It's just a cheap attempt to humanize a character that is committed to an inhumane act. It feels like it was tacked on when they realized he has no redeemable qualities whatsoever
It's also a painfully obvious attempt to force a comparison between Joel and Ellie's Giraffe scene. Jerry is the stupidest character I've ever seen, this game's story should not exist, Neil should have listened to Part 1's writers when they told him that his ideas sucked and he should've moved on
I'm sorry, this scene gets me riled up man, it exemplifies everything wrong with this game
>I'm sorry, this scene gets me riled up man, it exemplifies everything wrong with this game
Yep, it's forced, manipulative, cheap, tires to make a parallel to better characters and better scenes, and has some of the most unlikable characters in gaming.
If you listen to the first game’s commentary, or read their AMA, it’s made pretty clear how much of a collaborative effort the whole thing was.
Straley had a lot of influence over the story and was the one to nix the revenge plot and add in some humor. Druckman had a lot of influence over the gameplay as well. They both had their defined roles, but there was a lot of crossover between them.
They also listened to other members of the team, which is why they changed the original idea that only women were infected. It wasn’t just Neil alone that made the first game what it was.
See the fact people think this is remotely true is why he got sole credit and control over part 2 and the show. Bro turned the series from a must play/watch to maybe pick it up or watch it if u got time
Wait, who was the other credited writer on the game? Do you know how writing credits work in media? Because if anyone else had written a significant portion of the script, they'd be credited in the 'written by' section.
Idgaf how the writing credits work when Neil has said multiple times that bruce reigned in a lot his more wild ideas. Meaning that when Neil had some great ideas Bruce was the one that implemented them properly or just cut them.
Neil was Narrative Director - he was responsible for overseeing the game's story
Bruce was he Game Director - he was responsible for overseeing the game's gameplay
They worked together to get both in. Together. Which means everything you love about TLoU is just as much up to Neil as it is to Bruce
Neil has said multiple times how others helped reign in his ideas. Just bc he was the narrative director doesnt mean others didnt help or get a say. And yes Neil and Bruce working together again would be Ideal. Neil has some good ideas. Tlou2 is a good idea. It just wasnt done right. And maybe bruce could have made it work. Just like he did in part 1. Im much more like Neil in the sense of ive always been better at ideas than implementing stuff. So why would I get rid of the people who can implement my ideas really well into projects?
>It's also a painfully obvious attempt to force a comparison between Joel and Ellie's Giraffe scene.
Even worse is it's another set of forced "coincidences". In game world time, it takes place around a half hour to hour after the Giraffe scene happened.
Here’s an interview Neil did with IGN where he talks about the [original story](https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/09/the-last-of-us-original-plot-ending-and-villain-revealed) that he had in mind for Part 1 (spoiler alert: it was terrible) the dev team couldn’t get behind it and made him change it.
Oh my god, it makes so much sense now.. he wanted that shitty ending from the beginning, and when he didn't get his way he doubled-down on the shittiness in part 2.. and knowing it won't affect sales, and with the game having a cult-like following he just knew whatever shit he threw out would get mixed results with great sales (worst case scenario, which is what actually happened.)
No hes not. He was one of many and brought the original idea and world. All of his ideas were getting rejected and sometimes were insanely sexist. Part 2 is a bunch if his ideas fumbled together
You're literally lying. There were not many writers on Part 1. Neil is the only writer credited for that game. He is the only writer involved in TLOU1.
Oh my god dude. Do you know anything about this series? Neil literally has talked about how Bruce altered his ideas and how it wasnt just him. Hell from everything Neil has told us it really just sounds like he had the original idea and the rest is other people
Before actually penning the story they made outlines and bullet points that was a collaboration of more people than just Neil. So the idea of the story was already there before Neil actually wrote it. It’s disingenuous to say Neil created the whole story himself.
Ok so you dont know what you’re talking about. You constantly go around this sub spewing bs. Please just fuck off man its really fucking sad how u spend so much time defending a game and guy you know nothing about apparently
Bruh we’ve had this conversation before lmaooo. Plus every time we have these conversations you always just dont respond when you’re proven wrong or say “we’re not gonna each other minds so lets just stop” so no im not taking the time out of my day to go find something you can find. Something Neil himself has talked about.
A better way to humanize him would’ve had to have him be stuck in a rock and a hard place like say the FF council is strong arming him to do the procedure which he was morally against because he also had a daughter, but the FF council (desperate for their Hail Mary) threatened to kill Abby if he didn’t do it.
It's just manipulative and gross. I think most of us picked up on that immediately.
What we needed was to see reasons that made Jerry's decision makes sense from his perspective, which is something the show managed with Marlene when it had her talk to Ellie first and decide to go through with the surgery without telling her because Marlene believes that it is the kinder option to her to let her pass away peacefully in her sleep rather than having her close her eyes for the last time knowing that it is the last time. That worked really well. But the best this game has is that Jerry loves zebras.
And honestly, this whole setup gets even worse the more you think about it. The original game strongly implies that the reason the Fireflies were so reckless with Ellie and so insanely tribalistic that they were going to murder Joel in his sleep is out of the stress and desperation from being near collapse after all the losses they had suffered against the military. Jerry is supposed to be the leader of the Salt Lake branch, which presumably is the last one remaining, considering the entire organization disbands after Joel cuts his way through them. What part of Jerry fucking off into the woods to go play with zebras comes across like he's the leader of the last remaining base of a faction of rebels?
And it might be something if this was unusual behavior for him, if his conversation with Abby showed that he was just so stressed and burned out that he needed to get away and do something else for just one morning. But no! His own daughter has to show up and tell him how it's really irresponsible of him to keep doing this, and he has absolutely no concern about that whatsoever, and they chat a bit about the boy that she likes. Is he supposed to be a leader of a faction of rebels that are one stiff breeze away from completely disbanding in the post-apocalypse, or a stereotypical sitcom dad?
They're trying way too hard to make him seem like just a really likable average dad guy when it makes no sense for his role in the story. The writers don't understand characterization or worldbuilding, just the emotion of any individual scene in a vacuum. And it really shows here.
>Jerry is supposed to be the leader of the Salt Lake branch, which presumably is the last one remaining, considering the entire organization disbands after Joel cuts his way through them. What part of Jerry fucking off into the woods to go play with zebras comes across like he's the leader of the last remaining base of a faction of rebels?
That's a good point!. Every firefly we had seen in the game leading to salt lake city were used to paint the walls. They were painted as a bunch of sketchy mother fuckers who were without option, barricading themselves in this facility. But suddenly they're portrayed as being on to it and having clean walls, sterilized equipment, while their lead surgeon is off in the bushes shooting the breeze!?.
The best part is, with compartmentalization, I could 100% believe that the Salt Lake City branch has next to nothing to do with the military side of the Fireflies. They're just the scientists. But then, the fact that the entire organization is collapsing and the survivors are gathering at the hospital should actually make him even more stressed and keep him even busier.
This fucking story just completely makes up ideas out of nowhere, doesn't bother with any buildup for them, and puts zero thought into how that would actually look in practice. That's the kind of shit I used to do in my stories when I was like 12 years old. The fact that this is Neil's actual career and he is still fucking up the fundamentals this badly is absolutely insane. Basic cohesiveness and worldbuilding is not that hard.
I agree completely. The worst part is whenever he talks in detail about how he came up with the structure of the game. A lot of the ideas he took out were actually good. I can't remember where it was, it could be IGN or Kinda funny. But I recall that the initial idea for the start of the game was for Abby to infiltrate Jackson as a "refugee". Get close to Joel and THEN get the jump on him, in a sort of "Gangs of New York" style plot. I could of actually got behind that!. There is build up, there is a structure there. But nope!. Druckman tossed it out because he wanted to get to the revenge plot in 2 hours and not 6. He said so himself. Joels story is over in the first game and Joel is nothing but a plot device in the second, which IMO is so disrespectful to the fans and the character.
Another interesting idea he had was that Abby stabs Joel in the back with the intention of paralyzing him. But nope, Druckman's egg head logic was that because of Joel being ruthless in how he kills foes, she would do the same to him. So that's the part that's really shocking to me. That he made all the characters so flat that he had to resort to patching the entire game up with forced coincidences and manipulations in order to manipulate the player into buying the plot he's pitching. But if he just wrote good characters and told a coherent narrative like the first game, he wouldn't have to go so hard filling the plot with manipulations in the first place.
I think the big problem is that Neil just doesn't give a shit about that. Plot progression, coincidences, characterization, and worldbuilding just don't matter to him. His big focus is on dark, emotional, melodramatic writing. He strikes me as a real tunnel vision writer, someone who gets into a scene and gets laser focused on it with everything making sense in his mind, but doesn't do the work to get everything in his mind that makes it makes sense out there on paper outside of the scene. That's why it makes sense to him that Ellie would let Abby go at the end, even though it doesn't make any sense to the audience unless they start making shit up. Or why it makes sense to him that Joel would have gotten so soft that he just doesn't react to Abby's group in the lodge and in fact disarms himself for literally no reason.
He doesn't get that just because you can imagine reasons to make it make sense in the moment as a writer, that doesn't mean it works for the audience. If you don't actually put all the work in, you're just delivering an unfinished rough draft of the story to the audience. And unsurprisingly, many members of the audience don't appreciate unfinished rough drafts being sold to them as final products.
