Max: Hi! I'm Max and today we're going to talk about the sequel to everyone's favorite
2013 game about a broken man
voiced by Troy Baker
who learns to care about someone else.
Nnnnno, the other one.
I marathoned The Last of Us 2 right when it came out.
I loved it, and immediately went on Twitter
to see what other people thought
and found myself to be in the minority
at least of those who were the most
vocal.
I do agree with and appreciate much of
the criticism of the game,
but I also found a lot of it to be
wildly off-base.
and, for this video, I want to do my best to
rebuff those specific criticisms,
explore what meaning I, personally, found
in the game, and look at how that meaning
might apply to the real world including some of the criticisms levied at the game.
Some disclaimers going in:
1. I'm going to spoil both Last of Us games.
2. This video is gonna include depictions of violence homophobia and PTSD
as well as discussions of transphobia and systemic racism.
The Last of Us Part 2 is often criticized for judgmentally wagging its finger at the player.
Neil Druckmann: They're like "oh the game is like - I kill a dog in one second and I pet the dog,
so the game is like wagging its finger at me.
Which does sound awful.
I'd hate that game.
But that's not the game I played.
The game that I played was not interested in making moral judgments at all.
It was interested in the stories people tell themselves to prove that they are "the good guy,"
and how our deepest motivations are not rational,
but based almost entirely on emotion
A great example of an emotionally-charged action like this
is the one that the entirety of the first game built toward
In The Last of Us Part 1, we play as
Joel
and almost immediately see him lose his daughter
on the day of a zombie outbreak.
We then jump forward 20 years and the
rest of the story sees Joel escorting Ellie,
a girl immune to the virus
across the country to some rebels called "The Fireflies."
The Fireflies went to use Ellie to make a vaccine.
As we play, it becomes clear that joel has hardened himself
and done awful things to survive, closing off the world
so nothing can hurt him as much as the death of his daughter.
As the journey progresses, though,
Joel begins to find Ellie filling the hole in
his heart.
Right before Ellie and Joel reach the
Fireflies, Ellie nearly drowns,
and a spooked Firefly knocks out Joel as he is trying to resuscitate her.
Joel wakes up to learn that Ellie will be operated on to produce a vaccine for the virus,
but the procedure will kill
her
Joel decides he will not let this happen.
To free Ellie, he kills dozens of Fireflies,
including the only doctor capable of making a vaccine.
He then lies to Ellie about what happened.
She appears to believe him, though with
clear hesitation.
He believed that her death could produce a cure
and that Ellie would want to give her life for it if she could
The opening of the second game confirms both these things.
Joel: They were actually gonna make a cure.
She needed her immunity to mean somethin'.
I told her...
Her immunity meant nothin'.
Max: What I'm getting at is that Joel could have told himself a story for why he was the good guy here.
Say the Firefly cure wouldn't have
worked,
or that Ellie wouldn't have wanted this.
But he doesn't even try.
He knows this decision was not about right and wrong,
but about how strong his love for Ellie was.
This motivation worked for many players and it works for Joel's brother, Tommy
when Joel confesses to him
Tommy: I can't say I'd've done different.
Max: Joel doesn't attempt to construct a narrative around why his actions were right.
He knows his actions are entirely
emotionally-motivated.
He's the only character I'm gonna
analyze in this video, though,
where this will be the case.
For everyone else,
I'll be using this same framework on screen to explore both the story they tell themself
about why they're the good guy and the
emotions that are really driving them.
Though, going into the sequel,
most players expected Naughty Dog to build an emotional motivation like in the first game
that patiently developed the relationship
between two people in a lonely world.
So, at the beginning of The Last of Us Part 2, Joel is beaten to death
by some of the surviving Fireflies from the
first game.
It's not outright stated, but, like, you
know it's probably them.
Or at least you know, when the game starts, that anyone who wants to kill Joel
probably has a good reason to.
Ellie: So, uh, you kill a lot of innocent people?
Joel: *Grunts/sighs*
I'll take that as a yes.
Max: The setup to Joel's death happens partially from the perspective of a new character named Abby
who's staying in a cabin just outside of Joel's new settled town of Jackson.
Now, when i played this, interpreted this line:
Owen: Assuming he's in there, how do we get to him?
to be referring to Joel and have this realization of
"Oh my god! totally understand why someone would want to kill this man
"and I can't fault this woman for it,
"but I really don't want her to succeed."
The inner-conflict I felt here was one
of my highlights of the game.
It was the first of many tastes of the
conflict between loving a character
and finding their actions to be worthy of
revenge.
In an extremely convenient turn of events, Abby is saved from a zombie horde by Joel and Tommy
She convinces Joel and Tommy to take shelter back where her group has set up camp.
When they arrive, she turns on them and eventually beats Joel to death,
but not before Ellie shows up just in time to be scarred by it.
I've heard a lot of people criticize the circumstances surrounding Joel's death.
Tommy introduces himself and Joel to Abby by name very quickly after meeting her.
Tommy: I'm Tommy. That's Joel.
This strikes people as off because they'd expect Joel to be like the Joel from the first game who's untrusting
and that both him and his brother would be on high alert worried about Fireflies looking for retribution.
I do have my justification for why Joel and Tommy might act like this within the
world of the game.
It seems this isn't an uncommon
occurrence for Joel and Tommy
—to just run into folks passing through.
Neil: That's four years of having lived in this community that's safe.
Four years of like they meet people on the outside all the time and they bring them in.
We have all these notes and stuff.
These guys are not hunters.
Like, Joel's looking for hunters. These are
regular people, um,
just like the people that live in Jackson.
And Joel has become a regular person who lives in Jackson, as well.
Max: Jackson is a place that people visit very frequently
and the fact that we
don't see other interactions like this
isn't an example of sloppy writing,
but an example of the game not wasting your time with needless filler.
It's still possible that Joel might have been on higher alert.
I agree, the whole thing is a bit contrived,
but that's not really what was ever important,
which is, yes, Joel is more trusting of other humans than he used to be.
Troy Baker: There's a specific moment. A specific moment in that scene.
the thought that Joel has—
Is "This is what happens when you drop your guard.
