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Wanting a game thats main appeal is its story to have a good story: An unreasonable demand.
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Oct 27, 2015 11:06
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Fans posted:I liked SOMA's end because it made sense and was aptly foreshadowed the first time you switch bodies. It made complete sense in the rules they established with how copies work. Dude, the game brought up chaos theory and the butterfly effect tons, the outcomes of your meddling is questioned all the time, none of this was out of nowhere. Sorry your fanfic isn't canon.
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Oct 27, 2015 11:07
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wyoming posted:Dude, the game brought up chaos theory and the butterfly effect tons, the outcomes of your meddling is questioned all the time, none of this was out of nowhere. Sorry your fanfic isn't canon. The Butterfly effect and chaos theory are referenced yes. I missed how either of those means it makes sense for a vindictive Tornado to try kill a teen girl if you use time travel powers. The whole point of them is your actions can have unintended consequences. I guess an angry tornado is certainly that, but that doesn't mean it makes much sense. Helping Victoria means she ends up getting captured because of who she goes to for protection is a good example of the Butterfly Effect, or how rescuing Chloe's dad means Chloe ends up paralyzed, that was a really good one. Saving a girl summons a vengeful tornado is not. How does that make sense? Does blue hair cause Tornado's? Fans fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Oct 27, 2015 |
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Oct 27, 2015 11:11
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What's it like living in a world without symbolism?
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Oct 27, 2015 11:14
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Is it okay if I think the end is bad because it was boring and derivative? Just checking.
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Oct 27, 2015 11:16
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Please explain to me the symbolism of the Tornado and how it makes the narrative of a vengeful Tornado make sense.Sakurazuka posted:Is it okay if I think the end is bad because it was boring and derivative? I would have totally been fine with an ending that is the usual "It turns out you have to accept the past" if it had just been done in a way that wasn't so incredibly hamfisted. But if you find it boring sure! Fans fucked around with this message at 11:23 on Oct 27, 2015 |
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Oct 27, 2015 11:18
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Sakurazuka posted:Is it okay if I think the end is bad because it was boring and derivative?
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Oct 27, 2015 11:31
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wyoming posted:What's it like living in a world without symbolism? In that case the tornado is just a huge piece of phallic symbolism and something-something lesbians hate penises. Woah, symbols.
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Oct 27, 2015 11:35
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Sakurazuka posted:Is it okay if I think the end is bad because it was boring and derivative? And yet earlier you were complaining about themes. Hmm.... Fans posted:Please explain to me the symbolism of the Tornado and how it makes the narrative of a vengeful Tornado make sense. Why do you assume it's vengeful?
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Oct 27, 2015 11:43
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wyoming posted:And yet earlier you were complaining about themes. Hmm.... Please show me where I was complaining
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Oct 27, 2015 11:45
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wyoming posted:Why do you assume it's vengeful? Because "Time Travel causes Tornadoes" was even sillier and I wanted to be nice.
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Oct 27, 2015 11:46
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wrap it up maxialures, interacting with media in anything but a passive receptive role is for losers
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Oct 27, 2015 14:11
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wyoming posted:Being upset that the ending is different than what you expected or wanted is pretty dumb. So if the game ended with the entire town suddenly being hit by a meteor with no explanation, is that OK? Or if Max and Chloe turned to the camera and started making mouth-fart noises and then jumped off the cliff, that's fine? Pompidou suddenly goes crazy and gnaws all the main characters to death? Jefferson inexplicably escapes/reanimates and kidnaps the main characters again, then the credits roll? These are all cool? I'm just trying to figure out how far we need to go to establish that bad endings are a thing that exist in the world, because apparently we need to do that first before we're allowed to discuss whether this particular ending is bad or not.
