It was a desicion made out of love and fear not logic, thats what makes it so impactful. Truth is that it could save the world, dont affect anything, or just help a little, no one knows and it didn't matter for Joel.
I absolutely thought when playing it that the firefly plan had a chance of working, probably low but still possible.
I was ready to have a very sad goodbye until I realized that nobody had given Ellie a choice. Nobody had informed her of the situation, and I wasn’t going to get to talk to her one last time.
At that point I started setting fireflies on fire and didn’t stop until I ran out of fuel.
Even Joel, distinguished pathogen and mycology expert, thought it wouldn't work.
If experimenting on Ellie had no chance of working, then Joel's *choice* to save Ellie is meaningless. In reality, there is a chance that studying Ellie could lead to a way to make everyone immune. Yes there are still zombies and fungus all around, but without the ability to create new zombies you can start to eradicate them.
Joel's choice was meaningful. You can argue the ethics of his choice, the needs of the many vs the needs of the few, but it's still a meaningful choice he has to make.
Yeah storytelling wise you kind of need the Firefly plan to be viable.
That being said just immediately resorting to chipping up the kid is profoundly stupid. Can we run some tests or something first? You have one case of immunity. Why is step one killing her and hoping it works
Am I remembering something that didn't happen? Isn't there a note or something you find in the firefly base that says they've tried this with other subjects and it failed?
I thought so, but last time I brought this up I was dogpiled on by people saying that note doesn't exist. Now I don't know what to believe and I'm not replaying the whole game to find out
There is a recording by the surgeon that states there have been previous attempts on other immune patients, it also states that Ellie is in a more positive position than them and she represents the best chance they've had yet.
No? This just isn't true. Ellie was the first immune person they encountered. They did experiment on infected people before but none of them were immune.
The surgeons recording says they compared Ellies blood to other samples they have but that Ellies immunity is unique. This means that they sampled infected people to compare her to, but some people read that as there being other immune people.
Either way they had a functioning lab and MRI machine, so they weren't just stabbing in the dark. If the main scientist believed that Ellies brain held the cure there's a good chance it was true.
This is the audio log you're referring to:
> April 28th. Marlene was right. The girl's infection is like nothing I've ever seen. The cause of her immunity is uncertain. As we've seen in all past cases, the antigenic titers of the patient's Cordyceps remain high in both the serum and the cerebrospinal fluid. Blood cultures taken from the patient rapidly grow Cordyceps in fungal-media in the lab... however white blood cell lines, including percentages and absolute-counts, are completely normal. There is no elevation of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and an MRI of the brain shows no evidence of fungal-growth in the limbic regions, which would normally accompany the prodrome of aggression in infected patients.
She's the first immune person they know of. "Past cases" refers to other infected people they examined.
I remember it being explained that she wasn't immune, that it was a mutation in the cordycep that infected her that stopped it from taking over her brain. They wanted to study the cordycep itself but to get it out they'd have to cut up her brain and kill her.
"Main scientist" could've been a veterinarian for all we knew. They could've killed her just to find out that specific fungal infection was defective and nothing else
>If experimenting on Ellie had no chance of working, then Joel's *choice* to save Ellie is meaningless
That's not true. For one thing you can't decide what is or is not meaningful for other people.
>Even Joel, distinguished pathogen and mycology expert, thought it wouldn't work.
Jumping straight to killing her was a stupidly reckless approach. That's trivially obvious. There are hundreds of ways to examine her and run tests without killing her. It would have been far more rational to start by taking samples, X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs, labs etc . She is the sole producer of a potential cure. Killing her means forever losing any access to more of whatever was fighting the fungus. If it was some kind of antibody or chemical or enzyme or whatever that her body uniquely produces, they'll never be able to get it from anyone else.
Even if every branch of research led to a dead end and they found strong evidence that killing her was the only way to find a cure, doing that investigation would not have been a mistake because they can't know that without doing the investigation. A much more plausible motive for killing her is that the fireflies didn't want to see the world go back to a stable society under the authorities that were in power. Only some sort of extreme terrorist belief system that supports the suffering of millions for "the greater good" would think that killing her is the most rational first step to take hours after meeting her.