"Allowed myself to trust. I allowed myself
to love.
"Allowed myself to feel. I allowed myself
to be safe.
"And this is what you get."
It's a moment of regret.
And even inside that moment he goes "I'd do it all over again
because what I got was the girl."
the point of the first game
is that Joel's rough exterior was a product of the pain caused by losing his daughter.
Once Ellie filled that role in his life, he could drop some of his tougher tendencies.
You see this when he playfully pushes
Ellie into the water.
You see it when she runs away and his
first reaction isn't to yell at her,
but to tell her she can confide in him
if she needs to.
Joel: You talk to me.
And you see it in Joel's
house where it's clear
he just spent his free time whittling
animal sculptures and making guitars
The first time you see this dude in this game after a four-year time jump is him helping someone up.
Just this shot right here is
so intentional—the fact that this is the first time you see him.
This shot's doing so much work to tell you how Joel's changed
and what a different person he is right now, that, I-I don't know.
To me, this is super strong storytelling
and all the criticisms that are like
"why don't we get to see him interact
with other survivors in Jackson" or "why
don't we get more development of him"
It's-It's because this is doing it. This is the development
and it's so economical and effectively using its time. I just-I love it. It's great
and I'm upset that, particularly to me, a lot of the criticisms of this development of his character
like people asking for the game to be made worse and more meandering
in a game that's already a little longer than it needs to be.
None of this is inconsistent writing.
It's playing off of the most
clear character change Joel went through
in the first game.
It also makes his death scene a lot more tragic.
Joel's death is an incredibly powerful motivator
and it only works if it happens at the beginning of the game.
The Last of Us Part 2 requires you to have played the first game to get the full emotional experience
Killing Joel off creates emotions in a player
that any first game in a series
would struggle to conjure up in its first act.
Neil: We wanted to make a scene that would disturb us.
Max: And I think, wherever you fall
on the spectrum on how good this game was,
he succeeded at least at that.
Neil: Okay, the scene works.
On one level it like-it's like it did what it
meant to do
the rest of the game would not work as well without this deep emotional motivation
Maria: you going with her?
Max: Ellie now sets out on a journey with her girlfriend Dina,
later being joined by both Tommy
and Dina's ex-boyfriend, Jessie,
to track down and kill all eight people from the party that Abby was a part of when she murdered Joel.
This takes them to Seattle in search of the Washington Liberation Front (WLF),
the gang they believe Abby belonged to
This part—the tracking down and killing part—is, from what I gather,
pretty popular with people who swear this game is the worst thing since the "three beams of light."
YouTuber 1: The first 15 hours or so are somewhat enjoyable
there are graphic scenes of your horse dying and overabundance of brutality and gore,
but, narratively speaking, it seems understandable
YouTuber 2: What's really interesting
about this game is that, at the start,
we spend the first 10 hours of the game
trying to track down
and seek revenge on every single person
that helped murder Joel.
And, as a player, I think we can all respect that.
A lot of
people playing this game
really want each of these fuckers dead
and talk about how satisfying it is to kill them.
for this subset of people, the disgust generated from Joel's death worked
and Ellie's motivations were believable.
I'm not here to defend whether these
actions by Ellie are believable or not over the top.
It didn't entirely work for me, so, if it didn't work for you, I feel ya.
One not entirely negative reason I think
that people might find Ellie's killing
more troublesome than Joel's in the
original
is that you don't actually kill another
human til' like five or six hours in.
There's a lot more weight given to
killing in this game than the first one
where you kill someone in what's
basically a tutorial.
I haven't seen as much
attention paid to this
as giving all the human enemies names
Zoe's friend: Zoe!
or making their deaths really brutally-animated
*gunshot*...*pained screams*
And I think that speaks to its effectiveness as a subtle choice.
Still, any game that needs to have challenging and entertaining combat
with multiple human enemies over a long runtime
is going to turn its protagonist into a bit of a psychopath
and maybe that's a larger conversation than just this game.
Honestly, my biggest complaint in this section is its super repetitive gameplay
Oh, ya! Another segment where I duck in and out of buildings to flank human and canine enemies.
wooooooooo *without enthusiasm
Even if I don't fully buy everything,
I do enjoy how the game tests how far the player will go and still root for Ellie.
Perhaps the Washington Liberation Front
Dina: Wolves
Ellie: Whatever
Max: Isn't such pure evil
that deserves to be mass murdered
After fighting their way through many
infected parts of Seattle,
Dina and Ellie discover that the wolves are
much bigger than the small group in Jackson
and it seems as though there are
dozens or hundreds of them.
Though they attack on sight, certain
things bother Dina and Jesse.
Dina: Something keeps bugging me.
Why didn't they kill you and Tommy when they had the chance?
Ellie: I don't know.
Dina: Could be that you just weren't who they were looking for,
so they let you go
Max: Joel's done bad things. Maybe they had a good reason.
Jesse: That change anything for you?
Ellie: Nope
Max: But it's repeatedly mentioned that the
wolves aren't like the people of Jackson.
Dina: I can't believe they just attacked like
that.
Ellie: These people are not like us.
Ellie: This place isn't like Jackson.
I mean Joel and Tommy helped Abby when she got attacked.
These people are trying to kill everyone around them.
Max: And Ellie bats away any
suggestion that they might not be
entirely deserving of violence.
Dina: Yeah, but why do you think that they didn't finish th-
Ellie: It doesn't matter.
they fucked up.
Max: Starting to draw parallels between her people and the Wolves
might prevent Ellie from justifying her actions.
The people around Ellie clearly start to see that something isn't quite right with her.
Dina: She didn't hurt Joel. It would have been pretty fucked-up to make her talk.
Ellie: She traveled hundreds of miles to torture him.
I don't care whether she
held the club or not.
Ellie: If those fuckers who killed Joel got taken out by some random infected...
Dina: Then they'd still be dead, Ellie.
Jesse: I really hope you make it.
But the player can hold on to one thing
in her defense.
Ellie doesn't know the real reason that Joel was killed.
Or does she?
