u/ShaanitheGreen

For the past few months, I have been playing Life is Strange with my Mom. This has been a very busy, stressful time in her life - my uncle has entered home hospice care, and she has had to move in with him and watch him 24/7 - and I have been doing so to help take her mind off of a lot of troubles. It has helped a lot.

In the first game, she found herself enjoying the characters, though she didn't really get that it was a mystery until the end. She enjoyed it quite a lot.

In Before the Storm, Chloe became her favorite character, whom she identified with a lot. She had a bit more trouble getting onboard with Rachel, but gradually started to like her, too.

After she was moved in, I started going over there, streaming from my computer onto her little Wal-Mart laptop. It wasn't always easy. But, I got it working, and for the past 3 weeks, we've been gradually playing through Double Exposure, reading Out of Focus, and finally capping it all off with Reunion.

At the start of DE, Mom immediately and emphatically rejected all romance options for Max. "She's Chloe's girl."

Gwen Hunter was an interesting thing to watch. Mom has always believed in rights for everyone, and we have relatives who are trans, but she hasn't had a chance to interact with many trans people in our small, conservative community. She didn't understand that Gwen was trans at first, only asking what was up with her voice. After explaining it, she was fine with Gwen for the rest of the game. Gwen wasn't her favorite trans character, though - that would come later.

Moses, on the other hand, became her instant new favorite, and remained so until the end. I think she was more invested in Moses than in Safi.

Lucas mainly made her roll her eyes.

Since we were playing the Bay ending, she didn't have to deal with all the drama around Chloe.

I've noticed two kinds of people who consume DE - people who think the game goes completely off the rails once Safi is revealed, and people who think that's when it finally becomes interesting. Mom was more on the later than the former.

Mom was loyal to Safi throughout the game though (like me) she had a real fucking problem with what Safi did to Robbie. She referred to it as "evil and mean" and confirmed to me it did color her perceptions of Safi a bit.

On the other hand, I think she liked Yasmin a lot less than Safi. This might be her general aversion to teachers and school staff in general, but she was never quite as onboard with Yasmin as she was with Safi.

In the end, she chose to side with Safi, out of a general sense of loyalty to friends and a desire for Safi to not go crazy.

Afterwards, I gave her Out of Focus, which she eagerly accepted and read through in about two days. She was very glad to be back with Chloe. She wasn't 100% sure how Chloe came back, but got the general idea. Because Chloe starts off the book just appearing in Seattle with no human connections or relationships, she was of the opinion that Chloe didn't exist prior to the first scene in the book, having been dead in our game.

Mom REALLY liked the book. It might have been her favorite part of the series. Chloe interests her more than Max, with her saying Max would always be okay because "she has powers". More on that in a sec.

Obviously, I wasn't there to get her initial reactions to everything. Reading a book is a solo experience, but I did ask her about it. She took the fact that everyone was gay in stride, believing that to be the kind of community Chloe would belong in. Izzy was her favorite member of the band, and she became her favorite trans character. She was surprised when Izzy being trans first came up in the book, but she was 100% Team Izzy all of the way. So much so that, after finishing the book, she picked up another (unrelated) book with a transfem protagonist to enjoy.

She really enjoyed Drugstore Makeup and it's hurricane of dramatic queer women in general. She really dug the idea of a song about an ex named "Crotch Rot", and she said her only real issue with the novel was that it ended before Chloe and Max reunited.

Then, in the past week, we blasted through Reunion in three settings.

