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Rachel Dawn Amber[2] is a fictional character in the Life Is Strange video game series by Square Enix. Created by Dontnod Entertainment for the original Life Is Strange game released in 2015, Rachel's character was significantly expanded upon by Deck Nine for a prequel game released in 2017.[3][4]

Rachel Amber
Life Is Strange character
First appearanceLife Is Strange (2015)
Last appearanceLife Is Strange Remastered Collection (2022)
Created byDontnod Entertainment
Voiced byKylie Brown (English)[1]
In-universe information
Full nameRachel Dawn Amber
HomeArcadia Bay, Oregon
Age
  • 15 (Before the Storm)
  • 18 (at time of disappearance in Life Is Strange)
Height5'5" (1.65m)
BornJuly 22, 1994
Long Beach, California
DiedApril 22/23, 2013

Her character is introduced in the eponymous Life Is Strange as an affluent, popular student who is the former best friend of character Chloe Price.[5][6] She attended the protagonist Max Caulfield's school and has mysteriously vanished,[1][7][5] serving as one theme of the story.[6][8] In the prequel game Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, Rachel is a main character and forms a relationship with protagonist Chloe, which is optionally romantic.[9][10][11]

Rachel's character was noted as an important theme in the original game and her portrayal in Before the Storm was generally received positively by critics and attracted fans. Commentators noted and criticized the eventual reveal of her being kidnapped and subsequently murdered in the original Life Is Strange as a LGBT variation[lower-alpha 1] of the "women in refrigerators" trope.


Concept and development



Dontnod Entertainment (Life Is Strange)


Michel Koch, the co-director and art director, stated in a January 2016 interview with Shacknews: "We really wanted to push [Rachel Amber as] this mysterious character that you never see. We really tried to create her and have characters talk about her to the point that she was in the game, even if you never see her. We really have her be one of the main characters, but one that's never see."[12] Koch also stated that DontNod wanted her character arc to subvert favored plot directions by audiences, since the game was "about real life" and "not a fantasy game".[12]


Deck Nine (Before the Storm)


After publisher Square Enix chose Deck Nine to develop a Life Is Strange game, the developers chose a prequel expanding upon the plot threads established within the original game.[3][4] Within Before the Storm, they wanted to focus upon and establish Rachel Amber's relationship with Chloe Price. In a November 2017 interview with Engadget, Deck Nine's game director Chris Floyd stated that the team wanted to establish "that she was lovable. Extremely lovable, especially as we're seeing her through Chloe's eyes. And yet, we also know a lot of troubling things about her from season one. So we had to include a touch of that as well."[3]

In a March 2018 interview with Game Informer, Deck Nine lead writer Zak Garriss stated that the development of Rachel was "one of the biggest challenges in Before the Storm as a whole. We had instruction from the first game in that her absence from the story and characters' lives was felt. You could talk to every character, especially in the first episode, and someone would have something to say about Rachel."[4] Writing that it was a challenge to build her "as a compelling character. We just did our best with it. But it was fun. I think we all thought and wrote about people we've met in our lives that defined chapters for whatever reason. Your first love, the person who breaks your heart, someone who says something at just the right time and place to change the way you think about a fundamental facet of your life. We all have these people and we really focused on that and drew on that in building and creating Rachel."[4] Garris stated that the team wanted to leave it deliberately ambiguous on whether Rachel possessed some form of powers similar to that of other characters within the series. Saying that they wanted the story to primarily focus on "her ability to light Chloe up and change the spaces that she's in... [that] is really her gift".[4]


Fictional biography and portrayal



Life Is Strange (2015)


Rachel's six-month long disappearance acts as the theme for the events of the story, which concludes with her dead body being found.[6][8] Rachel is initially introduced as an affluent and popular student of Blackwell Academy who mysteriously vanishes without explanation.[7][5][1]

