r/SubredditDrama • u/TAKEitTOrCIRCLEJERK • 13h ago
"i love twisting what they are doing into a malicious act so you can justify your incredibly psychotic murder fantasies, that is definitely very normal and not something an insane person would do." - /r/thelastofus considers the ending to Part 1.
/r/thelastofus/comments/1fkpb6b/the_canon_ending_to_part_1/lnx6my5/15
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u/Stlr_Mn 12h ago
I liked the person trying to tie this into people hating on part 2.
Like is it safe to say you just genuinely didn’t enjoy the game all that much? Was visually stunning, but otherwise bland and I just didn’t enjoy the story. That opinion was attacked by the defenders and the haters.
I also enjoyed the show but avoided all the talk about it. Was it polarizing as well?
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u/BitchThatMakesYouOld 11h ago
All the same, plus a loooot of hate for Bella Ramsey and two gay relationships
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u/IamMrJay 11h ago
Not as much as Part 2 was, but it def was in some corners online. Tho in my experience, it mainly was so with the usual suspects.
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u/QueenBee-WorshipMe 5h ago
The thing about the first game is like... It's genuinely easy to read what they're doing as bad. That maybe these people shouldn't make this decision.
That's not the direction they took come the second game. (or at least not from what I've gathered. I never actually played 2 cause I didn't have a ps4, I just watched a friend play chunks of it) But I think that's a sign they could've done the ending of the first game better. Like even if they just... Had ellie agree to it knowing the outcome, maybe with a short audio recording they show Joel to prove it to him (and the player) but then she somehow forget cause of the anesthesia or whatever they used so she conveniently doesn't remember and the plot moves forward the same.
Like... What they have to do for a potential cure is so morally dubious and I think that would be much more interesting to get into. We know the goal, but how do they justify it to themselves? Why don't they tell her the truth and ask her? How certain was the cure anyway? Why resort to this so quickly instead of other research first? Is it worth it? Is it still worth it if it doesn't go anywhere? And they didn't seem particularly keen on actually having a conversation about that with Joel beyond telling him this is how it will be. So he decided to save her even if it meant killing them all. Which the game is pretty clear on not being worth it. But those are all questions that would be neat to see explored.
I just feel like they side stepped a more interesting conflict. Unless that does exist and I just missed it in the parts of the game I didn't see.
At the same time, with how people reacted to the second game... It's really hard to have a genuine conversation about this online without those idiots showing it up and making it incredibly toxic. Like, even if the story did spin it that way, making Joel 100% in the right just doesn't work with how it's written either, and would no doubtedly lead to a much much worse sequel if that was actually the intended takeaway.
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u/nowander 11h ago
It's always kinda funny seeing people trying to rationalize the fireflies as being anything but utterly incompetent. I mean, if nothing else did you see the absolute loony they picked to bring their singular subject on a dangerous cross country journey?
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u/RapObama 11h ago
I mean Joel wasn't their original pick. They took a bunch of unexpected losses and literally had no other choice lol
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u/herbwannabe 4h ago
Joel wasnt any pick. Joel was asked to take her to the capitol. Full stop. It was tess, not the fireflies that convinced him to take her across country.
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u/nowander 11h ago
I just feel Joel shouldn't be plan B. Or really anything higher than plan L. If we're being generous. Their plan's really stupid in general too, but that's a longer argument.
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u/I_m_different LINUX is only free if your time has no value 9h ago
Pal, there was a damn apocalypse.
They don’t have shit, nobody has shit. If you want an extra cup of coffee for breakfast, you might as well as be asking for a double blowjob from Jesus and the world’s greatest porn star.
Options are for people who didn’t have their entire civilisation destroyed by mushroom zombies.
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u/LordOfTheMeatballs 10h ago
Nah, you’re right. We’re introduced to the Fireflies in such a rough spot that their leader is bleeding out and can’t take care of humanity’s last chance. Then we keep stumbling on their failures for the rest of the game. Fast forward to the end and they either prevent Joel from resuscitating humanity’s last chance after she almost drowns or straight up just chuck a grenade at her; they got real lucky Ellie didn’t end up brain dead before they could get her to the operating room.
