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[Critical Drinker] Joel Did Nothing Wrong - The Importance Of Ambiguity

Tickle My Tendies

Tickle My Tendies

Member
I like that it is up for interpretation. The ending of TLOU was perfect, IMO. Great storytelling.

After beating TLOU I engaged in a lot of discussion regarding Joel's choice. There were good points both for and against him. Initially, I was kinda on the "Joel is the villain" train but my stance changed/softened over time. I get it.

Man, TLOU is such a great game. Wish I could go back and play it again for the first time. One of the best experiences of my PS3's era.

I wish TLOU2 had taken a different path, or at least been a little more nuanced in portraying Joel.
 
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Jigsaah

Jigsaah

Gold Member
Hmmm, save one to sacrifice the collective. If it was my daughter...human nature says I'd save her too. Fuck everybody else.

Abby just did what I would do if they
killed my father.

It's an unfortunate series of events for sure, but so is the environment the characters live in.
 
Keihart

Keihart

Member
I disagree, the ambiguity of Joel's decision depending of your POV it's reinforced in the sequel by the mere fact that Ellie learns to appreciate it too. The game misleads you at the start in how Ellie feels so your view of what happens changes with context towards the end. If anything, TLoU2 doubles downs on the style of the first game by picking up a theme as revenge and forgiveness and not giving you any easy answers.
 
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Blue Spring

Blue Spring

Read my tears about xbox here --->
Heh, watched the vid now. I knew where he was going and he did not exceed my expectations.

All the talk he did was just a lead up to say that TLOU2 lost ambiguity and that the game preaches to the players through Ellies condemnation of Joels actions. But that nonsense. I for one have always expected Ellie to flip her shit and distance herself from Joel if she ever found out what he did. I was always on Joels side in the first or second game but acting like Joel did not have it coming is naivety. He himself was always prepared to reap what he sow and that was shown in the interaction between him and Abby before the beating started. Joel was ice cold in that moment "why dont you say whatever you have rehearsed and lets get this over with".

Also if anything Ellie was a little too ambigious in TLOU2 for me.
 
bender

bender

What time is it?
I always thought it would have been funny if the clicker who bit Ellie was the genetic abnormality and not Ellie. TLOU2 kind of ruins that notion.

I always read the ending of TLOU as Joel making a selfish choice and lying to Ellie and Ellie understanding that she was being lied to. TLOU2 kind of fucks up that notion as well with her trip back to Utah to discover the truth.
 
GhostOfTsu

GhostOfTsu

Banned
Joel did nothing wrong in TLOU1 but TLOU2 was written in a way to make you pissed at him and root for pig Abby. The fact that it worked on some mindless people makes it even more pathetic.

Even Ellie was mad at him, ungrateful psycho bitch. They ruined that character too.
 
Blue Spring

Blue Spring

Read my tears about xbox here --->
Gods&Monsters said:
Even Ellie was mad at him, ungrateful psycho bitch. They ruined that character too.
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What, you expected Ellie to be cool with it? It was always a foregone conclusion that Ellie would be mad at him if not straight up hating him. Dont forget that Joel put a bullet into Marlenes head. Someone she knew for far longer than she knew Joel.
 
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GymWolf

GymWolf

Member
Joel and neil are both idiots.

Joel find a document in the first game where it's clear that the fireflies doesn't know what the fuck they are doing in the medical aspect and neil change this on the sequel making the fireflies looking more hopefull than they really are.

Just show to the annoying bitch the fucking document and let her realize that losing her life would be useless.

But no, let's make some easy shitty quality drama...
 
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M

Maybe It's Medicine?

Member
I've always felt that the ending was shit. They spend all this time showing how flawed humanity is, how we fracture in to groups and are more of a danger to ourselves than outside threats which we could otherwise work together and overcome. So to me, the idea the Ellie would even provide a cure, or that that cure wouldn't be lost or stolen or destroyed is laughable. The entire building protecting the doctors were taken out by a single fucking guy.

