Jaicee said:
First of all, honestly, to read your post, it seems more like you're actually criticizing the direction of the game rather than the writing; the direction being the core idea and the writing being part of the execution. What you're criticizing here are the core ideas of the game more than their execution, it seems to me. Just as a minor correction. As to the writing though, I find The Last of Us Part II to be among the very very best-written video games I've ever played, and I've played a lot! If you really do think it's poorly-written, I'd be interested in seeing what you consider examples of solid writing in games for the sake of comparison. Anyway, to some specifics... Spoiler!
You ask why Ellie is so mad at Joel for saving her life at the hospital. What she's experiencing is a phenomenon called survivor guilt, which is a real thing that really happens! It's currently treated as a possible, significant symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, which Ellie clearly has. It's a situation where a person believes they've done something wrong by surviving a traumatic event when others didn't. In other words, her anger isn't strictly rational. She hates herself for being alive under these conditions, which is in turn why she's angry with Joel. It's really more her self-hatred than it is about her hating Joel. She has no self-esteem. Like everything she's got to say about herself in the game is self-denigrating. She'd only just begun to try and see the value that Joel saw in her. But that's another reason why the loss of Joel is all the more harmful to Ellie. As we learn near the end of the game, she had just begun the work of trying to forgive Joel for saving her...and in that respect, of trying to finally forgive herself for being alive. Joel's untimely murder halts that process of forgiveness (both of others and herself) and healing, rendering her unable to proceed with her life. It exacerbates her survivor guilt, in other words, to the point where she can't feel anything else and feels like she has to address the source of that problem. (There are those who have theorized that perhaps Ellie doesn't even intend to survive her mission to kill Abby, which is why she takes so many risks and relents at the end when it appears she might emerge victorious, though I don't really see any clear contextual evidence to support that particular conclusion.) The real trouble for Ellie...and others...is that these experiences transform her from the Ellie we knew from the first game into a more Joel-like person in some of the worst ways. (She was also substantially raised by Joel, after all.) The game is in essence about her process of acceptance; of learning to let go. She can't let go of Joel until she learns to forgive him and she can't forgive him until she finally forgives herself. The memory of that last talk with Joel comes up during her second fight with Abby for a narrative reason. It's to show that, ironically, though she's become a lot like Joel was, in so doing she's abandoned what Joel wanted for her. Joel didn't want Ellie to become like him; unable to really trust or forgive people. THAT's why she relents at that particular moment. That's how I read it anyway. |
These characters were great in TLoU1 but now these characters have been ruined in the sequel.