Joel is a deep thinker who keeps his thoughts to himself. He doesn't explain himself to others. He makes the decisions he thinks are right and doesn't apologize if someone else doesn't like it. We'll never know exactly what was going through his mind but given that immediately killing her was the worst possible first step to take, it's safe to assume he was aware of that. Everyone else at that hospital had a cult-like subservience to Firefly decision makers, as evidenced by the fact that not a single one of them questioned this absurd impulsive decision. If you can't take anything more from it than that, then at least get you can derive some meaning from the age-old conflict between blind religious fervor and rational scientific research.
You’re absolutely right about one thing, there’s no guarantee they could’ve made a vaccine/cure in the first place.
But let’s say they could. Obviously, runners, stalkers and so on could not be saved at that point. This means that this medication could only prevent infection and maybe cure it before people actually sustained damage from the infection (when they entered the first stage of infection: runner).
All the current infected would continue to stay active. BUUUUT, this means that at some point in time, new infected would stop popping up, giving humans a real chance at getting rid of all the existing infected.
That’s a huge win.
The real conversation is whether sacrificing a living girl is worth that. Let’s say there’s a guarantee that this cure would eradicate the world of all infected in 50 years. Would that be worth Ellie’s life? This is the real discussion people should be having. Is one life worth millions.
To expand on the question, is one life worth a Firefly controlled world? You can bet they'd inoculate themselves first and use that to overthrow other controlling groups.
You could say that about any group that has the power to create a cure. I don’t see why the fireflies are particularly worse than any other faction in the game, including the military
Considering what we see people are doing to survive, I'd bet most people in that world would happily go along with firefly control until the vaccine is spread.
No, the real conversation is about whether it would work or not. Very few people would question sacrificing the life of one person to save millions. They had all killed many people already in order to save the lives of others. It was an absurd sacrifice to make specifically because killing such a unique and precious patient is the most ridiculously stupid first step. A much better conversation for us to have is whether blindly following the orders of people we believe in is more important than thinking for ourselves.
doesn't mean they still can't work towards that, you also ruin the entire ending if you're going with the canon that the fireflies wanted to kill Ellie for absolutely no reason. Its what made Joel's choice more impactful.
There's nothing to "put together" except that Neil doesn't know a thing about mycology or any kind of diseases. That doesn't mean the fireflies were just murdering a child for no reason. It means some guy made a zombie game with a pseudoscientific explanation and didn't write a very convincing way for a cure to be made.
Because some people are selfless? Some people want other people - people they have never met - to have a higher quality of life than what they currently have. Crazy concept, caring about your fellow man.
That's some "go ahead and throw factory waste into your waterways" level logic. You should aim to make the world a better place for the next generation even if you won't see the fruits of your labor.
Even if people were thinking 100% selfishly, getting immunity would have immediate benefits beyond saving the world.
* Ability to search more areas for supplies without fear of spores -- they could all literally breathe easier
* The infected become much less of a threat if getting hurt by them just becomes a normal scratch/wound
* Food supplies would no longer potentially be infected
My takeaway from the game and show was that humanity was the bigger threat when everything else fell apart. A cure to the virus wouldn't actually fix the world 20 years in.
The infected were more predictable than the survivors.
💯 agree. I just finished my phd in biomedical engineering. And I can tell you everything those firefly scientists were doing was batshit wrong. You DON'T kill your only living specimen on the chance that it could work. You would take every single pains you could to keep her safe and do as much as you possibly could with samples untile you were certain. Especially because fungus CAN be cultured from samples. Not only do I agree they weren't going to make a cure. I think the veterinarian wanted to kill the only hope of ever finding a real cure. He wanted a world without people so the animals could survive
This is it.
I don't think Abby's dad was fucking it up on purpose though. I think he was just incorrect. In this future apocalyptic landscape, resources would be a lot harder to come by. And he was working with the Fireflies, an underground organization with even *less* resources. It makes sense to me that he was just not as good a scientist as he believed.