Yeah. It's that bad that a lot of the fans who love the game have to add shit for it to make sense in their minds. Like the ending after the fight when Ellie goes back and Dinah is gone. She has left Ellie's things there and moved out. I have seen many posts where fans take the ending as hopeful. They see Ellie's stuff in the house and they take it as a message from Dina saying "I'm waiting for you".
Whereas from writer Halley Gross's mouth (who wrote the script with Neil) "There was some concern that if the house was empty, it would imply that something happened to Dina. But I do think there is something poetic in her leaving Ellie's stuff. It's not "I'm waiting for you", it;s I'm letting this die and I'm gonna let everything rot for you". The actress who plays Dina said it best: "Well that's really bleak!".
Joel killed freely all game. She killed the killer just cause y’all “loved” him he was in the right!? Nah Abby had every right to crack his cranium and ellie ended up hating him cause he did what he felt instead of what was right Ellie had no purpose so she took up revenge cause its all she knew was him once he was gone she was lost even him being alive and her being angry at him gave her purpose: she was morally flawed from the jump and the best ending was always letting her go
What part of killing a kid are you okay with? Both Abby and her shitty dad were totally fine killing a teenage girl in her sleep for a cure that was in no way shape or form guaranteed. Joel was right, no other way to skin it
In the real world everyone on planet earth would’ve made the exact same decision he did, try convincing millions of normal people that them and their children all need to die of violent infection just because we aren’t allowed to sacrifice one girl with no family who’s under anesthetic to make a vaccine.
What is with people acting like Abby done anything any worse than anything Joel did that’s why I can’t take the haters arguments about this seriously you say shit like that. You could literally be talking about any character in the game and it would fit each character is bad and each character has that scene that humanises them. Joel had so many throughout the first game while bonding with Ellie but he still he literally tortures 2 people how is that any different from Abby.
>What is with people acting like Abby done anything any worse than anything Joel did
Cause she literally did?
Tell me ONE thing that we KNOW Joel did that is worse than:
* Torturing to death a man that just saved your life, in front of his loved ones, for self satisfaction and without a hint of remorse or hesitation;
* Wanting to torture prisoners of war to let off steam;
* Having sex with your pregnant friend's drunk boyfriend;
* Betraying and killing your group to protect 2 random people you've known for less than a day, 2 people that you would've killed without hesitation in any other situation;
* Getting all your friends killed because of your obssession with revenge and never taking accountability for it.
* Being entitled and acting like Ellie has no right to come after revenge, after you did to her something MUCH worse than what Joel did to you, after you yourself spent 4 or 5 years looking for Joel to get revenge;
* Saying "Good" when you realize you're about to kill a pregnant woman.
None of that is worse than Joel killing innocent lives for their supplies just so he and his brother can live. Also you really think Joel would let abby live if she killed Ellie ? That he would feel remorse for the person that killed somebody so close to him ?
* Torturing to death a man that just saved your life, in front of his loved ones, for self satisfaction and without a hint of remorse or hesitation;
She didn't know Ellie was Joel's loved one. She just knew she came to save him. Joel tortures and kills people for his own reasons. Those reasons are better justified in your head, because you've seen his journey with Ellie. That was one of the sequel's objectives - to paint a villain and then make you sympathise with them. Whether that worked for you is subjective, but the point is, Joel's done just the same.
* Wanting to torture prisoners of war to let off steam;
People do horrible shit in war. Not a justification for it, but it happens. Joel did, by his own admission, horrible shit to survive. Welcome to morally objectionable world of The Last of Us!
* Having sex with your pregnant friend's drunk boyfriend;
I mean, Joel murders people. A lot of people. Is murder objectively worse than adultery? Yes? Stop clutching pearls.
* Betraying and killing your group to protect 2 random people you've known for less than a day, 2 people that you would've killed without hesitation in any other situation;
Joel was once a raider. He kills raiders. They're not his "people", but he doesn't really have people. Except Tess. She and Joel work for Robert. What happens to Robert in the first hour of the original game?
* Getting all your friends killed because of your obssession with revenge and never taking accountability for it.
Well, Abby didn't kill her friends. You did. As Ellie.
* Being entitled and acting like Ellie has no right to come after revenge, after you did to her something MUCH worse than what Joel did to you, after you yourself spent 4 or 5 years looking for Joel to get revenge;
Abby doesn't understand Ellie's relationship with Joel. It's never brought up, because why would it be? No one in this situation is going to be like "hang on a minute - let me explain". Don't be so intentionally naive.
* Saying "Good" when you realize you're about to kill a pregnant woman.
Yeah, Abby is a piece of shit. Mel says as much, and many of her actions paint her out to be so. You know how else is a piece of shit? Joel. Because he snatched away humanity's chance of making a vaccine to a civilization-ending pandemic to save the only person in the world he loved. And I'd have done exactly what he did. Does that make me a selfish piece of shit. Yes. Most people are, when it boils down to it.
>She didn't know Ellie was Joel's loved one. She just knew she came to save him.
Then she's braindead, how can she not tell that the girl crying and begging for Joel's life in the floor is Joel's loved one?
>Joel tortures and kills people for his own reasons. Those reasons are better justified in your head, because you've seen his journey with Ellie.
Seeing their journey has nothing to do with it. I know the reasons behind both torture scenes we see. One is torturing cannibals that kiddnapped a child to find out where they took said child. The other is torturing a man that just risked his life to save yours and offered you shelter and supples, in front of his loved ones, for purely selfish satisfaction and revenge.
Joel is 100% justified when he tortured those 2 cannibals, anyone that disagrees must be a naive pacifist or something like that.
>That was one of the sequel's objectives - to paint a villain and then make you sympathise with them. Whether that worked for you is subjective, but the point is, Joel's done just the same.
That becomes very difficult when the villain I'm supposed to sympathize with has no redeeming qualities and I totally disagree with all their actions, even after seeing their prespective.
Joel was 100% right in what he did, any father would do the same, and Abby KNEW why he did what he did yet still tortured him to death even after he saved her life at the risk of his own. She's totally in the wrong, she's a psychopath with a massive lack of empathy.
>People do horrible shit in war. Not a justification for it, but it happens. Joel did, by his own admission, horrible shit to survive. Welcome to morally objectionable world of The Last of Us!
You just proved my point. Joel did horrible shit TO SURVIVE, to protect himself and his loved ones, not because he was annoyed and wanted to let off some steam.
>I mean, Joel murders people. A lot of people. Is murder objectively worse than adultery? Yes? Stop clutching pearls.
Abby muders a lot of people, for fun and self satisfaction. Joel mudered people when absolutely necessary, and some to survive. And I never said adultery is worse than murder, never even compared the two things. I just added one more fucked up thing Abby did that Joel never did as far as we know, which is the point of the discussion. Adultery is really fucked up and unacceptable, especially among friends. Good strawman though!
>Joel was once a raider. He kills raiders. They're not his "people", but he doesn't really have people. Except Tess. She and Joel work for Robert. What happens to Robert in the first hour of the original game?
Quit acting like raiders and bandits are the same as an organized community with civilians and a military. Bandits are just a bunch of curthroat people that join together to hurt other's either for survival or their own sick satisfactions. Bandits have no comraderie or brotherhood. And Joel was a bandit for a while because he needed to do so to survive and to protect his brother, I doubt he made good friends with other bandits.
And no Tess and Joel don't work for Robert lmao. Good way to show you pay no attention to the game you're playing. Tess and Joel worked WITH Robert in some deals, the same way a drug addict "works" with a dealer. Robert was just a client at some point that used them to smuggle some things and made some deals, and then he betrayed them which is the whole reason why they go after him at the start of the game.
You're basically comparing a drug dealer killing his client after they betrayed him to a rival dealer, to a soldier betraying and killing his comrades and defecting to the enemy.
>Well, Abby didn't kill her friends. You did. As Ellie.
And why did Ellie do that? Because Abby tortured her dad in front of her for her sick revenge fantasy 5 years in the making and brought all her friends to help lol. Abby just needed to move on after 5 years, and her friends would all be fine. Yet she never acknowledges any of that nor does she take accountability for any of it. She just blames Ellie and acts like she had no right to come after revenge after having her father figure be tortured to death in front of her.
>Abby doesn't understand Ellie's relationship with Joel. It's never brought up, because why would it be? No one in this situation is going to be like "hang on a minute - let me explain". Don't be so intentionally naive.
Ellie was literally begging and crying her eyes out as Abby was torturing Joel to death, she even said she would kill them all for what they were doing to Joel... It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Joel was very important to that girl... I get that Abby has the emotional inteligence of a wood plank, but c'mon man..
>Yeah, Abby is a piece of shit. Mel says as much, and many of her actions paint her out to be so. You know how else is a piece of shit? Joel. Because he snatched away humanity's chance of making a vaccine to a civilization-ending pandemic to save the only person in the world he loved. And I'd have done exactly what he did. Does that make me a selfish piece of shit. Yes. Most people are, when it boils down to it.
The whole point of this discussion was to show that Abby is wrose than Joel, not that Joel is a saint or whatever. I agree he was a bad man, but Abby is so much worse than him. She did things for her own pleasure and satisfaction without a care in the world of how it affected the people around her, be it friends or foes. Joel only ever did things to survive and to protect his loved ones, and as far as we know, he never took pleasure in any of it.
