The Last of Us Part II

[Stormdash]

I mean, I'm not making the argument that the Fireflies were acting morally either. But there could have been that conversation, just not when she was already under and in the operating room.

If she is screaming, "I don't wanna die!" and they come for her at gunpoint against her consent, THAT IS A TOTALLY DIFFERENT SITUATION FROM WHAT HAPPENED, and probably a whole lot more morally justified as self-defense.

We've got centuries of legal/moral/cultural norms built up around the idea that someone who can't clearly register their preferences in a life or death situation, that you treat it as though "help, I don't wanna die!" is what's happening. Again, this isn't about whether Joel's motives were clean or not, it's a question of "what is the right outcome".

I can't insist clearly enough - that Ellie's conversational assertions about "whatever it takes", "has to mean something", etc are substantively different from "hey, you're going to die, right now. Not maybe, not in a year. To accomplish what we want to accomplish, you have to die, today", and Ellie is a teenager. Grown adults are infamous for saying one thing and doing another when actually called upon, children doubly so. Marlene wants to take those abstract conversations as definitive consent; Joel doesn't care that she said it at all. Between the two, Joel's is closer to understanding real human behavior.

We can speculate all we want over how Ellie felt about it in theory OR how she felt about it after the fact is how she would have felt about it with a consent form in her face and people standing by ready to put her under from which she'd never wake up. But that's all it can ever be is speculation. Again, under circumstances chosen by the Fireflies, not by Joel. And in absence of that certainty, eleven words for which he should never apologize are these: "Making the vaccine would have killed you. So I stopped them."

- - - Updated - - -

No it isn't. Sometimes you have to break eggs. Only people who think 1 life even their own blood is worth more than the rest if humanity are monsters. If you believe that then you are a monster.

No, it is. We just rarely see it show up in the form of one life. Usually it's always a population. There's always some "greatest good for the greatest number" that can be maximized if only you are willing to smash your boot down on some group. It's the philosophy that has justified almost all the most depraved acts in human history - that this one life or these hundred or these several million don't matter against the abstract Greater Good.

If humanity can be saved by thee death of one you do it. No hesitation. And you do it with a smile on your face knowing the species survives. If you stop it from happening then EVERY single person from that moment on that dies from being infected or killed by an infected you have murdered because you allowed that to happen pure and simple.

TLOU was an object lesson that if you subscribe to that degenerate philosophy you better be better shots than those that don't

[everydaygamer]

We've got centuries of legal/moral/cultural norms built up around the idea that someone who can't clearly register their preferences in a life or death situation, that you treat it as though "help, I don't wanna die!" is what's happening. Again, this isn't about whether Joel's motives were clean or not, it's a question of "what is the right outcome".

I can't insist clearly enough - that Ellie's conversational assertions about "whatever it takes", "has to mean something", etc are substantively different from "hey, you're going to die, right now. Not maybe, not in a year. To accomplish what we want to accomplish, you have to die, today", and Ellie is a teenager. Grown adults are infamous for saying one thing and doing another when actually called upon, children doubly so. Marlene wants to take those abstract conversations as definitive consent; Joel doesn't care that she said it at all. Between the two, Joel's is closer to understanding real human behavior.

We can speculate all we want over how Ellie felt about it in theory OR how she felt about it after the fact is how she would have felt about it with a consent form in her face and people standing by ready to put her under from which she'd never wake up. But that's all it can ever be is speculation. Again, under circumstances chosen by the Fireflies, not by Joel. And in absence of that certainty, eleven words for which he should never apologize are these: "Making the vaccine would have killed you. So I stopped them."

You're kind of missing the point, Joel did it for entirely selfish reasons, that's why he doesn't ask to wake Ellie and ask what she wants. He knows what she would say that's why he lied to her at the end of the game because he knew she would be angry and he couldn't risk the possibility of losing her. That's why he did it, not because he thought her death would be meaningless, not because he thought Ellie didn't understand what she was agreeing to. He did it because he couldn't stand to lose her no matter what.

For Joel's actions to be considered anything less than selfish, he would have had to come clean to her and accept that she might leave him and simply be happy with the fact that at least she's still alive. But that's not what happens he instead made the choice that kept her in his life because that was what was more important to him, not the fact that she was alive but the fact that she continued to stay with him.