About halfway through this stretch of revenge Ellie corners Nora, one of her many targets.
Nora knows who Ellie is
Nora: You're breathing spores.
You're her.
Max: and gives a certainty, once and for all,
that these are ex-Fireflies.
Nora: There are no Fireflies anymore
This conversation also finally makes clear to Ellie what Joel did.
But this doesn't change anything for her
and Ellie tortures Nora
to figure out where to look next for Abby.
After this, we find out that Ellie ran away to go to the Firefly hospital two years prior,
and learned everything that Joel had done.
She didn't react well, at the time.
Ellie: Oh my god
Ellie has known what Joel did
this whole time.
Ellie: Don't you fucking touch me.
and even assumed that these are the Fireflies getting revenge.
One of her journal articles expresses this
and shows how even she doesn't
understand why she's doing this.
Her rationale - her story - for why she's
good isn't driving her.
It's some primal instinct drawn from the pain of losing Joel.
And she keeps going.
She doesn't find Abby, but instead kills Abby's friend, Owen, and his pregnant girlfriend, Mel,
as Ellie attempts to get them to give her
info on Abby, failing miserably.
She only decides to pack up and return home because Dina is pregnant with Jesse's baby
and she doesn't want to put them at
risk for her revenge.
That's when a really pissed-off Abby
shows up, gets the drop on Tommy,
shoots Jesse in the face, and gets Ellie to
disarm by threatening to kill Tommy.
We're then faced with Abby—a character who has so many good reasons to kill Ellie—
the character who we've been led to love more than any other in the game.
And now a really controversial thing happens...
*"The Last of Us" song builds slowly*
We're thrust into Abby's shoes and flash back a full four years earlier in her life.
Again, I'm not trying to say everything in this game needs to be perfect.
I get why even people who don't mind playing as Abby don't like the structure
and wish her story had been more interspersed with the rest of the game.
But it worked for me.
Her whole story has added tension because we care that the Abby we meet in the theater
isn't the same Abby who
killed Joel for revenge months prior.
Ellie's life hangs in the balance and,
even if you don't believe they'd kill her off,
Tommy and Dina's life are very realistically in jeopardy.
You find out that Abby is the daughter of the doctor that Joel kills to save Ellie.
We're given enough information to understand that these two have an important and close relationship
Jerry: See? I've got my little girl to keep me
safe.
with one particular parallel to Ellie and Joel's scenes.
Jerry: You'll be back with Owen before you know it.
Abby: Wait, what?
Jerry: Nothing. Just noticed you two have been hanging out a lot.
Moreso than usual.
Abby: Oh God.
Joel: I hear the way Jesse talks about you.
Ellie: No, Jesse and I are just friends.
Joel: Now, now, now, I've got a pretty keen eye for these sort of things
Ellie: Not so keen with this one.
Max: Abby's dad, Jerry, is even a lot more on-point.
Abby: How long have you known?
Jerry: I'm your dad. I see things.
Ellie: I'm...not into your type.
Tommy: What? Asians?
Ellie: Yeah, that's obviously what I meant.
Max: We learn enough to know that Abby and her dad care about each other and that's all we really need.
We're not supposed to care
about Abby's dad as much as Joel,
but it cements that we probably don't
have a rational reason to think of Abby as a villain
for wanting to inflict pain on someone who has taken a loved one away.
Especially not in the world we've been exploring where characters we love do exactly that.
Ellie *through tears: I'll fucking kill you.
Max: Then, we get a long scene back in the
present-day exploring what being a Wolf is like.
and how developed their society is.
You see that they have a school with the
same daily schedule as in Jackson.
They have stores, we get a parallel with
an arming-up to go on patrol scene,
and we get to pet a dog.
The dog, in particular, gets a lot of flack for being manipulative
because of how Ellie interacts with this dog.
Abby: Oh, hey there Bear.
Unsuspecting Wolf: Bear. Good boy!
*Silenced gunshot*
Unsuspecting Wolf: Oh God!
Max: But it just didn't hit me that way because the sheer scale of the Wolves'
stadium base drove home the point that,
yes, this place is like Jackson.
Tommy/Manny: Ladies first.
I don't think this game is trying to
make you feel bad.
Neil: The game is not making any judgments.
The game is just presenting "here are some acts and here's another view on the same acts,"
you make with it what you will.
Max: If anything, this tore back
all of my feelings and
just made me go a little more into logic
brain mode for a second.
It made me look at all the excuses I'd
been making to morally justify Ellie's actions
and found that they're all nothing.
Or, at the very least, their immorality still
applies to characters I liked, as well.
The story moving forward continues to
tear down bogus rationalizations.
We follow Abby through a bit of the
Wolves' war with the Seraphites,
a cult organized around a deceased doomsday prepper,
who forego modern technology and kill captured enemy combatants by hanging and gutting them.
This also explains why Ellie and Dina
were attacked on sight.
That, and the fact that a random stranger
had JUST killed a bunch of their people.
Ellie: Tommy did this.
Max: It's true that the Wolves
aren't entirely like the people of Jackson,
but maybe because they're at war?
*stupid voice: But, were that it were so simple.
It's established early-on in Ellie's story
that the Wolves took power from
government remnant forces,
usually referred to as "FEDRA,"
Ellie: FEDRA soldiers.
Check out that wall. They were executed.
Max: in retaliation for the way the government repressed civilians and imposed martial law.
Ellie: Idiots! Just turning everyone against you.
Max: Then, the Wolves turned around and became their own kind of oppressors,
Dina: Seattle traded one shitty ruler for another.
Max: executing people for crimes as small as graffiti and creating many enemies for themselves.
Even life fighting WITH the Wolves is not the greatest,
as you meet a group of deserters who attack Ellie on sight,
Wolf Deserter: We're not going back, understand?!
terrified that she is a Wolf who has
come to take them back to Isaac, their leader.
Wolf Deserter: Isaac can go to hell!
Max: Isaac might lend a bit of an explanation
to the hurt behind the acts the Wolves
commit.
