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endureandplay · 4 years

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The Last of Us 2 - Symbolism of Eyes

---MAJOR SPOILER WARNING----

I would like to talk about something that really stuck with me after playing The Last of Us 2, and which really made me think a lot. This is gonna be a loong post lol. Not sure anybody will read this.

We know that the motto of the Fireflys is "When you're lost in the darkness, look for the light." Quite obviously, the ongoing problem addressed in The Last of Us 2 is that our characters “have stopped looking for the light.” The game revolves around blind hate, revenge and retaliation. And loss as the origin of those.

Ellie’s journal entries are as dark as can be. Most of them are dedicated to Joel of course. You’ll probably have noticed that she never draws his eyes. All she does is practice drawing eyes a lot. What’s more, she keeps talking about feeling blind herself, she says she’s lost the light.

For me, it’s like she doesn’t see any hope, no joy, no future in which she can find true happiness ever again. She’s *had* this hope. She wanted to forgive Joel for what he did, start anew. They’ve wasted a lot of time because Ellie understandably couldn’t forgive him so easily for what he’s done. At the end of the game, we get to see the last conversation that happened between them, the night before Joel dies. In this conversation, Ellie tells him that she “would like to try” to forgive him. And that’s probably the moment they reconnected after years of distance, tension and resentment. Ellie speaks of this last conversation in one of her early journal entries:

I was thinking about the meaning of Ellie not being able to draw his eyes. One that came to my mind is that whenever she tries to imagine them, all she can see is his disfigured face right before he dies.

Ellie looked him in the eyes and begged for him to get up. It was the last time they really looked each other in the eyes, had this connection, maybe saw all the things they went through together flash before them right before it was taken away from them. We find out that she has PTSD or something very similar to it when she lives on the farm with Dina. She can’t get the images out of her head:

Despite them having other people in their lives after settling in Jackson, they complemented and gave each other what they needed the most.

Despite Ellie saying it, we know that they they could never be done with each other, because too much connects them. That’s what the first game was all about, after all.

Ellie had hurt Joel over and over again. He’s not a hero, but we love him, because we love Ellie, and because we can understand why he did what he did. And Ellie does too. Her pain and hurt is just as understandable. She met him with almost cruel resentment and rejection all the time, got angry at him for small things, even when he meant well (like after she kissed Dina).

It’s this fight they had that she remembers right before deciding to finish what she’s started, to find Abby and kill her. When she couldn’t sleep on that farm, she got up, went to her room, closed the window, knocked over the guitar and thought of that night.

And I don’t think this is all about revenge. I think Ellie feels deeply guilty for having been to him that way, because she understands how much she means to him, and because she understands how deeply hurt and broken he is himself. She never wanted things to be like this between them, and she just wanted to forgive him in the end - she loves him and understands his pain better than anybody else.

But she never got to get things right. This chance was taken away from them, her forgiveness came “too late”. I think Ellie is so deeply broken herself, and I feel like she hates herself. Hates that she was the one who didn’t turn when Riley did. That her life only would have mattered if they killed her to make a cure. All these years, she was mean and cruel toward him. Now he’s dead, and part of her wants to make it up to him.

By wanting to kill Abby, she doesn’t only want to avenge Joel, she wants to redeem herself.

Notice how she can’t draw Joel’s and Abby’s eyes, but she can draw JJ’s and Jesse’s eyes?

I think that that she can’t draw their eyes has a good reason. With Joel, it’s not only that she can’t get the images out of her head. I also don’t think it’s because she can’t remember what he looked like - I think she can. All too well.

I think it’s because if she imagined his eyes before her, it’s like Joel would reflect everything she does and did. His eyes would “stare” at her, as she wrote in one journal entry, but then she replaced it with “smile”. She associates him with warmth and love, but what she does is losing herself. And he’d never want that. She does things that deeply traumatize her more and more. She tortures people, kills a pregnant woman. Looking him in the eyes would mean reflecting on her actions and on herself. Putting loved ones at risk and prioritizing revenge while neglecting her family and other relationships. Looking him in the eyes would mean for her to acknowledge that Joel would never condone that. He’s gone and nothing she does can change it. And he’d want her to be safe and stay true to herself and her values. Not be blinded by hate and grief.

Abby’s eyes represent something similar. Ellie knows that Joel crossed a lot of people. She knows he killed hundreds of people, especially Fireflys, including Marlene (although we don’t know if she knows that). She knows that he did a lot of bad shit in the past. Abby and her friends spared Ellie and Tommy, and that indicates that they aren’t universally bad people. Even when Dina asks Ellie what she thinks why they spared them, Ellie doesn’t want to talk about it and says that it doesn’t matter. But it does.

And she’s avoiding and denying this gray area. She’s dividing the world into good and bad now, disregarding everything in between. Even in the end, when she sees that Abby is just a normal human being like Ellie is, taking care of Lev, she feels obliged to kill her.

Jesse and JJ don’t represent her blind hate. They represent the love and people in her life that still make her happy and care about her. The life she could have, if she were able to “leave it all behind”. She doesn’t associate them with pain and loss.

Only when she finally has the choice to kill Abby, she remembers the last conversation she had with Joel - and it was about forgiveness. But it was not only about deciding to forgive him. It was about understanding that the world isn’t as simple as good and bad, black or white. People are more than that, just like Joel was neither a hero, nor a villain. Just like Abby is neither a hero nor a villain.

