you around like a lost puppy...depending on the day of the week ig...hehehe

LOVES to play indie games often gets you to join her and grind terraria on weekends

Adores having long conversations with you and always loves to hear your opinions

Amazing listener and great communicator

Treasures every single moment with you . Somehow a professional baker. Bakes mouth-watering treats and doesn't allow you to touch anything only wash the dishes.

Whenever you have a stressful day she gives you endless cuddles and kisses and makes sure you feel better. gives you your space if needed but checks up on you and is super clingy and touchy

Breakfast in bed

Loves to cook with you and try out new food from different cultures

Lies down next to you on the bed and aimlessly scrolls through her feed complaining to you whenever she falls for ragebait or when she sees something mind bogglingly stupid.

Messages you throughout the day updating you about every single small detail happening in her life.

Whenever it's cold she cuddles close to u burring her face into your neck

thats it!! i have more in my mind but for now im done. THIS IS my first ever post if you liked it say so and drop some requests about other characters (they dont have to be from LIS i am involved in loads of fandoms) thank you for reading lovely people

[hackerwrench]

[welldonekhushi]

when your enemy mixes garlic in the blood vial you just drank —

having a damn art spree is crazy, bro