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Sacrificing Chloe also makes 0 sense logically. Max has zero proof, other than mere speculations, that it will work. And If she goes through the photo, she alters time yet again. Not "goes back to before it all began", "resets time alterations" or whatever, because at the time of the photo she has when making the final choice not only her very first rewound has already occured, but she has also changed the past (burned the photo of her and Chloe making pancakes and destroyed her contest selfie). Meanwhile, from her "save Bill" experience Max knows that altering the past in such a fashion can have dire consequences.
Yeah I'm honestly so surprised that people didn't catch onto this already. The "Everyday Hero" Contest photo being destroyed the same time she initially took the picture should've done one of three things: altered the events of the bathroom entirely, Max not even having to go the bathroom in the first place, or that final choice never being presented in the first place.
There would be no Butterfly photo to travel back to Monday in the restroom without her ripping her picture in the restroom beforehand. In fact I don't even know how Chloe still has that photo when they were at the lighthouse.
Regardless without that Self Portrait photo there's no Butterfly photo.
To elaborate why; The whole destined to die theme came up very late und Max just learned what happens when you jump back a stretch into the past and change things. She would be killing her soulmate for a chance of others surviving.
Sacrificing her also would undo almost all of her character progression, it would also make the act of her getting the power at all meaningless.
"But everyone in the town gets killed!" I saw no bodies. No bodies, no death. Just a lot of damage and horrible truths laid bare.
I like what Max says when she's asked to choose:
"Not anymore"
That's how I felt. I felt that Max had Chloe, Max went through Hell to save Chloe, now they're both here, Destiny is being fulfilled. I saw the Storm as a test, unrelated to Max's choice... Also because the other ending seems so sad... I don't have the strength to play an alternate choice, but what would happen? Even if the storm is averted, Max lives on, without her best friend, in a world that is still the same after she went through? And going back would stop Jefferson as well? I just felt that it couldn't be. I couldn't do that. If I have to choose between those I love an the world, I would choose those I love.
Whew.
Just had to say that.
Diegetically:
- what everyone else said.
- if the fates actually wanted to kill Chloe, they had many, many chances to do it while Max wasn't there to save her. They didn't - she is literally only ever placed in mortal danger where Max is (eventually) able to help.*
- all the stuff in the game was building up to Max's need to save Chloe and prioritize her.*
- Chloe's theory makes no sense as a rational analysis of Max's time travel powers, but makes perfect sense as an expression of her abandonment issues.*
- they would've heard Max crying in the bathroom.
- once Chloe was dead, we'd have a Max who, for all of Monday evening through Friday morning, would have time travel powers, no knowledge of the storm coming on Friday, no memory of why she didn't save Chloe in the bathroom after that first rewind, and no side mystery about Rachel and Kate to be distracted with - so guess what she'd be dedicating all her time to that week. Based solely on the rules that can be established by observations within the game, if she tried to use the butterfly photo before her memories returned, she could either sacrifice Arcadia Bay anyway or create an infinite loop. There's probably some implicit safeguard against the latter given we do eventually get to Max's memories returning at the funeral, but it's never explored what that safeguard is. I can think of some possible theories to harmonize this, but the more I think about it the more it feels like a plain old plot hole.
Narratively:
- the ending cinematic itself fits better with the pacing and aesthetic of the rest of the game. It's shorter and more sparse and explain less, but every second and ever detail (listen to how the cuts line up with the lyrics in each ending's song) counts so much more.
- Max's "Not anymore" is a perfect Hollywood hero flex, and a perfect culmination of her Bildungsroman.
- there's actually a hidden mystical religious allegory that only works with the Sacrifice Bay ending.
- society has moved beyond the need for more bury-your-gays narratives.
*Very similar points apply to why I can't even imagine taking the other choice in the Big Final Decision in Tell Me Why...
This was such a powerful statement which made that ending so much better, it was Max telling the universe to go eff itself. Her decision was final.
Loved that.
EDIT: And only in typing this do I realize those two utterances are scarcely more than a day apart... Episode 4 was long
What are your thoughts on there being a time loop of some sorts in the game? I can at least count two instances where there might or already is a loop in progress.
1.): The very beginning of the game, when Max has her "Nightmare" She's not entirely sure whether or not she is dreaming or if that was real. There's also the Director's commentary on that scene in particular where one director says they have an idea why when Max does the very first rewind in the bathroom, she hops back to the classroom the moment she wakes up from her "Nightmare". He doesn't explain it but he does elude that there IS reasoning behind it.
2.): And The End of the World party the Vortex Club held. That's when we see the double moons. Everyone sees it, they also can't take a picture of it which is interesting. If there were two moons on that Thursday, then that means Max has already either time hopped to that moment or she's going to.
I've also been working out this theory that whenever Max blacks out that another Max has replaced her from another timeline. And that essentially the "real" Max has been displaced from her original timeline.
As for why the first rewind goes back to it, it seems more natural to infer (and we don't have enough information to say more than that either way) that the vision was some kind of marker or a target for that rewind, or that first vision was when Max was granted the power and the rewind just went as far as it could go, than that it's somehow connected due to some alternate timeline.
I also tend to assume that the player is following a single continuity of consciousness/memory, so we're not playing Max with one set of recollections of events at one point and Max with a substantially different set of recollections the next.
The actual loop I was thinking about goes more like this:
1 - Chloe gets shot and Max finds herself unable to use her rewind powers to prevent it.