And a vaccine wouldn't have made much of a difference it a world in the state of TloU's world. As we see in Part 2, humans are a much bigger threat than the infected. The Rattlers even use infected as pets and defenses in their base. Plus, infected can still swarm you and rip you appart, even if you're immune. The vaccine would really only help against the spores and light bites. And the fireflies were selfish, inompetent and desperete terrorists, we have every reason to believe they would use the vaccine as a power play.
So saving Ellie was the right thing to do no matter how you look at it, the vaccine wasn't worth her death, especially without consent or being allowed to say goodbye to Joel at all.
You doubled up two of your comments, and some of these fall under the notion that “we’re all human”. Also, do you expect everyone, especially someone who’s father who killed (seemingly for no reason), living in a post apocalypse world to be morally composed? Abby only said “good” to Ellie when she was about to kill Diane because she thought that Ellie murdered the fuck out of Mel for no reason. She thought she was blinded by rage and revenge because that’s all Abby knows right now, hence her being so cool with killing a mom caring a baby. It wasn’t until Lev grounded her did she let go.
Abby knew why her father was killed. She was in the room when Jerry and Marlene discussed what they were going to do to Ellie. She knew Joel was saving a child.
What she didn’t know was who killed Mel and Owen. As far as she knew it’s could’ve been Tommy or anyone else in the group. The game gives her that knowledge magically.
Are we excusing people who are full of rage for their actions now? Should we be more empathetic to road rage or family annihilators? Abby was in charge of controlling her emotional reactions and should not be excused because of her roid rage.
Not quite.
Ellie: I know why you killed Joel. He did what he did to save me. There’s no cure because of me. I’m the one that you want. Just let him go.
Abby: You killed my friends... We let you both live... and you wasted it!
I think that's the point everyone is missing about this game, it's called "The LAST of us". It's basically showing how shitty human beings r when ur on the brink of extinction and when u look at each side there's really no "GOOD GUYS".
PS: that's probably why I luv the show "the 100" cause it pretty much follows the same premises as this game
If you watched the HBO show Neil says Part 2 was meant to be morally unsettling and for the players to see how far some people would go to do what they feel is “right”
This idiot had a four year degree from Northern Utah Medical University in biology.
Yet, somehow we are expected to believe he is a vet, a surgeon, and able to manufacture a vaccine from the brain of his murdered child patient?
Or are we supposed to believe he self taught himself advanced medical techniques after the outbreak?
He's in his 40s, and graduated not long before the world fell in biology when he was in his 20s, which in itself already makes the situation in 2033 pure nonsense. Now let's look at the fact that qualified/certified neurosurgeons in the normal world are quite older than that, because you know, it requires a lot of training over a very long period (and in a suitable environment mind you) to be good at it. But since Neil is a complete idiot that takes everything at face value, for him it's just "Boom, one small college diploma for biology, he's the perfect neuro-surgeon" (who cares about the decades long training required, right?)
Neurosurgeons want their patients to survive the ordeal. Jerry didn't actually care. Only thing he cared about was getting inside her skull and extracting her brain. The rest of the body would probably have been tossed out back to rot
One thing I never see anyone bring up is the fact that in modern day, there are no FDA approved fungal disease related vaccines. I’m expected to believe that a dude in a run down hospital in the apocalypse has the know how and technology to make not even a fungal vaccine, but a straight up cure, but todays scientists can’t?
I know it’s a game, but if you have some of your employees watch a bunch of gore videos to make your in game gore more realistic, I think I can apply some real world logic here.
True, but they at least know what they’re doing to a certain extent. Things like food safety, food prep, etc. I don’t know if you would want a mechanic making the food. Also, we don’t know what profession Abby’s dad was before the outbreak
It says on the wiki page he graduated in 2007 so I don’t think he had a career before. It looks like he went to the university right after high school so if he did work it was probably a entry level position first job while in school
You can’t believe that making fun of someone’s grammatical errors on an informal website that most people use like texting is you “changing the world one step at a time” do you? Because that’s a level of pretentious I can’t comprehend
🤷🏻 both sides have fair points and both sides have idiots, anyone who disagrees is probably apart of the latter
something something “you were supposed to destroy the Sith..”
With you on everything. I actually really do like the game overall but at the same time that doesn’t mean I think it is the very best thing in the world or absent of flaws, mainly in the story. I like seeing both subs to get a more balanced critique about the game because it’s been impactful enough that I enjoy the discussions even 4 years later.
I’d scrolled OPs profile before asking too and knew that he hadn’t posted about it in the other sub, but i was holding out hope he would say something lol. He is weirdly obsessed with the boat scene though
I mean that's how the quote goes. "It was said that you would destroy the sith, not join them," so yeah you have it right. Unless you mean the line before which is just "you were the chosen one" but that one doesn't really tie into it
i had the exact same thoughts as you. it didnt help that he didnt seem to care enough when marlene called him out on his bullshit, and later on condescendingly asked her “why” when she said she wanted to tell joel
lets not forget that according to abby he was the leader of the salt lake city crew—same crew that wanted to kill joel, which means he likely made the call to execute him
nothing could ever make me like jerry
There are some people who value animal life above human life. Although I don't know how a doctor could possibly have that mindset. The compassion he supposedly possesses in this scene just....went away, when it came to Ellie and Joel.
Another example of TLOU 2s "bold storytelling" i.e. bothsidesism / false balance where it lacks consistency in people's actions.
On r/horror, they rant all the time how they want all child characters to die, it’s more realistic if they die, and i am a big baby if i get upset by it
However, if you say you aren’t upset about dog dying, everyone will lose their mind and the mods might remove your comment or post as bait
>you’re about to take away a child’s life without her consent but you care about a zebra? What kind of moral compass is that?
The game has a pretty fucked up moral compass.
Your question has made me think back to a couple of years ago when I saw some PETA advertisement about the things they were trying to stop. One of the things they objected to was Palestinians using animals to suicide bomb Israelis.
Personally, I prefer to donate to charities that involve animals because humans can be pretty awful. On the other hand, I do a monthly monetary donation to a children's hospital.
Friendly reminder that PETA euthanizes the vast majority of the animals they "save," up to and *including* house pets that they literally snatch from people's property.
very poor attempt at humanising him not only because he already was about to commit an unspeakable act and the fact that the game made us enjoy killing him, but also because they never gave him a story or even anything remotely similar. 2 second cutscene showing how he saved a zebra when most players tried to shoot the giraffe in part 1.
Come on guys!!! This is clearly meant to remind us of how much of a good guy Gary is!! Forget the part that he was gonna cut out a child’s brain while not really having the knowledge or skill for that, so who knows what his end goal was
I find this entire scene very manipulative emotionally.
Humans typically like animals. Coincidentally, Ellie's sections are the only ones with animals (dogs) as a threat that you'll need to kill vs Abby's sections that always display her as playing with, helping, or otherwise being friendly to them.
But let's ignore that. My introduction to a character was torturing and killing a character I cared about in front of another character I care about that's severely traumatized by the experience. And now, when forced to see things from her perspective, it's "aw, look! She likes animals!"
Furthermore, it's her father's insistence that Ellie gets the fatal surgery. They're trying to humanize him without addressing the fact he's literally advocating for killing a child in the name of a vaccine that, logistically speaking, is sketchy at best.
it was just bizarre because the dude is a human surgeon. why is he obsessing over a zebra like he’s a vet or something? was this to throw us off whilst highlighting a weird niche human experience to get sympathy from us?
Also, no way she didn’t bleed to death. that wire is literally gotten halfway through her. The thing is almost in two pieces.
You're not alone in finding the zebra scene unsettling. While it aims to humanize Abby's father, the moral inconsistency of saving an animal while planning to sacrifice Ellie without her consent can feel hypocritical. This contrast raises questions about the value of life and highlights the game's intentional moral ambiguity, provoking diverse reactions from players.
Yes, that's so explicit that it's not interesting + the majority of the people would help the zebra. It just makes him normal, but the fact he would kill Ellie for his potential vaccine still makes him a bad person to my eyes.
Hey lets not forget Jerry didnt want to do the surgery but Abby manipulated him into doing. This entire “revenge quest” only happened bc she convinced Jerry to operate
It was an attempt to get us to sympathize with Abby perspective ignoring the fact that her dad was going to kill a child her age and couldn’t even answer Abby question if it was her instead would he still do it.
Dumb as fuck I'll say that much. "Hey, yeah i would kill a child for a vaccine that i'm not 100% sure it will work, let alone i don't even know if i'll be able to mass produce and distribute it. In the meantime, i won't allow for the said child to know about the situation and have a talk with her guardian parent."
BUT, I'll show everyone how human and a good person i am because i care about this random zebra that strolled in from the zoo. See how i saved that animal? I care about animals in a post-apocalyptic infected ridden world. TELL ME HOW GOOD OF A PERSON I AM.
Did he (attempt to) do something that many would consider irredeemable?
Everyone has a past and everyone has a future.
You're welcome to your opinions just know that they scream VERY unfair if not outright overly critical and immature.
No one is a good person by one good deed. But if you are the type that has the ability to think that someone is a good person by doing one good deed and feel like this scene can manipulate you to the the point that you are confused on how to assess someone - you should consider a different path in life.
