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mc776(Part 2: Rewind)
(Part 3: Focus)
(Part 4: Conclusion/Misc.)
[2020-09-10: These notes really were primarily only for my own benefit. IsraelBlargh does the same analysis within an actual fanfic in much better and more concise words (albeit more words because, you know, actual story), so read that instead: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6164365/chapters/14124193]
This series of posts is basically me trying to explore what possible justifications there might be to opt for a Bay ending that still preserves the salvific transformations of not just Chloe but Kate (because of course you quit to the menu and replayed as far back as necessary until you got this right) and possibly others. If such a preservation exists (and two alternate timeline versions of one person, each with a separate consciousness, can even be considered the same person for any moral purpose), it may well justify a utilitarian approach to the game's final choice; if not, I remain convinced that this is not a typical trolley problem but a murder-the-fat-man trolley problem with an Omelas on top.
The game explicitly opens up the possibility that Max's power is creating alternative timelines: in other words, that whenever Max makes a certain kind of change, another universe imperceptible to Max continues without that change with real conscious people (whether they're unwitting copies of originals, or the original themselves while their copies are sent into Max's world) having to live with the ramifications of that absence. She names it as one major source of her anxieties about using this power, but independent of those anxieties nothing ingame really supports or undermines that possibility.
I believe Chloe's final remarks on the clifftop are best understood primarily as warning Max against any future temptation to think that everything they shared together was nothing but a dream or a delusion. Even if we can accept that her initial offer was based on an externally inspired revelation that such an option was on the table (they had no empirical facts indicating that letting her die in the bathroom would stop the storm), that inspiration does not commit her to any faith in a continued existence in the state she then knows.
And she offers this, of course, without having any of Max's experiences of observing another person be deeply, radically changed by an event, only to become totally unaffected by it when Max prevents it a moment later.
LiS provides no observable evidence of any continued alternate reality. The closest thing I have seen to a real vision of an alternate reality that presents Max with something that she does not already know is the text in the nightmare sequence ostensibly from the William-lives timeline. But even this is compiled purely from things Max would have already known, expressed in language (surveillance, overdose, abandonment) that seem designed to play on anxieties caused by things Max would only have known through "primary timeline" events (David, Rachel, Max's failure to write); the rest of the nightmare, meanwhile, at best contains new combinations of things Max has already seen, and the arrangements all seem designed specifically to hurt and annoy her rather than having any independent existence or significance of their own.
Before considering the possibilities, here's what I think is at stake with each:
Pre-existing, immutable alternate timelines
One possibility is that all possible alternatives to everything we choose already exist in eternity, and one's decisions only determine the path that oneself experiences. In that case the only thing that really matters is what is best for oneself, and the time power has no truly real consequence beyond improving your ability to choose the desired path. I will not explore this any further.
Creating alternate timelines
This means that every time you go back to fix something, you get a timeline where that fix did happen and a timeline where it did not. This means that, no matter what you do, there will be somewhere out there a world where the fix did not happen and you can do nothing to help them. This means that, unless your fix results in a significantly better world, each time you use your power you're increasing the suffering of all possible worlds (and each failure that causes you to use your power again means reduplicating the original catastrophe you were seeking to avoid).
Where people's existence is at stake in a zero-sum situation, the best option may be to create multiple timelines to allow each party to continue existing in one or more of them (again, of course, assuming that we can treat alternate versions of a party as one).
If we assume rewinds - or at least the very first involuntary rewind - do this, then the Bay timeline already exists, as simply being the one that happens without any supernatural intervention, and there is no reason to choose anything but Bae.
If we assume only focus creates new timelines, however, and not rewind, and therefore the Bay timeline must be created before it exists, Max's best option would be to use the butterfly photo, keep the photo in her journal, use the butterfly photo again once she's "back" at the funeral, restore the intervention and (screwing over her newly-created alternate self, but again we're ignoring that for now) not live out the timeline where she undid a one-in-a-billion soul match and no one will ever know what she and Chloe gave up for them.
(We know from the unused audio clips that Max had specifically rejected writing additional reminders to herself as a strategy, but others might remind her anyway. "Symbol of our reunion"... forget the horror here... choir of furies in your head...)
