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reiedits1 · 4 years

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The Last Of Us Part II

I played and finished The Last Of Us Part II last week and it has been on my mind ever since. I obviously understand that a lot of people have problems with this game, and that’s okay. I’m not here to change anyone’s views on the game or anything, I just want to kind of write down my opinions and takeaways as, again, it’s been on my mind since finishing it lol. Nobody may see this and this will mean nothing, that’s fine.

Anyway, this post will contain SPOILERS

My Overall Thoughts

I’m not entirely sure how to structure this so I guess I’ll just start with a broad statement lol; I loved The Last Of Us Part II. In my opinion, it’s a beautiful and well-crafted story about loss, grief and consequences, with how each of these things affect different people.

Discussion

From what I’ve seen, I see a lot of people hating on this game for its handling of Joel and the decision to have the player play as Joel’s murderer, Abby. I’ve also seen a lot of people say that the message is as simple and plain as “viOleNcE iS bAd”, but I personally think it’s so much more than that.

The Last Of Us Part II doesn’t just tell you that violence is bad, but it shows you the ramifications of it by dealing with the emotional toll as well as the consequences on not just the main person involved, but their loved ones too.

As we all know, at the start of the game, Joel is brutally killed by Abby and we go with Ellie on a mission to avenge him by killing everybody involved. We see it all from Ellie’s point of view, hardheartedly seeing Abby as the villain as she just killed the character that we know and love as we have an emotional connection to him after the first game. His death is supposed to make you feel angered. It’s not like you’re supposed to be joyed by it. His death scene left me feeling empty and sick, wanting revenge alongside Ellie.

However, as the game goes on, we start to see the story from Abby’s point of view. We learn that the doctor that you, the player, had to murder at the end of The Last of Us is actually the father of Abby. This is brilliant. Now we see one of the main themes of the story, consequences, and I was immediately on board. Joel is not a good person, at all. He murdered hundreds of Fireflies and took away the possible cure for humanity for his own personal reasons. This is incredibly selfish, even going to the lengths of lying to Ellie about the events as he knows that it isn’t what she would want. Technically, Joel is the villain.

Joel had been through so much, so you may think it’s justified. But the point is, Joel isn’t the only person in the world of The Last of Us. Everybody he murders aren’t just mindless NPCs, they are people. People with their own problems who have gone through their own share of pain and loss, people with their own loved ones. Such as the doctor, who had Abby, whom he loved very much and Abby the same. So, understandably, she would feel incredibly angry and feel the need for revenge, just the same as Ellie and the player after Joel’s death.

There is now a cycle of revenge. Ellie goes on to kill Abby’s friends, and so Abby tries to kill Ellie and her friends. It’s not until Lev talks Abby out of it that the cycle seems to have been “broken”. Abby and Lev put it behind them, however, Ellie cannot and nor can Tommy, which means that the cycle is not broken. Ellie continues her hunt for revenge, thinking it’s still what she needs. Just as she’s about to murder Abby, she sees it’s completely useless.

Here I’m going to talk about another core theme of the story: loss. As Ellie is about to kill Abby, she realises that Joel is gone. Completely gone, and killing Abby is not going to change that. She now has Lev, and if Ellie was to kill Abby, Lev would only lose Abby, leaving him in the same situation Ellie was in at the start of the game, which in turn means Ellie is becoming what she set out to kill. It’s no use. Revenge only causes more pain and loss. This cycle is so vicious and nobody wins, and Abby realised this once she found Lev, and found that revenge is a futile thing that does not achieve anything, especially not bringing back her dead friends. She managed to break the cycle herself, and in turn, she found a life worth living, a live with Lev. However, Ellie could not manage this, choosing to still seek revenge.

Because of this, she faces the consequences. She loses all of her loved ones. She loses Dina, she loses Jesse and she loses her baby son, JJ. Tommy is the same too. Tommy couldn’t break the cycle, and he loses his wife, Maria. And guess what, Joel is still gone. All of that loss, yet Joel is still dead. It’s all been for nothing. Ellie is now completely alone, which is what she said she was scared of in the first game, all because of revenge. The way forward is not anger, rage or revenge, but acceptance and love. That’s my takeaway.

