#i havent talked about tlou 2 since the finale of the show

[rise-my-angel]

please i’m so curious. please mlord elaborate on your hatred for tlou 2 🙏 (no i definitely don’t have your notifs on idk what you’re talking about haha)

I WAS GONNA SAY

Okay so I will try to sound as rational as possible and not personal, because I really hate that game.

I think it fundamentally ruins everything about the first game. We are not invested in the game because the game play is so good. No one loads up The Last of Us because they are just really excited to walk around and press triangle. They love it, for Joel and Ellie. That relationship is genuinely one of the best father daughter dynamics of its kind. The writing and voice acting is so good that even guys who don't get attached to characters the way fandoms do, feel deeply attached to them. The game doesnt work, if Joel and Ellie dont work.

The entire game is building up to that final sequence though. You know Joel and Ellie so well that no matter what you personally would choose to do, you never question Joels choice in rescuing her. You know why he does it, and why he's right to do it. And Ellie does too.

Ellie went into surgery thinking she would wake up, and she and Joel would get to do all the plans they made before. She didn't know she was going to have to die. So she wakes up, still in the hospital gown, in the back of a car with Joel as he tells her everything went fine and doesn't explain how they got where they are. She knows something went wrong. She knows Joel did something he isn't telling her. And that final scene is all we need. She asks him if he's telling her the truth, and he says yes. Ellie doesn't beleive him. Its in the way she says it. She knows Joel is lying, but she decides in that moment, that she cares more about Joel and her trust in him, then whatever the truth really is. She choose Joel over the truth and makes her peace with the fact that he is lying to her. Because she knows he does it to protect her.

So, TLOU 2 ruins that. Ellie is suddenly blindsighted by Joel lying to her and gets angry that he stole her purpose. Marlene lied and was going to have Ellie killed and told no one on purpose, Joel didn't steal anything, he protected her from a fate she didn't know about nor deserved. So, it breaks their trust and bond to say Ellie suddenly hates Joel for what happened.

The point of the end of the first game, is that she decides she cares more about Joel doing whatever it was to protect her, then the fact that hes lying about what he did at all. Ellie willingly choose Joel over the truth because they love each other. The entire first game breaks, when you suddenly decide Ellie would ever get mad at Joel for resucing the life of the girl who became his daughter.

Then, there is the disrepsect of his death. Now I'm not against Joel dying in general, but the way they did it was so disrepectful that its hard to put into words. The series of events leading to his death were all out of character or very contrived to the point it paints Joel out to be uncharacteristically trusting to the point he comes across as naive.

Then theres the death itself. You can do shocking and violent deaths and be impactful. You know the fandom we're in. But, the difference lets say between the Red Wedding and TLOU 2, is that the violence is not the focus. The violence is overpowered by how shocking it is that it happened, the realization that Robbs own allies lead him into a deadly trap and the horror of watching Catelyn lose her first and last boy, before having no more will to live herself. It's violent, but never so explicit to be shock value. The shock comes from the emotional chaos.

Joels death is shock value. It is violent to the point it is unreasnable. Abby tortures this man before beating him to death with a gold club as they have Ellie screaming in the background all so you feel shocked at what happened. But thats it. The shock is that he was violently beat to death. The shock is the violence. The shock is that they game did not care about giving this beloved character a death that mattered. They only cared about making it as brutal as possible. I remember when I played it, I sat in silence for almost two minutes before just going "Yeah..okay." Then continuing on. And it happens as the inciting incident, not the culmination of an arc he and Ellie went on.

It's just a disrepectful way to kill Joel in the guise of shocking the audeince to the point of absurdity.

Theres other issues, the way they tried and failed to force you to sympathize with a woman who tortured and beat a man to death, by painting this previously character driven story now as a "revenge is bad" motif driven story. The lack of nuance in any of the characters, the problems in the plot, the bland charatcers outside of Ellie and Abby, the lack of any actual stakes in their final face off because they ran into each other by accident in the end, and by not giving the player the choice to kill Abby or not it ruins Ellie as a character. It makes her unreasonably charitable towards the woman who tortured and beat her father figure to death in front of her.

It's overall a game that to me, wants to suddenly change its mind and go back. it wants to rewrite the ending sequence in the hospital to make Joel look like the bad guy, it wants to make us think Joel is wrong and deserves to be punished, killed, isolated from his adopted daughter who gave him purpose for the first time since Sarah died in his arms. It wants us to hate him, and it ruins Ellie, by making her hate him, only to double back and decide she loves hime nough to go on an absurdly violent killing spree while STILL trying to paint Joel as wrong and bad.

The Last of Us never needed a sequel. Its ending was perfect. And the sequel we got, changed everything about what and why the first game worked and ruined its story and characters. And for a game whose success is soley based around its story and characters, that is enough for me to write it off completely.

I know a lot of people at the time hated the game for being "woke" or whatever, or for a lot of dumb reasons, but I hate it, simply, because by changing the morals and motivations for Joel and Ellie, and writing them in an inconsistent way just to serve the narrative, it disrespecte eveything that made the fist game so beloved.

I adore The Last of Us, and really liked the show. So to think that the second game is going to be adapted for season 2 and possibly 3? It kills my interst in it. I already saw this story and characters ruined through the second game, I don't have it in me to watch it happen again but on a televison screen.

I care too much about that story to watch what I think ruined it, happen all over again.

[larksinging]

oh and one more i'll shoot back at you, what are some movies, shows, or games coming up that you're looking forward to?

okay let me think, my  mind always goes so blank but lets see. lets start with games

i just remembered that man of medan is coming out VERY soon i think. i really enjoyed until dawn so im very curious about how this is gonna be? 

im very curious about control? it looks surreal but with an interesting gimmick. i keep like forgetting about it but i REALLY should pay attention because it looks like my kinda thing

death stranding! ive talked this one to death (heh) but you know

i am not interested in shenmue 3 as much as im curious how it will play out. its kind of all the faults and flaw of the game industry in a single spiraling disaster

im hesitantly curious about psychonauts 2 and the last of us 2. psychonauts was a game i played and love when i was younger, but doublefine’s last few years have been.... troubled, and im interesting to see if it pulls off (and honestly improves upon) the original. and while i was never super into TLOU... like... its still TLOU, it was a cultural touchstone of its generation. sooo

i wish i could say im excited for sword and shield, but i’m not

hmmm i wish i could list some indie games but i usually find those like years after the fact

oh, red candle finally released a statement, so... im excited if they ever decide to re-release devotion (which they don’t plan to anytime soon), but also whatever they do next. i fully believe theyre making some of the best horror games rn, if not the best games of the generation overall

OKAY MOVIES

oh, wonder woman 1984! i loved the first one, and its the best thing the dceu has put out, so yeah. obviously. 

IT chapter 2!! the first movie kind of lost me a little because honestly im... not super into stories about a gang of 80s preteens doing stuff. but the second being adults might be enough to pull me back in

i loved the first maleficent and though im wary of the next one, it looks FUN at worst so

im morbidly curious for sonic the hedgehog

whats that one western-horror movie... the wind? im SUPER interested in that, because im fascinated by the idea of mixing westerns with other genres. 

okay SHOWS fuck whats coming out coming up. i never keep up with shows enough uhhh

westworld 3! i cant wait for everyone to complain about the genre shift while i sit back and enjoy some sweet sweet cyberpunk dolores. the people who got upset during s2 because the themes of the show went over their head and are bound to get more upset can cry harder

can i list rwby--

OH the his dark materials show!! my mom got super pessimistic about it but but PSH im excited. i havent actually read the books since i was young and, at the time, kind of had problems with the second and third book, but i HOPE they get to that point because i really wanna experience it again at an older age + through a different lens where i might appreciate it more

okay not any of the above but ANASTASIA we’re going to see it in the fall when we’re in san francisco and im SUPER pumped. we very very rarely go to the big theater in the city for shows (theres theaters down south that show smaller and more obscure productions for much cheaper we usually go to instead) but we are for this and its gonna be SO worth it