@kemuri07: Going by TLOU1, Joel and Tommy were not behaving like themselves in the early part of this game. Them saving an armed stranger is a little iffy, but okay. Them immediately turning their back to her, hell no. Them going into a house with 6 to 8 armed strangers, giving out their name, saying where they live and that it's close by, hell no again. Not even the dumb characters in The Walking Dead would do that. Speaking of The Walking Dead, Joel's death just feels like a cut and paste of Negan's baseball bat kill of Glenn, but even that mostly mediocre show was smart enough to know that if Negan had done that to Rick or Daryl it would piss off and bother fans too much to try to redeem Negan later.
Joel could've died and there would've been no backlash, but them killing him in such a disrespectful way and so in early in the game when the trailers/commercials they released were falsely edited to make it look like Joel was there pissed off a lot of people (the Youtube link I put in this thread shows examples). Hypothetically, if Abby had captured Ellie and her girlfriend then sent her friends to Jackson saying we have two of yours, Joel better come to us unarmed and alone if he wants them safely back. Joel gives himself up, Abby shoots him in the head, Ellie is tied up and can't do anything. That way Joel isn't brutally killed, Abby creates some goodwill because she's not gleefully smashing in the head of a beloved character and it shows she has some honor by keeping her promise of not hurting Ellie. In the game it's really silly that Ellie and Tommy survive the golf club scene, it just feels like plot armor and the idea they murder someone with clothes on that identify their group and giveaway their location.
We're used to main characters dying, was there a huge backlash when both Red Dead Redemption games did it, Game of Thrones killing Ned Stark and other heroic characters, The Walking Dead game and Lee? No, but there is here since they handled it like Eli Roth was directing the scene, they make us play as the murderer for 10+ hours, and there's a lot of artificial BS scenarios to make Abby look better than Ellie. Abby owns and plays with a dog, while Ellie shoots and shanks them. Abby didn't kill a pregnant woman while Ellie does. There are some cheap and obvious tricks to try to get Abby to be likable.
I think people miss the point of TLOU1 in a different way. Joel didn't deny the world a cure, he denied the world a possibility of a cure. Ellie wasn't the first immune person they would've been killing and experimenting on. Maybe she would've led to something or maybe not at all. They were going to kill a little girl for something they believed might work, so it's not some black/white situation. We see in our real world that cures aren't easy. Even if they have a cure, I think it's too late for their world. Their problem is a lack of resources and people to kill all the infected and different human factions killing each other, I don't know if a cure fixes either of those problems. Now if they could create a biological weapon that would only kill the infected, that sounds effective and what they need. So I disagree with the common premise that Joel ruined the world, he's evil, and blah blah blah. If the fireflies had talked to Ellie, gave her all the info, and let her choose then that's a different story, but they were going to do it all without her permission.
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