I just beat The Last of Us II last night, and I'm still trying to process the game. I'm sure I'll continue to process the game well after this blog, and maybe I'll never fully process it. But I just want to write out some thoughts while they're still in my head in regards to this game. This blog will be spoiler heavy, so if you haven't finished the game and don't want anything spoiled, then please don't read any further.
SPOILERS BELOW!
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Ok, here we go. Probably the most controversial thing about The Last of Us II is the game's new character, Abby. The game is split down the middle between her and the previous game's Ellie. The game is trying to tell a dichotomic story between Abby and Ellie, and this has become such a topic of contention among fans. I've been reading comments and articles and watching videos and I've honestly never seen such a debate over a video game like this. The game clearly wants you to pick a side, and it's so split down the middle for me, but I'm leaning towards Abby. And here's why.
If you read the spoilers or played the game, you know Abby kills Joel in the opening hours and not just a swift death, but a long, agonizing and brutal death. This is meant to anger you. This is intentionally set up to make you immediately hate Abby for it, so much so that your rationality for understanding her motives is completely lost. You no longer care about the fact that Abby is only avenging the death of her father. Yes, the doctor Joel killed at the end of the first game in order to steal Ellie away was Abby's father. Fuck her revenge, right? She just killed my favorite character! Now I have to avenge Joel!
Yes, but let me say something that will most likely piss you off. Joel didn't deserve being avenged. Trust me, I've had a hard time coming to grips with that conclusion myself. I remember back when I was beating The Last of Us, and I went back to the room and killed the doctor and escaped with Ellie. I DIDN'T WANT TO DO THAT! I didn't like what I was doing. I was undoing the entire REASON of trekking across the country with Ellie in tow, because we were supposed to save humanity! But Joel condemned the world that day. Yeah, he didn't want to lose Ellie, so he made that hard decision, but it was ultimately the wrong one at the end of the day.
Near the end of The Last of Us II, there's a flashback of Joel and Ellie and Joel doubles down and says if he had the chance to do it all over again, he would. So, Joel would rather give up millions of lives for one little girl. All the constant wars between factions, the WLF, FEDRA, the Scars, the Jackals that pop up at the end of the game, the continued spread of the infection, it ALL is a result of Joel's selfish decision. It doesn't matter how much you love Ellie. She was birthed into existence for one very special reason: she was the cure. The only one of her kind.
During the first game, you had hope that you were going to save the world, but not only did Joel strip you of that hope, but he also flat out lied to Ellie saying there was no cure. He made Ellie find that out on her own and when she did and confronted him about it, he double downed and said he'd do it all over again. Despicable. So, no. as much as you loved Joel, he didn't deserve being avenged. Not only did he condemn the world to more war and death, but he killed countless people along the way and killed Abby's father in the process. For what? Because he was SELFISH.
Now, let's talk about Abby. When Abby's character was first revealed, her appearance pretty much solidified she wouldn't be universally accepted by gamers, and would make it that much harder for people to give her a fair shake in the game. With a muscular build, flat chest and boyish face, many people believed her to be the transgender character, but that role fell to Lev. If you haven't played the game, I can assure you, Abby is 100 percent cis female. She has her own flashback sequences, one of which is when she's a teenager, actually filling out a bit. She has feelings for a guy named Owen, and they go on little getaways. There's even a sex scene, albeit awkward as all hell, between her and Owen and yes, you do see her breasts. So, if your dislike towards Abby is because she's transgender, you are severely misinformed and actually pretty bigoted. I do wish they would have spent a little bit of time exploring Abby's decision to dedicate herself to her physical training, but it's easy to understand why she'd want to get as strong as she could because of the things she had to do.
