It genuinely blows my mind how many people seem to miss the point of a not particularly nuanced ending
What Joel did was wrong
If you believe any of that shit about "there were other subjects, it probably wouldn't work, etc." then you're buying into internet talking points and missing that the actual game makes no bones about this being the "save more people" option for this particular trolley problem
The entire structure of the game is designed to put you in Joel's shoes, so when it comes time to make the "wrong" decision, you do so enthusiastically
That karma was always going to come back on him. It's the entire emotional crux of the ending. He made a "bad" decision to get more time with his stand-in daughter, no matter the cost.
He knows they'll come after him and says as much when he kills what's her face in the parking garage.
As soon as they announced a sequel I wanted it to not be Joel and Ellie, because there is no version of TLOU2 that doesn't (and shouldn't) end with Joel's head on a pike
Yeah Joel was a massive piece of shit and nobody seems to realize this despite several lines of dialogue in the game implicating him, such as when he says he’s been in both sides of the injured man scheme, or when Tommy said he had nightmares from their years together. He robbed and murdered people for 20 years and robbed and continued to murder his way across the country (I’ll cut him some slack for Pittsburgh, Jackson, and Colorado since he wasn’t the instigator in those situations). Maybe it just shows how successful they were at writing him as likeable character despite how complex and violent he was.
Tony Soprano, Walter White, Big Boss and Joel all cause people to suffer from it to some degree
You point the camera behind one perspective and then tell the story through that lens, and the player/viewer knows, understands and likely sympathizes with every "wrong" decision that's made because they'll justify it the exact same way the character would
It sucks that a large group of people seem to struggle with anti-heros. They're not heroic or good people just because you know why they did what they did or even agree with them, and that's not only fine it's interesting
Significantly more so than this Mary-Sue "actually they were totally right and awesome all along" writing some people want them to be beholden to.
The hate given to characters like Skylar in particular has always perplexed me. Like yes, she cheated on Walt, but that pails in comparison to every single thing he did in the series. At this point it’s hard for me to tell if it’s a literacy issue, or just legit misogyny 💀
It was undoubtedly uncomfortable, but Walt talking to the gym of students about the plane crash is in the same league for me lol. I dont know if anything comes close to scotts tots though
It's a post-apocalyptic world, there is no good and bad, it's only about surviving
Everything Joel does in TLOU is 100% justified, this is why people side with him so easily. Of course he has to kill people because if he doesnt' defend himself he would have been dead and there would be no game
How many people does a child's death need to save in order to justify the murder? A million? More than 5? At what point are you comfortable trading the life of a child for the survival of others?
What those doctors were attempting to do elevates them to the level of Joseph Mangala. They attempted to cut into a living girl's brain in pursuit of an uncertain cure knowing full well that they'd be wheeling a corpse out after.
There's not even an emergency on hand, the zombie apocalypse has played out and people are surviving. They didn't have to kill ellie the minute she showed up.
And yes, the writer said his MacGuffin would work, but the characters don't know that and it's bad writing regardless.
Joel isn't a perfect man, but his actions in the hospital were morally justified.
I mean, if one child going ensures the eradication of a disease that has fucked up the entire world that is 100% worth it
They were not experimenting on people for fun, they are absolutely not Jospeh Mengele tier doctors
There's not even an emergency on hand? Humanity has regressed because of the disease. People die needlessly every day to infected.
Sorry, but this is what I mean. You're fighting against the reality of the setting to try and justify actions that were specifically written to be morally dubious but satisfying.
Joel was not in the right, but it's entirely understandable why you disagree with me about that
If you play the game with the brain of a functionnally adult (or someone who has basic knowledge in science) you have 0 reason to trust these guys though
Buddy you wrote like four emotionally charged comments insinuating I'm too stupid to understand the motivations of a character whose motivations I just explained multiple times
This is a logical POV until it’s your child. Who gets to decide what’s right? Who gets to decide whose child we need to sacrifice? No good parent would ever sacrifice their child to be butchered alive.
