#in the game that scene replaced joel with ellies friend and the ex bf of ellies gf

[cakesexuality]

I know you said you weren't assuming anything but you wouldn't be wrong to. I won't get into it just bc I don't think this thread is the place for that, but maybe there is something there about David and a few experiences in my past, idk. Those particular events weren't really traumatizing for me but they're still connected to a person who very much did traumatise me in other ways.

But maybe me liking David is just about the game's themes of morality. Like, the game ends with it being revealed that Ellie has to die in order for them to make a cure/vaccine for the zombie fungus (and Ellie knew the whole time that she would likely die), her godmother greenlit the surgery for it, but her pseudo-adopted dad killed the doctor who was going to do it bc he'd already had his biological daughter die and refused to go through that again, which creates a question of who the bad guy is -- Joel, who stopped something that could potentially save humanity? Or Marlene, who promised Ellie's mom to keep her safe but was letting her die anyway? (I think there's no real right side here bc I don't think there was a guarantee of a cure/vaccine so her death could have been for nothing but it's also what Ellie wanted and she was okay with dying if it meant saving everyone else)

And the second game asks the same questions, by having you watch a cutscene where a woman brutally murders a beloved character (elaborating in the tags bc spoilers) and then you spend several hours playing as that woman, to make her motivations sympathetic and let her redeem herself by showing her be a big sister figure to two kids who've been chased out of a religious cult after one came out as trans. You even get into a boss fight where you play as her while fighting Ellie.

Maybe capital-G Gamers just don't like redemption arcs or something bc the response to the fact you have to play as someone framed as a villain was piss poor and there are absolutely things to criticise the game for but that's Not It and I feel like a lot of those people are the same people who were being transphobic about Abby bc she's a woman with lots of muscle and about Lev bc he actually is trans and oh my god I could go on about the controversies around this game for a very long time

"You like villains bc you see something of yourself in them and use them to vicariously imagine yourself doing bad things you wouldn't be able to bring yourself to do irl"

Well then please explain why I love Habit from EMH and David from TLOU bc I see nothing of myself in them