OK, taking some time off from trying to clean and import data into Hadoop bc my JSON is just a pain in the ass

Gonna do another TLOU related megathread. Feel free to mute, but I kinda want to get my six month out take on the characters before the HBO shows complicates things

(also, if following me makes you tired of hearing about TLOU, I've got bad news for you about how much literally everyone talks about HBO shows :P )

So, my thesis here is that the TLOU saga is not in fact about zombies or revenge, but is rather one of the more direct examples of an auteur-style Real Art exploration of a theme - which I think is ultimately "pessimism about the future" and possibly "climate pessimism"

Here are my base premises, which I'm trying to limit myself to in my analysis rather than going off on any headcanons:
1. Neil Druckmann (Druckmann henceforth, ND would be reserved for Naughty Dog) said he intended the first game to be about "what if parental love, but too much"

2. The games rely very heavily on expecting the audience to infer a lot of subtext; they are drawing on show, don't tell rules in a way very few games do, but there are confirmed statements from devs and other contexts we can use to reliably draw interpretatons

3. Druckmann & team have *always* valued multiple perspectives; Druckmann is clearly a big fan of classic "perspective-shift" games, ones that predate the one everyone is always bringing up, Spec Ops: TL

For instance, Half-Life definitely influenced D., and he's confirmed this

Every Naughty Dog game I've played except I *think* Uncharted 2 has featured a protagonist switch, and every one (excepting the shorter Left Behind, if we consider it its own game) that Druckmann has directed has

In particular, I view the entire series as Druckmann's challenge to himself to step out of his perspective as a cishet man and find commonalities with others; TLOU, the original, takes this "easy" and just asks us to empathize with daughters as well as their dads

4. Rad-left aligned game critics are correct in their implicit assertion that Druckmann is a liberal, not a leftist; someone who considers the world of TLOU, where our broken society has collapsed, to be a loss and not a gain of potential.

Basically, my reasons for getting into Druckmann's specific motivations here are discussions I've had with people who are parents recently, who fear their children's future when climate change is coming.

I think that Druckmann drew on this & the cordyceps may well stand in for climate change.

Of course, Druckmann set hard mode by asking "what if you had a choice between your children growing up in a world that was doomed, and them just dying now"

And yes, it's directly drawing on Cormac McCarthy's The Road, but is far, far more interesting (in my opinion) in its themes, because the father in The Road has Joel's ruthlessness, but there's never any conflict on the level of what Joel faces, bc there's no hope in The Road

So, on to my analysis of the themes

- Starting the player as Sarah was probably intended to make her death a twist, but enough players knew that the girl Joel was protecting wasn't his bio-daughter that I don't think that really worked.

It's an *extremely* effective tactic,*when done properly*, though,to make a stock Tragic Character Moment work;people care more about characters they played,even though Sarah never does anything

(If your development is soulless, like in WD: Legion, you can fail to pull this off)

Hell, to keep dunking on Watch_dogs, the original Watch_dogs also has a Tragically Dead Little Girl, and while I don't think playing as her would have fixed that game, it would have made it way more interesting

It was a good strategy

Here I'll interject that the HBO show has a challenge here: since we don't "play as" anyone, they lose the ability to do a lot of these strategies that ND can only do in a game; we're quite used to seeing in the POV of people like the Boltons on HBO, so Abby as POV will do less

Anyway, I think we can infer that the core conflict of TLOU (incl. Left Behind) and TLOUII is between the ability to imagine a future, and the defense mechanism of retreating into only your personal relationships or grudges or obsessions

This is obviously *a* theme, but I think a lot of people would disagree that it's *the* theme of the games. I think it's a defensible position if you look into the stuff that is textually, definitively part of the game, for a reason, but gets less attention than key moments

So, we never see a Joel who can imagine a brighter future. He even seems to have given up on anything besides making money to take care of Sarah in the prologue; but we know that he had a dream.

To be a singer. Also, to go to college. He did neither, bc he had a child too young.