[Stormdash]

A conversation I have almost every day discussing a different game altogether is that people have this strange and dysfunctional delusion about selfishness. Just because what you do is selfish, just because what you do is the thing that makes you happiest personally... that doesn't make it the wrong thing. Indeed, it doesn't even make it automatically suspect. You can selfishly have reasons to do the right thing without it being a moral conundrum. The right thing is "they were going to kill that girl on the mere guess that it's what she would really want, so stop them." That Joel also had a whole other selfish motive for doing the right thing doesn't suddenly negate the objective reasons it IS the right thing.

[everydaygamer]

A conversation I have almost every day discussing a different game altogether is that people have this strange and dysfunctional delusion about selfishness. Just because what you do is selfish, just because what you do is the thing that makes you happiest personally... that doesn't make it the wrong thing. Indeed, it doesn't even make it automatically suspect. You can selfishly have reasons to do the right thing without it being a moral conundrum. The right thing is "they were going to kill that girl on the mere guess that it's what she would really want, so stop them." That Joel also had a whole other selfish motive for doing the right thing doesn't suddenly negate the objective reasons it IS the right thing.

What makes it the wrong thing to do is that his actions resulted in the immediate deaths of a bunch of people whose only crime was trying to find a way to save the lives of others and he killed them without even trying to find another way. If the only people affected by his choice were him and Ellie maybe you'd have a point but the reality is a lot of people suffered because of his choice when they might not have needed to.

[Stormdash]

What makes it the wrong thing to do is that his actions resulted in the immediate deaths of a bunch of people whose only crime was trying to find a way to save the lives of others and he killed them without even trying to find another way. If the only people affected by his choice were him and Ellie maybe you'd have a point but the reality is a lot of people suffered because of his choice when they might not have needed to.

Their crime was taking up arms to resist the attempt to prevent a child-murder. Nobody really had to die other than Joel's initial captor, everybody else chose. I do not care about act-utilitarian justifications because act-utilitarianism is the IRL gutter trash of moral philosophy. They weren't fighting for a cure so much as they were fighting for the exact here-and-now means they had chosen to try to get it, i.e. child exploitation and murder.

Which, incidentally ties back to the bitter pill of "yeah, the Fireflies are actually just psycho fanatics with science as dogma", because actual not-crazy science folk wouldn't have skipped immediately to "here is our one and only immune person, let's definitely just kill her outright without having done so much as drawn blood or any other research on her, her medical history, etc, because absolutely nothing could happen that would leave us thinking 'shit I wish she was still alive so we could try X'".

EDIT: Honestly there's nothing more laughable here as I think about it than the idea that the Fireflies were medically advanced and equipped enough to cure the fungal infection but not advanced and equipped enough to start off with, say, a brain biopsy.

[Kallisto]

EDIT: Honestly there's nothing more laughable here as I think about it than the idea that the Fireflies were medically advanced and equipped enough to cure the fungal infection but not advanced and equipped enough to start off with, say, a brain biopsy.

Maybe if you bothered checking the game instead of making up bullshit about the game (which you were proven wrong on and still kept going on about said bullshit) you'd find out the reason why during an Abby flashback scene.

[everydaygamer]

Their crime was taking up arms to resist the attempt to prevent a child-murder. Nobody really had to die other than Joel's initial captor, everybody else chose. I do not care about act-utilitarian justifications because act-utilitarianism is the IRL gutter trash of moral philosophy. They weren't fighting for a cure so much as they were fighting for the exact here-and-now means they had chosen to try to get it, i.e. child exploitation and murder.
.

So your argument is they deserved to die because they dared to defend themselves? Wow okay.

Which, incidentally ties back to the bitter pill of "yeah, the Fireflies are actually just psycho fanatics with science as dogma", because actual not-crazy science folk wouldn't have skipped immediately to "here is our one and only immune person, let's definitely just kill her outright without having done so much as drawn blood or any other research on her, her medical history, etc, because absolutely nothing could happen that would leave us thinking 'shit I wish she was still alive so we could try X'".

EDIT: Honestly there's nothing more laughable here as I think about it than the idea that the Fireflies were medically advanced and equipped enough to cure the fungal infection but not advanced and equipped enough to start off with, say, a brain biopsy.

Except they did do a bunch of tests that's how they determined that the source of the immunity was the Cordyceps growing on her brain. The only way to examine them and reverse engineer a vaccine was to remove them which, because they grow on the brain, would result in her death. They didn't just jump to killing her for no reason.