One note in the early game details how
Isaac's compatriots were tracked-down
and killed by the government relief
forces,
perhaps hinting that his ruthless rule
is built from a loss of close friends.
While the Seraphites are clearly
very bad,
their actions are maybe not much worse than the Wolves'.
It's made clear that the Wolves' rise to power was rough and many people were searching for
any alternative that might give them security.
Dina: It must have been scary for all these
people.
First the outbreak, then FEDRA,
then the Wolves.
Max: It's also made clear through notes that, while there are no Seraphites who join the Wolves,
many Wolves do defect and join the Seraphites.
It's also detailed that the seraphites' trauma and rise in violence was set off by Isaac's killing of their prophet.
Lev: We weren't stoning or hanging people until after she died.
They're taking her words and twisting them.
Abby: Isaac... Fuck. You turned a crazy person into a martyr.
The Seraphites are a pure embodiment of our basic tendency to see ourselves as good no matter what.
To achieve this, the Seraphites adopt
some really weird and destructive beliefs.
But, in a complicated world where everything has gone to shit,
any narrative that tells you you are good is reassuring,
especially when it comes with the emotional compatriarchy
of people who have been bonded by mutual hurt.
Yeah, I know, I made up a word, but I like how it sounds and you know what I meant so I'm keeping it.
The Seraphite-Wolf conflict is
incredibly rich
and illustrates, at a large scale, what the game does on a small scale with Abby and Ellie
When it comes to complicated conflicts, who you side with often has more to do who you care about
than who might be objectively in the right.
Let's take a real-world example!
The Vietnam War,
As seen here, portrayed with 100% unbiased, historical accuracy in Call of Duty Black Ops.
Aaand, I'm sorry, this is gonna work mostly for Americans or folks from American-allied countries:
How much do you, personally, know about
why we were in that war,
and why we were the good guys?
Sure, some of you probably know a lot about the conflict,
but, for most of us, it's something like
"I don't know, there was a boat that might have been shot at
"and national security, cold war, dominoes
something, something."
And even among people who maintained
that the war was unjustified and unnecessary,
there's still a pretty strong sense that the forces fighting the Americans in Vietnam were bad.
If America is criticized for its action,
it's usually for the unnecessary loss of American life
without considering the
loss of Vietnamese life.
My point here isn't to say you need to
come to the conclusion that
the American invasion of Vietnam was a bad thing that we did.
Even though I 100% think that it was.
Like the game, I'm less concerned with casting moral judgments than I am
than I am with with looking at thought processes.
My guess is that most of us came to the conclusions we have about the Vietnam War
based, not on extensive research, but the
beliefs and attitudes of people we trust
and possibly the personal experiences of
people we love
who experienced the war firsthand from the American side.
I'm assuming most gamers aren't old enough to have fought in that war,
but maybe I'm wrong.
Or perhaps the fact that coming to an
alternative conclusion
would mean telling ourselves a story
in which we were definitely not the good guy.
With regards to The Last of Us part 2,
The game's director said that it was
partially-inspired by his own lived experience
growing up in the West Bank.
None of this is to say that we cannot rationally determine what is right or wrong.
Needless killing is wrong whether it's done by video game characters or the US government.
When I say that this game is
not interested in moral judgments,
I am not saying that we cannot make them.
I am saying that this game is more interested in examining the forces
that might make it very hard for us to make them in the moment.
Ellie: I don't want you to think bad at Tommy
Dina: Ellie. If I had my sister's killers tied
to a chair
I'd do worse
I'm also not making a [Ben Shapiro voice] "facts don't care about your feelings" argument
More that feelings can cause you to only
consider the facts that make you feel good.
Ellie: It doesn't matter. They fucked up.
Abby's personal story involves her
learning to move beyond the use of violence
to process her emotional pain.
She goes AWOL to check on her friend and ex-boyfriend Owen.
Along the way, she is saved from becoming a human piñata
by two runaway Seraphites, Yara and Lev.
She helps them avoid getting eaten by
zombies or killed by their former tribe mates,
but leaves them to fend for themselves as Yara rests an arm the Seraphites pulverized.
Abby finds Owen and discovers he doesn't want to fight anymore.
After an argument, we get a really misguided sex scene.
*exasperated noise*
There's a dream sequence where Abby is
back in the hospital where she found her
dad dead.
But, in the dream, she sees Yara and Lev
hanging from trees,
gutted in the typical Seraphite fashion.
Recognizing the value of their life that transcends the conflict, she decides to save them
and spends almost the rest of the story focusing on this relationship.
There's some really believable bonding
in Abby's section that
cuts through a lot of the rest of the
game's ugliness.
Abby: Oh, fuck these Scars!
Seraphites. Whatever.
Lev: Yeah. Fuck em'.
Abby: I've never heard a Seraphite cuss
before.
Lev: it was my first time
Yara: Where's California?
Abby: Okay, so look, uh, this is Seattle.
And this is Santa Barbara.
Abby: Can we take a minute and be impressed by me?
Lev: Not yet.
Abby: Lev, come here, I'm gonna hug you!
Max: One of my favorite scenes is one in which Yara
plays fetch with Abby's dog, Alice.
Yara: she's not going to bite, right?
Abby: Nope. I promise.
Max: It feels really profound
because the last time we saw
a Seraphite interacting with a dog they
were being mauled.
And now they're just playing fetch
together.
It highlights how meaningless human conflict often is and how good we can be deep down
I see this get written-off as another scene kinda rubbing your face in the fact that Ellie later kills this dog,
but I really didn't think that was the point
and it's kind of a shame this scene
gets read that way.
I thought it was swell!
This section is also where the developers bothered to put all the varied gameplay sections
with really fun environments to navigate through.
My highlight was a segment where you have to avoid Tommy as a sniper as you fight infected.
Like it's so frustrating on Survivor
difficulty
and you start to hate Tommy a little bit
and it's cool that the game manages to use its gameplay to achieve that.
Coupled with the fact that Tommy killed my favorite character from this section.
Manny *sarcastic tone: This is so much better than getting drunk and watching anime.
Abby: What?
Manny: Nothing
Max: It was the only time I really actually started to root for Abby above Ellie and all her friends.
