Tommy wants Abby gone because the same thing that led Joel to saving Ellie is the same thing that saves Abby in the snow. Mel is right about Abby....just look at the company the fireflies keep. The first guy that Joel kills in the hospital, Marlene who was happy to receive Ellie yet against her having consent to surgery and the surgeon, Abby's father having a one track mind absolving him to any moral obligations. All of them are POS'. Joel didn't hesitate to save Abby. Abby made a mockery of his purpose that you said multiple times was to protect others. Tommy wanted to avenge that. What he(Tommy) does ask of Ellie is unfair but as is typical of the Fireflies, they didn't really give anyone a choice. They're not too different from David's crew in Salt Lake. Shoot first ask questions later.

This video was incredible. Thank you for your patience in putting it together. There are a few points that I could comment on, but I'll just choose one. I'm alerted to the many people suggesting Dina being selfish by leaving, and I wonder about the traumas and isolation those with this point of view have had to endure. It seems to me quite burdensome to expect Dina to stay. This is ironic as that sense of being a burden initially played in the reverse throughout the story. Yet, by the end, Ellie had very clearly become the burden. And while many can empathize with Ellie, it might also highlight the need to seek professional help, as Ellie obviously needs. The story, from this perspective, seems to be about the idea of seeing the world through Ellie's eyes then turning a mirror on the player to see if there are any fractures in the reflection. And of course, with all of us, there always are.

Thank you

Been waiting for this since last year 🙏🏽

Excited more and more everyday!!! Cant wait!

Hey... just watched a couple of uour videos, and a reaction to this one... ugh, i totally feel you, and i adooooree3 the game, and i have no idea how some ppl do not like it... i feel you so much when you say it means something else... i got Ellie's tattoo, and when ppl.ask me, i just say its from a game (they might think i am crazy), but you just cannot describe it with words of how it touches and what you feel... and yeah, i hope we get to see PIII, whatever story that might be. All the hugs to you!

if ellie was feeling suicidal then in part 3 that might be the end of her since i heard that she will not have a big role in that part…

I have just watched this great masterpiece for the second time. It left me with a deep understanding for both Dina and Ellie. I love it. Thank you so much for this amazing analysis🩵

i use to hold out on watching this vid cuz i feel like it would hurt too much but, now five months after has given me time to contemplate their relationship and issues they had. glad i watched this video!!

Hey if it was actually shown what happened instead of having it off screen I think it's totally work maybe it could in the HBO show especially since he's gonna be a father himself in that

where did you get that shirt? It looks so cool.

Comment

Hey! I have just found your channel and just wanna say I LOVE your content! So in-depth and well thought-out! I love that I can take a deep dive into the characters after having recently finished playing part 2. Feels like I can hang on to this amazing story for a little while longer 🥲 But not only that, you are opening up new thought avenues for me, that simply hadn’t occured to me while playing the game. Really appreciate what you’re doing!

Season 2 Ellie part season 3 Abby part makes sense buttttt I don’t know how Bella will get the hard revenge attitude from part 2 of the game but I wish to get proven wrong because looks and first part wise she is the perfect actor

They called this ending bad, man... When I watched Ellie walk alone back down the path, I knew she was finally going to be okay. Not because the revenge we wanted for Joel was achieved, but because it wasn't.

36:14 she did NOT overpower him, he got shot in the leg and she shot him while he was weak. Abby would’ve been dead if Lev hadn’t been there and same thing goes for what happened earlier in the ferry terminal, she would be dead if Yara hadn’t stepped in.

i always appreciated the argument scene between joel and tommy bc it makes it clear early on how they both handled the apocalyptic world differently and are actively impacted by the horrible things they went through in contrasting ways

I have a few issues with Caitlin/vi this second season. But they are still some of my favorite characters of all time. But they made some strange choices this season

Hey, would you eventually made a video on the smaller side character on TLOU2 like Jesse and Manny? I actually think that they are pretty similiar to each other and they are my two most favorite new character in TLOU2.

