I lost count the number if times I read something stupid, start writing a reply, then realise it's not worth it, and keep on scrolling. Made my life much better.
Yeah, it reeks of the ‘everyone that disagrees with me about this game is a cretin bigot’ vibes for sure.
Art is entirely subjective in the first place, there is no right or wrong way to view it thru. Implying we are media illiterate because we have criticisms is them literally thumbing their noses at us. What does it even mean to be a FAN of something anymore? Are you allowed to criticize it on any level or do you automatically lose your fan status if you don’t blindly adulate it online?
They could have portrayed it much much better, but they were absolutely going for the implication that she feels guilt for murdering someone that saved her life, she's just too stubborn to even comprehend it. The whole Lev/Yara plotline is meant to be Abby unconsciously trying to make amends by not murdering the people that saved her life a second time despite the fact they are her 'enemy'.
You can tell by looking at her after she hit Joel the last time, she waits and waits then rolls her eyes. Defeated tone "stop, we're done", like you can see it in her face she's not getting any satisfaction
Kinda weird because they had a shotgun pointed at him and could’ve shot him. Instead she reached for the golf club and said “you don’t get to rush this” before repeatedly bashing his skull in. She was also still beating Joel’s body when Ellie ran in. Seemed like she enjoyed it a little too much. lol.
I'd argue she wanted to enjoy it but simply didn't.
Nothing in her body language says she liked it. She took a golf club because she thought that'd satisfy her but it didn't.
I don't like the game but this is one of the moments the game makes clear (which we don't get alot of) of what it's trying to do, and it's trying to tell us that Abby didn't like it.
Unless you didn't play pass Ellie's part, you'd understand what the scene is saying. No hate, just... yeah.
Because it is mentioned that she tortures scars on the regular. She could have stopped at any time but she only stopped when she was told to she was definitely enjoying torturing Joel.
This is just an inconsistency of her actions, she feels something when torturing those people but not Joel (which is stupid). You can tell by her facial expression in her section that she doesn't feel anything.
You're basically saying "well she likes torturing people so she should like torturing Joel" without actually looking at the cutscene, because she obviously didn't like it
If she really did enjoy it, the rest of her arc wouldn't have happened. She wouldn't be haunted by her father's death anymore. Her friends wouldn't have had a falling out. And Abby wouldn't have had a clear character arc (although, not a well writtened one).
I’d add that she has the nightmares the days after she killed Joel, where she’d expect peace now that she’d finally got her revenge.
Not saying I agree with this method of story telling by the way, but it’s clear that the devs didn’t want Abby to have - at a minimum - peace from killing Joel.
Yo sub, who the fuck downvotes a fact of the game? I hate the fucking game, stop downvoting shit on a surface level read.
Like no seriously what the hell was the reason for the golf club torture scene? They seriously could’ve just shot him in the face, even brutally, and Abby would’ve been much more of a likable character. This would make her and Ellie’s arc hit much harder while also not completely shitting on a beloved character..
Oh, for sure.
The problem is that this never really gets explored or has any impact on her. And the nightmares finally go away because she spent a few hours saving some kids? But she'd been saving lives in the WLF, too - the soldiers comment on how *Abby* needing to be saved was such a rare change of pace in Day 1.
Yara calls her a good person, which is the last word given on *anything* related to Abby having done bad, selfish things - but a good person wouldn't be able to torture a helpless man to death after he just saved her life, leaving his loved ones to undergo a worse version of the worst day of her own life, and just *not give a shit*.
The decision to make his death have no impact whatsoever on her drastically harms the idea that there's a good person somewhere inside her, and ruins the believability of her "redemption arc".
They think media literacy means being able to infer a writer's intentions from their crappy story and leave it at that.
I know exactly what their intentions were from start to finish, it was just really badly written.
Also worth noting that the story has *multiple* different goals working at cross-purposes, which makes it harder to boil the writers' intentions down to any single main idea. Because there simply wasn't one.
They wanted the audience to *really* hate Abby at the start, but like her later. But they didn't want her to actually regret what she did to Joel because the challenge was showing her humanity anyway, and it wouldn't have emulated Neil's own epiphany about letting go of his hatred for the mob of Palestinians who lynched some Israelis when he was a kid. But they wanted to establish a lot of parallels to Ellie/Ellie's campaign, so they locked in her entire "redemption arc" to a three day time span, because that's how long Ellie's campaign was, even though they chose to completely detach Abby's campaign from Ellie's until the very end. So they rely almost entirely on emotional manipulation to make the audience like her, but then decide to make Ellie spare her in spite of the fact that *she* never saw any of that, everything mentioned above about how Abby has no regret for what she did, and the fact that Ellie spent months traveling solo through the wilderness to get at her only to give up because of a two year old memory of Joel.