Joel states all of this outright during the final approach to the Firefly hospital in Utah, I'm not inferring any of it. His dreams are more modest than Ellie's (astronaut), but that's partly bc of the fact that Ellie has no more immediate prospects in her life

Ellie wants to be an astronaut, but she can also live vicariously through others - just as Joel did through Sarah and then Ellie, both of whom he gave guitars to, clearly passing on his own interests

But Ellie's big vicarious thing is comics and video games.

The only comics that appear in TLOU are Savage Starlight, which is summarized as follows: "Dr. Daniela Star dreams of deep space. In the year 2186, mankind has conquered the solar system, but the shackles of special relativity prevent them from going any further."

The choice to emphasize this arc as a direct parallel to Ellie's, and to note that Joel doesn't really get the appeal, both reinforce this idea, of humanity being held back.

(I will reiterate that I believe the title of the games intends to reference humanity's extinction. It's multilayered, since Ellie gives an explanation at the end where she herself is "the last of us" aka the last person she knows to die, so I could be wrong here.)

This is where the comic storyline goes:
"The victory of the Travelers was absolute,& so too were the terms of humanity's surrender. The living flesh of every man, woman, and child left alive was claimed as the spoils of war. For how long can Daniela escape their terrible grasp?"

Notably the comic's metaplot diverges in the later issues from paralleling the plot of the game, I think intentionally to throw players off; the Joel equivalent, not the Ellie equivalent, ends up having to sacrifice himself for the survival of everyone

Anyway, that's the narrative that's appealing to Ellie, and that, cruelly, Joel is feeding her (if he's picking up the comics, which I assume the "canon" Joel is): the idea that a better future may require sacrifice, but it is possible.

Joel never wanted any of that, and his dreams were - I just realized this - ultimately crushed at the same age as Ellie, 17 (when he got his girlfriend pregnant, and when Ellie found out he lied to her)

So, the thing is, the games agree with Ellie's view. The first game is uncertain, but the second isn't. They twist the knife by making Ellie utterly unaware that hope exists, but it does exist, and Abby is ultimately the heroine not bc she saves Lev but bc she seeks hope

OK, so a few other notes before I get to my main point:
"Ellie" is not a "real name" etymologically, unlike Ellen or Eleanor, I know this intimately bc my parents intended to make an allusion that does not work with both my birth name and my would-have-been-female birth name

aka, the etymology of "Eleanor" is boring, and my birth name also did not mean, as my parents falsely read in etymology books, "bringer of light." And Eleanor doesn't mean "light" either, that's from misreading it as a Hebrew name, which it isn't

But "Ellie"is pretty vague in its origins and could in fact be drawing on the etymology that means light. It's also very common misinformation believed by parents who name their kids Ellie or things that shorten to it that it means light

Hence, the Fireflies "look for the light"

In the first game, it's sort of a sick joke - Ellie is only the Fireflies' "light" in the sense of being a repository they intend to snuff out. (But which parallels the ending of Savage Starlight, in which the ultimate sacrifice is a blast of light from a neutron star.)

In the second game, Ellie's name having that significance essentially takes on the kind of irony that Light Yagami has. Or the corruption of Lucifer, etc.

OK, so, overall summary: for the entire period of Joel's life where we've seen him, he is not a "bad person" in the sense that would ever come out if he wasn't in an extreme, violent world. He just cares about the people around him, in a very limited circle

And in particular, Joel cares about children - those he's accepted as his own - but he *never* buys into the idea of there being a real future for the world

He says so in the opening to TLOUII: "I guess I was starting to buy into the whole cure business." He never fully did.

Ellie, on the other hand, does not give a sh*t about children, she abandons her own, she *never* has that much of a conscience about violence... some of this likely probably comes from being raised by abusive soldiers to be an abusive soldier

Ellie says this to Dina in Seattle - she thinks she would have been a WLF grunt equivalent if she'd stayed in Boston. In some ways her moral compass was always weaker than Joel's. But that's bc Joel's first big trauma was actually before even the prologue

What Ellie has is the ability to dream of a better world. She knows she's not going to space, but she wants to fantasize and dream, and... yeah, I'm thinking of this bc of the mini-flamewar last night - she gets offended when Dina says she wants a farm, and not a space shuttle

"But you can have a farmhouse now!"
"My tastes are simple..."