At the climax of Abby's story, she, Lev and Yara wind up on the Seraphite island
and watch Isaac attempt to commit a genocide to end the war.
Yara is wounded by a soldier who shoots her without a second thought
and Abby puts herself between Lev and Isaac,
risking her own life, before Yara goes
out in a blaze of glory, shooting Isaac in the back.
Abby and Lev then have to fight through Wolves and Seraphites to survive,
in the process, seeing the absolute destruction brought to the Seraphite island
and how many wolves die in the process.
Voice 1: Isaac is fuckin' dead! Anyone else get off the island?
Voice 2: Echo, you're the first to call in. No word from the other units.
Voice 1: Jesus Christ! Where the fuck was their backup?
Abby is then left only with Lev. And
Owen and Mel too, but...
you know.
Of course, she finds them and then it's Ellie-murderin' time!
...because Ellie left behind her map
pointing right to her location.
Yeah, again, this game's not perfect.
Going into this fight, a lot of people still really hated Abby.
So, I think it's important to look at some of the arguments for how Abby is the antichrist
compared to Ellie and how little they hold up to scrutiny.
Number one: Abby kills Joel brutally.
Ellie: NOOOOOOOO!
Max: So, yeah, she kills a dude who wasn't a threat and travels to do it.
Though, as we now know, this guy killed her father
and, if you don't think a character can be likable despite this,
we need to talk about Ellie's rampage to
kill people who clearly left her alive.
In a scene I glossed over earlier, it's
revealed that most of the Wolves
except for Owen, wanted to kill Ellie and
Tommy to tie up dangerous loose ends
a thing they were rightfully worried about
and Abby was the deciding voice in not killing them
Abby: We're done.
Number 2: Abby kills plenty of Scars.
Lev: Seraphites.
Abby: Yeah, I was gonna say that.
Max: Yes, she kills people in a war. People who have probably shot, hung, and flayed several of her friends.
If we can justify liking Joel despite his dark past robbing people selfishly in raids,
using their kindness against them.
Ellie: How did you know?
Joel: know what?
Ellie: About the ambush?
Joel: I've been on both sides.
Max: it doesn't seem like that much of a
stretch to like Abby despite being part of a war.
Yes, it's definitely not a good or admirable part of her character,
but not one that makes her abnormally psychopathic within the world of these games.
Number 3: Abby seems to enjoy the
killing though.
Yes, she, at one point, expresses a desire
to torture Seraphites.
Abby: After our morning, I wouldn't mind a few minutes with these guys.
Max: But Ellie seems to get pleasure from
killing Wolves.
Ellie: fuck you
WLF fuckers
Dick!
She fucked up a bunch of Wolves. You'd've been impressed.
Max: And talks about torture
Ellie: Just give me five minutes and my knife
I'll tell you if they were lying or not
Dina: Oh, wow. Okay.
Max: and even engages in it with Nora.
There's also a scene of Joel doing the
same thing to save Ellie in the first game
and clearly taking some pleasure in it.
Remember, this is a game that buys into
the fantasy that torture
is an effective way to extract valuable information from people.
Again, this game is not perfect, even in
its political messaging.
It's true that Abby has very little respect for Seraphite life in general,
but, again, dehumanizing your enemy is a
theme of this game
that Ellie definitely participates in
too.
Ellie: You'd've been impressed
Max: Honestly, I don't have a conclusive
feeling on how the game handles this but,
it's definitely not a characteristic
unique to Abby,
and I'm maybe kinda glad that the game
doesn't portray war as this gentlemanly competition
and bothers to portray how it often devolves into thinking of other people as subhumans.
The youtube channel Three Arrows has a good video on the subject relating to World War One
I'll link it in the description.
Number four: Abby kills her own people
Yes she turns on the Wolves as they are
massacring people
and are about to kill children that she
cares about.
also, the wolves are her adopted movement.
she wanted to be a Firefly and chose this because the Fireflies disbanded after Joel killed a bunch of them
Oh, what's that? A dude killing people he
was previously aligned with to save a kid that he liked?
Huh funny that.
Number five:
She shoots Jessie in the face and Tommy
in the back of the head.
Ellie: Tommy!
So she was outnumbered in a clearly
high-stakes situation
against an enemy, she'd just seen totally waste a friend of hers just inches from her face.
Killing people to stay in control of a deadly situation is,
of course, something that Ellie would
never do.
Number six: Abby does not show any regret
for any of this
No!
Manny: Yo. Easy.
Max: Abby clearly expressed to Lev and Yara that she feels she needs to do what
she's doing.
Lev: Why did you come back for us?
Abby: Guilt
but also...I needed to.
I had to.
needed to lighten the load a bit.
Max: The dream of them hanging shows some guilt at the way she is able to forget
that others trauma might be as relevant to them as her own is to her.
Abby: you don't deserve this.
Max: We see her change from reading notes from Seraphites to their prophet with contempt
Abby: Ooh. someone wants to get laid
Max: to regret, as they talk about losing friends to Wolves.
Abby: Man.
Max: And she even remarks to Owen...
Abby: What happened to us?
Max: You know, clearly because she thinks that everything she's done in her life has been great
and perfect and there's nothing she needs to, like, make up for.
Yara: I don't know how to thank you.
Abby: You don't need to. I did it for me.
Max: Just because she doesn't completely lose composure the same way that Ellie does,
doesn't mean she's not having the same
feelings.
She's a soldier who's been part of one paramilitary organization or another for her entire adult life.
She's gonna react a little differently
then a teenager
who spent the last four years in a cozy mountain village.
None of the reasons for why Abby is a worse person than Ellie really hold up that well to scrutiny.
But I think there's a much better one:
She killed Joel!
She beat him to death in front of Ellie
and we watched Ellie cry while Abby did it.
We hate her and, whatever rationale the game gives for her actually being an understandable person,
will never outweigh the pain we feel for Joel's loss and the love that we have for Ellie.
This is not a moral reason for
establishing that Abby is a bad person,
but an emotional explanation for how
deep many players' hatred of her was
The next scene in the game just made me
sit with that.