You may think this treatment of Joel and Ellie is “disrespectful”, but I disagree. In the first game, you do a lot of bad things as these characters. Yeah, you go through a lot of pain, but so has everybody else, yet they still face the unfavorable consequences. It only makes sense that Joel and Ellie would too. In my opinion, this only helps to build the world of The Last of Us and show that just because Joel and Ellie are the main characters, they aren’t invincible, and the world doesn’t revolve around them. They just happen to be two people who live in the world amongst so many others, which for me, makes it so much more realistic. This is emphasised in the incredible detail in the gameplay of each enemy having names, with other enemies interacting with eachother as you stalk them. It makes them feel so much more real and only increased my enjoyability.

From a story like this, which is so dark and gritty, I don’t expect a happy ending. You’re not supposed to like Ellie by the end of this story, as she serves as the example of why the cycle of revenge is horrible. You’re not supposed to feel satisfied by it, you’re supposed to feel empty, hurt and sad. That is literally the point.

You have to realise that The Last Of Us is a piece of artistic storytelling told and made by artists. It would have been so easy for Neil Druckmann to write a boring and two-dimensional story to appease players and make bank. But he didn’t. He chose to craft an intricate, heavy and creative direction for his material, and I hugely respect that. At the end of the day, he doesn’t owe you anything. This is his story, and these are his characters, he can do what he wants with them. If you don’t like his creative vision, then great! You don’t have to. If you don’t like something, just don’t play/watch/read it. If you loved the first game but hated the second, then just pretend it doesn’t exist and come up with your own fanfiction for these characters, it probably wouldn’t have been as good as this.

A lot of people blame “bad writing” when they don’t like something. There’s a difference between feeling bad about something than it being bad writing, you know. Just because it wasn’t what you wanted, doesn’t mean the writing is bad. By you feeling angry about Joel dying, Neil Druckmann’s writing has accomplished its objective. And I’m not trying to say that everybody who doesn’t like this game didn’t like it because their fanfiction didn’t come true. You cannot like this game solely because you don’t like the direction it took, and that’s fine. Because again, this story is a piece of artistic storytelling, and art is subjective.

This entire post is just my opinion. I personally loved this story and these characters, and it was exactly what I wanted to get out of this game. Everything about the game I just adored. I loved the plot, the writing, the characters, the gameplay, the music, the visuals, the performances - everything. And if you didn’t, then great. That’s your opinion. It just hurts me to see so many people dismissing the incredible things achieved in this game solely because of one plot point. I don’t know. As I said, I’m not trying to change your opinion or anything, I just thought I’d share mine.

I only scratched the surface of my thoughts and opinions on this game. I could talk about it for hours, which only goes to show the extent of its achievements and how incredible it really is. I doubt anybody is reading this and that’s fine, apologies if none of what I said made any sense at all lol, I’m awful at articulating my opinions aha.

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056crowshit6556 · 4 years

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“Go. Just take him.” The cycle of Revenge in The Last of Us Part II

MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE LAST OF US PART 2

Spoilers + screenshots under the readmore!

Some thoughts on The Last of Us Part II

The Last of Us Part II threw me for a loop in subtle, nuanced, deep, and impactful ways. It was a story of loss and hate, resentment and grief, and the major theme: The Cycle of Revenge.

These themes all come together in the last fight between Abby and Ellie– which, before I delve into some kind of analysis, made me cry. It was honest in its delivery, resonant in its pain. It seemed Ellie wasn’t just fighting Abby, but herself in a sense. And because we had played a big part of the game as Abby, I felt a hesitance to fight Abby to the death. It doesn’t feel victorious-- plainly put, it felt “bad” to fight Abby, and in another sense, it felt futile.

