Life Is Strange: misc. notes on reading Max and Chloe as an allegory for Christ and His Church

For indeed, when we came to Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were troubled on every side. Outside were conflicts, inside were fears.

Nevertheless God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus, and not only by his coming, but also by the consolation with which he was comforted in you, when he told us of your earnest desire, your mourning, your zeal for me, so that I rejoiced even more.

I know I've made comments like this (not all of them on this blog) about a few games already, so to deal with that:

1. the Mass Effect series was far, far more explicit with this. I kinda feel it's almost less effective for it, though it still remains a baseline for me as a videogame that can be read as an allegory for Christ.
   
2. what I'm seeing in LiS completely blows what I've seen in Doom out of the water.
   
3. there are zillions of games out there that go "descend into underworld, defeat its ruler, save the world, emerge victorious" and that without a lot of other Christ-pointing imagery is generally not really worth spending a huge amount of energy over.

For contrast, here are a few games where I don't read this kind of allegory, which I enjoy or could reasonably be expected to enjoy:

• Anything in the Quake series
  
• Half-Life
  
• Diablo, to the point of actively refuting any such reading
  
• Jill of the Jungle, Crystal Caves, classic Duke Nukem, really any of the old golden-age shareware platformers
  
• Cave Story
  
• Final Fantasy 6
  
• LiS: Before The Storm, if I were to understand it as a work on its own independent of LiS, focussing only on Chloe and Rachel's relationship and Max as just a background character
  
• Freedoom
  
• Doom or Freedoom with Hideous Destructor (in retrospect I'm a bit surprised how I'd decided to specifically reject this reading by making a perverted version of it part of the big bad's villain speech)
  
• Any of the new Doom games from 2016 onwards (there is still some to the extent they resemble the original Doom 1 and 2, but all the other stuff tends to water it down greatly)
  
• The Baldur's Gate series (which may have distinctly Christian or post-Christian themes of redemption and sacrifice, but no allegorical reading easily presents itself)
  
• Tell Me Why, at least what little I've seen of it. The twins are too equal and symmetrical in their relationship in a way Max and Chloe are not.

A great deal of "but what about", "but she doesn't", "Harold, they're lesbians" can be answered fairly simply that I'm not even beginning to aim for a perfect 1:1 here.

( the spoilers begin here )

~

While compiling this list someone on Facebook shared a meme attributing to C.S. Lewis: Love is unselfishly choosing for another's highest good. Anyone who's read how Lewis uses the word "unselfish" in The Great Divorce and The Screwtape Letters is on alert at this point, especially upon considering the prospect of knowing someone else's highest good.

This is inspiring for me as I write this, but not likely in the way the meme-maker intended. Instead I'm just reminded of all the unselfishness described in those books and why the evil organization in the last Space Trilogy book is called "NICE" and what I wrote here:

The photo is the Ring. That, and not Max's time travel power on its own, is the Ring's true temptation: to make things right again, for everyone, for the world. Even if it means betraying your best friend and consigning her to a miserable death, angry and alone - and worse: turning everything that would have redeemed her soul into something not demonstrably better than "it was all a dream". All to maintain the power structures of the status quo, albeit bringing a few of its chaotic aspects to "justice".

The irony is, of course, that I myself was never able to accept the Christian faith until I gave myself permission to be a little selfish about my own salvation, whereupon everything began to make sense.

I've made snide remarks in the past about what I've described as the worst rationale for sacrificing Arcadia Bay: the insistence that all of my work, what I did as the player, have meaning. I still think it's a bad rationale, and best to downplay in light of so much better; and yet there's the echo of salvation even in that.