You play as Abby, right after she shoots Tommy in the back of the head,
as she tries to track down a fleeing
Ellie and kill her.
Now, this scene is incredibly unpopular, but I loved it!
I knew I had no good rational reason for rooting for Ellie.
I knew I was biased and supporting Ellie because I cared more about her after playing the first game.
Playing as Abby forced me to confront
that head-on.
It's the conflict from the end of the first game where the life of someone you care about
can mean more to you than the lives of
hundreds of people you don't know.
It's a powerful statement about love, but
also an incredibly disturbing one.
I don't think Naughty Dog expected
anyone was gonna play this scene like:
"Yes, it's time for me to kill the child
I've watched grow into a woman
and have spent upwards of 30 well-crafted hours with."
They knew you'd hate this,
even after being given a convincing argument to the contrary.
It's a great statement on how emotions and care for other human beings will trump our rationale.
Also, it's great to see all the ways that
Ellie can kick abby's ass despite being half her size.
Like, the most I grinned in this game is during this scene when Ellie killed me with a trip mine.
*explosion *Abby screaming
It's just fun to have your tactics used
against you
and it really drives home how good at fighting Ellie has gotten since killing that first raider in part 1.
Anyway, the fight ends and Abby has the upper hand and almost kills Dina as revenge for Mel's death.
Ellie: She's pregnant
Abby: Good.
Max: But, looking at Lev convinces Abby
to spare her.
This makes sense because they just
watched thousands of people die in fire,
and, if Lev can become the most important
person in Abby's life
after being aligned with her mortal
enemy,
maybe revenge isn't the most important thing to her anymore.
Abby decides to not inflict the same pain on Dina and Ellie that they inflicted on her
because she now understands that it won't bring anyone back to life.
She made some peace with the death of her father by helping others
where killing Joel gave her none.
Ashley Johnson: You see that she doesn't have relief.
She realizes, in that moment, "I don't have
relief but I have to move on."
Max: Just look at the way she wakes up when her focus is on revenge or violence
versus when she is able to save a life.
Abby: Dad!
*Startled inhale*
*Angry exhale...*Joel ded
*Startleder inhale*
*Startledest inhale*
Max: Sometimes, the emotional responses we justify
aren't the right ones for, not just the people on the other side of them, but us too.
So, Dina and Ellie survive.
They settle in a farmhouse outside of
Jackson where Dina has her baby
and the three all get to live in a kind of
sickly-idyllic life
that's so hard to square with the game we've been playing for more than 20 hours now.
I understand that this feels off to people, but that felt really intentional to me.
There's this great scene where Ellie and her baby, JJ, are sitting on this tractor
and Ellie's talking about all the stories she'll tell him when he gets older.
Ellie: Much older.
Max: And, as you sit there, watching
every blade of grass sway,
thinking about how many programmers
spent actual nights away from their actual families,
trying to make this look so detailed,
There's an intense feeling of uneasiness
Of course, Ellie has really bad PTSD that keeps her up at night and makes her miserable.
We also learn that Tommy survived,
right before he reveals that he tracked Abby to California and tries to get Ellie to go find her,
getting himself kicked out of the house.
But Ellie can't shake this.
She still has trauma over Joel and, even
if she can't justify it,
the only thing she has left to follow is
her urge to get revenge on Abby.
The catalyst for the game's final act is Ellie recalling what we imagine is her last interaction with Joel,
after he pushes someone who lobs a slur at her and Dina.
Ellie: What is wrong with you?
Joel: He had no right!
Ellie: And you do?
Ellie: I don't need your fucking help, Joel.
Max: We see his sad eyes and, with this last look, are given some motivation
to make one last trip to track-down Abby,
even if it destroys everything that Ellie has built with Dina and JJ.
If there were ever any evidence that this game isn't too concerned with passing moral judgment,
other than Druckman saying as much,
Neil: The game is not making any judgments on your actions.
Max: It's this section.
Abby and Lev have been captured by the Rattlers,
an incredibly vicious gang who get most of their power from slave labor,
who also set a trap that badly injures Ellie,
which she only escapes by using her
immunity against one of her captors.
While there are, technically, some
attempts to humanize the Rattlers,
these people are generally vile beyond anyone in the entire series, committing constant atrocities.
Rattler 1: Come on! Come on! You can do it! Just a little closer, buddy!
Rattler 2: Dude, leave him alone. He can't feel anything.
Rattler 2: Fuck that. I promised him I'd do this to him.
*Rattler 1 taunts zombie*
Rattler 2: This is such a fucked-up hobby.
Rattler 1: Bet you wish you didn't try and escape now, don't ya, Anthony?
Max: And yet Ellie doesn't treat them
differently from any other obstacle.
She makes a journal entry where she complains about them alongside the Fireflies, Wolves, and Scars.
It doesn't matter that they're slavers. Just that they're in her way.
Ellie does, maybe the best thing anyone does in this whole series, in this section
by freeing some prisoners who start a
revolt,
but she does it almost by accident,
using them in a fight against a guard.
This hugely good act seems of little
consequence to her
and she shrugs it off as she limps, bleeding, towards Abby who's been crucified on the beach
The Abby we encounter here has clearly changed.
Before this, there are some touching
scenes with Lev.
Abby: If we find Fireflies, we'll celebrate with strawberries.
If we don't, we'll console ourselves with
strawberries.
Lev: Maybe there's another way in.
Abby: Are you being positive?
Lev: I'm trying to be helpful.
Abby: You're always helpful.
Max: And when she's let down off the pole, even though she sees a woman who has done awful things to her,
her first priority is saving this kid she loves so much.
As I said, Abby learned to value the things she could save in life
over hurting those who'd done her wrong,
and it's in everything down to her
character model.
We see Abby get stronger and stronger
throughout time with growing muscles.
This not only makes diegetic sense
because she lives very close to an actual gym,
but also because she's built herself to be a killing machine
in a world where she's learned that plenty of people are in need of killing.
But, when she no longer has the same physical strength, the good in her is still there.
She cares about what she can protect
more than what she can kill.