I have a soft spot for storytelling, and there’s always been something about The Last of Us which touched me, probably because it focuses on the complicated nature of what’s morally right or wrong. At the game’s beginning, I wasn’t completely sold on Abby’s storyline. I could tell that Naughty Dog was trying to show a neutral grey area, that there’s no black and white, no true heroes and villains. I think alot of stories are going with this direction now, some poorly (i.e. a villain gets an underserved or forced redemption arc), but The Last of Us Part II treated its characters less like heroes and villains and more like human beings who are capable of good and evil, capable of bravery, selflessness, indoctrination, and antagonism.

The list could go on. The world of The Last of Us strives to mirror our own world to the best of its ability. It asks “what could go wrong in a post-apocalyptic world”, then in the same breath, “but what is beautiful and meaningful in such a world too?”

As the story progressed, I saw parallels between Ellie, Abby, and Joel. I saw the message as ‘destruction in revenge’; but also, by having two protagonists, one of which I should have been led to despise, I came to see each person as a “main character” of their own story, as we are main characters of our own lives, or stories, due to the limits of our perception. Abby’s world is different from Ellie’s, but there’s overlap, enough to see them as a reflection of each other. And as I’ll delve into, their story arcs follow similar paths, as they’ve both experienced loss which left them incapacitated, except... Abby’s story is about redemption, while Ellie’s is about hate and revenge.

This final fight, the scene near the end of the game, struck me for a number of reasons.

The location of the fight has significance, as the ocean represents our subconscious, and the fog represents disillusionment and confusion. Ellie had buried memories of Joel, both good and bad, into her subconscious. That was her way of dealing with the pain. She buried the pain “underwater” so to speak, into an underwater oceanic subconscious.

In that scene, she is surrounded by an “ocean of grief.”

It resurfaces to Ellie in dreams throughout the game. PTSD flashes of memory too.

Ellie went after Abby a second time, and engaged in a fight with her. Abby, starving and weak, could hardly fight back. At the last moment with Abby’s head underwater, as she was drowning, Ellie sees an image of Joel– happy, safe, alive.

And she falters, she releases Abby.

Ellie continued to seek vengeance, an outward action, rather than experience grief, which is an inward action. Revenge as the distraction. Grief as the unbelievably long, lonely process. Revenge may have been satisfying, but if Abby had been killed, what would happen next? Ellie would be sitting in the ocean, still wrought with grief, still unable to essentially face Joel’s memory (whether it’s the terrible memory of his death, or the good memories, or the memories where she pushed him away because of resentment).

When Ellie says to Abby, “Go. Just take him,” she’s talking about Abby taking Lev and making their getaway, but to me… it was the overarching summation, the metaphorical line that delved into the point of the entire story.

When Ellie says, “Go. Just take him”, she’s also talking about Joel.

The vast ocean in front of her represents the subconscious, the unknown, and death. Ellie is sitting in the water, facing the unknown, and inwardly, the grief she feels over losing Joel. When she releases Abby, she is releasing her desire for vengeance. It is a singular point in the story. Revenge is a goal, a mission– it’s what drove the story, especially from Ellie’s point of view. But… revenge is not really a process, it’s a cycle. Because as the story showed, one act of vengeance turns into another act, and then another. It is the serpent biting its own tail.

Abby’s cycle of revenge halted because of Lev.

Abby’s responsibility was altered by the presence of Lev. Lev tells Abby to stop just before Abby is about to kill Dina.

The music at this part slows from an adrenaline-fueled heartbeat. The hate and the rage lessen. Quiet takes over. The presence of Lev is what stopped her. This new-found purpose halts the cycle of revenge on Abby’s part. She is done.

Abby found new purpose and direction in her life because of Lev. Abby’s relationship with Lev is very similar to Joel’s relationship with Ellie in the first game. Joel found new purpose and meaning in his life with the arrival of Ellie. They even look similar to Joel and Ellie, I believe, in how Abby is clearly Lev’s protector, as Joel was Ellie’s protector in the first game:

(Even the colors of their clothes resemble Ellie and Joel in the first game).

By the game’s end, Abby has found new purpose in her life just as Joel found new purpose in his through Ellie. As Joel said in the first game,

“I struggled for a long time with surviving. And you– No matter what, you keep finding something to fight for.”

