Life Is Strange, Life Is Strange: True Colors (continued), & Blood Meridian
I wound up writing about tone in this one but I'm mostly just not sure what's happening in Blood Meridian tbqh
I didn’t think I was going to have more to say about Life Is Strange: True Colors, but I wound up spending time with a friend who is very into Life Is Strange, we talked about True Colors because what a coincidence I’d just finished it yesterday, and then we started the original Life Is Strange, which I have never actually finished.
It’s pretty wild how different the making decisions is between the first and third entry in the series. I was surprised how infrequently True Colors prompted you with a decision, and how the majority of them were real clear-cut “right thing to do” decisions (like “do you comfort a grieving old man filling the void left behind by his dead wife with alcohol? Y/N?????”). The original Life Is Strange goes ham on flashing THIS DECISION WILL HAVE CONSEQUENCES over everything with a wide range of stakes, from the over-the-top melodrama absent from True Colors like reporting a student who threatened another student with a gun to the “this will have consequences?” of watering a plant. It’s weird that playing the original is making me appreciate the greater artistic maturity of True Colors so much more in retrospect, even though I like the original because of this goofiness. I suppose a boring criqitue of True Colors could be that it railroads you more, that your decisions don’t affect much, but I wouldn’t agree with this; I appreciate how well it narratively understands its own scope in a way that the episodically developed and released original couldn’t have.
Although I guess the thing I did critique last week is that does this mean that a video game is the best medium for this story, if its CYOA character-driven narrative plus vibes-heavy environmental storytelling is “enough” to overcome the flattening of video game rules and true/false binaries on agency, the effect that has in turn on how it can achieve a statement about emotions and the human condition, etc. And if so, does the excessive THIS ACTION WILL HAVE CONSEQUENCES of the original (plus the… puzzles?) mean it does “more” with the medium? Or does True Colors abandoning the puzzles, going all in on hang-out-itude of the setting, and just having better written dialogue show more imagination with the medium?
Re: the writing, the core cast of True Colors are in the baby years of their early twenties, while OG Life Is Strange is S-tier teenager cringe-core. This might benefit True Colors, albeit in basically the way that any story not about teenagers can be about something other than what it’s like being a teenager. But then the cringe and the melodrama of being a teen of the original is peak vibes - Max is a charmingly dweeby teen still carving out her identity - even if the quality of the dialogue often doesn’t follow through on the promise. If True Colors is servicable Netflix original series-quality writing, the original Life Is Strange (thus far) caps out at charmingly inexplicable video game-quality writing.
Emphasis on “caps out at”. It’s just as often like… The Room-quality.
What’s interesting, to me, is the games’ and characters’ maturities match each other perfectly in this way. True Colors’s 21-year-old’s grief would absolutely bomb if the writing had a whiff of “no one talks like that”, but Life Is Strange’s 18-year-old’s social anxiety is almost bolstered (however unintentionally) by her existence in an uncanny world where everyone talks like they’ve only ever read the Wikipedia article about how to talk to other humans.
I was Max’s age the first time I read Cormac McCarthy, who just died, and thus I’ve finally picked up my copy of Blood Meridian. Yes, this is an extremely flimsy segue. This isn’t a deep academic analysis newsletter. I’m not saying anything Max would have to look up on JSTOR to write a paper here. But one of the main things I remember from being Max’s age - at the end of childhood, but with looming adulthood still a nebulous concept - is, when encountering the nihilism of All The Pretty Horses, I found it mindblowing in a way I struggled to put words to. The dry, scalpel-precise language of Cormac McCarthy in a world not dying but carelessly changing felt like a such a pointed, magical inclusion in my high school senior year literature class syllabus. I bet Max would love it. Or maybe she’s more of a Crime and Punishment girlie. We read that senior year too, because someone was determined to ensure our last year of compulsory education and life asking if there’s any point to any of all this.
I don’t have much to say about Blood Meridian yet except I wanna think a little bit about these lil summaries at the top of each chapter. Especially this one that sounds like a particularly gnarly post-punk band’s setlist.
This is an interesting little choice! It’s a mysterious little outline or overview of what’s to come. Thus far in my experience it’s useful to flipping back to in the middle of the chapter when I’m like “have I missed something?” because… Blood Meridian is a tougher read than McCarthy’s other books, man. This is not character-driven at all. There’s sort of a main character, but about a hundred pages in, sometimes he gets like a single mention per chapter, I don’t know anything about what his deal is, he’s like barely barely an audience surrogate. Maybe next time I’ll have more to say aside from “whew! glad I read All The Pretty Horses first!” but wowee I am lost atm.