We also see this in a note she writes to
Owen, after his death,
where, rather than becoming obsessed with killing his killer like with her dad,
she's savoring a good memory of them
watching a spotted seal.
I've glazed over Owen's character
details thus far, but I love him.
Not just because he's played by Patrick
Fugit,
who I always like to see getting work after his childhood role in Almost Famous,
or not because Owen's some great dude,
because he isn't,
but because he's just such a friendly prick.
Owen is one of the least mean-spirited characters in the game.
He's the first to advocate for not killing Ellie and Tommy
Manny: It's too risky to leave them alive.
Owen: Too fucking bad.
Max: and is one of the first to tire of bloodshed with the Seraphites.
And he's such a goober.
Owen: Yeah, well, my aquarium, my stuff.
I'm just kidding, you can take whatever you want.
You can't.
But he's also selfish. He cheats on his pregnant wife and repeatedly tries to ditch her to save Abby.
He's not a great guy, but in a way where he's not overtly malicious and I appreciate the nuance in his character.
I bring up Owen because of a key scene where he describes why he went AWOL
after sparing a Seraphite's life.
Owen: I hit this one on the head. Hard.
And he goes down.
And his weapon's right there.
And he doesn't go for it.
Instead, he turns to me.
And he's old.
And tired.
He was just...
ready.
Max: He doesn't spare them because of
some large moral crusade,
as much as because killing takes a toll.
Owen: I couldn't do it.
This theme is throughout the game.
Abby: You don't think joel deserved what he got?
Mel: I think he deserved worse. I just...I just
wish I didn't take part in it.
Abby: Needed to lighten the load a bit
Owen: I am tired, Abby!
Max: Look at the way Isaac is portrayed.
After all these notes building up Isaac as this super ruthless dude,
we just see a tired old man who has clearly been worn down by all the violence he's experienced
and just wants to get to an end.
Max: This is, in its own way, a selfish act done because Owen realized that killing this Seraphite
had nothing to do with anything that would
make his life better.
And that's where we get to the ending.
Ellie follows Abby out to some boats, apparently strongly considering not engaging.
Maybe because she's taken aback by Abby's diminished state and change in priorities.
Maybe because they needed an excuse for
a water fight.
Again, not a perfect game.
She then forces Abby to fight her by threatening Lev.
And, after losing a couple of fingers to
Abby, she appears to have won.
She's gonna kill Abby and it'll be over.
But she doesn't kill Abby.
She lets Abby go and Abby and Lev go off into the fog.
I understand the frustration with this game over how Ellie suddenly gains morals
when a named character shows up,
but I disagree with this framing.
this kind of thing happens two times in the game before this,
once with Nora and once with Mel.
With Nora, it makes sense because of how
personal the death is,
how much harm Ellie inflicts on one
human.
For Mel, it's not even the morals of killing a pregnant woman.
It's that Ellie's justification melts away when Mel's pregnancy reminds her of Dina.
Tommy even helps her rationalize this
killing, after the fact.
Tommy: They got what they deserved.
Ellie: But she gets to live?
Max: Why does Ellie forgive Abby at the end?
Because she doesn't.
In the instant when she could end Abby's life,
she realizes she feels just as terrible
as she always has since Joel's death.
He will be every bit as gone as he always has been
and killing Abby will achieve nothing.
Ashley: She realizes, in that moment, "I don't have relief, but I have to move on."
*Ellie screams*
*Abby gasps for air*
Max: Killing takes a toll
and she won't take it one more time.
She lets Abby go, not because she's forgiven her
or because she thinks it's some morally-righteous act,
but because she's learned, at some level, that revenge has nothing to do with healing your pain
and is not worth even the slightest amount of trouble it causes.
Jesse: My friends can't get out of their own damn way.
Ellie: That's better
Max: Even though she spares Abby, Ellie still pays a high price.
Dina has left. Packed up.
Taken baby JJ and relegated Ellie's possessions to one room.
No note or anything.
Ellie attempts to play guitar and she can't even do that because she's missing fingers.
She then has the last Joel flashback.
Turns out she talked to Joel after what we previously thought was their last encounter.
And we hear him say this absolutely
heartbreaking line:
Joel: If somehow the lord gave me a second chance at that moment...
I would do it all over again.
Max: And Ellie says this:
Ellie: I don't think I can ever forgive you for that.
But I would like to try.
*Joel sniffles*
This whole time, since I found out Ellie
knew what Joel did,
I was wondering how we went from this:
Ellie: I'll go back,
but we're done.
Max: To this:
Ellie: Nooooo
Max: And I think, after this, for me, the answer is nothing changed.
Joel did something that Ellie could not square with her views of what was a good person.
And it made it nearly impossible for her to stand the cognitive dissonance of being close to him.
But I think if he'd been killed the day
after she learned that about him,
she'd still have done everything the same.
Because it wasn't about what was right.
It was about how much she loved Joel.
Her pain was for missing-out and a good thing that she never got to have:
She didn't get to make up with Joel.
She didn't get to have her movie night with him.
Ellie: I was thinking of inviting Joel to
watch a movie.
Dina: Oh...You guys good?
Ellie: Yeah.
Max: But killing was no substitute for that,
and now Ellie knows that all she can do is look for the light left in the world that brings her joy.
Because that's what
the game has always been about.
Yes, The Last of Us Part 2 is about a trail
of revenge,
but also a trail of love.
Joel loves Ellie and saves her life, killing Jerry.
Abby loves Jerry and kills
to avenge him.
Ellie loves Joel and kills to avenge him.
Isaac loves his friends and fights a war against FEDRA and then the Seraphites to protect and avenge them,
as the Seraphites try and avenge their
prophet and their own friends
who they loved and brought light into
their life.
Neil: Both games are about love.
Some of the worst atrocities that happen
in the world happen in the name of love.
Max: And, by the end, almost every surviving character has learned to focus on the love,
rather than the monstrous actions that can be taken in its name.
Yes, The Last of Us Part 2 is a far darker game than its predecessor,
but it's still about the love that can be found between humans and dark times
that puts into perspective what is really valuable.