• She really appreciated seeing Drugstore Makeup in Chloe's texts and enjoyed having the context around that.
• She was still big on Moses and enjoyed the dynamic he and Chloe had together.
• "True love is not seeing someone for ten years, and still not needing an answer to a single question before you jump into a truck to run from the cops with them." Words of wisdom.
• Mom didn't really notice Ren until the end. She suspected Safi for a lot of the game. However, she had Vihn's number from the start, pointing to Sledgehammer Guy as being him right away. She was VERY proud when I confirmed she was right, and said it took her months, but she finally felt like she was understanding the games.
• She informed me during the Mabon party that she took LSD once. She thought the bush outside her house had feet, and ran back inside to hide in the dark until it was over.
• She really wanted Max and Chloe to finally figure it out. She was a full-on Pricefielder at this point.
• Last night, she texted me to talk about the game. She was very excited all night to finally finish, and we ended up texting back and forth about Max's character.
• After I won the backtalk against Ren, she knew it was him. I was also sure to do all of the saving - people chores so we could get the best ending.
• Despite earlier saying that she thought Max would always be okay due to her powers, when she and I picked at Max's character a bit and her relationship with guilt, she began to think that the ending would involve Max dying to save Chloe and Safi from the Overlight.
• In the end, on October 11, 13 years after the Storm, Chloe burned the photograph. This was her choice because she thought Moses made it clear that Chloe should do that. I pointed out the parallels to the ending of the first game - Chloe gave Max a photograph and told her "You're the only one who can choose" and now Chloe was taking that responsibility back, freeing Max from it's weight and allowing her to finally live free of guilt over how she's used her powers.

In the end, Mom was satisfied with it as an ending to Max and Chloe's story. She was very happy to have experienced it with me, though she was a bit sad it was over.

Next week, my uncle is going into respite care for five days, and she is going on a well-earned vacation with her sisters. After that?

Her social medias have shown her Life is Strange 2, True Colors. the other two novels, and the comic series, and she is aware of the upcoming TV show. There are also some other Dontnod games that neither she nor I have played. She is also a fan of The Walking Dead, and we've both enjoyed the Vox Machina animated series, so Dispatch could be on the list?

So, who knows? Maybe the journey we've been taking together for the past three months isn't over yet. For now, consider my Mom a fan of Life is Strange.

Rachel Amber is one of the most controversial characters in the fandom. There seem to be three broad takes on her that are common:

1. Rachel is a perfect, flawless, luminescent angel who loved Chloe ten thousand times more than anyone else and everything wrong about her is because she was tricked and fooled and groomed and how dare you?
2. Rachel is a soulless, heartless, manipulative bitch who was only using Chloe for her own ends and didn't care about anyone but herself.
3. Michael Koch said she was a trailer trash energy vampire who's father beat her, and since he was the director, what he says goes! Even if he didn't put any of that in the games and doesn't work on them anymore and admits it's just his opinion and probably would have changed if the writing staff had developed it.

There's very little grace in any of these opinions. She either gets put on a pedestal or torn down. It's kind of easy to see why, though. In the games, we get everyone's opinion on Rachel except for Rachel's. She's always defined by someone else, or in relation to someone else. She never gets to be viewed as her own person, with good and bad traits.

Everyone has opinions on what she does, but nobody ever asks what she's going through.

So, I'm going to give my opinion on Rachel, and since it's her birthday, I'm going to try to examine her as her own individual, the good and the bad.

• Rachel and the Cave

In order to understand Rachel Amber, you have to start with Plato, and . . . wait, where are you going?! Get back here! I'll keep it brief, I promise. Here, I'll even put in a picture.

Trust me, it's relevant!

The Allegory of the Cave is one of Plato's most famous works.

In it, a group of prisoners are kept in a cave for their whole lives. They are chained down so they can only face the wall of the cave. They are never allowed to see anything but the wall of the cave. In order to explain concepts to them, they are shown the shadows of objects cast on the wall. So, they know what things are, but have only experienced them as shadows. They are allowed to hear voices, but only the echoes.

One day, one of the prisoners is released and taken to the surface. He sees the sun, and experiences actual reality for the first time. He realizes that everything he's ever seen or heard is just a distorted reflection of what's real.

How does he react? Could he go back into the cave and be happy with the shadows and echoes after experiencing reality? Could he explain any of this to the other prisoners, to any degree that would make them want to leave?

It's basically the Red Pill/Blue Pill thing from the Matrix.

So, what does that have to do with Rachel?

Well, Chloe's dinner with the Amber family pretty much explains the why of Rachel.

\"Integrity. Honesty. Loyalty.\"

We are told by Rachel that she is close to her father, James Amber. She speaks fondly of him, of her upbringing. But when we actually see the Amber household, it's extremely fucking weird. Rachel's parents act less like a family, and more like a pair of ChatGPT robots told to act out an episode of Leave it to Beaver.

