#there’s an article i read that i largely agreed with abt hbo tess

[aeirithgainsborough]

Honestly a TLOU2 about Abby going on her revenge journey and still having all her bonding time (or, you know, more) with whatstheirfaces and then... you know, basically giving her Ellie's arc, where she has to choose NOT to enact revenge against Joel... that would have been a good game.

oh definitely! if their goal was to parallel abby/lev’s journey with joel/ellie’s that would have worked SO much better. if we had met her on her journey TO jackson and travelled it with her and along the way she met lev and yara maybe trying to escape seattle and the seraphites (for a different reason plssss cus idk why we still have to have transphobia 20 years into an apocalypse) and there’d be that same arc but fleshed out and over a longer period than 2 fucking days (their day 1 together hardly counts lol) and through that bond growing abby begins to understand why joel saved ellie cus she’d do the same for this kid - in fact, she does in a way when she kills all her own people for him but it would have stuck better if a) it had been longer than a day to get her to that point of turning on the people she’s known and fought beside for years and b) we’d seen a moment of clarity like ohhhh now i get why he did it and why my revenge was unjust and wrong. it’s really amazing how they wanted to parallel abby and joel but they couldn’t even make that basic connection of abby gaining some clarity and ppl say it’s well written lmfao???!!! it was right there in front of them… but yeah anyway if she’d had that moment of understanding why joel did it and then be able to grapple with this revenge she’s set out on it would have been SO much better.

the issue is this. neil wanted to tell his story about abby. that in itself is not an issue. the issue is that bcus he wanted to pull in those big numbers, he decided ellie and joel needed to be a big part of the story too. the result is a ham fisted and heavy handed mess that doesn’t work narratively or structurally. the way it’s structured to accommodate for all the different parts makes it feel like such a slog to get through. ive played longer games that felt shorter to play than tlou2. and narratively it’s just a mess bcus the stories have been forced together in a way that doesn’t work and ends up being a hypocritical, unsubtle mess. if neil had just told a story about abby in which ellie and joel aren’t there in person (only in presence through abby’s journey) or are just there at the end when abby gets to jackson, it would have worked better narratively and structurally. and like fix the abby issues too pls - it’s extremely weird to be trying to make me sympathise with her when she’s so brutal (the way she killed joel, being sad she has no time to torture seraphites, the fact she’s top soldier in her authoritarian militia and has no qualms about wiping out a whole group and killing children etc) and generally unpleasant (horrible to mel, sleeps with owen when mel is pregnant, has a serious lack of empathy towards ellie ‘we let you live and you wasted it’ ok well u also killed someone clearly very important to her, maybe show remorse and empathy bcus losing ur dad was so painful to you?? again it’s wild the point of the game is to find empathy for abby when she behaves as she does). but again, if there’d been more than 3 days and we’d been able to see her grow and change from that person to a better person the way joel did, it just would have worked better.