The analysis presented here is generally in favour of rejecting this model. I know, however, that this puts me at odds with one of the first major LiS fics I've ever read. As it happens, this fic also intentionally introduces (whereas the scene I mentioned must exist in one form or another as its outcome is the cause of numerous events in the game) the very events that appear to be conspicuously missing in LiS itself: had they been in LiS, I would not have come to my conclusions.
Single timeline being modified
Only the final result counts, no matter how many times you use the time power. This is the only situation where the final choice presents a real moral dilemma that cannot be (or has not already been) in any way mitigated. In that respect, thematically it makes by far the most sense as actual authorial intent.
I am including in this category the situation in which previous events made no longer to have occurred still leave some kind of residue in absolute reality, whether in any way perceptible to any observer who is bound within time, but no consciousness is any longer actually living through that situation in any ordinary sense - an edit history, or archive, remembered independently of the working copy.
Literary/Audience-level assumptions and inferences
Here are a few sets of details I will not read anything into because I'm cross-the-street certain that these are matters of artistic licence or technical limitation, or I believe they are affected by other things going on:
From the director comments and interviews it seems the worldbuilding was primarily about the literal world itself - the town, the environments, the personalities of the people. This is not a high-fantasy cosmology where there's a clear (or at least fairly exhaustively (or at least exhaustingly) laid out) universe of created timelines and rules about them that the characters' perceived world must fit. Anything not established or clearly implied in LiS should be presumed to be similar to our world (with some allowance for common fiction tropes like knocking people out, shooting gas tanks to explode them, etc.).
In real life, no one, outside of extreme depression or belief in some other sort of supernatural intervention of a very specific sort, actually lives their lives as though they could rely on some alternative "them" doing something better or worse than what they experience themselves doing. We generally don't commit acts of wickedness confident that our other selves are doing great things and the karma will spill over; nor despair to the point of suicide over our other selves being irredeemably bad.
We know Dontnod intentionally increased the stakes of the final choice to ensure a balance of bad versus bad for a maximum gut-punch. (Contrast one early option where Chloe survives being "sacrified" and is in a coma by Friday; memory of previous time wiped but still time to atone.) But beyond that there's nothing suggesting they're horrible edgelords who are intentionally setting up an endless deathtrap where every effort to do anything will always make everything worse. In any event, a game directed by such edgelords would look nothing like the Life Is Strange we see. (I'm reminded, for instance, of the Gantz manga with its explicit existential horror about the "resurrected" people being mere copies; there's also the fridge horror of what happens in All Wounds, which I think Destiny_Smasher addresses with some of the storm references and the very problem of "trying to save everyone".)
At no point is the final decision framed as "you are now within a great number of nested substitute realities: you may now either return to living in truth, knowing that you have forever lost the one you love, or continue in this tiny inauthentic pocket universe you have created for yourself with a very conveniently convincing facsimile of her". Instead, what we have is "your receipt of this very real gift has resulted in this very real calamity; only if you reject the gift will the calamity be averted". The only stakes if you choose Chloe are that people die (and infrastructure is destroyed) - and not only that, the whole moral dilemma is that they would die, not that you would leave them behind in some higher plane of existence where they are just fine (along with your possibly-zombie alt) in favour of this lower one where you experience their possibly-zombie alts dying.
One objection arises: if this stuff about alternate realities isn't supposed to be real in the game's internal logic, why even bother mentioning it? Against this argument by Chekhov's Gun, I humbly submit Caulfield's Axe.
That said, even if we proceed with reading the game as having a single unified reality that is altered directly, I'm not going to suggest we take any particular care not to talk about it sometimes as though it were otherwise. In particular, comparing how 2 major characters turned out 5 years after a major life-changing event being averted, versus 5 years after it had happened, gets much less clumsy and awkward if we can just use different words for each of them as though each variation were a different person.
(Part 3: Focus)
(Part 4: Conclusion/Misc.)