What Joel did was protected what mattered, the ones you care about, because the world was fucked and we had an entire game showing how fucked it was. There nothing preventing the humans from coming together and being decent to each other, the virus was just an excuse they needed to act out who they really were.

So yeah. The idea of a fairytale ending is nonsensical. We have no reason to believe a cure, even if it was feasible, would have been used as anything more than another point of conflict. Either we aren't supposed to believe the world of TLoU is what we have experienced all game, or we are supposed to believe that Ellie was made of magic and everything went have went perfectly fine. Either way, it's shit writing and an overrated story. The only nuggets of gold are the interactions between Joel and Ellie, everything else falls apart, and that is why TLoU2 is as shit as it is.
 
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Hugare

Hugare

Member
I've watched 8 minutes before he started saying how the awards for TLOU 2 were fake, attacking Neil, repeating that Ellie is gay and etc.

Shit like this is meaningless to the analysis. During an analysis, put your brains on it, not your angry boy feelings.

With that aside, I cant agree with most of his thoughts.

No, TLOU 2 didnt get rid of ambiguity. If anything, it doubled down on it. Ffs, look at how divisive the game is (and its ending).
You dont even get to know Ellie's motives until the end of the game.

He goes to say that the ending of the first game is ambiguous, but then proceeds to describe its meanings as something literal ("Ellie knew that it was a lie but played along").

No, you fucking idiot. We didnt know for sure back then (only with TLOU 2).
That's what, you know, made the ending ambiguous in the first place.
 
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Blond

Blond

Banned
Gods&Monsters said:
Joel did nothing wrong in TLOU1 but TLOU2 was written in a way to make you pissed at him and root for pig Abby. The fact that it worked on some mindless people makes it even more pathetic.

Even Ellie was mad at him, ungrateful psycho bitch. They ruined that character too.
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Honestly it worked because the ending was ripped straight out of PoP0
 
Clear

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
Lupingosei said:


Pretty much spot on
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The stuff about TLOUII is so fucking wrong I actually feel bad for him.

I generally like CD but its sadly evident he's had his perspective warped by his relationship with HeelVsBabyface, a dimwit who might be qualified to critique Ginster's pasties but is way, way too invested in the whole GamerGate "industry is the devil" bollocks to ever be taken seriously on the subject.

The big errors:

For a start are his apparent ignorance of the existence of Left Behind, which established Ellie's backstory (and-preferences) back in 2014. Back when the culture war wasn't in full swing so her sexuality wasn't considered such an imposition.

Then there's the assertion that the sequel changes Joel, when it simply does not. He is completely unchanged and just as fiercely loyal to Ellie as he was in the first.

The character that actually changes is Ellie. Which is unsurprising given how spiky she is as an adolescent in the original, and now as a young adult is lashing out as people of that age do at her parental figure.

The internal motivation for her anger are justified and understandable to a degree given what we learn about her motivations in the first game and its add-on scenario. She is the one driving them both to rendezvous with the Fireflies in order that she can play her part in finding a cure. In his narration CD implies that the twist is not just that providing the cure will cost her life, but that she is the cure.

This specifically is a big deal because the conflict for her is far bigger than for Joel, and not because of the fatal consequences, its because she is still young and altruistic, whereas Joel is bitter and cynical about the state of the world. Joel never truly believes in the "cause", but Ellie does, and for very personal and deep-seated reasons as laid out in Left Behind.

So, as over time, and painstakingly laid out in the flashbacks with her and Joel in TLOUII, we see her dawning realization of what Joel's actions meant for that "cause". She uncovers the dissolution of the Fireflies before she has any understanding of what Joel did and why. The reality is that by the time she realizes the why, it no longer seems so important.

The bottom line is that the character trajectories are consistent and there is no retconning or revision. Everyone who finished the first game killed the doctor because the game you no choice other than to do that. More importantly nobody bitched about it at the time because whatever your feelings about Joel, the one thing you cannot argue with is that he's capable of being cold-blooded bastard.