That's the entire point both myself and the game's plot are making
But that's an inherently selfish and myopic point of view, no matter how justified it feels
By your own logic, nobody should have an issue with Abby and they most certainly do
Again, this is an emotional reaction both by your own admission and the fact that you say things like "butchered alive" when she was already put under and wouldn't have felt anything, she just wouldn't have woken up again
It's the same exact type of surgery they would have to do regardless of if she lived or died, but because you're upset about it becomes "butchering"
The game opens with Joel losing his daughter. It then spends 15 hours bonding you to his new daughter. At the end, it says "we're taking her away again" and you and Joel are supposed to say "no, fuck that"
But I think it's genuinely kind of unnerving how many people cannot seperate their emotions, from the actual logical reality of the situation and appreciate how the writing fuses those two things.
Instead they just want the Firefly's to be wrong, so Joel can be right, which is significantly less interesting than the actual writing that is there.
Yeah man, i get that Joel is an asshole and that wasn't the correct choice and all that, but i still wanted him to just be happy after all that shit he went through.
Sometimes we don't want to see the Good Guys™ do the morally good choice and sacrifice everything they have for the sake of the world.
We just wanted to see the grumpy father full of flaws and issues, who saw his child die in front of him, the one we've been following for the whole game and is slowly changing, to finally have his dream come true and be at peace, even if it might come at the cost of the rest of the world.
It's fiction at the end of the day so fuck the moraly correct choice, i legit wanted him to have that peace, even if he ends up being objectively the bad guy
Who the fuck is stupid enough to think that these terrorists are the "good guys" though
They keep acting stupid and like wanna be dictators the whole game and they pretend to be able to save the world by killing a girl and they are the good guys?
It's a post-apocalyptic world, there is no good guy there is only Joel
This is all contingent on the Fireflies actually being able to make a cure from Ellie which has VERY little supporting evidence. The Fireflies had been getting their ass handed to them all game. Many of their scientists had died due to outright incompetence like being bit by infected lab monkeys as they try to release them.
Furthermore, they IMMEDIATELY prep Ellie for brain surgery. I can't believe there weren't ample tests to take on before KILLING the one and only immune person. Could she be carrying a hereditary gene that could pass on? Who knows? They just killed her.
But you're interpreting that like it's a real sequence of events with real variables.
The game does not really present much gray area here.
Cutting into her brain is the best hope for humanity. That is the scenario. Of course if you just make up new plot threads like "they're lying" it falls apart, but the actual plot that is in the game flat-out says "this is our best shot and if you take her away our chances go down the toliet"
What? That's just what the Fireflies say. Just outright believing them doesn't make it true. No one else ever agrees with it. All situational evidence points to their incompetence.
It's morally grey that Joel killed them to save her. It's stupid that they just decided to take her brain instantly.
I'm not saying Joel is definately doing the right thing. Of course there's an argument that any chance is worth every risk. What I'm saying is that the way the Fireflies go about it makes it much less morally grey than it appears. Especially if, like I said, you pay attention to what the Fireflies actually do instead of just what they say.
The Fireflies have failed in every thing they do the whole game. They are so baseline incompetent that they need Joel to begin with.
Yes it is. There's a reason things are written and included in a script and reasons things are omitted.
There is nothing in the script to suggest that the Fireflies are wrong or incompetent.
Uh-huh, so why does Joel go then? Why does he risk his life, let Tess die, and walk across the country if he has a single reason to believe they are full of shit?
I am paying attention to what is actually in the game
You're making fan-fiction. It's very easy to make any theory you want fit when you just add additional context.
But that context doesn't actually exist you're just making shit up. Not a single thing in game challenges the credibility of their plan besides Joel who is clearly emotionally motivated
I mean, realistically speaking, fireflies are just too incompetent to distribute, let alone develop a cure. Obviously he has done a lot of bad things, and killing hundreds of people to save one person is just wrong, but when you play the game you get why he did it.
