Rachel’s relationships in Life is Strange and Before the Storm

[mummywoof]

I know the games have been out for a couple years now, but I recently went through the games again and something has really been bothering me. It’s clear that in BtS Rachel and Chloe have a really strong bond and love each other a lot, and it’s shown in LiS that Chloe still loves her after her disappearance. But the Rachel in BtS and LiS seem like two completely different people, in BtS she clearly loves Chloe a lot, but in LiS it’s shown that she was sending love letters to Frank, and that she was having sex with him, and let him take pictures of her in her underwear. And later Mr. Jefferson said that Rachel loved him and wanted him to take pictures of her in his darkroom, that she didn’t need to be drugged, and a girl in LiS said that Rachel Amber definitely had sex with Mr. Jefferson. So what I don’t understand is what happened to the clearly strong love between Chloe and Rachel in BtS where they’re like let’s run away with each other and be together forever, and what seems like Rachel’s unstable love life where she is sleeping around with Frank and Mr. Jefferson in LiS? Is this just a slip up by the writers or what? Like I loved her and Chloe in BtS it was cute and lovely but Rachel in LiS seems kind of like an attention Wh*re which I hate, because I loved her in BtS. So what do you think?

[darkdisciple1313]

I think some people have tried to deify Rachel via her relationship with Chloe. I think otherwise. I think Rachel was using Chloe for reasons not made clear, but once found out, started Chloe down the path where she ended up being shot in that bathroom. Max left, other things happened, and then Rachel silently betrayed Chloe. I think Chloe was likely in denial about it, which is why she acts out the way she does in the first game.

None of this is specified in detail, of course (the developers do love their vague-ness), so I'm just engaging in conjecture. But I think Rachel also essentially abandoning Chloe is what turned her into the untrusting young woman she ended up portraying in Life Is Strange. The good thing is that at least Frank was able to convince Chloe (in the good ending of that sequence, anyway) that Rachel was a decent person, just not altogether angelic. She had outgrown Chloe at that point, apparently, as Max originally did after moving to Seattle.

Chloe always reminds me of the archetype of the scapegoat or the whipping boy, where all the community's sins and difficulties are channeled onto a single person, in the hopes that by doing so, their lives will be better. Chloe represents, to me anyway, the distilled negativities of Arcadia Bay, and her death acts as a means for the town to start to heal from its own problems. If Chloe lives, of course, Arcadia Bay ends up paying for its own sins (so to speak) by being wiped off the map. Either way, Chloe is a tragic character who is basically made to pay for the bad behavior of others if she is allowed to die.

[Deusuum]

Human relations are a complicated thing. We really do not know what was going on in Rachel's mind even during the events of BtS - read the topic http://steamcommunity.com/app/554620/discussions/0/1621724915801090824/
A lot was said about her and how she treated Chloe. I still believe that their relations did not necessarily meant sex or being engaged in some form, like sworn to each other, looks like they could date anyone they wanted - Chloe mentions Rachel helping her going through "a boy-toy phase". Also, I believe that Rachel truly cared for Chloe and knowing how jealous Chloe can be she simply didn't tell her about her many adventures because she didn't want to upset her best friend. Rachel was Chloe's sunshine, and judging by what we are given Chloe was Rachel's sunshine as well. Were they lovers? Probably. I think they meant a lot to each other despite secrets, affairs or something else.

[darkdisciple1313]

I have no problem with Chloe or Rachel being romantically involved, but I don't think it's the ONLY way they were together. It annoys me when people try to make any relationship as only one thing, since that's not how it works in real life. I had friends who I barely spoke to more than once a week, but when we were together, we always had a blast. Others I saw every day, but we only spoke of common interests and little else. Others again slid into the realm of the romantic and back again; some ended up breaking apart because of it. In short, every relationship I've ever had has been different in some way, as it is with pretty much everybody.

In the end, it really doesn't matter. Rachel and Chloe were together for a time, and then they weren't. Whatever specifics were involved were wisely left out of the equation and open to interpretation, since that part wasn't really important. What mattered more than anything was how Rachel's disappearance affected Chloe, even if in a good ending kind of way, Rachel had outgrown Chloe at that point and lived to move to Los Angeles to follow her dreams. Regardless, Chloe was heart-broken by yet another seeming betrayal.

Also, Chloe is a needy person, even if she'd slit her own throat before admitting it, and who can blame her? I still feel that Rachel was, in a small way perhaps, using Chloe to move from one area of her life to another. It's not the best thing for a person to do, but it's how many people operate. The point is that, in many ways, everybody in the game is selfish in some ways, and highly giving in others. Well, maybe not Jefferson, but he's slime, so we'll forget about him. Even Frank loves dogs enough to rescue them from fighting, and he's as dangerous as can be.

