#I'm kind of on Mazin's side and I think he's doing his best

[seabird-bard]

hi hi!!! bored so do you have anything you like want to infodump about? or just send a long post about or want me to research/read/watch/listen to or etc? this ask can take as long as u want or be as long as you want or whatever u want just curious :) can be about absolutely anything!!

hey there!

sooo this is pretty different from what i normally talk about BUT tlou hbo has reignited my hyperfixation on it and sadly they have taken over my brain once again. aaand i kind of feel like people are misinterpreting the core of the story at the moment, so. full ramble below the cut and yes i will be spoiling absolutely everything (including the next season, but i'll mark that part with a warning) so i am very sorry tumblr user hazmatazz if you can't read this now but. i NEED to get this off of my chest.

right off the bat, i'm going to get to the main thing: joel's lie.

a lot of what i'm about to explain is best summarized with the bts the making of clips that are shown at the end of look for the light but i feel a very deep need to spell this out for some of you.

NO ONE IN THIS SITUATION IS RIGHT OR WRONG!!!

and this is a running theme that i'm definitely going to get back to later because that's another main thing with tlou as a whole.. they tend to create very morally grey, not-right not-wrong characters, and that's on purpose. a large part of this story as a whole is to show how people (and humanity in a lot of cases) would react if we were put into these situations.

which leads us right back to what joel did.

the last of us offers this already very damaged, very broken person a really visceral, hard decision. and i feel like people are forgetting that these experiences, him losing sarah and tess and the promise he made to tess.. all of that shapes his decision to save ellie and protect her.

like (i believe it was, i don't have the time to check--) craig mazin said at the end of look for the light, a lot of tlou1 is about the deep, unconditional love of a parent. he was essentially offered to save his adoptive daughter or save humanity.

just think about his situation for a second. if you had this person that you loved like family, and you had to choose saving them over a world that is already long gone, would you? because i know i would, and i'm sure there are a lot of people that would agree with me.

and then there's ellie.

throughout the first part, ellie has this strange sort of, for lack of a better term, "chosen one" complex, where she has this mindset that's like, "okay, i have this really special, probably rare thing, and there's no one else like me, as far as we know. what can i do with that?" and her first answer is always to use it. the show takes this another step further in a small way when she tries to save sam, but it doesn't work, which is some pretty rough foreshadowing, but i'm getting off-topic.

ellie wants her immunity to mean something bigger, to be something greater than just something that can only stop her from getting infected. she wants to save and help people, because she couldn't save rylie or tess or sam, and she's watching all of these people die around her, and she can't do anything. so, obviously, when she finds out there's a chance she can change that, she's going to want to tak eit. and even more so, she's going to get hurt when joel, this person she loves and cares a lot about, stops that from happening on purpose and lies to her face about it.

they both have their reasons. does that make joel a little selfish, in some ways? maybe. but talk to any parent you know, and they would do the same thing. sometimes, when it comes to stuff like this, people can be inherently selfish. it doesn't mean that they're bad people, though.

you could argue for both sides here, and that's what makes all of this so complicated. ellie is a bordering-on-suicidal fourteen year old girl who wanted her immunity to mean something for other people, too. joel just wanted to keep her around and let her live a somewhat fulfilling life. you could also say that fedra wouldn't allow the vaccine to be distributed, or that the fireflies are liars or that maybe the fireflies were just trying to help, and you'd be right on all accounts. it is just too difficult to call either of these people wrong for getting upset and doing what they did.

season two spoilers start here!

i also sort of want to elaborate on that thing i said earlier about tlou and its characters, because i know for a fact we're going to have the same fights we got when tlou2 came out once season 2 is out, and i want to clear some stuff up right now before i lose my mind. yes, this is tangential. i do not care at all lmao

if you can forgive joel and tommy for all of the shitty things they've done, hell, if you can forgive ellie for what she does in part 2, then you can absolutely forgive abby, too. and if you don't, you're kind of biased and lack some very important empathy, imo.

let's just look at what these characters do during this conflict completely objectively, for a minute, sticking to the games' canon.(since s2 isn't out yet)

joel kills abby's father, the surgeon that was meant to kill ellie, in order to save her. abby, in turn, once she finds him, kills joel. ellie and tommy, out of pure grief and anger, track abby and her group down and kill all eight of them off one by one. ellie only spares abby once she's the last person standing and has a kid to take care of.

keep in mind, abby literally SPARED ellie and tommy. was this for some pretty harsh reasons? probably. but still. she said it herself, she let them live. she could have killed them at any time in that room, and she made the choice not to.

now, no one other than abby had really laid a hand on joel, other than wrapping that tourniquet around his leg at the very beginning. ellie still wanted them all dead, because they were there, and they helped, and they were friends with abby, and in ellie's eyes, that's crime enough to deserve punishment.

but we still love ellie. we still love tommy. we still root for both of them, because we understand their characters and empathize with them. (which was sort of the point of playing as abby for so long in part 2 but i guess some people just didn't click with that which is fine but ugh. you don't GET ITTTT)

on the outside looking in, abby really isn't any worse than either of them. you may even argue that she's better. but that's one of the driving themes of the games, and the story as a whole. no one is good or bad, we're all just people with separate motivations that intersect in bad ways.

spoilers end here!

i guess that's why i get so frustrated when i see that we're still misunderstanding the conflict between joel and ellie here. there isn't any right or wrong here! they are both just people who care about each other very deeply, and sometimes, because of that, they get hurt. if we're going to keep doing this i am begging you all not to watch season two. you're just going to get pissed off again.

#tlou spoilers #tlou 1 #tlou 2 #ugh. #needed to say all of that before i exploded #when i say seeing people still hating on joel or abby in the year of our lord 2023 makes me mad #you have NO IDEA #YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT OF EVERYTHING #URGRHGRH