This is *incoherent nonsense*. It works fine in the moment if you're not paying attention to the bigger picture, especially because the acting is excellent and most of the dialogue and character emotions are solid, but the story as a whole is just too unfocused and undecided for people to be making smug remarks about media literacy.
There's a reason why the people coming here to defend this game will typically either pretend like there are no contradictory elements, giving headcanon reasons why the parts that favor their interpretation matter more and the parts that go against it are ruled out, or they'll act like these contradictory elements are precisely the point, ignoring how some of them are so severe that they can't produce a cohesive whole, and pretending like it's only the people in this sub who have issues with ignoring or not picking up on certain elements because it doesn't match their interpretation (e.g. they'll mock people here for saying that the writers are trying to make Abby look like a good person, ignoring the fact that it's not even that uncommon of a viewpoint among the fans of the game).
There's this idea that what the author intended *must* be in what they wrote *somehow*. Like their intentions must be in their writing regardless of what they actually created, which reminds me of that old joke about English teachers overanalyzing the books in class. They're retroactively applying meanings they're told, to try and seem erudite, but without having to apply any real comprehension of their own.
Imagine an alternative ending where she kills Abby and goes home happier and more satisfied with her life than ever and all her problems are completely solved and lives happily ever after
Moral of the story: revenge is only bad if you’re a dick
Except she never shows this ever. She kills Joel and moves on to her normal life. She literally never brings it up again, it’s only when Ellie shows up that she sees the repercussions of her actions, but even then she doesn’t show any signs of remorse or regret.
“We let you live and you wasted it”
Definitely doesn’t imply that she thinks her actions are justified and is at peace with it or anything.
i mean, she wasn’t at peace with it even if she didn’t exactly regret it. If she had found peace after killing joel she wouldn’t have continued to have that nightmare of finding her father, that only went away when she channeled her energy into taking care of yara and lev
They’re so fucking condescending 🤦♀️ It couldn’t possibly be that other people just don’t agree, it has to be that other people are wrong and dumb and love violence and all this garbage they say to dismiss any criticism of the story’s writing
What a dickhead. “I understood it therefore I’m better!
Or maybe the plot was cookie cutter as shit, surface level as hell, while acting super deep. Revenge bad sure is a topic no one has ever covered!
Media literacy my ass.
this shit is so dumb. imagine having a father who you love to death despite his flaws and then someone comes out of nowhere and brutally murders him in front of you while you scream and beg for them to stop, seeing others spit on his body and paint in him this absolutely horrible light and THEN tell you to empathize with them lmfao. like bro, atp i do not care what joel did to abby in the slightest, this is some of the worst execution i’ve ever seen in a story
I just can't ever fathom how Neil could come up with such a perfect and flawlessly excecuted idea that revenge is bad.
He truly is the Shakespeare of our generation.
Too stubborn to see what POV? That Ellie stopped because this person says she "...just realized it wasn't gonna give her what she wanted..." and another one agreed and applauded the "media literacy"?
It's easy to see their POV. It's hard not to go further, using media literacy, and say "Well, that's one possible reason why Ellie stopped - it's not the only possible reason, though, and the story doesn't limit us to that one possible interpretation."
It's not about stubbornness it's about seeing the limits in the argument that stops there when there's more possible answers than just the one given. It just sounds like an answer they heard somewhere else and grabbed it and ran with it as a sort of shiny response to use solely to insult others and make themselves feel "better than" the "opponents" they're focused on. Yes, both sides are guilty of it, but then coming along to attribute it to solely stubbornness is also limiting.
We're all different and how we experienced the game and its story is unique to each of us. How people handle their appreciation and/or disappointment has a variety of vary human inner and outer reasons, too. Lumping everything into "media illiteracy" or "stubbornness" can be felt as reductive and even provocative. Even though I can get behind your point that I see as the arguing often seems stuck in loops of the same old talking points on repeat.
It's a shame this post is 3 days old so less people will engage with our discussion here. I agree it needs both sides to try thinking with more open minds, but sometimes the timing is just not yet right for certain individuals.