Earlier, Abby and Owen are speaking outside the surgery room. Abby says that Yara and Lev are just kids, then she asks:

Abby found the light in Lev, a Seraphite, or “Scar”– she found the light in someone who would otherwise be her enemy.

Abby has a recurring dream, in which she’s walking down the hospital corridor towards the surgery room where her father was killed. It is her place of fear, her nightmare, and over and over it haunts her, replaying her pain and trauma.

After saving Yara and Lev, the dream changes. Her father is alive and smiling, almost as if this is his way of saying goodbye to her.

That is what’s crucial here– After Abby kills Joel and satiates her need for revenge, she still has the nightmare of her father’s death. Revenge did not reconcile her pain, it did not stop the nightmare– in fact, it only created guilt.

In the boat scene, Owen explains why he killed Danny. He describes how there was a Scar at a camp, and he was going to kill him. He describes how he hit the man on the head, hard, but he just laid there. He didn’t go for his weapon. He was an old man who was tired and ready.

And something about that weakness, that human vulnerability, breaks Owen, and he can’t kill this old man. The cycle of revenge exhausts itself.

This story directly parallels Joel’s– he was an old man who was tired and ready.

In this same scene, Owen shames Abby for going after Joel. Mel does the same in a later scene, telling Abby that she’s a bad person. Abby’s group struggled with the action they took on Joel. Abby does too. Her reaction to Owen and Mel shaming her shows she feels guilt over what she did.

That guilt is reconciled with the arrival of Yara and Lev; particularly Lev, who becomes Abby’s responsibility later in the story.

By the same token, Ellie had that option with Dina and the baby. She could have shifted her direction in life towards her new family, but she chose not to– instead, she went after Abby a second time. It could be because she was overwhelmed by grief, or because her trauma felt unbearable. Maybe she was obsessed with the idea that revenge would alleviate the pain. Or maybe, she felt responsible for Joel’s death.

Ellie continued to move her life in the direction of vengeance, when really she needed to confront her own grief of losing him. And that takes time. That takes confrontation. The stagnation of “doing nothing” is not in Ellie’s character (for instance, Dina loses Jesse because Abby killed Jesse, but she does not seek revenge. She refocuses her life on her baby).

To contrast, Dina’s responsibility in life is to her child; Ellie’s responsibility in life is not necessarily to get revenge but to atone for her resentment towards Joel.

Ellie attempts to drown Abby as though it will bury the memories of Joel even more, but they surface regardless, one small droplet memory of Joel sitting on the porch with a guitar, and she can’t do it. She can’t continue the cycle of revenge.

After the final fight, Ellie looks out into the ocean, but there is no horizon. The fog covers it. There is no point, no “point on the horizon.” There is no point in continuing the cycle of revenge. As the poet John Ford wrote, “Revenge proves its own executioner.” Ellie was destroying herself as much as she was destroying her enemies.

I think... the reason Ellie had such difficulties dealing with her grief was because she felt responsible for Joel’s death in a roundabout way-- if she had died on the operating table, Joel would have never been a target, if she had never been immune, she would have turned when she was bitten-- and because she felt guilt, because she couldn’t accept their last conversation.

Which was so beautiful in its simplicity. Neither Ellie or Joel knew this would be their last conversation, and so there’s a sense of mundanity about it. It’s crucial but at the same time, not (because we as the players know this is their last conversation).

Ellie says she will consider forgiving him. The animosity Ellie felt towards Joel was not entirely resolved. And besides that, she had been giving him the silent treatment for over a year before that. She lost time with him because she held a grudge; the grudge is another reason she feels guilty. (Not saying Ellie’s grudge isn’t warranted. That’s what makes the situation so complicated and nuanced. She had a right to be mad because she wanted the vaccine, she was willing to sacrifice her life for it. So we see the difficulty she has in accepting Joel’s decision). Which spurred her on in her quest for revenge, while pushing aside the grief she felt.

