mc776 | Life Is Strange as The Lord Of The Rings

Two small figures on a mountain/hilltop during a lightning storm. One is in front and standing over the ledge, holding some bright shining thing. Before the below are crashing waves, or flames, coloured an ominous red.

The final decision point in Life Is Strange is certainly a conundrum. The way it is articulated is much closer to what Saruman presents to Haladdin in The Last Ringbearer than the moment of weakness in The Lord of the Rings but the game is clearly more connected to the latter while missing both the originating quest to destroy the Power and the final moment of ultra-rational, involuntary eucatastrophe present in either. So I decided to see if drawing some parallels could help come to an answer.

The story has in its climax the protagonist being dragged up a mountain in inclement environs by their forever loyal loving servant, to make a stark choice that would irreversibly, radically change the world as they know it.

Max is Frodo. This is obvious on many levels.

Smol
Protagonist
Ends quest to save the world irreversibly scarred and wounded in ways that they could never express or articulate to any other person

Chloe is Sam as far as her relationship with Max is concerned for this analogy. She is also at least three other L.R. characters - more on this later.

David is also Sam, but mostly the scruffy boring one we often forget by the time we get to Mount Doom.
But it might be more fitting to say he is Boromir, if you consider the surveillance aspect of the Ring and the nature of his introduction and redemption as well as his motives.

This leads fairly straightforwardly to black-clad, four-eyed, luring, envenomating predator Jefferson as Shelob. The parallel redundantly highlights that Jefferson himself is not the singular Big Bad of the story and the story's resolution is (or was, by the time Sam/David shows up to complete the analogue) certainly not just "defeat him and win". Our man-spider also lurks in the depths of the realm of the menacing distant evil, where they use each other but also compete with conflicting agendas.

...but, of course, we actually do have a groundskeeper in the idyllic home base named Sam. But this Sam seems like a total red herring, a glimpse into the broader supernatural world but there's no particular thing you can say he actually influenced the main plot in any way besides. He reminds me more of the Púkel-men than any central character. (And I notice someone else has made the Tom Bombadil connection.)

Gollum is split into two men: Frank the Slinker and Nathan the Stinker. Neither of them is given an opportunity to respond, however, to Max's act of mercy by forcing the right thing to happen at the end.

Now so far this all seemed mostly a clever, detached mental shitpost for me until one specific "click", so incredibly obvious in hindsight: Chloe is Éowyn. Trapped, despondent and desperate to escape, dressing as a warrior and looking to go out in glory. But she never gets the same comeuppance, being summarily killed without a world by the Nazgûl Jefferson (who actually inflicts, as much as a lone mortal criminal acting under the cover of a very public day job can, on numerous other victims what the Witch-King merely threatens on Éowyn). Like her, however, her only healing does not come from this violence but only happens slowly with the patient unflinching care of one who loves her. In terms of blow-by-blow fight resolution, however there's also a parallel with the initial bathroom encounter with Max giving an assist from behind the adversary.

That said, Chloe has a truer parallel which, as it depends on what we're supposed to identify with the Ring, I'll get to in a moment.

Max's Power is problematic as a simple analogue to the Ring. Yes, it's unexpectedly given to her and yes it continually threatens to destroy her throughout ~~and yes the mountaintop scene presents her with the choice of destroying it~~ [2020-08-27 actually nothing in LiS or LiS2 says that Max loses her power after either ending], but:

Unlike the Ring which is all but literally Sauron himself, the Power has nothing to do with any established known evil.
In fact, none of the "powerful" characters in the story even know anything about it.
It just comes out of absolutely nowhere, as a free gift to save a friend in a time of need.

Without suggesting it actually is, this looks more like Tom Bombadil - or the eagles - than Sauron.

So, back to Ring: better to back up and establish a Sauron first. Sean Prescott is clearly the candidate for an evil powerful tyrant who is almost never encountered directly in the story (Pippin's brief glimpse through the palantir notwithstanding). Which basically means our Mordor and Shire are the same place, which is exactly how L.S. goes (and why I have not said anything about a Scouring analogue - it's implied throughout L.S.).

Jefferson's modus operandi of capturing people and corrupting them in his torturous underground hidden fortress, even including a throne scene resembling the confinement of Húrin, is obviously better paralleled in Morgoth in the Silmarillion than Sauron. If (despite limiting ourselves to the L.R. everywhere else and notwithstanding the other Shelob parallel) we run with this, the storm becomes (now even) less of an evil to be prevented and more of an apocalyptic eucatastrophe that must happen to purge the darkness from the land - which, I note, is strongly implied in the nature-is-healing prancing animals (no ponies, sadly, just deer and birds) and beautiful sunrise glow we see in the Destroy Arcadia ending.

Control, coercion and ego are the biggest, most obvious evils embodied by these two men, reflected more shallowly in the likes of Nathan and Victoria and David and and others. Whatever Ring analogue I posit must embody this.

L.S. clearly has its own powerful imagery for a tiny, shiny thing of terrible and sinister power, unequivocally connected to ego and coercion: its guns. But Max doesn't have a gun in her hands: the Power is innate to Max and not connected to any physically alienable object that she can simply throw off a mountaintop into the element that would destroy it and be done with it.

Except...
A Polaroid photo of a brilliantly blue butterfly on a bucket on a bathroom floor.

A Polaroid photo of a brilliantly blue butterfly on a bucket on a bathroom floor.

That was the other realization that compelled me to write a proper post about this. 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". There are multiple times in Chapter 5 (and throughout the story) where you can make a major difference in helping people come to forgiveness and reconciliation even as the storm closes in.

And, of course, given the event that is to be allowed to happen with this, the temptation to use the Power here does involve using a gun.

This brings us back to the other Chloe parallels: Galadriel and Bilbo. The exchange at the lighthouse could have gone very differently. Chloe could have:

Begged for her life.
Rationalized about the nature of the storm to try to convince Max it could not be avoided this way.
Forced Max to relinquish the photo and allow the storm to continue.
Simply not given Max the photo.

But she doesn't. She clearly contemplates the stakes before her and what she can stand to gain or lose, and out of mercy and gratitude freely hands over this power to the dear trusted friend, the one who had suffered so much to get to this point who among far more powerful and experienced people is the only one who even comes close to being worthy of being trusted to make the judgment call with the Power before her.

Then gets the hell out of the way before she changes her mind.

I would go so far as to say that the true - or at least primary - narrative moral test at the lighthouse was Chloe's moral choice, the resolution of which ironically leaves it open for Max's choice to save her to be transformed from a mere utilitarianism-versus-selfishness into an act of grace.

(One could argue that the joking oath of fealty - supported by Max's own oath to Warren - actually created a geas, Frodo-threatening-Gollum style, that bound Chloe to allow Max to make the decision the way she did. But if we go this way, it suddenly becomes much more possible that the storm has nothing to do with Chloe and only has marginal relationship to the Power, but was retribution against Frank breaking his blood oath or against Jefferson or the Prescotts for some general or particular evil. Personally, I am more than okay with this interpretation. [2020-07-06 I am reminded that the wording is actually just cribbed from the Pledge of Allegiance. I stand by this point, as Chloe's tone and body language make it clear what she is actually doing. I don't know whether to thereby find the Pledge even more creepy, or marvel at how well this illustrates the impoverishment of these heavily secularized characters' language in dealing with such things.])

In short, I don't think it's appropriate to understand Max's power as inherently evil or corrupting and to be avoided, but some kind of deus ex machina that can be freely exploited for evil purposes but was designed, limitations and all, for healing and hope.

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Life Is Strange as The Lord Of The Rings

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