1/3/2024 0 Comments Oxenfree alex![]() However, the point of giving us a choice in this moment is that we’re meant to realize that we don’t have to agree. She’s supposed to be us, but grown up just a little bit more. This trope and the degree to which Oxenfree plays into it is what tempts us to follow the advice of our future-reflection. Alex should, ostensibly, leave the island as a more mature woman. It’s the kind of story in which the main character usually ends up learning an important lesson about life, love, loss, friendship, family, or all of the above. That sci-fi plotting is just a means of digging into issues of identity and personal growth, specifically regarding teenagers.Īs noted, Oxenfree is a coming-of-age story about a group of teens and the One Big Night that changes their lives forever. Oxenfree isn’t actually interested in those philosophical questions about time travel. There are a lot of questions raised in this moment that deal with the philosophical consequences of time travel, but at the core of this issue is something much simpler: Do I agree with that advice? So do I say what my future-reflection advised, or do I reject her? Will rejecting that advice cause some sort of time paradox? Was my future self trying to change the past by telling me to do something different, or was she trying to keep the timeline intact? In retrospect, it’s now clear that my reflection was speaking to me from the future. ![]() He asks about his relationship with Clarissa, and I’m given a choice in how to respond. However, a few supernatural time traveling shenanigans later, I’m in the past and talking with my soon-to-be-dead brother about his future. Besides the fact that Michael is dead, Clarissa is such an asshole that any decision that makes her happy seems to be the wrong decision. The advice seems like nonsense in the moment - in my game, my reflection told me to tell Michael, my dead older brother, that he should stay in a relationship with Clarissa, the mean girl of our group. There are several moments in the game in which we see our reflection in a mirror or in a lake, and our reflection gives us advice on our current supernatural situation. Oxenfree argues that there is no line, there is no coming of age. However, beneath that generic surface is a story that undercuts and deconstructs the very idea of coming of age, the idea that there’s this arbitrary line in a person’s emotional development in which we go from “child” to “adult”, from someone young enough that we should be taking advice to someone old enough that we should be giving advice. On its face, Oxenfree is a standard, though well-written, young adult coming-of-age story, the story of One Big Night that offers life lessons to its teenage characters. Like most mysterious islands, this one is an attractive hang out spot for teens looking to escape from their normal lives for a night, and what begins as a night of unsupervised drinking becomes something much more sinister and dangerous. Oxenfree is a Young Adult story about a girl named Alex, a group of her friends, and the supernatural entities they get involved with on a mysterious island.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |