perhaps my most biased and controversial complaint is that de for max is her moving on. it’s her healing from arcadia bay, and most importantly, chloe. as someone who chooses bay more often than not, it meant a lot to me to see max beginning to put chloe’s ghost to rest … and beginning to accept new people into her life ; people she can allow herself to love, and care for, and inexplicably trust. de shows how little max has grown due to the heavy weight of her trauma, but it also starts to unravel her and have her mature — slowly, but surely, she sheds her complexes and flaws and she doesn’t choose the girl over the town, but she won’t choose the town over the girl either. her refusing to choose matters. just as much as her refusing to run away with safi. max making a home of caledon, choosing to face her mistakes and the scrunity of her new friends … it is so deeply important to her as a character. max has spent the last decade hiding from people who love her, from her pain — she’s spent years beholden to chloe’s ghost in the same way chloe was to rachel’s and safi was to maya’s. and it’s unhealthy and so, so stunting. staying at caledon, having new friends, being honest, and even saying she’ll visit arcadia bay again one day? it was growth.
growth that immediately is ruined by reunion. for no reason at all, all her friends and lover(s) forget about her honesty at the turtle … and max just lets them, and will continue to let them forget, forever. she breaks up with vinh/amanda for vague reasons and stops talking to them. chloe gets revived and max gets her arcadia bay and her blue-haired girl — and she becomes obsessive, fixated, pathetically attached to chloe and her hero complex all over again. she lives and breathes chloe and spares no more thoughts towards caledon or arcadia bay besides vague notions of playing savior. she allows chloe to diminish her friends ( safi, always, and vinh depending ) and turns a blind eye to their suffering or even gets angry at them for causing problems. it goes back to how it was before : max, secretive, refusing to be open to anyone besides chloe and one other person. max, claiming that chloe is all that matters. max, who was previously tired of running away and had taken a shine to teaching and caledon, suddenly running off to play band photographer and loving every second of it. there’s no implication she’ll keep in contact with anyone besides moses. safi? amanda? vinh? reggie? diamond?? gwen? they’re blips in her life now. instead of being a permanent place in her heart, they were rendered as placeholders for chloe.
max’s flaws are revived and worsened tenfold and the game never challenges this like it did in de. it’s just so, so fucking disappointing. max was finally at a point of healing, of moving forward instead of looking back, and reunion gave her a ghost and an amazing new reality and dragged her back to the start. chloe and max’s bond doesn’t change. it goes back to what it was, maybe even worse. everything max does is for chloe now. in fact, the writers manipulated de’s ‘merging realities’ incident to make it about max choosing to save chloe and not safi. like … what? the writers wrote safi calling max out on this, and max’s two responses all but confirm it, as it’s a weak excuse or an even weaker apology. i guess safi was supposed to look selfish somehow with this dialogue instead of reasonable and hurt.
anyway. i don’t see how this is max’s happy ending. or how this ending for her is particularly interesting. max moving on and finding a life past the trauma of arcadia bay was always what i wanted, and what was so enriching about max’s plot in de anyway. undoing all that just to give her everything she wanted ( if you get to good ending ) is … boring. i don’t know how else to word it. as a tragedy enjoyer it all just sucks.