I actually like almost everyone in the last of us series but each in a different contexts

at 39:08 the literal Ellie is asking why will Joel be more pragmatic while hers appear to be more emotional. It was intentionally kept from Ellie like it was kept from the character playing Ellie. And as the player that time, all of us felt the need to go out now and kill everyone from that group. We were emotional, we were Ellie

Finally. Someone explained the game perfectly to how I felt playing it

I absolutely love what last of us part 2 tried to do once i was done with the game i felt like it had taken a piece of myself with it. I feel like people feeling so much anger and calling it depressing was the point, you're meant to feel angry you're meant to feel what Ellie feels and then thar whiplash you get from switching to Abby forced to see the other side its meant to feel that way. Art should challenge you make you question yourself.

I'm not so sure that the series will be following the same narrative structure as the game does. For me, in a series with episodic stories, it would make much more sense to intertwine Ellie's and Abby's story arc more and don't tell them one after the other.

that sounds like nora to me

I mean, I don't think their relationship is over at all. At the end of LoU2, she's setting out to save it.

Thank you for this

I thought they were a horrible couple. Good game though.

The sad thing is that I can relate to Dina here, sometimes you can try your damn hardest to support someone going through some form of mental health crisis/trauma and try to support them to a better path but at some point you have to accept that if they aren't willing to help themselves then there's no point letting yourself get drug down with them into that deep pit with, in their mind, no escape.

While the game is still not a game I enjoyed playing, I've come to appreciate the story more since release but god damn is it still depressing.

The main problem is that this forcefulness of the themes is so heavy handed and done in an unambiguous way that it makes a large majority of players not want to engage in the art in the first place. So, much of this video, and their series of videos, is giving this game an extreme level of good faith and ignoring execution. Which is something I believe you should never do, because if you wanted good themes in a vacuum regardless of delivery then you should listen to a TedTalk. A lot of what I'm going to talk about is the mental gymnastics of accepting the structure of the story. The idea proposed in the video, and many people who defend the game, that the games pacing doesn't come to a screeching halt or that even if it does it doesn't matter is insane. The game's pacing slows down for 10 to 15 hours, building back up to the place we were already at and ultimately ruins the encounter due to us learning for a fact about how much of a shitty person Abby is. She doesn't go on the arc of realizing what she did was wrong or unjustified like her character archetype is known for, it's just that she has to go on the arc that Joel went on without any of the nuance that the first game had. She was willing to kill a girl that's pregnant. Which as I'll get into later we can't use our moral justifications of our own society to judge this one. It's worth noting that either because the author doesn't understand the society he helped create or in this society killing a pregnant lady would be seen as a bad thing that the story treats this action as a negative. She gaslight and blackmailed all of her friends into coming on a revenge path that ultimately getting them all killed because she couldn't rationalize her father was a terrible person as well, or at the very least was going to make a terrible decision. The game trying to "humanize" him also adds to the heavy handedness of the story. The game essentially tells us, "Before he was willing to murder a 14 year-old girl in the vain hopes of getting a cure he was a swell guy, saving the lives of people who bombed innocents and random wildlife in his vicinity. Which is laughable and clearly is a creator not understanding how to get the audience to like or empathize with a character who is so reprehensible that you yourself want to kill them as you get to know them. She gets a guy who is dating a girl who he's going to marry and is pregnant with his unborn child to cheat as his last action before he dies. Actively participates in murdering children in an enemy faction and when confronted with it doesn't care and shrugs it off. Gets all of her friend's killed and doesn't show any remorse or reflection that they are dead because of what she did. Instead blames Ellie when she decides to kill her. It's good that you're engaging in this game with as much good faith as possible but it's to a distracting degree, as you mold the character's and story around the themes rather than the plot that's meant to support those themes. The game acts like Ellie killing the friends of Abby is some uncrossable line, but she guns down hundreds of soldiers and doesn't care. Which, in turn, makes their lives meaningless as by the end of the story they all died for nothing. Where before Ellie could have rationalized those deaths as a means to an end, now she has no justification for killing them other than they attacked her. The faction Abby fights for kills children and outsiders on sight, which again, why are you fighting for a faction that is strictly authoritarian and only becomes the bad guys because they want to kill people Abby personally likes. The game's structure and storytelling when compared to the first is significantly terrible, no amount of mental gymnastics is going to make that go away. This alone makes the story not worth telling. As you'd be trampling on the first game as you wouldn't be able to separate the two. As any game going forward will be in a timeline where the main character died in a way that was bullshit, only to facilitate the writers themes rather than how they'd actually die. Last of Us was a game built around nuance, the problem that Neil has with his Cycle of Violence trope is that he, himself, doesn't actually understand what it means to be in that cycle, and most people don't. Because of this, a lot of people don't know how to write characters with a gray moral background when in a world that is gray. When you're living in a world where killing someone else is normal, you stop caring about the morality of your actions, you kill who you have to and you don't think about it. Especially when you're in a world where you, as a character, are in a safe community, beginning to open up to your father figure again, and some outsider from literal states away comes and kills your father figure simply because he killed theirs. When anyone would understand that, 1) the fireflies were never going to create a cure, item descriptions and the layout of the story itself supports that before Neil decided to definitively say that he was bad and the fireflies were a NET good, 2) the killer's father figure quite literally was going to kill a girl without getting consent because he was deranged enough to believe he could develop a cure, when the entire U.S government with infinite resources couldn't do that in the 20 years prior to the first games story. The fireflies biggest flaw is their blind idealism, which is best represented when a firefly accidentally gets himself killed because he wanted to free infected monkey's into THE WILD. Which on it's own could kill an infinite amount of people. They are really a bunch of idealistic retards who would have doomed humanity for glory and a chance to become the ruling faction after killing so many innocents of the people they are obstensively (not spelled right I know....) trying to save. The killer's father wouldn't have died if he didn't step in the way of Joel, and tried to kill a literal child for a chance at making a cure he was most definitely going to fuck up. I don't expect Abby to understand this since she's just angry, though in like 6 years you'd think one of her friends would've pointed this out. But you would think that Ellie would say this after four years of mental reflection in the scene where she actually talks to Abby in the theater, not, "there's no cure because of me." Or even Joel in the scene where Abby or Ellie confronts him about what he did because in the years he's had he would have rationalized it in his head either as that due to actual mental reflection. I guess we could have him say, "I killed them because they were going to kill you," and risk having the daughter figure he saved to leave him because he didn't want to explain himself in FOUR YEARS or in the moment, and actively choose to lose his life when the girl he saved is still alive and not fully equipped to deal with the world, and quite literally told him the night before that she wants to rebuild with him. He has every reason to want to live and would try his best to survive, not stand in the middle of a room filled with people he doesn't know. The story and it's structure is bad, and the amount of good faith you give it is distracting. Doubt you'd read this but I found it interesting to type.