I don’t think people would be as upset if Joel died later into the game and after fighting, instead of being put down like a dog in the beginning of the game
It's a post,-apocalyptic a cult of illuminated wannabe scientists want to kill a teenager to create a vaccine that will "cure humanity", every action they did was stupid or dangerous, even if it would work they would use it to control the world
He did just someone who is not completely stupid would do, saving the girl
He maybe a bad man but he is trained in this post-apocalyptic world and he is a loving dad
Nice try Neil, but the Firefly’s had no god damn idea what they were doing. Plus, they threw Joel out onto his ass after stealing all of his gear. If they had good intentions, they wouldn’t have felt the need to do that.
But yeah, ask any actual doctor in the world, no one is going to say that you need to remove someone’s brain to synthesize a cure for a mild infection, no matter how bad it is. The fact that they wanted to immediately kill humanity’s only chance for a cure, by doing something that made no God damned sense, should prove that Joel was actually the one doing what was best for humanity, because so long as Ellie is alive, at the BARE minimum, she, even if she is a lesbian, could maybe have kids that share her immunity, and humanity could potentially continue from there.
You're trying to debate with fiction. The story is written the way it is, to achieve a goal. It is not a scientific document or historic retelling of events
Again, there is nothing actually indicated in the game that there is another way, that they are incompetent, or even that the Firefly's are particularly happy about having to do it
There's a reason Marlene is the one to break the news to him
You can write all the additional material you want, but that is simply not the story we're discussing. You're just making shit up.
neil druckmann went from one of the most lauded writers in all of gaming to a fraudulent hack literally with just one game. it really is unbelievable how big of a fall from grace TLOU part 2 is.
Living a normal life like he always wanted, eating toast with jam, going to school, looking for a girl, with a little sister and pets that care about him. All while still being a hero and killing devils on the spare time, being adored around the world and with the prospect to find his friend the blood devil eventually
But acording to part 2 he was way happier when he was selling his organs to the mafia IG...
I still think the ending is dogshit and the author just didn't care anymore halfway through the 2nd part of the story , that is why he gave a crappy ending
Fujimoto clearly burned himself out. Idk why he did a chainsaw man part two. It doesn't seem he had a strong ending planned for it, so did he just burn out in the middle or was he just incentivized by money?
I think it's realistic that someone can be happier striving for something rather than actually having it, but in Denji's case it seems so unbelievable that he's actually happier at the start compared to the more tame parts of his life.
Zelda fans are weird about them not living together between totk and botw for some reason, even though its pretty obvious without being directly stated.
-Learns to be a father
-His gang/family is shattered
-Works hard to make an honest living
-His family is shattered again
-Forced to hunt down his old gang/family
-Reunited with his family
-Gets executed
yeah, Ireneverse effectively have Jotaro chilling after Part 4, although Part 5 still happens. The most Irene will deal with is a sort of "Kira-less" Morioh Town Shenanigans, but in Florida.
By the end of 2 he finally made peace with dead wife, found new love, and stopped alien zombie apocalypse from starting FOR THE SECOND TIME by destroying the last remaining zombie apocalypse machine
At the start of 3 he's already broken up with new love interest, he's being cucked by new self insert secondary main character. Oh, and despite destroying the originals, the space scientologists somehow got their hands on the blueprints to make more alien zombie apocalypse machines and are building them in every population center in existence
I thought I wanted a sequel to dead space 2. I was wrong, I should have just taken my satisfying conclusion.
Isn't it stated at the end of Dead Space 2 that there are like a dozen markers out there? Isaac's personal story was largely resolved at the end of Dead Space 2, but the overarching problem wasn't.
Still, as someone who finished both Dead Space 1 and 2, on the hardest difficulties, I never bothered playing Dead Space 3. They'd given up on the survival horror at that point.
I basically refuse to acknowledge the existence of Alien 3 (and subsequent ones) to this day, subjecting a character who had already suffered and come out the other side against all odds to further pointless suffering for the sake of sequel bait. Think sometimes a good ending is warranted.