[Firewalk]

You'd be surprised how much people can change in 3 years. I mean, considering how much has happened in just those 3 days in BTS... yeah its not a stretch. I am though in agreement that these two sound like different characters at times.

[Zoey]

I think that it makes sense that Rachel and Chloe wouldn't work in the long term, and would only be friends by the time LIS started, even if they were an item in BtS. Not because they weren't compatible, or because Rachel wasn't really into Chloe, but because Chloe became so infatuated with Rachel so quickly, that I don't think it could've lasted.

Chloe needed someone like Rachel so damn badly, that when she showed up, Chloe immediately latched onto her like a drowning person desperately clinging to anything they can to keep their head above water. Rachel clearly liked Chloe too, but reaching that same level of attachment or connection was going to take longer for her, and Chloe following her around like a puppy, would've gotten in the way, making her feel guilty, or like she was taking advantage of her because she didn't feel the same way yet.

It's really, really hard to build a healthy relationship from that. If the infatuation isn't too extreme, then the other person can catch up, but if it's too unbalanced, then the only thing that seems to work is breaking up, hopefully giving them time to shake off that infatuation so they can be on even footing.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like Chloe ever managed to take Rachel down from that pedestal. Rachel probably didn't have the heart to make the breakup as clean as it needed to be. Chloe was crushing so hard on her that she would've had to kill any hope that the breakup was only temporary in order to keep Chloe from clinging to that hope. I've been on Chloe's end of that and it suuuuuuuucks.

It must've killed Rachel to do it at all. She definitely cared about Chloe. You don't take on a violent, knife-wielding thug with a two-by-four because they put their hand on someone who doesn't mean a lot to you.

We only get tiny fragments of what happened between them since LIS, but I only ever got the impression that she was anything but another sweet, but mixed-up kid. I've never quite known what to make of that letter about Jefferson, but the thing between her and Frank seemed genuine.

It's hard to really say it doesn't fit, considering how young they were in BtS. Three years is a long time at that age

[darkdisciple1313]

Originally posted by Sub-Zero:

You'd be surprised how much people can change in 3 years. I mean, considering how much has happened in just those 3 days in BTS... yeah its not a stretch. I am though in agreement that these two sound like different characters at times.

There's also the whole Max-messing-with-time motif, which may have done things to change past events even without her realizing it. When she goes back to save Chloe's dad, she also does a few little things that she did not do originally (giving her little speech to Chloe while holding both of her hands, for example), which may have altered things just enough that there is no way to completely reset the original timeline. Max may have recovered the larger parts of the past-present, but the future-present she altered when she went back to when she was 13 was forever changed, even if they were just tiny things that seemed unimportant at the time.

It's like the Star Trek episode The City On the Edge of Forever...Kirk and Spock are there to prevent McCoy from farking up history by saving Edith Keeler, which they do. However, at least a dozen things occur during the episode which they do not address that also altered the timeline. These include: McCoy losing his phaser, which a homeless person picks up and erases himself from existence with; the cop catching Kirk and McCoy stealing clothes; Kirk threatening another denizen of the soup kitchen; and so on. Maybe nothing happened, maybe a lot changed because of them. Generally, of course, most people are not important enough to make that big of a ding in a timeline. However, there is always an exception...

Of course, that's conjecture, and in reality it's probably just two different companies writing for the same game and not paying attention to things the other team of writers did. That's such a mundane reason, though. Blah, really.

[nihilistninja]

A big part of the dissonance between LiS Rachel and BtS Rachel is the different developer teams and writers and what they were trying to show with the character.

DONTNOD's depiction of Rachel in the original was meant to be a mysterious, larger-than-life figure made of smoke and shadows. Everyone has a different story of her, from Chloe's angel to Jefferson's human chameleon, Rachel was a lot of different things to a lot of different people. We were never meant to know or understand Rachel in LiS.

On the other hand we have Deck9's version, they were interested in showing the origin of Chloe and Rachel's relationship - whatever your read of that relationship is. This meant Rachel needed to be more grounded in reality, more human than the original if players were to sympathise with her and Chloe believably develop any connection with her.

Everything said, BtS happens over the course of a few days, and even then only from Chloe's POV. These characters are 15-16 at this point, a long way from the people they become in the lead up to LiS. Whether Rachel is as into Chloe as she acts in BtS and later grows away from her, whether she was only ever playing a role, whether Chloe and Rachel were ever lover or just friends, all of that is up to your personal interpretation. There's enough there for you to go either way.