10 Things I Hate About The Last of Us
I know that my last few blog posts have been very baby centric and ranty. Unfortunately, between not being at work and then the lockdown I haven’t had heaps of material to draw on so it’s either Matt or the ways in which pregnancy screws you over.
And I can only throw Matt under the bus so many times before it just becomes mean.
So here is something I’ve had sitting on the back burner for a while now, let’s be honest, it’s well and truly out of date and not something anyone asked for but since when is anything I’ve written something that someone asked for?
So here it is, 10 Things I Hate About The Last Of Us 2
*If you have not played TLOU or TLOU2 and you plan to, but still don’t know what happens then I suggest you turn away now. You have been warned. **
- How Joel dies.
Joel dies in one of the most brutal ways and all in front of his adopted daughter. He doesn’t even question why Abby has shot out his kneecap, he knows that whatever her reasoning it’s probably deserved and he just…tells her to kill him.
2.Ellie’s entire reaction to seeing Joel be killed in front of her.
Just the way she begged for him to get up had me tearing up. I should’ve known then and there that things were only going to get worse…if that was possible. Then her begging for Abby to not kill Joel. All we know by this point is that Joel and Ellie have had a falling out of some kind, it’s most probably one sided because we know that Joel loves Ellie more than life itself, but she would’ve given everything in that moment for Joel to not die.
- Stop killing all the animals.
To say that I jumped out of my seat when that bomb exploded under Shimmer and sent Ellie and Dina flying would be an understatement. I played this particular part with a friend who had already played through once and they teared up all over again. They’re a bit of a horse lover.
I tried more than anything else to get through every section with dogs without having to kill them. Why? Because hearing their handlers call out their names as they saw their dogs die in front of them was hitting a little too close to home. I think anyone who has ever owned and loved a pet can relate.
The fact that as Abby you play with dogs that you kill as Ellie hits a little bit too hard for my liking.
- Tommy.
Honestly, fuck Tommy. I get it, his brother is dead and he’s heartbroken about it. You’d also think that maybe he would’ve known Joel better than anyone else and should have been able to recognize that he would never want the person he loved most in the world (Ellie) to turn into a murderer like him. Because that’s what they were. They were smugglers and murderers and they hurt people. Joel never hid who he was, he did what he had to in order to survive in the new world. Unfortunately, that meant that he hurt people to survive, some of them maybe didn’t deserve it as much as the others, but he did it.
He never would’ve wanted that life for Ellie. All of her kills in the first game were for survival, they were because it was them or her and in the case of Cannibal David it was definitely not a mistake. Doesn’t mean it wasn’t any less scaring on the psyche of a 14-year-old kid. Walking cure or not.
It’s one thing to kill a monster, it’s another entirely to kill a human being.
When Ellie kills Nora in TLOU2, she doesn’t just kill her, she tortures her for information, and we see how badly that affected her. She knew that she was crossing lines she never thought she’d cross but because of her need to avenge Joel’s death, she was willing to cross them.
By the time Ellie and Dina are living at the farmhouse with baby JJ, Ellie has done a lot of shit. She’s killed a lot of people who maybe did or didn’t deserve it. She unwittingly killed a pregnant woman and the realisation sent her into a panic attack.
Tommy using Ellie’s survivor’s guilt against her to get her to go after Abby after everything they had been through was just the epitome of a dick move. He was all happy to leave Seattle and let Abby live after they’d killed all of her friends, save Lev, despite them not having officially avenged Joel’s death. However, his attitude suddenly change to one of vengeance again because why? Oh, because they shot out his knee and blinded him in one eye. No problem letting Abby live when she’d just killed his brother, but the moment she inconveniences his life, nah Ellie you gotta drop everything and go off and kill her.
Fuck you, Tommy.
I was done with this particular point of contention however upon finding this image I feel the need to add on to it.
Joel dying was 80% Tommy’s damned fault. Abby and her crew had no idea what Joel looked like. If he had just kept his mouth shut or said fake names then they would’ve been able to leave without the brutality that was Joel’s death.
So yeah, it’s no wonder that he was pushing Ellie so hard to go after Abby. He was just too chicken shit to admit that it was his fault because he was an idiot in the first place. Like I mentioned before, he was more than happy to leave Abby alive until she physically disabled him. He’s a coward and an asshole.
Onto the next one.
- Ellie Leaving Dina
I kept begging for Ellie to stop being dumb and get back in bed with her girlfriend, to not leave the farmhouse and pursue something that would be sure to destroy her. But no. She left Dina and JJ, the farmhouse, the life that she was building.
At this point I’m considering doing a 10 things I love about TLOU2 and 9 of them will revolve around Dina somehow.
And the last one will be how Tommy deserved everything he got for being a POS.
- Understanding why Ellie left Dina.
More than I hate Ellie leaving Dina and JJ, I hate that I can understand why she left. She had survivors guilt up the wahzoo. Her mum died, her best friend Riley died, the people put in charge of getting her to the fireflies all died. Sam and Henry died. Joel died. Jesse died. Joel also saved her. He saved her from becoming the cure, from sacrificing herself for the bettering of the human population.