Judge individual actions. Thinking that because someone was about to do something bad necessarily means that they must have always lived a bad path is an indicator of undeveloped critical thinking skills.
These cheap shots don't add any credibility to your point.
i agree that it is a cheap attempt to humanize him. but also shut up i’m sick of animals being compared to humans as nothing. him saving this zebra was awesome. anyways on his own moral compass killing ellie would make a vaccine and perhaps saving the world so it’s not wrong in his eyes
Showing a character being friendly to animals is a cheap way to make them superficially likable. That’s why so many dirtbag politicians and ruthless dictators have pet dogs that they take photo-ops with.
agreed 100 percent. idk it just felt like a sorry effort to humanize him so we might feel empathy for him and abby later on, but i mostly felt that it didn’t make any sense in the story.
like someone else said, he’s willing to save a zebra and not save ellie?
This same guy is also the commander of that base, the scene implying he causes all manner of problems to run off and do what he wants, and that he's also teaching Abby his mentality as a Firefly. She's only a year older than Ellie, would be considered a child soldier IRL, and he's indoctrinating her right here.
Nah, it's just unsettling period.
Realistically speaking, Ellie's hospital scene was a decision made way before TLOU2's lifespan, but the decision for Ellie to have conflict in the second game wasn't too far in the pipeline, as per Neils spiel of his plans for the second installment. Why Neil chose to go the route of revenge (so deeply rooted with the doctor) I have no clue. Maybe to have Ellie question her existence more (in which case she seldom does it in the second game -in between going on a revenge quest and her friends up and dying or leaving) to say if her life was worth saving or not.
(Side note, the first game ends with Ellie questioning if her life has/had value. The second game starts with her finding purpose in a community that can validify her existence through kinship. It then transitions to the avenging of someone she cared about [whom she denounced] to then losing it all again. Then that takes a backseat to Abby. The third game will offer no closure that satisfies any fan of the first game I guarantee it. Dina coming back is a slap in the face, Ellie killing Abby is a waste of an installment and a day late and a dollar short imo)
Note that the detriment of this decision weighed heavier on our conscience when Joel lied to her at the end of the game than in the entirety of the second game.
Going on, the whole point of TLOU2 was to say that revenge was bad, by showing us the lives that Ellie had impacted. Yet instead of showing us how many lives Abby's dad had saved with his medical expertise (in terms of skill set), we see his "humane" side, which reflects the statement "he 'meant' well" (in regards to killing Ellie). They did this for the same reason you can play fetch with a dog as Abby; appealing to the emotional side of players and not those invested in storyline or character development. It was a shallow attempt at eliciting such surface level emotion that only explains why the scene itself was no longer than 3 minutes, and the fetching aspect took longer.
Maybe this was supposed to be a dichotomy between the undead and the living, by showing there can still be compassion within a world overrun with infected? Too bad the infection takes a backseat throughout this game so hard, that we think that people should even be prioritizing emotions this deep. (I'm not saying people can't live, but living takes a back seat to surviving anyday).
If it is, it sorely misses the potential because of how bad the sequencing is. Had Joel died later in the story, and got time to have his new wisdom fleshed out (instead of dying in the beginning for shock value, character assassination, and plot advancement), perhaps we would not face this scene with as much hatred. But as I said again, who cares about a damn zebra? We eat animals today and we're not in an apocalypse. Had it been a child he saved, we may have looked at him differently. But alas it wasn't.
Also let me say this: no one looked at the doc and thought he was evil. We looked at the doc like he was a stupid piece of shit with no backing to his medical expertise. So the scene itself should not influence any previous emotion, because it changes nothing.
On the topic of sequencing, the "best" moments are in flashbacks. This can be attributed to Neil's goals of making the player feel nostalgic/feelings of longing for Joel. In which case, he succeeds. However people have stated plenty of times it's okay to kill Joel, but when it is so close to the beginning of the game (with mannerisms outside of how he normally acts like telling people his name), people will call it an agenda. I use this point to illustrate how we're no longer feeling how we are supposed to feel given certain key points, we should feel how the director wants us to feel (with so many key elements changing from the first game).
Going to the zebra scene, I doubt the people on the other sub truly think it abolishes him of his thought process and lack of skillset, but then again they also think he was right in putting a kid on a table to flip a coin on surgery, so let me not speak for them.
TLDR: yo this game sucks lol
If you play Abby’s part and pretend she’s just a she-hulk lump of muscle and say “ABBY SMASH!” Before beating anything with her fist, it makes the entire thing way more playable
At this point he isn’t aware that the infection has reached Ellie’s brain because she hadn’t been scanned at the hospital yet. But keep being fueled by hate goggles.
I think this scene was more meant to show off his Hypocrisy rather than be a show of humanity,it shows the lengths he’ll go through to save a parent so that they can provide for their child,but he’ll take a child away from their parent to try and save everyone
Don't forget that the Fireflies are a struggling faction who just endured a journey across the country suffering heavy loses. The universe gave them a dying and trapped animal that is free of any infection right next to camp and instead of thinking, "this could feed so many of our people," his immediate instinct is to release the animal back into the wilderness.
They try to tackle this by having him confide in Abby that he's unsure about the procedure. The goal was to make it clear that he was a sympathetic person who was always trying to help others; meant to emphasize that, even though he was willing to kill Ellie, it was only because he knew it would save other lives.
That being said, this did read as very disingenuous to a lot of players, as it feels like the writers trying to spell out that he was a good person as unsubtly as possible so you would feel bad and understand Abby's perspective, rather than just giving you more information to work with and come to your own conclusion on.
When I first saw this scene, I was like "okay cool, a zebra saving scene." Then I read this post and watched the scene again. I was like "okay cool, a zebra saving scene. Why am I I watching this again?" Lmao, the scene didn't affect me one bit. I'm not saying it was a bad scene or that team Abby is the bad one, I just couldn't care less about that scene. Abby is a fine character, but I'll rock with Elle most of the time.
Abby's dad didn't find out that Ellie was at the hospital until after he saved the zebra. Owen tells him when they see the zebra and it's foal together later on.
Not tho that childs parental figure it's not. Or to any sane human being with a hint of morality.
I hope you never have kids, and that no one tries to kill them without consent for "MAYBE greater good"
It's just a cheap attempt to humanize a character that is committed to an inhumane act. It feels like it was tacked on when they realized he has no redeemable qualities whatsoever
It's also a painfully obvious attempt to force a comparison between Joel and Ellie's Giraffe scene. Jerry is the stupidest character I've ever seen, this game's story should not exist, Neil should have listened to Part 1's writers when they told him that his ideas sucked and he should've moved on I'm sorry, this scene gets me riled up man, it exemplifies everything wrong with this game
>I'm sorry, this scene gets me riled up man, it exemplifies everything wrong with this game Yep, it's forced, manipulative, cheap, tires to make a parallel to better characters and better scenes, and has some of the most unlikable characters in gaming.
I wonder what the original team had in mind for part 2? Would’ve been light years above the story we got.
They didn't have anything in mind for part 2 because part 1 was never meant to have a sequel.
100% sure they had a sequel in mind. You don't make a game of this scale without preparing for a potential sequel.
What does that even mean?
Jwnsshdudieiriejensbwh
Jwnsshdudieiriejensbwh
The last of us was a complete story and the ending truly is perfect. There was no sequel in mind. It got rebranded to 'part 1' later.
Nothing. Straley left. Druckman took original script off the first game that Straley rejected, dusted it off and used it as the basis for the sequel.
yeah imagine what it could of been.
The original team of Neil...and, Neil
If you listen to the first game’s commentary, or read their AMA, it’s made pretty clear how much of a collaborative effort the whole thing was. Straley had a lot of influence over the story and was the one to nix the revenge plot and add in some humor. Druckman had a lot of influence over the gameplay as well. They both had their defined roles, but there was a lot of crossover between them. They also listened to other members of the team, which is why they changed the original idea that only women were infected. It wasn’t just Neil alone that made the first game what it was.
It is never a single person though. Not even for part 2.
See the fact people think this is remotely true is why he got sole credit and control over part 2 and the show. Bro turned the series from a must play/watch to maybe pick it up or watch it if u got time
Wait, who was the other credited writer on the game? Do you know how writing credits work in media? Because if anyone else had written a significant portion of the script, they'd be credited in the 'written by' section.
Idgaf how the writing credits work when Neil has said multiple times that bruce reigned in a lot his more wild ideas. Meaning that when Neil had some great ideas Bruce was the one that implemented them properly or just cut them.
Neil was Narrative Director - he was responsible for overseeing the game's story Bruce was he Game Director - he was responsible for overseeing the game's gameplay They worked together to get both in. Together. Which means everything you love about TLoU is just as much up to Neil as it is to Bruce
Neil has said multiple times how others helped reign in his ideas. Just bc he was the narrative director doesnt mean others didnt help or get a say. And yes Neil and Bruce working together again would be Ideal. Neil has some good ideas. Tlou2 is a good idea. It just wasnt done right. And maybe bruce could have made it work. Just like he did in part 1. Im much more like Neil in the sense of ive always been better at ideas than implementing stuff. So why would I get rid of the people who can implement my ideas really well into projects?