So the "world", the tragedy of losing his daughter and the atrocities he had to do in the name of survival, made him into that, but he is what he is,
 
J

Jokerevo

Banned
It's simple really. Parents shape the future through their treatment of their children.

Joel's just selfish/a father. I wonder how many of you faced with the same decision would sacrifice one of their own. I know I wouldn't either.

TLOU2 just reframes Joel's actions by forcing you to look at them in a different context. He reaped what he sowed.

The genius of the two games how you can make a case for both characters. Both of them are justified in their own context which is why this game is so divisive. You wanted it to be an all American hero with an all American happy ending? Well wake up, there's two sides to every story.


Part 3 is gonna see Ellie join up with Abby and finally sacrifice herself for the cause. It fits right?
 
Clear

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
rofif said:
Is he negative or positive about tlou2 ?
I don't want to watch another video shitting on tlou2. I think the game was amazing aside from weed scene and slow pacing in first half. But that's it.
The story absolutely won me over. Ofc Joel ldid nothing wrong - that is according to him and options that were presented to him
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He's, just parroting the usual line. Like I said, its just embarrassingly bad criticism that makes him come across like another anti-sjw bolwhard who's so entrenched in the struggle that all objectivity is lost and is guilty of the same things that his ideological opposites are.

Shame, because I do enjoy his movie critiques and generally think he makes good points. But the hatred of TLOUII is just demeaning, and as I say seems to have leaked in because of his relationship with Ade, the guy who does HeelVsBabyface and who has had an immense hate-boner on for the game since before it was launched.
 
Cherry Sonoshee

Cherry Sonoshee

Banned
I don't really get this video. Also why the need to constantly mention that Ellie is gay? Lame joke.

My reading of the first game's ending is that Joel is a violent man. He committed heinous things to survive and while there may be a reason to his character, as he is a broken man. He still is at his core violent. But being violent doesn't mean he has no heart. He needs Ellie to survive, so he commits a selfish act and guns down the fireflies to save her. But the point is also just like them, he didn't ask for Ellie's opinion. He made the selfish choice all for himself because he doesn't want to be hurt by loss again. Would the cure have worked? I don't know and I don't care. I don't think the ambiguity lies in that question, more so in how Ellie will react.

I don't think TLOU2 messes with this ending. It doesn't decide if he was right or wrong. If anything it just further tries to grapple with the choice. Joel is contrasted with Abbie's father who is also making the choice to take a girl's life for the sake of his daughter's survival. If anything the game give's Joel some perspective. I think it makes complete sense for Ellie and Joel's relationship to be strained. I mean if anything she's going through a young adult rebellious phase with her father, but she also has to grapple with the idea of "maybe she could have been a savior". It's hard to probably live day by day and see all the death and think to yourself "maybe I could have saved everyone". People are usually empathetic and empathy has no bounds.

Abbie killing Joel is not the game-deciding he was right or wrong. It's the game saying eventually your actions will catch up to you. She doesn't kill him because she's right, she kills him because she's angry. Which then the game goes into detail to give her just desserts. She is'nt fulfilled. She alienates her friends and then most of them die because of her actions. Making her revenge pointless, but she still has to carry on with her life.

TLOU2 is about grappling with choices. It's not perfect, but that messiness to me makes a way more interesting story.
 
Clear

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
The real bottom line is that TLOUII is not about Joel. Its about Ellie and as such if you want to judge its adherence to canon, you just need to examine her character in the first game and its DLC add-on to see if its consistent.

Which it is. Down to her orientation.

And as pointed out above, her sexuality has zero impact on the plot or the characterization. Its just a detail. The one time its brought up is to act as a vehicle to introduce her and Joel's estrangement.
 