Of course, by deciding to break the cycle of revenge, which is the most obvious topic in the game, she spares Lev of going through the same pain Ellie and Abby did. But I think something deep inside her forgives Abby for what she’s done. I think Ellie understands that Abby isn’t just a bad person, just like Joel wasn’t. By stopping there, Ellie undergoes the growth not to be like Abby and kill the one who’s responsible for her loss, just like Abby grew and decided not to kill Dina despite the fact that Ellie killed Mel.

And she finally lets her mask slip. When she decides to let Abby live, she finally accepts that Joel is dead and “reconciles” with him. She decides not to turn into something she’s not and let her grief and hate get the better of her. Ellie understands what she’s done, the mistake she’s made. How she’s lost herself and how she wronged Dina.

And that’s when she can finally draw his eyes.

#the last of us #the last of us 2 #thelastouf2 #tlou2 #tlou #tlou ellie #joel and ellie #ellie x dina #ellie miller #ellie the last of us #Abby tlou #Abbyanderson #abby anderson #neildruckman #ashley johnson #troy baker #thelastofus #the last of us part two #the last of us part II

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endureandplay · 4 years

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The Last of Us 2 - What’s up with the user score? (Spoiler-free)

Approximately 3 days after the launch of the game, the game scored only 3.3 on Metacritic, whereas The Last of us 1 and Left Behind scored 9.1 and 8.0. People argue that the score isn’t that low because of the LGBTQ+ representation in the game. Many compare it to other games like Life is Strange, Detroit: Become Human and even the Left Behind DLC itself which all represent LGBTQ+ and still have a pretty good user score. First of all, we think that these other games are a LOT more subtle and often “the worst you get” is a kiss scene. The Last of Us 2 takes this to a different level: Romance is very explicit and present all the time.

Second, and most importantly: The user score is actually going UP. And that makes sense. Within the first 3 days there were about 15,000 user ratings submitted on Metacritic. The Last of Us 1 - after seven years - currently only has ~10,000 reviews. The Left Behind DLC only has ~1,100 as of now. The huge gap between these numbers makes a lot of sense considering people’s reaction to the leaks a few months ago. Without ever having played it, many rejected the direction of the story and cancelled their pre-order. Neil Druckman received so many hateful messages that you really gotta question what’s wrong with some people to threaten another person like this, and even more so, because of a game. Let’s also not forget about the hundreds or thousands of people who complained right from the start that the sequel confirmed Ellie being gay (which they probably had dismissed as “experimenting” up to then). Or those who were enraged that the game wouldn’t have multi-player like the first one, and cancelled their pre-order because of that, way before the leaks. The game had lost many supporters at that point already.

Of course there are those who simply don’t like the story. The “golf” scene and many things about the new main character in particular, at least that’s the critique we heard most often. But just because people don’t like the story doesn’t mean the game deserves a 1/10, does it? Most people would agree that the graphics are amazing, that the gameplay is fun and engaging and that Naughty Dog improved a lot of things in general. Taking this into account, the game CAN’T objectively be a 1/10. How many stories in video games suck or are pretty shallow, yet people still love the game? It’s only that the expectations are pretty high for The Last of Us, considering the success of the first game and the scale it set. So if the story disappoints for some, they dismiss the entire game as bullshit.

Honestly, maybe a small part in the disappointment also plays that the trailers are very misleading and having followed them, you’d expect something pretty different from what’s in the actual game.

Our guess is that many, many people - without having so much as touched the game - immediately went to hate on it by giving it the lowest possible score. Just to show everyone how pissed they are. And many people also wanted to convince others of not buying the game because “it’s trash”.

Now after those people had the chance to submit their negative review right away, the user score slowly becomes more objective. There are those who love, like or dislike it for good reasons. More and more people actually finish the game themselves (and while some are fast and have the time, the majority of people can’t fit a 30+ hour game into a single weekend, especially if they’re busy). So people have a chance to build their own opinion after having explored and experienced the game - and obviously, the game isn’t that bad. There are just as many people having a blast playing it.

While I’m writing this, there are almost 100,000 reviews on Metacritic. The score is at 4.8 today (6/29/20) and I’m basically checking every day - it keeps getting better.

Truth is that the game isn’t complete trash. In fact, we, personally, enjoy every bit of the game, we love what Naughty Dog did including the story. It’s probably best not to assume the direction the story will take and instead going into the game with a fresh mind, because what Naughty Dog did is definitely brave and could be seen as controversial. But we find that everything about the story and how it is told makes perfect sense. It’s a great sequel to the first one, and more importantly, we don’t think it’s random, like they had to come up with some story that feels forced in and out - it’s perfectly logical.

A little heads up for those who haven’t played it: Just be prepared for explicit violence in this game. It’s really detailed, brutal and gory. Here are links to articles that found out the same, and you can easily find more if you check:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2020/06/25/the-last-of-us-part-2s-metacritic-user-score-rises-32-now-that-people-have-actually-finished-it/#6b7cacce924d https://screenrant.com/last-us-2-metacritic-score-users-rising/

#thelastofus #the last of us #tlof #tlof2 #thelastofus2 #the last of us 2 #thelastouf2 #ellie #lgbt #lgbtq #playstation #metacritic #usercore #reviews #naughtydog #naughty dog #neildruckman #gaming

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