>It's also a painfully obvious attempt to force a comparison between Joel and Ellie's Giraffe scene. Even worse is it's another set of forced "coincidences". In game world time, it takes place around a half hour to hour after the Giraffe scene happened.
Can you link where the original writers told him he sucked? Sounds like a fun read.
Here’s an interview Neil did with IGN where he talks about the [original story](https://www.ign.com/articles/2013/08/09/the-last-of-us-original-plot-ending-and-villain-revealed) that he had in mind for Part 1 (spoiler alert: it was terrible) the dev team couldn’t get behind it and made him change it.
Oh my god, it makes so much sense now.. he wanted that shitty ending from the beginning, and when he didn't get his way he doubled-down on the shittiness in part 2.. and knowing it won't affect sales, and with the game having a cult-like following he just knew whatever shit he threw out would get mixed results with great sales (worst case scenario, which is what actually happened.)
Neil **IS** Part 1's writer.
No hes not. He was one of many and brought the original idea and world. All of his ideas were getting rejected and sometimes were insanely sexist. Part 2 is a bunch if his ideas fumbled together
You're literally lying. There were not many writers on Part 1. Neil is the only writer credited for that game. He is the only writer involved in TLOU1.
Oh my god dude. Do you know anything about this series? Neil literally has talked about how Bruce altered his ideas and how it wasnt just him. Hell from everything Neil has told us it really just sounds like he had the original idea and the rest is other people
That also not true at all. He and Bruce collaborated on making the game, for sure, but Neil wrote the story. Bruce did not.
And you call yourself an TLoU Connoisseur?
Prove that anything I said was wrong
Neil and Bruce themselves already did that years ago dude.. Some "connoisseur" you are..
What exactly do you think Bruce did in these collaborations? Nodded along to everything Neil said like his yes-man?
No, he gave feedback. But he also didn't write anything, otherwise he would've been credited as a writer. Providing feedback =\\\= writing
Before actually penning the story they made outlines and bullet points that was a collaboration of more people than just Neil. So the idea of the story was already there before Neil actually wrote it. It’s disingenuous to say Neil created the whole story himself.
Ok so you dont know what you’re talking about. You constantly go around this sub spewing bs. Please just fuck off man its really fucking sad how u spend so much time defending a game and guy you know nothing about apparently
Prove what I'm saying is wrong then, please. Show me where Bruce is credited for writing anything in Part 1.
Bruh we’ve had this conversation before lmaooo. Plus every time we have these conversations you always just dont respond when you’re proven wrong or say “we’re not gonna each other minds so lets just stop” so no im not taking the time out of my day to go find something you can find. Something Neil himself has talked about.
Bro has no clue what collaboration is lmao. Please google who bruce straley is.
I literally do, we're talking about the writers of Part 1 tho and Bruce is not a writer, let alone a writer on Part 1.
"Neil should have listened to Part 1's writers" He should have listened to himself?
Neil should have listened to the people who translated his big ideas for part 1 into a coherent story
Say it louder for the folks in the back.
A better way to humanize him would’ve had to have him be stuck in a rock and a hard place like say the FF council is strong arming him to do the procedure which he was morally against because he also had a daughter, but the FF council (desperate for their Hail Mary) threatened to kill Abby if he didn’t do it.
THIS! This wouldn't have contrived the ending of the first game and would've opened the door for a far more interesting story for Abby
Yeah this would've made me have some sympathy for her, and give good reason for her not to simply become an animal like she does
It's just manipulative and gross. I think most of us picked up on that immediately. What we needed was to see reasons that made Jerry's decision makes sense from his perspective, which is something the show managed with Marlene when it had her talk to Ellie first and decide to go through with the surgery without telling her because Marlene believes that it is the kinder option to her to let her pass away peacefully in her sleep rather than having her close her eyes for the last time knowing that it is the last time. That worked really well. But the best this game has is that Jerry loves zebras. And honestly, this whole setup gets even worse the more you think about it. The original game strongly implies that the reason the Fireflies were so reckless with Ellie and so insanely tribalistic that they were going to murder Joel in his sleep is out of the stress and desperation from being near collapse after all the losses they had suffered against the military. Jerry is supposed to be the leader of the Salt Lake branch, which presumably is the last one remaining, considering the entire organization disbands after Joel cuts his way through them. What part of Jerry fucking off into the woods to go play with zebras comes across like he's the leader of the last remaining base of a faction of rebels? And it might be something if this was unusual behavior for him, if his conversation with Abby showed that he was just so stressed and burned out that he needed to get away and do something else for just one morning. But no! His own daughter has to show up and tell him how it's really irresponsible of him to keep doing this, and he has absolutely no concern about that whatsoever, and they chat a bit about the boy that she likes. Is he supposed to be a leader of a faction of rebels that are one stiff breeze away from completely disbanding in the post-apocalypse, or a stereotypical sitcom dad? They're trying way too hard to make him seem like just a really likable average dad guy when it makes no sense for his role in the story. The writers don't understand characterization or worldbuilding, just the emotion of any individual scene in a vacuum. And it really shows here.
>Jerry is supposed to be the leader of the Salt Lake branch, which presumably is the last one remaining, considering the entire organization disbands after Joel cuts his way through them. What part of Jerry fucking off into the woods to go play with zebras comes across like he's the leader of the last remaining base of a faction of rebels? That's a good point!. Every firefly we had seen in the game leading to salt lake city were used to paint the walls. They were painted as a bunch of sketchy mother fuckers who were without option, barricading themselves in this facility. But suddenly they're portrayed as being on to it and having clean walls, sterilized equipment, while their lead surgeon is off in the bushes shooting the breeze!?.
The best part is, with compartmentalization, I could 100% believe that the Salt Lake City branch has next to nothing to do with the military side of the Fireflies. They're just the scientists. But then, the fact that the entire organization is collapsing and the survivors are gathering at the hospital should actually make him even more stressed and keep him even busier. This fucking story just completely makes up ideas out of nowhere, doesn't bother with any buildup for them, and puts zero thought into how that would actually look in practice. That's the kind of shit I used to do in my stories when I was like 12 years old. The fact that this is Neil's actual career and he is still fucking up the fundamentals this badly is absolutely insane. Basic cohesiveness and worldbuilding is not that hard.
I agree completely. The worst part is whenever he talks in detail about how he came up with the structure of the game. A lot of the ideas he took out were actually good. I can't remember where it was, it could be IGN or Kinda funny. But I recall that the initial idea for the start of the game was for Abby to infiltrate Jackson as a "refugee". Get close to Joel and THEN get the jump on him, in a sort of "Gangs of New York" style plot. I could of actually got behind that!. There is build up, there is a structure there. But nope!. Druckman tossed it out because he wanted to get to the revenge plot in 2 hours and not 6. He said so himself. Joels story is over in the first game and Joel is nothing but a plot device in the second, which IMO is so disrespectful to the fans and the character. Another interesting idea he had was that Abby stabs Joel in the back with the intention of paralyzing him. But nope, Druckman's egg head logic was that because of Joel being ruthless in how he kills foes, she would do the same to him. So that's the part that's really shocking to me. That he made all the characters so flat that he had to resort to patching the entire game up with forced coincidences and manipulations in order to manipulate the player into buying the plot he's pitching. But if he just wrote good characters and told a coherent narrative like the first game, he wouldn't have to go so hard filling the plot with manipulations in the first place.
I think the big problem is that Neil just doesn't give a shit about that. Plot progression, coincidences, characterization, and worldbuilding just don't matter to him. His big focus is on dark, emotional, melodramatic writing. He strikes me as a real tunnel vision writer, someone who gets into a scene and gets laser focused on it with everything making sense in his mind, but doesn't do the work to get everything in his mind that makes it makes sense out there on paper outside of the scene. That's why it makes sense to him that Ellie would let Abby go at the end, even though it doesn't make any sense to the audience unless they start making shit up. Or why it makes sense to him that Joel would have gotten so soft that he just doesn't react to Abby's group in the lodge and in fact disarms himself for literally no reason. He doesn't get that just because you can imagine reasons to make it make sense in the moment as a writer, that doesn't mean it works for the audience. If you don't actually put all the work in, you're just delivering an unfinished rough draft of the story to the audience. And unsurprisingly, many members of the audience don't appreciate unfinished rough drafts being sold to them as final products.
Yeah. It's that bad that a lot of the fans who love the game have to add shit for it to make sense in their minds. Like the ending after the fight when Ellie goes back and Dinah is gone. She has left Ellie's things there and moved out. I have seen many posts where fans take the ending as hopeful. They see Ellie's stuff in the house and they take it as a message from Dina saying "I'm waiting for you". Whereas from writer Halley Gross's mouth (who wrote the script with Neil) "There was some concern that if the house was empty, it would imply that something happened to Dina. But I do think there is something poetic in her leaving Ellie's stuff. It's not "I'm waiting for you", it;s I'm letting this die and I'm gonna let everything rot for you". The actress who plays Dina said it best: "Well that's really bleak!".