[Rendark]

What makes it the wrong thing to do is that his actions resulted in the immediate deaths of a bunch of people whose only crime was trying to find a way to save the lives of others and he killed them without even trying to find another way. If the only people affected by his choice were him and Ellie maybe you'd have a point but the reality is a lot of people suffered because of his choice when they might not have needed to.

If they didn't want to die then they shouldn't have tried to kill his kid.

[Stormdash]

So your argument is they deserved to die because they dared to defend themselves? Wow okay.

I'm unmoved by the self-defense rights of those taking up arms for the cause of child murder. If they didn't want to die they'd have negotiated on the terms of obtaining explicit consent at the very least.

Except they did do a bunch of tests that's how they determined that the source of the immunity was the Cordyceps growing on her brain. The only way to examine them and reverse engineer a vaccine was to remove them which, because they grow on the brain, would result in her death. They didn't just jump to killing her for no reason.

Here's the thing - while she's alive the cordyceps are growing on her brain. Once she's dead, the cordyceps are going to not be growing on her brain, and all that they'll ever have to work with is what they harvested that one time. You can't guarantee you can transplant them to keep growing them, and you absolutely can't guarantee that you are going to get the cure right on the 1st, or thousandth, trial. Certainly scientists can't. Scientific quasi-religious zealots in an apocalypse would, though. How long do you think Joel was sitting in that hospital room that they can credibly have been said to exhaust every scientific avenue that doesn't compromise the host?

- - - Updated - - -

If they didn't want to die then they shouldn't have tried to kill his kid.

It's really not that complicated, see?

[Mrbleedinggums]

People really need to stop seeing black and white and start looking at the world in shades of grey. What Joel did in the first game was a classic clash of ethics between two schools of moral thought: utilitarianism and deontoligical ethics. This is commonly known as the trolley/train dilemma and is played out extensively in different movies and games. Joel pulled the lever and allowed the 5 people on the train tracks to die to save the one person on the other tracks, figuratively speaking.

If there was no external factors then I'm quite certain it would have been quite difficult and even morally reprehensible for him to kill all the people. However, having known that they were the reason that Ellie was going to die made it quite simple for him to decide that killing everyone to save someone that was essentially a daughter to him? Because we, the gamers, have played hours and gotten to known Ellie through the eyes of Joel, we learned his emotions and felt his connection with her. That is why many of us side with Joel in his actions to kill the people that we also view to be evil.

However, if we were able to step outside that point of view into a neutral standpoint and simply watch someone kill every single person in a room that was about to perform surgery on someone to potentially save the entire world? Now it starts to weigh differently. Sure, the girl was a daughter figure to him, but did he really have to kill everybody? At some point the right of self defense stopped and blind vengeance took over.

If someone killed one of your family members, wouldn't you be filled with hatred and vitriol to want to avenge their death? Would it matter if you found out that you later found out that the reason your family member died is because it was an avenge-killing for another person that died? Because if you continued in your path and killed the murderer, now someone else is justified in killing you to avenge that person's death no more than you were for your loved one's death.

"Hate begets hate; violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness. We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love..." - MLK Jr.

Another trope where this occurs is in Naruto during the Assault of Konoha by Pain. Pain ends up killing Jiraiya and Naruto has to decide whether or not to avenge the murder of his mentor and father figure. That show gets a ton of hate because of his "friendship talk no jutsu" approach of trying to find peace even in his villains but that show goes into the clash of the two moral thoughts of ethics plenty of times. Hell, it occurs in real life too. In war, we never find ourselves to be the villains. No nation (as a whole, not individuals) wants to fight for villainous reasons. All you have to do is demonize your enemies and all of a sudden, it's no longer killing another human being. It turns into killing an enemy or an evil person.

TL;DR: Life is not black and white, but shades of grey. Joel did right by him, but wrong by others. What happened in the game is justified in the eyes of the person that killed him, just as much as it was justified in the eyes of Joel by killing everyone in the surgery room. (Also, my signature note fits this whole mindset perfectly)

[Malix Farwin]

This kind of trickery is present in movie trailers and rarely do people throw shit fits over it. It's really not a big deal to anybody other than the extremely incensed vocal minority you see on forums like this.

Damn man i thought moves only costed a ticket that wasnt 60 bucks, only a couple hours of my time, and didnt require me to have a PS4. Also i don't recall the last movie that had that much of a bait in switch that was received well, mind giving examples?

[everydaygamer]

I'm unmoved by the self-defense rights of those taking up arms for the cause of child murder. If they didn't want to die they'd have negotiated on the terms of obtaining explicit consent at the very least.

