The Last Of Us

[olivermoss]

Joel did nothing wrong.

I hate, despise, sacrificing the world to save one person type plots.

But, there are a few key differences here: A) Fireflies can't even keep the lights on. Killing her would have been a hail mary pass at best. B) The cure would give someone a massive amount of power, and the Fireflies having that power would not be good... assuming their rapidly faltering organization could even keep that power to themselves. C) People are the main problem. FEDRA are a nightmare, but so are a lot of other power bases. The problem is mainly people. It's like maybe in the event of a major pandemic one of the biggest problems would be people exploiting it or using it to fuck with people or something rather than people acting right... Gosh I guess we'll never know whether that would happen in reality.

Dismantling Firefly was the only way. Marlene would have hunted them.

At the start we sort of have the impression that the Fireflies are more on top of things, that out west they'd been running intentional vaccine trials and putting Ellie in FEDRA care was a calculated move. Even if there was good reason to think Ellie's death could be a cure, they are not the ones to do it. It was fundamentally shitty of Marlene to try to try to have her own people work on it and gives lie to everything she said. If there was only one crack at the cure, that was not the time or the place. If there really was one hope, she was way too eager to kill that hope.

I like this canon. It's the opposite of fridge logic. Things may feel bad in the moment, but once you think things through it makes more and more sense.

I do think Joel was running more on emotion than logic, but still, his actions were correct.

Also, I assume someone's already done the meme format of -

Joel: Place got hit by raiders

Joel: It's me, I'm raiders

[Editing to add]

I see most people talking about this like it's a basic trolley problem, save your kid or the world. I just don't see it that way. If Marlene had a proper set up, if they had known about Ellie and been prepping for her to grow up, etc, etc... then yeah.

I see it as save the kid or blow this chance at a cure on an unreliable, crumbling organization that is going to take more major losses before they can even try to cure anyone. Basically, the kid or a lottery ticket.

In the show, we see how Ellie was born and became immune which was not in the game. It was supposed to be a side story told in an animated short that never happened. I think some game fans need to realize we are coming at a different version of the canon with more info than they had at the end of the first game. Game players might think Firefly made Ellie and were ready to, uh, harvest.



And yay, now I can freely interact in the....nope, nope, nope, people posting TLOU2 spoilers in response to people talking about the show finale. Time to fire up that TLOU2 LP. TLOU is coming to Steam at the end of the month, but there is no date on a TLOU2 port.

Comments

[colls]

I agree that Joel did the right thing and that Marlene and her surgeon were not playing with a full deck. His lying to Ellie about it is going to come back and bite him in the ass. You could tell by the look on her face that she knows what he did and she knows he's lying. *sigh

I can't say the show would make me pick up the game, but the show might make me consider thinking about maybe looking at the game... *side eyes Steam

[olivermoss]

I think Joel's lies should have been closer to the truth. That is a good point.

Marlene's crumbling org is under serious pressure to deliver results on promises and she's moving way too hastily. Also, if they had a vaccine they'd have it for like five minutes before FEDRA would yoink it from them.

That the online discourse seems to treat this like a straight forward trolley problem is so confusing to me, but I also didn't play the game. I only know some of the differences from listening to the podcast. Per the podcast, Ellie's origin was written ages ago and was supposed to be released as a short, but it kept falling through. That's been part of the canon for years, but game fans haven't had that context.

I'm very pragmatic. I do not like choosing one person over the world endings. I am usually the 'nah, the person should have died' person everyone thinks is cold and dead inside. Ellie is an asset no org can be trusted with.

Console ports to PC are not always good. I want to try it, but I am not pre-ordering or buying at launch.