2 - Max does not yet have the memory of that week where she had used her powers to prevent it, nor any information that would connect Chloe's survival with the storm. But she does have her rewind powers, so it would be natural to try to experiment with it to see if she could somehow replicate that first rewind.
3 - Let's suppose that, before the time-travel memories come back during the funeral on Friday, Max discovers the photo jump. She uses the butterfly photo to go back and successfully save Chloe. Let's say this happens on a late Tuesday afternoon.
4 - After Chloe is saved, the events of the week progress as they had before - until (this) Max's memories return.
5 - Let's say that that interim-Max failed to save Kate. This means that this interim-Max already has blood on her hands from this first photo jump - and apparently she had a vision that there was a storm coming on Friday that seems to be related to her time power.
6 - Let's say that, despite this, the game's events more or less continue as they had before.
7 - They're on the clifftop, but instead of what we have in the canon game Max is now also saddled with the knowledge that (a) she'd killed Kate saving Chloe; and (b) there was no sign of any storm coming while Chloe had been dead. This would mean that she'd sacrifice Chloe all over again.
8 - Max goes back and undoes saving Chloe. From that point onwards, from the viewpoint of the new interim-Max...
9 - Chloe gets shot and Max finds herself unable to use her rewind powers to prevent it.
10 - Max does not yet have the memory of that week where she had used her powers to prevent it, nor any information that would connect Chloe's survival with the storm...
I had a fanfic where this almost happened, but the loop was broken by delaying the return of Max's memories until the loop has finished:
1 - Chloe gets shot and Max finds herself unable to use her rewind powers to prevent it.
2 - Max does not yet have the memory of that week where she had used her powers to prevent it, nor any information that would connect Chloe's survival with the storm. But she does have her rewind powers, so it would be natural to try to experiment with it to see if she could somehow replicate that first rewind.
3 - Let's suppose that, before the time-travel memories come back during the funeral on Friday, Max discovers the photo jump. She uses the butterfly photo to go back and successfully save Chloe. Let's say this happens on a late Tuesday afternoon.
4 - After Chloe is saved, the events of the week progress as they had before.
5 - The interim Max's memories do not yet return, so this second-level interim-Max just experiences what we see in the game.
6 - [as above]
7 - They're on the clifftop. This Max does not have the guilt of having killed Kate using her powers, but at the same time nothing else is different either, so whatever thought pattern led to sacrificing Chloe happens again.
8 - Max goes back and undoes saving Chloe. From that point onwards, from the viewpoint of the new interim-Max...
9 - Chloe gets shot and Max finds herself unable to use her rewind powers to prevent it.
10 - Max does not yet have the memory of that week where she had used her powers to prevent it, nor any information that would connect Chloe's survival with the storm. But she does have her rewind powers, so it would be natural to try to experiment with it to see if she could somehow replicate that first rewind.
11 - Let's suppose that, before the time-travel memories come back during the funeral on Friday, Max discovers the photo jump. But as she grabs the butterfly photo, the Max who had already jumped with it back in (3) returns.
12 - Max looks around and sees that nothing appears to have changed.
13 - Eventually Friday rolls around and her memories are overwritten by those of the original (game) Max.
EDIT: One other possible way to break the loop is to have the time travel damage stack for that Tuesday-afternoon-sacrificed-Chloe-Max until she passes out on the last attempt. Not sure how exactly that would work, and the effect is way less spooky, but it seems to posit fewer entities not observed in canon... maybe...
EDIT: There is no more canon support for any mechanism for stacking this damage than there is for arbitrarily delaying the return of Max's memories. I'm leaving my fic as is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daulatpur-Saturia_Tornado
had a death toll of ~1200 people
http://population.city/bangladesh/manikganj/
Manikganj's population at the time hovered around 1M
for a total of 0.12% of the population
From the appearance of Arcadia Bay I'd guess it probably has a population of ~5000
so a proportional death toll is like...... 6 people
That said, the town as an infrastructural entity could be totally screwed, and no doubt thousands of lives would be irrevocably changed and mostly for the worse - and of course this doesn't count any numer or degree of injuries including permanent loss of limbs or control of lower body.
So my headcanon tends to keep the death toll not much higher than 100, and even that range presupposes the fate gremlins are actively working to kill more people than an equivalent naturally occurring storm would.
Would you classify the Storm in the game, a Tornado or a Hurricane? The deadliest hurricane was, The Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Killed 6,000 to 12,000 people in Texas and was a category 4 storm.
To me the storm was likely a hurricane because in the first episode Chloe said that it shouldn't be snowing during "80 degree weather" so that got me to thinking. Hurricanes don't come to the west coast ever because the temperature of the west coast isn't warm enough. So if Birds are dying i mass clusters, Whales are being beached, and bad fishing conditions are happening then its likely the water got warmer and the climate had changed.
Then here comes Max with her rewind ability. The connection between her powers, Chloe's specific time of death, and the storm are iffy at best. But one thought I've been having recently is, what if Max rewinding so much has caused weather conditions to advance quicker.
We all know that climate change has been rampant lately for us and its only been in the last 4 years that its been getting bad. The game was based in 2013, and when Chloe said that wind storms of some sort happen every 20 years or so (ironically in 2033 that's when Life is Strange 2 ends), what if Max going back in time so much is accelerating the conditions of climate change. Making the storm come sooner than it originally was supposed to, I mean if Chloe said was right then another storm is due to come for Arcadia Bay anyways.