There is not point in continuing the cycle of revenge. Grief… it doesn’t necessarily have a “point” either, I don’t think. Like the ocean, it comes in waves. It soaks the body. It ebbs and flows, but it will lessen with time. As with Abby, who found a purpose in life by protecting Lev, Ellie has the option of finding a purpose in her life too– not the one she initially wanted, in which she sacrificed herself for a cure, but maybe one built with the same kind of love Joel felt for her.

But the process of grief means Ellie has to essentially, at one point, say to Death or the Unknown, Okay. You can take him. When she releases Joel, she is releasing so, so much more than what she would have gained from killing Abby.

At the game’s beginning, when Joel was dying, he looked at Ellie, and he smiled. There was something in his eyes that said he was glad, for everything, the pain, the struggle, the heartbreak, because in the end he’s looking at Ellie, and in the last crucial moment it’s as if he thinks, ‘It was worth it, for you’.

He knew the consequences of his actions when he stopped the Fireflies, when he stopped the cure from ever being made, and when he took Ellie from that hospital. He knew there was a risk involved, but at the game’s ending, during the flashback scene, he says, “If somehow the Lord gave me a second chance at that moment… I would do it all over again.”

(*Brief note: Interestingly enough, Abby is not explicitly seeking revenge on Joel because he prevented the cure from being made... she’s seeking revenge because he killed her father. It shows that in the grand scheme of things, what matters is the close relationships we form with others... that if Ellie had been the cure she would have been remembered as an almost “deified” concept, but Joel would have returned to the hopelessness of his own life. Abby didn’t enact revenge for humanity’s sake, she did it for her father. This ties in nicely with the ongoing war between the WLF and the Seraphites, and how each faction is a faceless mob until individuals like Yara and Lev meet Abby, or Owen has his emotional experience with the old man who was too tired to fight. Owen says he’s tired of fighting for land he doesn’t give a fuck about. It begs the question of what’s important in life... like the memories of Joel and Ellie exploring museums or Tommy and Ellie sharpshooting. It was the small, seemingly insignificant moments which mattered most, the moments Ellie remembered).

Joel died without regret. He died knowing that Ellie would be willing to forgive him. And even though their time of peace was brief, he died happy for the small moments they got to spend together, that for all the pain and suffering, in the end, it was worth it.

Ellie is angry at him because she believes her life would have mattered if she sacrificed herself for a vaccine. That there was a point to all the loss, for her best friend Riley’s death, for the numerous other deaths she witnessed in The Last of Us. When Joel took her from the hospital, it was selfish, but that’s because her life does matter, to him. Beyond being a cure, beyond being a martyr, Ellie as a human being matters to him. Yes, she would have been remembered as “the cure”, but only Joel would have remembered her as an actual human being: a person with habits, quirks, unique traits, vices and virtues.

He would do it again knowing how much she would resent him for it. I don’t know how else to describe that. I think it goes along the notion that, you don’t truly understand what it means to love someone more than anything, more than yourself, until you’ve had a child. With loss comes grief, then hope. Joel lost his daughter Sarah and suffered for years, but Ellie gave him hope. Abby lost her father, but found hope in Lev.

Ellie lost Joel, but what kind of hope returned to her at the story’s end?

When she returns to her home, Dina and the baby are gone. The house is empty, and all of Ellie’s belongings have been put into a single room. She goes there, and picks up the guitar Joel gave her.

Ellie lost two of her fingers, and now she’s unable to throughly play the guitar. The notes are disjointed, the melody is cracked. That is how Ellie is now. I’m not saying she’s a miserable broken wreck now– I’m saying she’s rough around the edges, she has a noticeable aura of fragmentation about her. Even if the grief lessens with time, she will be hardened by this pain. What she’s experienced has changed her and it’s a weight she’ll have to carry for the rest of her life. As the title suggest, she is the “last of us” regarding our journey throughout the game-- every emotion, every violent action, every loss and heartache-- Ellie is the bearer of it.

She places the guitar against the windowsill and leaves.