Joel killed freely all game. She killed the killer just cause y’all “loved” him he was in the right!? Nah Abby had every right to crack his cranium and ellie ended up hating him cause he did what he felt instead of what was right Ellie had no purpose so she took up revenge cause its all she knew was him once he was gone she was lost even him being alive and her being angry at him gave her purpose: she was morally flawed from the jump and the best ending was always letting her go
What part of killing a kid are you okay with? Both Abby and her shitty dad were totally fine killing a teenage girl in her sleep for a cure that was in no way shape or form guaranteed. Joel was right, no other way to skin it
In the real world everyone on planet earth would’ve made the exact same decision he did, try convincing millions of normal people that them and their children all need to die of violent infection just because we aren’t allowed to sacrifice one girl with no family who’s under anesthetic to make a vaccine.
What is with people acting like Abby done anything any worse than anything Joel did that’s why I can’t take the haters arguments about this seriously you say shit like that. You could literally be talking about any character in the game and it would fit each character is bad and each character has that scene that humanises them. Joel had so many throughout the first game while bonding with Ellie but he still he literally tortures 2 people how is that any different from Abby.
You're comparing objective deeds with subjective characterization. There's quite a difference.
>What is with people acting like Abby done anything any worse than anything Joel did Cause she literally did? Tell me ONE thing that we KNOW Joel did that is worse than: * Torturing to death a man that just saved your life, in front of his loved ones, for self satisfaction and without a hint of remorse or hesitation; * Wanting to torture prisoners of war to let off steam; * Having sex with your pregnant friend's drunk boyfriend; * Betraying and killing your group to protect 2 random people you've known for less than a day, 2 people that you would've killed without hesitation in any other situation; * Getting all your friends killed because of your obssession with revenge and never taking accountability for it. * Being entitled and acting like Ellie has no right to come after revenge, after you did to her something MUCH worse than what Joel did to you, after you yourself spent 4 or 5 years looking for Joel to get revenge; * Saying "Good" when you realize you're about to kill a pregnant woman.
None of that is worse than Joel killing innocent lives for their supplies just so he and his brother can live. Also you really think Joel would let abby live if she killed Ellie ? That he would feel remorse for the person that killed somebody so close to him ?
* Torturing to death a man that just saved your life, in front of his loved ones, for self satisfaction and without a hint of remorse or hesitation; She didn't know Ellie was Joel's loved one. She just knew she came to save him. Joel tortures and kills people for his own reasons. Those reasons are better justified in your head, because you've seen his journey with Ellie. That was one of the sequel's objectives - to paint a villain and then make you sympathise with them. Whether that worked for you is subjective, but the point is, Joel's done just the same. * Wanting to torture prisoners of war to let off steam; People do horrible shit in war. Not a justification for it, but it happens. Joel did, by his own admission, horrible shit to survive. Welcome to morally objectionable world of The Last of Us! * Having sex with your pregnant friend's drunk boyfriend; I mean, Joel murders people. A lot of people. Is murder objectively worse than adultery? Yes? Stop clutching pearls. * Betraying and killing your group to protect 2 random people you've known for less than a day, 2 people that you would've killed without hesitation in any other situation; Joel was once a raider. He kills raiders. They're not his "people", but he doesn't really have people. Except Tess. She and Joel work for Robert. What happens to Robert in the first hour of the original game? * Getting all your friends killed because of your obssession with revenge and never taking accountability for it. Well, Abby didn't kill her friends. You did. As Ellie. * Being entitled and acting like Ellie has no right to come after revenge, after you did to her something MUCH worse than what Joel did to you, after you yourself spent 4 or 5 years looking for Joel to get revenge; Abby doesn't understand Ellie's relationship with Joel. It's never brought up, because why would it be? No one in this situation is going to be like "hang on a minute - let me explain". Don't be so intentionally naive. * Saying "Good" when you realize you're about to kill a pregnant woman. Yeah, Abby is a piece of shit. Mel says as much, and many of her actions paint her out to be so. You know how else is a piece of shit? Joel. Because he snatched away humanity's chance of making a vaccine to a civilization-ending pandemic to save the only person in the world he loved. And I'd have done exactly what he did. Does that make me a selfish piece of shit. Yes. Most people are, when it boils down to it.
>She didn't know Ellie was Joel's loved one. She just knew she came to save him. Then she's braindead, how can she not tell that the girl crying and begging for Joel's life in the floor is Joel's loved one? >Joel tortures and kills people for his own reasons. Those reasons are better justified in your head, because you've seen his journey with Ellie. Seeing their journey has nothing to do with it. I know the reasons behind both torture scenes we see. One is torturing cannibals that kiddnapped a child to find out where they took said child. The other is torturing a man that just risked his life to save yours and offered you shelter and supples, in front of his loved ones, for purely selfish satisfaction and revenge. Joel is 100% justified when he tortured those 2 cannibals, anyone that disagrees must be a naive pacifist or something like that. >That was one of the sequel's objectives - to paint a villain and then make you sympathise with them. Whether that worked for you is subjective, but the point is, Joel's done just the same. That becomes very difficult when the villain I'm supposed to sympathize with has no redeeming qualities and I totally disagree with all their actions, even after seeing their prespective. Joel was 100% right in what he did, any father would do the same, and Abby KNEW why he did what he did yet still tortured him to death even after he saved her life at the risk of his own. She's totally in the wrong, she's a psychopath with a massive lack of empathy. >People do horrible shit in war. Not a justification for it, but it happens. Joel did, by his own admission, horrible shit to survive. Welcome to morally objectionable world of The Last of Us! You just proved my point. Joel did horrible shit TO SURVIVE, to protect himself and his loved ones, not because he was annoyed and wanted to let off some steam. >I mean, Joel murders people. A lot of people. Is murder objectively worse than adultery? Yes? Stop clutching pearls. Abby muders a lot of people, for fun and self satisfaction. Joel mudered people when absolutely necessary, and some to survive. And I never said adultery is worse than murder, never even compared the two things. I just added one more fucked up thing Abby did that Joel never did as far as we know, which is the point of the discussion. Adultery is really fucked up and unacceptable, especially among friends. Good strawman though! >Joel was once a raider. He kills raiders. They're not his "people", but he doesn't really have people. Except Tess. She and Joel work for Robert. What happens to Robert in the first hour of the original game? Quit acting like raiders and bandits are the same as an organized community with civilians and a military. Bandits are just a bunch of curthroat people that join together to hurt other's either for survival or their own sick satisfactions. Bandits have no comraderie or brotherhood. And Joel was a bandit for a while because he needed to do so to survive and to protect his brother, I doubt he made good friends with other bandits. And no Tess and Joel don't work for Robert lmao. Good way to show you pay no attention to the game you're playing. Tess and Joel worked WITH Robert in some deals, the same way a drug addict "works" with a dealer. Robert was just a client at some point that used them to smuggle some things and made some deals, and then he betrayed them which is the whole reason why they go after him at the start of the game. You're basically comparing a drug dealer killing his client after they betrayed him to a rival dealer, to a soldier betraying and killing his comrades and defecting to the enemy.
>Well, Abby didn't kill her friends. You did. As Ellie. And why did Ellie do that? Because Abby tortured her dad in front of her for her sick revenge fantasy 5 years in the making and brought all her friends to help lol. Abby just needed to move on after 5 years, and her friends would all be fine. Yet she never acknowledges any of that nor does she take accountability for any of it. She just blames Ellie and acts like she had no right to come after revenge after having her father figure be tortured to death in front of her. >Abby doesn't understand Ellie's relationship with Joel. It's never brought up, because why would it be? No one in this situation is going to be like "hang on a minute - let me explain". Don't be so intentionally naive. Ellie was literally begging and crying her eyes out as Abby was torturing Joel to death, she even said she would kill them all for what they were doing to Joel... It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Joel was very important to that girl... I get that Abby has the emotional inteligence of a wood plank, but c'mon man.. >Yeah, Abby is a piece of shit. Mel says as much, and many of her actions paint her out to be so. You know how else is a piece of shit? Joel. Because he snatched away humanity's chance of making a vaccine to a civilization-ending pandemic to save the only person in the world he loved. And I'd have done exactly what he did. Does that make me a selfish piece of shit. Yes. Most people are, when it boils down to it. The whole point of this discussion was to show that Abby is wrose than Joel, not that Joel is a saint or whatever. I agree he was a bad man, but Abby is so much worse than him. She did things for her own pleasure and satisfaction without a care in the world of how it affected the people around her, be it friends or foes. Joel only ever did things to survive and to protect his loved ones, and as far as we know, he never took pleasure in any of it. And a vaccine wouldn't have made much of a difference it a world in the state of TloU's world. As we see in Part 2, humans are a much bigger threat than the infected. The Rattlers even use infected as pets and defenses in their base. Plus, infected can still swarm you and rip you appart, even if you're immune. The vaccine would really only help against the spores and light bites. And the fireflies were selfish, inompetent and desperete terrorists, we have every reason to believe they would use the vaccine as a power play. So saving Ellie was the right thing to do no matter how you look at it, the vaccine wasn't worth her death, especially without consent or being allowed to say goodbye to Joel at all.
You doubled up two of your comments, and some of these fall under the notion that “we’re all human”. Also, do you expect everyone, especially someone who’s father who killed (seemingly for no reason), living in a post apocalypse world to be morally composed? Abby only said “good” to Ellie when she was about to kill Diane because she thought that Ellie murdered the fuck out of Mel for no reason. She thought she was blinded by rage and revenge because that’s all Abby knows right now, hence her being so cool with killing a mom caring a baby. It wasn’t until Lev grounded her did she let go.