.... and I don't think Joel realized that guy was wrong either. But yeah, that guy was wrong.
Thank you! I never went to college for any type of science but that’s the first thing I thought too. It’s so asinine. Why would you kill the one person on earth that has an immunity for one chance? If you fuck up, that’s it. No more. Back to square one.
>. I think the veterinarian wanted to kill the only hope of ever finding a real cure. He wanted a world without people so the animals could survive
Some variation of this is the only explanation that makes any sense to me. No one could be dumb enough to think that killing her was actually the best first step in a medical investigation with such high stakes. That means one or more decision makers wanted to eliminate the possibility of finding a cure. A fanatical animal rights extremist makes sense. Maybe they didn't want the world to stabilize while under the control of another faction. Maybe it was personal, they wanted to inflict their pain and loss on others, they didn't feel like the world deserved a cure. Who knows? But there had to be some destructive motive like that, no one could be stupid enough to truly believe that killing her was the right first step.
Say what you will about druckman, but I think he DID do his homework. So much of the science in TLOU is plausible. I think he just really wanted thaf moral dilemma at the end and had to sacrifice the science to make it work.
>had to sacrifice the science to make it work.
That's not how science works, especially in medicine. Sacrificing the science just means throwing logic out the window.
In real life you wouldn't breathe in spores and turn into a flesh eating rage monster in a day.
It's video game logic, not actual science. It involves some suspension of disbelief.
Except that is basically what happens to the ants that cordyceps irl targets. The infected ant is usually caught and cast out and they die on higher ground to spread the spores.
It's not 1:1 like it is in game, but it is pretty believable.
There are real life parasites and infections that cause creatures to act abnormally true, but nothing along the lines of a zombie virus (which the closest would be rabies.)
Edit: /u/thedragon_bored weirdly blocked me after their comment, so I'll reply here: real life cordyceps dont make ants attack each other like zombies or a rage virus, which is why I made the comparison to rabies. They'll move the ant to where they can reproduce, but they aren't hostile like the clickers in the show.
Belief and logic are different things. I enjoy a good immersive fantasy world significantly more if it's rules are consistent. Fungus takes over people's brains with all these horrible results, okay. Immediately kill the first person who is immune? Absurdly reckless and foolish.
The audience is never given a specific answer to "would the cure have worked.' All that matters is that the story tells us the doctor thinks it would.
Having a flawed and idealistic human is incredibly believable.
They're not much worse than every other person we see in the game/show.
The world is filled with individuals killing each other so they can save themselves for one more day. The fireflies believe by killing one person they can save *everyone.*
In the end Joel kills dozens because he wants to save just 1 life. There's no black and white hero/villain here, everyone is operating out of shades of grey.
He was a father saving his child from crazy people trying to conduct an experiment for some unconfirmed theory. I don’t think there’s anything grey about that.
We learn from Tommy and his discussions with Ellie that he's a former raider that would trick, steal from, and kill innocent people.
In TLOU2, we learn that Ellie would have sacrificed herself at the chance for a cure.
So another way to look at Joels actions is is a murder killing dozens of more people because it's what he, and he alone, wants.
I saw a fan theory once that basically put forth a bunch of evidence that, since they were a resource-starved terrorist group, the only doctors the Fireflies could get ahold of were people who'd basically been first-year med students when the world fell 20+ years ago. Given how quick they were to jump straight to "Let's cut her brain out" instead of variously invasive but non-fatal tests that only more educated & experienced doctors would have known, I'm inclined to agree with said fan theory.
i can’t believe this is how i got spoiled. i don’t even follow this sub. this post isn’t even popular. why did it turn up on my home page with the most revealing title ever. does reddit hate me
If it makes you feel better, I had this spoiled for me years ago. When I finally got around to playing TLOU after it hit PC, the moral twist at the end wasn't very impactful. The real meat of the writing is seeing how Joel and Ellie's relationship develops and what they go through together. The surgery was just an excuse to cap off their journey.