And it's intentional, because this is Rachel's cave, and James Amber is her captor.

Rachel has grown up with the opinion that she was raised by a good family that loved her, and that her father is closer to her than anyone else in the world.

But what we actually see is very different. James Amber is the local District Attorney - a very powerful elected position in local law enforcement. America is a country that judges it's leaders by their immediate family - would you trust someone to enforce the law if they can't even keep order in their own house?

That is what the Amber family really is - an accessory to James' career. They exist to make him electable, to maintain the public's trust. They have to be perfect, at least on the outside, to help him maintain his powers.

On the surface, Rachel has had a fine upbringing, but it's all hallow. The Amber family's weird pantomime attempts to be normal lack any actual affection and soul. Rachel's father views her as an accessory to his campaign, and her mother is not her mother. Everything they've ever given her, ever shared, has been conditional on how they make James look to the voters. They are a shadow of what a family should be - and that's all Rachel has ever had.

It's clear from the onset that Rachel has started to doubt that her family are real, even before meeting Chloe or seeing her Father kissing another woman. It's triggered a crisis in her - her family meant everything to her. They were all she ever knew.

Rachel has grown up in material comfort, but is emotionally starved. She has grown up with zero genuine attachments to anyone else. She doesn't know what a sincere relationship with someone could or should look like - she's only familiar with the distorted echo of intimacy.

Without other people, Rachel has failed to create a sense of inner self. Rachel doesn't know who Rachel is. We see signs of this everywhere - from her attachment to being a Leo, to the personality test results that she has hung on her wall - that she's latching onto anything that she thinks will help tell her who she's supposed to be.

This lack of an inner self is what makes her such a good actress, and also a social chameleon. For her, it is easy to pretend to be someone else, because she's been pretending to be herself for her entire life.

Rachel is the prisoner freeing herself from the cave. This is what she's struggling with throughout BTS - trying to decide if she needs to accept the reality that her family doesn't love her, or rather it doesn't matter if the stars are dead, as long as they are pretty.

In the end, Chloe can choose to either help her free herself - by telling her the truth about James - or can lie and continue the illusion that the shadow is real.

Red pill or blue pill, basically.

The problem is that according to both Plato and the Matrix, once you start down the rabbit hole, you can never go back.

Rachel's relationship with her father was doomed from the moment she started to understand what that relationship actually was. Even if Chloe lies, she will find the truth eventually, and when she does, that will help lead her down the path to the Dark Room.

• NATURE AND NURTURE

In BTS, Chloe is in love with Rachel - regardless of how Rachel feels about it. She is wearing rose-tinted glasses that make her ignore a lot of the red flags Rachel displays. Fortunately, we have her parents, who exist primarily to display those flags outside of the context of Rachel herself.

James is manipulative. In many ways, he's an utter fraud. He's the chief law enforcement agent in the town, and he's working with the chief criminal in town to kill his ex-wife. His relationship with his family - including Rachel - is equally fraudulent and insincere. Rachel had considered him to be the person she as closest to, but by the time BTS starts, she has already begun to down him.

Much of the "Rachel" we know is the result of his manipulation. It's because of James that she has been pushed to be the way she is - a star student and a 'perfect' girl who seemingly has the entire town enthralled. It has been good for her in a lot of ways, but the gaping flaw is that it has left her with an impression that relationships should always be manipulated. This kind of poisons the way she interacts with everyone else. She is certainly manipulating Chloe in some ways - even if she feels bad about it afterwards. She talks Chloe into skipping class, purely because she wants to spy on James. Afterward, she's willing to take the fall for Chloe, but she wouldn't have been in that position in the first place if not for Rachel.

When you tear away the perfect façade that James has built, what does Rachel actually have left? Only the things her birth mother Sera left her.

Sera is, basically, what Rachel would have been if she'd lived longer. If Rachel showed up in Double Exposure, she'd probably be just like Sera. She is a woman with a deep emptiness in her soul that she seeks to escape from with drugs. Without the persona James built for her, Rachel is left with nothing but a burning anger at having been lied to her entire life, and a need for escape.

