Spoiler alert. The hate for abby stemmed for the leaks, and she made out to be a transgender. She isn't a butch character, but I blame it to the direction/animation that just happened to be in the leaked footage, where she appeared and large and her face looked aliitle distorted looking. But when you play the game, she is actually the complete opposite to that menacing persona. And there are cutscenes that show she isn't butch, but infact lean and ripped. Abby is infact probably one of the most beautifully realized character made, her personality and qualities stand out, and is well made as joel/ellie if not better. And it's such a shame the undeserved hate she got, and I understand why neil said he is so proud of her and the character they created.

As for joel, he had it coming , everyday was a time bomb and his death was going to be ugly, and it fit perfectly the tone of the game, the series, the world they live in. His death and impact was beautifully redeemed with the flashback segments. People just don't know what kind of game they were playing, it's as though subconsciously they were expecting an uncharted like game, with an uncharted like ending. Were people expectinmg joel to die by a clicker or shot by some enemy or die of cancer or something? Then you have people expecting another joel and ellie team up and a repeat of the first game, which would have been pointless because their first outing together is unsurpasable, as in the emotions they experienced and what they went through in terms of raw emotion, is as good and high as it gets. Was joel supposed to sit at home and offer ellie advice and then save her along the way, like he did multiple times already?? The game had to go in the direction that it went.

Once they release the multipleplayer, people will start twitching and live streaming on youtube and such, and it will gain populatiry and more sales will come. There are people who love the multiplayer more than campain and are waiting. And this will sell well om ps4 and ps5 when the enhanced edition comes out.

It is relevant when it becomes a meme, you are completely understimating the power of ridiculous stuff on the internet.

I've heard more about Abby body then the spoilers before the game released (gladly), and people were going on a purposedly harmful spree of spoiling of the game.

About what Abby does, you are making a mistake thinking she has to be likable to do anything, everyone is quite flawed in TLoU world, that's a lot of its essence, nodoby is a hero, Joel certainly wasn't, and that was a huge point in the original game: egotism.

About Ellie sexuality, it was already a part of the original game, it was a big point of its DLC too, it was nothing new.

TLoU2 got a lot of hate from people that never touched it, people that talk a lot of shit about things they don't even know, it was the same back then with the original, TLoU was the game that made mainstream the idiocy of "Sony make movies not games", gladly it was completely crushed by the game success, TLoU was a shiny new thing afterall.

The hate TLoU2 got was built quite a lot prior the game release, which was carried by a massive hate campaign, very clear on Metacritic, from people that never played it and didn't knew a thing about the game but memes and cherry picked spoilers.

On this very site I was told the game was supposed to have a horrible ending when it had a completely well thought one which a lot of built up within the game to develop that way.

All games, and things, suffer from blind hate to various extents, but as far as games goes TLoU2 is by far the biggest case we have had, it felt like it was quite organized and had the clear goal to set a bad image of it as if it was a consensus.

TLoU2 will have excellent sales anyway, we still have its multiplayer game to come and a potential PS5 second wind.

But what was pushed against this game was certainly blind hate to gargantuous extents. You don't get 50K+ people that didn't play it giving it 0 scores on metacritic before day one was even finished (with more than 130K total scores now) when very successful games like GoW4 only move 13K in their whole lifetime. It was a completely unnatural thing, it was staged and it affected the hive-mind view of it to some good extent without a doubt.