And you see that shot through the open window, Ellie leaving the house in the background, the guitar leaning against the windowsill in the foreground. I see that and I know, in one year the vines and weeds will start to take over the house like they do in all the abandoned houses. In two years the strings will rust and snap. In ten the guitar will become part of nature. Nature will come in through the window, and it will wrap itself around the guitar. The wood will crack and eventually it will disintegrate from the rain and wind.

The reason I think there’s an emblem of a moth on the guitar is because moths have very short lifespans (in their adult stage, they typically only live about one week). Because of the brevity of their life, and because they are night creatures, they are considered messengers of the unknown, or the “beyond.” Something not quite of this world, symbols of magic. But I think the more important part of the moth on the guitar is to show how brief Joel and Ellie’s time together was; how the lives of the characters in The Last of Us are often cut short, often without warning. In an even broader sense, life is brief, and time’s a thief, as the saying goes. The guitar in the last frame of the story was played for only a few years, and then, it has been left to the hands of time.

It’s here that we don’t really know what happens to Ellie: does she go in search of Dina? Does she go back to Jackson? Does she begin somewhere else, or will she live on her own for the rest of her days?

The uncertainty of her life from this point on leaves a bittersweet touch to the story. People move on, people leave. What is an old guitar weathered by the seasons, lost to time, was once a beautiful song shared between two people.

Joel, in saving her life, essentially gave her a chance at life. The rest is up to her.

#the last of us #the last of us part 2 #the last of us part II #the last of us 2 #tlou 2 #joel miller #ellie williams #my posts

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saphicfreshman · 4 years

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Spoilers tlou 2!!!

A lot of people seem to think that the entire message of the game is that violence is bad but I actually think that there is soo much more to it... (I'm gonna ramble about a lot of things and it's gonna be quite long, so sorry in advance. Also this is just my personal take on it. Please, don't feel offended if you see it differently)

1. As a player we feel incredible hatred towards Abby as a character after she kills Joel and we simply want to hurt her in the same way. We despise her, which is a natural human reaction. However, the point in this game is that it forces us to see the other perspective. It forces us to admit that maybe we weren't playing the heroes because in this game nobody is. This game revolves around humans and what they have to do to survive.

2. A lot of people complain that the game judges your actions or makes you feel guilty. It never explicitly judges anything. It simply shows you the different perspectives and that you feel guilty is on you, not on the game because through the game, we as the player realize that our actions had consequences and that we didn't just kill NPCs but humans who had friends and families and had their own personality. This makes the game so much more realistic.

3. If you don't play this game narrow-minded, you will see that Ellie and Abby have exactly the same motives. They both seek revenge for the same reason and even though Abby killed our beloved character Joel, we have to admit that Ellie and Tommy killing most of her friends and Joel killing her father the surgeon were pretty good reasons to justify her actions. We aren't supposed to love Abby after all she killed Joel but we are supposed to sympathize with her and at least I can say that it truly worked for me. At the beginning I only wanted revenge for Joel but on that beach scene I truly didn't want to see her die and I didn't want to fight against her.

4. I've heard many people say that the game forces you to dislike Ellie or to see Joel as the villain. I don't agree with this statement at all. The flashbacks we see of Joel and Ellie make Joel seem like such an amazing guy and make him even more loveable. We see that his relationship with Ellie grew even stronger until she found out that he had lied about the fireflies and we saw that Joel got softer in the years after the first game. He seemed to open up a bit more and I think that is due to his peaceful life in Jackson. I loved that development and I think that is also the reason why he told Abby's group his real name. He didn't see them as a threat since Jackson welcomed outsiders and constantly took new people in.

Concerning Ellie's storyline: Yes, she makes a lot of bad choices and I didn't want her to go down this path but I also understood why she did it. I don't hate her, if anything I feel sorry for her and want to protect her even more because of everything she's been through. Yes, she did threaten Lev but I can understand why... I played through this game in a bit more than two days and when it came to the beach scene I just felt exhausted and I wanted it to stop. When we as the player already feel like that think about the character. Ellie was wounded, has left her family and has done horrible things to get to Abby and now Abby refuses to fight her. Everything she had done would have been for nothing if she didn't fight Abby. So, I personally think that Ellie was desperate and that's the reason she threatened Lev but I also think that she wouldn't have killed him if it came down to it.