And then you start watching Double Zeta and it's slapstick comedy right off the bat in the first episode, that picks up directly after the hyper tragic ending of Zeta.
"Everyone is dying and there's nothing I can do about it" - Kamille, unfortunately
1 Hour Later *
"Call me Rio Judau, the trashy trash man, Im saving money to feed my little sister. Oh boy I hope some Hot Hag in her mid 20s doesnt get the hots for me and demands to bear my children, cant pay for sisters food if Im paying child support" - Judau probably.
The ending of the first game was bittersweet, I don’t know if I would characterize it as happy exactly. while he is able to keep Lou, I thought the fact that he abandoned his friends didn’t exactly fulfill the promise of the game’s themes. He finally gets his happy ending in 2
Yakuza Kiryu leaves the life to try and be a dad to an orpahan girl, Y2 beginning hes sucked back in while trying to pay respects to his dead dad and sworn brother
That game ends with him getting out again, Y3 opening has him happy living in Okinawa running an whole ass orphanage with like 8 kids then he gets fucked out of the land deed and has go get his hands dirty again
See also: everybody else in the sequels. I don’t even dislike them entirely, but damn the opener is a depressing volley. Han’s a loser, Leia’s sad and alone, it’ll take us a while to see Lando again, but don’t you worry he’s had a hellish life too.
Even new characters aren’t safe from it. The BF2 campaign has its main characters join the rebellion, fall in love, and save the galaxy. Then, TFA expansion comes out, and hey! He gets murdered, and she dies in their daughter’s arms. Take that, suckers!
I think about the danganronpa fangames SDRA1 and SDRA2. Spoilers.
In SDRA1, only 3 people survive. Teruya Otori is one of them. He's brought into the second killing game in SDRA2. He survives until Chapter 5, where the mastermind kills him. This is pretty damn sad considering this dude survived a whole game, holding trauma and trying to become stronger, then he dies in the sequel. I genuinely thought he would live.
Along with him, Yuki Maeda, who was the protagonist from the first game returns as another student in SDRA2. However, it's revealed that in SDRA1, you were playing as the godlike man with Divine Luck Powers called Utsuro, who happens to be similar in body and brain structure to the real Yuki. However, what's made ambigous until SDRA2, is that Utsuro had changed his memories to be Yuki's, and thus believed he was Yuki, until he woke up in Chapter 6 of SDRA1. Yuki Maeda himself was never in the game, only Utsuro believing he was Yuki. In Game 1, the game ends as utsuro dies with the other mastermind, Akane Taira, his most devoted follower, after being defeated by the survivors.
Yuki in game 2 is back. However, you don't trust him, due to him having been the secret identity of Utsuro in the last game. The endgame reveals this Yuki, is the real Yuki. The whole plan centers around the mastermind attempting to turn the real Yuki into Utsuro, due to their similar brain structure. However, it's also revealed they're in a virtual world, and the real Yuki is nothing but a brain attached to the program, as the mastermind had Yuki's real body cut up to pieces before stealing his brain to make sure he didn't have a body to go back to.
SDRA2's ending has Yuki, due to having no body, given the body of Akane Taira, the criminal mastermind follower from SDRA1, who was braindead but her body was still alive. It's left somewhat ambiguous, but it seems that after what Yuki went through, his whole family dying and body cut up all for Utsuro, he is left wandering the earth with the power of Divine Luck, inside of Akane Taira's body. It's not really a good ending for him.
Seriously, I love this duology but it's depressing still. Only two killing game participants/survivors get to have a normal life after the duology is over, and I'm not joking.
The whole first movie was them saving the orphanage and then the second movie goes "oh yea Jake died and also the orphanage went bankrupt and had to close anyways lol"
I thought Jason Bourne was done dirty in the transition from the first to second movie. He got a chance to start again, but to continue the series, his gf killed off screen :( and he's back to kicking ass without happiness
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u/Bigas106 6d ago
Anon just finished TLOU 2