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Ulysses 31

Ulysses 31

Member
Lupingosei said:
Because it is was the developer makes the whole time to get enough brownie points, not because it makes Ellie a more interesting or compelling character it is just cheap virtue signaling.
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And creates a weird confliction with Ellie's attitude to want to help cure the world so much but never thinks to explore if her offspring could be immune too. 👀
 
B

Balducci30

Member
This was a lot of the problem with last of us 2 for me. I assumed when playing the first game it was more akin to a real world circumstance - you could question if this vaccine would actually be effective, if it would be distributed - there’s a lot of nuance in this as a real life scenario where considering the way the fireflies roll I don’t think I would trust them or believe that this is the one and only chance and they couldn’t find another way. Like there’s so many variables. Last of us 2 gets rid of that and makes it just a clear choice to save Ellie over humanity which is kinda dumb given that a real world version of this would never be that black and white or clear cut. It sorta exposed that the whole thing was a lot simpler than I initially thought.
 
Lupingosei

Lupingosei

Banned
MHubert said:
Why do some people think that ambiguity of motives transcends the question of right or wrong? The games are not about that...
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You are mixing up movies (which the last of Us 2 Part 2 wants to be so desperately) and games. In the end, the Last of Us Part 2 is nothing more than a walking simulator, follow the path we give you, you will have no choice at all and we leave nothing open for you to decide or imagine. The end of the first part was open, maybe Ellie was ignorant, maybe she did knew, maybe she was ok with it. In Part 2 there is nothing open for interpretation, Neill does all the thinking all the judgment for you.
 
B

Balducci30

Member
Cherry Sonoshee said:
I don't really get this video. Also why the need to constantly mention that Ellie is gay? Lame joke.

My reading of the first game's ending is that Joel is a violent man. He committed heinous things to survive and while there may be a reason to his character, as he is a broken man. He still is at his core violent. But being violent doesn't mean he has no heart. He needs Ellie to survive, so he commits a selfish act and guns down the fireflies to save her. But the point is also just like them, he didn't ask for Ellie's opinion. He made the selfish choice all for himself because he doesn't want to be hurt by loss again. Would the cure have worked? I don't know and I don't care. I don't think the ambiguity lies in that question, more so in how Ellie will react.

I don't think TLOU2 messes with this ending. It doesn't decide if he was right or wrong. If anything it just further tries to grapple with the choice. Joel is contrasted with Abbie's father who is also making the choice to take a girl's life for the sake of his daughter's survival. If anything the game give's Joel some perspective. I think it makes complete sense for Ellie and Joel's relationship to be strained. I mean if anything she's going through a young adult rebellious phase with her father, but she also has to grapple with the idea of "maybe she could have been a savior". It's hard to probably live day by day and see all the death and think to yourself "maybe I could have saved everyone". People are usually empathetic and empathy has no bounds.

Abbie killing Joel is not the game-deciding he was right or wrong. It's the game saying eventually your actions will catch up to you. She doesn't kill him because she's right, she kills him because she's angry. Which then the game goes into detail to give her just desserts. She is'nt fulfilled. She alienates her friends and then most of them die because of her actions. Making her revenge pointless, but she still has to carry on with her life.

TLOU2 is about grappling with choices. It's not perfect, but that messiness to me makes a way more interesting story.
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They make it very clear that Ellie was the only shot at a vaccine and it was human survival vs Ellie’s life in the second game. It’s not about right or wrong to me but about how that (imo) is just way less nuanced than the ending of the first game. There are no other options explored that feasibly would be in a real world scenario
 
Ulysses 31

Ulysses 31

Member
Balducci30 said:
This was a lot of the problem with last of us 2 for me. I assumed when playing the first game it was more akin to a real world circumstance - you could question if this vaccine would actually be effective, if it would be distributed - there’s a lot of nuance in this as a real life scenario where considering the way the fireflies roll I don’t think I would trust them or believe that this is the one and only chance and they couldn’t find another way. Like there’s so many variables. Last of us 2 gets rid of that and makes it just a clear choice to save Ellie over humanity which is kinda dumb given that a real world version of this would never be that black and white or clear cut. It sorta exposed that the whole thing was a lot simpler than I initially thought.
Click to expand...
I also find it puzzling that Joel doesn't get to defend himself and just takes Ellie's condemnation. The Fireflies made it more black and white with how they handled the situation.
 
