It's difficult to articulate, but easy to spot. Placing priority upon the narrative first is under what circumstances it's fine. That's when it comes off as natural and unforced. Beginning with an ideology and placing focus upon it to make a social and political commentary stemming from outside the game within the game is when people take issue.
As someone mentioned above, it's like being repeatedly hit with a woke machine gun over and over and over while playing. A LGBT couple? No problem whatsoever, in fact fully expected given where we had left off on Left Behind's characterization of Ellie with her relationship with Riley. "Bigot Sandwiches"? Alright, amusing. Garbage, meme-tier writing, but amusing. A she-hulk playable character that's given no real narrative justification in the game world for her size and that stretches believability? Sure. A pregnant woman dead-lifting her weight up a rope? Uh-huh. Oh yeah, here's a trans kid you have to go rescue and hear of his gender identity tale of woe. But not before the female Sepharite brutes you have to fight that are laughably large, alongside many female models in the game that are highly androgynous in their design. As a final note, we'll include this "Dr. Uckman" super-hero collectible card "fighting for equality", just to make sure, if you've somehow miraculously missed all the above. Then we'll bookend the game with both an opening and closing shot of a butterfly on the neck of the guitar.
But it seems if we take any issue with any of this, we're bigoted, homophobic, transphobic basement-dwelling virgin incel losers.
Any one of those on their own wouldn't raise anyone's brow. But after a certain point, as a collective, it's so glaringly obvious what's going on here that it pulls you out of the experience because an agenda is consistently being pushed in your face again, and again, and again. Druckmann couldn't help but unload his ideological wad all over this game. It's like he's just been waiting to be appointed creative director so he could bust his nut in one go. It saddens me that one of my favorite studios of Sony's is now headed by this hack who is using Naughty Dog to vent his ideological frustrations, and we can all rest assured, all future games from them are going to double-down on this artificial and hamfisted nonsense. It's only going to get worse from here.
