Pricefield

You might have the very reasonable position that I, as a person, and a game critic, and, like, many other things, have a very negative opinion on Life Is Strange. This is possibly due to me referring to it in other times and places as, say, for example:

And I’m not wrong. Life Is Strange is a story where your two ultimate ends are either letting almost everyone you know die and then making you feel bad for doing it, or letting a young adult woman die in a hate crime because ‘she should.’ I have written many words about Life Is Strange and how mad I am at it, how I feel that it is Queer Art whose author is Not Queer, with a punitive end to a narrative that does not merit it unless you view enjoying being queer as a sin.

I hate Life Is Strange.

But hate is but love disappointed.

I wouldn’t hate Life Is Strange if I didn’t want it to be better than it is.

It’s very rare for me to see characters in media that I enjoy that I like. It’s even rarer when we’re talking about lesbian media, because no two ways about it, there’s a lot of stuff about lesbians that I don’t feel I share. Part of it is tied to some really protestant guilt which got potently admixtured with social justice culture: I am an invading man, entering lesbian spaces, and they are not here for me to consume with my eyes. I cannot understand The Lesbian, the Mysterious Beast She Is, and for me to dare to is to be an interloper, an intruder, the latest example of that problem that oppresses.

This is my damage, mind you, but there’s a lot of people who wielded the knife.

This means I largely look at lesbian media at arm’s reach, because, y’know, it’s, not for me and I need to walk through it like I’m taking a tour through a national park. Nothing but takes and footsteps, and to be respectful of this delicate media, for fear of criticising a Lesbians Thing. And to be fair, this is pretty easy by the fact most lesbian media that I’ve enjoyed has had something as central as ‘oh, well, isn’t that sweet.’ Plus, I tend to try and focus on things I do feel qualified to comment on, like whether or not a movie with lesbians would be improved if those lesbians could beat up Nazis or had some variety of battle truck or whatever.

Point is, that I’ve very much gotten used to, when a game is about liking or appreciating a pair of characters, accepting that I’m probably not going to, and just trying to understand those characters in terms of why someone who isn’t all mangled up like me might like them.

I really like Chloe Price and Max Caulfield. I like the weird-dumb literary reference in Max’s name that doesn’t apply at all to her story. I like Max’s want to be good at her schoolwork because she finds it legitimately engaging, and I like Chloe’s disinterest in same because nobody made that work engaging to her. I like that you get to spend enough time with these characters in a variety of different situations that you know a lot about how they do things, about what they care about. I like that they jump around between ideas, and conversations meander and get lost.

I also like that – in the context of this being a kind of superhero narrative – Max’s powers are primarily reactive while Chloe is primarily proactive. Chloe is the one who devises ways to use Max’s powers, the one who wants to explore them and work out what they mean. This is a great mix – a powerful character who needs guidance from a more clever, wily one, and a character who’s ambitious and reckless whose partner can save and catch them. That’s a great pairing for the kind of low-key superpower story they have, which hovers around the ‘detective mysteries’ level of things.

There’s definitely an element of these characters that feels naturally cagey. You can after all, play the game in a way that doesn’t try to push these characters towards being in a romantic relationship, and the game doesn’t suddenly represent a rift between them. That is a kind of comforting thing too – these two don’t have to be in a relationship to be each other’s deeply beloved best friends, and that can be nice for other takes on the characters as well. Essentially, playing the game does ask you if you want to ship these characters together, if you do perceive them as being an interesting relationship and encouraging you to step into it if you want the story to include that place.

(It does not deliver on that, at all, of course, but you know)

This is part of shipping: It is fundamentally, playful. It is about being given pieces that can interact, and asked how you think they interact. What aren’t we seeing, what fits in this space, what can work with what you know? What does need to change to get to the story you want? What doesn’t? Is your vision of this recognisable to other people? Do you need to invent a version of a character out of nothing to imagine that they work the way you want with another character? Or are you playing in a space that other people will recognise?

The game itself wants to present the idea that this shipping space, this hopeful story of cool characters who like each other and want to kiss one another while also having superpowers, is made at the expense of the entire town. This town features a secret society of rich assholes who abuse people for fun, Christian fundamentalists, abusive drug dealers, an actual fucking serial killer, paranoid preppers and economic desperation. There are some homeless people and dogs, so those people probably don’t deserve to die.

On the other hand, the story kinda presents this relationship – Chloe and Max – as a contrast point to all the alternative lives. It wants to make you feel bad for them… though I guess in the sequel they do make a point that there are survivors.

In the end, I don’t accept the proposition the game makes that the bay is worth saving, that Chloe should get hatecrimed so the rest of the town can remain the way it is and give her stepdad sad feelings. It’s even more hollow when you spend the whole game realising just how bad the town sucks and how you were attending classes with two serial killers and this town, much vaunted safe place of childhood you returned to, was fantastically unsafe, and just willing to digest these two.

So I don’t.

It’s a dumb ending, I don’t care what it says.

Now, I can’t go talking about shipping without some media related to it, right? Well as it happens, I actually do indulge in a kind of fan media about Pricefield, though it’s pretty weird. See, at some point in the past seven years since the game’s release, we got the rise of SFM porn, where people stripped models from the games to make animations of those characters doin’ things to each other, to their butts and whatnot.

Turns out though there’s also a bunch of people who use that technique to make really sweet wholesome sequences of the characters doing things like chatting over breakfast, or celebrating a house purchase, or hugging each other. I just go to GifyCat, and type in ‘Pricefield’ and see what people have made lately.

And it’s very sweet and usually very nice.

It can be challenging to be a fan of something made by ninnies, after all.