M

MHubert

Member
Lupingosei said:
You are mixing up movies (which the last of Us 2 Part 2 wants to be so desperately) and games. In the end, the Last of Us Part 2 is nothing more than a walking simulator, follow the path we give you, you will have no choice at all and we leave nothing open for you to decide or imagine. The end of the first part was open, maybe Ellie was ignorant, maybe she did knew, maybe she was ok with it. In Part 2 there is nothing open for interpretation, Neill does all the thinking all the judgment for you.
Click to expand...
Sure, I'm all up for criticizing the story and especially how it relates to the gameplay, but; All I'm saying is that the narrative is obviously not about 'Right or wrong', which makes the take in OP's video kind of idiotic.

I have no idea why you think I mix it up with movies.
 
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Noncanon Ship

Noncanon Ship

Banned
I really liked the points he made about ambiguity, and relating it to those episodes of TNG resonated with me. I agree that TLOU2 served to largely undermine the ambiguity of TLOU1's ending. I also picked up on the jarring retconning, not just in the Fireflies' ability to make a vaccine but also in Ellie's response. Everyone back then picked up on Ellie's reaction of "... okay" meaning that she knew he's lying to her but she realizes that for whatever reason, he wants her to believe it strongly enough that he's willing to lie to her. And she she's willing to accept that lie because she loves him. Then in TLOU2 she acts shocked and angry that he lied... it just didn't make sense. I didn't think it was fine that Joel didn't defend himself. Maybe I'm alone but it put me in the position as the audience of defending him in my mind. From what I've seen though of game journos, they all seem to think he had it coming so I guess most people didn't look at it the way I did.

I guess TLOU1's ending was ambiguous enough in that it got people talking, but really to me it wasn't ambiguous. It's absolutely unacceptable to allow a 14 year old to make medical decisions that will drastically impact their future, let alone kill them. Everyone who says the problem is just that no-one woke her up to let her make the decision herself is missing the point. It's a breach of all medical ethics to pressure a minor into consenting to a procedure that will kill them. There is no way for her consent to be valid. Joel killed who he had to because they made the decision to stop him. You can't be bullied into going along with something that's wrong because you're afraid of what people will do if you stand up, and how that might force you into a position of hurting them.
 
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Bit_Reactor

Bit_Reactor

Member
I think the thing being missed by most people who talk about the game is that TLOU2 very clearly defines what Joel did as "bad" in every scene we get it and those talking points are parroted by the people surrounding the discourse.

You have people who sang the praises of Joel's ambiguity years prior now saying "yeah fuck joel" including reviewers and journalists. You have people who retort the same "Joel was a piece of shit human" and "isn't even that beloved" constantly for some reason. Hell even Jim sterling can be quoted back to himself as praising the original game and shitting on Joel in the new one because that's the "popular think" way to handle it.

The fact that there is NO choice to take revenge on Abby further reinforces that the "right thing" to do is kill Joel and Joel did "a bad" by what he did. They leave no more room for ambiguity because they explicitly tell you in Abby's plot line that Joel was wrong and there is no other view of it. You just have to accept that he's gone and smile and nod as the game does the "revenge bad" plot.

Ellie has no reason to see Abby's perspective on literally anything and the game goes out of its way to not have them talk and/or interact in a meaningful way that establishes any conflicting perspectives or views in the game, and in the end you're forced to take the desired plotline of "abby did nothing wrong" and wave as she rows off into the sunset.

Even the people who claim "She got her comeuppance" don't realize that her "punishment" is in no way related to the acts of the first part of the game and in no way related to Ellie, so just seeing that "Abby got what was coming to her" after killing a thousand dudes to get to her still doesn't warrant the lack of choice and terrible ending we got.
The game treasured visual and "muh themes" over actually delivering on the messages it's trying to TELL the viewer vs show them, and majority of the game back pedals and tries to insist that you like Abby by giving her one moment of terrible act and then making her quip and joke most of the rest of the game and act like the forced love triangle plot has any semblance of a sympathetic moment.

