"but it's realistic that they would breakup"
Not the point.
"But they had a lot of trauma the re-"
Also not the point.
"But at least she's a-"
Absolutely not the point.
Y'all trying to justify a narrative choice from within the narrative constraints.
That's a mistake.
Just like how many people never understood why so many would pick Bae ending, so many people just don't seem to get what the pairing meant overall.
Y'all realise what this pairing meant to people when it came out?
Despite the issues with the ending, the adoration and love the pairing has to this day has been earned by the game - it's inseparable from the franchise and it's reception.
It wasn't just another pairing. It wasn't just something that existed as bait or something within fanon or something developers never committed to.
Through the years plenty of ships get baited disingenuously while throwing the audience nothing but breadcrumbs - for example the disaster of Sherlock fandom, the mess with Supernatural, Teen Wolf, Voltron and so on. Or the way Blake/Yang in RWBY were the most blatant baiting that got no on-screen development(despite all the setup that show ignored for years) till the moment the show literally was getting axed and they wanted to milk LGBTQ+ community for money one last chance.
And some shows would stumble into something important but fail to realise it and thus end up squashing it - ask Buffy fans about Tara and Willow or The 100 fans about clexa.
There were LGBTQ+ pairings in video games too but rarely they would be so front and center and very often would be playersexual.
This wasn't what Life is Strange ended up being.
Life Is Strange, at the very core is about queer experience - about fitting in, about making connections in the world that rejects you, about finding beauty in the life that hates and hurts you - Max and Chloe's relationship is the key to the entire game.
For some that meant letting go but for others? It gave the chance to fight a trope no matter what and to get an ending, albeit flawed, where a WLW pairing they liked can be happy and face the future together.
People lived through those two characters and their experiences finding something genuine to relate to.
Max and Chloe were that generation's Korra/Asami, Willow/Tara, etc.
Even DONTNOD recognised that in the end and treated it with respect.
Double Exposure might not pull a BYG outright but it sure does everything to kill the happy memories a fandom made about the pairing - to go back through every single ray of sunshine one ending got and subvert it, taint it, reject it.
Picking the Bae choice when playing Double Exposure is the Narrative constantly telling you how wrong you were to expect happiness when you picked the ending where the pairing is intact and how acshually it isn't intact!
It doesn't kill the characters but it sure goes an extra mile to kill what those characters MEAN to the audience.
Realism, plausibility and so on come after - it's what a writer does when they decide on a path. A writer doesn't just do something because it makes sense and is out of their control - they decide to do it and then make it make sense. Whether they succeed or not depends on how good a writer is.
Double Exposure isn't the story about a breakup. It isn't the story about two women dealing with their trauma.
Double Exposure treats an iconic pairing people cared about as a backstory element - nothing more.
Deck Nine expects the audience to accept what happened and move on to shiny new cast and possible new LIs.
The writers of Double Exposure are telling you - "look, this doesn't matter. Now here's a new mystery you can solve and new cast and look Max is back and you liked using her powers right? Use powers to do stuff."
To this developer team the core element of what made the franchise so important to its audience is nothing more than a leftover plot thread to "write around".
Because to these writers queer experience apparently starts and stops with searching for a relationship - someone being in a relationship that's not part of the story or someone being comfortable NOT being in a relationship at all just don't exist.
What Deck Nine writers seem to be doing is treating it as disposable or interchangeable/replaceable, while also inadvertently tainting whatever comes after with fandom rage.
The worst thing that can happen to a new character is being "the next love interest" - because people channel their frustrations towards the character (or in some worst cases, please don't do this, the actor).
Where there was an iconic part of the franchise Double Exposure, intentionally or not, sets up a toxic battle ground.
That's the point - treating LGBTQ+ audience as sales numbers, manipulating us, treating something that has been a formative experience to so many lives as disposable, or worse yet - malleable.
(And yes there's also a wider issue with Deck Nine and the working conditions there, misogyny, the nazi imagery and the rest but I don't think this is that disconnected from that? How they treat their audience and subject matter is a reflection of culture inside.)
