'Life is Strange' made me finally understand the 'friend zone' problem
The best friend's insistence irritates and frustrates the protagonist — who's you
Video games are great for exercising empathy because they make you live the life of someone who is often nothing like you. In “Life is Strange”, which I finished playing Friday, 3, this escalates to high levels, since you not only have to control the protagonist, Maxine Caulfield, but also need to deal with the consequences of the choices she (you) made.
The game approaches a series of good issues, but I want to draw attention to a not so obvious one: the friend zone, something the Urban Dictionary explains like this:
A term often used in bitterness by men when women make the choice to not fuck someone. Often used by douchebags or people with Nice Guy Syndrome.
I had already read some explanations for why the term is stupid, but I kept laughing with the memes and I must admit that I never fully understood why such discomfort about it. In my head, the friend zone subject was probably not so serious to deserve problematization.
Then I played “Life is Strange” and, living as Max, had to deal with Warren Graham.
Presented in the first chapter as one of Max’s best friends, Warren is practically the only nice guy of Blackwell Academy, the high school where the game takes place. But the character slowly makes it clear that he is not necessarily interested in friendship, and at one point his intentions are so evident that other characters start talking about it to you.
There’s a whole Warren’s debate on the internet, because, while some see him as a creepy, others understand that he behaves the way any teenager in love would do. I think this disagreement depends on how the story is conducted. When you start playing, you see the following warning:
"Life is Strange" is a story based game that features player choice, the consequences of all your in game actions and decisions will impact the past, present and future. Choose wisely…
Part of these decisions is related to Warren. If you show him some interest, probably his attitudes are not going to bother you, otherwise, he will develop into an annoying and insistent guy who can’t understand the concept of friendship.
I was on the second team and didn’t want anything more than friendship, so I was getting more and more frustrated with the guy’s behaviour. He keeps complaining about the things he did to help you and all the time insists in asking you to the cinema. He makes points about his discomfort in relation to your relationship with other people and sends weeping texts suggesting that you “owe” him for saving you.
Depending on how you deal with Warren, his behaviour worsens, but since the beginning it’s possible to notice that he is not that much of a nice guy. For instance, if you accept his first invite for going out, he will think it was too easy and also throws in your face that he had already invited another person; in case you refuse, you will hear him call you a “dirty human” — a reference to the movie they would see, "Planet of the Apes".
Reading about it on the internet, I found out that he even spies on Max. On the image bellow, for instance, it is possible to see Warren looking at the girl’s bedroom at 7 a.m. It’s so subtle that I didn’t even notice when I played.
His insistence is so overwhelming that I ended up giving in. But with a feeling like “Okay, let’s do it once and for all” and thinking: “Shit, Warren, I wanted us to be just friends, why don’t you understand that?”
And it was only then that I finally perceived how annoying it is to have your friendship twisted even though you did everything to make it clear that you didn’t want to change your relationship status. Max is the “I’m nice to everybody” type, so she treats all her colleagues well, but Warren was the only one who understood this as an invitation, and the only one that gave himself the right to bother her for having friendzoned him.
Warren Graham, in the end, is a reliable representation of the man who doesn’t know how to separate things and demands privileges in exchange for his good attitudes. The spoiled guy who can’t hear a no, but at least he made me finally understand why the friend zone thing is so stupid.
Leonardo Pereira is a Brazilian journalist located in Dublin. He is a senior writer and proofreader at Olhar Digital and can be found on the Internet as @leeopereira.