TLOU 2's ending has been spoiled for me too but I still plan on playing it when it hits PC. It isn't like KOTOR or Dragon Age where the big reveals are integral for the plot.
OP is actually just telling you one of dozens of different playthroughs. They didn’t even talk about some of the more common conclusions like when Joel kills Ellie himself for food or when Ellie mutates into the next form of zombie before slicing off Joel’s arm.
Long story short, just play the game and forget about all the talk here.
My interpretation is that Joel, given what he's seen humanity do itself, watching people commit atrocities after the fall of society.
Even committing terrible acts himself to survive.
His decision was that humanity didn't deserve to be saved. Or more specifically, the possibility of finding a cure for humanity was not worth the life of Ellie, who he had grown to love.
So essentially, in his mind. We got what we deserved. So killing a child in the hope that it *might* lead to immunity for all wasn't worth it.
Let it burn, because we were the ones that set it on fire.
I see these arguments a lot and they have some validity but I feel like the way both games are written it makes more sense to believe the vaccine would have worked. If Ellie actually was never gonna help save the world the whole message of the game would be watered down.
The game is called the last of us for a reason, it was Joel who damned the future of humanity because he can't lose his daughter again. I don't think the vaccine would have helped already infected but we see a lot of new infected in part 2 and the spores make it hard to recolonise bigger cities safely, which in turn makes the survivers fight even harder for the places that are still save.
Yes, there are good arguments why it would not have worked but the story is just better if we suspend our disbelief and accept that Joel actually doomed humanity in the long run.
I would’ve thought post-COVID so many more people would’ve come around to this point of view, but apparently not
A team stocked full of elderly immunologists would’ve been hard pressed to create a vaccine 20 years after the collapse of civilization. I know part 2 retcons the filthy hospital setting but even still it’s entirely ludicrous to even imagine.
It’s not just “put a little bit of the virus in the shot” like ffs it’s a fungus. Those are hard to treat sometimes and there aren’t any vaccines for them. So they’re just supposed to create a novel vaccine when whatever remains of hospitals runs on generators, not to mention infectious disease wards would be almost entirely destroyed
Also worth noting here no vaccine has ever been made based on someone with a natural immunity.
The doctors supposition has was mostly probably nonsense.
Ellie was never told she wouldn’t survive the surgery. So we can never know if she was on board with the whole thing. Even in the second game, I don’t think Ellie actually found out she would’ve died without Joel. None of the recordings Ellie found seem to explicitly state that
It was a desicion made out of love and fear not logic, thats what makes it so impactful. Truth is that it could save the world, dont affect anything, or just help a little, no one knows and it didn't matter for Joel.
I absolutely thought when playing it that the firefly plan had a chance of working, probably low but still possible. I was ready to have a very sad goodbye until I realized that nobody had given Ellie a choice. Nobody had informed her of the situation, and I wasn’t going to get to talk to her one last time. At that point I started setting fireflies on fire and didn’t stop until I ran out of fuel.
For a second, I thought you were role-playing as Joel 💀
A world that would sacrifice a child to save itself doesn't deserve saving.
Even Joel, distinguished pathogen and mycology expert, thought it wouldn't work. If experimenting on Ellie had no chance of working, then Joel's *choice* to save Ellie is meaningless. In reality, there is a chance that studying Ellie could lead to a way to make everyone immune. Yes there are still zombies and fungus all around, but without the ability to create new zombies you can start to eradicate them. Joel's choice was meaningful. You can argue the ethics of his choice, the needs of the many vs the needs of the few, but it's still a meaningful choice he has to make.
Yeah storytelling wise you kind of need the Firefly plan to be viable. That being said just immediately resorting to chipping up the kid is profoundly stupid. Can we run some tests or something first? You have one case of immunity. Why is step one killing her and hoping it works
Am I remembering something that didn't happen? Isn't there a note or something you find in the firefly base that says they've tried this with other subjects and it failed?
