#like i said it's just that this is near verbatim the exact argument i've heard for years upon years now

[agirlking]

Hi, fellow anti-anti here, so please let's be friends even if we agree to disagree because it's all fiction anyway :) And sorry about the long ask.

I saw your posts about Joel, and I do get your point - that Joel was motivated by his own feelings, not morality. But I genuinely want to understand why you think Joel was the bad guy in that ending.

The Fireflies didn't ask Ellie if she was ok with sacrificing herself to make the vaccine and didn't let Joel talk to her. The only explanation as to why is because that way Marlene and Jerry could comfort themselves by believing Ellie would have said "yes" rather than risking her saying "no" and having to kill a horrified Ellie explicitly against her will.

If the Fireflies had given Ellie a choice, if Joel and Ellie had the opportunity to talk first, if Joel were unable to convince her to not go through with the surgery/sacrifice, and heard from her own lips that this was what she really wanted... Can you see Joel gunning down the Fireflies in cold blood while dragging a horrified Ellie away from the hospital against her will? I think most fans' gripe with the narrative in Part II that Joel took away Ellie's choice is because the Fireflies were the ones who actually did that.

And yes, later Ellie feels betrayed by Joel's actions and lies, and she says she would rather have followed Marlene’s plan. But let’s invert the original scene: When Ellie is just about to get sedated for the surgery, she hears shots being fired and Joel’s scream. She runs off and sees Joel dead and Marlene holding the gun that killed him. Ellie realizes the truth: nobody had told her that the surgery would kill her and Joel was trying to stop them. Would she still have followed Marlene and accepted her death peacefully, and think Joel was in the wrong for trying to save her? I think it’s natural for Ellie to get mad at Joel for what he did and ignore Marlene precisely because Joel survived and Marlene didn’t, but I fully believe if the scenario was inverted, Ellie would have supported Joel’s actions.

I don’t really see what makes Joel the bad person, I think in the end he was basically a cornered animal who reacted purely on impulse to the Fireflies’ unilateral decisions. Would really like to know your point of view on what makes him bad.

I don't say this with disrespect, but honestly I'm exhausted of having this argument, cause it just goes in circles, so I'm not going to get TOO into all of this.

Joel doomed humanity for his own feelings. Joel disregarded Ellie's agency and autonomy for his own feelings. That makes him the bad guy. He was not panicking when he killed them, he was calm. He knew what he was doing, and his calm demeanor in the car afterward and his unflinching lies only prove that.

I very very very very VERY VERY VERY often see this argument of "The FIREFLIES took her choice because they didn't ask her." But...Ellie told Joel before they got there she wanted the cure made period. At any cost. Did she use the words "including if it kills me"? No. Was that the implication? Yes. Her decision was MADE. (And if they were taking her choice then why is it okay Joel did that too? Wouldn't the answer be he should've broken her out and run off and given her a chance to wake up and decide to go back? But he didn't do that, because it wasn't about that. This is what I mean when I say people push their own morals onto it. Joel did not think for a second about how wrong it was Ellie didn't get to choose, he was thinking how he'd feel if she died. Which is a very normal way for a parent to react.) It doesn't MATTER the Fireflies made a decision instead of asking her (who would want to do that? Let a kid know you're going to kill them? And as saving humanity is objectively more important than ONE life, then what would they do if she said that wasn't okay? They'd have to kill her anyway, yeah you're right it probably was to comfort themselves because they were not psychopaths who wanted to do this, but recognized they had to.) Because Ellie already made that choice.

That was the whole reason for Sam, that plus her experience with Riley. Ellie WATCHED two people turn and die that could've been saved with a cure. (This was further emphasized with the body she finds in the hotel with Joel in the second game). She can't ignore that. She doesn't value her life more than everyone else's, and she SHOULDN'T, because as much as we and Joel love her her life isn't more valuable than every person that won't have to turn, and be killed by someone they love, if a cure and or vaccine existed.

And Joel was already a bad person. The first game told us that before the ending. Tommy's reactions told us that. Joel realizing the guy was faking his injury told us that. How calmly he was able to bludgeon a man to death told us that, (I do not blame him for wanting to stop Ellie being cannibalized and assaulted, I'm talking about his demeanor and how calm it was). Joel was never good.

And that's okay! It's okay Joel is not good and it's okay he did something wildly wrong, that makes him interesting. And he does still love Ellie and in many ways was a good father. That does not make him a good person.

I guess part of the issue with why I disagree with so much of the fandom here is I'm a type of person who sees those "you can kill ten people to save one newborn or sacrifice the newborn to save ten people" questions and go "well sacrifice the newborn. Duh. Needs of the many." So I have never gotten how it could be a debate, regardless of how it went down, if it was right to destroy all possibility of a cure. To me it would never be right. Though I acknowledge that's me putting my morals on the situation lol so I'm not fully above it. But I think it let me step back from the knee-jerk reaction of "but they're killing a kid!" to think about it differently.

I apologize if I sound hostile, I tend to be passionate, and as I said I've spent YEARS seeing people ignore what the story was trying to say, and in the process harass a lot of people (like Abby's face model...) because their headcanons weren't what they chose to validate, even though narratively and tonally the second game was sound. Hell we even all knew Joel would die! The very first teaser trailer we saw everyone went "oh Joel's going to die." But then it happened and everyone acted shocked.