[2020-09-10: These notes really were primarily only for my own benefit. IsraelBlargh does the same analysis within an actual fanfic in much better and more concise words (albeit more words because, you know, actual story), so read that instead: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6164365/chapters/14124193]
This series of posts is basically me trying to explore what possible justifications there might be to opt for a Bay ending that still preserves the salvific transformations of not just Chloe but Kate (because of course you quit to the menu and replayed as far back as necessary until you got this right) and possibly others. If such a preservation exists (and two alternate timeline versions of one person, each with a separate consciousness, can even be considered the same person for any moral purpose), it may well justify a utilitarian approach to the game's final choice; if not, I remain convinced that this is not a typical trolley problem but a murder-the-fat-man trolley problem with an Omelas on top.
The game explicitly opens up the possibility that Max's power is creating alternative timelines: in other words, that whenever Max makes a certain kind of change, another universe imperceptible to Max continues without that change with real conscious people (whether they're unwitting copies of originals, or the original themselves while their copies are sent into Max's world) having to live with the ramifications of that absence. She names it as one major source of her anxieties about using this power, but independent of those anxieties nothing ingame really supports or undermines that possibility.
I believe Chloe's final remarks on the clifftop are best understood primarily as warning Max against any future temptation to think that everything they shared together was nothing but a dream or a delusion. Even if we can accept that her initial offer was based on an externally inspired revelation that such an option was on the table (they had no empirical facts indicating that letting her die in the bathroom would stop the storm), that inspiration does not commit her to any faith in a continued existence in the state she then knows.
And she offers this, of course, without having any of Max's experiences of observing another person be deeply, radically changed by an event, only to become totally unaffected by it when Max prevents it a moment later.
LiS provides no observable evidence of any continued alternate reality. The closest thing I have seen to a real vision of an alternate reality that presents Max with something that she does not already know is the text in the nightmare sequence ostensibly from the William-lives timeline. But even this is compiled purely from things Max would have already known, expressed in language (surveillance, overdose, abandonment) that seem designed to play on anxieties caused by things Max would only have known through "primary timeline" events (David, Rachel, Max's failure to write); the rest of the nightmare, meanwhile, at best contains new combinations of things Max has already seen, and the arrangements all seem designed specifically to hurt and annoy her rather than having any independent existence or significance of their own.
Before considering the possibilities, here's what I think is at stake with each:
Pre-existing, immutable alternate timelines
One possibility is that all possible alternatives to everything we choose already exist in eternity, and one's decisions only determine the path that oneself experiences. In that case the only thing that really matters is what is best for oneself, and the time power has no truly real consequence beyond improving your ability to choose the desired path. I will not explore this any further.
Creating alternate timelines
This means that every time you go back to fix something, you get a timeline where that fix did happen and a timeline where it did not. This means that, no matter what you do, there will be somewhere out there a world where the fix did not happen and you can do nothing to help them. This means that, unless your fix results in a significantly better world, each time you use your power you're increasing the suffering of all possible worlds (and each failure that causes you to use your power again means reduplicating the original catastrophe you were seeking to avoid).
Where people's existence is at stake in a zero-sum situation, the best option may be to create multiple timelines to allow each party to continue existing in one or more of them (again, of course, assuming that we can treat alternate versions of a party as one).
If we assume rewinds - or at least the very first involuntary rewind - do this, then the Bay timeline already exists, as simply being the one that happens without any supernatural intervention, and there is no reason to choose anything but Bae.
If we assume only focus creates new timelines, however, and not rewind, and therefore the Bay timeline must be created before it exists, Max's best option would be to use the butterfly photo, keep the photo in her journal, use the butterfly photo again once she's "back" at the funeral, restore the intervention and (screwing over her newly-created alternate self, but again we're ignoring that for now) not live out the timeline where she undid a one-in-a-billion soul match and no one will ever know what she and Chloe gave up for them.
(We know from the unused audio clips that Max had specifically rejected writing additional reminders to herself as a strategy, but others might remind her anyway. "Symbol of our reunion"... forget the horror here... choir of furies in your head...)
The analysis presented here is generally in favour of rejecting this model. I know, however, that this puts me at odds with one of the first major LiS fics I've ever read. As it happens, this fic also intentionally introduces (whereas the scene I mentioned must exist in one form or another as its outcome is the cause of numerous events in the game) the very events that appear to be conspicuously missing in LiS itself: had they been in LiS, I would not have come to my conclusions.