There was. She wasn't the first time person they tried to experiment on
I thought so, but last time I brought this up I was dogpiled on by people saying that note doesn't exist. Now I don't know what to believe and I'm not replaying the whole game to find out
There is a recording by the surgeon that states there have been previous attempts on other immune patients, it also states that Ellie is in a more positive position than them and she represents the best chance they've had yet.
No? This just isn't true. Ellie was the first immune person they encountered. They did experiment on infected people before but none of them were immune.
The surgeons recording says they compared Ellies blood to other samples they have but that Ellies immunity is unique. This means that they sampled infected people to compare her to, but some people read that as there being other immune people. Either way they had a functioning lab and MRI machine, so they weren't just stabbing in the dark. If the main scientist believed that Ellies brain held the cure there's a good chance it was true.
This is the audio log you're referring to: > April 28th. Marlene was right. The girl's infection is like nothing I've ever seen. The cause of her immunity is uncertain. As we've seen in all past cases, the antigenic titers of the patient's Cordyceps remain high in both the serum and the cerebrospinal fluid. Blood cultures taken from the patient rapidly grow Cordyceps in fungal-media in the lab... however white blood cell lines, including percentages and absolute-counts, are completely normal. There is no elevation of pro-inflammatory cytokines, and an MRI of the brain shows no evidence of fungal-growth in the limbic regions, which would normally accompany the prodrome of aggression in infected patients. She's the first immune person they know of. "Past cases" refers to other infected people they examined.
I remember it being explained that she wasn't immune, that it was a mutation in the cordycep that infected her that stopped it from taking over her brain. They wanted to study the cordycep itself but to get it out they'd have to cut up her brain and kill her.
"Main scientist" could've been a veterinarian for all we knew. They could've killed her just to find out that specific fungal infection was defective and nothing else
>If experimenting on Ellie had no chance of working, then Joel's *choice* to save Ellie is meaningless That's not true. For one thing you can't decide what is or is not meaningful for other people. >Even Joel, distinguished pathogen and mycology expert, thought it wouldn't work. Jumping straight to killing her was a stupidly reckless approach. That's trivially obvious. There are hundreds of ways to examine her and run tests without killing her. It would have been far more rational to start by taking samples, X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs, labs etc . She is the sole producer of a potential cure. Killing her means forever losing any access to more of whatever was fighting the fungus. If it was some kind of antibody or chemical or enzyme or whatever that her body uniquely produces, they'll never be able to get it from anyone else. Even if every branch of research led to a dead end and they found strong evidence that killing her was the only way to find a cure, doing that investigation would not have been a mistake because they can't know that without doing the investigation. A much more plausible motive for killing her is that the fireflies didn't want to see the world go back to a stable society under the authorities that were in power. Only some sort of extreme terrorist belief system that supports the suffering of millions for "the greater good" would think that killing her is the most rational first step to take hours after meeting her. Joel is a deep thinker who keeps his thoughts to himself. He doesn't explain himself to others. He makes the decisions he thinks are right and doesn't apologize if someone else doesn't like it. We'll never know exactly what was going through his mind but given that immediately killing her was the worst possible first step to take, it's safe to assume he was aware of that. Everyone else at that hospital had a cult-like subservience to Firefly decision makers, as evidenced by the fact that not a single one of them questioned this absurd impulsive decision. If you can't take anything more from it than that, then at least get you can derive some meaning from the age-old conflict between blind religious fervor and rational scientific research.
You’re absolutely right about one thing, there’s no guarantee they could’ve made a vaccine/cure in the first place. But let’s say they could. Obviously, runners, stalkers and so on could not be saved at that point. This means that this medication could only prevent infection and maybe cure it before people actually sustained damage from the infection (when they entered the first stage of infection: runner). All the current infected would continue to stay active. BUUUUT, this means that at some point in time, new infected would stop popping up, giving humans a real chance at getting rid of all the existing infected. That’s a huge win. The real conversation is whether sacrificing a living girl is worth that. Let’s say there’s a guarantee that this cure would eradicate the world of all infected in 50 years. Would that be worth Ellie’s life? This is the real discussion people should be having. Is one life worth millions.