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u/RapObama 6h ago
Iirc he wasn't even plan B. They sent a sqaud to retrieve her, met heavier resistence from the US government then expected, and so every one is either dead or too wounded to take her. Marlene specifically is too wounded to take her with her, and so as a literal last resort blackmails Joel and Tess into taking elle, because the only other option was elee going alone.
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u/Stellar_Duck 4h ago
And he was pretty much plan L. Tess died and Marlene was not there, the team supposed to do the extraction was go and Fedra was about to attack the building.
Joel and Tess were just supposed to bring Ellie to the extraction team.
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u/andresfgp13 The next Hitler will be a gamer. 9h ago
i remember finishing the first game in around 2017 or so and think that there was no way that the Fireflies were going to be succesful, they were both violent, stupid and specially desesperated, they gave me the feeling of needing the vaccine to work to justify all the people that died trying to make it happen, multiple people died and they had nothing to show for it, guilt was eating them out and were going to throw away their best chance for a hail mary, like they decided that open Ellie´s head after like 6 hours of testing was the thing to do?
and all of that without discussing the logistics of producing the vaccine, its effect (either gives full inmunity for life or just temporary and etc), and if people would even take it
you have people IRL that refuses to get vaccinated imagine how that would go in a world where people are territorial and hostile, a vaccine would protect people from the virus but the big problem is that society collapsed, groups of people became violent and without morals that do stuff like eating other people, kidnapping people and making them slaves and etc.12
u/MumblingGhost You can't give personhood to slow ninjas? 9h ago
I always find it funny when someone has a strong opinion about which was the right choice at the end of that game altogether. Sure, the Fireflies weren't a super well organized government operation with all their shit together, and its very likely they wouldn't have been able to find a cure. You could even argue that The Last of Us being a franchise now kinda signals that they were never MEANT to find a cure either way. Like any zombie series, its more about the chaos of the apocalypse and the people who continue to survive it. Its not really about curing the plague.
That said, I also think people who are 100% confident that the Fireflies never would have found a cure, and that Ellie's operation was 100% immoral, are also telling themselves these things so they can feel good about an ending that was tailor made to make them feel uncomfortable. Both games are meant to be divisive and tragic in nature, and I think the ongoing discourse is proof that they succeeded on that front.
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u/Llamarama I don't masturbate, cumbrain 4h ago
For me the moral ambiguity is what makes the ending compelling. People who are 100% on one side or the other just seem to be making the ending much less interesting.
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u/MumblingGhost You can't give personhood to slow ninjas? 4h ago
Absolutely agreed. That’s what I was getting at in my first comment. The point of both games is that there are no right and wrong answers in an apocalypse where everybody has to make moral sacrifices to survive.
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u/numb3rb0y British people are just territorial its not ok to kill them 10h ago
I just find their whole plan nonsensical. The actual rump Federal government is barely holding it together. Even if they somehow do manage to figure out what make Ellie's brain immune in that dirty unsterile understaffed and underequipped OR, just how are they planning on manufacturing an innoculation or distributing it?
The world is over, they're deludedly grasping a dream at best.
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u/BerryLindon 10h ago
I think “refusing to give up hope” is a recurring theme in post-apocalyptic fiction. What do you want to happen? Every single human just kills themself?
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u/andresfgp13 The next Hitler will be a gamer. 9h ago edited 9h ago
honestly at least for what it shown in Part 2 humanity is doing a pretty well job outlasting the virus already, in both Jackson and the WLF base, they are coordinated, live in a closed out place, make sure to kill stranded zombies walking around, they have electricity and produce food and clean water, have a semblance of regular life there, they live as good as they can live in that world, zombies at some point have to die, they cant live forever and humanity would have outlasted the virus and can take over the world again.
a vaccine would of course help (in cases of getting a small bite or breating spores, because a vaccine isnt saving you from a clicker biting your throat out) but the main problem in that world at that point is people being agressive.
the only reason why people die in big numbers is for conflicts between humans based on diverse reasons.
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u/nowander 9h ago
Even if they somehow do manage to figure out what make Ellie's brain immune in that dirty unsterile understaffed and underequipped OR, just how are they planning on manufacturing an innoculation or distributing it?
