The Blue Butterfly: On Life Is Strange, Alternate Timelines, And Accepting the Things We Cannot Change

Even before the end of the third episode of Life Is Strange, I knew that Max’s well-meaning attempt to prevent her friend Chloe’s father from being killed would have unfortunate consequences. It was the blue butterfly that tipped me off, the harbinger of Max’s ability to rewind time way back in episode one. This was clearly developer Dontnod’s way of acknowledging Ray Bradbury’s famous short story “A Sound of Thunder,” in which a time-traveling dinosaur hunter steps off the path laid before him and accidentally kills a butterfly, damaging the course of history. Normally when Max manipulates time, she is determining the course of the path ahead of her. But by reaching back into the distant past to keep Chloe’s father alive, she was straying from the path that had already been established.

I love that Life Is Strange is interested in more than simple time travel gimmicks and plot twists, and that it uses Max’s ability to explore questions of memory and identity. The first thing we learn after Max changes the past in episode three is not how this change affects Chloe, but how it affects Max herself. The Max of this new timeline is a member of the obnoxious elitist clique known as the Vortex Club and friends with Victoria Chase, who regularly mocks Max in the game’s main timeline. This raises the question: Who is the Max of this timeline? If she’s hobnobbing with the frequently cruel Victoria Chase, she’s a different person, and there’s a good chance that this Max is a person that the Max we’ve come to identify with over the course of the game wouldn’t like very much. 

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When I was younger, I was obsessed with the concept of alternate timelines, because I felt certain that I was trapped in the wrong one. The fact that I was trans, which I had no way of discussing with anyone who would be accepting or understanding, seemed like a cosmic mishap, and I was sure that in the “correct” timeline there was a version of me who had been assigned female at birth and who was going to middle school and making friends and living her life without being smothered under the weight of having to pretend she was a boy. I envied her so much, and every night in bed I hoped against hope that somehow in the morning I’d wake up in that timeline, the cosmic mishap corrected, and be able to live my life as the person I felt I really was. I would have given anything to change it.

But what Life Is Strange acknowledges is that a Carolyn who lived that life and had the formative experiences and the memories that would have come with it would be a completely different person from the Carolyn I am today. Even though nothing has caused me more pain and confusion and isolation than my being trans, that was the path that was set before me, and if somehow I had strayed from it, I might have become a person that the person I am now wouldn’t like very much. I might not even recognize that person as myself. For better and for worse, the life I’ve lived is what has made me who I am.

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When Max goes to see her friend Chloe, she learns that her attempt to spare her friend from pain and misfortune has only resulted in replacing one pain with another. Chloe’s loving father William didn’t die and her mom Joyce never married that overbearing jerk David Madsen, but a horrible car accident has left Chloe bound to a wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down, with a deteriorating respiratory system. As with Max, the experiences of this timeline have made Chloe a different person. She’s softer and warmer; the hard-edged bitterness that came out of her father’s death and her clashes with her stepfather are nowhere to be seen.

But she also knows that she’s dying, and that keeping her alive is putting her parents in a financial hole they may never be able to climb out of. Walking around that house, seeing indications everywhere of the crushing debt the Prices are taking on, seeing William and Joyce put on a strong front but knowing that this is all taking a tremendous toll on them, I wondered: How do you weigh one timeline against the other? How do you weigh William’s life against Chloe’s? You can’t. Life Is Strange doesn’t want it to seem simple or easy. But if you go up to what is now Chloe’s empty upstairs bedroom, Max finds an image of a blue butterfly, an indication that straying too far from the path of time comes at a price.

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Chloe and Max spend a pleasant evening together, reminiscing about their shared childhoods and then watching Blade Runner, a film that deals with how memories shape our sense of who we are. In the film, the replicant Rachael has always believed she is human because she has the implanted memories of a human, and the movie suggests that Harrison Ford’s Deckard might himself unknowingly be a replicant.

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The next day, after you make one of the most emotionally taxing decisions a game has ever presented players with, Max undoes the changes she has made. William dies again, Joyce marries David, and Chloe is once again the person these events have made her. 

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And as you’re sitting there with her in her upstairs bedroom, the perfect song for the moment, “In My Mind” by Amanda Palmer, plays in the background. In the song, Palmer makes her way to the realization that in spite of or because of all the ways in which she’s sloppy and screwed up, she is exactly the person that she wants to be. And you know that even though things are so far from perfect, you’re back where you belong.

And in my mind
I imagine so many things
Things that aren’t really happening
And when they put me in the ground
I’ll start pounding the lid
Saying I haven’t finished yet
I still have a tattoo to get
That says I’m living in the moment
And it’s funny how I imagined
That I could win this, win this fight
But maybe it isn’t all that funny
That I’ve been fighting all my life
But maybe I have to think it’s funny
If I wanna live before I die
And maybe it’s funniest of all
To think I’ll die before I actually see
That I am exactly the person that I want to be

Fuck yes
I am exactly the person that I want to be

I don’t believe in fate at all. I don’t believe that everything happens for a reason. Way too much bad shit happens to good people for me to ever believe that. But I do believe that there are things that eat away at us that we cannot change, things we just have to accept–that job you didn’t get, that person who didn’t love you back–and that sometimes it’s up to us whether we spend our lives resenting those things or we try to find some significance in them, some meaning and strength that we can take with us. Sometimes the things we wish so badly that we could change, we really shouldn’t. Sometimes those things make us who we are.

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