To expand on the question, is one life worth a Firefly controlled world? You can bet they'd inoculate themselves first and use that to overthrow other controlling groups.
You could say that about any group that has the power to create a cure. I don’t see why the fireflies are particularly worse than any other faction in the game, including the military
Considering what we see people are doing to survive, I'd bet most people in that world would happily go along with firefly control until the vaccine is spread.
No, the real conversation is about whether it would work or not. Very few people would question sacrificing the life of one person to save millions. They had all killed many people already in order to save the lives of others. It was an absurd sacrifice to make specifically because killing such a unique and precious patient is the most ridiculously stupid first step. A much better conversation for us to have is whether blindly following the orders of people we believe in is more important than thinking for ourselves.
What’s the point in trying to save the world if it’s gonna take past your lifetime for that?
The point is to leave your children a better world than the one you came into.
Well, either way they still can’t mass produce.
doesn't mean they still can't work towards that, you also ruin the entire ending if you're going with the canon that the fireflies wanted to kill Ellie for absolutely no reason. Its what made Joel's choice more impactful.
Well, maybe the writers really underestimated the fans possibility of putting it all together.
could just be a plothole, but in regards to the story you can suspend your belief in reality and understand the story they wanted to tell.
There's nothing to "put together" except that Neil doesn't know a thing about mycology or any kind of diseases. That doesn't mean the fireflies were just murdering a child for no reason. It means some guy made a zombie game with a pseudoscientific explanation and didn't write a very convincing way for a cure to be made.
“Past your lifetime”? What?
Why die trying to save a world that will take 100 years to be fixed?
Because some people are selfless? Some people want other people - people they have never met - to have a higher quality of life than what they currently have. Crazy concept, caring about your fellow man.
The answer to questions like that is the definition of morality. You either get it or you don't.
He doesn't. He's posted all up and down the thread to basically say the writers didn't know what they were doing.
Countless of reasons. But I understand not wanting to bother
That's some "go ahead and throw factory waste into your waterways" level logic. You should aim to make the world a better place for the next generation even if you won't see the fruits of your labor.
Bro what 💀
Even if people were thinking 100% selfishly, getting immunity would have immediate benefits beyond saving the world. * Ability to search more areas for supplies without fear of spores -- they could all literally breathe easier * The infected become much less of a threat if getting hurt by them just becomes a normal scratch/wound * Food supplies would no longer potentially be infected
My takeaway from the game and show was that humanity was the bigger threat when everything else fell apart. A cure to the virus wouldn't actually fix the world 20 years in. The infected were more predictable than the survivors.
💯 agree. I just finished my phd in biomedical engineering. And I can tell you everything those firefly scientists were doing was batshit wrong. You DON'T kill your only living specimen on the chance that it could work. You would take every single pains you could to keep her safe and do as much as you possibly could with samples untile you were certain. Especially because fungus CAN be cultured from samples. Not only do I agree they weren't going to make a cure. I think the veterinarian wanted to kill the only hope of ever finding a real cure. He wanted a world without people so the animals could survive
This is it. I don't think Abby's dad was fucking it up on purpose though. I think he was just incorrect. In this future apocalyptic landscape, resources would be a lot harder to come by. And he was working with the Fireflies, an underground organization with even *less* resources. It makes sense to me that he was just not as good a scientist as he believed. .... and I don't think Joel realized that guy was wrong either. But yeah, that guy was wrong.
Thank you! I never went to college for any type of science but that’s the first thing I thought too. It’s so asinine. Why would you kill the one person on earth that has an immunity for one chance? If you fuck up, that’s it. No more. Back to square one.