The moments of joy and euphoria are still here amidst all the darkness,
and, for me, the contrast only made them shine all the brighter.
It takes a trip through the darkest aspects of humanity to show us that there is still hope
and that our salvation can still come
from our best instincts.
but The Last of Us Part 2 really doesn't deliver the same set of feelings as the original.
Whatever criticisms there are to make on its merits,
the stark difference in emotional impact between the two games is far more undeniable.
I think a lot of folks consume media looking to get the same feeling and experiences
as other media that came before it.
I'm not talking down to anyone here
I totally sympathize with this
and it's taken me more time than i care to admit to fully formulate my thoughts into this video.
It's understandable why a lot of people
found this game so violently disappointing,
but I don't think I'm off base in saying that a lot of the backlash came from the hurt this caused
and a lot of the criticisms were
rationales made to justify that after the fact.
The backlash to this game was, in microcosm,
an example of its strength.
The game caused deep pain. As did a character within it
and people became angry at it and came up with a lot of reasons that this character must be awful
and that Neil Druckmann must be a hack.
I don't want to invalidate anyone's opinions, but I find it hard to believe we wouldn't see a few more reviews
from people like Jim Sterling and Cosmonaut Variety Hour,
who don't sing the game's praises at all, but don't have this violent negative reaction to it.
There's also people like the democracy who don't buy into Ellie's motivation
and just think all the characters are needlessly cruel and I don't have a really have a strong defense against that.
But it's not really what I was trying to address with this video.
I'm interested in the negative reviews
that subscribed to this rigid adherence
to black and white morals.
That there are good and bad guys.
That actions have to be either good or bad
and we need to feel bad about the bad ones and lift up the good ones.
I don't find that kind of thinking helpful.
I made this video because I thought this framing was very common and harmful to how we act.
And when I say i thought about it,
I mean like this is something that was
going around in my head before I played this game
and when I played it I was amazed to see it reflected back in a work of art.
I know I've had a conflict with people where I find myself looking for reasons why someone else's actions
are morally wrong and even that other people are evil,
when, often, neither of these things are the
case.
It often results in me changing my opinions to make my story more cohesive,
rather than changing my actions to make
the world better.
In my experience, it's more effective to
just think about the effects of people's actions
and communicate with them,
rather than coming up with fantasies in your head about why they wouldn't be let through the Pearly Gates.
Rigid, moralistic, thinking rarely helps the person experiencing it,
and it's certainly unpleasant to be on the other side of.
This almost even made this video much worse.
I started making this as a blanket
defense of both the game and Naughty Dog.
My original tone was a lot less attentive to the game's flaws and a lot less critical of its developer.
And I also don't want to defend Naughty Dog.
They were really bad to their staff
in a lot of ways.
Yeah, sure, it's cool that Naughty Dog isn't compromising their artistic vision to sell more copies.
Neil: We're lucky enough that we've had so much success
that there isn't a lot of creative questioning of what we want to do.
Max: But the people in charge know that that freedom of creativity
hinges on them being able to produce games that sell well on a consistent timely basis.
Just because I don't personally believe that Naughty Dog was making a worse product to exploit their customers,
doesn't mean it's any better that they were willing to mistreat their workers to avoid doing so.
The way Lev's gender is handled is also
not great,
as it kind of comes to define his whole character.
And a large chunk of the game is about queer people experiencing abuse.
There's a great medium post on this under the name Haruspis,
I'm definitely not pronouncing that right.
that dissects the game's issues on this subject better than I ever could.
While I don't find this game as heavy-handed as many do,
I can totally see where someone is coming from labeling it "trauma porn"
and it really didn't help that Naughty Dog's review embargo made it impossible
for players to know about possible triggers before playing the game.
Even though I really liked the game, I can acknowledge that this is a problem.
Anita Sarkeesian: It's both possible and, even necessary,
to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects.
Max: So this isn't my attempt to tell you to buy this game or that Naughty Dog deserves your praise.
Just like the game, this video isn't a
search for a hero.
This is my expression of how this game
connected with me on my first playthrough.
As sloppy as I can recognize that parts of the game are,
it hit me on a really profound level in a way many recent games hadn't
because it spoke to themes that I think are incredibly important to understanding the world around us.
I think now, more than ever, is a time where it's incredibly important to recognize
the way in which emotions can cause us to buy into harmful narratives
and support systems that harm real people.
Because there's something that matters far more than rambling about a video game for an hour:
Black lives!
Racial justice advocates are currently executing one of the largest protest movements
against racial injustice in my country's history.
And I see some fellow white people going through a lot of the same thought processes I explored in this video
to dismiss it completely.
You'll hear them say things like,
"yeah, it's unacceptable to not care about
Black lives,
"but I can't respect THESE protests
because they're violent."
That's not an argument.
It's clinging to the first thing someone can find to stop thinking about an issue that's distressing.
because considering a reality where
racial injustice is so painful and destructive
that people would be moved
to violence...
is really hard to come to terms with.
Kimberly Jones: When they say "why do you burn down the community?"
"Why do you burn down your own neighborhood?"
It's not ours!
We don't own anything!
There's a social contract that we all have
that, if you steal or if I steal,
then, the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation.
But the person who fixes the situation is
killing us!
For white folks, being an ally often requires learning things that cause guilt and fell bad,
but that's not the point.
The point is to do what you can to ensure the well-being of the human beings that are here on this planet.
It's important to look at the stories
you've been telling yourself and get educated.
I'm currently going through Abolition Journal's Prison Abolition Study Guide.
There are a lot of good resources on here from historians and academics of all kinds.
And it's all available for free,
though the creators suggest that you buy Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis.
There's also a helpful list of Black-owned bookstores to buy it from.
You can support people affected by America's prison industrial complex
by donating to the Community Bail Fund, which gives money to more than 70 bail funds around the country.
You might even find a local one within their directory that you could give to directly.
And, finally, you can get out there and have a more direct effect on the world
and stand on the front lines against racism in protests that are still going on across the country.
Now is not the time to focus on how good
we want things to be.
It's time to take action to make them better.
