The Last of Us Part 2

[Lethologica]

Spoiler: Story stuff

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Saying "that's the point" doesn't excuse it from being poorly executed and bad. Lots of bad stories would make valid points if they were written by better authors. If they fail to get their point accross to the majority of people who experience their story, that's on them, not the consumer.

You don't have any polling data with you (that hasn't been review-bombed to smithereens), so I'm just going to ignore comments about "the majority of people."

My point in this segment was to get back to, as you put it, "the actual story they wrote," which is not one where Abby is presented as getting off scot-free, or as deserving to get off scot-free. Again, my opinion is that they did a perfectly fine job executing that point, and you may have a different opinion, but that's entirely orthogonal to the point.

Maybe they could have written the story in such a way so that Joel wasn't completely justified in what he does. They didn't do that though. The rest of us are talking about the actual story they wrote and not some hypothetical story that doesn't exist where Joel's actions are less justified. You're basing a lot of your points on a version of the story that doesn't actually exist.

For clarity, my version of the story is one where Marlene tells Joel that the doctor can make a vaccine, but that it will kill Ellie, and Joel decides to save Ellie even if it means killing all the Fireflies in his way. That story plays out here, verbatim. Also, in TLOU2, Abby walks in on multiple bodies, so this is not a version of the story where Joel only killed the head surgeon because of the knife.

Now, you are welcome to cite the parts of the story where Joel's actions are ever presented as justified by the uncertainty of a vaccine being developed, but my guess is you're importing that based on your understanding of vaccine development in real life and your impression of the Cordyceps fungus from the game in order to disbelieve what the game tells you. And you can run with that for your own personal moral calculus of the situation. But you can't cite a single iota of either game to tell me that was Joel's moral calculus, let alone any other character's understanding of Joel's moral calculus.

I don't sympathize with her any more than any other of the psycho murderers in the game, who presumably also had families and motives.

As far as not sympathizing with Abby, as I said, shrug. This is not a position to be argued. I am curious if you do sympathize with anyone in the game.

Yes, people are typically miserable when you murder their loved ones. Yes, Ellie is miserable. So is everyone else. That's because the authors of this story think sad=depth. Like I said before, it's baby's first creative writing.

This doesn't actually address anything I wrote.

Everyone understands the plot. It's simplistic. Like someone else said, literal children's shows have done the same plotlines for years, and done them much better. When you're rehashing the plot of Naruto...but somehow it's worse? It's not exactly stellar writing.

I am addressing plot misunderstandings that I have observed, so it is not the case that everyone understands the plot.

With that said, would you like to address in what way the plot is simplistic?

There's no way to write that scene that isn't awful, because it's just a culmination of the story up to that point. You'd have to just scrap the whole thing and write something different if you wanted a satisfying ending.

I was satisfied. But hey, more power to you.