Rachel is stated to be the best friend of character Chloe Price and is implied to have had illicit romantic and/or sexual relationship with art teacher Mark Jefferson.[5][6] Throughout town, missing persons posters, including those put up by Price, are seen throughout the town of Arcadia Bay.[5][6][13] Although many within the town initially dismiss concern about her situation, believing that she ran away from her parents to the town of Los Angeles,[5][14] it is gradually revealed through the investigation of Max Caulfield and Price that her disappearance was the result of malicious activity.[5][15][16] Eventually, her body is discovered by Caulfield and Price at the Arcadia Bay junkyard.[15] It is revealed that she had been kidnapped by Jefferson and student Nathan Prescott, dying of a drug overdose.[15][16]

Beyond being murdered under unknown circumstances, it is left ambiguous on who killed Rachel and whether her death was intentional.[17] Jefferson claims that Rachel was accidentally killed by Prescott in an attempt to render her unconscious. However, it is established that Jefferson is an unreliable narrator, and other parts of the story seem to conversely suggest that Jefferson intentionally murdered her.[15][16][17] Alexander Ulyanov of PopMatters describes her character in the game as "a looming presence that informs and motivates the story from behind the scenes and beyond the grave."[18]


Life Is Strange: Before the Storm (2017)


Rachel forms a relationship with protagonist Chloe, which is optionally romantic.[8][9][10][19]

A post-credit scene shows Chloe calling Rachel's phone seventeen times without a response.[6][8]


Other appearances


Rachel makes a brief cameo appearance in the DLC Life Is Strange: Wavelengths as a friend of Steph Gingrich and Chloe Price in a flashback.[20]


Reception


In Life Is Strange, Alexander Ulyanov of PopMatters noted an intentional "allusion" to the character of Laura Palmer from television series Twin Peaks, whose death similarly served as a similar theme for the events of the series. According to Ulyanov, Rachel was referred to as Jessie Palmer during game development.[18] The portrayal of Chloe and Rachel's relationship in Before the Storm has been cited by several publications, including Gayming Magazine, as a positive example of LGBT relationships in gaming.[8][9][11][19]

Critics including Kotaku noted her character as an intentional allusion or subversion of the manic pixie dream girl archetype.[21] Jessica Conditt of Engadget labeled her in Before the Storm as a "darker" version of the typification: labeling Rachel's depiction within the game as a form of a "manic pixie nightmare girl"; a term which Deck Nine game director Floyd agreed with.[3] Similarly, Ulyanov described her character as "a representative of that inner force that awakens all of a sudden, by its own laws, and makes every young person feel like he or she is the main character of this life."[18]


Use of trope and reactions


The conclusion of Rachel's storyline in Life Is Strange, which it is revealed that she had been kidnapped and subsequently murdered, received negative response from critics and scholars; with Rock Paper Shotgun's Jessica Castello citing it as a LGBT variation[lower-alpha 1] of the "women in refrigerators" trope.[lower-alpha 2][8][22][24][25][26] Other criticisms of the narrative's conclusion related to claims that it was exploitative, simplistic, sensational, and cliché.[6][8][25]

In the journal Gaming Studies, reviewers Holger Pötzsch and Agata Waszkiewicz panned Rachel's character arc in the original Life Is Strange, saying that it ultimately concluded in being a disappointing storyline "centred upon a generic evil guy who abuses the boy... and who plays around with the limp bodies of once self-confidently acting and succeeding women in his high-tech bunker--the dark room."[24] Castello argued that it undercut the emotional impact of Life Is Strange: Before the Storm, saying that while "Deck Nine did an admirable job in telling Chloe and Rachel’s story" it ultimately rendered a story in which... "When bad things happen to them, it just feels unfair because we already know that they suffer enough. When they’re happy, it’s only a reminder that it will be all too fleeting."[8]


Reaction from Life Is Strange and Before the Storm development teams

Michel Koch, co-director and art director of the original Life Is Strange, said during a January 2016 interview with Shacknews about the conclusion of her character arc in Life Is Strange that "It's quite hard, quite dark, the way you discover her, but that's something we also wanted to push... it's like some times in real life, when you have someone that's been missing for months. Most of the time, the reality is, that person is dead. We knew for a lot of players, there was this fantasy of finding her alive or that she was a time travel or she was something else. But for us, Life Is Strange is not a fantasy game, even if there were sci-fi elements. It was about real life and it was something dark and hard, but the most logical outcome was that maybe she's dead."[12]