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Oct 27, 2015 14:58
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SOMA's ending was good because it asked interesting questions, and explained its fantastic elements sufficiently enough that they didn't end up garbling what the writers were trying to communicate. Life is Strange's ending was bad because its questions didn't really jive with the fantastic elements. The fantastic elements were barely explained and the game pretty much said that the writers didn't care to explain them. The questions this game asks and then tries to answer are mundane enough that the entire framing of the time travel powers bringing about a huge disaster was completely unnecessary and only served to confuse the narrative. It's like they had interesting ideas for two different games and then mashed them together, though I'm more inclined to believe that the writers actively disdained the time travel elements and I have to wonder if they were shoehorned in somehow by someone else involved. Evil Max felt like the writers saying "gently caress you for using the time powers we didn't want to include them." This game would have been much better stripped of the time travel. Not only that, the ending has some pretty worrying implications. So it turns out that the only way to fix everything is to let your lesbian lover die. Don't help her, she'll die, and literally everything else will be tied up in a neat little bow. This combined with the game's tendency to frame Max as nosy for getting involved in other peoples' lives points to a lesson of 'Mind your own business. Keep your head down.' 'But symbolism!' doesn't excuse sloppy writing. Symbolism is not incompatible with internal consistency. The only thing the insistence that the game was thematically consistent throughout is leading me to realize is that the rest of the game -wasn't- that good. The people saying this are absolutely right, the end choice -was- a natural endpoint for this game. And that's pretty bad.
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Oct 27, 2015 15:09
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I loved Life is Strange, the ending too. But I did feel still hungry for more. It does feel incomplete as an ending. Would still highly recommend and call it my game of the year, next to SOMA.
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Oct 27, 2015 15:17
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Viridiant posted:SOMA's ending was good because it asked interesting questions, and explained its fantastic elements sufficiently enough that they didn't end up garbling what the writers were trying to communicate. Also I really doubted there were forced to put in the time travel, it was there since Day 1 most likely, its just they screwed up tying it all together badly, though there was multiple avenues they could have taken to have the time travel stuff and the coming of age stuff work together. Accordion Man fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Oct 27, 2015 |
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Oct 27, 2015 15:24
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wyoming posted:Why do you assume it's vengeful? Isn't that the game's own implication? Arcadia Bay is dying and corrupt. The economy is in the toilet. A secret sexual assault bunker is chugging along. Blackwell is run by a money-driven alcoholic and owned by the most corrupt family in town. The Prescotts are even ripping up the forest to build...somethingsomething estates. Nature omens and prophecies all give the storm a mythic quality, as if it's some purifying force/divine punishment. I think there's even a letter from Sean Prescott that implies he's aware that something is coming. Man versus nature is a thing in the story, what with the spirit animals, climate change references, and other small bits of dialogue. The characters constantly mention destiny and fate. There are implications of nonhuman forces at work in Arcadia Bay. To suggest that the storm was just a freak coincidence, the result of a selfless act just feels silly. To suggest it actually was punishment is worse. Max can use her powers to deceive and manipulate others in a town full of shady assholes, but no, see, the REAL sin is being a teenager who hasn't learned a very important lesson about *chorus of fart noises*.
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Oct 27, 2015 15:51
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LoseHound posted:Arcadia Bay is dying and corrupt. The economy is in the toilet. A secret sexual assault bunker is chugging along. Blackwell is run by a money-driven alcoholic and owned by the most corrupt family in town. The Prescotts are even ripping up the forest to build...somethingsomething estates. Nature omens and prophecies all give the storm a mythic quality, as if it's some purifying force/divine punishment. I think there's even a letter from Sean Prescott that implies he's aware that something is coming. Man versus nature is a thing in the story, what with the spirit animals, climate change references, and other small bits of dialogue. The characters constantly mention destiny and fate. There are implications of nonhuman forces at work in Arcadia Bay. Almost all of this tends to get handwaved away as 'red herrings', although I'd argue that a red herring is something that the plot intentionally brings up and then later resolves as an innocuous side detail. Character X is acting suspicious, and it turns out they were actually planning a surprise party is a red herring (a terrible cliched one, but still). Character X is acting suspicious, and then the story ends without ever touching on it again isn't a red herring, it's just an unresolved, dropped plot thread. And this game has enough dangling plot threads to knit a blanket out of.
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Oct 27, 2015 16:32
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What I think about the ending is best expressed by this post I made in this thread on May 3rd.Junkfist posted:90% certain they're going to do a Donnie Darko ending so that nothing that happens is going to matter.