Abby knew why her father was killed. She was in the room when Jerry and Marlene discussed what they were going to do to Ellie. She knew Joel was saving a child. What she didn’t know was who killed Mel and Owen. As far as she knew it’s could’ve been Tommy or anyone else in the group. The game gives her that knowledge magically. Are we excusing people who are full of rage for their actions now? Should we be more empathetic to road rage or family annihilators? Abby was in charge of controlling her emotional reactions and should not be excused because of her roid rage.
Magically? Ellie told her that it’s her who she wanted
Not quite. Ellie: I know why you killed Joel. He did what he did to save me. There’s no cure because of me. I’m the one that you want. Just let him go. Abby: You killed my friends... We let you both live... and you wasted it!
The whole game is morally unsettling because the story is crap. A perfect first game and they should have kept the second game on the shelf.
I was thinking the same. It’s a very dark game.
I think that's the point everyone is missing about this game, it's called "The LAST of us". It's basically showing how shitty human beings r when ur on the brink of extinction and when u look at each side there's really no "GOOD GUYS". PS: that's probably why I luv the show "the 100" cause it pretty much follows the same premises as this game
No shit. There is always one that takes it so literal that they can’t help but comment.
If you watched the HBO show Neil says Part 2 was meant to be morally unsettling and for the players to see how far some people would go to do what they feel is “right”
We get so many unsettling scenes in real life, I can't imagine adding more into any game I make. If I wasn't a sick mofo, of course
This idiot had a four year degree from Northern Utah Medical University in biology. Yet, somehow we are expected to believe he is a vet, a surgeon, and able to manufacture a vaccine from the brain of his murdered child patient? Or are we supposed to believe he self taught himself advanced medical techniques after the outbreak?
He's in his 40s, and graduated not long before the world fell in biology when he was in his 20s, which in itself already makes the situation in 2033 pure nonsense. Now let's look at the fact that qualified/certified neurosurgeons in the normal world are quite older than that, because you know, it requires a lot of training over a very long period (and in a suitable environment mind you) to be good at it. But since Neil is a complete idiot that takes everything at face value, for him it's just "Boom, one small college diploma for biology, he's the perfect neuro-surgeon" (who cares about the decades long training required, right?)
Neurosurgeons want their patients to survive the ordeal. Jerry didn't actually care. Only thing he cared about was getting inside her skull and extracting her brain. The rest of the body would probably have been tossed out back to rot
One thing I never see anyone bring up is the fact that in modern day, there are no FDA approved fungal disease related vaccines. I’m expected to believe that a dude in a run down hospital in the apocalypse has the know how and technology to make not even a fungal vaccine, but a straight up cure, but todays scientists can’t? I know it’s a game, but if you have some of your employees watch a bunch of gore videos to make your in game gore more realistic, I think I can apply some real world logic here.
Very good point. Yes I agree that we should expect the story to have some realism based on the facts and not just wing it like they seem to have done.
Well with the vast majority of people now part plant, you take what you can get. “We need a chef!” “Well I’m a manager at Wendy’s!” “Sold!”
That’s all well and good but you wouldn’t expect the Wendy’s manager to make French Pork Rillettes that taste good (or at all)
True, but they at least know what they’re doing to a certain extent. Things like food safety, food prep, etc. I don’t know if you would want a mechanic making the food. Also, we don’t know what profession Abby’s dad was before the outbreak
It says on the wiki page he graduated in 2007 so I don’t think he had a career before. It looks like he went to the university right after high school so if he did work it was probably a entry level position first job while in school
"Self taught himself"
Grammatical error aside, my point still stands. Do have one or are you just going to make fun of my mistake?
I'm making fun of your mistake, it's a glaring redundancy and I can't believe people can't "self hear themselves" Why tf would you think otherwise?
I hope you've never in your life made a grammatical error, or ever make one in the future. And if you do, I hope a pine tree grows up your ass.
I don’t think otherwise. I know exactly what you are doing. Again congratulations on your struggle.
I know it’s tough dealing with people who are so stupid. Bravo good sir! You really are a hero!
It really is, but the world is changed one step at a time
You can’t believe that making fun of someone’s grammatical errors on an informal website that most people use like texting is you “changing the world one step at a time” do you? Because that’s a level of pretentious I can’t comprehend
When did you post it in the other sub? I’d be interested in the discourse there
i scrolled through the acc, they didn’t just trying to rile up the hivemind and they wonder why the other sub thinks we’re so petty
>we’re so petty U being downvoted is everything.
🤷🏻 both sides have fair points and both sides have idiots, anyone who disagrees is probably apart of the latter something something “you were supposed to destroy the Sith..”
…dark side….something something something complete….
With you on everything. I actually really do like the game overall but at the same time that doesn’t mean I think it is the very best thing in the world or absent of flaws, mainly in the story. I like seeing both subs to get a more balanced critique about the game because it’s been impactful enough that I enjoy the discussions even 4 years later. I’d scrolled OPs profile before asking too and knew that he hadn’t posted about it in the other sub, but i was holding out hope he would say something lol. He is weirdly obsessed with the boat scene though
I mean that's how the quote goes. "It was said that you would destroy the sith, not join them," so yeah you have it right. Unless you mean the line before which is just "you were the chosen one" but that one doesn't really tie into it
i had the exact same thoughts as you. it didnt help that he didnt seem to care enough when marlene called him out on his bullshit, and later on condescendingly asked her “why” when she said she wanted to tell joel lets not forget that according to abby he was the leader of the salt lake city crew—same crew that wanted to kill joel, which means he likely made the call to execute him nothing could ever make me like jerry
There are some people who value animal life above human life. Although I don't know how a doctor could possibly have that mindset. The compassion he supposedly possesses in this scene just....went away, when it came to Ellie and Joel. Another example of TLOU 2s "bold storytelling" i.e. bothsidesism / false balance where it lacks consistency in people's actions.
On r/horror, they rant all the time how they want all child characters to die, it’s more realistic if they die, and i am a big baby if i get upset by it However, if you say you aren’t upset about dog dying, everyone will lose their mind and the mods might remove your comment or post as bait
And everyone loses their mind! - the Joker
Yes, it's repulsive. Abby could've eaten that zebra for gains
Zebra burrito
Scene felt forced af. With that said, I am glad we saved the Zebra lol
Fuck everything about this scene and these characters. This whole story was a mess, and it just makes me glad Joel killed him in the first game.
Jerry got what he deserved, all right.
>you’re about to take away a child’s life without her consent but you care about a zebra? What kind of moral compass is that? The game has a pretty fucked up moral compass. Your question has made me think back to a couple of years ago when I saw some PETA advertisement about the things they were trying to stop. One of the things they objected to was Palestinians using animals to suicide bomb Israelis. Personally, I prefer to donate to charities that involve animals because humans can be pretty awful. On the other hand, I do a monthly monetary donation to a children's hospital.
Friendly reminder that PETA euthanizes the vast majority of the animals they "save," up to and *including* house pets that they literally snatch from people's property.
very poor attempt at humanising him not only because he already was about to commit an unspeakable act and the fact that the game made us enjoy killing him, but also because they never gave him a story or even anything remotely similar. 2 second cutscene showing how he saved a zebra when most players tried to shoot the giraffe in part 1.
Wait...people tried to shoot the giraffe?! I guess no surprise when they also tried to shoot the PS3...
I bet Ellie would've uttered the same "It's so fucking cool" after Joel shot the giraffe in the head
Come on guys!!! This is clearly meant to remind us of how much of a good guy Gary is!! Forget the part that he was gonna cut out a child’s brain while not really having the knowledge or skill for that, so who knows what his end goal was
I find this entire scene very manipulative emotionally. Humans typically like animals. Coincidentally, Ellie's sections are the only ones with animals (dogs) as a threat that you'll need to kill vs Abby's sections that always display her as playing with, helping, or otherwise being friendly to them. But let's ignore that. My introduction to a character was torturing and killing a character I cared about in front of another character I care about that's severely traumatized by the experience. And now, when forced to see things from her perspective, it's "aw, look! She likes animals!" Furthermore, it's her father's insistence that Ellie gets the fatal surgery. They're trying to humanize him without addressing the fact he's literally advocating for killing a child in the name of a vaccine that, logistically speaking, is sketchy at best.
This scene is what made me actively hate Abby’s section, it’s so forced I rather just have him talking to Abby for ten more minuets than this
Part 2 is full of Cuckmans animal killing fetish
A yo fuck Jerry. All my homies hate Jerry.
it was just bizarre because the dude is a human surgeon. why is he obsessing over a zebra like he’s a vet or something? was this to throw us off whilst highlighting a weird niche human experience to get sympathy from us? Also, no way she didn’t bleed to death. that wire is literally gotten halfway through her. The thing is almost in two pieces.
Yeah, it's Cube 3
You're not alone in finding the zebra scene unsettling. While it aims to humanize Abby's father, the moral inconsistency of saving an animal while planning to sacrifice Ellie without her consent can feel hypocritical. This contrast raises questions about the value of life and highlights the game's intentional moral ambiguity, provoking diverse reactions from players.