Both of these characters do have more to them than just being a problem for Rachel, but their role in the story is to display Rachel's flaws.

Rachel's last flaw is her anger. She's realized she's been lied to about being loved for her entire life. It's kind of understandable that she's angry.

• So, did Rachel really love Chloe?

The answer to this question is a "Yes, but . . . ."

Yes, I think Rachel did care about Chloe. I think we do see moments where she genuinely connects with Chloe on a meaningful personal level. Moments like the train or in Rachel's bedroom seem to show her openly and honestly engaging with Chloe in a way she just doesn't with anyone else.

But . . . I don't think Rachel is able to maintain this level of honesty and intimacy. She doesn't know how. She has never been taught how to be authentic, and even if she had, her poorly developed sense of self prevents her from being open with Chloe in the way she needed to be. Chloe is almost painfully sincere in the way she approaches her relationship with Rachel. and Rachel just cannot match that sincerity with her own, because she doesn't know how to.

I don't think Rachel ever stopped caring for Chloe, either. It's clear that whatever their relationship to each other was, it never reached the point of being an exclusive romantic entanglement. The fact that they were never exclusive was probably Rachel trying to spare Chloe. She knew what she'd have to do to manipulate her way out of Arcadia Bay, and didn't want to break Chloe's heart. She struggled with being honest, but she did try - we see she was trying to write a letter to Chloe confessing what she was doing and why.

And I think Chloe accepted this state of affairs, even if she would have preferred otherwise. She always thought she wasn't good enough for Rachel, and if Rachel wanted to see other people, then who was she to argue? At least she gets the amazing Rachel Amber some of the time. I think the fact she still carries condoms in her jacket shows that she was onboard with the idea of being in a "friends with benefits" style situation, even if she'd have preferred otherwise (and I don't think Chloe ever really intended to use them).

We know that Rachel's entanglements with men were largely her way of trying to find someone to get her out of Arcadia Bay and away from her family. She conducted these affairs behind Chloe's back, and it can seem like she intended to leave Chloe behind.

I'm not sure it's that simple.

Regarding Frank, I've often seen it said that he groomed her, which I don't think is true. Not because there wasn't misconduct, but because you're using the wrong word. Grooming is the act of enticing someone, and I don't think Frank had the capacity to entice Rachel into anything she didn't want to do.

What you're actually thinking of is statutory rape, which is very much on the table, even if we can't prove that their relationship took place before she turned 18. It's going to have to remain a mystery when Rachel and Frank ended up together, or for how long, and rather or not she was legal at the time. But that's not technically grooming; it's a different crime.

She almost certainly did not love Frank. She also almost certainly did not love Jefferson. But, she's a good enough actress to fool them both.

https://preview.redd.it/qu09xe74kseh1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=1624a95f91c35f195c200f41ea7f80dac0e96f00

Sometimes, Rachel doesn't mean to do things, but doesn't mean to not do them. With Frank, the trucker, and Jefferson, I don't think she put much thought into taking Chloe or leaving her behind. She was desperate to escape. She would have certainly preferred to take Chloe, I think, but her hatred of her father might have driven her to do anything to get away from him, even abandon Chloe. I'm not sure even Rachel really knew if that was ever actually on the table or not, but I think it would have been a last resort.

• BUT SHE WAS RICH AND HAD MONEY AND HER FATHER WAS THE DA AND

And you would trade the crew of your hover-ship for some virtual steak with Agent Smith, I get it.

Rachel doesn't have to be financially destitute to make sense, she only needs to be spiritually destitute. You can be poor and happy. You can be rich and unhappy.

Rachel's upbringing gave her everything she needed to succeed in life, except for a stable personal identity and the ability to be open and honest with other human beings. I think Rachel was trying her best with Chloe, but she was still her father's daughter. Chloe loved her, and I think she wanted to love Chloe, but simply couldn't. Her understanding of love was so twisted by James that she was unable to distinguish it from manipulation. I think she genuinely cared about Chloe, but wouldn't have been able to show it, only act it the same way her father acted that he loved her.

• A DA's daughter wouldn't just disappear!

She would if he told the police to stop looking.

By the time of Life is Strange 1, Rachel has certainly figured out that her father is full of shit, and broken off her relationship with him. She's living in the Blackwell dorms instead of home. She's spent the past 2.5 years joined at the hip to a dropout, and she's banging drug dealers and her own teacher.

James used to have a woman like that in his life, and look at what he did to her.

I'm not saying James was involved, but when Sera got too lost in drugs and escapism, he left her and buried any connection he had to her, then immediately married someone who made him look better.

I think he did the same to Rachel. He wrote her off. She was no longer conductive to his image. He was probably sad that she was gone, but maybe it was for the best, ultimately.

He loved Rachel the way everyone loved Rachel - at a distance, as someone who played a role. The only person who authentically cared was the last person looking for her - Chloe Price.

That's the ultimate tragedy of Rachel - everyone loved the image of her, but nobody - not her father, not the town, not even a lot of the fandom - ever really gave a shit about the person behind it.

This might be the one school activity where she'd have the skills and drive to succeed.

"No way. I'd turn off the fucking game right here."

EDIT:

* Immediately pegged Max as gay. Just thought she had the vibe.

* Didn't want to shoot Frank

* Saved Kate

* Thinks Chloe is "a sweet girl" who's acting out to protect herself.

* Couldn't kill Wheelchair Chloe

* "God, I hated girls like Victoria back in high school."

* Wanted to kiss Warren despite thinking Max is gay, "because he's nice."

* Unleashed a flurry of dirty language when Jefferson was revealed, insists she should have known because "fucking teachers"

* Believes the Prescotts actually caused the Storm after reading the emails in the Dark Room

* Laughed out loud at the image of Max being hunted in the Nightmare by all the men she's talked to in the past week and took that as confirmation that Max is hella gay.

* No choice/preference between Bay/Bae. Told me she trusted whatever I picked. I chose Bay to get the longer ending. She said it was "cold" but she couldn't argue for or against either ending. When I told her Max leaves town immediately after the funeral, she said "Good, fuck this place."

She says she wants to play BTS sometime.

Her exact words when Jefferson stepped into view were "Damn damn damn. Fuck. Shit damn hell." stated in a quiet but concerned tone of voice.

I agree wholeheartedly.

Do you think Chloe would chose to tell Rachel or not? How did her decision end up affecting Rachel, since she seems to end up in the Dark Room regardless?

A common complaint I see about DE is that people do not care about Safi, since very little time is spent with her. They do not understand why Max cares so much about this person and is so desperate to save her.

And it's true. You do not spend a great deal of time getting to know Safi in the first 3 episodes of Double Exposure.

But, I think that's by design.

In late 2023, on this very sub, someone leaked the first details of DE. At the time, the game was called Aperture, and the details largely were correct. One of those details that was not correct - or was changed prior to release - was that the game would take place entirely in the Bay timeline, and that Chloe would be dead by default.

Obviously, this was (haphazardly) changed, but it appears that, until fairly late in development, that was the plan. It would only take place in the timeline where Chloe died ten years prior.

The two biggest complaints people have about Safi are that Max doesn't really know her, and that she's kind of a ripoff of Chloe. And if you're the kind of person who always picks Bae, then those are valid criticisms and I'm not arguing with you.

I am asking you to look at the story the intended way.

It's ten years after Chloe died, and the relationship Max has with Safi is both familiar and alien.

Like Chloe, Safi functions as kind of a partner in crime. We first see her breaking into a building with Max. We see her protecting Max when she gets herself in danger. We see her taking a genuine interest in Max's photography. At the bar, we see her try to gently push Max out of her comfort zone and into forming some kind of relationship with Amanda. We see her drag Max into situations where she isn't alone and has to socialize.

These are all the things Chloe did for Max, yes. But, it's not the same relationship. At the same time, we see that Max and Safi have a mutual agreement in place to not talk about themselves or share their secrets. Max and Safi barely even know each other. They refuse to be vulnerable to each other, to tear down the walls.

That's because Max's relationship with Safi is really all about Chloe.