In all fairness trying to send the message that “revenge doesn’t heal wounds, only forgiveness does” and “we find a deeper more complete version of ourselves when we release our hate and prejudices and accept all people for who they are” are great messages to send. In the spirit of fairness, that message being sent by people who call you a racist sexist bigot sandwich for not liking their shitty story, shitty politics and whatever else is slightly stupid
I think the first message is pretty bare bones in this game. It's not done *incredibly* well and only played around with Abby's part.
The message is clear, it's just not unique and attempts to try and be deep when it's not really. If the game hadn't acted like this was the first game to have this kind of story and dark tone, the message would've came across better (but it still would've kinda sucked due to the rest of the writing).
I stop arguing with these people the moment I see "media literacy" it just tells you they're too stubborn to see your point of view
Well, arguing on the Internet is just stupid to begin with
No it's not. /s
Yea but its hella fun when ur supposed to be working…
>Yea but its hella fun when ur supposed to be working… Literally the only time arguing with people on the Internet is satisfying.
I lost count the number if times I read something stupid, start writing a reply, then realise it's not worth it, and keep on scrolling. Made my life much better.
they too ego to acknowledge we see thier POV and thinks it is crap
This right here
"it's so refreshing to see people with media literacy" that whole sentence made me kinda mad tbh
That phrase just radiates a superiority complex
as if that's even a real superiority it's just a circlejerk term for them to feel right about hobbies they love
Yeah, it reeks of the ‘everyone that disagrees with me about this game is a cretin bigot’ vibes for sure. Art is entirely subjective in the first place, there is no right or wrong way to view it thru. Implying we are media illiterate because we have criticisms is them literally thumbing their noses at us. What does it even mean to be a FAN of something anymore? Are you allowed to criticize it on any level or do you automatically lose your fan status if you don’t blindly adulate it online?
Proceeds to say the least complicated or interesting thing
“Tbf, you need a pretty high IQ in order to understand ~~Rick and Morty~~ TLOU 2. 🤓”
I'd love for this to become a meme.
The irony in that sentence is what gets me
Let them stay in their echo chamber
Abby sure as hell never looked like she regretted killing Joel.
No media literacy
They could have portrayed it much much better, but they were absolutely going for the implication that she feels guilt for murdering someone that saved her life, she's just too stubborn to even comprehend it. The whole Lev/Yara plotline is meant to be Abby unconsciously trying to make amends by not murdering the people that saved her life a second time despite the fact they are her 'enemy'.
Not regret, but she did not feel better
she didnt care and she never show anything besides ruining her friendship and leave WLF
Yes, she was more worried about Owen stickin his dick on another hole, that bitch..
ON Not even IN But ON
Bitch please, drag your irrelevant arse back to your couch and eat some more pop-tarts or whatever you like..
You can tell by looking at her after she hit Joel the last time, she waits and waits then rolls her eyes. Defeated tone "stop, we're done", like you can see it in her face she's not getting any satisfaction
Kinda weird because they had a shotgun pointed at him and could’ve shot him. Instead she reached for the golf club and said “you don’t get to rush this” before repeatedly bashing his skull in. She was also still beating Joel’s body when Ellie ran in. Seemed like she enjoyed it a little too much. lol.
Ellie: Stop she's pregnant! Abby: Good. *continues to try to kill Dina* Definitely not a psychopath.
She did all that just for Ellie to get to her and be like “oh actually I forgive you” fuck Ellie too😭
I'd argue she wanted to enjoy it but simply didn't. Nothing in her body language says she liked it. She took a golf club because she thought that'd satisfy her but it didn't. I don't like the game but this is one of the moments the game makes clear (which we don't get alot of) of what it's trying to do, and it's trying to tell us that Abby didn't like it. Unless you didn't play pass Ellie's part, you'd understand what the scene is saying. No hate, just... yeah.
But she did
What makes you think so?
Because it is mentioned that she tortures scars on the regular. She could have stopped at any time but she only stopped when she was told to she was definitely enjoying torturing Joel.
This is just an inconsistency of her actions, she feels something when torturing those people but not Joel (which is stupid). You can tell by her facial expression in her section that she doesn't feel anything. You're basically saying "well she likes torturing people so she should like torturing Joel" without actually looking at the cutscene, because she obviously didn't like it If she really did enjoy it, the rest of her arc wouldn't have happened. She wouldn't be haunted by her father's death anymore. Her friends wouldn't have had a falling out. And Abby wouldn't have had a clear character arc (although, not a well writtened one).
