Would you save Ellie?

[irstupid]

GribbleGrunger said:

irstupid said:

I'd say the conclusion that this did is the cliché fictional ending. You know the one where the hero makes the selfish decision to save one life over another, but being as its not real life, we as the viewer or player are always fine with it cause we know there is another solution out there somewhere. The decision gets reduced to a "Easy or hard mode" You know, you let her die you took the easy way. You let her live you need to play the sequel to find the cure for the world.

You see it a billion times in games like by bioware. You come upon a situation where there is a moral dilemma. There is one act that is usually portrayed as evil. You know let the bad guys kill someone, or kill a few people to solve the situation. Or the good act where you don't do that and you have to solve the situation by fighting a ton of people and its much harder.

TLOU kept the story small and personal and made it seem like you won. You don't see your consequences of your choice. Think of playing Witcher 3. Felt like every other mission I did, even though I felt I did the right thing, the moral thing, the good thing, it was then shown later afterwards that I done fucked up. In Witcher 3, it didn't matter what choice I made, both did an amazing job of making me feel like I made the wrong choice because of the consequences of said choice. In so many games, the choice is usually always just a what gives better rewards, or if there is a moral bar and you want to be one way or another. You really don't care about the actual dilemma cause it doesn't affect anything really in the game.

In TLOU they choreographed the scene as you described to make you happy with the choice and not care about the consequences. Except it wasn't really a choice to begin with at all. It's like a magician when he tricks you into doing or saying what he wants. You think it's your choice, but it was orchestrated by him the whole time. And again the conclusion of the story is basically the hard mode in a story/game. You know the whole, we didn't really fuck over the entire world, we just have to find the cure another way. A cop out to make it so that in the grand scheme of things someone can look back and say "see I made the right choice back then and wasn't being selfish"

It wasn't set up to think 'he made the right choice'. The narrative was set up to ask 'should he have lied to her?'. It was a personal story about Joel and Ellie, not a moral story about 'saving humanity'. It's disingenuous to broaden the theme in order to take exception to the outcome.  

Not exactly my point. The exact specifics are not important. My point was that they made his decision personal. The consequence being as it is, is a cliché end of the world or save one hundreds/thousands/millions/ect die situation. Seen it a million times and it was presented to the reader as a choice. Do this or that. cliché lazy writing. That is not how life works. In life you rarely see forks in the road, its only after you have made a decision can you look back and see that it was indeed a fork. You rarely know the consequences of your choices until after it's too late and the choice has long been since made.

I bring up Withcer 3 again, cause it did consequences in a realistic fashion. Rarely did I know what was going to happen until afterwards. I assumed I was doing the right thing that would either save the most people, fix the situation or even being selfish at times save one. I was always surprised by how it seemed like whatever I did ended up doing something I never expected. I save some ghost and it turns out she ends up spreading the plague due to that. I go and do something for someone and come back and they are murdered due to my actions, ect. The point is, I didn't know the results. In TLOU and others, you are basically presented with the conclusions in the choice. It asks you straightup. Do you want to do this, which will cause this, or do that which will cause this. It makes me not care. I choose for metagame reasons.

Or in the case of TLOU, I'm not making a choice but being pulled along the directors narrative he wants to tell me. I prefer that to fake choices sure, but the topic of this OP is stupid.

1. One would never be given a straight up choie like this

2. If you chose to save Ellie, you are delusional. Clearly you believe you are some superhero that can kill thousands of zombies and run through armored enemies and head shooting people left and right. Your living in a fake reality where you are getting kill streaks and your a god. In the real world, if you weren't already dead you would likely be hiding in a bomb shelter for the rest of your short life cause if you did step foot outside the hundreds of zombie would kill you and you can't just hide in the tall grass. So your delusional thoughts that you can somehow protect you and ellie are clouding your judgement. Most likely you would have already considered committing suicide thousands of times and probably even killing Ellie thousands of times to put her out of this miserable existence.

But no, us saying save the world are the kindergarten opportunistics. Ha. I say those that say otherwise are the ones that are living a pipe dream.