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aeirithgainsborough · 1 year

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i just finished playing parts 1 and 2 of tlou for the first time and, as someone who has grown to love joel and ellie very much within the span of 72 hours and found their characterization in pt 2 to be straight up bizarre, your takes on the game are a godsend. the rage in my heart cannot be extinguished but it can be soothed. thank u for ur service 🫡

you’re welcome!! it’s baffling to me how many people seem to have mindlessly taken it all in, just letting themselves be force fed some bullshit morality tale with no thought cus… yeah it’s bad ajsjjs. the gameplay is good although a little repetitive since it’s more open, the graphics are stunning, and as a disabled person who can struggle with games sometimes the accessibility is next level. they definitely get credit for that!

but the narrative is terrible. for a start it’s chock full of contrivances. abby happens to find tommy and then when she’s looking for him after making a FOURTEEN DAY JOURNEY across a dangerous world she gets into trouble and who should save her but joel! who then runs into a lodge unarmed with a group of strangers after 20 years of being on his guard. and then ellie runs into the room too unarmed despite the noises she can hear coming from it, even though she took on david and his cronies at 14 and got the better of them lol? then they all travel another FOURTEEN DAYS no problems, they find who they need in a huge city, ellie leaves a handy map for abby to find her. it’s absurd. one or two contrivances i can ignore but when you’re that reliant on them for your plot it’s not good writing!

then there’s ellie ‘im scared to end up alone’ ‘you’re the only person to never leave me and id be more scared without you’ williams. a girl who lost her best friend/first love traumatically and had a whole ‘let’s make the most of the time we have left’ thing with her… and she doesn’t speak to the most important person in her life for 2 years?? not my ellie lmao. i can see her being mad. i can see her being cold to him. I can see that relationship being different bcus of joel’s lie. i can’t see her going cold turkey whilst living on the same property as him for that long. i can’t see her never asking him for a proper explanation in that time. she leaves everything behind eventually despite her fears and how important the notion of family is to her. bye dina and jj. and then at the end… it’s pointless! she didn’t even get her revenge after becoming unrecognisable, leaving her loved ones behind, and killing a slew of people to get there. nor does she develop lol AT ALL. at 14 she had survivors’s guilt and was ready to sacrifice her life bcus of that and a belief her life doesn’t matter and then at 19 she’s the same! there’s no lightbulb moment where she’s like OH my life does matter it does have value none of my friends’ deaths were my fault and i don’t need to die for absolution. there’s no moment she realises why joel saved her. she’s stagnant. it’s so miserable. and it haunts me what we could have had if joel hadn’t been killed off for torture porn shock value. if they’d had to go on some journey with their relationship cold and not As It Was and along the way ellie has that understanding that her life DOES matter. ‘no one wants the same story they played in tlou blah blah boring’ LOL YES?? ellie and joel are why ppl loved part 1 and that’s why they had to lie so much in the lead up to the game and marketing. ‘this is a story about joel and ellie that’s why we decided not to have it about new characters’ lie ‘we love joel and ellie and we’re going to treat them with respect’ lie, plus aging joel and ellie up in the trailers and inserting joel into the trailer in a way that made ppl think they were going on a journey. it was a deliberate lie to make ppl who wanted more joel and ellie buy the game and they told it for a reason. and besides there’s a difference between ‘i just met you and i don’t like you rn but slowly im gonna love you’ and ‘i love you but i don’t much like you’ and that difference is actually fascinating and could have been used to rlly good effect instead of… all those stupid contrivances and torture porn!

and then there’s joel lmao. even the opening when he says ‘i saved her’ is so funny his expression his tone it’s literally disney/marvel villain sjsjsjd i cannot take it seriously. beyond that there’s such a dissonance between a) what actually happens in part 1 and what they say in part 2 and b) the violent world they’ve put him/us in and then asked us to get across in one piece with a kid in part 1 and how he’s then judged for that in part 2. ‘get this kid across the country but when WE make it so you’re attacked in every chapter and have to defend yourself/ellie we are going to say joel is a cruelly violent man’ ‘get this kid across the county without letting her die when you’re attacked pls and btw in part 2 we are going to say you taught her violence and corrupted her’ never mind that it’s impossible joel could have done the job in the world THEY created and then punished us for acting accordingly in, but also that he doesn’t even give her a gun until using one makes her sick and it’s not a fun toy to her. and even then it’s for emergencies. he never attacks first, he only defends. and they made it that way! that specific world is useless in moralising to us about violence bcus of that dissonance. none? of? us? can? help? it? ‘be violent when ur attacked or you’ll die and can’t progress the story but we are gonna punish and villainise and demonise you for it in part 2’ ‘kill hundreds of people and dogs, torture people, but did you know violence is bad actually??’. ABSURD. and in that hospital joel was NOT the aggressor. honestly the whole thing would have worked better if abby’s revenge had been for pointless violence. but from the point we know him joel is never violent until they are attacked first. that’s inarguable fact. even tommy in part 2 tells ellie joel wouldn’t have gone to seattle for revenge if it had been one of them! it’s been a long time since he did terrible things and im not saying that makes it ok (except he’s hot and not real so idc) BUT that aside the point is, he doesn’t go looking for it, and it’s never pointless anymore. but he’s the Big Bad Evil who deserves to die like a dog and we know you all love joel but we’re gonna make you hear it and watch it and also in the whole game we are gonna make him the punching bag we are not even going to ONCE let him open his mouth and explain what really happened in that hospital and why he saved ellie (yeah he’s so terrible for not letting a suicidal 14yr old kill herself)! which rlly brings us back round to the dissonance cus they’ve ALL done shitty stuff to survive including abby but she’s gonna be the one to ‘stop horrible evil villain joel in his tracks’ when he’s been living quietly in jackson for 5 years and she’s gonna get her revenge and then after get a happy hopeful ending all to show us violence and revenge is bad which a) falls flat bcus what? revenge makes you lose everything and end up alone except not for abby! and b) she’s objectively just as awful if not more so than joel but she’s the one who has to stop him and gets a nice redemption arc with a hopeful happy ending and joel has to die! abby:

shows great pleasure in slowly torturing joel and then killing him brutally

does the above in front of his screaming kid who’s being held down and forced to watch even though just finding her dad’s body is traumatising for her

is in an authoritarian militia who is intent on wiping out anyone else out in seattle lol?

kills people for that militia including kids

after torturing joel and killing him is so deeply unaffected by it she laments the fact she hasn’t got time to torture some seraphites who are chained up in cells

kills jessie when he’s unarmed cus she rlly learnt violence and revenge was so awful and took everything from you. wait, no, only ellie had to learn that lesson and end up alone. she also shoots and injured tommy!

once again shows sadistic pleasure in the idea of killing when she’s about to slit dina’s throat. this pleasure is bcus she’s pregnant so again yeah she rlly was so affected by her violence and revenge lmao.

never shows any great remorse beyond a throwaway line, meanwhile ellie loses absolutely everything including her fingers and joel, peacefully minding his business in jackson is the villain who deserves to brutally die and even after he’s dead he’s further villanised by the narrative lol even tho he was right to kill jerry fuck that man!

it’s just completely nonsensical! not only are they moralising to us in a world that doesn’t suit it, but they can’t even do it well!

it’s also just relentless misery and torture porn. kill all these ppl kill these dogs watch joel die horribly beat ellie up as the person who killed him even though you love her and are attached to her (really struggle to understand where im meant to find empathy for abby during this, esp after jessie and then the whole dina bit) watch ellie lose her family lose her fingers and end up alone which was her greatest fear. don’t even get me started on the section that posits ellie as a david figure down to gameplay mechanics and the theatre set up which is beyond vile when he tormented her when she was a fucking kid and the voice actor has talked about how he was going to r*** her. it’s vile enough that they took the first lesbian protagonist of an AAA game and tortured her for 25 hours straight and turned her into the villain but to also position her as her own fucking predator is straight up horrific. cus that’s not a stereotype in the lgbt community… as an aside, troy saying joel is the same as david is the stupidest thing ive ever heard and he should shut up forever.

on top of all that the game is homophobic, transphobic and racist. neil got the idea when he fantasised about killing palestinians in revenge… yikes. you can even see how the conflict between the wlf and the seraphites mirrors what’s going on in palestine. it’s actually a plot that’s very similar to an early iteration of tlou1 that was stopped cus... it didn’t make sense for anyone in that world to travel when it’s so dangerous just to get revenge ajsjsjs come back bruce! (ppl like to forget he was integral to part 1)

this game doesn’t respect the characters, it doesn’t respect the world, and it sure as heck doesn’t respect us. it takes the ambiguity from the end of part 1 which made it SO great and rips it to shreds. instead of being allowed to make our own minds up they ram down our throats that joel was completely wrong in the way they punish him through the narrative and ellie (the ellie part just makes it worse :/). goodbye nuance goodbye grey area. the reaction to it from gamers who hail it as a narrative masterpiece and love abby whilst arguing joel is a villain who deserved to die show what propaganda was invented for actually! and then ppl have the audacity to say if you don’t like the game you’re a homophobic woman hater with no depth or nuance ITS LAUGHABLE.

i found the experience of playing the game so genuinely traumatic it was that full of torture porn but the good news is the further out i get from playing the game the better it gets. i haven’t cried for days and days about it which is a record!! and at that point it gets so much easier to disengage from part 2 and just enjoy the actual masterpiece part 1 was.

#SORRY I GOT CARRIED AWAY ON UR ASK #it’s just tiresome to keep being told there aren’t any valid criticisms of this game… so here they all are ajsjjsd #the feelings of rage and upset get better tho #like ill still complain cus im an autistic goblin but im feeling much better now #the last of us spoilers #tlou2 #anti tlou2 #tlou

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