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Oct 27, 2015 16:33
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Fans posted:The Butterfly effect and chaos theory are referenced yes. I missed how either of those means it makes sense for a vindictive Tornado to try kill a teen girl if you use time travel powers. Haven't you heard "Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?" The game literally kicks off with tornado and butterflies. It's chaos theory taken to the extreme, but it's still logically consistent, even if we don't know the exact mechanism of action. Saving a girl doesn't summon a tornado, saving a girl sets of a chain of causality that results in a tornado. A good question is why does letting Chloe die spare the town and vice versa? What's the thematic significance of that? The vengeful spirit idea has already been mentioned but I don't think the tornado was necessarily vengeful. Nature by it's own nature can be destructive. Death is a natural consequence of life, so when Max uses her powers to save Chloe, nature tries to return to a state of "equilibrium", and the more Max uses her powers, the stronger the equilibrium force gets (culminating in a tornado). This is also consistent with how nature keeps trying to kill Chloe throughout the game through various means in an attempt to restore equilibrium. It's not necessarily true that saving Chloe is the single event that causes the tornado. Saving Chloe leads to a series of events where Max continually uses her powers. Presumably, when she time travels back to the bathroom to witness Chloe's death is the last time she uses her powers. No time travel -> no tornado. Every other timeline takes place in a world where events are causally linked to events in an alternate, future timeline (i.e. that Max made a choice based on foreknowledge of what happened). E.g. Max winning Everyday Heroes is causally linked to her finding the darkroom in the future. In the final instance when she travels back to the washroom, all events that occur after that have no causal link to what Max did in the future (remember she goes into autopilot from that point on so she can't use her knowledge of the future to change how events would occur compared to the first time Chloe gets shot). Thus, no tornado. Also, it's pretty absurd to say that the takeaway from this game is that if you try to be anything more than a passive observer, bad things happen. I think the "lesson" of the story is about the acceptance that life gives and takes. There are highs and lows. Subyng fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Oct 27, 2015 |
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Oct 27, 2015 16:34
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LoseHound posted:Isn't that the game's own implication? Yeah, see, when I was playing the game, I saw a lot of this. The storm and Max's powers were fairly obviously connected in some way, but I felt given the way the first storm vision appears before Max learns of her powers, that Max's powers were a response to the storm, in a sense. She was given these abilities so she can learn the truth of what's going on, find Rachel, stop the Prescotts, and through doing so prevent the storm. Having the storm happen because of Max's use of her powers doesn't really fit as cleanly as it should. Granted, I think that would work if Max started having her storm visions after she saved Chloe in the bathroom, but as it is that doesn't work for me. Plus, having the storm more or less happen because Max did a thing on Monday is pretty bullshit. I guess you could say that the storm happened because Max continued to use her powers either at Chloe's behest or to save Chloe, but it's still not as clean as I'd like. As I said earlier, I think that - party scene aside - the story started going in a radically different direction after the scene in the Dark Room than it was previously.
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Oct 27, 2015 16:37
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I hated the ending because it invoked the Sacrificial Queer trope. I agree that it's appropriately foreshadowed, I agree that it's in keeping with the game's internal mythos, I don't dispute any of that. But that doesn't make it not lazy schlock that manages to be Every Time Travel Story Ever that's also Every Story About A Woman Who Loves A Woman Ever at the same time. And it does it in a medium and genre where it's not uncommon to find male heroes totally willing to risk the fate of the city/country/planet/galaxy/universe for a chance at rescuing their beloved, and such male heroes are usually painted as Heroic, Noble, Exemplars Of True Love, and they usually succeed. That's what made me mad. I never played SOMA and frankly I don't think I care to, but unless it prominently features women who love women
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Oct 27, 2015 16:48
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Plom Bar posted:I hated the ending because it invoked the Sacrificial Queer trope. Lmao. The ending is bad regardless of sexual preferences or even sex/gender of any of the characters.
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Oct 27, 2015 16:53
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Paladinus posted:Lmao. Only a fool would deny that such endings happen waaaaay more frequently to one particular sexual preference and gender of character.