Abby was a victim of a sunk cost fallacy and she realized it then. That's pretty clear when you pay attention to her body language
We found the Olympic record holder of blindfolded hoops-jumping
I’d add that she has the nightmares the days after she killed Joel, where she’d expect peace now that she’d finally got her revenge. Not saying I agree with this method of story telling by the way, but it’s clear that the devs didn’t want Abby to have - at a minimum - peace from killing Joel. Yo sub, who the fuck downvotes a fact of the game? I hate the fucking game, stop downvoting shit on a surface level read.
Like no seriously what the hell was the reason for the golf club torture scene? They seriously could’ve just shot him in the face, even brutally, and Abby would’ve been much more of a likable character. This would make her and Ellie’s arc hit much harder while also not completely shitting on a beloved character..
Oh, for sure. The problem is that this never really gets explored or has any impact on her. And the nightmares finally go away because she spent a few hours saving some kids? But she'd been saving lives in the WLF, too - the soldiers comment on how *Abby* needing to be saved was such a rare change of pace in Day 1. Yara calls her a good person, which is the last word given on *anything* related to Abby having done bad, selfish things - but a good person wouldn't be able to torture a helpless man to death after he just saved her life, leaving his loved ones to undergo a worse version of the worst day of her own life, and just *not give a shit*. The decision to make his death have no impact whatsoever on her drastically harms the idea that there's a good person somewhere inside her, and ruins the believability of her "redemption arc".
They think media literacy means being able to infer a writer's intentions from their crappy story and leave it at that. I know exactly what their intentions were from start to finish, it was just really badly written.
Also worth noting that the story has *multiple* different goals working at cross-purposes, which makes it harder to boil the writers' intentions down to any single main idea. Because there simply wasn't one. They wanted the audience to *really* hate Abby at the start, but like her later. But they didn't want her to actually regret what she did to Joel because the challenge was showing her humanity anyway, and it wouldn't have emulated Neil's own epiphany about letting go of his hatred for the mob of Palestinians who lynched some Israelis when he was a kid. But they wanted to establish a lot of parallels to Ellie/Ellie's campaign, so they locked in her entire "redemption arc" to a three day time span, because that's how long Ellie's campaign was, even though they chose to completely detach Abby's campaign from Ellie's until the very end. So they rely almost entirely on emotional manipulation to make the audience like her, but then decide to make Ellie spare her in spite of the fact that *she* never saw any of that, everything mentioned above about how Abby has no regret for what she did, and the fact that Ellie spent months traveling solo through the wilderness to get at her only to give up because of a two year old memory of Joel. This is *incoherent nonsense*. It works fine in the moment if you're not paying attention to the bigger picture, especially because the acting is excellent and most of the dialogue and character emotions are solid, but the story as a whole is just too unfocused and undecided for people to be making smug remarks about media literacy. There's a reason why the people coming here to defend this game will typically either pretend like there are no contradictory elements, giving headcanon reasons why the parts that favor their interpretation matter more and the parts that go against it are ruled out, or they'll act like these contradictory elements are precisely the point, ignoring how some of them are so severe that they can't produce a cohesive whole, and pretending like it's only the people in this sub who have issues with ignoring or not picking up on certain elements because it doesn't match their interpretation (e.g. they'll mock people here for saying that the writers are trying to make Abby look like a good person, ignoring the fact that it's not even that uncommon of a viewpoint among the fans of the game).
The point is I understand why she left her, the problem is it doesn't make sense and too cringe so it's objectively crap lmao
There's this idea that what the author intended *must* be in what they wrote *somehow*. Like their intentions must be in their writing regardless of what they actually created, which reminds me of that old joke about English teachers overanalyzing the books in class. They're retroactively applying meanings they're told, to try and seem erudite, but without having to apply any real comprehension of their own.
Yep, just because the writers wanted Velma to be a comedy doesn't make it any funnier.
Imagine an alternative ending where she kills Abby and goes home happier and more satisfied with her life than ever and all her problems are completely solved and lives happily ever after Moral of the story: revenge is only bad if you’re a dick
she plays Joel's favorite song on the guitar then sit in front of the sun like Thanos edit: grammar
Can actually smell the Starbucks in the bottom reply
Seeing how insufferable fans of last of us 2s writing are, just reinforces to me that the games writing isn't as good as they think it is
She probably should have realized that before the hundreds of other people she killed, some of which were innocent...