Personally, I don’t think it actually would’ve done any good had she successfully sacrificed herself, purely because of the type of infection the Cordyceps was. There’s a number of Youtube videos that go more in depth to explain how killing Ellie and using her brain in the way they intended was actually counterproductive.
If you take a look at this video by Game Theory, it explains how the Cordyceps is a fungal infection not a virus that can be fought with a vaccine.
Anyways, she felt guilty that she was still alive when not only had so many people died because of her but Abby was still alive despite her promise that she was going to kill Abby.
Guilt is a bitch.
- Abby.
People can bitch about this game and Ellie’s choices about Abby all they want. I’ll admit that there were a good many times when I tried to just let Abby die but unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.
The thing is though that no matter how much we all hated having to play as the person who killed Joel, we were also forced to keep that person alive. Our only other choice was to turn the game off and walk away, but how many people do you know that actually did that? Yeah, exactly because then we wouldn’t be able to see how the whole thing played out.
The consequence of not having enough self-control to turn the game off was that we had to keep Abby alive. We had to meet her friends and go through the flashbacks of her life. Eventually we come to realise that Ellie and Abby aren’t all that different. Joel killed Abby’s dad, the doctor from the end of the first game that was going to operate on Ellie, for anyone who’s drawing a blank right now.
Joel is the closest thing that Ellie has to a father figure. Joel despite his initial reservations about escorting a child across the country, eventually came to see her as a daughter. He loved her more than anything or anyone else. We saw what happened when Abby killed him, the revenge plot that was born from that.
So, it’s pretty justifiable that Abby felt the same way Ellie did about Joel, about her actual dad. It’s pretty fair that she wanted to kill the man who took her dad away.
You can understand why she trekked across the country to find that man, taking a team of back up with her.
After all.
Isn’t that exactly what we did with Ellie?
- That scene with Abby and Owen on the boat.
Okay this one is a genuine hate. We’ve all been subjected to some pretty rough scenes while playing video games. Things we can’t necessarily unsee without some intense video game therapy.
Also, when I say rough, I don’t mean rough like that scene on the boat was rough. I mean rough like Joel being beaten to death a gold club. I mean Jesse being shot in the eye. I mean in Bioshock whenever those spider splicers would drop from the ceiling in the flickering lights. I mean the death scene that plays throughout both TLOU 1 and 2 when you’re caught by an infected anything. The bigger and stronger they were the more brutal the scene.
Then there’s the other side of scenes we can’t unsee that aren’t traumatizing per say but they stick with you forever and attack you when you least expect it. Like Geralt and Yennefer on that unicorn. That plot twist in Bioshock, “Would You Kindly?”.
I’m getting off topic. Shocking I know.
My point is this, that scene was not something that we needed to witness. Ever.
- The lack of puns.
Right, so we all remember the puns from the first game? They were amazing. I actually printed them out and used them for my wedding. Each place setting had a pun from TLOU inside. They were so corny and such dad jokes, but it was something cute and I’m glad I did it.
The severe lack of puns in TLOU2 was upsetting. So, upsetting in fact that when Ellie finally made a pun to JJ at the farmhouse I teared up from happiness.
10. And lastly, the tenth thing I hate about TLOU2 was that I didn’t hate it, not even a little bit, not even at all.
Except for that fucking Owen and Abby scene. That scene can burn in hell where it belongs.
There were a few honorable mentions, one of which being how Ellie could walk into an apartment that was obviously being lived in. Like there were tomato plants flourishing in that place and she didn’t once stop and think, “Oh shit, someone might actually be coming back here.” Nope, she just walked on past like it wasn’t there. The entire game there was an abundance of the obvious being stated but this one she just let it slide. Then she got attacked.
Before I played TLOU2 I had to play the first one because once the feels train leaves the station there’s no stopping it and apparently, I wanted an extra-long ride. There is a point during the Pittsburg chapter (I did have to look up specifically where it occurs because I forgot to note that part down) that Ellie and Joel come across two people who have committed suicide. Ellie comments about how they took the easy way out and Joel says “It ain’t easy,” there’s also a point at which he tells Ellie that he struggled for a long time with surviving. Ellie isn’t the only one with survivor’s guilt. Joel’s daughter Sarah was shot and died in his arms.
So yeah, while the line about suicide not being easy could’ve just been a throwaway line to impart some wisdom on a teenager, when you put the whole of Joel’s character together and what he’s been through since the initial outbreak, it’s a hell of a lot more than that and you realise that Joel has himself tried to commit suicide. Whether he attempted it and was just unsuccessful or if he thought about it but never went through with it doesn’t matter. He found a way to keep surviving.
Also, just like Patrick in 10 Things I Hate About You, Joel gave Ellie a guitar when she was mad at him…
I had to point that out. Soz not soz.
S.J Smith Books 