Max is a deeply avoidant person when it comes to her feelings. She does not like to express her feelings and deal with them. It's the reason she ghosted Chloe, the reason she waited so long after returning to get in touch with her, and the reason why she left Arcadia Bay the second she could after the first game and never looked back.

But those feelings exist, and Max is feeling them. In a world where she 100% sacrificed the most important person in her life, the number one feeling she's avoiding is guilt. Max feels extremely guilty, no matter which ending you pick, but buries the feeling. And in the Bay ending, that guilt has a face: Chloe's face.

Max has taken someone who - on the surface at least - is like Chloe, and built a relationship that casts her in the same role Chloe filled. Max is avoiding learning anything significant about Safi because she wants Safi to be Diet Chloe.

I don't think she meant to do this, or would acknowledge it at the beginning of the game, but she has made her entire friendship with Safi all about her guilt over sacrificing Chloe. The relationship she built with Chloe cannot be replicated (and Safi is different from Chloe in a lot of ways), but having a facsimile gives Max a way of avoiding the guilt that's been hounding her for the past decade. She doesn't have to mope anymore - Safi's about 60% of what she'd be doing with Chloe anyway!

Is that healthy? Probably not. But a lot of the time, Max isn't a particularly healthy person.

And then, Safi gets shot and dies in front of Max.

I think that the significance of this is either missed by a lot of Bae people, or just doesn't land as hard. In the original idea for this, the last time Max saw Chloe was when she was shot in the bathroom. That entire scene (as we see later in DE) is the source of Max's greatest shame. It is when she let the person she loves most die horribly.

She cares about Safi - not because she had a stellar relationship with Safi, or because the audience is meant to love Safi - but because she's still hung up on Chloe, and so are we.

I think that's the major misstep in the final version. Safi is meant to evoke Chloe in a way that makes us understand why Max would link her death and Chloe's . . . but because of "respect both endings", Chloe is probably not even dead in your game, and you're just mad because she's not there with Max for admittingly stupid reasons.

Chapter 5 also has a huge problem with this. I think a lot of the rehashed imagery from LiS1 that we see in DE is unearned, because a lot of the connective tissue isn't there. But, I can see where it probably used to be during the writing and rewriting process.

The game is intended to be about Max coming to terms with her grief over sacrificing Chloe.

There was a recent post on here saying that Max was out of character during the ending of DE, because she would never hurt someone she cared about. In that person's playthrough, that might be true, but on the whole, that is an incredibly false statement. Max does let Chloe die in one of the endings, and that was the ending that was in mind during DE's development.

This isn't just a Max that might shoot Safi; it's a Max that - at least in her head - has already done it.

The bathroom nightmare scene in Chapter 5 of DE is a part of the game that should be entirely earned and make perfect sense, but doesn't in the "respects both endings" version we got. Max is reliving the moment where Chloe died, with herself as the killer, and Safi as the victim. Because in her head, that's exactly what happened. There's a part of Max that doesn't see herself as any different than Nathan Prescott for what she did, that feels like she belongs in the Dark Room as punishment for not fighting harder to save Chloe.

In the Nightmare, Max is wresting with her guilt over Chloe's death, and the loneliness that came after. She works through it with sheer grit, guided a bit by Chloe's spiritual presence. As she says in that ending to Chloe, she is extremely sorry, but she's also tired of being sorry. Max has spent ten years being sorry for something that honestly was never really her fault, something that Chloe would never blame her for (she even texts Max from the other side to tell her that).

When she comes out of the other side of the gauntlet, she's still sad that Chloe's gone, but it's a healthy sadness, one she can live with. And with her new perspective, she can finally see Safi for who she really is - someone who's incredibly dangerous. Perhaps still worthy of compassion, but maybe someone Max might have to stop one day.

At the end of DE, Max's self-hatred for losing Chloe is finally gone. She finally accepts herself, enough that she's willing to open up with other people about who she really is. The new relationships she's building aren't going to be ghosts of what she had with Chloe, like the one she had with Safi; they're going to be something new.

Max cares so much about Safi because she still loves Chloe.

