The more and more I play Life is Strange, the more and more I realize how fucked up Joyce and David are.
Yeah. At first the romantic in me was all ready to blame Chloe for instigating stuff and slowly starting to think maybe David is to blame and then it hit me.
Joyce is enabling David’s abuse of her daughter.
Because when Chloe is hit the look on her face is not of someone hit for the first time. This is an ongoing thing… and Joyce tells Chloe not to instigate David rather than… you know… tossing him out on his ass. It’s only when she learns he was fucking spying on her and Chloe that Joyce finally womaned up and chose to kick him to the curb… and I like to think that if Max had not spoken up, David was out anyway. Max can calm things down and save David’s ass. But even then he’s still ungrateful.
Joyce was allowing an abusive bastard into her home because she was lonely. She missed William. Chloe was pushing her away because Chloe was in pain having lost both her dad and best friend. So what does Joyce do? She turns to the first “cute face” that comes along and shows her interest and clings to him. Hell, David wasn’t even a security guard at Blackwell at that point. In the other timeline we see David driving a bus – probably because Joyce convinced him to put in at Blackwell in the William Dies timelines.
When you listen to Chloe begging Max to sacrifice herself for the town, you can hear an abused and fractured young woman begging her best friend to save the life of the woman who enabled her breaking. This is the woman who refused to listen to her own daughter when she said David hit me and instead said “don’t instigate him.” Or in other words… “you deserved it.”
Sorry. I don’t care if Joyce dies in the Save Chloe ending… because in my eyes Chloe is worth a dozen Joyces. The one saving grace about Joyce is she probably agrees with me on that.
I know a lot of people disagree with me on this. Joyce is this “wonderful angel” in the eyes of many because she is “patient” with Chloe and the like. But she allowed an abuser to hit her daughter and chose to tell Chloe “don’t instigate him” rather than throw David the fuck out. She allowed her daughter to be abused and this is a significant reason why Chloe is as broken as she is.
Further, it is when her own privacy is violated by David that Joyce throws him the fuck out, rather than anything David did to Chloe. Chloe was forced to live in a household where she did not feel safe because of Joyce’s actions. Hell, I have to wonder if David had smacked Max for some reason if Joyce would have been all “you shouldn’t have instigated him” as well for all that she seemed to love Max as a second daughter.
Joyce is a selfish person who thought of herself first. This doesn’t make her a bad person. There are plenty of decent-but-flawed people out there. But she isn’t the angel so many like to claim she is… and in the end I’m fairly certain she’d have told Max “save my daughter” if she’d had a say in the matter.
ForLoveFromFear 