[The following article contains spoilers for most of the Life is Strange episodes, including the finale]

The final scene of Dontnod’s Life is Strange gives players the biggest ultimatum of the series. Despite the narrative leading us turn after turn to believe that Max and Chloe were more than just “friends” if you made certain choices to play the game that way, the way the series came to an end in “Polarized” proved that queer-baiting is alive and real in video games.

When it comes down to it, Life is Strange forces you to either save the entire town of Arcadia Bay or essentially “kill the queer.” I know it’s an odd stretch of the imagination, but think of it this way. A lot of folks like myself had guessed that Chloe would have to die in order for the timeline to be fixed and for everything to go back to normal, so many of us predicted that we would have to make the choice to “kill Chloe” by the end. While it’s nice that the developers give you the option to say, “fuck it all” and drive off Thelma and Louise style with Chloe to Portland or some other place, I was more than a little peeved that the developers made a habit of disappearing queer women.

It begins with Rachel Amber, a sexually ambiguous character that Chloe pines for desperately (and whom Frank also lusts for) and hopes will be found. She is the story’s Laura Palmer, as many Twin Peaks references in the game nod to. When her death is finally confirmed at the end of the fourth episode, the game follows it up immediately by killing Chloe for what feels like the hundredth time in the game. Two queers disappeared, just like that. I don’t know if you noticed this, but somehow Life is Strange managed to tell every iteration of the lesbian death bed story in the ways it killed Chloe; first she dies getting mixed up in a drug deal, then she becomes paralyzed and asks for assisted suicide on what would be her deathbed anyway, and finally she gets killed by a jealous male authority figure.

But let’s just call this what it is. It even has it’s own page on Tv Tropes: the Magical Queer. The point of this trope is that the queer must die such that humanity (Arcadia Bay) can be saved. What’s worse is that nobody seems to know or care that Chloe sacrifices herself for the town if you choose that ending. Chloe asks you to kill her over and over, not because she feels a sense of duty to her home, but because she literally feels that her life is worthless in comparison to the other people in Arcadia Bay (maybe barring Jefferson and some other grimy characters) and tells Max that she needs to “accept her fate…our fate.”

I’m not the only person who has pointed out the queer subtext in the game as a somewhat deliberate attempt at queer-baiting. Even if you choose the Thelma and Louise escape option like I did, the romantic subtext between Max and Chloe is never explored. And before anyone argues that the queer relationship is just a subtlety (“look, they’re holding hands!”) that we as players need to look for, I will just call that what it is: lazy story development. A gentle shoulder touch does not a romantic relationship make. In fact, the only time you get the opportunity to initiate a real romantic moment with Chloe is right after you choose the option to sacrifice her, thereby killing any chance of the queer relationship that the game kept building up to but never delivering on. Talk about bait-and-switch, developers! I mean, seriously, right up until the end the game was like, WE’RE JUST GAL PALS BEING PALS. And if you chose the other ending, you’re like, I JUST DESTROYED THE ENTIRE TOWN AND ITS PEOPLE FOR YOU, IT’S FINE, WE’RE JUST FRIENDS. Life is Strange, you broke my heart a lot over the episodes, but that moment hurt in a bad way as someone who identified with Chloe and literally was born with that as my birth name. //holla name change//

What this all comes down to is that I haven’t played the perfect game about on screen teenage girl romance. While something like Gone Home was its own brand of genius storytelling, I can’t include it here because most of the story was retroactive and without visible characters on screen; but to be fair, that game was still masterfully done and on screen romance simply wasn’t the point. It’s tough to tell myself to just settle for this, for the one real on screen kiss and never the realization of queer relationships (unless it’s in a Bioware game). It’s even harder to criticize independent developers who have a lot more to lose than bigger companies if their game flops due to their narrative choices, even if I would say, screw those people for being afraid to incorporate diversity. Again, I just want to reiterate that I really enjoyed Life is Strange and that this critique is just a call for every game developer to bring us the representation we’ve been calling for.

With the news that Life is Strange will have a second season, I’m feeling more than a little intrepid about what they could possibly choose to explore. While I expect the next season to continue focus on topics outside of mainstream video games, I don’t expect to see another exploration of a queer relationship. It would be nice to see it actualized on screen, though.