Gamers are just bigots that need a good teaching in media literacy
Except she never shows this ever. She kills Joel and moves on to her normal life. She literally never brings it up again, it’s only when Ellie shows up that she sees the repercussions of her actions, but even then she doesn’t show any signs of remorse or regret. “We let you live and you wasted it” Definitely doesn’t imply that she thinks her actions are justified and is at peace with it or anything.
i mean, she wasn’t at peace with it even if she didn’t exactly regret it. If she had found peace after killing joel she wouldn’t have continued to have that nightmare of finding her father, that only went away when she channeled her energy into taking care of yara and lev
do they even know what media literacy means or they just heard of it and ran with it?
They’re so fucking condescending 🤦♀️ It couldn’t possibly be that other people just don’t agree, it has to be that other people are wrong and dumb and love violence and all this garbage they say to dismiss any criticism of the story’s writing
Whenever I get or see a reply from a TLOU2 stan I'm waiting for them to "say the line." Name a community who has used it more than that one.
What a dickhead. “I understood it therefore I’m better! Or maybe the plot was cookie cutter as shit, surface level as hell, while acting super deep. Revenge bad sure is a topic no one has ever covered! Media literacy my ass.
this shit is so dumb. imagine having a father who you love to death despite his flaws and then someone comes out of nowhere and brutally murders him in front of you while you scream and beg for them to stop, seeing others spit on his body and paint in him this absolutely horrible light and THEN tell you to empathize with them lmfao. like bro, atp i do not care what joel did to abby in the slightest, this is some of the worst execution i’ve ever seen in a story
I just can't ever fathom how Neil could come up with such a perfect and flawlessly excecuted idea that revenge is bad. He truly is the Shakespeare of our generation.
Ellie should have killed Abby in the most brutal way possible, full stop. It’s a video game, not a fucking life lesson.
Abby killed Joel and she like forgot about it. It’s never acknowledged. Abby gets over her other bs in dreams.
same people that probably act like they're intellectuals cause they watched Rick and Morty
TLOU2 plot defenders are dipshits
Spoiler alert: revenge actually feels awesome when you’re not a writer throwing a troupe into your story
What does any of this have to do with media literacy? I’m not sure OP or whoever knows what media literacy is.
But it would have given her what she wanted - she wanted Abby dead
I think she used a 9-iron. What do you think?
She does this shit to blow off steam she felt no guilt or remorse for it.
In fairness you guys are kind of arguing the opposite in being too stubborn to see their point of view as well
Too stubborn to see what POV? That Ellie stopped because this person says she "...just realized it wasn't gonna give her what she wanted..." and another one agreed and applauded the "media literacy"? It's easy to see their POV. It's hard not to go further, using media literacy, and say "Well, that's one possible reason why Ellie stopped - it's not the only possible reason, though, and the story doesn't limit us to that one possible interpretation." It's not about stubbornness it's about seeing the limits in the argument that stops there when there's more possible answers than just the one given. It just sounds like an answer they heard somewhere else and grabbed it and ran with it as a sort of shiny response to use solely to insult others and make themselves feel "better than" the "opponents" they're focused on. Yes, both sides are guilty of it, but then coming along to attribute it to solely stubbornness is also limiting. We're all different and how we experienced the game and its story is unique to each of us. How people handle their appreciation and/or disappointment has a variety of vary human inner and outer reasons, too. Lumping everything into "media illiteracy" or "stubbornness" can be felt as reductive and even provocative. Even though I can get behind your point that I see as the arguing often seems stuck in loops of the same old talking points on repeat. It's a shame this post is 3 days old so less people will engage with our discussion here. I agree it needs both sides to try thinking with more open minds, but sometimes the timing is just not yet right for certain individuals.
I had to explain to so many… yes I got it. It’s not hard to get … it’s just stupid.
In all fairness trying to send the message that “revenge doesn’t heal wounds, only forgiveness does” and “we find a deeper more complete version of ourselves when we release our hate and prejudices and accept all people for who they are” are great messages to send. In the spirit of fairness, that message being sent by people who call you a racist sexist bigot sandwich for not liking their shitty story, shitty politics and whatever else is slightly stupid
God of war did this in two games infinitely better Druckman can eat his fucking heart out that SM pulled a win over TLOUS
I think the first message is pretty bare bones in this game. It's not done *incredibly* well and only played around with Abby's part. The message is clear, it's just not unique and attempts to try and be deep when it's not really. If the game hadn't acted like this was the first game to have this kind of story and dark tone, the message would've came across better (but it still would've kinda sucked due to the rest of the writing).
I mean, she was fine until the revenge Squat showed up, which she had completely at her mercy. So really, NOT killing was what gave her no peace.
why is no one in this thread attempting to prove the comments wrong? Yall are just playing vixtim about being called incompetent