And she learns that Safi isn't Chloe in the end because she learns to love herself.

The story of Max and Safi is nothing but the story of Max's suffocating guilt. Without the narrative being built around Max's guilt for picking Bay, the entire experience comes across as way more hollow than it should. The game was rewritten around the idea that either ending could be true, and that stripped the heart out of the story, the driving tragedy that made the whole thing come together.

A Bay-Only DE would have been a more worthy successor to the original.

I got almost all the Delta Recruit rewards way back in the day. If I create a character this month, will they have access to those rewards at level 20, or would they have to re-earn them?

One of the most oddly prevalent hot takes about S1 that I've seen is that Chloe is somehow manipulating Max into looking for Rachel, exploiting her powers to try and get what she really wants.

It's just such an odd reading of both main characters.

Episode 1 Max starts noticing the missing person posters and listening to gossip about Rachel before meeting up with Chloe. She is a naturally curious (somewhat nosy) person who's vaguely interested in sticking her nose into this mystery.

The first time Rachel comes up with Chloe is during the first scene in the bedroom, when Max finds a picture of her and Rachel. Chloe immediately snatches it away from her. She is willing to tell Max that Rachel was important to her, and a couple of details about her being missing, but on the whole isn't very interested in discussing Rachel with Max. Her body language shows signs of an impending panic attack - she's practically in the fetal position by the time she sends Max away so she can self-medicate with weed.

I've had enough panic attacks in real life to recognize one when I see it.

The Fluroxene that Max finds in the bathroom is often administered to people who have panic attacks, underlining that Chloe has a problem with them.

Rachel is not brought up again by either girl until after they sneak out. At the lighthouse, Max and Chloe discuss how she got involved with Nathan - attempting to get money from him to pay back the money she borrowed from Frank to escape the town with Rachel (I will get back to this in a moment).

Max brings up the idea of destiny bringing them back together, at which point a very sad looking Chloe brings up the idea of finding Rachel.

This is literally the only time that Chloe brings up looking for Rachel unprompted.

It is not until after this that Max reveals her powers to Chloe.

At the start of Episode 2, Max is far more concerned with Kate than Rachel. Max is deeply concerned for Kate on the morning of the second day, and asks her what happened. Her description of being drugged at a Vortex Party and brought somewhere by Nathan immediately sets off alarm bells in Max's head - she now knows that Nathan drugged Chloe. Rachel Amber also disappeared right after a Vortex Club party, and it feels like Max is, at least, starting to be concerned that Nathan also did something to her.

Chloe, on the other hand, spends the morning barely talking about Rachel at all. Her reaction to learning that Max has powers isn't "Hey, let's go use them to find Rachel!", it's "Hey, let's go hang out together and use your powers to have fun."

Literally the opposite of what these people say.

Chloe take Max to the junkyard, a place she shared with Rachel. One could argue that it's Chloe's manipulative plan to get Max to snoop around through her and Rachel's private things in order to convince her to use her powers in her search, but . . . why? Why would she do that, instead of just asking Max for help? Max would totally be down to help Chloe without psychological games.

Max does dig through Rachel's stuff though, and we start to get a clearer picture of her motivations. Max is legitimately concerned for Rachel's safety, having connected her with what's happening to Kate, but that genuine concern is also mixed with her feelings of guilt and jealousy. She feels awful about ghosting Chloe for five years, and jealous of the fact that Chloe found a new best friend. She says that the friendship bracelets she sees "hurts a little bit" and writers her own name on the wall because "I was here, too."

It honestly feels to me like this is the moment when Max decides, entirely on her own, that she wants to find Rachel. She wants to bring Chloe's friend back, to make up for abandoning her, and she wants to become her friend as well, in order to assuage her own jealousy over Chloe's new relationship. If they're all three best friends, then Chloe won't love Rachel more than she loves her, right?

But there's one line of dialogue that I feel puts the nail in the coffin of this reading.

At the railroad tracks, Chloe talks about Rachel again - prompted by Frank and the bracelet. She explains her debt to Frank, that she borrowed the money to escape from Arcadia Bay when Rachel showed up again.

An then, she makes a very revealing slip.