I will admit that her story may not have been fleshed out as well as Ellie's, but believe it or not, Abby has a lot more going on than Ellie's story. Ellie's role exists solely for the purpose of revenge. Abby got that part of her story out on the onset. So from this point out, Abby sets about her role as a soldier for the Washington Liberation Front, WLF for short and Wolves for shorter. Their priority is to fend off a group of cultists known as the Scars, so Abby is CONSTANTLY struggling with war. Very soon, one of their soldiers Owen goes AWOL and Abby goes after him to bring him in. When they meet up, they have a weird fight that ends in weird sex. She finds out Owen wants to leave to Santa Barbara with Mel, a woman pregnant with his child, who also despises Abby. Abby ends up going solo and gets captured by Scars and is then saved by two children who excommunicated themselves from the cult. Long story short, Abby ends up abandoning her affiliation with the Wolves and protects the two Scars children Lev and Yarra. She risked her life to go back and save the children when they were in trouble, risks her life AGAIN when Yarra's dying from a broken arm, and AGAIN when Lev goes off to chase after his mom.
I'm bringing this up because I'm seeing the argument too much that tries to paint Abby as this completely evil person. That she shows no remorse, regret, humility, humanity, whatever. It's just not the case. Unless you're really adamant on ignoring everything going on with Abby, she is feeling pain. She is capable of love. Abby is kind enough to play with dogs. Abby tries to maintain friendships. She is cold, yes, but so has been Ellie. In fact, Ellie kills one of her captors in cold blood, after incapacitating him with his own weapon and getting the info from him that she wanted.
Now, when Abby and Ellie crossed the first time when Abby killed Joel, it was ABBY who showed mercy and didn't kill Ellie, even though she had every right considering Ellie was a witness. She went against her teammates who said she ought to be killed. It was ELLIE who decided to go after Abby to kill her, and I thought it was really interesting that the confrontation was pitting you as Abby against Ellie, turning her into a boss character. I didn't see that part coming, but at the end of that scene, it was ABBY again who showed mercy. Yes, it was at the behest of Lev, who didn't want to see Abby kill anymore, but it was BECAUSE Abby had humanity that ALLOWED her to listen to Lev and let Ellie ago, AGAIN. Yes, there was the scene where Abby was going to slit Dina's throat, who was pregnant, but this was AFTER Ellie killed pregnant Mel. Abby is righteously angry at this point, and even with all this anger, SHE STILL LET ELLIE GO!
When the game slowed down after that confrontation, Ellie was given the perfect ending. She survived, with Dina, and Dina had her baby. They lived in a house on a farm and were going to have a beautiful family. This is where the game should have stopped in my honest opinion, but instead, Tommy who miraculously survived being shot in the head, shows up and tells Ellie he has a lead on Abby. Because he's maimed, he physically can't go after Abby so he wants Ellie to do it. Ellie, rightfully so, tells him no. He gets angry and walks out, but the seed has already been planted. Dina does not want Ellie to pursue Abby, because they BOTH agreed they were done, but Ellie just couldn't let it go. She keeps having images of Joel, the man who condemned the world to an incurable disease and further war while also denying Ellie's purpose of existing, and she STILL needs to avenge him. She was shown mercy TWICE and now has a quiet life with Dina and a baby, and yet STILL has to see this through.
She sneaks off in the middle of the night, lands on a Santa Barbara shore and after one last massive encounter, finds Abby strung up on a pillar. Instead of fulfilling her role for abandoning her life with Dina, Ellie shows mercy this time and cuts her down. She lets Abby cut down Lev, who is also still alive and heads off to a pair of boats with them. I don't know what to think at this point. You took me all the way to California and had me kill a bunch more people, one even in cold blood, and you decide at THIS very point that Ellie's going to have a change of heart? Then not only that, you decide that Ellie's going to change her mind again and try to fight Abby this time, who REPEATEDLY says no? Yes, this psychopath you hate so much, this woman who is SO EVIL, is now the one refusing to fight Ellie, when BOTH previous encounters, Abby was the one who showed mercy. NOW, you're going to have Ellie FORCE Abby to fight her by threatening to slit the throat of Lev who is too weak to defend herself? So you drag me through this shit and force me to fight someone I don't want to fight anymore, and then just as I'm about to drown Abby, the very last second, you flash Joel's smashed face in front of me again, and THAT.. that final moment, more than a year a later in the game, is what makes Ellie finally let Abby out of the water and let her go... A moment that was flashed repeatedly in the game to only further Ellie's rage and quest for revenge... was used to end the circle of violence...