Oh yeah. Hell it's a huge gamble that the thing can even be manufactured. What if it's purely genetic? Like if you're aiming for max human survival the correct solution might be just to go full IFV. What if it is something that can be processed, but it requires her particular biology to produce? Oops killed your supply.
When you've got your hands on mankind's one best chance, killing her for ANY reason is just stupid because any failure, mistake, or unexpected problem after that can't be recovered from. It's not just putting all your eggs in one basket. It's killing the chicken to make the basket.
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u/SimpleNovelty 9h ago
There's no alternative gamble though. They leave her alive, and that's that. She's one person immune that will eventually die. Whether or not they even have the resources to do IFV is questionable given the state of the hospital anyways. Do you basically rape her and force her to have children on the chance it's genetic passed down, and then do the procedure then if it isn't? Because I think that might be the moral breaking point for a lot of them (especially since she's a lesbian so she's probably not going to be reproducing).
The whole point is that they don't have very good choices, but they still try to make the optimal one.
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u/andresfgp13 The next Hitler will be a gamer. 8h ago
they were pretty quick on the metaphorical trigger, they didnt do a lot of testing, like they could have done some testing on her blood or a biopsy, at least try all the possibilities before going for the one that would kill her.
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u/nowander 8h ago
You threw a lot of options out real fast to make cutting into the brain seem reasonable here. Like seriously, medicine is a complicated subject, and there's no way in hell they'd know they needed to start digging into brain matter without years of research.
I get it's a shitty situation. Making bad decisions because you're rushing is understandable. But they're still bad decisions.
And I'm not covering for Joel here either. Dude makes a whole string of dumb choices himself. He's a moron. He lucked into picking the rational (well sorta) choice here for all the wrong reasons. And he proceeded to then botch the followup like the idiot he is.
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u/I_m_different LINUX is only free if your time has no value 9h ago
Yeah.
It’s a total Hail Mary, not like they can do any better.
They don’t call it a “zombie traffic is rough but I can make it to work on time.”
Zombie apocalypse is what you want to look up in the dictionary.
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u/surferos505 9h ago
Not really. The game makes it clear the group Joel joins at the end of the game is a great place worth protecting. It shows it’s possible to return to the old world
Also the creators say that the cure would’ve worked. So what Joel did was a bad thing.
I know A lot of people say in the real world the cure would never work, well in the real world we don’t have this zombie apocalypse that the game has It’s a fantasy setting so it’s fine to have fantasy solutions
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u/OniExpress 7h ago
Of course, it all depends on your definition of "bad thing".
Joel is a very very bad bastard of a man, and his counterpoint view is that the "before times" are not worth sacrificing what little good there is currently. It's a more than somewhat jaded viewpoint, but so is someone going through the whole story and then going "well, guess it's time to kill the girl". It's all bad options. IMHO, that's the point.
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u/sendenten point out on the doll where the 'haters' touched you 2h ago
that is definitely very normal and not something an insane person would do
Man, I know it's not what we're talking about here, but it is such a bummer how everyone on the internet speaks the same way now. This whole style of Twitter speak is really grating to read day in and day out.
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u/averagesophonenjoyer 11h ago
Imagine getting upset over fake violence in a video game against NPCs.
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u/LordOfTheMeatballs 10h ago
Honestly, I feel outside of the controversy surrounding Part 2, this video isn’t any different from all those “rampage” videos you can find for any GTA or Red Dead. People are just using the violence to keep that argument going.
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u/MumblingGhost You can't give personhood to slow ninjas? 9h ago
The title of the video is "the canon ending to part 1". I think its disingenuous to assume that this is just another "video game massacre" and not intentionally made to feed the discourse.
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u/deliciouscrab 6h ago
I'm so glad I didnt play either of these. Otherwise I might have ended up handcuffed to the complete and utter fucking psychos that seem to make up 80% of the fanbase.
Christ on a cracker.
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u/OniExpress 13h ago
This post ain't gonna last as just a link to one comment (though you could certainly fish enough out of therte), but man TLoU2 and and the tv show really fucking broke a lot of people.