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Chloe accidentally refers to Rachel in the past tense. It's a little thing you can write off as a slip of the tongue, but it's not something Chloe has done before, or will do again.

This whole time, Chloe has presented this unwavering belief that she will be reunited with Rachel, to the point where she's willing to put herself deep into debt to be ready to go the moment Rachel comes home. It speaks to a hope and optimism that isn't found in Chloe's character at all, a surety that Rachel will return that contradicts what we know of Chloe's personality.

That's because this whole time, Chloe is lying, both to Max and to herself.

She is well aware that Rachel is probably dead, and has been aware of it for a long time.

Rachel played a large part in helping Chloe get over the pain of her father's death, and her seeming abandonment by Max. She was a positive force in Chloe's life. Even if you disregard BtS and it's relationship mechanics, you can see that at the very least, Chloe had a one-sided crush on Rachel.

When Rachel disappeared, so did the one good thing Chloe had going on in her life. Very likely, associating with Rachel helped keep Chloe's panic disorder under control by providing her with an outlet and a way to soothe herself. She provided a reason to look forward to the future, where she would run away with Rachel to LA. With her sudden vanishing, Chloe has no outlet for her emotions anymore.

A normal person who's loved one has disappeared would, after six months, still have hope. But, they would know to prepare themselves and their other immediate family for the worst news. They would not borrow huge amounts of money from dangerous people 'for when they get back.'

Chloe, who has no support but Rachel and no other outlet for her emotions, cannot admit to herself what she already knows. With nobody else to count on, losing Rachel forever would destroy her. So, she throws herself into the search to a delusional degree, pouring her emotions into that project so she doesn't have to admit that her entire world has basically crumbled.

After six months, the amount of self-delusion she's engaging in to cope has reached critical levels. She's engaging in risky, self-destructive behaviors to keep up the facade, like trying to blackmail Nathan, or borrowing money from Frank with no intention of paying it back. She has also clearly spent at least some of the money she borrowed, either on printing an endless amount of Missing Persons posters, or on buying weed to keep herself from having panic attacks. She is coping so hard with this delusion that, when she literally sees pictures of Nathan burying Rachel in a shallow grave, she refuses to believe it until she sees Rachel's body with her own eyes.

It isn't until she starts to bond with Max again that she finally slips up and, for a moment, refers to Rachel as if she were no longer living. This is because being with Max is providing her with relief from the anxiety that's causing her to semi-deliberately lie to herself. She's providing the companionship that Chloe clearly has been missing; she can now, for the first time in half a year, stop thinking about how much she misses Rachel and focus on something else. Chloe is, well . . . enjoying herself with Max. When she's around Max, she seems to not need to think about Rachel's disapperance all the time. It only seems to drift back into her thoughts during the quiet moments.

She still doesn't really bring up the idea of looking for Rachel. After the train, the thought of Rachel seems to drift from Chloe's attention, as she hugs Max and seemingly spends the entire ride back to Blackwell talking about Max and speculating about her powers.

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It is Max, in fact, who has started to think about actually finding Rachel. After seeing physical proof of how Rachel took her place in Chloe's life, she seems determined to find Rachel. It doesn't really seem to be for Chloe's sake, let alone at Chloe's bidding. If anything, reuniting Rachel with Chloe seems to be far from the top of Max's desires (although I think she would like to see it, it would be bittersweet if Chloe were able to run off with her new best friend after reconnecting with Max).

Max telling us what her real motivations for finding Rachel are.

In truth, her concern is driven by concern for Kate. She's seen enough now to strongly suspect that whatever is going on with Kate is also tied to what happened to Rachel. Kate is one of Max's only friends at Blackwell, and is someone she cares a lot about, and her concerns for Kate are extremely justified, as she will discover mere minutes later.

Kate's problems take the spotlight for the rest of Episode 2, but Rachel does come up one more time.

Max laying it all out.

It is Kate, not Chloe, that is driving Max's desire to find Rachel at this point.

Finally, as Episode Two closes, we see Max coming to the final decision - entirely on her own - that she will find out what's going on with Chloe.

Chloe doesn't even mention Rachel.