They were never going to work out because Ellie is a dreamer. She accepts the farm for a while bc she's lost absolutely everything but Dina; she tries to integrate JJ into her circle she cares about, but can't

Joel was reluctant to bond with Ellie bc he knew doing so would end exactly the way it did - he doesn't have problems caring for a kid, quite the reverse. Ellie writes in her journal about trying to co-parent JJ and it's clearly something she's doing to fill the emptiness

Basically, what happens with Ellie is like this:
1. She doesn't really believe Joel's lie - you can tell, bc of how she's treating him in the early prologue of Pt 2 where you're playing Joel

2. Ellie suppresses her memory of the hope of a cure that she knows is now impossible (even if she doesn't know why) bc Joel sells her, at least, a childhood she never got to have, and there's girls to chase.

3. Joel offers her another lie, one she always knows is a lie but unlike the other one wants to believe, with the space capsule scene, and it works. It's the best she'll ever get and she comes to trust and love Joel in that moment, *for that lie*

4. Immediately afterward, Ellie finds the dead Firefly and the reminder and further evidence of the other lie. Things sour with Joel, and that continues right up to their final conversation.

5. Ellie has a weed hangover and is badly beaten when she sees Joel die. This is traumatic and it leaves her with exactly two things left that she values: Dina, and a memory of the time Joel told her a nice lie. And she has to avenge the Joel she knew in that moment.

6. Ellie knows that it's 99% that the people who killed Joel did it for the reason she hated him when he was alive. She knows she's killing people who don't deserve it, whose grievances and dreams she shares.

But the world is f*cked, so it doesn't seem to matter.

This is why Ellie is okay with threatening Lev - she doesn't thing there's a future for anyone. Her childhood was a sick joke full of lies,and she figures more or less the same would be true for Lev

Relatedly, she shows she's fallen morally farther than Joel, bc Lev saved Dina and the unborn JJ. Joel would never have threatened someone who saved Ellie just to get revenge (and in fact, bc he never dreamed as big, he never cared about revenge at all, even for Sarah)

But Ellie also recognizes that Abby has become at least as good as Joel. Here I step a little bit into speculation, but I think Ellie lets Abby live bc she thinks Abby has as good a chance of giving Lev that one worthwhile memory even if she's a piece of sh*t

The end of Ellie's arc leaves her completely empty - she doesn't know there might still be hope for a cure, she's lost the thing Joel passed down to her, she's lost her social connections

But I think Ellie lives and does *something*, bc people don't stop dreaming.

The thing about Abby is that she's literally a Joel-Ellie fusion - she cares about protecting the future both in the sense of kids, and in the sense of the world.

Obviously, she doesn't face the same dilemma that Joel did, the people trying to kill Lev aren't the same ones who are trying to make the world better, but as I've noted, Joel didn't believe in the vaccine even before he knew what it'd cost

Abby "looks for the light" *and* she protects a kid, because she believes in what her dad was doing - regardless of your ultimate ethical judgment of Jerry, Abby sees him as a moral rock, and her ultimate reconciliation with him in her end of day 2 dream shows that doesn't change

/fin

Actually, NOT /fin, one last thing. The best summation I can have of TLOU2 is that Ellie's role is that of Gollum. Abby and Lev's journey is the actual "heroic quest" and it succeeds - *because* Ellie can't let go of her obsession

Ellie can't let go and she gets her fingers bitten off (flip of Gollum/Frodo, but it could easily still be an allusion) but without her actions, Abby and Lev would never have reached the Fireflies

And the ending load screen tells us that they did, in fact, get there

Owen, a character who I'm convinced is a Druckmann self insert, dreamed of making it to Southern California, to somewhere where people had hope and didn't fight pointlessly

The game shows us that Lev and Abby end up in such a place. Ultimately, only because of Ellie

I'm gonna throw down this gauntlet: if anyone actually wants to take the concept of "hopepunk" seriously, TLOU2 if not 1 is Hopepunk as f*ck

Now I'm done