Have to disagree with notion that Joel wouldn’t have gone on a vengeance quest. Man would have made Ellie look like Mother Teresa and Tommy look like the Pope. Abby would have died on Joel’s first day in Seattle.

Good video

"Ive never seen you give up on anything, Ekko" from Powder Ep 7 and "You're never going to give up on me are you?" from Jinx to Vi. Ekko and Vi are so similar. I dont really understand though why Vi is somewhat punished by "not moving on"; I dont think it is a flaw to want to protect your family. And its certainly not treated like a flaw when it comes to Ekko, Ekko regains this hope for Jinx and reaches out to her and attempts to save Jinxs life. We then see him in the finale in the same spot they kissed, but rightfully as you pointed out its also Vi and Powders hangout spot. But Vi is up in Piltover. They are both grieving Jinx, but I cant help but feel like it would have been so great if Vi and Ekko reunited at the end here because they both share in this loss, but they are so disconnected. I dont like how lost vi and jinxs relationship was in season 2 if im being honest. They were my favourite duo/relationship, and definitely felt the most important out of the show. I wouldve liked if Vi was with Ekko in that moment, as that place both means something to them.

so glad I clicked onto this video. Your insight and attention to detail is crazy. You made me appreciate this scene way more than I ever did (which, like many wasnt a lot as I wasnt too interested in Abby and Owens relationship and their love scene after this). I cant wait for Abbys story in the live action TV Show, I think itll translate well onto the screen as TLOU part II has always felt more cinematic than an actual video game. Thank you for making this!