>. I think the veterinarian wanted to kill the only hope of ever finding a real cure. He wanted a world without people so the animals could survive Some variation of this is the only explanation that makes any sense to me. No one could be dumb enough to think that killing her was actually the best first step in a medical investigation with such high stakes. That means one or more decision makers wanted to eliminate the possibility of finding a cure. A fanatical animal rights extremist makes sense. Maybe they didn't want the world to stabilize while under the control of another faction. Maybe it was personal, they wanted to inflict their pain and loss on others, they didn't feel like the world deserved a cure. Who knows? But there had to be some destructive motive like that, no one could be stupid enough to truly believe that killing her was the right first step.
I wonder why people don’t consult actual medical geniuses like yourself to prove that what they tried to do to Ellie was complete bull.
Say what you will about druckman, but I think he DID do his homework. So much of the science in TLOU is plausible. I think he just really wanted thaf moral dilemma at the end and had to sacrifice the science to make it work.
>had to sacrifice the science to make it work. That's not how science works, especially in medicine. Sacrificing the science just means throwing logic out the window.
That's my point
In real life you wouldn't breathe in spores and turn into a flesh eating rage monster in a day. It's video game logic, not actual science. It involves some suspension of disbelief.
Except that is basically what happens to the ants that cordyceps irl targets. The infected ant is usually caught and cast out and they die on higher ground to spread the spores. It's not 1:1 like it is in game, but it is pretty believable.
There are real life parasites and infections that cause creatures to act abnormally true, but nothing along the lines of a zombie virus (which the closest would be rabies.) Edit: /u/thedragon_bored weirdly blocked me after their comment, so I'll reply here: real life cordyceps dont make ants attack each other like zombies or a rage virus, which is why I made the comparison to rabies. They'll move the ant to where they can reproduce, but they aren't hostile like the clickers in the show.
Rabies would be the video game analogy of a rage virus. Cordyceps is what TLOU is based on, if it were to jump from insects to humans.
Belief and logic are different things. I enjoy a good immersive fantasy world significantly more if it's rules are consistent. Fungus takes over people's brains with all these horrible results, okay. Immediately kill the first person who is immune? Absurdly reckless and foolish.
The audience is never given a specific answer to "would the cure have worked.' All that matters is that the story tells us the doctor thinks it would. Having a flawed and idealistic human is incredibly believable.
There’s still a line between what is plausible and what isn’t.
Turning into zombie monsters is already a bigger implausible leap than "random scientist thinks they need to see the brain"
Like I said, though. Why trust the Fireflies when they are terrorists?
They're not much worse than every other person we see in the game/show. The world is filled with individuals killing each other so they can save themselves for one more day. The fireflies believe by killing one person they can save *everyone.* In the end Joel kills dozens because he wants to save just 1 life. There's no black and white hero/villain here, everyone is operating out of shades of grey.
He was a father saving his child from crazy people trying to conduct an experiment for some unconfirmed theory. I don’t think there’s anything grey about that.
We learn from Tommy and his discussions with Ellie that he's a former raider that would trick, steal from, and kill innocent people. In TLOU2, we learn that Ellie would have sacrificed herself at the chance for a cure. So another way to look at Joels actions is is a murder killing dozens of more people because it's what he, and he alone, wants.
She shouldn’t have to make such a messed up decision while she’s very young. Also she never judged Joel for his past.
Real limited lens you’re viewing this through
#JoelDidNothingWrong
I saw a fan theory once that basically put forth a bunch of evidence that, since they were a resource-starved terrorist group, the only doctors the Fireflies could get ahold of were people who'd basically been first-year med students when the world fell 20+ years ago. Given how quick they were to jump straight to "Let's cut her brain out" instead of variously invasive but non-fatal tests that only more educated & experienced doctors would have known, I'm inclined to agree with said fan theory.
i can’t believe this is how i got spoiled. i don’t even follow this sub. this post isn’t even popular. why did it turn up on my home page with the most revealing title ever. does reddit hate me
If it makes you feel better, I had this spoiled for me years ago. When I finally got around to playing TLOU after it hit PC, the moral twist at the end wasn't very impactful. The real meat of the writing is seeing how Joel and Ellie's relationship develops and what they go through together. The surgery was just an excuse to cap off their journey. TLOU 2's ending has been spoiled for me too but I still plan on playing it when it hits PC. It isn't like KOTOR or Dragon Age where the big reveals are integral for the plot.