Before the Storm's lead writer Zak Garriss, said in an April 2018 interview that internally the developers were heavily divided about the conclusion of Rachel's story and that "he didn’t want to do that... I very deliberately didn’t want to do that. Other devs... actually made the choice to do that in response to a very particular note we got. And when I saw it, I was really upset... — and I know this sounds silly — it was a little bit too far for me. I didn’t like actively showing that right outside of frame, something is happening in the moment. It felt like a little more visceral than I wanted to go... “I still think about it. I think I’m not done thinking about it.[6] But with "that final moment, [we’re not trying] to shock our players or punch them in the stomach or anything like that, but simply do something that I think this medium alone can really do, which is make you feel the way Chloe felt".[6] One of the final scenes of Before the Storm shows Chloe calling Rachel's phone seventeen times without a response.[6][8]


Notes and references



Notes


  1. In the context of LGBT characters, it is sometimes referred to as the "bury your gays" trope.
  2. Examples include:[8][22][23][24][25]

References


  1. Browne, Emily (December 11, 2017). "Talking to the voice of Rachel from Life is Strange: Before the Storm". PC Gamer. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  2. "Life is Strange on Twitter: Rachel's Birthday". Twitter. July 22, 2015. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  3. Conditt, Jessica (November 23, 2017). "How 'Life is Strange' landed in Deck Nine's hands". Engadget. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  4. Favis, Elise (March 27, 2018). "Deck Nine Talks Deleted Scenes And Queer Characters In Life Is Strange Prequel". Game Informer. Retrieved August 17, 2022. Deck Nine took on an ambitious project when it signed on to create a prequel to Dontnod's Life is Strange, bringing Chloe and her relationship with Rachel Amber to the forefront. Rachel was one of the biggest challenges in Before the Storm as a whole. We had instruction from the first game in that her absence from the story and characters' lives was felt. You could talk to every character, especially in the first episode, and someone would have something to say about Rachel. From that, we learned that she's a little bit different to everyone, that she's kind of chimeric in that. She can represent a lot of different versions of herself.
  5. Dontnod Entertainment (24 March 2015). Life Is Strange (Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360). Square Enix. Level/area: Out of Time.
  6. Farokhmanesh, Megan (April 5, 2018). "Life is Strange: Before the Storm dev still isn't sure the game's ending was 'the right move'". The Verge. Retrieved August 17, 2022. When popular girl Rachel Amber goes missing, her absence sets the story — about a teenage girl named Max who can rewind time and her best friend Chloe, who is in love with Rachel — in motion.
  7. McDonald, Tim (March 7, 2018). "Life is Strange: Before the Storm and Farewell – Full Season Review". PC Invasion. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  8. Castello, Jay (March 8, 2018). "Life Is Strange: Before The Storm can't escape the first game's use of harmful tropes". Rock Paper Shotgun. Retrieved August 17, 2022. Instead, we were given a scene of Chloe sobbing over the body of the woman she loved; the first time that Life Is Strange leaned on the trope, known as Bury Your Gays, in which gay and lesbian characters are denied a happy ending. The problem with this trope hinges on two facts: there are relatively few LGBTQ+ characters in media, and those that do exist are disproportionately likely to end up dead. Taken together, they gives the impression that LGBTQ+ people (especially queer women) and their relationships are doomed to end in tragedy.
  9. Olszar, Aleksandra (December 7, 2021). "Life is Strange's Depiction of Queerness". Gamereactor. Retrieved August 16, 2022.
  10. Riendeau, Danielle (September 7, 2017). "With 'Before the Storm,' Life Is Strange Finally Leans into the Gay". Vice. Retrieved August 16, 2022.