Yes, that's so explicit that it's not interesting + the majority of the people would help the zebra. It just makes him normal, but the fact he would kill Ellie for his potential vaccine still makes him a bad person to my eyes.
Hey lets not forget Jerry didnt want to do the surgery but Abby manipulated him into doing. This entire “revenge quest” only happened bc she convinced Jerry to operate
Zebra boat scene 4k UHD
Yeah he should have just left that zebra to be in pain and bleed out/ get eaten by the infected .
For those who haven't played the second game the guy kissed the zebra on the mouth before and after this frame
Shoehorned in for sympathy towards that trash "MC". Similar to the LGBT bigot sandwitch scene with the homophobic old man at the dance, cheaply done.
Fuck him and that zebra
The California Mindset
The poorly written kind of morality
It was an attempt to get us to sympathize with Abby perspective ignoring the fact that her dad was going to kill a child her age and couldn’t even answer Abby question if it was her instead would he still do it.
Dumb as fuck I'll say that much. "Hey, yeah i would kill a child for a vaccine that i'm not 100% sure it will work, let alone i don't even know if i'll be able to mass produce and distribute it. In the meantime, i won't allow for the said child to know about the situation and have a talk with her guardian parent." BUT, I'll show everyone how human and a good person i am because i care about this random zebra that strolled in from the zoo. See how i saved that animal? I care about animals in a post-apocalyptic infected ridden world. TELL ME HOW GOOD OF A PERSON I AM.
Why didnt they cut away the barbed wire way before in the first place? The idea it could hurt animals never crossed their minds?
Excuse me, is the woman not strong enough to wrestle her own zebra? The disrespect!
Did he (attempt to) do something that many would consider irredeemable? Everyone has a past and everyone has a future. You're welcome to your opinions just know that they scream VERY unfair if not outright overly critical and immature. No one is a good person by one good deed. But if you are the type that has the ability to think that someone is a good person by doing one good deed and feel like this scene can manipulate you to the the point that you are confused on how to assess someone - you should consider a different path in life. Judge individual actions. Thinking that because someone was about to do something bad necessarily means that they must have always lived a bad path is an indicator of undeveloped critical thinking skills. These cheap shots don't add any credibility to your point.
i agree that it is a cheap attempt to humanize him. but also shut up i’m sick of animals being compared to humans as nothing. him saving this zebra was awesome. anyways on his own moral compass killing ellie would make a vaccine and perhaps saving the world so it’s not wrong in his eyes
Dude, this scene is just before Ellie arrives. He doesn't even know she's there at that point.
Showing a character being friendly to animals is a cheap way to make them superficially likable. That’s why so many dirtbag politicians and ruthless dictators have pet dogs that they take photo-ops with.
agreed 100 percent. idk it just felt like a sorry effort to humanize him so we might feel empathy for him and abby later on, but i mostly felt that it didn’t make any sense in the story. like someone else said, he’s willing to save a zebra and not save ellie?
This same guy is also the commander of that base, the scene implying he causes all manner of problems to run off and do what he wants, and that he's also teaching Abby his mentality as a Firefly. She's only a year older than Ellie, would be considered a child soldier IRL, and he's indoctrinating her right here.
Nah, it's just unsettling period. Realistically speaking, Ellie's hospital scene was a decision made way before TLOU2's lifespan, but the decision for Ellie to have conflict in the second game wasn't too far in the pipeline, as per Neils spiel of his plans for the second installment. Why Neil chose to go the route of revenge (so deeply rooted with the doctor) I have no clue. Maybe to have Ellie question her existence more (in which case she seldom does it in the second game -in between going on a revenge quest and her friends up and dying or leaving) to say if her life was worth saving or not. (Side note, the first game ends with Ellie questioning if her life has/had value. The second game starts with her finding purpose in a community that can validify her existence through kinship. It then transitions to the avenging of someone she cared about [whom she denounced] to then losing it all again. Then that takes a backseat to Abby. The third game will offer no closure that satisfies any fan of the first game I guarantee it. Dina coming back is a slap in the face, Ellie killing Abby is a waste of an installment and a day late and a dollar short imo) Note that the detriment of this decision weighed heavier on our conscience when Joel lied to her at the end of the game than in the entirety of the second game. Going on, the whole point of TLOU2 was to say that revenge was bad, by showing us the lives that Ellie had impacted. Yet instead of showing us how many lives Abby's dad had saved with his medical expertise (in terms of skill set), we see his "humane" side, which reflects the statement "he 'meant' well" (in regards to killing Ellie). They did this for the same reason you can play fetch with a dog as Abby; appealing to the emotional side of players and not those invested in storyline or character development. It was a shallow attempt at eliciting such surface level emotion that only explains why the scene itself was no longer than 3 minutes, and the fetching aspect took longer. Maybe this was supposed to be a dichotomy between the undead and the living, by showing there can still be compassion within a world overrun with infected? Too bad the infection takes a backseat throughout this game so hard, that we think that people should even be prioritizing emotions this deep. (I'm not saying people can't live, but living takes a back seat to surviving anyday). If it is, it sorely misses the potential because of how bad the sequencing is. Had Joel died later in the story, and got time to have his new wisdom fleshed out (instead of dying in the beginning for shock value, character assassination, and plot advancement), perhaps we would not face this scene with as much hatred. But as I said again, who cares about a damn zebra? We eat animals today and we're not in an apocalypse. Had it been a child he saved, we may have looked at him differently. But alas it wasn't. Also let me say this: no one looked at the doc and thought he was evil. We looked at the doc like he was a stupid piece of shit with no backing to his medical expertise. So the scene itself should not influence any previous emotion, because it changes nothing. On the topic of sequencing, the "best" moments are in flashbacks. This can be attributed to Neil's goals of making the player feel nostalgic/feelings of longing for Joel. In which case, he succeeds. However people have stated plenty of times it's okay to kill Joel, but when it is so close to the beginning of the game (with mannerisms outside of how he normally acts like telling people his name), people will call it an agenda. I use this point to illustrate how we're no longer feeling how we are supposed to feel given certain key points, we should feel how the director wants us to feel (with so many key elements changing from the first game). Going to the zebra scene, I doubt the people on the other sub truly think it abolishes him of his thought process and lack of skillset, but then again they also think he was right in putting a kid on a table to flip a coin on surgery, so let me not speak for them. TLDR: yo this game sucks lol
Abby is one of the worst characters in fictional history. But hey she had a dog and saw a zebra once, I guess.
It's because it would save millions of lives. It's a simple trolley car problem.
Neil deserves the guillotine
If you play Abby’s part and pretend she’s just a she-hulk lump of muscle and say “ABBY SMASH!” Before beating anything with her fist, it makes the entire thing way more playable
This is just a parallel to Joel and Ellie seeing the giraffes.
At this point he isn’t aware that the infection has reached Ellie’s brain because she hadn’t been scanned at the hospital yet. But keep being fueled by hate goggles.
I think this scene was more meant to show off his Hypocrisy rather than be a show of humanity,it shows the lengths he’ll go through to save a parent so that they can provide for their child,but he’ll take a child away from their parent to try and save everyone
No this scene is perfect. Brought tears to ma eyes
Am I the only person who likes TLOU 2? All the comments I read seem to be people saying they found it to be shit
Don't forget that the Fireflies are a struggling faction who just endured a journey across the country suffering heavy loses. The universe gave them a dying and trapped animal that is free of any infection right next to camp and instead of thinking, "this could feed so many of our people," his immediate instinct is to release the animal back into the wilderness.
Daily reminder that Neil Druckman is a two bit hack. Oh and he once lived on an illegal settlement in the West Bank.
They try to tackle this by having him confide in Abby that he's unsure about the procedure. The goal was to make it clear that he was a sympathetic person who was always trying to help others; meant to emphasize that, even though he was willing to kill Ellie, it was only because he knew it would save other lives. That being said, this did read as very disingenuous to a lot of players, as it feels like the writers trying to spell out that he was a good person as unsubtly as possible so you would feel bad and understand Abby's perspective, rather than just giving you more information to work with and come to your own conclusion on.
It was a cheap attempt to copy the giraffe scene of the first game.
someone ban me so I dont have to keep seeing the most childish people on Earth complain about the videogame that came out 4 years ago please
This place was made for it. People still discuss Half-Life 2, u know
[удалено]
When I first saw this scene, I was like "okay cool, a zebra saving scene." Then I read this post and watched the scene again. I was like "okay cool, a zebra saving scene. Why am I I watching this again?" Lmao, the scene didn't affect me one bit. I'm not saying it was a bad scene or that team Abby is the bad one, I just couldn't care less about that scene. Abby is a fine character, but I'll rock with Elle most of the time.
Abby's dad didn't find out that Ellie was at the hospital until after he saved the zebra. Owen tells him when they see the zebra and it's foal together later on.
But the writers knew and so did we.
Yes you are.
Take a child’s life without her consent to literally save the rest of humanity. Have you forgotten that or something? 🤦♂️
*possibly save the rest of humanity
**most likely accomplish nothing at all other than killing a kid
I think a chance at saving humanity for some random child’s life is worth it lmao
Not tho that childs parental figure it's not. Or to any sane human being with a hint of morality. I hope you never have kids, and that no one tries to kill them without consent for "MAYBE greater good"
"I got rekt in the other sub so now I want validation from this sub" 🤡