Yes, the circle of violence. I've heard this argument, too. I'm supposed to care that Ellie ended the circle of violence by letting Abby go when in all actuality, it was JOEL who started the circle of violence in the first place by killing Abby's father and condemning the world. Ellie was SUPPOSED to end the circle because SHE was the one who kept it going! I'm not giving her praise for that. Joel was responsible for MILLIONS of deaths in the future. Abby was responsible for ONE. Joel was not worth avenging! You can get as emotional about that as you want, but that does not change the fact that the WEIGHT of what he did was not worth Ellie's life.
You can feel bad about Ellie's loss all you want. Yeah, she lost her father figure. Abby lost her actual father. Ellie lost Jesse. Abby lost Manny and Yarra. She lost Owen and Mel directly to Ellie, and Ellie even killed her fucking dog. You can argue that the last three were in self defense, which is true, but also because Ellie CHOSE to put herself in harm's way on her quest for revenge. You can flip the argument all you want to by saying that Abby's quest for revenge triggered Ellie's, but no amount of people Abby killed could EVER amount to what Joel did. It just strikes me odd that people are so worked up by being forced to play a character who killed Joel, but yet they wanted to keep playing as someone who was responsible for the inevitable extinction of the human race...
Let me just reframe this a bit. Let's say that The Last of Us started out as Abby. You spent the game as a teenager, developing your relationship with Owen. You interact with your father on a daily basis. You begin to understand the severity and importance of your father's work. You had your own battles with the infected, so you know how deadly they are, how they threaten the lives of your family and friends. Then, you hear about a girl being brought in that could could cure this whole mess, but your father is unable to make a vaccine without killing her. You know how such a hard decision has to be made, but you know it has to be made. Now you're hearing sirens. You rush towards the ward your father's in, running down that long corridor, red lights flashing everywhere. You run through the door and find your dad on the ground, throat cut, blood everywhere, dead. You'd be infuriated. You'd be crying. You'd want revenge. Imagine if that's how the first game was, and then the second game's story involved Abby going after Joel. You'd understand completely and you'd have NO problem with it. But that's not how the first game was, so you got attached to Joel. The game is FORCING you to see the other side of the coin, as uncomfortable as it may be. It's a shame we didn't see more of Abby before the death of Joel, because I think it would have put things into perspective better, but the game's already too long.
When I finished the first game, I knew right then and there I didn't want a sequel. I felt there was no way they could really follow this up in a form that I'd be happy with, at least not with Joel. If anything, I was hoping that if a sequel did happen, it would be with two completely different characters. Instead, when it was revealed, we had Joel and Ellie again. I just didn't know how that was going to work. I think I'd be far more uncomfortable continuing to play as Joel, because I'd always be reminded of what he did, literally undoing everything they were working up to in the first game. Instead, we got to play Abby, who no matter how many times she clubbed his face in, would never be able to fix his wrong and instead of simply accepting that fact, we got Ellie continuing the circle of violence. It only makes sense that when the game pit the two characters against each other that you played as Abby fighting Ellie as the boss. Ellie's the villain. That's why I sided with Abby.
Sorry if this blog got really emotional near the end. I don't think I've been this conflicted about a game before. It's just a testament to how daring Naughty Dog was for deciding to go this route with the game. Many, many people said that this game was not what they wanted, but if Naughty Dog gave them what they wanted, I think the impact of the game wouldn't be anywhere near the same level.
Thank you, Naughty Dog, but in the same breath, fuck you.
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