  11. Hart, Aimee (February 3, 2020). "Gayme of the Week: Life is Strange Before the Storm". Gayming Magazine. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  12. Mejia, Ozzie (January 22, 2016). "Life is Strange co-director discusses the game's endings, production, and answers Chatty questions". Shacknews. Retrieved August 21, 2022.
  13. Clarke, Dan (August 5, 2016). "Gay themes and video games together at last". Star Observer. Retrieved August 18, 2022. Rachel and Chloe were close. Really close. So close that Chloe spends her days plastering those missing person posters across town and desperately investigating her whereabouts. Intuition gives a distinct impression that these girls were more than friends, something that’s soon confirmed. Rachel initially filled the best friend void left by Max when she moved away, but that developed into something else. Chloe is gay, that’s not a throwaway piece of information.
  14. Arbuckle, Alyssa; Bath, Jon; Saklofske, Jon (2019). Feminist War Games? Mechanisms of War, Feminist Values, and Interventional Games. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9781000751208. ...as we search to uncover the mystery of Rachel Amber's disappearance. The popular town narrative is that she ran away to Los Angeles; however, the benevolent mentor-figure, Max's celebrity photography teacher Mr. Jefferson, is revealed to be a predator, assaulting and murdering his female students.
  15. Dontnod Entertainment (24 March 2015). Life Is Strange (Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360). Square Enix. Level/area: Dark Room.
  16. Dontnod Entertainment (24 March 2015). Life Is Strange (Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360). Square Enix. Level/area: Polarized.
  17. Jessey, Ben (February 4, 2022). "Life Is Strange: How Did Rachel Die?". The Gamer. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  18. Ulyanov, Alexander (February 2, 2022). "Life Is Strange: Artistry and Philosophy". PopMatters. p. 2. Retrieved August 21, 2022. Still, there is another set of central characters in Life Is Strange, whose situation is closer to the mythological context of Schiller’s maxim. These are the archetypes that remain unsubverted, the mythologized figures within the in-game world. They supply symbolism for the story, bringing it to the level of universal patterns and not just random people. One of these mythic figures is Rachel Amber...
  19. Liang, Nathan (February 1, 2018). "Love Done Right". The Tech. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  20. Deck Nine (September 30, 2021). Life Is Strange: True Colors (Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Stadia). Square Enix Europe. Level/area: Wavelengths (DLC).
  21. Hernandez, Patricia (October 23, 2017). "Life is Strange: Before The Storm Ep. Two Captures The Recklessness of Teenage Crushes". Kotaku. Retrieved August 21, 2022.
  22. Needham, Jessica (August 2018). "Queering Player Agency and Paratexts: An Analysis and Expansion of Queerbaiting in Video Games". Cultural Analysis and Social Theory.
  23. Fredenburg, Tara (May 31, 2019). "QUEER LIFE IS TRAGIC: Lauren Berlant's "Cruel Optimism" and Lee Edelman's Negative Queerness in Life is Strange". Sprinkle: An Undergraduate Journal of Feminist and Queer Studies. 12 via Digital Commons.
  24. Pötzsch, Holger; Waszkiewicz, Agata (December 1, 2019). "Life Is Bleak (in Particular for Women Who Exert Power and Try to Change the World): The Poetics and Politics of Life Is Strange". Game Studies. Retrieved August 17, 2022.
  25. Flores, Natalie (May 16, 2019). "Why Life Is Strange 2's Ungraceful Depiction of Queerness Is Important". Paste Magazine. Retrieved August 17, 2022. The first season of Life is Strange was criticized by some for not being explicitly queer enough and having an ending that played into the infamous Bury Your Gays trope by making Max choose between sacrificing an entire town or her potential lover, Chloe. Before the Storm—a spin-off prequel made by Deck Nine Games—had a strongly queer main narrative but its ending left a bad aftertaste for some fans who felt it played into the same trope by sensationalizing the tragic death of Rachel Amber.
  26. Browne, Emily (January 19, 2018). "Life is Strange: Before the Storm broke our hearts in good and bad ways". PC Gamer. Retrieved August 17, 2022.



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