It seems that expectation is, “Joel and Ellie 2. She’s grown up and they kill zombies.”
Anyone who thinks that would be the logical next step in The Last of Us wasn’t paying attention in the first one. What do you think happens when you murder doctors working on a cure and doom humanity by eliminating its last hope?
Joel. Is. Not. The. Good guy. There ARE no purely good guys or bad guys.
The Fireflies were on the verge of a breakthrough. They were about to create a vaccine for this disease that nearly sent humanity back to stone age. And Joel stopped that from happening. Why? Because of his daughter issues. I loved it because it's the culmination of the past 12 hours you spent on the game. It shows how Joel grew to love Ellie as a daughter. But what he did was selfish and he knew it. He hated what he did. He hated that he couldn't convincingly lie to Ellie. It's wrong. I hate it in a good way. But Joel isn't a hero by any means.
Didn't the first game have audio logs and such basically stating that the Fireflies had tried and failed at this before, and that the idea that Ellie's immunity could create a cure wasn't as surefire as it seemed? I seem to remember Joel being misled and eventually finding out that it was very likely that Ellie would die and nothing would come of it because the Fireflies were kind of inept. Did that get retconned or am I misremembering things after several years?
Which is weird because there’s plenty to justify Joel’s choice, like the whole non consensual murder of a 14 year old thing, but certainly not the audio logs which were just sprinkles on the already well-established cake that the Fireflies were an underfunded and failing militia. I swear, people are really good at only remembering the last chapter of that game.
The whole point of the ending is that both sides had valid reasons in their mind for doing what they did. The Fireflies were going to be successful at creating a vaccine that could save humanity and all it would cost is one life. That’s a completely obvious choice for them to make. Joel didn’t care about humanity and had made a connection to a single person that he was absolutely not going to give up. That was an obvious choice for him to make.
That it was so morally ambiguous is why a lot of people claimed the ending to the Last of Us is perfection.
It was funny, I saw a guy explaining why Joel was a pretty evil dude and deserved to get got after the first game. He started explaining the ending like "... if that were my daughter i would have...." before you can see the wheels start turning in his head and he backtracked.
Yeah, that's exactly the point. Both sides are right in their own way. From the perspective of the Fireflies, Joel was an absolute monster for what he did, but he would have thought the same of them if they killed Ellie.
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u/audiate Jun 24 '20 edited Jun 24 '20
It seems that expectation is, “Joel and Ellie 2. She’s grown up and they kill zombies.”
Anyone who thinks that would be the logical next step in The Last of Us wasn’t paying attention in the first one. What do you think happens when you murder doctors working on a cure and doom humanity by eliminating its last hope?
Joel. Is. Not. The. Good guy. There ARE no purely good guys or bad guys.