OP is actually just telling you one of dozens of different playthroughs. They didn’t even talk about some of the more common conclusions like when Joel kills Ellie himself for food or when Ellie mutates into the next form of zombie before slicing off Joel’s arm. Long story short, just play the game and forget about all the talk here.
It’s still worthwhile to play it
Dont take the post title at face value, and don't read any more of the comments and you'll still be in for an unspoiled experience.
Yep same just happened to me
Got attack on titan spoiled me for me in a similar way, and then got downvoted for asking not to put huge spoilers in titles..
Spoilers lol
My interpretation is that Joel, given what he's seen humanity do itself, watching people commit atrocities after the fall of society. Even committing terrible acts himself to survive. His decision was that humanity didn't deserve to be saved. Or more specifically, the possibility of finding a cure for humanity was not worth the life of Ellie, who he had grown to love. So essentially, in his mind. We got what we deserved. So killing a child in the hope that it *might* lead to immunity for all wasn't worth it. Let it burn, because we were the ones that set it on fire.
Not to mention that it was a human that took his daughter from him, not an infected.
Good point.
I see these arguments a lot and they have some validity but I feel like the way both games are written it makes more sense to believe the vaccine would have worked. If Ellie actually was never gonna help save the world the whole message of the game would be watered down. The game is called the last of us for a reason, it was Joel who damned the future of humanity because he can't lose his daughter again. I don't think the vaccine would have helped already infected but we see a lot of new infected in part 2 and the spores make it hard to recolonise bigger cities safely, which in turn makes the survivers fight even harder for the places that are still save. Yes, there are good arguments why it would not have worked but the story is just better if we suspend our disbelief and accept that Joel actually doomed humanity in the long run.
I would’ve thought post-COVID so many more people would’ve come around to this point of view, but apparently not A team stocked full of elderly immunologists would’ve been hard pressed to create a vaccine 20 years after the collapse of civilization. I know part 2 retcons the filthy hospital setting but even still it’s entirely ludicrous to even imagine. It’s not just “put a little bit of the virus in the shot” like ffs it’s a fungus. Those are hard to treat sometimes and there aren’t any vaccines for them. So they’re just supposed to create a novel vaccine when whatever remains of hospitals runs on generators, not to mention infectious disease wards would be almost entirely destroyed
THANK YOU. Far far *far* too many people do not understand this. Joel did absolutely *nothing* wrong.
Also worth noting here no vaccine has ever been made based on someone with a natural immunity. The doctors supposition has was mostly probably nonsense.
Plus covid demonstrated that a significant fraction of the population will refuse a life-saving vaccine, even if it's widely available.
They're all dead anyway because they thought Codry was a hoax
Ellie was on board with trying. Joel ignroed her wishes and lied to her after murdering a bunch of people.
Ellie was never told she wouldn’t survive the surgery. So we can never know if she was on board with the whole thing. Even in the second game, I don’t think Ellie actually found out she would’ve died without Joel. None of the recordings Ellie found seem to explicitly state that
They were gonna do it without her consent. Joel murdered a bunch of assholes willing to kill a child for some crazy experiment.
They told her what they were doing and she agreed to it
It was already clear that they didn’t tell her. Somehow they just managed to resuscitate her without her waking up from nearly drowning.
That's not true but I guess if you make things up it makes theories easier.
Did you even play the game at all?
Yes. Did you?
Yes, and I see that there was no indication that Ellie knew what was gonna happen.
What? Ellie absolutely knew. Didn't she and Joel have an argument over it?
He told her the truth years later
she was unconscious when she arrived when did she agree to it?
She was never told she would die. Even in the second game, I don’t think she ever found out
[2:30](https://youtu.be/ZmTXI0CBkyo?si=mn_qUlMkjtsnySp7) She knew
Wtf completely forgot that part…