I'm not mad about what happened in TLOU2, I'm just mad about how it happened and how its supposed messaging and themes are bungled in the execution of the game, and the fact that they have to go out of their way to not only retcon but change the framing of the Fireflies to do so hurts their narrative rather than helping it.
 
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Neff

Neff

Member
Bit_Reactor said:
majority of the game back pedals and tries to insist that you like Abby
Click to expand...
But I did like Abby!

Bit_Reactor said:
and the fact that they have to go out of their way to not only retcon but change the framing of the Fireflies to do so hurts their narrative rather than helping it.
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The only retcon which rubbed me the wrong way was clumsily and inexplicably making Marlene sympathetic to Ellie's fate, and shifting the moral responsibility of taking her life to Abby's father. Suddenly she's no longer the bad guy (at least from Joel's perspective), which of course undermines the ending of part 1.
 
Bit_Reactor

Bit_Reactor

Member
Neff said:
But I did like Abby!


The only retcon which rubbed me the wrong way was clumsily and inexplicably making Marlene sympathetic to Ellie's fate, and shifting the moral responsibility of taking her life to Abby's father. Suddenly she's no longer the bad guy (at least from Joel's perspective), which of course undermines the ending of part 1.
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For me it's mostly about the entire thing making the Fireflies NOT the dicks they clearly were in the first game. This isn't some "unreliable narrator" shit, they literally tell Joel to go fuck himself and are constant twats in the entirety of the game but now they're "just trying to get by uwu" in the sequel lol
 
Captain Toad

Captain Toad

Banned
Bit_Reactor said:
For me it's mostly about the entire thing making the Fireflies NOT the dicks they clearly were in the first game. This isn't some "unreliable narrator" shit, they literally tell Joel to go fuck himself and are constant twats in the entirety of the game but now they're "just trying to get by uwu" in the sequel lol
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Some Fireflies were dicks. Some wolves were dicks. Some Scars were dicks.

That's kind of how the world works. I imagine it's amplified in post-apocalyptic times.
 
Bit_Reactor

Bit_Reactor

Member
Captain Toad said:
Besides killing countless innocent people to get his way and dooming the entire human race, yeah, he did nothing wrong.
Click to expand...
Every time someone comes back with this retort I want to ask "How did he doom the human race?"

So here's the things to keep in mind with the "cure":
1. They had no confirmation it would even work or that they could make one, just that scooping her brain out was the only option.

2. If they DID have a cure, what good would it do? At this time it would only be for the rare cases in which people get bit, in which case they're usually beyond saving because by the time of the second game, if you're fighting a clicker you're already fucked. You're not going to "reverse" that for those people.

3. The entire society in the second game minus the spore area is built around there not even being a problem with the zombies. Hell aside from the "didja get bit" and the intro, they literally have pet zombies in some of the facilities.

4. Ellie and her fam are literally on a farm out in the open by the ending of the game with little to no defenses. IF the Zombie plague was hurting the human populace that bad and the humans not the REAL problem as the game implies (the humans were the real monsters, insert plot cliche here) then the game itself doesn't do a good job of raising that tension and/or making it relevant to the arcs the characters are going through.

I'd argue the game ignores entirely the concept of a cure and Ellie NEVER really confronts how society would be different and the writing focuses on the CHARACTER angst versus the world effects of having no cure.

Captain Toad said:
Some Fireflies were dicks. Some wolves were dicks. Some Scars were dicks.

That's kind of how the world works. I imagine it's amplified in post-apocalyptic times.
Click to expand...
Except the sequel goes far and beyond that to go "The fireflies are good people" minus their forced conflict with a faction no one cares about.
 
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Blond

Blond

Banned
The worst thing about both of these games is that you play for 20 hours only to have duckman decide to undo everything you just did. POP08 did this and it was stupid and opened up a giant cliffhanger that went unresolved.
 
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