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thegeminisage · 3 years

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Wait hold up… would you be willing to deposit some of the tlou 2 shit talking onto the blog? Apologies if you’ve already posted about this before and I just missed it

this will inevitably show up in the tlou2 tag where i do not want it to so strangers please know i do NNNOT want to debate about it with tlou2 defenders i am simply answering an ask if you try to argue with me or engage me on my post i'm just gonna block you and delete your reply if you send me an ask that gets deleted too. don't waste your time or mine thank you <3

ok i have posts here here and here that i made as i went thru the game but to add to those (cut for length + spoilers + discussion of upsetting content - racism, violence, etc):

i think the bait and switch they were going for (that initially you side with ellie and feels what she does is justified and halfway through the game you flip and side with abby and begin to see ellie as a monster) was DOOMED to fail because of three reasons: primarily, that people love joel and ellie so much that some of them were never going to side with abby; secondly, that abby took a long time to grow on most of the audience because most of the empathy for her comes from her scenes with lev and the rest of her group is kind of flat and boring; thirdly, because based on Values different people are going to have very different reactions to ellie torturing and executing a black woman and getting lovingly comforted afterwards by her brown girlfriend in a game and i cannot stress this enough that was released on juneteenth - and i don't even think they released it on juneteenth on purpose, i think that happened to be the friday before father's day and that they weren't thinking about black people or black issues at all, which is pretty par for the course as far as these games go

i think druckmann thought people would kind of eagerly execute nora the first go round because they hated her for her part in joel's death and then later realize that was monstrous and ellie is a monster and Oh God I Executed Her Too I'm Complicit! but like because of the protests happening around that time it just comes off as...extremely tone deaf. and the game literally doesn't give you a choice, other than to turn it off and quit. to get to the end of this thing you paid $60 for you have to do it. so like ??? who's the one who's complicit here? i didn't write that game, druckmann did

I also think the game could have had ellie learn the lesson it was trying to teach maybe ten hours sooner??? like, she let abby go in the end, but the ending of her coming home to nothing would have almost been more powerful if she had killed her. like congratulations you shithead you got what you wanted how does it feel! i think maybe they didn't have ellie kill abby because they didn't want her to be completely irredeemable but the way it's written invariably huge swathes of the audience will have already found her to be a monster a third of the way thru the game or will never decide she's a monster no matter what. they could have had that same fight in seattle on day 3 but instead we have to have abby and lev kept as slaves first and then beaten and starved and literally left for the crows to eat. if the game had ended with the shocking horror of that leading to either ellie either killing abby (partially out of mercy) or saving her and letting her go i could have dealt with it - it might have been especially effective if that was your only real choice in the game - but it just would not stop and would not end. and like lol of course we're gonna include slavery in this game and release it on again juneteenth like...buddy...

i could have even dealt with like, abby meets up with lev and they attempt to rescue abby from the slavers together but they find her like that and lev begs for her life, putting abby in the position that joel was in at the beginning of the game, and putting ellie in the position that abby was, and lev in the position that ellie was. like and THEN she chooses to do it different, you know?

but instead it's 75% misery porn, it's not very well paced, and almost all of the character interactions fall flat, and the ones that DON'T we don't see nearly enough of. tlou1 was one of the best games ever written, it was perfectly paced, and even for all the bleak misery and hopelessness the setting offered there was always something to fight for and some joy in the characters being there together. tlou2 was almost completely joyless, and it just feels like druckmann got all that money and manpower to work through something* he could have done with an essay or some therapy sessions or whatever

* reportedly this game was partially inspired by druckmann's reaction to a lynching and the extremely normal justifiable and appropriate reaction he had to it, which was that he wanted to hurt the people doing the lynching. instead of being like "yeah lynching is bad fuck those guys i hope they die" he became uncomfortable with that feeling of wishing violence on someone and made tlou2 to tell us about why wishing violence on people is bad, even if they appear to be bad people. which like. ok. you took all those years to waste all that goodwill and untold manpower and money with one of the worst and most miserable development periods to tell us that? really??

anyway, it was always going to be a polarizing experience because he chose to kill joel and the audience's feelings on joel were polarized by the end of tlou1 but from what i can tell "polarizing" here means half the people who hate it hate it for one reason and half the people who hate it hate it for the other reason - and unfortunately not as many folks fall in the middle, but somehow it still won awards? god ok i'm done now i'm literally never talking about tlou on this blog again if anybody else asks i can link them to this post

#liz answers asks #anonymous #///#////#/////#tlou2 #i don't have...a tlou2 liveblogging tag #i should #but i don't. so.#anyway don't debate me on this leave me in peace

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