Single timeline being modified
Only the final result counts, no matter how many times you use the time power. This is the only situation where the final choice presents a real moral dilemma that cannot be (or has not already been) in any way mitigated. In that respect, thematically it makes by far the most sense as actual authorial intent.
I am including in this category the situation in which previous events made no longer to have occurred still leave some kind of residue in absolute reality, whether in any way perceptible to any observer who is bound within time, but no consciousness is any longer actually living through that situation in any ordinary sense - an edit history, or archive, remembered independently of the working copy.
Literary/Audience-level assumptions and inferences
Here are a few sets of details I will not read anything into because I'm cross-the-street certain that these are matters of artistic licence or technical limitation, or I believe they are affected by other things going on:
- Max's ability to casually tear apart instant film with her bare hands (as per director notes)
- The surfeit of fireflies in the PNW
- Cottonwood seed in October
- The symbolic significance of anyone's name
- The technical (low light, zoom) capabilities of instant film cameras
- Any technical issue with the guns
- Any technical issue with Max's indestructible eyeshadow
- The actual theoretical physics of this
- Max's uncanny ability to replicate her exact words, tone and emotional reactions when rewinding and redoing most conversations - obviously a technical/budget limitation and a compromise against the inability to micro-rewind within a conversation to the last decision point
- Various alleged inconsistencies of the time-travel rules in the Bay ending (the photo was taken after Max had already used her rewind power multiple times and the one in hand was actually a product of the Zeitgeist focus, etc.) - why I'm ignoring this is the subject of another post
From the director comments and interviews it seems the worldbuilding was primarily about the literal world itself - the town, the environments, the personalities of the people. This is not a high-fantasy cosmology where there's a clear (or at least fairly exhaustively (or at least exhaustingly) laid out) universe of created timelines and rules about them that the characters' perceived world must fit. Anything not established or clearly implied in LiS should be presumed to be similar to our world (with some allowance for common fiction tropes like knocking people out, shooting gas tanks to explode them, etc.).
In real life, no one, outside of extreme depression or belief in some other sort of supernatural intervention of a very specific sort, actually lives their lives as though they could rely on some alternative "them" doing something better or worse than what they experience themselves doing. We generally don't commit acts of wickedness confident that our other selves are doing great things and the karma will spill over; nor despair to the point of suicide over our other selves being irredeemably bad.
We know Dontnod intentionally increased the stakes of the final choice to ensure a balance of bad versus bad for a maximum gut-punch. (Contrast one early option where Chloe survives being "sacrified" and is in a coma by Friday; memory of previous time wiped but still time to atone.) But beyond that there's nothing suggesting they're horrible edgelords who are intentionally setting up an endless deathtrap where every effort to do anything will always make everything worse. In any event, a game directed by such edgelords would look nothing like the Life Is Strange we see. (I'm reminded, for instance, of the Gantz manga with its explicit existential horror about the "resurrected" people being mere copies; there's also the fridge horror of what happens in All Wounds, which I think Destiny_Smasher addresses with some of the storm references and the very problem of "trying to save everyone".)
At no point is the final decision framed as "you are now within a great number of nested substitute realities: you may now either return to living in truth, knowing that you have forever lost the one you love, or continue in this tiny inauthentic pocket universe you have created for yourself with a very conveniently convincing facsimile of her". Instead, what we have is "your receipt of this very real gift has resulted in this very real calamity; only if you reject the gift will the calamity be averted". The only stakes if you choose Chloe are that people die (and infrastructure is destroyed) - and not only that, the whole moral dilemma is that they would die, not that you would leave them behind in some higher plane of existence where they are just fine (along with your possibly-zombie alt) in favour of this lower one where you experience their possibly-zombie alts dying.
One objection arises: if this stuff about alternate realities isn't supposed to be real in the game's internal logic, why even bother mentioning it? Against this argument by Chekhov's Gun, I humbly submit Caulfield's Axe.
That said, even if we proceed with reading the game as having a single unified reality that is altered directly, I'm not going to suggest we take any particular care not to talk about it sometimes as though it were otherwise. In particular, comparing how 2 major characters turned out 5 years after a major life-changing event being averted, versus 5 years after it had happened, gets much less clumsy and awkward if we can just use different words for each of them as though each variation were a different person.