That option went out the window the second Joel decided to kill them. I'm not saying Joel is wrong to want to save her, it makes sense for him to do what he did. What I'm saying is wrong is completely ignoring the opposite side of the argument simply because it makes it easier for you to accept Joel's action if the fireflies are just a bunch of murderous monsters.

Here's the thing - while she's alive the cordyceps are growing on her brain. Once she's dead, the cordyceps are going to not be growing on her brain, and all that they'll ever have to work with is what they harvested that one time. You can't guarantee you can transplant them to keep growing them, and you absolutely can't guarantee that you are going to get the cure right on the 1st, or thousandth, trial. Certainly scientists can't. Scientific quasi-religious zealots in an apocalypse would, though. How long do you think Joel was sitting in that hospital room that they can credibly have been said to exhaust every scientific avenue that doesn't compromise the host?

That's not how it works. What makes the Cordyceps so dangerous is that they keep growing until they eventually overtake the body, that's how you wind up with something like a bloater. What makes Ellie so special is that the Cordyceps in her not only mutated in such a way that they stopped growing before they could overtake her but also granted her immunity from any further infection. You can't just harvest some and wait for more to grow that's not how it works because the whole point is that they aren't growing anymore. Even if that was an option you're still harvesting them from her brain something you couldn't do without killing her at worst or leaving her brain-damaged at best.

It's really not that complicated, see?

Nope if you ignore everything that makes the situation unpleasant and just wants to boil it down to a simple black and white action than yeah it's not very complicated. It's a pretty dangerous way of thinking and is the main cause of so many unnecessary conflicts in the world but hey whatever makes things easier for you.

[eschatological]

It's not even a trolley/train switch problem.

It's like putting the train on the tracks yourself, refusing to acknowledge the people on the track, bull rushing forward in your locomotive, then realizing at the last second the one person you're about to run over is someone you care about, and even though EVERYTHING YOU DID BROUGHT YOU TO THIS MOMENT, INCLUDING YOUR INACTION AND INABILITY TO COMMUNICATE, you freak out. And instead of accepting the consequences of your vast and wild mistakes, you instead derail the train, kill dozens of people riding in the train with you, just to save the one person on the tracks. Who, by the way, was willing to be run over and resents you now for killing all those people.

Except even that doesn't make sense as an analogy, because in this analogy, running over the person on the tracks has the opportunity to save thousands of lives.

Here's how you determine if it's moral or not: if it was a complete stranger (but still a young girl) on the table, would Joel have interrupted and killed all those people? I think the answer is unequivocally no. He did it for selfish reasons, and if he's not willing to do it for strangers, he's not doing it for a moral reason, especially since there's a compelling moral counterpart. People get experimented for medical reasons all the time.

Hell, the polio vaccine (which is kind of what the TLOU story is based on), was cultivated off the "immortal" cells of Henrietta Lacks, a patient dying of cancer. The cells were taken without her knowledge, and knowing it would do nothing to cure her cancer. Her cells were so remarkable scientists felt it necessary to take them to study them. From those cells, MILLIONS OF LIVES have been saved. There's a lot of injustice re: Henrietta Lacks cells, but none of it is around taking it without her permission, most of it stems from the fact that her family saw none of the profit of the medicines developed from her cells, and court cases which said one's biological material isn't a copyrightable thing you can profit off of. The difference is Lacks was dying not from the experiment, but extemporaneously from it, but there are other patients who have died for medical experimentation, knowing full well what they were getting into.

[everydaygamer]

It's not even a trolley/train switch problem.

It's like putting the train on the tracks yourself, refusing to acknowledge the people on the track, bull rushing forward in your locomotive, then realizing at the last second the one person you're about to run over is someone you care about, and even though EVERYTHING YOU DID BROUGHT YOU TO THIS MOMENT, INCLUDING YOUR INACTION AND INABILITY TO COMMUNICATE, you freak out. And instead of accepting the consequences of your vast and wild mistakes, you instead derail the train, kill dozens of people riding in the train with you, just to save the one person on the tracks. Who, by the way, was willing to be run over and resents you now for killing all those people.

Except even that doesn't make sense as an analogy, because in this analogy, running over the person on the tracks has the opportunity to save thousands of lives.