5. Now that I'm already talking about the ending, I want to add that I think that assumption that Ellie has lost everything at the end of the game is wrong. Yes, she has lost a lot but at the same time she found herself again. She stopped the cycle of hatred. If the game would have ended with Dina, JJ and her it would have been incredibly sweet but it wouldn't have been a character development. Because she was forced to let Abby go after Abby defeated Ellie and Dina. Ellie didn't have another choice in this moment but in order to let go of the hatred, she had to spare Abby out of her own volition. At the end she regained some sense of humanity and there's still hope for her. At least that is what I got from that ending. In my opinion the reasons why she spared Abby are these two things:

1) Through the flashback she saw Joel and realized that no matter what she did he was gone and nothing could bring him back. At the same time she probably remembered Joel for who he had been in the last few years and what he would have wanted her to do.

2) She thought about Lev who had nobody except for Abby which is such a strong parallel to Ellie and Joel. She didn't want to cause Lev the same pain and suffering by taking Abby away from him.

6. I saw many messages about how important these characters (Ellie and Joel) are to people and how they deserved better/were completely different characters in this game.

I started playing the first game when I was 14 (just like Ellie) but I was honestly a bit to scared to play through the game so I played different games until I came back to tlou a few years later and I found myself incredibly impressed with the story. I loved how despite the cruel and harsh world Ellie and Joel live in the game still made me feel happy and calm in many sections. It was such a joy to watch the relationship between Ellie and Joel develop throughout the game. Playing the dlc and finding out that Ellie is a gay woman, just as me, obviously made me love the character even more.

Nowadays, I'm 19 (again just as old as Ellie) and I have become more mature, I have to face bigger and different problems than with 14 and I see the world in a different way. (I know that was a lot of information about me, I'm sorry but I promise I try to get to a point)

In the second game Ellie isn't the innocent, sweet little girl anymore that we got to know in the first game. She has been through a lot, she has different problems now and simply life in general is a lot more complicated than with 14. A huge part of the first game was about Ellie's innocence and how she grew up in front of our eyes during the game. "It can't all be for nothing" is in my opinion such a powerful line that explains her character development in tlou 1 perfectly. In the second game she is an adult with complex and complicated relationships and a different world view. She stopped being the innocent child a long time ago and is now a grown woman who isn't dependent on Joel anymore. So, that their dynamics would change is obvious. I am sad at the tragic turn of events for Joel and Ellie in tlou part 2 but I believe that the characters are incredibly well written and just a good continuation of the first game.

7. I see many people being toxic and attacking the story saying that it is "shit", "horrible", and that a child could write a better one. And I have to say that the people who say this probably would be more content with a fanfic like story from a child that includes a nice, action adventure and a happy ending. A light-hearted story that's maybe a bit dark sometimes but overall pretty nice. But that's not what Neil had in mind, because it truly would be easy to write a story that would appease the masses and that would be a slightly different game than the first one but overall with the same atmosphere to it. I think that's what a lot of fans wanted and that's not what we got.

Instead we got an amazing story that was incredibly emotional, took turns and forced us out of our comfort zone. I know that I will never forget this gaming experience. Especially the moment where I had to attack Ellie as Abby and I truly thought I was going to kill her. I smashed the square button while at the same time repeatedly saying: "please don't die Ellie, please don't die". I've never had such a weird, conflicting experience and I have never felt so many different emotions while playing a game. If naughty dog and Neil Druckmann had given us the game we wanted, it would have been a good gameplay, amazing visuals and great music and sound choices but it would have been a story that would have tried to recreate the first one and therefore it would have been easily forgettable and not impactful.

This game just keeps on making me think about the characters, reflecting on their actions and makes me feel so many different emotions that I'm not even sure what to think. And this, at least for me, is a masterpiece.

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