| KLAMarine said: I recall discussion that Joel did not doom humanity for the chance that Ellie's sacrifice would have paid off was not guaranteed. I have to also wonder what the Fireflies were thinking killing Ellie and potentially destroying whatever it was that made her immune. She could have instead just been kept alive to provide small samples in hopes of developing a vaccine. That's how the smallpox vaccine was developed: people with cowpox didn't have to die to provide for the smallpox vaccine. Just take a small sample from a cowpox patient. |
They weren't exactly short on people infected with cordyceps; it was explained that they needed to dissect Ellie's brain in order to figure out why she'd developed an immunity to it, instead of turning into a crazed zombie like most infectees do.
Ironically, TLOU2 was actually the one which properly explained the situation, and laid it out as being a case of sacrificing Ellie's life to potentially provide a cure, versus the much greater possibility that humanity would eventually go extinct if the cordyceps pandemic was allowed to continue unabated. It was TLOU1's much more cursory explanation of things that allowed people to latch onto the final mission as less a case of a traumatised man making a selfish decision in order to avoid having to relive the loss of his daughter, and more a badass survivor heroically slaughtering a bunch of nutjobs who were about to carve up an innocent girl.