Here's how you determine if it's moral or not: if it was a complete stranger (but still a young girl) on the table, would Joel have interrupted and killed all those people? I think the answer is unequivocally no. He did it for selfish reasons, and if he's not willing to do it for strangers, he's not doing it for a moral reason, especially since there's a compelling moral counterpart. People get experimented for medical reasons all the time.

What the hell are you talking about? You are literally describing the trolley problem. The whole point of the scenario is you have to choose who is going to die, the many or the few. There is even a variation that includes you knowing one of the people about to get run over to see if that influences your decision.

[Cattleya]

Honestly, the "you don't know if they'd have been able to actually create a vaccine" is a pretty moot point because it's really just about what Joel thought when he made the call. And he says at the start of this very game, they would've been able to make the vaccine but it would've killed Ellie. So he stopped them.

Regardless of what-ifs, Joel thinks they'd have been able to create a vaccine and did what he did anyway. And it came to bite him in the ass eventually.

I say this as someone who 7 years ago actually supported his decision while half of the TLOU players were laying into him for "dooming humanity"

[everydaygamer]

Honestly, the "you don't know if they'd have been able to actually create a vaccine" is a pretty moot point because it's really just about what Joel thought when he made the call. And he says at the start of this very game, they would've been able to make the vaccine but it would've killed Ellie. So he stopped them.

Regardless of what-ifs, Joel thinks they'd have been able to create a vaccine and did what he did anyway. And it came to bite him in the ass eventually.

I say this as someone who 7 years ago actually supported his decision while half of the TLOU players were laying into him for "dooming humanity"

Basically this, everyone involved including Joel believed that the cure was possible and that killing Ellie would be an unavoidable consequence. That's the scenario presented to us and trying to come up with an alternate scenario is just an exercise in trying to make it easier to justify Joel's actions.

[Kolvarg]

"wow you deprive your life of all other meaning when you fixate on revenge, I'm glad someone came along to explain this to us for the very first time"

I mean, you're right, but then again what exactly was so original about the first one's plot? Essentially it just boils down to "Man traumatized by losing his daughter warms up to a little girl he is forced to cross the country with". And many of what happens in the game is more or less irrelevant to that main point other than it being things that the characters are exposed to. Hell, many if not all of those smaller stories that are told in the first were done in some way by the Walking Dead comic alone by then, let alone other media.

It might have been unique if you consider games only, and especially if you look at AAA games in particular. But then again Part 2 is also doing unique things if looked from that perspective.

Don't get me wrong, I loved the first one, it's one of my favorite games, and I do believe it was better than what I played of Part 2 so far. But many of the flaws people are pointing at Part 2 (which is getting a lot of flack) were already a part of the first one (which people tend to put on a pedestal) - and the feeling I have is it's not because the sequel didn't improve those aspects, but because they were willing to overlook them in the first one. It genuinely feels like many people were prepared to hate the game because of the leaks, and didn't even gave it a proper chance int he first place.

[DarkAmbient]

The reality is people got upset that a beloved character was killed off and have been throwing a tantrum ever since while people on the internet cash in on a popular trend of hating on it. Give it a few weeks and those people will fade away into the background.

How exactly am I 'cashing in' by pointing out that the writing sucks?

[eschatological]

What the hell are you talking about? You are literally describing the trolley problem. The whole point of the scenario is you have to choose who is going to die, the many or the few. There is even a variation that includes you knowing one of the people about to get run over to see if that influences your decision.

The trolley problem involves an inevitable outcome where someone HAS to die.

Nothing about what happened in the hospital was inevitable. It rarely is in human relations, where you can talk to people, talk half-measures, compromise, communicate, etc.

[everydaygamer]

How exactly am I 'cashing in' by pointing out that the writing sucks?

Because it's not based around any valid criticisms. I've looked into a bunch of people who claim the story sucked and it begins and ends with them not liking that Joel died and being unable to accept it while proceeding to hate the game no matter what after it happened. I've even seen people argue that Joel is simply too good at what he does to die the way he did despite the fact that considering the context of the situation there was literally nothing he could have done to avoid it. While others argue that they just don't like the way he died, that if he was going to die it should be as melodramatic as possible because god forbid his death be messy, sudden or real because he's simply too good for that despite the fact that that has always been the kind of tone these games follow.

And if people hate it because Joel died? Fine, but own up to it saying the story simply sucks is just cashing in on the current popular trend, even SkillUp whose opinion I honestly believe was genuine chose to cash in on the trend when he realized how popular his review was by taking potshots at the game on twitter.

https://twitter.com/SkillUpYT/status...673990144?s=20