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Oct 27, 2015 16:59
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Plom Bar posted:Only a fool would deny that such endings happen waaaaay more frequently to one particular sexual preference and gender of character. Neither Max or Chloe are necessarily queer. Hope that helps. And no, I'm sorry, I can't name a single other piece of media with this 'trope' from the top of my head. There aren't even that many things with lesbians, really.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:03
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Paladinus posted:Lmao. It can be bad for many reasons. The fact that the vast majority of stories with gay characters end with one or both of them dead (or magically turning straight) is a cliche that needs to die. It's as eye-rollingly outdated as helpless women getting tied to railroad tracks by moustache twirling villains. Seeing what was hoped to be a more positive take on the story take the same old stupid path was yet another disappointment to heap on the pile. I was just assuming all along they were just going to go with the less annoying, but still overplayed cliche of keeping everything terribly vague and never outright stating if the characters were in love or not. Of course, they really end up doing both, depending on which ending you pick.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:05
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Paladinus posted:Neither Max or Chloe are necessarily queer. Hope that helps. Chloe is no matter what. And I like that you think the bolded part disproves my point. Alright, look at it from the other side, then; how many stories can you name off the top of your head prominently feature queer women, and end happily for all said queer women? Bonus hard mode: At no point in the story do any of said queer women gently caress a man.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:06
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Plom Bar posted:Chloe is no matter what. *pulls out tvtropes article*
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Oct 27, 2015 17:13
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Plom Bar posted:Chloe is no matter what. What makes you so sure Chloe was (because she's dead) a lesbian? The only story with prominent lesbian characters and a happy ending I can name right now is The Legend of Korra. That's also pretty much all I know about it. There was also that film where an older woman grooms a teenage girl, but everyone is kind of happy in the end, I think. I can't name a single one with your trope, though. Also, is being bi is like being a bad lesbian or something?
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Oct 27, 2015 17:13
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Paladinus posted:What makes you so sure Chloe was (because she's dead) a lesbian? Chloe explicitly tells Frank that she loved Rachel Amber. I really can't believe you missed that. And your one example bucking the trope is something that, surprise, came out in the last year. Blue Is The Warmest Color, also a recent release, does NOT end happily for all the characters (which you'd know if you'd actually seen it), and also has one of the characters loving a man at some point within the story. Do you see what's going on here?
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Oct 27, 2015 17:20
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All lesbians I know have condoms in their coat pockets.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:21
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Junkfist posted:All lesbians I know have condoms in their coat pockets.  Since apparently I have to spell it out: she's canonically bisexual. She even talks about hooking up with both boys and girls in one of the optional conversations with Max.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:26
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Plom Bar posted:Chloe explicitly tells Frank that she loved Rachel Amber. I really can't believe you missed that. I might have never seen this dialogue, because, you know, branches. Can you link a video? Plom Bar posted:And your one example bucking the trope is something that, surprise, came out in the last year. Blue Is The Warmest Color, also a recent release, does NOT end happily for all the characters (which you'd know if you'd actually seen it), and also has one of the characters loving a man at some point within the story. No? I guess being a lesbian wasn't a cool experience for quite a long time and in many cases still isn't, and many people, including actual lesbians, might have wanted to show that somehow in their works. I never had queer studies at Uni, mind, so my knowledge on the subject is limited. But even after you said there was a trope, I still can't really think of any examples. Is it from animes?
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Oct 27, 2015 17:30
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All lesbians are canonically bisexual.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:31
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And they're just a smidge over 18 so nobody feels guilty about it.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:32
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It's later on in the game but Chloe does specifically say she loved Rachel romantically in the main dialogue, its why she felt so betrayed when she finds out Rachel had a relationship with Frank.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:32
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Look I know she looks 13 but from all the time travel she's probably very old so it's just like Chloe's favorite animes.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:34
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Paladinus posted:I might have never seen this dialogue, because, you know, branches. Can you link a video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6xihBmsPUI quote:No? I guess being a lesbian wasn't a cool experience for quite a long time and in many cases still isn't, and many people, including actual lesbians, might have wanted to show that somehow in their works. I never had queer studies at Uni, mind, so my knowledge on the subject is limited. But even after you said there was a trope, I still can't really think of any examples. Is it from animes? If you admit that your knowledge on the topic is limited, perhaps you should do some research before definitively telling me I'm wrong.
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Oct 27, 2015 17:39
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Plom Bar posted:Shortly after the 43 minute mark (bbcode won't parse the timestamp): Plom Bar posted:If you admit that your knowledge on the topic is limited, perhaps you should do some research before definitively telling me I'm wrong. Paladinus fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Oct 27, 2015 |
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Oct 27, 2015 17:46
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I know every cultured and respectable person hates TV tropes, but they collect this stuff like obsessive ferrets. If you really want a big list of stories where the gay character dies, they'll be happy to provide you with pages upon pages of examples. Edit: their 'cute' name for this is 'bury your gays'
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Oct 27, 2015 17:47
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